Download or read book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies written by Jodi Dean and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-02 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies is an impassioned call for the realization of a progressive left politics in the United States. Through an assessment of the ideologies underlying contemporary political culture, Jodi Dean takes the left to task for its capitulations to conservatives and its failure to take responsibility for the extensive neoliberalization implemented during the Clinton presidency. She argues that the left’s ability to develop and defend a collective vision of equality and solidarity has been undermined by the ascendance of “communicative capitalism,” a constellation of consumerism, the privileging of the self over group interests, and the embrace of the language of victimization. As Dean explains, communicative capitalism is enabled and exacerbated by the Web and other networked communications media, which reduce political energies to the registration of opinion and the transmission of feelings. The result is a psychotic politics where certainty displaces credibility and the circulation of intense feeling trumps the exchange of reason. Dean’s critique ranges from her argument that the term democracy has become a meaningless cipher invoked by the left and right alike to an analysis of the fantasy of free trade underlying neoliberalism, and from an examination of new theories of sovereignty advanced by politicians and left academics to a look at the changing meanings of “evil” in the speeches of U.S. presidents since the mid-twentieth century. She emphasizes the futility of a politics enacted by individuals determined not to offend anyone, and she examines questions of truth, knowledge, and power in relation to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Dean insists that any reestablishment of a vital and purposeful left politics will require shedding the mantle of victimization, confronting the marriage of neoliberalism and democracy, and mobilizing different terms to represent political strategies and goals.
Download or read book Publicity s Secret written by Jodi Dean and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, media outlets in the United States—most notably the Internet—have claimed to serve the public's ever-greater thirst for information. Scandals are revealed, details are laid bare because "the public needs to know." In Publicity's Secret, Jodi Dean claims that the public's demands for information both coincide with the interests of the media industry and reinforce the cynicism promoted by contemporary technoculture. Democracy has become a spectacle, and Dean asserts that theories of the "public sphere" endanger democratic politics in the information age.Dean's argument is built around analyses of Bill Gates, Theodore Kaczynski, popular journalism, the Internet and technology, as well as the conspiracy theory subculture that has marked American history from the Declaration Independence to the political celebrity of Hillary Rodham Clinton. The author claims that the media's insistence on the public's right to know leads to the indiscriminate investigation and dissemination of secrets. Consequently, in her view, the theoretical ideal of the public sphere, in which all processes are transparent, reduces real-world politics to the drama of the secret and its discovery.
Download or read book Zizek s Politics written by Jodi Dean and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical introduction to the political thought of one of the most important, original and enigmatic philosophers writing today. Zizek's Politics provides an original interpretation and defence of the Slovenian philosopher's radical critique of liberalism, democracy, and global capital.
Download or read book Crowds and Party written by Jodi Dean and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do mass protests become an organized activist collective? Crowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multitudes, Jodi Dean argues that we need to rethink the collective subject of politics. When crowds appear in spaces unauthorized by capital and the state—such as in the Occupy movement in New York, London and across the world—they create a gap of possibility. But too many on the Left remain stuck in this beautiful moment of promise—they argue for more of the same, further fragmenting issues and identities, rehearsing the last thirty years of left-wing defeat. In Crowds and Party, Dean argues that previous discussions of the party have missed its affective dimensions, the way it operates as a knot of unconscious processes and binds people together. Dean shows how we can see the party as an organization that can reinvigorate political practice.
Download or read book Blog Theory written by Jodi Dean and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Materializing Democracy written by Russ Castronovo and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-21 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVInvestigates the complex histories and conflicting desires that are generally concealed behind the term “democracy.”/div
Download or read book The Fragility of Things written by William E. Connolly and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-02 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Fragility of Things, eminent theorist William E. Connolly focuses on several self-organizing ecologies that help to constitute our world. These interacting geological, biological, and climate systems, some of which harbor creative capacities, are depreciated by that brand of neoliberalism that confines self-organization to economic markets and equates the latter with impersonal rationality. Neoliberal practice thus fails to address the fragilities it exacerbates. Engaging a diverse range of thinkers, from Friedrich Hayek, Michel Foucault, Hesiod, and Immanuel Kant to Voltaire, Terrence Deacon, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Alfred North Whitehead, Connolly brings the sense of fragility alive as he rethinks the idea of freedom. Urging the Left not to abandon the state but to reclaim it, he also explores scales of politics below and beyond the state. The contemporary response to fragility requires a militant pluralist assemblage composed of those sharing affinities of spirituality across differences of creed, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.
Download or read book The Communist Horizon written by Jodi Dean and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-10-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new title in Verso’s Pocket Communism series, Jodi Dean unshackles the communist ideal from the failures of theSoviet Union. In an age when the malfeasance of internationalbanking has alerted exploited populations the world over to theunsustainability of an economic system predicated on perpetualgrowth, it is time the left ended its melancholic accommodationwith capitalism. In the new capitalism of networked information technologies, ourvery ability to communicate is exploited, but revolution is stillpossible if we organize on the basis of our common and collectivedesires. Examining the experience of the Occupy movement, Deanargues that such spontaneity can’t develop into a revolution andit needs to constitute itself as a party. An innovative work of pressing relevance, The Communist Horizonoffers nothing less than a manifesto for a new collective politics.
Download or read book Public Things written by Bonnie Honig and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health .State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. In Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, Bonnie Honig asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be? Following Tocqueville, who extolled the virtues of “pursuing in common the objects of common desires,” Honig focuses not on the demos but on the objects of democratic life. Democracy, as she points out, postulates public things—infrastructure, monuments, libraries—that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be “gathered up” refers to the work of D. W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who popularized the idea of “transitional objects”—the toys, teddy bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an outside in relation to others. The wager of Public Things is that the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us into object relations with others and with ourselves. Public Things attends also to the historically racial character of public things: public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods restricted to white majorities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, who saw how things fabricated by humans lend stability to the human world, Honig shows how Arendt and Winnicott—both theorists of livenesss—underline the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.
Download or read book What is Media Archaeology written by Jussi Parikka and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past. Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology in relation to other key media studies debates including software studies, German media theory, imaginary media research, new materialism and digital humanities. What is Media Archaeology? advances an innovative theoretical position while also presenting an engaging and accessible overview for students of media, film and cultural studies. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary ties between art, technology and media.
Download or read book The Political Life of Sensation written by Davide Panagia and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-17 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The taste of chocolate, the noise of a crowd, the visual impressions of filmic images—such sensory perceptions are rarely if ever discussed in relation to democratic theory. In response, Davide Panagia argues that by overlooking sensation political theorists ignore a crucial dimension of political life. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s and Jacques Rancière’s readings of Kantian aesthetics, Panagia posits sensation as a radical democratic moment of aesthetic judgment. He contends that sensory experience interrupts our perceptual givens, creating occasions to suspend authority and reconfigure the arrangement of a political order. Panagia claims that the rule of narrative governs our inherited notions of political subjectivity and agency, such that reading and writing are the established modes of political deliberation. Yet the contemporary citizen-subject is a viewing subject, influenced by film, photos, and other perceptual stimuli as much as by text. Challenging the rule of narrative, Panagia analyzes diverse sites of cultural engagement including the visual dynamics portrayed in the film The Ring, the growth of festival culture in late-fifteenth-century Florence, the practices of convivium espoused by the Slow Food movement, and the architectural design of public newsstands. He then ties these occasions for sensation to notable moments in the history of political thought and shows the political potential of a dislocated subjectivity therein. Democratic politics, Panagia concludes, involves a taking part in those everyday practices that interrupt our common modes of sensing and afford us an awareness of what had previously been insensible.
Download or read book Platforms and Cultural Production written by Thomas Poell and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-10-14 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The widespread uptake of digital platforms – from YouTube and Instagram to Twitch and TikTok – is reconfiguring cultural production in profound, complex, and highly uneven ways. Longstanding media industries are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new industrial formations – live-streaming, social media influencing, and podcasting, among others – are evolving at breakneck speed. Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy explore both the processes and the implications of platformization across the cultural industries, identifying key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. The authors foreground three particular industries – news, gaming, and social media creation – and also draw upon examples from music, advertising, and more. Diverse in its geographic scope, Platforms and Cultural Production builds on the latest research and accounts from across North America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and China to reveal crucial differences and surprising parallels in the trajectories of platformization across the globe. Offering a novel conceptual framework grounded in illuminating case studies, this book is essential for students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand how the institutions and practices of cultural production are transforming – and what the stakes are for understanding platform power.
Download or read book Solidarity of Strangers written by Jodi Dean and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2018-04-20 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solidarity of Strangers is a crucial intervention in feminist, multicultural, and legal debates that will ignite a rethinking of the meaning of difference, community, and participatory democracy. Arguing for a solidarity rooted in a respect for difference, Dean offers a broad vision of the shape of postmodern democracies that moves beyond the limitations and dangers of identity politics. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.
Download or read book Comrade written by Jodi Dean and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When people say “comrade,” they change the world In the twentieth century, millions of people across the globe addressed each other as “comrade.” Now, among the left, it’s more common to hear talk of “allies.” In Comrade, Jodi Dean insists that this shift exemplifies the key problem with the contemporary left: the substitution of political identity for a relationship of political belonging that must be built, sustained, and defended. Dean offers a theory of the comrade. Comrades are equals on the same side of a political struggle. Voluntarily coming together in the struggle for justice, their relationship is characterized by discipline, joy, courage, and enthusiasm. Considering the egalitarianism of the comrade in light of differences of race and gender, Dean draws from an array of historical and literary examples such as Harry Haywood, C.L.R. James, Alexandra Kollontai, and Doris Lessing. She argues that if we are to be a left at all, we have to be comrades.
Download or read book Negative Capitalism written by J.D. Taylor and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2013-03-27 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Negative Capitalism: Cynicism in the Neoliberal Era offers a new conceptual framework for understanding the current economic crisis. Through a ranging series of analyses and perspectives, it argues that cynicism has become culturally embedded in the UK and US as an effect of disempowerment by neoliberal capitalism. Yet despite the deprivation and collapse of key social infrastructure like representative democracy, welfare, workers' rights and equal access to resources, there has so far been no collective, effective and sustained overthrow of capitalism. Why is this? The book's central call is for new strategies that unravel this narcissistic cynicism, embracing social democracy, constitutional rights, mass bankruptcies and animate sabotage. Kafka, Foucault, Ballard and de Sade are clashed with the X-Factor, ruinporn, London, and the artwork of Laura Oldfield Ford. Negative Capitalism's polemic is written to incite responses against the cynical malaise of the neoliberal era. ,
Download or read book Visionary Pragmatism written by Romand Coles and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As neoliberal capitalism destroys democracy, commonwealth, and planetary ecology, the need for radically rethinking and generating transformative responses to these catastrophes is greater than ever. Given that, Romand Coles presents an invigorating new mode of scholarship and political practice he calls "visionary pragmatism." Coles explores the profound interrelationships among everyday micropractices of grassroots politics and pedagogy, institutional transformation, and political protest through polyfocal lenses of political and social theory, neuroscience research, complex systems theory, and narratives of his cutting-edge action research. Visionary Pragmatism offers a theory of revolutionary cooptation that, in part, selectively employs practices and strategies of the dominant order to radically alter the coordinates of power and possibility. Underscoring the potential, vitality, and power of emerging democratic practices to change the world, Visionary Pragmatism's simultaneous theoretical rigor and grounding in actual political and ecological practices provokes and inspires new ways of cocreating knowledge and action in dark times.
Download or read book Deleuze s Political Vision written by Nicholas Tampio and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-08-06 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychiatrist-activist Félix Guattari’s 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus is widely recognized as a masterpiece of twentieth-century Continental philosophy. Until now, however, few scholars have dared to explain the book’s political importance. Deleuze’s Political Vision reconstructs Deleuze’s conception of pluralism, human nature, the social contract, liberalism, democracy, socialism, feminism, and comparative political theory. Unlike scholars who read Deleuze as a Marxist, author Nicholas Tampio argues that Deleuze was a cutting-edge liberal, concerned about protecting difference from what John Stuart Mill called the tyranny of the majority. The book brings Deleuze into conversation with other contemporary political theorists such as Hannah Arendt, William E. Connolly, Jürgen Habermas, Bruno Latour, Charles Mills, Martha Nussbaum, Carole Pateman, Abdolkarim Soroush, Leo Strauss, and Charles Taylor. Deleuze’s Political Vision translates Deleuze’s ideas into popular vernaculars to realize his political vision and reveal his work as essential to modern discussions of political theory and philosophy.
