Download or read book Alienation Spectacle and Revolution written by Neil Faulkner and published by Resistance Books. This book was released on 2021-11-28 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fast-accelerating world crisis is driving us towards barbarism and extinction. The capitalist system means ecological and social collapse. Mainstream politics, embedded in the system, has been reduced to irrelevance. Revolution has become an existential imperative. This book offers critical Marxist thinking about the nature of the crisis and what must be done to turn mass protest into the revolutionary transformation on which our survival depends.
Download or read book Society Of The Spectacle written by Guy Debord and published by Bread and Circuses Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Society of the Spectacle written by Guy Debord and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-29 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Society of the Spectacle is a work of philosophy by Guy Debord. In it the author expands on the concept of the Spectacle, coupled with presentations of Marxist critical theory.
Download or read book The Society of the Spectacle written by Guy Debord and published by Unredacted Word. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debord describes and critiques the way we live. The power in these ideas lies in their ability to question, identify, and name the common assumptions of the present. Developing the concept of The Spectacle, he describes the “gaze” of contemporary society. From its publication just before, and ultimately influencing the May 1968 revolt in Paris and Occupy Wall Street, this book continues to transform a wide range of progressive philosophical and political movements, most notably anti-capitalism, postmodernism, marxism, and anarchism. This new translation brings a concrete edge to the text, elaborating upon the original, and adding annotations. Bringing fifty years of prominent radical thinking back to the text, from Baudrillard to Odell to Zuboff—it’s clear that Debords’ book is more relevant in the era of social media, the attention economy, and the emergence of Surveillance Capitalism than ever before.
Download or read book Society of the Spectacle written by Guy Debord and published by Pattern Books. This book was released on 2020-06-28 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "Das Kapital" of the 20th century. Look, you don't need a description of the book. It is Capital of the 20th century, okay. You know who Marx is already, and the spectacle is mediating our lives through images. Get a cheap version of this book and drop it in a bin somewhere so someone else can read it. Send it to a prisoner. Don't put it on your shelf so you can look smart, put it in your pocket and treat it like you're smuggling drugs.
Download or read book Revolution of Everyday Life written by Raoul Vaneigem and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord’s masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed them with “formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies.” “I realise,” writes Vaneigem in his introduction, “that I have given subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me for this without first considering the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day after day.” Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. And in the second part of his book, “Reversal of Perspective,” he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation. For “To desire a different life is already that life in the making.” And “fulfillment is expressed in the singular but conjugated in the plural.” The present English translation was first published by Rebel Press of London in 1983. This new edition of The Revolution of Everyday Life has been reviewed and corrected by the translator and contains a new preface addressed to English-language readers by Raoul Vaneigem. The book is the first of several translations of works by Raoul Vaneigem that PM Press plans to publish in uniform volumes. Vaneigem’s classic work is to be followed by The Knight, the Lady, the Devil, and Death (2003) and The Inhumanity of Religion (2000).
Download or read book Reason and Revolution written by Herbert Marcuse and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic book is Marcuse's masterful interpretation of Hegel's philosophy and the influence it has had on European political thought from the French Revolution to the present day. Marcuse brilliantly illuminates the implications of Hegel's ideas with later developments in European thought, particularily with Marxist theory.
Download or read book Alienation and the Carnivalization of Society written by Jerome Braun and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-04-23 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines alienation from both a sociological and psychoanalytic perspective, revisiting classic treatments of the topic (Marx, Simmel, Weber) and exploring its relevance to understanding post-modern consumer society. It examines the escapist potentials for good and for ill in modern society - those fostered by commercial interests, and those maintained by individuals and groups as their form of resisting alienation.
Download or read book Capitalism s Future written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-05-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Capitalism's Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique, sociologists, philosophers and cultural theorists critique economic and political dynamics of contemporary capitalism. An agenda for 21st century critical social theory emerges in conjoined critique of political economyand critique of political psychology.
Download or read book The Spectacular Past written by Maurice Samuels and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Struggling to make sense of the Revolution of 1789, the French in the nineteenth century increasingly turned to visual forms of historical representation in a variety of media. Maurice Samuels shows how new kinds of popular entertainment introduced during and after the Revolution transformed the past into a spectacle. The wax display (in which visitors circulated amid life-size statues of historical figures), the phantasmagoria show (in which images of historical personages were projected onto smoke or invisible screens), and the panorama (in which spectators viewed giant circular canvases depicting historical scenes) employed new optical technologies to entice crowds of spectators. Such entertainments, Samuels asserts, provided bourgeois audiences with an illusion of mastery over the past, allowing them to picture their new role as historical agents.Samuels demonstrates how the spectacular mode of historical representation pervaded historiography, drama, and the novel during the Romantic period. He then argues that the early Realist fiction of Balzac and Stendhal emerged as a critique of the spectacular historical imagination. By investigating how postrevolutionary France envisioned the past, Samuels illuminates a vital moment in the cultural history of modernity.
Download or read book Beautiful Trouble written by Andrew Boyd and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Banksy, the Yes Men, Gandhi, Starhawk: the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest is now in the hands of the next generation of change-makers, thanks to Beautiful Trouble. Sophisticated enough for veteran activists, accessible enough for newbies, this compact pocket edition of the bestselling Beautiful Trouble is a book that’s both handy and inexpensive. Showcasing the synergies between artistic imagination and shrewd political strategy, this generously illustrated volume can easily be slipped into your pocket as you head out to the streets. This is for everyone who longs for a more beautiful, more just, more livable world – and wants to know how to get there. Includes a new introduction by the editors. Contributors include: Celia Alario • Andy Bichlbaum • Nadine Bloch • L. M. Bogad • Mike Bonnano • Andrew Boyd • Kevin Buckland • Doyle Canning • Samantha Corbin • Stephen Duncombe • Simon Enoch • Janice Fine • Lisa Fithian • Arun Gupta • Sarah Jaffe • John Jordan • Stephen Lerner • Zack Malitz • Nancy L. Mancias • Dave Oswald Mitchell • Tracey Mitchell • Mark Read • Patrick Reinsborough • Joshua Kahn Russell • Nathan Schneider • John Sellers • Matthew Skomarovsky • Jonathan Matthew Smucker • Starhawk • Eric Stoner • Harsha Walia
Download or read book Rethinking the Spectacle written by Devin Penner and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spectacle is usually considered a superficial form of politics, which tries to distract and deceive a passive audience. It is difficult to see how this type of politics could be reconciled with the democratic requirement of active and informed agency. Rethinking the Spectacle re-examines the tension between spectacle and political agency using the ideas and practices of Guy Debord and the Situationist International as a point of departure. Drawing on radical democratic theory and examining case studies such as the 2011 Occupy movement, Devin Penner concludes that spectacle can and should be used to mobilize the public for egalitarian purposes.
Download or read book The Spectacle 2 0 written by Marco Briziarelli and published by University of Westminster Press. This book was released on 2017-12-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spectacle 2.0 recasts Debord's theory of spectacle within the frame of 21st century digital capitalism. It offers a reassessment of Debord’s original notion of Spectacle from the late 1960s, of its posterior revisitation in the 1990s, and it presents a reinterpretation of the concept within the scenario of contemporary informational capitalism and more specifically of digital and media labour. It is argued that the Spectacle 2.0 form operates as the interactive network that links through one singular (but contradictory) language and various imaginaries, uniting diverse productive contexts such as logistics, finance, new media and urbanism. Spectacle 2.0 thus colonizes most spheres of social life by processes of commodification, exploitation and reification. Diverse contributors consider the topic within the book’s two main sections: Part I conceptualizes and historicizes the Spectacle in the context of informational capitalism; contributions in Part II offer empirical cases that historicise the Spectacle in relation to the present (and recent past) showing how a Spectacle 2.0 approach can illuminate and deconstruct specific aspects of contemporary social reality. All contributions included in this book rework the category of the Spectacle to present a stimulating compendium of theoretical critical literature in the fields of media and labour studies. In the era of the gig-economy, highly mediated content and President Trump, Debord’s concept is arguably more relevant than ever.
Download or read book The Dialectics of Art written by John Molyneux and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the question of &lquo;what is art?&rquo;, it is often simply responded that art is whatever is produced by the artist. For John Molyneux, this clearly circular answer is deeply unsatisfying. In a tour de force spanning renaissance Italy and the Dutch Republic to contemporary leading figures, The Dialectics of Art instead approaches its subject matter as a distinct field of creative human labour that emerges alongside and in opposition to the alienation and commodification brought about by capitalism. The pieces and individuals Molyneux examines — from Michelangelo’s Slaves to Rembrandts Jewish Bride to the vast drip paintings of Jackson Pollock – are presented as embodying the social contradictions of their times, giving art an inherently political relevance. In its relationship of creative and dialectical tension to prevailing social relationships and norms, such art points beyond the existing order of things, hinting at a potential future society not based on alienated labour in which creative production becomes the property and practice of all.
Download or read book The Spectacle of Disintegration written by McKenzie Wark and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following his acclaimed history of the Situationist International up until the late sixties, The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark returns with a companion volume which puts the late work of the Situationists in a broader and deeper context, charting their contemporary relevance and their deep critique of modernity. Wark builds on their work to map the historical stages of the society of the spectacle, from the diffuse to the integrated to what he calls the disintegrating spectacle. The Spectacle of Disintegration takes the reader through the critique of political aesthetics of former Situationist T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, René Vienet’s earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sangunetti’s pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice-Becker Ho’s account of the anonymous language of the Romany, Guy Debord’s late films and his surprising work as a game designer. At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to arms in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets, The Spectacle of Disintegration recalls the hidden journeys taken in the attempt to leave the twentieth century, and plots an exit from the twenty first. The dustjacket unfolds to reveal a fold-out poster of the collaborative graphic essay combining text selected by McKenzie Wark with composition and drawings by Kevin C. Pyle.
Download or read book The Coming Insurrection written by The Invisible Committee and published by Semiotext(e). This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A call to arms by a group of French intellectuals that rejects leftist reform and aligns itself with younger, wilder forms of resistance. Thirty years of “crisis,” mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy... We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it. The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as “the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.” The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine capable of “spreading anarchy and live communism.” Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the “war on terror.” Hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized life forms. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.
Download or read book Specters of Marx written by Jacques Derrida and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values. In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, 'Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, 'Specters of Marx', delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.
