Silvia Federici: Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (2012–) [EN, ES]

“Written between 1974 and 2012, Revolution at Point Zero collects forty years of research and theorizing on the nature of housework, social reproduction, and women’s struggles on this terrain—to escape it, to better its conditions, to reconstruct it in ways that provide an alternative to capitalist relations.

Indeed, as Federici reveals, behind the capitalist organization of work and the contradictions inherent in “alienated labor” is an explosive ground zero for revolutionary practice upon which are decided the daily realities of our collective reproduction.

Beginning with Federici’s organizational work in the Wages for Housework movement, the essays collected here unravel the power and politics of wide but related issues including the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labor, the globalization of care work and sex work, the crisis of elder care, the development of affective labor, and the politics of the commons.”

Publisher PM Press, Oakland, CA, and Common Notions, Brooklyn, NY, 2012
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9781604863338, 1604863331
188 pages

Reviews: Joshua Eichen (Mute, 2012), Nicholas Beuret (Red Pepper, 2012), Ashley Bohrer (spectrezine, 2012), Seth Sandronsky (Z Magazine, 2012), Dayna Tortorici (n+1, 2013), Laura Schwartz (Labor & Society, 2013), Emma Dowling (Feminist Review, 2014), Danielle DiNovelli-Lang (Alternate Routes, 2014), Marina Vishmidt (J Cultural Economy, 2015), Sutapa Chattopadhyay (Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2015), Leontina M. Hormel (Monthly Review, 2016).

Publisher
WorldCat

Revolution at Point Zero (English, 2012, EPUB, MOBI)
Revolución en punto cero (Spanish, trans. Carlos Fernández Guervós and Paula Martín Ponz, 2013)

Elena Filipovic: The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (2013)

“This study focuses on a series of fugitive operations that Marcel Duchamp incited in order to test, theorize, position, and even make his work as such. Not conventionally “artistic” in nature, even if intimately connected to the collection, presentation, reception, and valuation of art, these activities include Duchamp’s role as administrator, archivist, art advisor, curator, publicist, reproduction-maker, and salesman of his own oeuvre. Rather than merely procedural, auxiliary, or incidental, they might be thought of as constitutive, resulting in a still understudied but profoundly influential output by an artist who redefined so much of what, hence forth, would be called art. Here, those most iconic of Duchamp’s inventions, the readymades, although not the central objects of this study, are understood as significant insofar as they were not simply “nominated” to become artworks, but more importantly, because they were curated. It is precisely through curatorial operations—relative to much of Duchamp’s production, and constituting one of the central activities that this dissertation explores—that the artist rendered the discourse, institutions, marketing, and presentational strategies of art into something like his cardinal “medium.”

Tracing Duchamp’s perennial relationship to photography, reproduction, the museum, and the archive, and spanning the period between 1913 and 1969, three chapters closely examine a number of undeniably material things: chapter one considers the artist’s boxes of photographically replicated notes, the Box of 1914 (1913-14) and Boîte verte (1934); chapter two examines documentation of ephemeral exhibitions, recording Duchamp’s curatorial interventions as well as suitcases filled with miniature reproductions, the Boîte-en-valise (1938-42); and chapter three is dedicated to a permanent installation, Etant donnés 1. la chute d’eau, 2. le gaz d’éclairage (1946-66). However, the premise of this dissertation is that all of these gain a new significance if studied in relation to the elusive activities that actually constituted them as artworks. Together, they formed a counter-conception of the role of the artist, articulating—and complicating—the conceptual stakes of much of what is known of his practice and thickening into what Walter Benjamin called the artist’s “theory of the work of art.”” (Abstract)

Ph.D. Dissertation
Advisor: Hal Foster
Publisher Art and Archaeology Department, Princeton University, 2013
507 pages

Publisher

PDF (2 MB)
PDF (images section) (10 MB)

Hillel Schwartz: The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, 2nd ed. (1996/2013)

The Culture of the Copy is an unprecedented attempt to make sense of the Western fascination with replicas, duplicates, and twins. In a work that is breathtaking in its synthetic and critical achievements, Hillel Schwartz charts the repercussions of our entanglement with copies of all kinds, whose presence alternately sustains and overwhelms us. Through intriguing, and at times humorous, historical analysis and case studies in contemporary culture, Schwartz investigates a stunning array of simulacra—counterfeits, decoys, mannequins, and portraits; ditto marks, genetic cloning, war games, and camouflage; instant replays, digital imaging, parrots, and photocopies; wax museums, apes, and art forgeries, not to mention the very notion of the Real McCoy. Working through a range of theories on biological, mechanical, and electronic repro­duction, Schwartz questions the modern esteem for authenticity and uniqueness. The Culture of the Copy shows how the ethical dilemmas central to so many fields of endeavor have become inseparable from our pursuit of copies—of the natural world, of our own creations, indeed of our very selves.

This updated edition takes notice of recent shifts in thought with regard to such issues as biological cloning, conjoined twins, copyright, digital reproduction, and multiple personality disorder. At once abbreviated and refined, it will be of interest to anyone concerned with proglems of authenticity, identity, and originality.

First published in 1996
Publisher Zone Books, New York, 2013
ISBN 1935408453, 9781935408451
480 pages

Review (Terence Hawkes, London Review of Books, 1997)
Review (Francis Kane, The New York Times, 1997)
Review (Todd Gitlin, Los Angeles Times, 1997)

Publisher
Google books

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