The Frankfurt School has been somewhat of a mystery to me. Mentioned in nearly half the books I read, their thought is synonymous with critical theory. I’ve gotten a lot of secondhand exposure to the school, and I’ve read a fair amount of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse, but I’ve never felt a full grasp of the movement. Well, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (Continuum) is here to fix that. It fills the holes and explicates the missing pieces. Continue reading “The Essential Frankfurt School Reader”
Conversations on Consciousness Edited by Susan Blackmore
After exploring the newest science of cultural evolution in her last book, The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore returns now with twenty interviews with some of the world’s biggest minds. What does one talk about with the world’s biggest minds? Well, minds of course. Continue reading “Conversations on Consciousness Edited by Susan Blackmore”
Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers
Alan D. Schrift has hereby done a great service to anyone interested in French thinkers and their thought. Twentieth-Century French Philosophy (Blackwell) chronicles the lineage, the history, and the context of all of the major thinkers and thought of France in the last hundred years. This includes a succinct chronology, brief biographies, and a lengthy historical narrative — the latter of which might seem anathema to most French thinkers, but helps glue everything together here. And when we’re talking about Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Barthes, Blanchot, Sartre, Bataille, Bourdieu, Althusser, de Beauviour, Levinas, and Kristeva, among many others, we need as much cohesion as we can find. Continue reading “Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers”
Mark C. Taylor: The Philosophy of Culture
Mark C. Taylor is one of those people you stumble upon and wonder why you were previously roaming around unaware. His countless books explore many areas of culture, philosophy, art, theory, and, most recently, commerce. I originally came across his work while doing research on artist Mark Tansey (Taylor’s The Picture in Question explores the mix of messages and theory in Tansey’s paintings). Continue reading “Mark C. Taylor: The Philosophy of Culture”
The Laws of Cool by Alan Liu
Even with as many texts as have come out exploring and explicating our so-called information age, there has yet to be a more exhaustive account of just what the hell has happened than Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool (University of Chicago Press). Nevermind the misleading title. This isn’t another exposé on “cool hunting” and finding out what the kids are into. This lengthy tome is about how most of us came to be knowledge workers in the factories of information.
To call this book “exhaustive” is an understatement. I can’t stress the reaches of Liu’s research or the sprawling implications of his book enough – and reading it is quite the lengthy process. Every time one thinks that Liu has found his bounds, the next chapter opens another door on which one wouldn’t have even thought of knocking. Yet, it’s a cohesive work, written with unwavering wit and erudition.
Exploring the Foucauldian climate of the corporate control culture, set off by IT and the mainframe, Liu shows how managers came to be “seduced by the system” (as Ellen Ullman put it in her book Close to the Machine). They used the abilities of their information systems to keep tabs on their workers – even where there had previously been no problems. His use of temperature-related tropes (e.g., “hot,” “cold,” “warm,” and especially “cool”) is confusing at first, due to the previous uses of such terms (i.e., as slang or as in McLuhan’s ubiquitous probes). These temperatures eventually come together to illuminate the weather of the twenty first century workaday, from the stifling of hot emotions by the cold machine to the warmth of friends and family and the cool of today’s assimilated, yet über-hip “knowledge workers” (“We work here, but we’re cool,” quoth Liu).
Taken whole, The Laws of Cool is a high relief, topographical map of the workscape of the early twenty first century. Couple this with Ken Wark‘s A Hacker Manifesto and you have a crash course in post-Marxist labor studies.
Andrew Feenberg: Questioning Technology
“Technology marches on, over you or through you, take your pick.” — Stewart Brand
As technology marches on, who, besides alarmist Luddites, is keeping tabs on the changes it’s bringing about? One such person is philosopher Andrew Feenberg — and he does it with a philosophical pedigree that no one else can claim and from a critical stance that no other can maintain. His many books on the subject illuminate numerous aspects of technology’s ever-increasing influence that are so often overlooked in similar texts, yet he maintains an even keel: Andrew uses and embraces technology, so his critical perspective comes from the fray, not the forest. Continue reading “Andrew Feenberg: Questioning Technology”
A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark
A Hacker Manifesto is the Big Picture of not only where we are in the “information age,” but where we’re going as well. Adopting the epigrammic style of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, as well as updating its ideas, Ken Wark establishes so-called “knowledge workers” as an unrecognized social class: “the hacker class.” Wark also updates Marx and Engels, Deleuze and Guattari, Nietzsche, and a host of others: Continue reading “A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark”
From Modernism to Postmodernism and Philosophy of Technology
In short, that contradictions must be accepted. — David Jones
To unify the thing that is postmodernism might sound futile at the outset, but Lawrence Cahoone’s anthology From Modernism to Postmodernism (Blackwell) sets out to do just that. The very term “postmodernism” is fraught with misconception, misuse, and implies an adherence to fragmentation over unity. Cahoone’s selections combat this by demonstrating postmodernism’s origins, its disparate applications and definitions in different fields, and the ongoing debates about what exactly it all means. From Descartes and Hume to Nietzche and Sartre, and from the post-structuralists (e.g., Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guittari, etc.) to the architects (e.g., Le Corbusier and Robert Venturi), Cahoone’s anthology provides an excellent overview of an inherently fractured lens on the world. Continue reading “From Modernism to Postmodernism and Philosophy of Technology”
Derrida Directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman
Jacques Derrida is the founding father of deconstruction. Focusing on our use of language, Derrida (Jane Doe Films) shows the multiple layers of meaning at work. By deconstructing previous works of scholars, Derrida shows that language is a constantly shifting thing. Continue reading “Derrida Directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman”
David Weinberger: Small Pieces Loosely Joined
With ninety-five theses that redefined online markets and their prospective web consumers, The Cluetrain Manifesto (Perseus Books, 2000) dropped a virtual bomb on the virtual world. David Weinberger was one of its four authors. Therein he stated, “The web is viral. It infects everything it touches and, because it is an airborne virus, it infects some things it doesn’t. The web has become the new corporate infrastructure, in the form of intranets, turning massive corporate hierarchical systems into collections of many small pieces loosely joining themselves unpredictably.” With his new book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined (Perseus Books, 2002), Weinberger expounds on this idea. With insight and authority, he claims — among other things — that the web hasn’t been hyped enough. Continue reading “David Weinberger: Small Pieces Loosely Joined”