The politics of everyday life is to be found, time and again, in meandering movements, in making connections across and between things in the rough and tumble of the seemingly banal, fragmentary and quotidian experiences that make up our day-to-day existence. The key point of the book, ideally as well as practically, is to realize that there may be something potentially significant, and politically significant, in the very act of making such connections, of understanding the supposedly trite and trivial world of the everyday against a broader political backcloth. There is merit in sifting the fragments, the fragmentary experiences, of everyday life in order to see how they imply a broader political totality in which they are situated and, at times, cleverly made to function. This intuition, broadly inspired by Henri Lefebvre, is reflected in and through the various and varying ways Porter puts to work the ideas and provocations of thinkers such as Raoul Vaneigem, Gilles Deleuze, and Soren Kierkegaard.

The Politics of Authenticating: Revisiting New Orleans Jazz sets forth an entirely new approach to the study of authenticity, based not upon a search for finding the ‘true’ meaning of the concept or ‘unmasking’ its claims. Rather, it details a grounded theory of ‘authenticating’ as a basic socio-political process, important in understanding the origins, development and consequences of competing knowledge claims in diverse areas of human experience and activity over time and place. The book is part jazz historiography, part autoethnography, and part memoir. It details Richard Ekins revisiting of the quest for authenticity in the social worlds of international New Orleans revivalist jazz from the early 1960s onwards, from his standpoint as a social constructionist social scientist and cultural theorist. The book grew out of a series of long, detailed conversations between Ekins and his interlocutor (Robert Porter) and captures the energy and dynamism of these exchanges in the writing of the text, providing what the authors call a ‘riff methodology’ that might be drawn on by other scholars concerned to write books that revisit aspects of their personal and professional lives.

The politics of everyday life is to be found, time and again, in meandering movements, in making connections across and between things in the rough and tumble of the seemingly banal, fragmentary and quotidian experiences that make up our day-to-day existence. The key point of this book, ideally as well as practically, is to realize that there may be something potentially significant--and politically significant--in the very act of making such connections, of understanding the supposedly trite and trivial world of the everyday against a broader political backcloth. There is merit in sifting the fragments--the fragmentary experiences--of everyday life in order to see how they imply a broader political totality in which they are situated and, at times, cleverly made to function. This intuition, broadly inspired by Henri Lefebvre, is reflected in and through the various and varying ways Robert Porter puts to work the ideas and provocations of thinkers such as Raoul Vaneigem, Gilles Deleuze and Søren Kierkegaard--back cover.

Friend, enemy; loyalist, traitor: politics today seems caught in the grip of a binary reduction machine. Bidding us either with or against our neighbors as though we were already combined in, and owed allegiance to, mutually external, nameable collective entities - ‘communities’, ‘nations’, ‘races’ – denominations in general. Beginning with an examination of processes (‘routines’) of denomination in Northern Ireland, Maurice Macartney examines the era of Empire and enslavement to show that similar processes were at work then in ‘viceregally’ arranged structures for the authorization and organization of the violence of hostility and of indifference to the suffering of others. Macartney then brings the analysis up to date, arguing that the hostility of populism and the indifference of the global market overlap to intensify the violence unfolding today. Finally, taking seriously the Copernican revolution of nonviolence, for which the enemy is not ‘the enemy’, but violence itself, the book calls for a different kind of combination, for the coming together of a ‘community of others’, commoners on the one common, working, for all our differences, toward the democratic empowerment of everyone in the neighborhood, in an equitable, sustainable, ‘neighborhood democracy’ that would open beyond hostility, beyond denomination, beyond all boundaries.

Every politics is an aesthetic. If necropolitics is the (accelerated) politics of what is usually referred to as the ‘apolitical age’, what are its manoeuvres, temporalities, intensities, textures, and tipping points? Bypassing revelatory and reconstructionist approaches – the tendency of which is to show that a particular site or practice is necropolitical by bringing its genealogy into evidence – this collection of essays by artist-philosophers and theorist curators articulates the pre-perceptual working of necropolitics through a focus on the senses, assignments of energy, attitudes, cognitive processes, and discursive frameworks. Drawing on different yet complementary methodologies (visual, performance, affect, and network analysis; historiography and ethnography), the contributors analyse cultural fetishes, taboos, sensorial and relational processes anchored in everyday practices, or cued by specific artworks. By mapping the necropolitics’ affective cartography, they expand the concept beyond its teleological, anthropocentric, and reductive horizon of ‘making and letting die’ to include posthuman and posthumous actants, effectively arguing for the necropolitics’ transformatory, political potential.

In the wake of new far-right populisms, the fragmentation of progressive global narratives and the dismantling of economic globalization, there are signs that neoliberalism is beginning to enter its death throes. Using 1968 as one of the inaugural moments of neoliberalism, this interdisciplinary collection is a critical and comparative resource that reexamines the significance and legacy of the global 1968 uprisings from today’s vantage point. For scholars and students alike, this interdisciplinary collection will help readers understand why the global uprisings of 1968 continue to resonate and what it means for theory and culture today.

Alternative Comedy Now and Then: Critical Perspectives is the first academic collection focusing on the history and legacy of the alternative comedy movement in Britain that began in 1979 and continues to influence contemporary stand-up comedy. The collection examines the contexts, performances and reception of alternative comedy in order to provide a holistic approach to examining the socio-political impact and significance of alternative comedy from its historical roots through to present day performances. As alternative comedy celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2019, critically reflecting on its impact and significance is a timely endeavour. The book adopts a distinctive interdisciplinary approach, synthesizing theory, concepts and methodologies from comedy studies, theatre and performance, communication and media studies, sociology, political sciences and anthropology. This approach is taken in order to fully understand and examine the dynamics and nuances of the alternative comedy movement which would not be possible with a single-discipline approach.

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950-1975 is the first publication to deal with the postwar avant-garde in the Nordic countries. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations in arts and culture: literature, the visual arts, architecture and design, film, radio, television and the performative arts. It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: The cultural politics, institutions and new cultural geographies after World War II, new technologies and media, performative strategies, interventions into everyday life and tensions between market and counterculture.

Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology--to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside of the cinematic medium? Taking up this crucial question for the emergent field of film philosophy, American Avant-Garde Cinema's Philosophy of the In-Between argues that the films of the American avant-garde do in fact do philosophy and illuminates the ethical stakes of their aesthetic interventions. Author Rebecca A. Sheehan contends that American avant-garde cinema's characteristic self-reflexivity is an interrogation of the modes and stakes of our engagement with the world on and beyond the screen. The book demonstrates this with the theory of the in-between: a pervasive figure that helps clarify how avant-garde cinema's reflections on the creation of images construct an ethics of perception itself, a responsibility to perpetuate thought in an enduring re-encounter with the world and with meaning's unfinished production. The book is structured by a taxonomy of the multiple in-betweens evident in American avant-garde filmmaking. Rather than systematically seeking reproductions of particular philosophers' ideas in avant-garde films, Sheehan derives categories of analysis and the philosophical claims they disclose from close readings of the films themselves. This methodology opposes mapping preconfigured philosophical concepts and values onto these films, as too many philosophical approaches to cinema have done, silencing the philosophies uniquely articulated by these films in the interest of making them ventriloquize philosophies advanced elsewhere. The chapters of this book trace three modes of the in-between that function philosophically in American avant-garde cinema: the material, the dimensional, and the conceptual. Although the chapters are organized around discrete aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations that unify several filmmakers, these three presentations of the in-between cut through all the chapters, allowing the subjects of each to converse over the course of the book.