The PlayStation Dreamworld

The PlayStation Dreamworld PDF Author: Alfie Bown
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509518045
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
From mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is – to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek – the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace – a powerful arena for constructing our desires – or else the dreamworld will fall entirely into the hands of dominant and reactionary forces. While cyberspace is increasingly dominated by corporate organization, gaming, at its most subversive, can nevertheless produce radical forms of enjoyment which threaten the capitalist norms that are created and endlessly repeated in our daily relationships with mobile phones, videogames, computers and other forms of technological entertainment. Far from being a book solely for dedicated gamers, this book dissects the structure of our relationships to all technological entertainment at a time when entertainment has become ubiquitous. We can no longer escape our fantasies but rather live inside their digital reality.

The PlayStation Dreamworld

The PlayStation Dreamworld PDF Author: Alfie Bown
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509518061
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book Here

Book Description
From mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is – to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek – the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace – a powerful arena for constructing our desires – or else the dreamworld will fall entirely into the hands of dominant and reactionary forces. While cyberspace is increasingly dominated by corporate organization, gaming, at its most subversive, can nevertheless produce radical forms of enjoyment which threaten the capitalist norms that are created and endlessly repeated in our daily relationships with mobile phones, videogames, computers and other forms of technological entertainment. Far from being a book solely for dedicated gamers, this book dissects the structure of our relationships to all technological entertainment at a time when entertainment has become ubiquitous. We can no longer escape our fantasies but rather live inside their digital reality.

The PlayStation Dreamworld

The PlayStation Dreamworld PDF Author: Alfie Bown
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509518045
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book Here

Book Description
From mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is – to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek – the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace – a powerful arena for constructing our desires – or else the dreamworld will fall entirely into the hands of dominant and reactionary forces. While cyberspace is increasingly dominated by corporate organization, gaming, at its most subversive, can nevertheless produce radical forms of enjoyment which threaten the capitalist norms that are created and endlessly repeated in our daily relationships with mobile phones, videogames, computers and other forms of technological entertainment. Far from being a book solely for dedicated gamers, this book dissects the structure of our relationships to all technological entertainment at a time when entertainment has become ubiquitous. We can no longer escape our fantasies but rather live inside their digital reality.

Discognition

Discognition PDF Author: Steven Shaviro
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1910924067
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
What is consciousness? What is it like to feel pain, or to see the color red? Do robots and computers really think? For that matter, do plants and amoebas think? If we ever meet intelligent aliens, will we be able to understand what they say to us? Philosophers and scientists are still unable to answer questions like these. Perhaps science fiction can help. In Discognition, Steven Shaviro looks at science fiction novels and stories that explore the extreme possibilities of human and alien sentience.

Energy Security

Energy Security PDF Author: Roland Dannreuther
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509520945
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Many of the richest energy-producing regions of the world are wrought with conflict and billions of the world's poorest suffer the daily insecurity of energy poverty. All the while our planet is increasingly under pressure because of our continued dependence on fossil fuels. It is easy to see why energy security has become one of the major global challenges of the twenty-first century. In this book, Roland Dannreuther offers a new and comprehensive approach to understanding energy security. Drawing on the latest research, he treats energy security as a value that is continually in dynamic conflict with other core values, such as economic prosperity and sustainability. The different physical properties of the key energy resources – coal, oil, gas, nuclear and renewables – are of course critical for the differing manifestations of energy insecurity. But it is the social, economic and political contexts, developed over time and place, which are essential for a fuller appreciation of contemporary energy challenges. In highlighting the history and politics of energy security and the critical role played by power and justice in framing these debates, this incisive and cutting-edge analysis is a go-to introduction for students grappling with the complexities of energy security today.

Post Memes

Post Memes PDF Author: Daniel Bristow
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192431
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
Art-form, send-up, farce, ironic disarticulation, pastiche, propaganda, trololololol, mode of critique, mode of production, means of politicisation, even of subjectivation - memes are the inner currency of the internet's circulatory system. Independent of any one set value, memes are famously the mode of conveyance for the alt-right, the irony left, and the apoliticos alike, and they are impervious to many economic valuations: the attempts made in co-opting their discourse in advertising and big business have made little headway, and have usually been derailed by retaliative meming. POST MEMES: SEIZING THE MEMES OF PRODUCTION takes advantage of the meme's subversive adaptability and ripeness for a focused, in-depth study. Pulling together the interrogative forces of a raft of thinkers at the forefront of tech theory and media dissection, this collection of essays paves a way to articulating the semiotic fabric of the early 21st century's most prevalent means of content posting, and aims at the very seizing of the memes of production for the imagining and creation of new political horizons. With contributions from Scott and McKenzie Wark, Patricia Reed, Jay Owens, Thomas Hobson and Kaajal Modi, Dominic Pettman, Bogna M. Konior, and Eric Wilson, among others, this essay volume offers the freshest approaches available in the field of memes studies and inaugurates a new kind of writing about the newest manifestations of the written online. The book aims to become the go-to resource for all students and scholars of memes, and will be of the utmost interest to anyone interested in the internet's most viral phenomenon. ABOUT THE EDITORS ALFIE BOWN is the author of several books including "The Playstation Dreamworld" (Polity, 2017) and "In the Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Comedy" (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is also a journalist for the Guardian, the Paris Review, and other outlets. DAN BRISTOW is a recovering academic, a bookseller, and author of "Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis" (Routledge, 2016) and "2001: A Space Odyssey and Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory" (Palgrave, 2017). He is also the co-creator with Alfie Bown of Everyday Analysis, now based at New Socialist magazine.

Dream Lovers

Dream Lovers PDF Author: Alfie Bown
Publisher: Digital Barricades
ISBN: 9780745344881
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
How (and why) are new technologies radically reshaping our desires?

In the Event of Laughter

In the Event of Laughter PDF Author: Alfie Bown
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501342630
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as its pre-history and afterlives, In the Event of Laughter argues for a new framework for discussing laughter. Responding to a tradition of 'comedy studies' that has been interested only in the causes of laughter (in why we laugh), it proposes a different relationship between laughter and causality. Ultimately it argues that laughter is both cause and effect, troubling chronological time and asking for a more nuanced way of conceiving the relationship between subjects and their laughter than existing theories have accounted for. Making this visible via psychoanalytic ideas of retroactivity, Alfie Bown explores how laughter – far from being a mere response to a stimulus – changes the relationship between the present, the past and the future. Bown investigates this hypothesis in relation to a range of comic texts from the 'history of laughter,' discussing Chaucer, Shakespeare, Kafka and Chaplin, as well as lesser-known but vital figures from the comic genre.

Nonviolent Resistance

Nonviolent Resistance PDF Author: Todd May
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745690491
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
We see nonviolent resistance all over today’s world, from Egypt’s Tahrir Square to New York Occupy. Although we think of the last century as one marked by wars and violent conflict, in fact it was just as much a century of nonviolence as the achievements of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and peaceful protests like the one that removed Ferdinand Marcos from the Philippines clearly demonstrate. But what is nonviolence? What makes a campaign a nonviolent one, and how does it work? What values does it incorporate? In this unique study, Todd May, a philosopher who has himself participated in campaigns of nonviolent resistance, offers the first extended philosophical reflection on the particular and compelling political phenomenon of nonviolence. Drawing on both historical and contemporary examples, he examines the concept and objectives of nonviolence, and considers the different dynamics of nonviolence, from moral jiu-jitsu to nonviolent coercion. May goes on to explore the values that infuse nonviolent activity, especially the respect for dignity and the presupposition of equality, before taking a close-up look at the role of nonviolence in today’s world. Students of politics, peace studies, and philosophy, political activists, and those interested in the shape of current politics will find this book an invaluable source for understanding one of the most prevalent, but least reflected upon, political approaches of our world.

Upheaval

Upheaval PDF Author: Navid Kermani
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509518711
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
By foot, in buses, prison vans and trains, a steady stream of refugees traveled from the Greek island of Lesbos into Europe. In the autumn of 2015, award-winning writer Navid Kermani decided to accompany them on the "Balkan route." In this perceptive account from the front line of the "refugee crisis," Kermani shows how a seemingly distant world in which war and conflict rage has suddenly collided with our own. Kermani describes the situation on the Turkish west coast where thousands of refugees live in the most desperate conditions, waiting to take the perilous journey across the Mediterranean. Then, on Lesbos, he observes the culture shock amongst those who have survived the ordeal by sea. He speaks to aid workers and politicians, but most importantly of all to the refugees themselves, asking those who have come from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere what has driven them to risk everything and embark on the long and treacherous journey to Europe. With great sensitivity Kermani reveals, often through small details, the cultural and political upheaval that has caused people to uproot their lives, and at the same time shining a light on Europe's inadequate and at times openly hostile response to the refugees. Interspersed with powerful images by the acclaimed photographer Moises Saman, Upheaval is a much-needed human account of a crisis we cannot ignore.

Can Financial Markets be Controlled?

Can Financial Markets be Controlled? PDF Author: Howard Davies
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745688322
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
The Global Financial Crisis overturned decades of received wisdomon how financial markets work, and how best to keep them in check.Since then a wave of reform and re-regulation has crashed overbanks and markets. Financial firms are regulated as neverbefore. But have these measures been successful, and do they go farenough? In this smart new polemic, former central banker andfinancial regulator, Howard Davies, responds with a resounding‘no’. The problems at the heart of the financial crisisremain. There is still no effective co-ordination of internationalmonetary policy. The financial sector is still too big and,far from protecting the economy and the tax payer, recentgovernment legislation is exposing both to even greater risk. To address these key challenges, Davies offers a radicalalternative manifesto of reforms to restore market discipline andcreate a safer economic future for us all.