Symbolic Misery, Volume 1

Symbolic Misery, Volume 1
Author :
Publisher : Polity
Total Pages : 0
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0745652646
ISBN-13 : 9780745652641
Rating : 4/5 (46 Downloads)

Synopsis Symbolic Misery, Volume 1 by : Bernard Stiegler

In this important new book, the leading cultural theorist and philosopher Bernard Stiegler re-examines the relationship between politics and aesthetics in our contemporary hyperindustrial age. Stiegler argues that our epoch is characterized by the seizure of the symbolic by industrial technology, where aesthetics has become both theatre and weapon in an economic war. This has resulted in a ‘symbolic misery’ where conditioning substitutes for experience. In today’s control societies, aesthetic weapons play an essential role: audiovisual and digital technologies have become a means of controlling the conscious and unconscious rhythms of bodies and souls, of modulating the rhythms of consciousness and life. The notion of an aesthetic engagement, capable of founding a new communal sensibility and a genuine aesthetic community, has largely collapsed today. This is because the overwhelming majority of the population is now totally subjected to the aesthetic conditioning of marketing and therefore estranged from any experience of aesthetic inquiry. That part of the population that continues to experiment aesthetically has turned its back on those who live in the misery of this conditioning. Stiegler appeals to the art world to develop a political understanding of its role. In this volume he pays particular attention to cinema which occupies a unique position in the temporal war that is the cause of symbolic misery: at once industrial technology and art, cinema is the aesthetic experience that can combat conditioning on its own territory. This highly original work - the first in Stiegler’s Symbolic Misery series - will be of particular interest to students in film studies, media and cultural studies, literature and philosophy and will consolidate Stiegler’s reputation as one of the most original cultural theorists of our time.

What Makes Life Worth Living

What Makes Life Worth Living
Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages : 164
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780745681948
ISBN-13 : 0745681948
Rating : 4/5 (48 Downloads)

Synopsis What Makes Life Worth Living by : Bernard Stiegler

In the aftermath of the First World War, the poet Paul Valéry wrote of a ‘crisis of spirit’, brought about by the instrumentalization of knowledge and the destructive subordination of culture to profit. Recent events demonstrate all too clearly that that the stock of mind, or spirit, continues to fall. The economy is toxically organized around the pursuit of short-term gain, supported by an infantilizing, dumbed-down media. Advertising technologies make relentless demands on our attention, reducing us to idiotic beasts, no longer capable of living. Spiralling rates of mental illness show that the fragile life of the mind is at breaking point. Underlying these multiple symptoms is consumer capitalism, which systematically immiserates those whom it purports to liberate. Returning to Marx’s theory, Stiegler argues that consumerism marks a new stage in the history of proletarianization. It is no longer just labour that is exploited, pushed below the limits of subsistence, but the desire that is characteristic of human spirit. The cure to this malaise is to be found in what Stiegler calls a ‘pharmacology of the spirit’. Here, pharmacology has nothing to do with the chemical supplements developed by the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmakon, defined as both cure and poison, refers to the technical objects through which we open ourselves to new futures, and thereby create the spirit that makes us human. By reference to a range of figures, from Socrates, Simondon and Derrida to the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Stiegler shows that technics are both the cause of our suffering and also what makes life worth living.

Decadence of Industrial Democracies

Decadence of Industrial Democracies
Author :
Publisher : Polity
Total Pages : 200
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780745648101
ISBN-13 : 074564810X
Rating : 4/5 (01 Downloads)

Synopsis Decadence of Industrial Democracies by : Bernard Stiegler

Explores the development of industrial technologies and the prospects for human growth.

Time and Social Theory

Time and Social Theory
Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages : 346
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780745669397
ISBN-13 : 0745669395
Rating : 4/5 (97 Downloads)

Synopsis Time and Social Theory by : Barbara Adam

Time is at the forefront of contemporary scholarly inquiry across the natural sciences and the humanities. Yet the social sciences have remained substantially isolated from time-related concerns. This book argues that time should be a key part of social theory and focuses concern upon issues which have emerged as central to an understanding of today's social world. Through her analysis of time Barbara Adam shows that our contemporary social theories are firmly embedded in Newtonian science and classical dualistic philosophy. She exposes these classical frameworks of thought as inadequate to the task of conceptualizing our contemporary world of standardized time, computers, nuclear power and global telecommunications.

Technics and Time, 3

Technics and Time, 3
Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Total Pages : 0
Release :
ISBN-10 : 080476168X
ISBN-13 : 9780804761680
Rating : 4/5 (8X Downloads)

Synopsis Technics and Time, 3 by : Bernard Stiegler

In the first two volumes of Technics and Time, Bernard Stiegler worked carefully through Heidegger's and Husserl's relationship to technics and technology. Here, in volume three, he turns his attention to the prolematic relationship to technics he finds in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, particularly in the two versions of the Transcendental Deduction. Stiegler relates this problematic to the "cinematic nature" of time, which precedes cinema itself but reaches an apotheosis in it as the exteriorization process of schema, through tertiary retentions and their mechanisms. The book focuses on the relationship between these themes and the "culture industry"— as defined by Adorno and Horkheimer—that has supplanted the educational institutions on which genuine cultural participation depends. This displacement, Stiegler says, has produced a malaise from which current global culture suffers. The result is potentially catastrophic.

Resilient Life

Resilient Life
Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages : 175
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780745682839
ISBN-13 : 0745682839
Rating : 4/5 (39 Downloads)

Synopsis Resilient Life by : Brad Evans

What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or an ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political issue, fundamental to the new doctrine of ‘resilience’ that is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century. No longer should we think in terms of evading the possibility of traumatic experiences. Catastrophic events, we are told, are not just inevitable but learning experiences from which we have to grow and prosper, collectively and individually. Vulnerability to threat, injury and loss has to be accepted as a reality of human existence. In this original and compelling text, Brad Evans and Julian Reid explore the political and philosophical stakes of the resilience turn in security and governmental thinking. Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency. Its consequences represent a profound assault on the human subject whose meaning and sole purpose is reduced to survivability. Not only does this reveal the nihilistic qualities of a liberal project that is coming to terms with its political demise. All life now enters into lasting crises that are catastrophic unto the end.

Work's Intimacy

Work's Intimacy
Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages : 232
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780745637464
ISBN-13 : 0745637469
Rating : 4/5 (64 Downloads)

Synopsis Work's Intimacy by : Melissa Gregg

This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew "knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways. This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.

Harvey Sacks

Harvey Sacks
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages : 238
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780195214734
ISBN-13 : 0195214730
Rating : 4/5 (34 Downloads)

Synopsis Harvey Sacks by : David Silverman

Although he published relatively little in his lifetime, Harvey Sacks's lectures and papers were influential in sociology and sociolinguistics and played a major role in the development of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The recent publication of Sacks's "Lectures on Conversation" has provided an opportunity for a wide-ranging reassessment of his contribution.

Automatic Society, Volume 1

Automatic Society, Volume 1
Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages : 354
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781509506323
ISBN-13 : 1509506322
Rating : 4/5 (23 Downloads)

Synopsis Automatic Society, Volume 1 by : Bernard Stiegler

In July 2014 the Belgian newspaper Le Soir claimed that France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland and the United States may lose between 43 and 50 per cent of their jobs within ten to fifteen years. Across the world, integrated automation, one key result of the so-called ‘data economy’, is leading to a drastic reduction in employment in all areas - from the legal profession to truck driving, from medicine to stevedoring. In this first volume of a new series, the leading cultural theorist Bernard Stiegler advocates a radical solution to the crisis posed by automation and consumer capitalism more generally. He calls for a decoupling of the concept of ‘labour’ (meaningful, intellectual participation) from ‘employment’ (dehumanizing, banal work), with the ultimate aim of eradicating ‘employment’ altogether. By doing so, new and alternative economic models will arise, where individuals are no longer simply mined for labour, but also actively produce what they consume. Building substantially on his existing theories and engaging with a wide range of figures - from Deleuze and Foucault to Bill Gates and Alan Greenspan - Automatic Society will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities, as well as anyone concerned with the central question of the future of work.

The End of Representative Politics

The End of Representative Politics
Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages : 182
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780745690513
ISBN-13 : 0745690513
Rating : 4/5 (13 Downloads)

Synopsis The End of Representative Politics by : Simon Tormey

Representative politics is in crisis. Trust in politicians is at an all-time low. Fewer people are voting or joining political parties, and our interest in parliamentary politics is declining fast. Even oppositional and radical parties that should be benefitting from public disenchantment with politics are suffering. But different forms of political activity are emerging to replace representative politics: instant politics, direct action, insurgent politics. We are leaving behind traditional representation, and moving towards a politics without representatives. In this provocative new book, Simon Tormey explores the changes that are underway, drawing on a rich range of examples from the Arab Spring to the Indignados uprising in Spain, street protests in Brazil and Turkey to the emergence of new initiatives such as Anonymous and Occupy. Tormey argues that the easy assumptions that informed our thinking about the nature and role of parties, and ‘party based democracy’ have to be rethought. We are entering a period of fast politics, evanescent politics, a politics of the street, of the squares, of micro-parties, pop-up parties, and demonstrations. This may well be the end of representative politics as we know it, but an exciting new era of political engagement is just beginning.