Download or read book General Intellects written by McKenzie Wark and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to the thinkers and the ideas that will shape the future What happened to the public intellectuals that used to challenge and inform us? Who is the Sartre or De Beauvoir of the internet age? General Intellects argues that we no longer have such singular figures, but we do have general intellects whose writing could, if read together, explain our times. Covering topics such as culture, politics, work, technology, and the Anthropocene, each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to the work of the others. McKenzie Wark’s distinctive readings are appreciations, but are also critical of how neoliberal universities militate against cooperative intellectual work to understand and change the world. The thinkers included are Amy Wendling, Kojin Karatani, Paolo Virno, Yann Moulier Boutang, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, Slavoj Žižek, Jodi Dean, Chantal Mouffe, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Azumo Hiroki, Paul B. Préciado, Wendy Chun, Timothy Morton, Quentin Meillassoux, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway.
Download or read book The Militant Intellect written by Andrés Fabián Henao Castro and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-10-03 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Militant Intellect offers a way of rethinking the relationship between critical theory and politics. How does critical theory become self-conscious of its own relation to politics? How does it contribute to change the world through its reinterpretation of it? These are some of the questions that drive The Militant Intellect. In this book Andrés Fabián Henao Castro argues that critical theory cultivates the militancy of the general intellect by training that intellect to work towards the intersectional and structural death of the colonist and thus to envision at the same time the materialization of that feminist decolonial communist queer marronage world that constitutes its horizon. Henao Castro borrows and expands on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of conceptual persona to qualify the intellectual labor of critical theory as an undisciplined field, that performs its labor through the creation of conceptual personae capable of subjectivizing critical thought. Doing so, The Militant Intellect argues for the indispensable reinterpretation of Plato’s Philosopher Sovereign, Karl Marx’s Communist, Frantz Fanon’s Rebel, Jacques Derrida’s Specter, Gayatri Spivak’s Subaltern, Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Life, Jacques Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster, Judith Butler’s Antigone/Ismene, and Jordy Rosenberg’s Fox as compelling personifications of intellectual militancy for the general intellect to have new scripts capable of cultivating the virtuosity of its more revolutionary performances.
Download or read book Public Intellectuals in South Africa written by Chris Broodryk and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection gives voice to neglected public intellectuals in the arts, humanities, and journalism in South Africa who gave voice and presence to those who have been marginalized and silenced in South African history Edward Said described a public intellectual as someone who uses accessible language to address a designated public on matters of social and political significance. The essays in Public Intellectuals in South Africa apply this interpretive prism and activist principle to a South African context and tell the stories of well-known figures as well as some that have been mostly forgotten. They include Magema Fuze, John Dube, Aggrey Klaaste, Mewa Ramgobin and Koos Roets, alongside marginalized figures such as Elijah Makiwane, Mandisi Sindo, William Pretorius and Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees. The essays capture the thoughts and opinions of these historical figures, who the contributors argue are public intellectuals who spoke out against the corruption of power, promoted a progressive politics that challenged the colonial project and its legacies, and encouraged a sustained dissent of the political status quo. Offering fascinating accounts of the life and work of these writers, critics and activists across a range of historical contexts and disciplines, from journalism and arts criticism to history and politics, it enriches the historical record of South African public intellectual life. This volume makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates about the value of research in the arts and humanities, and what constitutes public intellectualism in South Africa.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation written by Cosima Bruno and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-19 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering the first systematic overview of modern and contemporary Chinese literature from a translation studies perspective, this handbook provides students, researchers and teachers with a context in which to read and appreciate the effects of linguistic and cultural transfer in Chinese literary works. Translation matters. It always has, of course, but more so when we want to reap the benefits of intercultural communication. In many universities Chinese literature in English translation is taught as if it had been written in English. As a result, students submit what they read to their own cultural expectations; they do not read in translation and do not attend to the protocols of knowing, engagements and contestations that bind literature and society to each other. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation squarely addresses this pedagogical lack. Organised in a tripartite structure around considerations of textual, social, and large-scale spatial and historical circumstances, its thirty plus essays each deal with a theme of translation studies, as emerged from the translation of one or more Chinese literary works. In doing so, it offers new tools for reading and appreciating modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the global context of its translation, offering in-depth studies about eminent Chinese authors and their literary masterpieces in translation. The first of its kind, this book is essential reading for anyone studying or researching Chinese literature in translation.
Download or read book The Eye of the Master written by Matteo Pasquinelli and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A social history of AI that finally reveals its roots in the spatial computation of industrial factories and the surveillance of collective behaviour. What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence," a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as in its complex neural networks. The Eye of the Master argues, to the contrary, that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations, as it is found in Babbage's "calculating engines" of the industrial age as well as in the recent algorithms for image recognition and surveillance. The idea that AI may one day become autonomous (or "sentient", as someone thought of Google's LaMDA) is pure fantasy. Computer algorithms have always imitated the form of social relations and the organisation of labour in their own inner structure and their purpose remains blind automation. The Eye of the Master urges a new literacy on AI for scientists, journalists and new generations of activists, who should recognise that the "mystery" of AI is just the automation of labour at the highest degree, not intelligence per se.
Download or read book Sensoria written by McKenzie Wark and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As we face the compounded crises of late capitalism, environmental catastrophe and technological transformation, who are the thinkers and the ideas who will allow us to understand the world we live in? McKenzie Wark surveys three areas at the cutting edge of current critical thinking: design, environment, technology and introduces us to the thinking of nineteen major writers. Each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to the work of the others. The authors include: Sianne Ngai, Kodwo Eshun, Lisa Nakamura, Hito Steyerl, Yves Citton, Randy Martin, Jackie Wang, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Achille Mbembe, Deborah Danowich and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Eyal Weizman, Cory Doctorow, Benjamin Bratton, Tiziana Terranova, Keller Easterling, Jussi Parikka. Wark argues that we are too often told that expertise is obtained by specialisation. Sensoria connects the themes and arguments across intellectual silos. They explore the edges of disciplines to show how we might know the world: through the study of culture, the different notions of how we create such things, and the impact that the machines that we devise have had upon us. The book is a vital and timely introduction to the future both as a warning but also as a road map on how we might find our way out of the current crisis.
Download or read book The Sustainable Development Theory A Critical Approach Volume 2 written by Ion Pohoaţă and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the present conflictual relationship between the economy, the environment, and society. The current mainstream economic model is analysed from the perspective of the founding economists to review its suitability to tackle issues of sustainable development. The problems of redistribution and social justice are debated at length; alongside those concerning the giant state, degrowth, and a vision of sustainability that is founded on the idea of a self-regulating free market economy. Business cycle sustainability, anti-crisis therapy, technological unemployment, the natural rate of interest, and the Bruntland matrix are also examined. This book aims to present a holistic approach to sustainable development where social, ecological, and economic components are balanced. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in this topic.
Download or read book Plotinus on Consciousness written by D. M. Hutchinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-26 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plotinus is the first Greek philosopher to hold a systematic theory of consciousness. The key feature of his theory is that it involves multiple layers of experience: different layers of consciousness occur in different levels of self. This layering of higher modes of consciousness on lower ones provides human beings with a rich experiential world, and enables human beings to draw on their own experience to investigate their true self and the nature of reality. This involves a robust notion of subjectivity. However, it is a notion of subjectivity that is unique to Plotinus, and remarkably different from the Post-Cartesian tradition. Behind the plurality of terms Plotinus uses to express consciousness, and behind the plurality of entities to which Plotinus attributes consciousness (such as the divine souls and the hypostases), lies a theory of human consciousness. It is a Platonist theory shaped by engagement with rival schools of ancient thought.
Download or read book Analogical City written by Cameron McEwan and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2024-01-18 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Analogical City, Cameron McEwan argues for architecture’s status as a critical project. McEwan revisits architect Aldo Rossi as a paradigmatic figure of the critical rational tradition, studying a neglected aspect of his thought — the analogical city — to excavate its potential. McEwan develops a grammar of the analogical city under the headings of Imagination, Transformation, City, Multitude, and Project. McEwan argues that the analogical city is critical, collective, and emancipatory. Analogical thought and understanding cities as analogical might open the conditions of possibility for rethinking the critical project in architecture. At a time when the humanities and the sciences are threatened by irrational thought, from climate denial to post-truth narratives, and when architecture has seemingly disavowed its critical capacity and political possibility through its commodification as an instrument of the neoliberal city, McEwan offers critical strategies, conceptual tools, figures of thought, and knowledge practices to articulate modes of thinking and acting differently within architectural criticism and practice. Today, knowledge is a common terrain of struggle and thought requires constant reinvention. The task of architecture, and critique more broadly, must be to interpret the world in order to change it. Consequently Analogical City proposes modes for imagining the city, the subject, and the world otherwise — towards a more egalitarian and critical architecture of the city. Ultimately, the analogical city is not a fully developed theory, nor is it only an intuitive, poetic, or purely formal practice, as some critics propose. McEwan argues that the analogical city is poetic and political: it always refers beyond itself towards a collective and critical project of the city, and yet it invites a series of formal, spatial, and graphic operations comprising erasure and negativity followed by substitution and remontage.
Download or read book Media Democracy and Social Change written by Aeron Davis and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we are told so regularly that we live in a ‘post truth’ age and are surrounded by ‘fake news’, it can be tempting to think of politics as primarily mediated. Discussion and analysis of public affairs is preoccupied with the power and reach of platforms or the passion and rage of social media exchanges. As important as these issues may be, a focus on the communicative risks downgrading the political. Media, Democracy and Social Change puts politics back into political communications. It shows how within a digital media ecology, the wider context of neoliberal capitalism remains essential for understanding what political communications is, and can hope to be. Tackling broad themes of structural inequality, technological change, political realignment and social transformation, the book explores political communications as it relates to debates around the state, infrastructures, elites, populism, political parties, activism, the legacies of colonialism, and more. It is both an expert introduction to the field of political communications, and a critical intervention to help re-imagine what a democratic politics might mean in a digital age. It will be essential reading for students, researchers and activists. Aeron Davis, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman and Gholam Khiabany all work at the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London, where they teach together on the MA in Political Communications.
Download or read book Gone Primitive written by Marianna Torgovnick and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this acclaimed book, Torgovnick explores the obsessions, fears, and longings that have produced Western views of the primitive. Crossing an extraordinary range of fields (anthropology, psychology, literature, art, and popular culture),Gone Primitivewill engage not just specialists but anyone who has ever worn Native American jewelry, thrilled to Indiana Jones, or considered buying an African mask. "A superb book; and--in a way that goes beyond what being good as a book usually implies--it is a kind of gift to its own culture, a guide to the perplexed. It is lucid, usually fair, laced with a certain feminist mockery and animated by some surprising sympathies."--Arthur C. Danto, New York Times Book Review "An impassioned exploration of the deep waters beneath Western primitivism. . . . Torgovnick's readings are deliberately, rewardingly provocative."--Scott L. Malcomson,Voice Literary Supplement
Download or read book How Slavoj Became i ek written by Eliran Bar-El and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-01-12 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engrossing account of the meteoric rise of contemporary philosophy’s most contentious and prolific intellectual. Slovenian philosopher bad boy Slavoj Žižek is one of the most famous intellectuals of our time, publishing at a breakneck speed and lecturing around the world. With his unmistakable speaking style and set of mannerisms that have made him ripe material for internet humor and meme culture, he is recognizable to a wide spectrum of fans and detractors. But how did an intellectual from a remote Eastern European country come to such popular notoriety? In How Slavoj Became Žižek, sociologist Eliran Bar-El plumbs the emergence, popularization, and development of this phenomenon called “Žižek.” Beginning with Žižek’s early years as a thinker and political figure in Slovenian civil society, Bar-El traces Žižek’s rise from Marxist philosopher to a political candidate to eventual intellectual celebrity as Žižek perfects his unique performative style and a rhetorical arsenal of “Hegelacanese.” Following 9/11, Žižek’s career as a global op-ed writer and TV commentator married his rhetoric with global events such as the War on Terror, the financial crisis of 2008, and the Arab Spring of 2011. Yet, at the same time, this mainstream popularity, as well as a series of politically incorrect views, almost entirely estranged the Slovenian from the normal workings of academia. Ultimately, this account shows how Žižek harnessed the power of the digital era in his own self-fashioning as a public intellectual.
Download or read book Sensoria written by McKenzie Wark and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Design, Politics, the Environment: a survey of the key thinkers and ideas that are rebuilding the world in the shadow of the anthropocene As we face the compounded crises of late capitalism, environmental catastrophe and technological transformation, who are the thinkers and the ideas who will allow us to understand the world we live in? McKenzie Wark surveys three areas at the cutting edge of current critical thinking: design, environment, technology and introduces us to the thinking of nineteen major writers. Each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to the work of the others. The authors include: Sianne Ngai, Kodwo Eshun, Lisa Nakamura, Hito Steyerl, Yves Citton, Randy Martin, Jackie Wang, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Achille Mbembe, Deborah Danowich and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Eyal Weizman, Cory Doctorow, Benjamin Bratton, Tiziana Terranova, Keller Easterling, Jussi Parikka. Wark argues that we are too often told that expertise is obtained by specialisation. Sensoria connects the themes and arguments across intellectual silos. They explore the edges of disciplines to show how we might know the world: through the study of culture, the different notions of how we create such things, and the impact that the machines that we devise have had upon us. The book is a vital and timely introduction to the future both as a warning but also as a road map on how we might find our way out of the current crisis.
Download or read book Intellectuals and Society written by Thomas Sowell and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals. Even government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by those intellectuals. Intellectuals and Society not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged. One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society -- and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.
Download or read book Authorship s Wake written by Philip Sayers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authorship's Wake examines the aftermath of the 1960s critique of the author, epitomized by Roland Barthes's essay, The Death of the Author. This critique has given rise to a body of writing that confounds generic distinctions separating the literary and the theoretical. Its archive consists of texts by writers who either directly participated in this critique, as Barthes did, or whose intellectual formation took place in its immediate aftermath. These writers include some who are known primarily as theorists (Judith Butler), others known primarily as novelists (Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace), and yet others whose texts are difficult to categorize (the autofiction of Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner; the autotheory of Maggie Nelson). These writers share not only a central motivating question how to move beyond the critique of the author-subject but also a way of answering it: by writing texts that merge theoretical concerns with literary discourse. Authorship's Wake traces the responses their work offers in relation to four themes: communication, intention, agency, and labor.
Download or read book Dead Epidemiologists written by Rob Wallace and published by Monthly Review Press. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of COVID-19 and the sociopolitical crises that led to the 2020 global pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic shocked the world. It shouldn’t have. Since this century’s turn, epidemiologists have warned of new infectious diseases. Indeed, H1N1, H7N9, SARS, MERS, Ebola Makona, Zika, and a variety of lesser viruses have emerged almost annually. But what of the epidemiologists themselves? Some bravely descended into the caves where bat species hosted coronaviruses, including the strains that evolved into the COVID-19 virus. Yet, despite their own warnings, many of the researchers appear unable to understand the true nature of the disease—as if they are dead to what they’ve seen. Dead Epidemiologists is an eclectic collection of commentaries, articles, and interviews revealing the hidden-in-plain-sight truth behind the pandemic: Global capital drove the deforestation and development that exposed us to new pathogens. Rob Wallace and his colleagues—ecologists, geographers, activists, and, yes, epidemiologists—unpack the material and conceptual origins of COVID-19. From deepest Yunnan to the boardrooms of New York City, this book offers a compelling diagnosis of the roots of COVID-19, and a stark prognosis of what—without further intervention—may come.
Download or read book Creative Ecologies written by Hélène Frichot and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architect and philosopher Hélène Frichot examines how the discipline of architecture is theorized and practiced at the periphery. Eschewing a conventionally direct approach to architectural objects – to iconic buildings and big-name architects – she instead explores the background of architectural practice, to introduce the creative ecologies in which architecture exists only in relation to other objects and ideas. Consisting of a series of philosophical encounters with architectural practice that are neither neatly located in one domain nor the other, this book is concerned with 'other ways of doing architecture'. It examines architecture at the limits where it is muddied by alternative disciplinary influences – whether art practice, philosophy or literature. Frichot meets a range of creative characters who work at the peripheries, and who challenge the central assumptions of the discipline, showing that there is no 'core of architecture' – there is rather architecture as a multiplicity of diverse concerns in engagement with local environments and worlds. From an author well-known in the disciplines of architecture and philosophy for her scholarship on Deleuze, this is a radical, accessible, and highly-original approach to design research, deftly engaging with an array of current topics from the Anthropocene to affect theory, new materialism to contemporary feminism.
