Fredric Jameson: The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (1998)

Fredric Jameson, a leading voice on the subject of postmodernism, assembles his most powerful writings on the culture of late capitalism in this essential volume. Classic insights on pastiche, nostalgia, and architecture stand alongside essays on the status of history, theory, Marxism, and the subject in an age propelled by finance capital and endless spectacle. Surveying the debates that blazed up around his earlier essays, Jameson responds to critics and maps out the theoretical positions of postmodernism’s prominent friends and foes.

Publisher Verso, 1998
ISBN 1859841821, 9781859841822
Length 206 pages

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Hamid Naficy: The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (1993)

Naficy explores the seemingly contradictory way in which immigrant media and cultural productions serve as the source both of resistance and opposition to the domination by host and home country’s social values while simultaneously serving as vehicles for personal and cultural transformation and assimilation of those values.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 1993
ISBN 0816620873, 9780816620876
Length 283 pages

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Luciana Parisi: Abstract Sex. Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (2004)

Astract Sex investigates the impact of advances in contemporary science and information technology on conceptions of sex. Evolutionary theory and the technologies of viral information transfer, cloning and genetic engineering are changing the way we think about human sex, reproduction and the communication of genetic information. Abstract Sex presents a philosophical exploration of this new world of sexual, informatic and capitalist multiplicity, of the accelerated mutation of nature and culture.

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004
ISBN 0826469906, 9780826469908
Length 227 pages

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Ronald E. Day: The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (2008)

Ronald E. Day provides a historically informed critical analysis of the concept and politics of information in the twentieth century. Analyzing texts in Europe and the United States, his critical reading method goes beyond traditional historiographical readings of communication and information by engaging specific historical texts in terms of their attempts to construct and reshape history.

After laying the groundwork and justifying his method of close reading for this study, Day examines the texts of two pre-World War II documentalists, Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet. Through the work of Otlet and Briet, Day shows how documentation and information were associated with concepts of cultural progress. Day also discusses the social expansion of the conduit metaphor in the works of Warren Weaver and Norbert Wiener. He then shows how the work of contemporary French multimedia theorist Pierre Lévy refracts the earlier philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari through the prism of the capitalist understanding of the “virtual society.”

Turning back to the pre-World War II period, Day examines two critics of the information society: Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. He explains Heidegger’s philosophical critique of the information culture’s model of language and truth as well as Benjamin’s aesthetic and historical critique of mass information and communication. Day concludes by contemplating the relation of critical theory and information, particularly in regard to the information culture’s transformation of history, historiography, and historicity into positive categories of assumed and represented knowledge.

Publisher SIU Press, 2008
ISBN 0809328488, 9780809328482
Length 152 pages

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Patricia Pisters (ed.): Micropolitics of Media Culture. Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari (2001)

This book focuses on the micro-political implications of the work of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari). General philosophical articles are coupled to more specific analyses of films (such as Fight Club and Schindler’s List) and other expressions of contemporary culture. The choice of giving specific attention to the analyses of images and sounds is not only related to the fact that audiovisual products are increasingly dominant in contemporary life, but also to the fact that film culture in itself is changing (‘in transition’) in capitalist culture. From a marginal place at the periphery of economy and culture at large, audiovisual products (ranging from art to ads) seem to have moved to the centre of the network society, as Manuel Castells calls contemporary society. Typical Deleuzian concepts such as micro-politics, the Body without Organs, becoming-minoritarian, pragmatics and immanence are explored in their philosophical implications and political force, whether utopian or dystopian. What can we do with Deleuze in contemporary media culture? A recurring issue throughout the book is the relationship between theory and practice, to which several solutions and problems are given.

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2001
ISBN 9053564721, 9789053564721
Length 302 pages

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Félix Guattari: The Three Ecologies (1989/2000) [English/Portuguese]

Just as rare species are disappearing at an alarming rate, so whole areas of human thought, feeling and sensibility are becoming extinct through the power of an infantalizing mass media and the social exclusion of the old, the young and the unemployed. Extending the definition of ecology to encompass social relations and human subjectivity as well as environmental concerns, Guattari argues that the ecological crises that threaten our planet are the direct result of the expansion of a new form of capitalism and that a new ecosophical approach must be found which respects the differences between all living systems.

A powerful critique of capitalism and a manifesto for a new way of thinking, The Three Ecologies is also an ideal introduction to the work of one of Europe’s most radical thinkers. This edition of The Three Ecologies includes a chronology of Guattari’s life and work, introductions to both his general philosophy and to the work itself and extended notes to the original text.

English edition
Translation by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton
Publisher Athlone Press, London, 2000
ISBN 0485004089, 9780485004083
Length 174 pages

As três ecologias
Portuguese edition
Translation Maria Cristina F. Bittencourt.
Edition 11
Campinas, SP: Papirus, 1990.
ISBN 85-308-0106-7

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Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980/2005)

A Thousand Plateaus continues the work Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari began in Anti-Oedipus and has now become established as one of the classic studies of the development of critical theory in the late twentieth century. It occupies an important place at the center of the debate reassessing the works of Freud and Marx, advancing an approach that is neither Freudian nor Marxist but which learns from both to find an entirely new and radical path. It presents an attempt to pioneer a variety of social and psychological analyses free of the philosophical encumbrances criticized by postmodern writers. A Thousand Plateaus is an essential text for feminists, literary theorists, social scientists, philosophers, and others interested in the problems of contemporary Western culture.

Translation and Foreword by Brian Massumi
Copyright © 1987 by the University of Minnesota Press
Eleventh printing 2005
Originally published as Mille Plateaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie © 1980 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris.

Key words and phrases: deterritorialization, abstract machine, rhizome, body without organs, semiotic, haecceities, war machine, stratum, black hole, nomad, fascism, destratification, psychoanalysis, line of flight, Gilles Deleuze, molar, haptic, schizoanalysis, surplus value, Paul Virilio

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Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972/2000)

When it first appeared in France, Anti-Oedipus was hailed as a masterpiece by some and “a work of heretical madness” by others. In it, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari set forth the following theory: Western society’s innate herd instinct has allowed the government, the media, and even the principles of economics to take advantage of each person’s unwillingness to be cut off from the group. What’s more, those who suffer from mental disorders may not be insane, but could be individuals in the purest sense, because they are by nature isolated from society. More than twenty-five years after its original publication, Anti-Oedipus still stands as a controversial contribution to a much-needed dialogue on the nature of free thinking.

Translated from the French by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane
Preface by Michel Foucault
Published by University of Minnesota Press
Copyright 1983 by the University of Minnesota
Tenth printing 2000
Originally published as L’Anti-Oedipe © 1972 by Les Editions de Minuit

Key terms: schizoanalysis, desiring-production, deterritorialization, Anti-Oedipus, psychoanalysis, Oedipus complex, anti-production, surplus-value, nuclear family, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Marxism, incest, exclusive disjunction, death instinct, Nietzsche, Spinoza, permanent revolution, paralogism, capitalist

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