Autonomy and Ideology
Price: $35.00
Autonomy and Ideology
Positioning an Avant-Garde in America
Robert E. Somol, editorEssays by Phyllis Lambert, Bernard Tschumi, Terence Riley, Robert Somol, Colin Rowe, Philip Johnson, Jeffrey Kipnis, Francesco Dal Co, Joan Ockman, Mark Linder, Detlef Mertins, Mitchell Schwarzer, K. Michael Hays, Sylvia Lavin, Rem Koolhaas, Paulette Singley, Peter Eisenman, and Beatriz Colomina
This is the documentation — transcripts, essays, and images — of the proceedings of an influential conference held in honor of Philip Johnson. Hosted in New York City in February 1996 by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, together with the Columbia University School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and the Museum of Modern Art, the conference was organized by Phyllis Lambert and Peter Eisenman and convened by Robert Somol. The international roster of diverse participants included historians, theorists, critics, and architects who debated such themes as the critical dynamics between museums as institutions and the material they represent; the issue of “high”...
Read more about: Autonomy and Ideology »A Culture of Conspiracy
Price: $19.95
A Culture of Conspiracy
Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America
Michael BarkunWhat do UFO believers, Christian millennialists, and right-wing conspiracy theorists have in common? According to Michael Barkun in this fascinating yet disturbing book, quite a lot. It is well known that some Americans are obsessed with conspiracies. The Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the 2001 terrorist attacks have all generated elaborate stories of hidden plots. What is far less known is the extent to which conspiracist worldviews have recently become linked in strange and unpredictable ways with other “fringe” notions such as a belief in UFOs, Nostradamus, and the Illuminati. Unraveling the extraordinary genealogies and permutations of these increasingly widespread ideas, Barkun shows how this web of urban legends has spread among subcultures on the Internet and through mass media, how a new style of conspiracy thinking has recently arisen, and how this phenomenon relates to larger changes in American culture. This book,...
Read more about: A Culture of Conspiracy »Writing
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Writing
The Political Test
Claude LefortWriting involves risks—the risk that one will be misunderstood, the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which one does not believe, this risk of inadvertently supporting a reader’s prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is true, the writer must “clear a passage within the agitated world of passions,” an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers are never the master of their own speech.
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In Writing: The Political Test, France’s leading political philosopher, Claude Lefort, illuminates the process by which writers negotiate difficult path to free themselves from the ideological and contextual traps that would doom their attempts to articulate a new vision. Lefort examines writers whose works provide special insights into this problem of risk, both literary artists and political philosophers. Among them are Salman Rushdie, Sade, Tocqueville, Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, Orwell, Kant,...The Cultural Turn
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The Cultural Turn
Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998
Fredric JamesonA convenient introduction to Jameson’s key writings on postmodernism.
No one would contest that Fredric Jameson, one of the leading Marxist critics in the English-speaking world, has had an immense impact on the way we now understand the phenomenon of postmodernism. His classic work, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, has been widely acclaimed as the seminal analysis of postmodernity from a cultural, philosophical and historical perspective.
Jameson’s reflections have become an essential reference-point for all those attempting to engage with postmodernism. However, until now his key writings on postmodernism have been unavailable in an easily accessible and affordable form. This book, designed as a short and convenient introduction to Jameson’s thought for both the student and the general reader, meets this need. Jameson on Postmodernism includes:
* “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Jameson’s classic analysis of postmodernity
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* “Marxism and Postmodernism,” in which Jameson responds to his critics
* “Theories of the Postmodern,” his survey of alternative approaches
* “The Antinomies of Postmodernity,” an extract from his recently published work,...The Strategy of Deception
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The Strategy of Deception
Paul Virilio
Written with his characteristic flair, Virillo’s latest book is a trenchant denunciation of the Kosovo war in which he successfully unites theory with a riveting study of the conflict. Tearing aside the veil of hypocrisy in which the USA and its allies wrapped the war, Virillo demonstrates that the nature of the bombing was set by strategic rather than ethical considerations.Beneath the humanitarian rhetoric, Virillo sees a sinister innovation in the methods of waging war: territorial space is being replaced by orbital space in which a system of global telesurveillance is linked to the destructive power of bombers and missiles. Governments, the military and the media are becoming part of a seamless and self-justifying process linked by new information and arms technologies.
Passionate and political, Strategy of Deception is a vital examination not only of the war in Yugoslavia but also what Virillo calls our “fin-de-siécle infantilization” in which the reality of battle is reduced to flickering images on a screen....
Read more about: The Strategy of Deception »Precarious Reader
Price: $12.95
Precarious Reader
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Texts on the Politics of Precarious Labour
Edited by Mute Magazine
