The Mirror of Production

The Mirror of Production PDF Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781788734899
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The most provocative work from the father of postmodernism. A spectre haunts the revolutionary imagination: the spectre of production. Revolutionary thought - from Marx to Deleuze - merely replicates the obsession with production of classical political economy. Jean Baudrillard's provocative early study The Mirror of Production, marks the point at which his thought breaks from the tenants of Marxism. Instead, Baudrillard seeks to go further than Marx, radicalising his thought by breaking with the capitalist logic of production in its entirety. Combining semiotics with a skilled reworking of critical theory, he carries out a thorough critique of Marxism, arguing that by placing production at the centre of its analysis it serves to naturalise capitalism instead of abolishing it. Instead, what we need is a thorough attack on productivism in all its forms and a total break from the logic of capital.

The Mirror of Production

The Mirror of Production PDF Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781788734899
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The most provocative work from the father of postmodernism. A spectre haunts the revolutionary imagination: the spectre of production. Revolutionary thought - from Marx to Deleuze - merely replicates the obsession with production of classical political economy. Jean Baudrillard's provocative early study The Mirror of Production, marks the point at which his thought breaks from the tenants of Marxism. Instead, Baudrillard seeks to go further than Marx, radicalising his thought by breaking with the capitalist logic of production in its entirety. Combining semiotics with a skilled reworking of critical theory, he carries out a thorough critique of Marxism, arguing that by placing production at the centre of its analysis it serves to naturalise capitalism instead of abolishing it. Instead, what we need is a thorough attack on productivism in all its forms and a total break from the logic of capital.

Simulacra and Simulation

Simulacra and Simulation PDF Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472065219
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Get Book Here

Book Description
Develops a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure. This book represents an effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body.

Society Of The Spectacle

Society Of The Spectacle PDF Author: Guy Debord
Publisher: Bread and Circuses Publishing
ISBN: 1617508306
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.

Capital in the Mirror

Capital in the Mirror PDF Author: Dan Krier
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438477759
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
Analyzes contemporary capitalism through the products of culture and art for fresh insight into emancipatory possibilities concealed within capitalism’s darkest dynamics. Aesthetic objects, crafted as poetic reflections of the contradictory worlds that they inhabit, are simultaneously theorized and theorizing. In Capital in the Mirror, eminent critical theorists explore the aesthetic dimension for reflective visions of capital that are difficult to obtain through even the most rigorous statistical analyses. Chapters address inequality, alienation, ideology, warfare, and other problems of contemporary capitalism through the cultural prisms of Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Charles Dickens, J. W. Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Walt Whitman, Bertolt Brecht, and science-fiction cinema. Famous narrative elements in their works, such as Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale in Melville’s Moby-Dick, demonic production and perverse desire in Mann’s Doctor Faustus, socially electrified bodies of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and dystopian projections of current sci-fi cinema, are theorized as stylistically distorted reflections of social life within capital. The authors reveal theoretical powers latent within these condensed images that prefigure the dark dynamics of capitalism. Focusing on dark images of domination and also prophetic images of transformation, the book points the way toward emancipation, social regeneration, and human flourishing. “This book makes a very important contribution to critical theory and the critical ‘human sciences’ and is a model of how to do a larger analysis of contemporary capitalist cultural products.” — Jeffrey A. Halley, coeditor of Bourdieu in Question: New Directions in French Sociology of Art

The Production of Space

The Production of Space PDF Author: Henri Lefebvre
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631181774
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Get Book Here

Book Description
Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Welcome to the Desert of the Real PDF Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784780057
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Get Book Here

Book Description
Liberals and conservatives proclaim the end of the American holiday from history. Now the easy games are over; one should take sides. Zizek argues this is precisely the temptation to be resisted. In such moments of apparently clear choices, the real alternatives are most hidden. Welcome to the Desert of the Real steps back, complicating the choices imposed on us. It proposes that global capitalism is fundamentalist and that America was complicit in the rise of Muslim fundamentalism. It points to our dreaming about the catastrophe in numerous disaster movies before it happened, and explores the irony that the tragedy has been used to legitimize torture. Last but not least it analyzes the fiasco of the predominant leftist response to the events.

Blog Theory

Blog Theory PDF Author: Jodi Dean
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745659551
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 143

Get Book Here

Book Description
Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications. Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj ?i?ek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system. In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchangesÑfrom blog posts to text messagesÑhave widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination.

The Distorting Mirror

The Distorting Mirror PDF Author: Laikwan Pang
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824830938
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Distorting Mirror analyzes the multiple and complex ways in which urban Chinese subjects saw themselves interacting with the new visual culture that emerged during the turbulent period between the 1880s and the 1930s. The media and visual forms examined include lithography, photography, advertising, film, and theatrical performances. Urbanites actively engaged with and enjoyed this visual culture, which was largely driven by the subjective desire for the empty promises of modernity—promises comprised of such abstract and fleeting concepts as new, exciting, and fashionable. Detailing and analyzing the trajectories of development of various visual representations, Laikwan Pang emphasizes their interactions. In doing so, she demonstrates that visual modernity was not only a combination of independent cultural phenomena, but also a partially coherent sociocultural discourse whose influences were seen in different and collective parts of the culture. The work begins with an overall historical account and theorization of a new lithographic pictorial culture developing at the end of the nineteenth century and an examination of modernity’s obsession with the investigation of the real. Subsequent chapters treat the fascination with the image of the female body in the new visual culture; entertainment venues in which this culture unfolded and was performed; how urbanites came to terms with and interacted with the new reality; and the production and reception of images, the dynamics between these two being a theme explored throughout the book. Modernity, as the author shows, can be seen as spectacle. At the same time, she demonstrates that, although the excessiveness of this spectacle captivated the modern subject, it did not completely overwhelm or immobilize those who engaged with it. After all, she argues, they participated in and performed with this ephemeral visual culture in an attempt to come to terms with their own new, modern self.

The Informal Media Economy

The Informal Media Economy PDF Author: Ramon Lobato
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745694853
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
How are “grey market” imports changing media industries? What is the role of piracy in developing new markets for movies and TV shows? How do jailbroken iPhones drive innovation? The Informal Media Economy provides a vivid, original, and genuinely transnational account of contemporary media, by showing how the interactions between formal and informal media systems are a feature of all nations – rich and poor, large and small. Shifting the focus away from the formal businesses and public enterprises that have long occupied media researchers, this book charts a parallel world of cultural intermediaries driving global media production and circulation. It shows how unlicensed, untaxed, or unregulated networks, which operate across the boundaries of established media markets, have been a driving force of media industry transformation. The book opens up new insights on a range of topical issues in media studies, from the creative disruptions of digitisation to amateur production, piracy and cybercrime.

Global Transformations

Global Transformations PDF Author: David Held
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804736275
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 548

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, the authors set forth a new model of globalization that lays claims to supersede existing models, and then use this model to assess the way the processes of globalization have operated in different historic periods in respect to political organization, military globalization, trade, finance, corporate productivity, migration, culture, and the environment. Each of these topics is covered in a chapter which contrasts the contemporary nature of globalization with that of earlier epochs. In mapping the shape and political consequences of globalization, the authors concentrate on six states in advanced capitalist societies (SIACS): the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Germany, and Japan. For comparative purposes, other states—particularly those with developing economics—are referred to and discussed where relevant. The book concludes by systematically describing and assessing contemporary globalization, and appraising the implications of globalization for the sovereignty and autonomy of SIACS. It also confronts directly the political fatalism that surrounds much discussion of globalization with a normative agenda that elaborates the possibilities for democratizing and civilizing the unfolding global transformation.