title,authors_json,strapline,summary,synopsis,review_count,reviews_json 10/40/70,"[""Nicholas Rombes""]",A bold experiment in film theory for the digital era.,"In an era of rapid transformation from analog to digital, how can we write about cinema in ways that are as fresh, surprising, and challenging as the best films are? In 10/40/70 Nicholas Rombes proposes one bold possibility: pause a film at the 10, 40, and 70-minute mark and write about the frames at hand, no matter what they are. This method of constraint—by eliminating choice and foreclosing on authorial intention—allows the film itself to dictate the terms of its analysis freed from the tyranny of pre-determined interpretation. Inspired by Roland Barthes’s notion of the “third meaning” and its focus on the film frame as an image that is neither a photograph nor a moving image, Rombes assumes the role of image detective, searching the frames for clues not only about the films themselves—drawn from a wide range of genres and time periods—but the very conditions of their existence in the digital age.","In an era of rapid transformation from analog to digital, how can we write about cinema in ways that are as fresh, surprising, and challenging as the best films are? In 10/40/70 Nicholas Rombes proposes one bold possibility: pause a film at the 10, 40, and 70-minute mark and write about the frames at hand, no matter what they are. This method of constraint—by eliminating choice and foreclosing on authorial intention—allows the film itself to dictate the terms of its analysis freed from the tyranny of pre-determined interpretation. Inspired by Roland Barthes’s notion of the “third meaning” and its focus on the film frame as an image that is neither a photograph nor a moving image, Rombes assumes the role of image detective, searching the frames for clues not only about the films themselves—drawn from a wide range of genres and time periods—but the very conditions of their existence in the digital age.",3,"[""For Nicholas Rombes, every film is an oracle. In 10/40/70, he proposes a new method of divination: stop the film at arbitrary points, and give a careful account of what you see. The result may be an intense formal analysis, or a new appreciation of narrative subtleties, or a kind of emotional weather report, or a dense train of subjective memories and associations. But in every case, Rombes uncovers unsuspected depths, and shows us cinema in a strange new light. ~ Steven Shaviro, Author of Post Cinematic Affect and Doom Patrols"", ""With his 10/40/70 essays, Nicholas Rombes breaks the habitual cycles of film criticism, forcing himself to approach familiar films from odd angles. He delegates to chance the task of selecting a film’s defining images, and the results are a series of revealing observations about movies caught unawares; often, he finds new points of entry to films we all think we know inside out. 10/40/70 can find a film’s vulnerable spots, those moments we rarely notice, whose significance we only gather in freeze-framed close readings. Sometimes the images are well known fragments of the iconic scenes that comprise our shared film culture, but more frequently, they are the unsung or incidental pieces that hold a film together, unassuming but always ripe for re-examination. By bringing into focus these triptychs of framegrabs, Rombes finds fresh perspectives on well-known movies, and demonstrates that there may be riches buried in their every frame if we compel ourselves to look. ~ Dan North, Author of Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor"", ""Rombes dives into the self-imposed constraints of his critical project with both feet, and the result is an innovative splash. Arguing that \""digital desire\"" predated digital cinema, this experiment in film writing pushes readers to re-frame our critical practices and to embrace new cinematic experiences and interpretive acts. We need more books like this. ~ Julia Leyda, Sophia University, Japan""]" 15 Years of Speculative Realism,"[""Charlie Johns""]",A definitive and invaluable re-assessment of the last decade of speculative realism.,"More than 15 years have passed since the speculative realism conference at Goldsmiths College, London, hosted Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. Their dictum was simple: Reality is not what it seems. 15 Years of Speculative Realism begins with four chapters, each dedicated to the work of a speculative realism panellist. On one level, their respective projects engaged with the great philosophical systems of yesteryear: Cartesian dualism; the Platonist distinction between reality and appearance; and the Kantian revival of noumena. But there is much more at stake here, such as the repositioning of the subject as yet another object in the universe, and the radically egalitarian view that individual human thought is best described as a local manifestation of nature. Through these observations, we are also encouraged to ask: 'Could the laws of physics change at any moment?' and 'How does thought think the gradual extinction of itself as but another perishable phenomenon in the physical universe?' Two further chapters offer wider context: the Analysis & Impact chapter evaluates speculative realism’s relevance to the wider domain of philosophy, as well as its achievements and shortcomings, with commentary by Slavoj Žižek, and the Interviews chapter has contributions from Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Goldsmiths College’s speculative realism conference coordinator, Alberto Toscano. As we prophetically enter into a new epoch - characterized by artificial intelligence and a withering climate - we call the Anthropocene, it seems that many of the insights offered to us through the speculative realist lens have come to fruition. The objective, now, is to speculate upon how far this major shift in the humanities will ensue, and how different this reality will be from our preconceived notion of the real offered to us by previous tenets of realism. This book charts the essential meaning of the movement in the wake of its spell as one of the most significant philosophical movements of the twenty-first century.","More than 15 years have passed since the speculative realism conference at Goldsmiths College, London, hosted Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. Their dictum was simple: Reality is not what it seems. 15 Years of Speculative Realism begins with four chapters, each dedicated to the work of a speculative realism panellist. On one level, their respective projects engaged with the great philosophical systems of yesteryear: Cartesian dualism; the Platonist distinction between reality and appearance; and the Kantian revival of noumena. But there is much more at stake here, such as the repositioning of the subject as yet another object in the universe, and the radically egalitarian view that individual human thought is best described as a local manifestation of nature. Through these observations, we are also encouraged to ask: 'Could the laws of physics change at any moment?' and 'How does thought think the gradual extinction of itself as but another perishable phenomenon in the physical universe?' Two further chapters offer wider context: the Analysis & Impact chapter evaluates speculative realism’s relevance to the wider domain of philosophy, as well as its achievements and shortcomings, with commentary by Slavoj Žižek, and the Interviews chapter has contributions from Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Goldsmiths College’s speculative realism conference coordinator, Alberto Toscano. As we prophetically enter into a new epoch - characterized by artificial intelligence and a withering climate - we call the Anthropocene, it seems that many of the insights offered to us through the speculative realist lens have come to fruition. The objective, now, is to speculate upon how far this major shift in the humanities will ensue, and how different this reality will be from our preconceived notion of the real offered to us by previous tenets of realism. This book charts the essential meaning of the movement in the wake of its spell as one of the most significant philosophical movements of the twenty-first century.",2,"[""When the first speculative realism symposium was held in 2007, it caused a sensation both inside and outside philosophical circles. It seemed to portend a radical shift in our relation to, and in our understanding of, the world. But it is the fate of successful revolutions in thought to be assimilated into the very frameworks that they initially seemed determined to destroy. The essays in this volume show how speculative realist projects contribute to, and enrich our understandings of, many different philosophical questions. ~ Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University and author of The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism"", ""A definitive and invaluable re-assessment of the last decade of speculative realism. ~ Thomas Nail, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of Matter and Motion: A Brief History of Kinetic Materialism""]" 2 Ennerdale Drive,"[""Rosa Ainley""]","A missed family funeral and too many phone calls going nowhere, except to 2 Ennerdale Drive. Who will play detective?","2 Ennerdale Drive is a memoir of a house and the family that lived there; a work of text and image encompassing architecture, social and personal history, town planning, photography and representation, carving a space within and between new forms of memoir, cultural studies and creative non-fiction. The house in north London, built during the phenomenal interwar wave of suburban development, begins an exploration of public and private lives, architectural and family narrative, charting territory between documented evidence, personal and cultural memory, association and emotional response. 2 Ennerdale Drive questions the veracity accorded to documents produced across institutional, public and private family contexts. Textual analyses of images relating to the house, the family (and its business: theatre) frame each chapter, generating stories and responses to the factual and the remembered. Visits to archives and to other houses document the existence and/or absence of such material. An epilogue locates the author, a family member and sometime narrator, in the frame and offers, perhaps, a final privileged glance into the family archive.","2 Ennerdale Drive is a memoir of a house and the family that lived there; a work of text and image encompassing architecture, social and personal history, town planning, photography and representation, carving a space within and between new forms of memoir, cultural studies and creative non-fiction. The house in north London, built during the phenomenal interwar wave of suburban development, begins an exploration of public and private lives, architectural and family narrative, charting territory between documented evidence, personal and cultural memory, association and emotional response. 2 Ennerdale Drive questions the veracity accorded to documents produced across institutional, public and private family contexts. Textual analyses of images relating to the house, the family (and its business: theatre) frame each chapter, generating stories and responses to the factual and the remembered. Visits to archives and to other houses document the existence and/or absence of such material. An epilogue locates the author, a family member and sometime narrator, in the frame and offers, perhaps, a final privileged glance into the family archive.",3,"[""It may or may not have escaped attention (though it has not escaped the attention of the Oxonian Review ) that Zero Books is having an extraordinarily good run at the moment - so heres plugs for four I think especially worth plugging. …\n\nThree books on film, in the loosest sense … More domestic, albeit deceptively so: Rosa Ainleys irascible, brief-yet-capacious 2 Ennerdale Drive , an unauthorised biography of a suburban house in Colindale. Into this frame she crams a trenchant analysis of suburbia itself, both against those who would condemn it and against those who would celebrate it, an Angela Carter-esque saga of acting dynasties, and a smartly Benjaminian take on the ubiquitous family history genre.\n\n~ Owen Hatherley, , sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/"", ""I devoured this fascinating and very unusual book in one sitting and then went straight back to the beginning to re-read it more carefully. By no means an easy read, it is one I know I'll return to again and again.\n\nAlthough I was already familiar with some of the stories of the Ainley acting 'dynasty', the book is much more than a series of theatrical memoirs. Complex and thought-provoking, it appeals on many levels, touching on social as well as theatre history, exploring the complicated relationship between a family and its homes and articulately expressing the joys - and the frustrations - of historical research.\n\nRosa Ainley's densely patterned (and often very poetic) prose conveys the zeal behind her quest to link the histories of three generations of her family but also expresses the frustrations which come with the realisation that - inevitably - there are always going to be questions which remain unanswered.\n\nA beautifully produced book too, elegantly stylish(although I do have a slightly pedantic niggle with the American spellings - why can't an Anglo-American publisher like Zer0 use English ones, especially when the book has such an 'English' subject? Still, the quality of the content more than makes up for this!)\n\nWonderful stuff!\n\n~ Joanna Duncan, Amazon review (five stars)"", ""2 Ennerdale Drive tells the story of the author's family through the spaces of their lives, weaving the texture of personalities – some touching, many eccentric – out of the well-worn details of London's built fabric. Part social and architectural history, part personal memoir, Rosa Ainley takes the reader on a fascinating journey through her past which is both touching and bright. She digs deep, in search of lost moments, into the intimate corners of her private life. And yet the anecdotes she recounts, the photographs she muses over, and the homes she visits, are not only of interest to a member of the Ainley family, they offer a humorous and intelligent view of London's recent architectural past, suburban and theatrical, and a critical reflection on what it is to write a biography of one's own family.\n\n~ Professor Jane Rendell, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (University College London)""]" Advancing Conversations: Aubrey de Grey - advocate for an indefinite human lifespan,"[""Douglas Lain"", ""Aubrey de Grey""]","A line of interview books documenting conversations with artists, authors, philosophers, economists, scientists, and activists whose works are aimed at the future and at progress.","Advancing Conversations is a line of interview books documenting conversations with artists, authors, philosophers, economists, scientists, and activists whose works are aimed at the future and at progress. The biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, as the world's pre-eminent longevity advocate, is nothing if not future oriented. De Grey is the founder of the SENS Research Foundation, an organization developing medical interventions to repair the damage the body does to itself over time. Stated more directly, Aubrey de Grey and his organization aim to defeat aging. In 2005 a panel of scientists and doctors from MIT, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Microsoft, and the Venter Institute participated in a contest to judge whether de Grey's ""Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence"" were worthy of debate and verification or whether these ideas were wrong on their face. The panel found that de Grey's proposals for intervening in the aging process, while speculative, often ""ran parallel to existing research"" and were not ""demonstrably wrong.""","Advancing Conversations is a line of interview books documenting conversations with artists, authors, philosophers, economists, scientists, and activists whose works are aimed at the future and at progress. The biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, as the world's pre-eminent longevity advocate, is nothing if not future oriented. De Grey is the founder of the SENS Research Foundation, an organization developing medical interventions to repair the damage the body does to itself over time. Stated more directly, Aubrey de Grey and his organization aim to defeat aging. In 2005 a panel of scientists and doctors from MIT, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Microsoft, and the Venter Institute participated in a contest to judge whether de Grey's ""Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence"" were worthy of debate and verification or whether these ideas were wrong on their face. The panel found that de Grey's proposals for intervening in the aging process, while speculative, often ""ran parallel to existing research"" and were not ""demonstrably wrong.""",0,[] Advancing Conversations: Srećko Horvat - Subversion!,"[""Alfie Bown"", ""Srećko Horvat""]",An interview with acclaimed European philosopher and political activist Srećko Horvat.,"In a world dominated by capitalism which is dangerously sliding into a new kind of fascism, Srećko Horvat's new book explores the concept of subverting the dominant paradigm in politics, technology and love. Drawing from his own experience of participating in different protest movements all around the world, working closely with WikiLeaks and being one of the protagonists of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, Horvat resists the prevailing melancholy of the Left by offering new political imagination beyond traditional concepts. Instead of the tension between horizontal movements or vertical political parties, “Subversion!” opts for a radical dialectics of both methods as the only way out of our current deadlock. If there is a crack in everything, the way to use the light that gets in is constructive subversion.","In a world dominated by capitalism which is dangerously sliding into a new kind of fascism, Srećko Horvat's new book explores the concept of subverting the dominant paradigm in politics, technology and love. Drawing from his own experience of participating in different protest movements all around the world, working closely with WikiLeaks and being one of the protagonists of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, Horvat resists the prevailing melancholy of the Left by offering new political imagination beyond traditional concepts. Instead of the tension between horizontal movements or vertical political parties, “Subversion!” opts for a radical dialectics of both methods as the only way out of our current deadlock. If there is a crack in everything, the way to use the light that gets in is constructive subversion.",2,"[""History has only produced decency when good people infiltrated despotic institutions and succeeded in subverting them, often at a terrible cost to themselves. Horvat explains brilliantly subversion’s creative potential, in juxtaposition to isolationism and escapism which are the establishment’s best friends. ~ Yanis Varoufakis, Economist, former Finance Minister of Greece"", ""Based on rich personal experience and participation in constructive subversion, along with wide reading from classics to the latest dreams of artificial intelligence, Horvat leads us on a whirlwind tour of the maladies and discontents of modern civilization and the many ways to right what is wrong and achieve a better future. ~ Noam Chomsky, MIT""]" Aesthetics & Alienation,"[""Gary Tedman""]",What is the role of the aesthetic state apparatus?,"Aesthetics has recently become the focus of greater attention, and is now seen as a central problem in critical cultural theory and Marxism. This places Gary Tedman's work at the forefront of this concern, where his concepts of the aesthetic level and of aesthetic state apparatuses have proved to be a challenge even to many conventional Marxisms as well as mainstream academic cultural theory. Beginning with an immersion in the work of Louis Althusser, Tedman sets out the concepts for an aesthetic theory that expands on and offers solutions to some difficult problems in the Marxist theory of social mediation (cult of personality, for example), the space between Marx and Freud, the question of feelings, and the role of art and media in class struggle. He takes issue with the Lacanian interpretation of Althusser's work, and returns us to the Marxist Althusser in the process.","Aesthetics has recently become the focus of greater attention, and is now seen as a central problem in critical cultural theory and Marxism. This places Gary Tedman's work at the forefront of this concern, where his concepts of the aesthetic level and of aesthetic state apparatuses have proved to be a challenge even to many conventional Marxisms as well as mainstream academic cultural theory. Beginning with an immersion in the work of Louis Althusser, Tedman sets out the concepts for an aesthetic theory that expands on and offers solutions to some difficult problems in the Marxist theory of social mediation (cult of personality, for example), the space between Marx and Freud, the question of feelings, and the role of art and media in class struggle. He takes issue with the Lacanian interpretation of Althusser's work, and returns us to the Marxist Althusser in the process.",0,[] After Pornified,"[""Anne G. Sabo""]","After Pornified: where female pornmakers lead the way, empowering women to claim their bodies and sex against a pornified culture.","Porn brings up a lot of negative images in our sexualized, pornified culture. But today a growing number of women are radically changing porn to authentically capture with respect and realism the sexual lives of women and men, empowering and inspiring the viewer to claim her sexuality against a pornified culture, and creating a real counterweight to pornified media and porn as it’s been known. Porn affects us. Today, women are leading the way to make those effects positive. After Pornified lets you see how.","Porn brings up a lot of negative images in our sexualized, pornified culture. But today a growing number of women are radically changing porn to authentically capture with respect and realism the sexual lives of women and men, empowering and inspiring the viewer to claim her sexuality against a pornified culture, and creating a real counterweight to pornified media and porn as it’s been known. Porn affects us. Today, women are leading the way to make those effects positive. After Pornified lets you see how.",19,"[""Anne G. Sabo's After Pornified: How Women are Transforming Pornography and Why It Really Matters is a straightforward study of pron made by women... In a world where porn often circulates in small clips that are divorced from their origins, with no indication of financing or mode of production, After Pornified is a helpful resource for those looking to study women-made porn. ~ Nora Stone, Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women's Studies Resources - Volume 35"", ""Want to know what distinguishes good, feminist porn from pornography that denigrates women and presents unhealthy images of female bodies? ... Sabo writes about sex-positive pornography and provides enough details in each synopsis to deliver a solid guide for selecting feminist films you may want to watch alone or with a lover. ~ Lorraine Berry, Bitch Magazine"", ""Sabo lays out a useful collection of what the genre consists in, and how it came into being. These are figures who are for many still hidden beneath the bedsheets: consider buying this book, girls and boys both, if only for the Appendix of titles. ~ Hannah Gregory, The Quietus"", ""A well-researched and multifaceted exploration of what I hope will be a historic moment in the history of cinema ... this book is unique. I’m pleased to see a serious academic making a strong case for the revolutionary potential of progressive pornography. ~ Jennifer Lyon Bell, blue artichoke films"", ""After pornified offers a well researched study of a movement that is evidently close to the author’s heart. She writes passionately about the subject and discusses it in depth. She is an expert in the field, with over a decade’s experience in research of female pornography behind her. ~ Sarah McDonald, Weekly Worker"", ""One of the points that excited me the most was Sabo’s emphasis on how feminist re-visioned porn could play a positive role in sex education and couples therapy ... that we could see a way to work towards porn as a means for self development. ~ Bradley Tuck, One + One Filmmakers Journal"", ""At last, a sane academic voice for the positive and good effects that porn can have. ... Seeing empowering images can help women and men learn more about their bodies, about what they like. Seeing actors that are genuinely adoring, loving and passionate with each other can inspire and open ways of communication. ~ Suemari du Plessis, Reviews and Discussions on Sexuality"", ""It’s fantastic ... a much-needed discussion of the growth of alternative, feminist, female-driven porn, sans the usual hysteria ... actually look[s] at porn in a nuanced and intelligent way ... a refreshing take. ~ , Ms Naughty's Porn For Women"", ""A pleasant tip-toe through the pleasant-smelling tulips that are sticking their heads up above the standard, porny mud. ~ , For The Girls"", ""A few years ago, my interviews with the now retired feminist performer and director Bobbi Starr (whose collective work is wrapped around BDSM, rough gangbangs, and anal scenes) reveal that gonzo flavors her cinematic taste. Starr understands that shooting sex her way can be pilloried as male-identified, though for her it’s a Teflon criticism and hardly a personal concern. Queer feminist performers Dylan Ryan and Madison Young (who sits in director’s chair on occasion) also relish the submissive role and are no strangers to bondage, anal scenes and facials. So, what does this tell us today about feminist re-visioned porn? Are women directors succumbing to an ensconced filming that appeals to a male fan base? Or have women, mainly through their indie companies, seized ownership of the very thing that anti-porn feminists insist is their source of oppression? Sabo introduces this question and for that alone, After Pornified is worth a read.\n\nSex-positive feminist filmmakers are making a difference in how a “pornified” society looks at the modern adult genre. Of course, anti-porn critics will continue to fire salvos at pornography as intrusive on society and debasing to women. Give them their due and move on. Take porn, re-vision it, and in the process pay close attention to Anne G. Sabo’s message.\n\nAnne G. Sabo’s newest study is a welcome addition to the debate … an educational primer … pay close attention to Anne G. Sabo’s newest book. ~ Rich Moreland, 3hattergrindhouse"", ""All written with intelligence and aplomb … Ms. Sabo has done her research and it shows in this illuminating and detailed treatise on the re-visioned/feminist porn movement … a goldmine for all sex-positive women and men. ~ Lady Cheeky, Evolved World"", ""Thoughtful and thought-provoking ... both scholarly and passionate, and thus a valuable contribution to the ongoing conversation about pornography's place in our culture -- both what it is and what it should or could be. ~ Anna J. Cook, the feminist librarian"", ""Candid, well-informed personal story of how a good girl became involved in porn. ~ , USP"", ""At last a book that appreciates female directed porn as the important cultural phenomenon that it is. For decades the media has represented porn as being for men only and that any women involved in the industry are mere dupes. Anne G. Sabo explains why this is not only untrue (and always has been) but also that it is women who are moving the genre forward, both as directors and consumers. ~ Anna Span, Britain's first female porn director and the author of Shoot Your Own Erotic Adult Home Movies (Carleton Books)"", ""Next to film professor Linda Williams, Anne G. Sabo is the most respected intellectual voice analyzing the new trend of feminist pornography. Actually Sabo's book demonstrates that it is not only a trend. Sabo shows that we are in front of a revolution of the genre. ~ Erika Lust, award-winning writer and erotic film director, and the author of Good Porn: A Woman's Guide (Seal Press)"", ""After Pornified does not cover the well-worn ground of whether or not porn should exist; instead Anne G. Sabo takes a close look at the kinds of sexually explicit material which are marketed as \""for women.\"" An analysis of these films which does not simply seek to criticize or dismiss porn for women by women is long overdue, bringing to the fore the political and personal intentions of a range of directors and producers, as well as the aesthetic and artistic considerations in making sexually arousing imagery. Written in an accessible style for an interested rather than an academic audience, After Pornified brings a much-needed dose of optimism to the debates about pornography, its content and effects. ~ Dr. Clarissa Smith, Reader in Sexual Cultures and the author of One for the Girls! The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women's Porn (Intellect)"", ""Anne G. Sabo's outstanding book challenges us to rethink presumptions about porn, and to see it as varied and potentially progressive. It will be valuable to anyone who cares about images of women in the media, gender equality, and the role of film and television in our lives. ~ Andrew K. Nestingen, Ph.D., Associate Professor and the author of Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film and Social Change (UW Press)"", ""Anne G. Sabo offers one of the freshest and most articulate voices on the controversial issue of porn since feminists began hotly debating its virtues and consequences back in the eighties. A much-needed contribution to what has become a tired and predictable discussion, Sabo courageously brings new insight to an emotionally charged issue in a voice that is eloquent, reasoned and accessible to all. Her work will surely be respected for the rare understanding she brings to a completely new cultural phenomenon, one that most are unable or unwilling to take on: that of women creating their own unique pornographic vision and its implications and potential benefits to all. ~ Candida Royalle, iconic erotic film pioneer and the author of How to Tell a Naked Man What to Do: Sex Advice from a Woman Who Knows (Fireside)"", ""One of the most remarked upon features of shifting production practices around porn and erotica is the growing participation of women. The presence of women was noted as a \""significant trend in the industry\"" as long ago as 2000. However, there has been strikingly little attention paid in academic or more popular literature to women who make pornography. Books in both areas are very overdue so this book is very welcome. I think After Pornified will be of wide interest to women who already have an interest in the topic and those who know very little about it, and a good starting point for rethinking debates about women's relationship to porn. ~ Feona Attwood, Ph.D., Professor of Sex and Communication, and the author of Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture (I. B. Tauris)""]" After The Apocalypse,"[""Monika Kostera""]","During times of crumbling social structures and deep divisions, we need to find ideas and values on which we as organizers and society members can build bridges, and unite in our journey towards a common future.","Our times of crumbling structures and decaying social bonds are often depicted as apocalyptic. This book takes the apocalypse as a metaphor to help us in the search for meaning in our everyday realities. Yes, the apocalypse is when social structures and institutions fall apart and we are terrified and suffocated by the debris raining down upon us. But “apocalypse"" also means “revelation”. The very collapse reveals what dissipating institutions were constructed upon: where there ought to have been foundational common values, most often there is violence and raw power. Yet the values are there, too, and they can be found. This book is a guide to these values, showing how they can be of help to organizers and organizational dreamers.","Our times of crumbling structures and decaying social bonds are often depicted as apocalyptic. This book takes the apocalypse as a metaphor to help us in the search for meaning in our everyday realities. Yes, the apocalypse is when social structures and institutions fall apart and we are terrified and suffocated by the debris raining down upon us. But “apocalypse"" also means “revelation”. The very collapse reveals what dissipating institutions were constructed upon: where there ought to have been foundational common values, most often there is violence and raw power. Yet the values are there, too, and they can be found. This book is a guide to these values, showing how they can be of help to organizers and organizational dreamers.",5,"[""So there is hope. And in After the Apocalypse, the Polish economist and professor of management Monika Kostera takes hope as her theme. Hope shapes experience and, crucially, Kostera wants to inspire it.\n\nShe makes an earnest and worthy contribution to organisation theory, which deals with the effects of social organisations on the behavior and attitudes of the people within them, as well as the effects of individuals on the organisations. It also considers the success and survival of organisations, the effects of organisations on political and cultural environments, and vice versa, and debates the principles that underpin research in the field.\n\nWith familiar social structures and institutions perceived to be failing, with neoliberalism and neoconservatism ‘destroying values such as the public good and active citizenry’, the threat of adverse climate change and of ecological disaster, and with prophets of doom abounding, Kostera takes the ‘sociological apocalypse’ as a metaphor in a bid to help us find the meaningful in everyday life.\n\nFoundational values - The word ‘apocalypse’, coming from the Apocalypse in the biblical book of Revelation, means catastrophic damage or destruction but, as Kostera points out, it also has connotations of ‘revelation’ or ‘uncovering’, showing where things have gone wrong and where common and altruistic foundational values could have led to different outcomes. She offers a guide to such values, showing how they can be of help to organisers and ‘organisational dreamers’. With society comprised of organisations of one kind or another, big and small, from top to bottom, one sees immediately the relevance of her undertaking.\n\nQuoting ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’, from W B Yeats’ apocalyptic poem ‘The Second Coming’, she says that when the centre collapses, and in turbulent times of uncertainty, ‘we look to the margins for a second coming to bring us hope for a future worth living in’. All new ideas tend to be born at the margins, she says, when alternative thinking has been pushed out by the centrifugal force of the centre as it maximises its power.\n\nThis huge system — the ‘Megamachine’, to use Scheidler’s word — which has been defining social life for centuries, Kostera says, could be cut off by a cataclysmic event, or simply implode. All trajectories seem to point that way: a workplace without workers (robots instead), driverless cars, classes taught by holograms, empty homes investments, policies without compassion, society without solidarity.\n\n‘In the sociological apocalypse, the process of destruction of structures and institutions, there is also an aspect of revelation of what is lying underneath,’ she writes. ‘Among the omnipresent debris of violence, there are precious values that have the potential to unite people. Hope opens doors to perception that can enable us to see these values.’\n\nAfter the Apocalypse is in four sections: first, Kostera looks from organisation theory to philosophy, sociology and psychology for a setting in a wider human context; second, she pursues the theme of hope in discussing how the creative spirit of poetics, art and music — a subject surprisingly absent from Scheidler’s book given his background in theatre and the visual arts — can be used to counter the ethos of organisations with ‘closed and oppressive settings’ and help them to be ‘liberating and original’. In the third part, Kostera turns to history, myth and religion to find ‘powerful expressions of human creativity and, at the same time, of our sense-making’; and finally, she invites readers to see hope acquire structure — in architecture, radical politics and organisation theory itself — and usher in ‘a new social reality after the apocalypse’.\n\nTo this end, she urges us to ‘read the books less cited, walk the roads less taken, study the organisations less fashionable, explore the theories less popular’.\n\n~ Geoff Ward, Medium.com"", ""Interview around some key topics addressed in the book ~ Interview by Grzegorz Sroczyńśki, https://next.gazeta.pl/next/7,151003,25899197,prof-kostera-wiekszosc-edukacji-na-wydzialach-zarzadzania.html"", ""Tough times deaden thinking and shrink imagination. Kostera undermines such paralysis with a stunning, insightful inventory of pretexts for hope. These actionable pretexts summarize much-needed foundations that reanimate longing. This is a terrific piece of work! ~ Professor Karl E. Weick"", ""Monika Kostera's pathbreaking book offers a sense of hope in a time of dramatic uncertainty and change. She reveals how the present crises can be transformed through new forms of organizing from one of alienation into radical \""dis-alienation\"". It reflects the ways these disruptions, this \""apocalypse\"" of the status quo, can reveal novel and exciting possibilities for recreating society. ~ Professor Peter Bloom, Essex University"", ""This is an original and engaging book, an eclectic piece that crosses boundaries of disciplines in which inspired by sociological imagination Kostera wears Baumanian lens to speaking about the hope, about the future of societies and the new nature of social connections. This rare piece, strongly influenced by the author's experience, connects perfectly different European spaces (Eastern and Western Europe) by mixing of various academic cultures and intellectual backgrounds. Kostera’s work inscribes itself in the prolongation and development of Baumanian world vision.\n\nCombining various disciplines of human intellectual activity as philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, architecture, management and organizational studies, radical politics with arts - poetry, literature, mythology, visual arts, painting, music and religion, the author develops, in an eclectic way, a fascinating reflection about the past, present and the future. In this rare book, which proposes some visions about what we will become as a society, after depicting the apocalyptic diagnosis of our present (Occidental) world, Kostera suggests a few propositions for tomorrow. This approach is rare in sociology and seems to be strongly inspired by liberal arts.\n\nThe author depicts a utopian future based on the compassion and cooperation, and on the collective way of living and doing things together. This vision which should replace the omnipresent competition is a very attractive proposition. The arts as the core axis to organize the life of our societies seems to be - in the light of Kostera’s book - a possible and seducing solution for the liquid world and destruction of the social bonds. This long term optimism, which took place after short term pessimism places the book in the tradition of Baumanian reflection – a central reference in Kostera’s work. Is this book an example of what Bauman expected, when he spoke about human creativity for resolving the contemporary problems of the times of interregnum? ~ Izabela Wagner, professor at Institute Convergence Migration (Paris) and laboratory DynamE (Strasbourg)""]" After the Great Refusal,"[""Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen""]","A Western Marxist, Avant-garde reading of contemporary art.","After the Great Refusal offers a Western Marxist reading of contemporary art focusing on the continued presence (or absence) of the avant-garde’s transgressive impulse. Taking art’s ability to contribute to a potential radical social transformation as its point of departure, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen' analyses the relationship between the current neoliberal hegemony and contemporary art, including relational aesthetics and interventionist art, new institutionalism and post-modern architecture. '...a trenchant critique of neoliberal domination of contemporary art.' Gene Ray, author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory","After the Great Refusal offers a Western Marxist reading of contemporary art focusing on the continued presence (or absence) of the avant-garde’s transgressive impulse. Taking art’s ability to contribute to a potential radical social transformation as its point of departure, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen' analyses the relationship between the current neoliberal hegemony and contemporary art, including relational aesthetics and interventionist art, new institutionalism and post-modern architecture. '...a trenchant critique of neoliberal domination of contemporary art.' Gene Ray, author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory",4,"[""In a time of headlong social and biophysical 'dissolution into capital', social reproduction crashes and dark political phenomena spring up on all sides. Friendly phantoms of reform surface here and there with their jolts of short-lived radical affect, while fascist libidinal economies go to work on everything from urban cultural life to state power. Meanwhile art institutions mind the crisis by widening the sphere of representation without traction that has long been the modus operandi of their stability. Rather than deploy cultural theory's well-worn genres of determinist allegory or fractal anecdote, Mikkel Bolt offers precision analysis grounded in the constitutive contradictions of the fact that art is a form of autonomy derivative of the value form, yet a space which can still figure social experience that goes through and past it into a non-capitalist time. Surveying art, architecture and revolutionary theory from the past half-century, After the Great Refusal makes a strikingly historical and sharply material argument in favour of negation and abolition as the only imperatives that still make any sense. ~ Marina Vishmidt, author of Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art"", ""As much as I hate art, I really loved reading the book. That may have been the point. Could also be my blurb. ~ Joshua Clover, author of Riot. Strike. Riot"", ""Informed by Western Marxism and the avant-garde and combining in-depth analysis of specific cases with historical insight and theoretical rigour, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen thinks through contemporary art’s manifold and deepening contradictions. Art’s promesse de bonheur has been coopted and corrupted to an extent that likely would have horrified even Adorno and Marcuse -\n\nthough it would not have surprised Debord, while the revolutionary Long March Through the Institutions has become a series of desperate compromises. Refusing to be satisfied with mourning a radical past and condemning a dismal present, Bolt sounds out how contemporary practice and theory can offer openings and create forms with a future - forms of futurity. ~ Sven Lütticken, author of Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy"", ""Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen’s After the Great Refusal is a trenchant critique of neoliberal domination of contemporary art. Incisively analyzing relational aesthetics, interventionist art, new institutionalism and postmodern architecture, Rasmussen renews Marxist critical theory and holds open the promise of radical culture “after the self-murder” of the artistic avant-gardes. ~ Gene Ray, author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory""]" Against Capital,"[""Cliff Slaughter""]","In today's globalised world, and after the collapse of Stalinism, what remains of Marx's 'the working class as the gravediggers of capitalism'?","‘The problem is not how to manage the capital system, but to get rid of it’. And who will do the job? These are the questions posed at the start of Cliff Slaughter’s latest book. Recognising the importance of István Mészáros’s analysis - in Beyond Capital (1995) and other books - of the historic, ‘structural crisis’ that has taken capital into its stage of ‘destructive self-reproduction’, Against Capital focuses on the crucial question of agency. Today, when there are fundamental disjunctures between the globalised economy, the means of social control and political and state structures, what are we to make of Marx’s conclusion that the working class - capital’s only structural antagonist - is ‘the gravedigger’ of capitalism? And what are the implications for this of the information revolution, the changing composition of the working class, and the emergence of new forms of oppositional organisation, with young people to the fore? Slaughter assembles contributions by participants in recent movements in South Africa, Britain, Spain, Mexico, countries in the former Soviet zone and - in a major contribution from Yassamine Mather - the Middle East. He offers an extended critique of ‘vanguardist’ conceptions such as Trotsky’s ‘the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of working-class revolutionary leadership’ and Kautsky’s and the early Lenin’s formulation that socialist consciousness must be brought to the working class ‘from the outside’. Finally, Against Capital examines the necessary theoretical foundations of a rebuilt working-class movement, with special attention to the concepts of class-consciousness and the relation between theory and practice. This book is a compelling and distinctive contribution to recent debates encompassing works such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism (2015).","‘The problem is not how to manage the capital system, but to get rid of it’. And who will do the job? These are the questions posed at the start of Cliff Slaughter’s latest book. Recognising the importance of István Mészáros’s analysis - in Beyond Capital (1995) and other books - of the historic, ‘structural crisis’ that has taken capital into its stage of ‘destructive self-reproduction’, Against Capital focuses on the crucial question of agency. Today, when there are fundamental disjunctures between the globalised economy, the means of social control and political and state structures, what are we to make of Marx’s conclusion that the working class - capital’s only structural antagonist - is ‘the gravedigger’ of capitalism? And what are the implications for this of the information revolution, the changing composition of the working class, and the emergence of new forms of oppositional organisation, with young people to the fore? Slaughter assembles contributions by participants in recent movements in South Africa, Britain, Spain, Mexico, countries in the former Soviet zone and - in a major contribution from Yassamine Mather - the Middle East. He offers an extended critique of ‘vanguardist’ conceptions such as Trotsky’s ‘the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of working-class revolutionary leadership’ and Kautsky’s and the early Lenin’s formulation that socialist consciousness must be brought to the working class ‘from the outside’. Finally, Against Capital examines the necessary theoretical foundations of a rebuilt working-class movement, with special attention to the concepts of class-consciousness and the relation between theory and practice. This book is a compelling and distinctive contribution to recent debates encompassing works such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism (2015).",2,"[""Synopsis: 'The problem is not how to manage the capital system, but to get rid of it'. And who will do the job? These are the questions posed at the start of \""Against Capital: Experiences of Class Struggle and Rethinking Revolutionary Agency\"" a compilation of thoughtful and thought-provoking articles edited by Cliff Slaughter (who now retired, for many years taught social anthropology and sociology at the Universities of Leeds and Bradford). Professor Slaughter assembles contributions by participants in recent movements in South Africa, Britain, Spain, Mexico, countries in the former Soviet zone and - in a major contribution from Yassamine Mather - the Middle East. He offers an extended critique of 'vanguardist' conceptions such as Trotsky's 'the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of working-class revolutionary leadership' and Kautsky's and the early Lenin's formulation that socialist consciousness must be brought to the working class 'from the outside'. Finally, \""Against Capital\"" examines the necessary theoretical foundations of a rebuilt working-class movement, with special attention to the concepts of class-consciousness and the relation between theory and practice.\n\nCritique: A critically important and inherently challenging series of critiques, \""Against Capital: Experiences of Class Struggle and Rethinking Revolutionary Agency\"" is a very highly recommended addition to academic library Economics reference collections and supplemental studies lists. For academics, students, and the non-specialist general reader with an interest in the subject, it should be noted that \""Against Capital\"" is also available in a Kindle edition ($9.99).\n\nAble Greenspan\n\nReviewer\n\n~ Greenspan's Bookshelf, Midwest Book Review"", ""“A fine and timely new analysis. Its international perspective and brave attempt to rethink basic principles will re-energise our politics for the fight ahead.”\n\n~ Tony Garnett, TV and film director and producer""]" Against Capitalist Education,"[""Nadim Anjum Bakhshov""]",The birth of a revolutionary art of world-creation.,"Out there in the so-called real world the education system is being crushed by the demands of capitalism and, in turn, is crushing those who pass through it, reducing them, diminishing them. The dream of the economic functioning unit. How do we break this? We need alternatives but not just one or two. We need the freedom and education to generate a trillion possibilities. An education system that is as broad as it is deep, that brings back a different type of thinking and a new use of fiction. This book signals the return of the dialogue and the conversation as the ground out of which new realities are born, the root out of which new alternatives are nurtured and explored.","Out there in the so-called real world the education system is being crushed by the demands of capitalism and, in turn, is crushing those who pass through it, reducing them, diminishing them. The dream of the economic functioning unit. How do we break this? We need alternatives but not just one or two. We need the freedom and education to generate a trillion possibilities. An education system that is as broad as it is deep, that brings back a different type of thinking and a new use of fiction. This book signals the return of the dialogue and the conversation as the ground out of which new realities are born, the root out of which new alternatives are nurtured and explored.",6,"[""Somewhere in this book, amongst the flashes of insight and exchange, lie the seeds of a revolution in our modes of existence, our forms of value and meaning and fundamental ways of existing as humans within this fragile planetary ecology.\n\n~ Baba Shree Vardi"", ""It is only through developing reasoned and imaginative alternatives that we can generate the light to shine into the ever-fragmenting modern world and open up paths into new worlds - speculative fiction meets philosophy. ~ Ibn Aflatun, author of Distilling the Universal"", ""Is the market and consumer logic the right way to manage our education systems? This book thinks not. This is conversation worth listening to. ~ Peter Lato, CEO of Shovian Analytics"", ""It is like stumbling into a corner of the world we had forgotten. It is time for a revival. A revolution. ~ Karl F. Tullah"", ""A fundamental challenge to those who argue the humanities have no place in the brave new world dominated by the technocrats. ~ Friedrich Faust, author of Gone With the Crowd"", ""For me, this type of exchange touches issues that lie at the heart of existence, all the while remaining within the world. ~ Frank N. Steinisch, creator of the VOAT Generator""]" Against the Vortex,"[""Anthony Galluzzo""]",Against the Vortex uses Boorman's '74 cult sci-fi film as the starting point for exploring a neglected strand of '70s thinkers and artists whose ideas propose a radical degrowth utopia as the horizon to which our politics should be oriented.,"Alongside scientific knowledge and collective effort, building a degrowth ecological society will require a different set of stories and myths than the big and fast Promethean fables we’re accustomed to. Using Boorman’s Zardoz as a tool, Against The Vortex unearths the artistic and intellectual output of a decelerationist 1970s, with an eye toward imagining a very different sort of future.","Alongside scientific knowledge and collective effort, building a degrowth ecological society will require a different set of stories and myths than the big and fast Promethean fables we’re accustomed to. Using Boorman’s Zardoz as a tool, Against The Vortex unearths the artistic and intellectual output of a decelerationist 1970s, with an eye toward imagining a very different sort of future.",9,"[""\""For a volume of fewer than eighty pages, Anthony Galluzzo’s Against The Vortex achieves an awful lot (...) it remains acutely sensitive to Zardoz’s complexities and contradictions and it gives nothing to the voguish reductionisms from across the political spectrum which would take Boorman’s vision as nothing more than a licence for Retromania.\"" ~ Oscar Mardell, 3:AM Magazine"", ""\""Anthony Galluzzo’s short, polished and highly readable Against the Vortex is, among other things, a significant addition to the ongoing reappraisal of the 1970s.\"" ~ Carl Neville, The Quietus"", ""This short book provokes us to ask: Should our species seek to transcend itself? Is mortality a disease or a gift?\n\nGalluzzo sees Zardoz as a great contemporary myth: a crystallization of the wisdom of the Aquarian 1970s, which warns against the clinical separation of life and death, of the body from being, and of man from history. We ignore it at our own peril. ~ Matthew Gasda, Compact Magazine"", ""Zardoz is not a simplistic black-and-white polemic and nor is Against the Vortex. Galluzzo brings the film into conversation with today’s issues in a compelling read and maintains the ambivalence characteristic of his object of study. ~ Samuel Miller McDonald, Epilogue"", ""Anthony's book is environmental humanities at its best.\n\nAs we in the degrowth community have increasingly been drawn into the immediate questions of economics and political economy, policy and political strategy, budgets and accounts, humane books like this, engaging with film and fantasy, bring back the soul of early decroissance engaging with broader philosophical questions, emphasizing questions of scale and conviviality, questioning modern dictates of 'progress' and development, reminding us that degrowth is also about 'roses' and not only breads.\n\nMore than anything else, the book is a pleasure to read and full of little gems of thought and intellectually history facts. Highly recommended! ~ Giorgos Kallis"", ""Galluzzo’s fascinating meditations on Zardoz are sure to provoke spirited debate. ~ Jordan S. Carroll, LA Review of Books"", ""Like a pastry chef who can MacGyver a five-star dessert out of a Twinkie or a Jell-O packet, Anthony Galluzzo confects something special from the unlikeliest of industrial products: the 1974 Connery-Rampling vehicle Zardoz. His secret ingredient is 'critical aquarianism,' a counter-modernist blend of radical tech critique and ebullient degrowth, and it carries the flavor of radical, careful thinking. Readers who rail among and against the machines of the world will savor this book, even in the waste and ruin. ~ Matt Tierney, author of What Lies Between: Void Aesthetics and Postwar Post-Politics"", ""Few people have seen the 1974 film Zardoz. And even those who have will likely remember little more than Sean Connery running around the desert with a space gun, wearing only a red diaper and thigh-high leather boots. Anthony Galluzzo, however, has watched this camp cult classic very closely and has drawn many fascinating lessons from the psychedelic wreckage. Indeed, Galluzzo has a genius for using neglected and misunderstood cultural texts as a prism for fiercely independent ideological critique, as well as opportunities for sketching promising political paths not taken. In this case, the author offers the intriguing prospect of a “critical aquarianism”: a concept and orientation that recovers the less compromised utopian energies of the past in order to fight the more Promethean techno-utopias of the present (and ominous near-future). Quite a feat! Indeed, who knew that Sean Connery was carrying quite so much inside that lurid red diaper? ~ Dominic Pettman, Professor of Media and New Humanities at The New School, cultural theorist, and author of Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human"", ""Against the Vortex is a delightful and surprisingly hopeful read. In the guise of film criticism, Anthony Galluzzo has laid out the foundation of a biocentric utopianism that re-directs our political imaginations away from technological delusion and towards what is truly possible. It turns out I'm a critical Aquarian, and you'll probably discover that you are, too. ~ Rhyd Wildermuth, author of Here Be Monsters: How To Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other""]" Against the Web,"[""Michael Brooks""]","From Michael Brooks, host of The Michael Brooks Show and co-host of the Majority Report, comes the first book to directly respond to the Intellectual Dark Web and Jordan Peterson.","Michael Brooks against the ""Intellectual Dark Web."" As the host of The Michael Brooks Show and co-host of the Majority Report, Brooks was a progressive fighter whose work brought people together from around the world. In this, his first book, he lets his understanding of the digital media environment direct his analysis of the ""conservative rebels"" who had taken YouTube by storm in 2018. Brooks provides a theoretically rigorous but accessible critique of the most prominent ""renegades"" including Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Brett Weinstein while also examining the social, political and media environment that such rebels thrive in. 'A brilliant critique of the Right with very sharp insight on some of the shortcomings of the Left, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to understand how dishonest actors spread their propaganda.' Ana Kasparian, Host and Executive Producer of The Young Turks","Michael Brooks against the ""Intellectual Dark Web."" As the host of The Michael Brooks Show and co-host of the Majority Report, Brooks was a progressive fighter whose work brought people together from around the world. In this, his first book, he lets his understanding of the digital media environment direct his analysis of the ""conservative rebels"" who had taken YouTube by storm in 2018. Brooks provides a theoretically rigorous but accessible critique of the most prominent ""renegades"" including Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Brett Weinstein while also examining the social, political and media environment that such rebels thrive in. 'A brilliant critique of the Right with very sharp insight on some of the shortcomings of the Left, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to understand how dishonest actors spread their propaganda.' Ana Kasparian, Host and Executive Producer of The Young Turks",5,"[""Michael called out the nonsense of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web well before anyone else caught onto their cynical games. A brilliant critique of the Right with very sharp insight on some of the shortcomings of the Left, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to understand how dishonest actors spread their propaganda. ~ Ana Kasparian, Host and Executive Producer of The Young Turks"", ""You don't know it yet, but this is the book you've been waiting for. Reading Michael Brooks' devastating and insightful account of the IDW feels like a breath of fresh air. He meticulously and expertly challenges the shallow platitudes and certainties of a certain cohort of \""public intellectuals\"" by pulling away the curtain of \""logic and reason\"" behind which these men (and yes, they are all men) hide their juvenile arguments. Yet Brooks does not just rebut and break down--he offers a humane and compassionate counterargument. He takes seriously the IDW's vast and hungry audience and suggests that left thinkers offer them camaraderie and not just self-delusion and justification. He also takes the left to task for the way they react to these provocations, but he maintains a sense of proportionality. He does not equivocate or engage in \""both sideism.\"" This is a must-read for anyone who has been puzzled by the appeal of the IDW or anyone seduced by their ideas. ~ Mehrsa Baradaren, Author of the Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap"", ""Michael Brooks has distinguished himself as one of the most intellectually honest and insightful commentators of the populist left. In this essential book, he takes the best arguments of the Intellectual Dark Web, puts them in historical context, and clinically breaks them apart piece by piece. If you want to understand where American and world politics may be headed, you need to understand the online right. And if you want to understand the online right, you need to read Against the Web. ~ Krystal Ball, Co-Host of The Hill’s Rising"", ""Michael Brooks offers us a polemic focused on the battle for ideas. This book is not a discussion of this or that issue but of worldview and narrative. Michael rips away the sophistry inherent in the prevailing right-wing narratives but then offers a humble, explicitly leftist alternative framework. In offering a left framework he also does battle with some of the key toxicities within the US Left that undermine our collective efforts to build a movement for fundamental social transformation. This book left me thinking; which is what I have come to expect from Michael Brooks. ~ Bill Fletcher, Jr., Editor of globalafricanworker.com, former president of TransAfrica Forum, author and activist"", ""Against the Web, is a welcome widening of Michael Brooks’ perceptive and incisive work. Easily one of the smartest and most informed commentators on his daily on his web show and podcast TMBS, he has now expanded, and deepened, his political analysis to book form. With his rare internationalist perspective and passionate commentary, this book provides a crucial guide to the prevailing political landscape of our time. Both the worst temptations of the online IDW pseudo arguments, while also making smart critiques of his own “side”, this book is original and needed ~ Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept""]" "Age of Nixon, The","[""Carl Freedman""]","applies Marxism and psychoanalysis to the study of American politics. In America, every age is the Age of Nixon.","The fundamental argument of this book is, first, that Richard Nixon, though not generally regarded as a charismatic or emotionally outgoing politician like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, did establish profound psychic connections with the American people, connections that can be detected both in the brilliant electoral success that he enjoyed for most of his career and in his ultimate defeat during the Watergate scandal; and, second and even more important, that these connections are symptomatic of many of the most important currents in American life. The book is not just a work of political history or political biography but a study of cultural power: that is, a study in the ways that culture shapes our politics and frames our sense of possibilities and values. In its application of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and other theoretical tools to the study of American electoral politics, and in a way designed for the general as well as for the academic reader, it is a new kind of book.","The fundamental argument of this book is, first, that Richard Nixon, though not generally regarded as a charismatic or emotionally outgoing politician like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, did establish profound psychic connections with the American people, connections that can be detected both in the brilliant electoral success that he enjoyed for most of his career and in his ultimate defeat during the Watergate scandal; and, second and even more important, that these connections are symptomatic of many of the most important currents in American life. The book is not just a work of political history or political biography but a study of cultural power: that is, a study in the ways that culture shapes our politics and frames our sense of possibilities and values. In its application of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and other theoretical tools to the study of American electoral politics, and in a way designed for the general as well as for the academic reader, it is a new kind of book.",2,"[""Richard Nixon was real, for all that he seems like a fictional character concocted in the course of some strange literary collaboration between Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Theodore Dreiser, and J. G. Ballard. And Nixon continues to fascinate us, and to haunt our dreams, even these many years after his death. Carl Freedman's compelling book takes the full measure of Nixon the man, Nixon the media image, Nixon the myth, and even Nixon the ideal type, the quintessential expression, and the most capacious representative of the political and economic system under which we continue to live today.\n\n~ Steven Shaviro, author of CONNECTED, WITHOUT CRITERIA, and POST-CINEMATIC AFFECT"", ""This is a wonderfully informed and enlightening exercise in cultural and political analysis, in which Freedman tackles the problem, just what was this man who was vice president, then a two-term president of the United States. It examines how Nixon's flaws--and his considerable strengths--fitted into, reflected, and finally illuminate philosophy, novels, and films, to produce, what, for better or for worse, can reasonably be called the Age of Nixon. Given the U.S.'s recent turn toward the conservative, it's amazingly timely and informative about the nature of such forces.\n\n~ Samuel R. Delany, author of DHALGREN, DARK REFLECTIONS, and TIMES SQUARE RED/TIMES SQUARE BLUE""]" "Agency of Their Own, An","[""Gregor Gall""]",Sex workers of the world are uniting and fighting to gain control over their working lives.,"This book concerns the projects and processes of sex worker unionisation and more widely forms of sex worker self-interest representation. Since the late 1980s, sex workers have unionised themselves as collective associations of workers in their worksites in many countries. The term ‘sex workers’, chosen by sex workers themselves, is a generic one covering all those who sell sexual services and comprises prostitutes, exotic dancers, porn actors and sex chat line workers.","This book concerns the projects and processes of sex worker unionisation and more widely forms of sex worker self-interest representation. Since the late 1980s, sex workers have unionised themselves as collective associations of workers in their worksites in many countries. The term ‘sex workers’, chosen by sex workers themselves, is a generic one covering all those who sell sexual services and comprises prostitutes, exotic dancers, porn actors and sex chat line workers.",0,[] Airplane Reading,"[""Christopher Schaberg"", ""Mark Yakich""]","Re-examining the strange and ordinary world of air travel, one flight at a time.","In Airplane Reading, Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich bring together a range of essays about air travel. Discerning and full of wonder, this prismatic collection features perspectives from a variety of writers, airline workers, and everyday travelers. At turns irreverent, philosophical, and earnest, each essay is a veritable journey in and of itself. And together, they illuminate the at once strange and ordinary world of flight. Contributors: Lisa Kay Adam • Sarah Allison • Jane Armstrong • Thomas Beller • Ian Bogost • Alicia Catt • Laura Cayouette • Kim Chinquee • Lucy Corin • Douglas R. Dechow • Nicoletta-Laura Dobrescu • Tony D’Souza • Jeani Elbaum • Pia Z. Ehrhardt • Roxane Gay • Thomas Gibbs • Aaron Gilbreath • Anne Gisleson • Anya Groner • Julian Hanna • Rebecca Renee Hess • Susan Hodara • Pam Houston • Harold Jaffe • Chelsey Johnson • Nina Katchadourian • Alethea Kehas • Greg Keeler • Alison Kinney • Anna Leahy • Allyson Goldin Loomis • Jason Harrington • Kevin Haworth • Randy Malamud • Dustin Michael • Ander Monson • Timothy Morton • Peter Olson • Christiana Z. Peppard • Amanda Pleva • Arthur Plotnik • Neal Pollack • Connie Porter • Stephen Rea • Hugo Reinert • Jack Saux • Roger Sedarat • Nicole Sheets • Stewart Sinclair • Hal Sirowitz • Jess Stoner • Anca L. Szilágyi • Priscila Uppal • Matthew Vollmer • Joanna Walsh • Tarn Wilson","In Airplane Reading, Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich bring together a range of essays about air travel. Discerning and full of wonder, this prismatic collection features perspectives from a variety of writers, airline workers, and everyday travelers. At turns irreverent, philosophical, and earnest, each essay is a veritable journey in and of itself. And together, they illuminate the at once strange and ordinary world of flight. Contributors: Lisa Kay Adam • Sarah Allison • Jane Armstrong • Thomas Beller • Ian Bogost • Alicia Catt • Laura Cayouette • Kim Chinquee • Lucy Corin • Douglas R. Dechow • Nicoletta-Laura Dobrescu • Tony D’Souza • Jeani Elbaum • Pia Z. Ehrhardt • Roxane Gay • Thomas Gibbs • Aaron Gilbreath • Anne Gisleson • Anya Groner • Julian Hanna • Rebecca Renee Hess • Susan Hodara • Pam Houston • Harold Jaffe • Chelsey Johnson • Nina Katchadourian • Alethea Kehas • Greg Keeler • Alison Kinney • Anna Leahy • Allyson Goldin Loomis • Jason Harrington • Kevin Haworth • Randy Malamud • Dustin Michael • Ander Monson • Timothy Morton • Peter Olson • Christiana Z. Peppard • Amanda Pleva • Arthur Plotnik • Neal Pollack • Connie Porter • Stephen Rea • Hugo Reinert • Jack Saux • Roger Sedarat • Nicole Sheets • Stewart Sinclair • Hal Sirowitz • Jess Stoner • Anca L. Szilágyi • Priscila Uppal • Matthew Vollmer • Joanna Walsh • Tarn Wilson",2,"[""A marvelous story round-up exploring and explaining what air travel does to us—and makes us do. Buy it now, but save it to read on your next cross-country flight. ~ Harriet Baskas, travel writer for USAToday.com, author of Stuck at the Airport"", ""An insightful exploration into the airplane journey that is both existential and humorous. This collection uncovers the surreal capacity of air travel to transport across tremendous distance but only after imposing a million grating indignities along the way. ~ Rafia Zakaria, author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan""]" Albion's Secret History,"[""Guy Mankowski""]","Snapshots of how English pop culture’s rebels and outsiders, from The Long Blondes and The Libertines, to Tricky and Goldfrapp, altered our sense of a green but sometimes unpleasant land.","Albion's Secret History compiles snapshots of English pop culture’s rebels and outsiders, from Evelyn Waugh to PJ Harvey via The Long Blondes and The Libertines. By focusing on cultural figures who served to define England, Guy Mankowski looks at those who have really shaped Albion’s secret history, not just its oft-quoted official cultural history. He departs from the narrative that dutifully follows the Beatles, The Sex Pistols and Oasis, and, by instead penetrating the surface of England’s pop history (including the venues it was shaped in), throws new light on ideas of Englishness. As well as music, Mankowski draws from art, film, architecture and politics, showing the moments at which artists like Tricky and Goldfrapp altered our sense of a sometimes green but sometimes unpleasant land. 'The most illuminating odyssey through lost, hidden or forgotten English pop culture since Michael Bracewell's England Is Mine.' Rhian E. Jones, author of Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender","Albion's Secret History compiles snapshots of English pop culture’s rebels and outsiders, from Evelyn Waugh to PJ Harvey via The Long Blondes and The Libertines. By focusing on cultural figures who served to define England, Guy Mankowski looks at those who have really shaped Albion’s secret history, not just its oft-quoted official cultural history. He departs from the narrative that dutifully follows the Beatles, The Sex Pistols and Oasis, and, by instead penetrating the surface of England’s pop history (including the venues it was shaped in), throws new light on ideas of Englishness. As well as music, Mankowski draws from art, film, architecture and politics, showing the moments at which artists like Tricky and Goldfrapp altered our sense of a sometimes green but sometimes unpleasant land. 'The most illuminating odyssey through lost, hidden or forgotten English pop culture since Michael Bracewell's England Is Mine.' Rhian E. Jones, author of Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender",13,"[""An inherently fascinating, iconoclastic, and informative read from cover to cover, \""Albion's Secret History: Snapshots of England's Pop Rebels and Outsiders\"" is an original work of impressive research and highly recommended for community, college and university library 20th Century English Cultural History collections. ~ Jack Mason, Midwest Book Review"", ""'With such an array of talent and with forays into film, literature and comedy, the running themes Mankowski draws from his varied subjects are as ambitious as they are thrilling...the way Mankowski uses them to ignite his thesis is intriguing and fresh. This book is about celebrating the unsung, and Mankowski has a knack for succinctly articulating what makes each one so special. The perfect banishing spell for the ghosts currently plaguing England.' ~ Maria Schurr, Pop Matters, https://www.popmatters.com/guy-mankowski-albions-secret-history"", ""‘Polishing minute details and allowing them to shimmer from the page and re-colour our own faded memories – that’s what Mankowski does best. That he achieves the same effect with some of the people and events from history is an excellent achievement…It is, in fact, as if a musician is performing a medley of favourite tracks alongside some moments of deeply impassioned improvisation…Exceptional…some magnificent passages… There is something for everyone in this compilation…Albion’s Secret History is one for the rebels, one for the thinking rebels.’ ~ Jane Roberts, The Librocultrualist , https://thelibrocubicularistreviews.wordpress.com/2021/03/26/the/"", ""“Mankowski offers an excellent analysis as to how Pulp used their hometown in their music. Mankowski really does dig deep and refers to scenes such as the mid-nineties Romo scene previously found in clubs such as Camden’s Club Skinny along with overlooked and underrated artists such as Patrick Wolf and Gazelle Twin. Mankowski also reminds us how locations and how the presently closed music venues contribute not just to music, but to the evolving British culture as told by the experience of everyday people. To quote The Libertines, as Mankowski does, it is “Time for Hero’s” previously overlooked and not fully acknowledged by mainstream British society to be recognised.” ~ XS Noize, https://www.xsnoize.com/book-review-albions-secret-history-guy-mankowski/"", ""“Albion’s Secret History is an enjoyable skim through an enormous subject… Mankowski must be applauded for his guts… The terrific chapter on Peter Cook and Evelyn Waugh when talking of class privilege is kept on-point. Albion…. is a fun read. Armed with the knowledge that this is one take amongst many on “England”, the reader can relax, aware this is a doomed mission from the outset and look to see what insights and forgotten treasures Mankowski’s mudlarking has thrown up. This book is Mankowski’s story, revealing his disappointments, hopes and generation’s take on what England is.” Richard Foster, Louder Than War\n\n~ Richard Foster, Louder Than War, https://louderthanwar.com/guy-mankowski-albion-secret-history/"", ""'What emerges is a dreamlike parade of personalities whose efforts to speak their own minds, follow their own muses, and be what we might call in contemporary parlance their “authentic selves” reflect a larger, arguably unconscious, yearning within English culture to break free from otherwise stifling social norms and, in so doing, to steer English history into uncharted waters.' ~ Small Press Reviews, 5"", ""Guy Mankowski has written the book I've been wanting to read for years. ‘Albion's Secret History is a highly intelligent and loving meditation on creativity and artistic freedoms, pursued over decades by a host of innovators, to those who had previously been denied on the basis of their position within English culture. Mankowski joins so many beautiful dots and creates a mesmerising story of social struggle and the shock and influence of the new. Magnificent and truly brilliant. ~ Daniel Gothard, author of Reunited and Simon Says"", ""No future in England’s Dreaming? The gleaming fragments of the nation’s cultural and countercultural histories unearthed by Guy Mankowski’s Albion’s Secret History suggest otherwise. ~ Karl Whitney, author of Hit Factories: A Journey Through the Industrial Cities"", ""The most illuminating odyssey through lost, hidden or forgotten English pop culture since Michael Bracewell's 'England Is Mine'. ~ Rhian E. Jones, author of Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender"", ""This is a superbly written book, where Mankowski tells how uncomfortable, awkward and magnificent it is to be English. It tells of a scary and beautiful world of musical geniuses, mavericks, chameleons, perverts and wizards, who thought that England was theirs and that it owed them a living, turning Albion into a treasure that everybody with a decent taste in music and some sense of humour can cherish. ~ Giacomo Bottà, Adjunct Professor in Urban Studies and Music Research, University of Helsinki"", ""Already recognised as a major rising talent, Mankowski here establishes himself as a significant voice. ~ Andrew Crumey, Man Booker Longlisted author of Sputnik Caledonia"", ""Albion's Secret History is a searing discussion of England. Through his snapshots of cultural history, Mankowski explores the form and shape of English identity to reveal who we are, who we've been, and who we'd like to be. ~ Dr. Jon Coburn, Lecturer in History and Heritage, University of Lincoln"", ""Albion's Secret History offers a refreshing upheaval of the concept of fixed British character to present a united sub-culture that instead runs on a creative spirit of constant evolution and reinvention. A host of freaks, rebels, and geniuses stand under one banner to feast on panthers, wear bleeding hearts of many stripes on their sleeves, each pursuing artistic liberty that would continue to rock the political establishment and old social orders to their core, calling death on the ashes of tradition as these heroes and heroines dance in its flames. Mankowski offers an emergent nostalgia for the future that rips through the strictures of class identity that we are still wrestling with today. Incisive, insightful and vital. ~ Adam Steiner, author of Into The Never: Nine Inch Nails And The Creation Of The Downward Spiral""]" "Aliens, Robots & Virtual Reality Idols in the Science Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson","[""John L. Steadman""]","John L. Steadman argues that there is little difference between alien indifferentism and alien inclusionism in the fictional works of H. P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson.","H. P. Lovecraft’s aliens are extra-terrestrial, terrestrial & trans-dimensional entities, totally unlike any other aliens in science fiction literature. In contrast, Isaac Asimov's and William Gibson’s aliens are human created positronic robots and virtual reality constructs, or 'idols'. Lovecraft’s great theme is alien indifferentism, tinged with a malevolence that escalates into an existential, apocalyptic threat against humankind, while for Asimov and Gibson, alien inclusionism is the norm. The robots and the VR idols integrate into society and their influence appears to be beneficial. But this is only on the surface. In this book, John L. Steadman demonstrates that there is ultimately little difference between alien indifferentism and alien inclusionism in the fictional works of these three great writers. For in fact, the robots and the VR idols evolve into monsters whose actions bring about outcomes which are every bit as terrifying as anything in Lovecraft’s work. Humans tend to be isolates ('alien'-ated). The reader is invited to question this, and to consider the possibility that an alien perspective, or platform, might, perhaps, be crucial if we intend on seeing ourselves clearly and understanding exactly what it means to be human.","H. P. Lovecraft’s aliens are extra-terrestrial, terrestrial & trans-dimensional entities, totally unlike any other aliens in science fiction literature. In contrast, Isaac Asimov's and William Gibson’s aliens are human created positronic robots and virtual reality constructs, or 'idols'. Lovecraft’s great theme is alien indifferentism, tinged with a malevolence that escalates into an existential, apocalyptic threat against humankind, while for Asimov and Gibson, alien inclusionism is the norm. The robots and the VR idols integrate into society and their influence appears to be beneficial. But this is only on the surface. In this book, John L. Steadman demonstrates that there is ultimately little difference between alien indifferentism and alien inclusionism in the fictional works of these three great writers. For in fact, the robots and the VR idols evolve into monsters whose actions bring about outcomes which are every bit as terrifying as anything in Lovecraft’s work. Humans tend to be isolates ('alien'-ated). The reader is invited to question this, and to consider the possibility that an alien perspective, or platform, might, perhaps, be crucial if we intend on seeing ourselves clearly and understanding exactly what it means to be human.",4,"[""Steadman (H.P. Lovecraft and the Black Magickal Tradition), a scholar of science fiction literature, provides an intriguing look at three giants of the genre in terms of how each treated the concept of the alien. As he acknowledges, his three subjects are known for tackling disparate themes. Lovecraft’s supernatural horror stories featured powerful beings from other dimensions, while Asimov imagined superintelligent robots, and Gibson has conjured virtual reality creations who ascend to a godlike status. Steadman demonstrates surprising parallels between these visions, such as how Asimov’s robots, though ostensibly benign and governed by an in-built code of ethics, end up posing a threat to humankind—as Lovecraft’s “Great Old Ones” do—“by eliminating all of the things that make humans human.” Steadman also connects Gibson’s powerful VRs with Asimov’s robots, noting that both manipulate humanity for their own agendas. There are some minor flaws, as when Steadman stretches to claim that Asimov’s human sleuth, Elijah Baley, was based on Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, or oddly muses that “humans in their infant stage evolve into aliens in their adult years.” Nonetheless, he makes a strong case for the connections he sees between authors not previously viewed as having much in common. ~ Publishers Weekly"", ""Steadman’s comprehensive guide wrestles with the concept of the ‘alien’, applying cutting edge theoretical and philosophical ideas to the work of some of the greats of Science Fiction to arrive at a set of exciting new discoveries about what the genre says it means to be ‘human’. Reading Aliens, Robots and Virtual Reality Idols guarantees that you will never look at the writing of Lovecraft, Asimov or Gibson in the same way again. ~ Dr David Simmons, Senior Lecturer in English and Screen Studies, University of Northampton"", ""John L. Steadman’s ambitious book offers a welcome commentary on what it means to encounter the Other under the most extreme possibilities. It also provides an insightful—and sometimes even chilling—analysis of several works by H. P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov, and William Gibson to suggest how each author imagines the human, the alien, and the universe. The result is an insightful and interesting read that offers a new perspective on each author while also focusing on what it means to be human in an increasingly strange world. ~ Carl H. Sederholm, Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities; Chair, Comparative Arts and Letters; Editor, Journal of American Culture, BYU."", ""As Lovecraft divulged, any “hero” in his modern folklore “is never a person but always a phenomenon or condition.” Nowhere is this more evident—Steadman tells his readers—than in Lovecraft’s “development of trans-dimensional aliens.” Steadman finds in Lovecraft’s greatest fiction a metaphor for “the limitations of the human mind and human technology,” and a warning that humanity must “circumvent, solve, or prevent the things that threaten our humanity” to one day “take our place in the greater cosmos.” ~ John D. Haefele, author of A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos and (forthcoming) Lovecraft: The Great Tales.""]" All Things Are Nothing to Me,"[""Jacob Blumenfeld""]","Max Stirner’s ""The Unique and Its Property"" (1844) is the first ruthless critique of modern society.","Max Stirner’s The Unique and Its Property (1844) is the first ruthless critique of modern society. In All Things are Nothing to Me, Jacob Blumenfeld reconstructs the unique philosophy of Max Stirner (1806–1856), a figure that strongly influenced—for better or worse—Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emma Goldman as well as numerous anarchists, feminists, surrealists, illegalists, existentialists, fascists, libertarians, dadaists, situationists, insurrectionists and nihilists of the last two centuries. Misunderstood, dismissed, and defamed, Stirner’s work is considered by some to be the worst book ever written. It combines the worst elements of philosophy, politics, history, psychology, and morality, and ties it all together with simple tautologies, fancy rhetoric, and militant declarations. That is the glory of Max Stirner’s unique footprint in the history of philosophy. Jacob Blumenfeld wanted to exhume this dead tome along with its dead philosopher, but discovered instead that, rather than deceased, their spirits are alive and quite well, floating in our presence. All Things are Nothing to Me is a forensic investigation into how Stirner has stayed alive throughout time.","Max Stirner’s The Unique and Its Property (1844) is the first ruthless critique of modern society. In All Things are Nothing to Me, Jacob Blumenfeld reconstructs the unique philosophy of Max Stirner (1806–1856), a figure that strongly influenced—for better or worse—Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emma Goldman as well as numerous anarchists, feminists, surrealists, illegalists, existentialists, fascists, libertarians, dadaists, situationists, insurrectionists and nihilists of the last two centuries. Misunderstood, dismissed, and defamed, Stirner’s work is considered by some to be the worst book ever written. It combines the worst elements of philosophy, politics, history, psychology, and morality, and ties it all together with simple tautologies, fancy rhetoric, and militant declarations. That is the glory of Max Stirner’s unique footprint in the history of philosophy. Jacob Blumenfeld wanted to exhume this dead tome along with its dead philosopher, but discovered instead that, rather than deceased, their spirits are alive and quite well, floating in our presence. All Things are Nothing to Me is a forensic investigation into how Stirner has stayed alive throughout time.",6,"[""Even people who have been grappling with Stirner’s work and its implications for quite some time will find new insights, new challenges, and, one hopes, new weapons on reading it. ~ Matty Groves, The Anvil"", ""In his ambitious study, Blumenfeld attempts to revive Stirner’s ghost once more in two regards: he wants to actualise Stirner both as a philosopher to be taken seriously and as a contemporary point of interest for both anarchist and Marxist purposes, a theoretician of contemporary political resistance against postmodern capitalism exactly because he might overcome the split between these two traditions. Blumenfeld undertakes this from an explicitly Stirnerian point of view: he does not want to save Stirner by making any concessions to his critiques and yet he attempts to make Stirner as strong as possible in order to show that it is Stirner’s opponents who are to make the concessions.\n\nThis radical gesture – a very Stirnerian one in itself –makes Blumenfeld’s book a valuable resource for anyone interested in philosophy and/or political theory. Blumenfeld succeeds in convincing the reader that Stirner is a critical philosopher for our time, impressively refuting the standard claims against him, but without hesitating to criticize him as well. ~ Paul Stephan, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books"", ""Max Stirner has been presented in many ways, but never as a punk rock philosopher. This is a refreshing take on a highly controversial thinker. ~ Gabriel Kuhn, author of Anarchismus und Revolution"", ""Stirner argued that thoughts can and should be violently appropriated and made our own, if they are to be of any use. This is what Jacob Blumenfeld does in this book: provide an interpretation of Stirner’s philosophy that can make it truly our own. In doing so, not only does he illuminate neglected aspects of Stirner’s philosophy, but, most importantly, make it breath and palpitate for our times. ~ Chiara Bottici, New School for Social Research"", ""Max Stirner is the bad boy, the black sheep of post-Hegelian philosophy. Often derided and dismissed, his philosophy of ‘egoism’ and his powerful critique of the ‘spooks’ of modernity have continued to resonate with those who are at odds with the world around them. In this brilliant book, Blumenfeld discovers that the ghosts of Stirner are alive and well, and that his message of nothingness and indifference speaks particularly to us today, living as we do at the end of history. Yet, as this book shows, rather than being the nihilist he is often characterised as, Stirner guides us along the path of a new ethical and political sensibility based on singularity rather than identity – something urgently needed today. Blumenfeld’s original and heretical reading shows Stirner’s undoubted contemporary relevance. ~ Saul Newman, Goldsmiths University"", ""We think we have the measure of Stirner’s egoism: it is too tempting to dismiss it as a provocation whose political upshot is either reactionary libertarianism or infantile anarchism. Whether anarchist or libertarian in temper, Stirner’s egoism is assumed to be inimical to Marx’s communism. Jacob Blumenfeld’s dazzling reconstruction of Stirner’s philosophy overthrows this received wisdom. Blumenfeld does not just interpret Stirner’s thought; he appropriates it, thereby exemplifying its most radical injunction. In Blumenfeld’s memorable formulation, Stirner’s egoism is communism seen from the first person singular perspective. But the perspective of the singular is precisely what nullifies the bourgeois subject. Far from sanctifying the individual, Stirner seeks to unleash the nihilating power of the unique beyond the ego. This annihilating power follows from the unique’s productive consumption of every property, including itself. The point is not to replace the sovereignty of the state with that of the individual but to bring about a union of singularities capable of annulling “the thing-like quality of the world”, together with the phantoms of self, society, state, and God. Blumenfeld’s Stirner is the precursor of contemporary insurrectionists and secessionists, but one who refuses to subordinate insurrection to community or secession to identity. The result is an anarchist who subverts the elevation of groundlessness into another law and a separatist who destroys the ontological grounds of separation. What is generated through the union of the uncommon is communism as what Marx called the “fraternization of impossibilities.\"" ~ Ray Brassier, author of Nihil Unbound""]" Allegories of the End of Capitalism,"[""Milo Sweedler""]",How contemporary films transcode popular discontent with global capitalism.,"In Allegories of the End of Capitalism, Milo Sweedler examines how filmmakers from six different countries, across four continents, give narrative and audio-visual form to the frustration and anger that burst into public view in 2011, the ongoing class war between the super-rich and the rest of the world's population, and the insurrection that it yet to come. Films examined include Melancholia, Cosmopolis, Suffragette, Django Unchained, Elysium and Snowpiercer. ""Allegories of the End of Capitalism ventures beyond the typical ambit of Hollywood Left productions to provide astute readings of six films from around the globe that agitate for revolution.' - Kirk Boyle, co-editor of The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television","In Allegories of the End of Capitalism, Milo Sweedler examines how filmmakers from six different countries, across four continents, give narrative and audio-visual form to the frustration and anger that burst into public view in 2011, the ongoing class war between the super-rich and the rest of the world's population, and the insurrection that it yet to come. Films examined include Melancholia, Cosmopolis, Suffragette, Django Unchained, Elysium and Snowpiercer. ""Allegories of the End of Capitalism ventures beyond the typical ambit of Hollywood Left productions to provide astute readings of six films from around the globe that agitate for revolution.' - Kirk Boyle, co-editor of The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television",4,"[""Sweedler's book deserves to be widely read. Its subject is of vital importance. ~ Daniel Lindvall, Film International"", ""Milo Sweedler’s book is an unfailingly interesting and indeed fun read from start to finish. Focusing on six films which conjure with various images of revolt against capitalism and even with capitalism’s demise, Sweedler offers accessible and intelligent decodings of the films, contextualised by reference to key cultural thinkers and political scientists.... The detailed micro-attention to and sophistication of his reading of film form are two of the book’s many strengths. ~ Mike Wayne, Culture Matters"", ""It has often been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Milo Sweedler’s highly readable and continually engaging book focuses on several recent films responsive in widely different ways to this lament. From considerations of the end of the world by celestial body to the creative destruction of financial markets, in both senses of the phrase, Sweedler places six “cinematic expressions of popular discontent” in a rich historical, theoretical, and aesthetic context, and demonstrates that, even in the bleakest circumstances, the hope of creating a better world survives. ~ Jeff Kinkle, co-author of Cartographies of the Absolute"", ""Contradicting the assumption that popular film inculcates the masses with reactionary ruling-class ideologies, Sweedler argues that the motion picture industry cannot sell its wares if it ignores the real-world struggles of its viewing audience. If those struggles have become anti-capitalistic, so be it: films will find ways—at times direct, at times coded—to reflect the widespread discontent with global capitalism’s failure to deliver on its promises. Allegories of the End of Capitalism ventures beyond the typical ambit of Hollywood Left productions to provide astute readings of six films from around the globe that agitate for revolution. ~ Kirk Boyle, co-editor of The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty-First-Century Bust Culture""]" "Almighty Machine, The","[""Pekka Vahvanen"", ""Mark Jones (Translator)""]",Read this book and re-evaluate your relationship with digital tech – is it making you unhappy?,"The hymn of Digitalization is nothing new: We must encourage the creation of new apps. We must develop AI in order to prevail among international competition. Technology's advance will halt climate change and let robots do the dumb stuff for us. Our faith in technology is powerful because it has saved us in the past. The Almighty Machine shows us technology’s flip side. The things that once powered us toward a brighter tomorrow are already undermining our quality of life. The data stream has shattered our concentration, human relationships have been reduced to a menu of emojis, constant surveillance has nullified much of our privacy, and the development of AI could be the beginning of the end for us. We are becoming the casualties of our own success. Pekka Vahvanen's bristling and timely critique, deftly translated by Mark Jones, throws doubt on the necessity of technological development in a world saturated in tech. The Almighty Machine presents an important question: Does progress no longer make us happier?","The hymn of Digitalization is nothing new: We must encourage the creation of new apps. We must develop AI in order to prevail among international competition. Technology's advance will halt climate change and let robots do the dumb stuff for us. Our faith in technology is powerful because it has saved us in the past. The Almighty Machine shows us technology’s flip side. The things that once powered us toward a brighter tomorrow are already undermining our quality of life. The data stream has shattered our concentration, human relationships have been reduced to a menu of emojis, constant surveillance has nullified much of our privacy, and the development of AI could be the beginning of the end for us. We are becoming the casualties of our own success. Pekka Vahvanen's bristling and timely critique, deftly translated by Mark Jones, throws doubt on the necessity of technological development in a world saturated in tech. The Almighty Machine presents an important question: Does progress no longer make us happier?",1,"[""Technological advancements are always necessary to keep up in the world, but here within The Almighty Machine, author Pekka Vahvanen shows us technology’s flip side.\n\nWithin this book and the eight chapters therein are a series of dedicated, expertly thought out, concise and at their crux, deeply worrying theories that are both pondered and expanded on by Vahvanen. ~ Anne Carlini, Exclusive Magazine""]" Along the Watchtower,"[""Nathan Akehurst""]",Europe’s war on migration is everywhere. This book unearths the forces behind it and how they’ve reshaped our society.,"Thousands of people die preventable deaths at Europe’s borders every year. And the situation keeps getting worse. From eastern Polish forest swamps to the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas to the corridors of power, Along the Watchtower describes how Europe’s war on migration has spun out of control. Through the stories of people seeking safety and the humanitarians who assist them, a portrait of a vast machine of slander, surveillance, violence, and criminalisation emerges — one that has spilled over from targeting migrants to putting us all at risk. States and profiteers have transformed the liberal Utopia, imagined by proponents of a bigger Europe, into an armed fortress willing to tear up the rights and values it once espoused. As climate breakdown, geopolitical shifts, and economic and political crises drive both a movement and a backlash against it, Along the Watchtower asks how we got here — and how we might demand a different world before it’s too late.","Thousands of people die preventable deaths at Europe’s borders every year. And the situation keeps getting worse. From eastern Polish forest swamps to the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas to the corridors of power, Along the Watchtower describes how Europe’s war on migration has spun out of control. Through the stories of people seeking safety and the humanitarians who assist them, a portrait of a vast machine of slander, surveillance, violence, and criminalisation emerges — one that has spilled over from targeting migrants to putting us all at risk. States and profiteers have transformed the liberal Utopia, imagined by proponents of a bigger Europe, into an armed fortress willing to tear up the rights and values it once espoused. As climate breakdown, geopolitical shifts, and economic and political crises drive both a movement and a backlash against it, Along the Watchtower asks how we got here — and how we might demand a different world before it’s too late.",4,"[""“This is a profoundly important book – about the moral black hole at the heart of the Western response to migration. The issue will dominate politics in Europe and North America over the next 20 years, as growing numbers of refugees are compelled to flee both from surging conflict and devastating climate change against a backdrop of whipped up nativism and xenophobia at home. Our governments’ response to this challenge has often been a callous suspension both of international law and basic decency.\n\nAkehurst’s prose is vivid, evocative, compassionate and elegant. It is based on considerable first-hand field observation as well as deep academic research. It’s a book which anyone who wants to understand where we’re heading needs to read – even if at times it chills the heart.” ~ Andrew Gilmour, former UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, Visiting Fellow of All Souls, author of The Burning Question: Climate and Conflict – why does it matter?"", ""“Across Europe and North America, governments have attacked migrants and refugees to avoid blame for the crises they have created. Along the Watchtower exposes the grim and heart-breaking consequences of rhetoric and policy, weaving deeply personal stories with history and theory into terrifying tale of state violence, climate change and war. Above all, Along the Watchtower is a powerful and much-needed antidote to hatred, showcasing the humanity of people just trying to find a place of safety, as well as those seeking to hold out the hand of friendship to fellow human beings in need.\"" ~ Jeremy Corbyn MP, former leader of the Labour Party"", ""By grinding wretched people migrating into raw material for its border-industrial complex, Europe forfeits its integrity and thus accelerates its disintegration. Along the Watchtower is a must read for those who wonder why Europe lost its way. ~ Yanis Varoufakis, economist, author and former Greek finance minister"", ""Along the Watchtower is a haunting and incisive interrogation of the rise of fortress Europe, and an epitaph to many of the lives that have been lost in its construction. Akehurst reveals the many layers of violence and imperialism that underpin Europe's war on migration, as well as the astonishing bravery and compassion of those resisting it. ~ Grace Blakeley, commentator and author, 'Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom' , Personal""]" Alphonso Lingis and Existential Genealogy,"[""Alexander E. Hooke""]",The first book-length study of the work of Alphonso Lingis' philosophical works.,"What is philosophy? Is philosophy an academic discipline that produces arguments and theories, or is philosophy also about understanding the world through stories, metaphors, analogies, ambience, and even through feelings? Alphonso Lingis approaches philosophy the way a travel writer approaches a strange new land, with his eyes open and with a conscious desire for experience. Using the genealogical approach of Nietzsche and Foucault, his work continues the phenomenological tradition. Alexander E. Hooke's Alphonso Lingis and Existential Genealogy is the first book-length study of Lingis' philosophical works.","What is philosophy? Is philosophy an academic discipline that produces arguments and theories, or is philosophy also about understanding the world through stories, metaphors, analogies, ambience, and even through feelings? Alphonso Lingis approaches philosophy the way a travel writer approaches a strange new land, with his eyes open and with a conscious desire for experience. Using the genealogical approach of Nietzsche and Foucault, his work continues the phenomenological tradition. Alexander E. Hooke's Alphonso Lingis and Existential Genealogy is the first book-length study of Lingis' philosophical works.",3,"[""Alphonso Lingis has been so far ahead of the intellectual curve that he has received less than his share of attention in orthodox philosophy. Alex Hooke closes that temporal deficit. This is a compelling and absorbing book that will more than repay the time it takes to dwell in and with it. A timely and exceptional study. ~ William E. Connolly, author of Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and The Politics of Swarming"", ""Professor Hooke’s existential genealogy expands Alphonso Lingis’s doctrine of the motility of thought, imperatively deepening Husserl’s battle cry - ”back to the things themselves” - to “back to the sensations themselves,” which move and affect our thought. With his own teleological insights into collaboration that extend Lingis’s theme of symbiosis, Hooke offers us a compelling collaboration with Lingis throughout. ~ Randolph Wheeler, editor of Passion in Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Alphonso Lingis"", ""Alexander Hooke has given us a quite personal introduction to Alphonso Lingis’s vast body of work. Drawing on decades of familiarity and time spent in the Lingis corpus, Hooke leads the reader directly into Lingis’s milieu like only a close companion can. He never leaves readers to wander on their own, however. Just the opposite. Under the rubric of “existential genealogy,” Hooke has provided readers with a roadmap with which to navigate the output of one of the most engaging and original interdisciplinary thinkers of the last half century. ~ Tom Sparrow, editor of The Lingis Reader""]" Althusser and Art,"[""Jonathan R Fardy""]",Althusser and Art examines the relationship between Althusser’s political theory and his writings on art.,"Althusser and Art offers a reading of Althusserianism as a meta-mediation on the question concerning the aesthetics of theory. Fardy shows that Althusserian theory is part of a larger genealogy of thought, stretching from Korsch through Laruelle, that has been primarily concerned with the search for a form of theory, an aesthetic of theorizing, capable of transcending the theory-practice dialectic.","Althusser and Art offers a reading of Althusserianism as a meta-mediation on the question concerning the aesthetics of theory. Fardy shows that Althusserian theory is part of a larger genealogy of thought, stretching from Korsch through Laruelle, that has been primarily concerned with the search for a form of theory, an aesthetic of theorizing, capable of transcending the theory-practice dialectic.",1,"[""In this impressively concise book calling for a \""return to Althusser\"" through the avenue of Althusserian aesthetics, Jonathan Fardy has accomplished nothing short of the twenty-first century equivalent of Althusser's own call for a \""return to Marx\"" in the 1960s. Readers will certainly learn much from Fardy's demonstration of why encountering the aesthetic form of Althusser's approach to critical theory is necessary for understanding the Althusserian project tout court, but where Althusser and Art shines brightest is in its engagement with the heavy Althusserian influence on Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière, and Francois Laruelle. In short, Fardy pries open new ground in the continually deepening intersections of the aesthetic and the political, modelling in the process an eminently readable style of prose that should be the envy of all who write on critical theory today. ~ Christopher Langlois, author of Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature""]" America and Other Fictions,"[""Ed Simon""]",If America or God didn't exist it would be necessary to invent them. Let's start.,"At a moment of cultural and political crisis, with forces of reaction seemingly ascendant throughout the West, it's fair to ask what use does anyone have for America, God, or any other similar fictions? What use does theological language have for the radical facing the apocalypse? Among the subjects considered: the need for an Augustinian left, legacies of American violence, speaking in tongues, the humanities facing climate change, the maturity of realizing that you will die, how to sail towards Utopia, and witches. 'Ed Simon’s essays help readers to understand how we got to this complicated moment in American religious history. Deft, thoughtful, and creatively told.' Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture","At a moment of cultural and political crisis, with forces of reaction seemingly ascendant throughout the West, it's fair to ask what use does anyone have for America, God, or any other similar fictions? What use does theological language have for the radical facing the apocalypse? Among the subjects considered: the need for an Augustinian left, legacies of American violence, speaking in tongues, the humanities facing climate change, the maturity of realizing that you will die, how to sail towards Utopia, and witches. 'Ed Simon’s essays help readers to understand how we got to this complicated moment in American religious history. Deft, thoughtful, and creatively told.' Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture",3,"[""In this book you'll rediscover America, the enchanted and cursed. For an age haunted with reactionary nostalgia, Ed Simon haunts readers with an American greatness that is both lovely and perverse, through masterfully told tales that look their subjects' original sins straight in the eye. His America is more than a country, more than an idea or a history or a code of laws; it's a system of worship, hitherto little-known as such to its own devotees. ~ Nathan Schneider, author of God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet"", ""Ed Simon's powerful, searching essays are conversant with a startling range of subject matter: Augustine and Whitman, Bob Dylan and Thomas Paine, Catholicism and Cathars, Cotton Mather and Martin Luther. Simon's mind goes, quite simply, everywhere. His goal as an essayist is a kind of secular reenchantment of the old, dead creeds—to acknowledge, and cherish, truths that go deeper than mere belief. Most remarkable of all is how often he succeeds. ~ Tom Bissell, author of The Disaster Artist and Apostle"", ""From dusty reliquaries to Walt Whitman’s odes, from Tomas Paine to Thomas Moore and all across the persistently stubborn landscape of the American religious imagination, Ed Simon’s essays help readers to understand how we got to this complicated moment in American religious history. Deft, thoughtful, and creatively told, this book reaches across the divides between left and right, popular and academic, into something greater and more significant: the American imagination. ~ Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture and Radical Reinvention: An Unlikely Return to the Catholic Church""]" Anatomy of Thought-Fiction,"[""Joanna Demers""]",Why do people choose to believe things they know are untrue?,"In the year 2214, the Center for Humanistic Study has discovered an unpublished manuscript by Joanna Demers, a musicologist who lived some two centuries before. Her writing interrogates the music of artists ranging from David Bowie and Scott Walker to Kanye West and The KLF. Questioning how people of the early twenty-first century could have believed that music was alive, and that music was simultaneously on the brink of extinction, light is shed on why the United States subsequently chose to eliminate the humanities from universities, and to embrace fascism...","In the year 2214, the Center for Humanistic Study has discovered an unpublished manuscript by Joanna Demers, a musicologist who lived some two centuries before. Her writing interrogates the music of artists ranging from David Bowie and Scott Walker to Kanye West and The KLF. Questioning how people of the early twenty-first century could have believed that music was alive, and that music was simultaneously on the brink of extinction, light is shed on why the United States subsequently chose to eliminate the humanities from universities, and to embrace fascism...",1,"[""Focused on music, but with implications that extend to just about everything, Anatomy of Thought-Fiction explores the role of false ideas in our intellectual and emotional life. Joanna Demers’ elegant monograph (or should that be polygraph?) softly shatters myths and tenderly takes apart received wisdom. Yet this cluster-bomb of a book also leaves the reader convinced that illusions aren’t just useful, they’re indispensable: a thought at once unsettling and liberating. ~ Simon Reynolds, Author of Retromania and Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy""]" Angels and Demons: A Radical Anthology of Political Lives,"[""Tony McKenna""]","A Marxist analysis of key political and historical figures including Hugo Chavez and Jeremy Corbyn, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.","A Marxist analysis of key political and historical figures including Hugo Chavez and Jeremy Corbyn, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Angels and Demons offers a series of profiles of historical figures both old and new. Using a Marxist analysis, the author adduces the particularities of each individual personality from the crest of living history which brings it to the fore, showing with each of the figures examined how the art, politics and creativity of their lives is infused by the rhythm and contradictions of the broader historical backdrop. The angels in the collection are Hugo Chavez, Andrea Dworkin, Rembrandt, Victor Hugo, Jeremy Corbyn and William Blake. The demons are Donald Trump, Christopher Hitchens, Arthur Schopenhauer and Hillary Clinton.","A Marxist analysis of key political and historical figures including Hugo Chavez and Jeremy Corbyn, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Angels and Demons offers a series of profiles of historical figures both old and new. Using a Marxist analysis, the author adduces the particularities of each individual personality from the crest of living history which brings it to the fore, showing with each of the figures examined how the art, politics and creativity of their lives is infused by the rhythm and contradictions of the broader historical backdrop. The angels in the collection are Hugo Chavez, Andrea Dworkin, Rembrandt, Victor Hugo, Jeremy Corbyn and William Blake. The demons are Donald Trump, Christopher Hitchens, Arthur Schopenhauer and Hillary Clinton.",3,"[""Newly released by Zero Books, Tony McKenna’s aptly titled “Angels and Demons” is a collection of profiles…that has the author’s customary psychological insight and literary grace…[I]t demonstrates a remarkable breadth of knowledge about disparate cultural, political and intellectual strands that is seldom seen today in an age of specialization. While I would not denigrate the efforts of Marxists in the academy, there is something extraordinary about McKenna’s body of work. Constrained by their professional obligations, most professors tend to specialize. This gives their work a narrow focus out of reach for the average reader, especially when it is behind a JSTOR paywall. Tony McKenna comes from a different place entirely…In 1865 Marx stayed with an uncle who lived in the Netherlands and, as was popular at the time, wrote a “Confession” that enumerated his traits. For example, as to “Your chief characteristic”, he answered, appropriately enough, “Singleness of purpose.” And for “Your Maxim”, he cited Terence: “Nihil humani a me alienum puto, which means “Nothing human is alien to me.” After reading “Angels and Demons” and other books and articles by Tony McKenna, that would seem to be the maxim he lives by as well. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/03/political-angels-and-demons-shaped-by-the-forces-of-history/ ~ Louis Proyect, Counterpunch"", ""Anyone looking for a modern attempt to recreate the dialectical balance between the individual and wider social forces in the spirit of Marx and Engels should refer to this highly readable collection of essays by Tony McKenna. The author impressively surveys the lives of a number of individuals across the fields of politics, philosophy and the arts who have had a major impact – for good or ill – on human affairs...[H]e deploys with virtuosity a remarkable grasp of the breadth of cultural, economic and political forces at work in the lives of these personalities. Anyone interested in any of the above figures will find their understanding enhanced by McKenna‘s sophisticated delineation of how the respective subject’s ideology was shaped by the dynamics of the age. https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/culture/theory/item/3018-angels-and-demons ~ Sean Ledwith, Culture Matters"", ""A marvellous collection of essays on an unusual range of figures from history, literature and contemporary politics: informative, intelligent, thought-provoking, and always highly readable. A unique and remarkable book. ~ Sean Sayers, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Kent""]" "Animatic Apparatus, The","[""Deborah Levitt""]","How the transition from analogue to digital, and the rise of animation and simulation transform our concepts of life in contemporary culture.","Unprecedented kinds of experience, and new modes of life, are now produced by simulations, from the CGI of Hollywood blockbusters to animal cloning to increasingly sophisticated military training software, while animation has become an increasingly powerful pop-cultural form. Today, the extraordinary new practices and radical objects of simulation and animation are transforming our neoliberal-biopolitical “culture of life”. The Animatic Apparatus offers a genealogy for the animatic regime and imagines its alternative futures, countering the conservative-neoliberal notion of life’s sacred inviolability with a new concept and ethics of animatic life.","Unprecedented kinds of experience, and new modes of life, are now produced by simulations, from the CGI of Hollywood blockbusters to animal cloning to increasingly sophisticated military training software, while animation has become an increasingly powerful pop-cultural form. Today, the extraordinary new practices and radical objects of simulation and animation are transforming our neoliberal-biopolitical “culture of life”. The Animatic Apparatus offers a genealogy for the animatic regime and imagines its alternative futures, countering the conservative-neoliberal notion of life’s sacred inviolability with a new concept and ethics of animatic life.",3,"[""At once theoretically dazzling and fearless, The Animatic Apparatus shows how the production of life in animation deconstructs ontology as such: “There is no death in animation, because there is no being, no existence, to begin with.” But an-ontology is not the end of living. Instead, carefully tracing how the medium of animation has come to operate as a supermedium, Levitt finds animation to be the key not only to modelling the contemporary condition but also to formulating an ethical relation to it. Animation offers nothing less than a toolkit for new assembling of lives upon the active void of contemporary media. ~ Thomas Lamarre, Author of The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Professor of East Asian Studies and Communication Studies, McGill University"", ""With subtlety and élan, Levitt compellingly animates an historical journey with dolls, puppets, automata, replicants and artificial life to secure the case for “an-ontology.” Media, in the form of novels, films, images, cartoons, screens, robots, and other automata are recursively part of the “human\"" condition such that distinctions between life and artificial life or intelligence and AI are ultimately unsustainable. Levitt’s inspired pursuit of a mediology of technology and metaphysics demonstrates that whatever we are, our emergence is bound up with the simulacrum, and that animation is at least as real as the real itself. What’s more, our ethics and our politics must come from that condition. ~ Jonathan Beller, Author of The Cinematic Mode of Production, Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Critical and Visual Studies, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY"", ""What if Mamoru Oshi's 2004 anime Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is not just a midnight cult film, but the secret template for nearly all of 21st century technoculture? In The Animatic Apparatus, Deborah Levitt convincingly argues that this is actually the case. \""Images possess their own forms of vitality,\"" ones that cannot be easily distinguished from our own. ~ Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University, author of Connected: Or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society""]" "Anthropology of Nothing in Particular, An","[""Martin Demant Frederiksen""]",A journey into the social lives of meaninglessness.,"There have been claims that meaninglessness has become epidemic in the contemporary world. One perceived consequence of this is that people increasingly turn against both society and the political establishment with little concern for the content (or lack of content) that might follow. Most often, encounters with meaninglessness and nothingness are seen as troubling. ""Meaning"" is generally seen as being a cornerstone of the human condition, as that which we strive towards. This was famously explored by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning in which he showed how even in the direst of situations individuals will often seek to find a purpose in life. But what, then, is at stake when groups of people negate this position? What exactly goes on inside this apparent turn towards nothing, in the engagement with meaninglessness? And what happens if we take the meaningless seriously as an empirical fact?","There have been claims that meaninglessness has become epidemic in the contemporary world. One perceived consequence of this is that people increasingly turn against both society and the political establishment with little concern for the content (or lack of content) that might follow. Most often, encounters with meaninglessness and nothingness are seen as troubling. ""Meaning"" is generally seen as being a cornerstone of the human condition, as that which we strive towards. This was famously explored by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning in which he showed how even in the direst of situations individuals will often seek to find a purpose in life. But what, then, is at stake when groups of people negate this position? What exactly goes on inside this apparent turn towards nothing, in the engagement with meaninglessness? And what happens if we take the meaningless seriously as an empirical fact?",9,"[""This book attends to those troubling moments that ‘go missing when we look for meaning’. The narrative stages a series of encounters with such imponderable, meaningless ‘nothings’, leading to a deeply philosophical tarrying with mute, meaningless materiality. These varied encounters begin in the author's apartment, where an epistemic encounter with a splatter on the wall of what looks a good deal like blood, but turns out to be splashed soup, becomes a gripping and deeply evocative ethnographic moment. Both from within and from without, nihilism informs an ethnographic approach that, if it doesn't attempt to sublimate nothings into a meaningful something, nevertheless shows us that nothing and meaninglessness is something to be attended to ethnographically, nothing is part of something. Moreover, like the author's other works, an ethnographic perspective and object that would seem to offer only morose and dimly lit reflections instead seems gripping, interested and interesting.\n\nWhat strikes me the most about this book is that it is a completely novel way of framing an ethnography. This book seeks to find a way of saying something about nothing, that is, ‘nihilism, meaninglessness and nothingness’, both as theoretical objects and as troubling and persistent ethnographic objects, part and parcel of everyday life. Ethnographically, the narration is like a kind of hopscotch through a random series of scenes, what speculative fiction writer J. G. Ballard (1967) called a ‘non-linear narrative’. This digressive narrative moves between theory and ethnography, fact and fable, something and nothing.\n\nThe author presents a problem, that nothing escapes the web of meaning. Ethnography, after all, has often attended to the boring banalities of daily life, what ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel called the ‘seen but unnoticed’, expected, background features of everyday scenes. In a sense, the ethnographic encounters with meaningless nothingness found in this ethnography superficially resemble what Malinowski famously called the ‘imponderabilia of actual life’ (1922: 19), those frequently banal ethnographic trivialities filling ethnographic diaries which might seem to be examples of meaningless nothingness. But for Malinowski, such apparent nothings are always really something, they never fall outside webs of significance, they are the flesh on the bones of the social.\n\nThe setting is deliberately not named, it is written as if it was about nowhere-in-particular: there is an anonymous city, there are characters whose names are mostly contrived to be obvious pseudonyms and from which no ethnonyms can be deduced (Oz, Whiskey, Hakuna, Dato, Mushu, Queenie, Conchita). The time, however, is contemporary. These nobodies who live nowhere populate and theorise the meaningless imponderabilia of their actual lives with a series of characters with real names; some are fictional characters, some pop cultural celebrities, some are theorists: Athos, Morrissey, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Tarkovsky, Seinfeld. Sometimes these characters speak off screen as disembodied voices of theory, sometimes they are just part and parcel of the meaningless nothingness.\n\nSituating an ethnography of nothing in particular as being, ethnographically speaking, nowhere-in-particular turns the local ethnographic problems of boredom and nothingness that haunt the author's other situated ethnographic works into a more general philosophical and ethnographic tour de force. This is a novel deployment of the ethnographer's magic, of turning real particular nobodies into nobody in particular, as Shunsuke Nozawa puts it:\n\n‘Everyday life implicitly represents culture because it is a normativity inhabited by anybody-because-nobody-in-particular’ (Nozawa 2011: 5).\n\nBut if these nobodies nowhere can be anybodies, anywhere, they are also real particular nobodies, who, as Nozawa points out, become the heroes of a social scientific underdog story where, like the way the banal imponderables of daily life become the real substance underlying the social fabric, these nobodies turn out to be somebody and something meaningful: ‘an implicit soteriology, salvaging nobodies from oblivion and driving them forward and upward in a topology of value’ (Nozawa 2011: 6).\n\nI dwell on this intellectual genealogy of nobodies to show what Martin Demant Fredriksen is trying to avoid doing with Oz and his circle: he seeks to let the nobodies remain nobodies. Standing at the centre of this ethnography is the organic intellectual of nothingness, Oz, a concrete nobody who defies description, he is not fat, not thin, not handsome, not ugly, neither old nor young. He is in this sense a nobody who could be anybody. The author admits when asked, at the end, that at the end of his search for nothing: ‘Oz, I found Oz’.\n\nOz and his circle of nihilists are part of an ethnography of a real particular nowhere: one can recognise elements here and there that are unmistakably the city of Tbilisi in the country of Georgia. I want to list them, but I will not. The author wants this to be about nothing and nowhere, and I will not pick at the carapace of nothing and nowhere to find fleshy titbits of something and somewhere. I will say that the city of Tbilisi is a pretty good – no, ideal – choice as a field site for an ethnography of nihilism. I have never met so many earnestly practising nihilists as I have met there; one could say it is infectious. The feeling is particularly infectious right now, as I re-read this ethnography in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic when we are all confined to our scattered apartments and we are all confronted by the banal imponderabilia of everyday life as meaninglessness, of being all in this – watching the paint peel – together. https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/ajec/29/2/ajec290211.xml?ArticleBodyColorStyles=full-text ~ Paul Manning, Trent University, Ontario, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures"", ""”The scope of nothing runs deep in the book as we are introduced to a motley crew of philosophical, political, literary and artistic roots seamlessly mixing tracks from Duran Duran, Pet Shop Boys, and Morrissey [through a conspicuous absence of his lyrics ] with insights from the group of young Nihilists along with Nietzsche, the Dude, Dostoevsky, Seinfeld, Sartre, Tarkovsky, Beckett (…) In Frederiksen’s ‘anthropology about nothing’ there is a comforting letting go, a succumbing to the fungus, an amassing of things that do not add up. The book both humours and mesmerizes, amongst other things, by way of its immersive fiction as Whiskey writes, dolphins perform, and the hero of Oz rides away into lavender sunsets – with a clean shave, organic grape juice diets, a tan. Or something.” ~ AllegraLab, http://allegralaboratory.net/review-an-anthropology-of-nothing-in-particular/"", ""(…) this is a book that should be read by anyone who is interested in experimental techniques of ethnographic writing, in the wonders and ambivalences of the nothing in particular, and in the ways in which traditional ethnographic descriptions can be substituted by anthropological fiction and imagination. Frederiksen does this with great skill and brilliance, while leaving the reader wondering about the future of anthropological thinking, writing and doing fieldwork. ~ Anthropological Forum, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00664677.2019.1625530?fbclid=IwAR3HB5PpxOlAAdB63ewogKvdVREe_GOOE93_O0owMYMOunQID6McrAvli4Q"", ""\""The book is both an experimental ethnography and a theoretical treatise on how we can understand and represent absence of meaning. Its author, Martin Demant Frederiksen, approaches the meaningless seriously as an ethnographic and experiential fact, refusing to explain what its ultimate meaning could be\"" ~ New Books Network, https://newbooksnetwork.com/martin-demant-frederiksen-an-anthropology-of-nothing-in-particular-zero-books-2018/"", ""For a short while in my formative years I was deeply involved with a girl from what sociologists would call the underclass. Three generations of unemployment lived head-to-toe in the same battered and neglected council house. “Nothing” was a common refrain.\n\nWhat you doing? Nothing. What do you think? I don’t think nothing. Why did you do that? Because I don’t give a fuck and I don’t believe in nothing. Through a haze of hashish and casual violence they had reached a twenty-first century approximation of Hassan-e Sabba.\n\nSubsequent success in the world of academia trained me to identify this nihilistic mindset with an extreme mode of alienation. Philosophers cannot abide meaninglessness. Expressions of nothingness must be meaning in disguise.\n\nIt’s a comforting thought, not only as it keeps nothingness at bay, but also because it suggests that these people will all join the Glorious Socialist Revolution once the Oxbridge Marxists finally bring it about.\n\nBut what else are we to do with the organic nihilists of the world if not interpret them? In his new book, Martin Demant Frederiksen proposes a radical answer: take them at their word.\n\nInstead of training a prurient eye upon the abjection and squalor of those who do not give a fuck, Frederiksen proposes nothingness as a recognizable mode of being. It is a valueless and directionless way of encountering the world, but it is nevertheless an encounter. Compared to other philosophies, it at least has the virtue of honesty and consistency.\n\nAlthough Frederiksen does utilize the occasional philosopher to craft his arguments, he balances this with an anthropologist’s observation of real life (mostly in the form of pointless chats with acquaintances and drinking vodka). Part real observation, partly fictional condensations of lived experience; the form of the book is as wonderfully unfocused as its subject matter.\n\nThe writing is detached and casual. Frederiksen carries you along like a directionless wander on a balmy afternoon, passing around a bottle. It is as unpretentious as a work integrating Nietzsche, Boudieu and the Null Morpheme could possibly be, using a light touch which leaves questions open and ideas unfixed. It feels like the kind of loose talk you’d have in the early hours. A fitting approach.\n\nSo what happens when we believe that some people just do nothing? Well, nothing much. There is no heroic conclusion to the book. No moment where the angry young writer declares “…and therefore we must all do this!”. Instead you get a real anthropological sense of how some, perhaps many, people live… and that’s it.\n\nAs a joyless workaholic I personally could not live the way that Frederiksen’s characters live. My existence is instead dictated by my desperate bad faith, clawing at any and all bits of meaning that fall within reach. Yet this, somehow, made the book appealing to me, comforting almost.\n\nI guess it’s nice to think that somewhere out there are people who are happy to watch twenty minutes of a movie they’ve seen before and then turn it off and have a nap even though it’s only 11am. It’s pleasant to read about people with nowhere to be. People who hold opinions that aren’t particularly strong and who have no interest in whether they are agreed with or not.\n\nIn summing up meaninglessness and packaging it in a form perfectly suited to the subject matter, Frederiksen has essentially captured a little bit of nothing between the covers of a book. I would recommend it both to those who want to feel nothing, and those who are simply tired of always being made to feel something.\n\nYou should definitely read this book. Or don’t. Whatever…\n\n– Joe Darlington ~ The Manchester Review of Books, https://manchestereviewofbooks.wordpress.com/"", ""“What strikes me the most about this book is that it is a completely novel way of framing an ethnography. This book seeks to find a way of saying something about nothing, that is, ‘nihilism, meaninglessness and nothingness’, both as theoretical objects and as troubling and persistent ethnographic objects, part and parcel of everyday life. Ethnographically, the narration is like a kind of hopscotch through a random series of scenes, what speculative fiction writer J. G. Ballard (1967) called a ‘non-linear narrative’. This digressive narrative moves between theory and ethnography, fact and fable, something and nothing.\n\n…\n\nSituating an ethnography of nothing in particular as being, ethnographically speaking, nowhere-in-particular turns the local ethnographic problems of boredom and nothingness that haunt the author’s other situated ethnographic works into a more general philosophical and ethnographic tour de force.\n\n…\n\nI re-read this ethnography in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic when we are all confined to our scattered apartments and we are all confronted by the banal imponderabilia of everyday life as meaninglessness, of being all in this – watching the paint peel – together.” ~ Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/ajec/29/2/ajec290211.xml"", ""Frederiksen's book is a well written and very interesting anthropological experiment. Not only does it address meaninglessness and the challenge it poses to the venerated tradition of looking for meaning and structure behind all kinds of everyday phenomena and personal life stories, Frederiksen also searches for a style of representation (or perhaps rather presentation) that resonates with his object of study. I really appreciate the way he takes his informants literally, not only in the sense of taking them seriously. Boldly and with success, he employs literary means in order to describe how nothing in particular takes place among them. ~ Anne Line Dalsgaard, University of Aarhus, author of Matters of Life and Longing"", ""This is a beautifully written piece of work; it deals with the kind of existential concerns that anthropology normally deals with so badly by approaching them through thickets of deep theory that all too often become the focus of attention rather than the questions of being that such theory is allegedly intended to illuminate. Instead, the author takes the direct route of explaining in clear and simple, yet never simplistic terms, why an endless quest for meaning may carry downsides and blindsides if relentlessly pursued. The text uses examples from fieldwork and literature in a manner designed to cut to the heart of these concerns, again in contrast to so much ‘experimental’ writing in anthropology, where the feeling all too often is that such tropes are clumsy additions stuck on top of pointlessly meaningful papers with sellotape. I think this book would be a suitable candidate to teach on a number of postgraduate courses; in particular those aiming to help students develop clear writing and avoid the pitfalls of needless obscurity. It’s enjoyable, clear to read and most of all clearly written for the right reasons, a deeply felt desire on the part of the author to explore his own experience of nothingness in an honest and open manner, and that honesty communicates from the page and is likely to communicate itself to readers as well. ~ Keir Martin, University of Oslo, co-editor of Journal of Extreme Anthropology"", ""It is a rare pleasure to read about nothing in particular with the constant notion of wanting to read more about nothing! The chapters of this book meander around nothing, leading the reader back and forth between observations on a place in its non-existence and detailed being, references to and analysis of nothingness versus nothing and the importance of a counterpart of nothing in everything. Like with its contents the author transforms language into a form of questions and in between – is it poetry? is it theory? – contesting those blind spots in a caleidoscopic manner. A text one reads so fast just to start over again when through in order to not have gotten lost on any of the details! ~ Katharina Stadler, conceptual artist and independent researcher""]" Anti-Hero,"[""A.J. Lozier""]","One man’s journey into, and out of, the movement that foreshadowed the modern-day “Antifa.”","A memoir of one man’s journey into, and out of, the movement that foreshadowed the modern-day “Antifa.” Between 1999-2005, as the nation convulsed with uncertainty over a contested election and the Sept. 11 attacks, A.J. Lozier attended and helped organize protests across the United States, as an active participant in the anarchist ""black bloc,"" predecessor to the modern-day ""Antifa."" He was charged, tackled, swung at, shot at with rubber bullets, punched and, once, arrested. He did his fair of shoving too, all in the name of Anarchy, which he believed to be the only hope for a more peaceful and equitable society, in which capitalism was a thing of the past. This is no ""behind the mask"" exposé, but nor is it a work of unselfconscious propaganda. It is first and foremost a story, but one that charts how a pure-intentioned desire for peace and justice morphed into a mechanism for justifying any behavior. It is a story that foreshadows the Antifa we see today.","A memoir of one man’s journey into, and out of, the movement that foreshadowed the modern-day “Antifa.” Between 1999-2005, as the nation convulsed with uncertainty over a contested election and the Sept. 11 attacks, A.J. Lozier attended and helped organize protests across the United States, as an active participant in the anarchist ""black bloc,"" predecessor to the modern-day ""Antifa."" He was charged, tackled, swung at, shot at with rubber bullets, punched and, once, arrested. He did his fair of shoving too, all in the name of Anarchy, which he believed to be the only hope for a more peaceful and equitable society, in which capitalism was a thing of the past. This is no ""behind the mask"" exposé, but nor is it a work of unselfconscious propaganda. It is first and foremost a story, but one that charts how a pure-intentioned desire for peace and justice morphed into a mechanism for justifying any behavior. It is a story that foreshadows the Antifa we see today.",3,"[""In what is told via a compelling narrative from start to finish, Anti-Hero: Memories of a Black Bloc Anarchist is a book for the ages; a refreshing take, an exposed side of a raging argument of a distorted viewpoint that now gets its day in the sun through Lozier. ~ Anne Carlini, Exclusive Magazine"", ""Lozier's book is a cocktail that mixes passion with politics, direct action with drunkenness, and self-deception with longing in his quest for belonging inside the alienating features of modern society. In doing so, he delivers a love letter to anyone curious enough to listen. ~ David Redmon, Award-Winning Director of Mardi Gras: Made in China"", ""In \""Anti-hero\"", Lozier reminds us that Antifa activists and others on the radical Left are not as one-dimensional as political talking heads would like you to believe. And ultimately, if we want to overcome hatred and build a better society, we need to remember the simple truth that we are all more alike than different as human beings. ~ Gabriel Nadales, Author of Behind the Black Mask, My Time as an Antifa Activist""]" Anti-Matter,"[""Ben Jeffery""]",An interrogation of art's ability to face unpleasant truths.,"Michel Houellebecq, author of five novels including Atomised and Platform, has become possibly the world’s most famous literary pessimist. His work declares that life is painful and disappointing, death is terrifying, and the human condition is a nasty sort of joke. He has been wildly successful – translated into over 25 different languages and hailed as the voice of a generation. Beginning with Houellebecq’s novels, this book explores the concept of ‘Depressive Realism’ in literature and philosophy – the proposition that the facts of life are bleak and unkind. Ranging over work by David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag, Fredric Jameson and Margaret Atwood, Anti-Matter surveys the case for pessimism, asks how a mass culture rooted in sentimentality and trivialisation manages to produce so much cynicism and apathy, and hunts for the space that remains for serious, life-affirming art.","Michel Houellebecq, author of five novels including Atomised and Platform, has become possibly the world’s most famous literary pessimist. His work declares that life is painful and disappointing, death is terrifying, and the human condition is a nasty sort of joke. He has been wildly successful – translated into over 25 different languages and hailed as the voice of a generation. Beginning with Houellebecq’s novels, this book explores the concept of ‘Depressive Realism’ in literature and philosophy – the proposition that the facts of life are bleak and unkind. Ranging over work by David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag, Fredric Jameson and Margaret Atwood, Anti-Matter surveys the case for pessimism, asks how a mass culture rooted in sentimentality and trivialisation manages to produce so much cynicism and apathy, and hunts for the space that remains for serious, life-affirming art.",4,"[""Anti-Matter is an example of the kind of rigorous and refined criticism that one rarely stumbles across these days. ~ Jacques Testard, Times Literary Supplement"", ""Ben Jeffery's Anti-Matter is the kind of intelligent, sophisticated response to provocative work that affirms criticism's value as art in itself. ... A more rigorous, less stylized version of the kind of long critical essay usually associated with writers like Geoff Dyer and Pierre Bayard, Anti-Matter is a work of criticism that honors—and occasionally exceeds—its source. ~ Scott Esposito , Book Forum"", ""Ben Jeffery has produced not only an excellent critical assessment of Houellebecq’s writings, but a fantastic think-piece in and of itself, refining the intentions of his subject, as well as opening up this erudite discussion of art to the act of living in the world.\n\n~ Emmet O'Cuana , abookadaytillicanstay"", ""A searching and eloquent consideration of one of the definitive bodies of work of our time, Anti-Matter is also a vital essay on the more general difficulties of meaning-making for contemporary novelists and/or human beings. ~ Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision and co-editor of n+1 magazine""]" "Architecture of Control, The","[""Grant Vetter""]",Grant Vetter develops an entirely new lexicon for analyzing architectural power in the twenty first century.,"Through six meditations on the ideology of architecture, Grant Vetter is able to give us an entirely new set of coordinates for understanding social control in the twenty-first century. Moving between historical precedents in the east and the west, Vetter's work reveals a hybrid order of architectural power that acts on subjectivity from within rather than without. Whether characterized as a process of indo-colonization, social ionization or a sub-atomizing social physics, Vetter's account of architectural subjectivation requires a complete rethinking of power/knowledge as invested in producing perfected subjects rather than normative ones. This new paradigm can be described as a sovereign power in as much as it acts directly on the body through enterrogatory discipline, inferrogatory infomatics, modulated (in)dividualism, auto-affective attunement and incentivizing injunctions. As a critical rejoinder to the discourse of Panopticism, The Architecture of Control is essential reading for everyone who is interested in new modes of resistance to the designs of biopower and imperial democracy.","Through six meditations on the ideology of architecture, Grant Vetter is able to give us an entirely new set of coordinates for understanding social control in the twenty-first century. Moving between historical precedents in the east and the west, Vetter's work reveals a hybrid order of architectural power that acts on subjectivity from within rather than without. Whether characterized as a process of indo-colonization, social ionization or a sub-atomizing social physics, Vetter's account of architectural subjectivation requires a complete rethinking of power/knowledge as invested in producing perfected subjects rather than normative ones. This new paradigm can be described as a sovereign power in as much as it acts directly on the body through enterrogatory discipline, inferrogatory infomatics, modulated (in)dividualism, auto-affective attunement and incentivizing injunctions. As a critical rejoinder to the discourse of Panopticism, The Architecture of Control is essential reading for everyone who is interested in new modes of resistance to the designs of biopower and imperial democracy.",4,"[""It was functionalist philosopher Jeremy Bentham whose development of the panopticon famously provided the genealogical project of Michel Foucault with the exemplar for a particular social-historical moment. For Foucault, its use of observational techniques to condition the behavior of prisoners superbly articulated the disciplinary societies of the late eighteenth century, where tightly defined architectural spaces were constructed in order exert specific effects on the body: the prison, the clinic, the factory, to name but a few. By the French publication of Discipline and Punish in 1975, however, the disciplinary society had already given way to something else. The proliferation of new technologies had deterritorialized the subjectivation of individuals, forming, as Gilles Deleuze would later say, a control society: a societal form where disciplinary confinements—or molds—come to be replaced by modulation, or supple and mobile controls.1 The movement from discipline to control represents a seismic shift, which provokes a number of questions about our contemporary relationship with Bentham’s panopticon. Fundamentally, it poses the question of how panopticism functions in our particular societal structure, or, rather, how is neo- panopticism complicit in the construction and propagation of a control society?\n\nIt is precisely with this question that Grant Vetter’s Architecture of Control occupies itself. Ambitiously, Vetter’s book attempts to demonstrate the way neo-panopticism functions to shape and regulate control societies. Indeed, while the title indicates an overarching concern for the place of architecture in a neo-panoptic apparatus, the book is as much about constructing a framework— an architecture—with which to understand a control society as it is about the place of architectural forms in the exercise of control. Even if Vetter periodically returns to the latter, his analysis continually has to exceed those bounds once it accepts that “panopticism today is wholly post-penitentiary. It knows...no physical, architectural or judico-legal constraints.”2\n\nFurthermore, it is in pursuit of the former where Vetter makes the most ground. On this front, one of his biggest achievements is to offer an incisive critique of the linear narrative that Foucault, Deleuze, and, perhaps more so, those reading them, construct from sovereign societies through to disciplinary societies and finally to the control society. Instead, Vetter demonstrates that, in our contemporary society, far from a singular transformation—a neat narrative that moves from one episteme to the next—the apparatus of a control society is determined by neo-panopticism or a “fourfold diagram” of control, which folds inside itself previous societal forms as panoptic techniques. In doing so, Vetter shows us, quite successfully, that neo-panopticism and panoptic logics are at work in an array of contemporaneous social forms and relations, forming a totalizing and seemingly inescapable web of control.\n\nVetter ably demonstrates that mysticism of the sovereign spectacle functions today as Synopticisim, or the many watching the one. Here, the valorization of the sovereign in festivals, ceremony and decree, becomes the elevation of personas to brand names; commodities that work to produce subjects in the image of the spectacular. Similarly, for Vetter, the sovereign ban enters the diagram as Banopticisism, a mobile power of prevention; surveillance, which serves both to produce dossiers on criminals and criminality and to act on them accordingly. The bio-political is also “folded” into this neo-panoptic diagram as “Bio-optics,” or the web of invasive recording of bio-data from DNA and gene sampling to biometric security. Finally, Vetter names the Acousticon—the symbolic joining of the audible and the visual—as the neo-panoptic technique where technological advances signal the “irrevocable loss of temporal and spatial respite from watching and listening devices.”3 In other words, it is the contribution of devices like the iPhone and software like Skype that have mobilized and sustain both “hyper-surveillance and the end of anonymity.”4\n\nUsing this fourfold framework, Vetter’s analysis casts neo-panopticism as both imminent (affective at a micro-level) and total (inescapable). But it is a comparative analysis between neo-panoptic control and the infamous totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century that gives us a clearer sense of the coherent functioning of seemingly disparate techniques for the purpose of what Vetter calls “hyperbolic capitalism.” Here, Vetter points out that neo-panopticism has a totalitarian potential, in that its domination of subjects is without rational limit (Vetter even supposes that technological advances have destroyed natural limits) and, therefore, “nothing is hidden and everything is given to be seen.”5 But Vetter rightly argues that neo-panopticism is, nevertheless, fundamentally different from totalitarianism because it is an apparatus of hyper-capitalism rather than a singular dictatorial authority. Referencing the work of Gramsci, Vetter demonstrates that neo-panopticism is hegemonic but does not create a hegemonic block; it dominates without central orchestration or, as Vetter says, “without deploying centrifugal forms of power.”6 Instead, it is a decentralized, supple, and malleable power. As a result, rather than demanding sameness, or a unity of subjectivity, it demands the avoidance of the Other (other than capital) and forecloses sameness, producing hyper-individuation as individualized consumption.\n\nHaving completed this analysis, Vetter brings us to the second occupation of Architecture of Control, which can be succinctly formulated into the following question: If neo-panoptic control is both imminent and totalizing, what strategies are available for resistance? For Vetter, such a strategy might be realized through feng-shui—via Foucault’s concept of “care of the self” and Giorgio Agamben’s term “profaning”—as a practice that reconfigures neo-panoptic spaces, activating within them an alternative spatial discipline. What traditional feng-shui practices appear to offer Vetter’s analysis is an approach to realigning the everyday that can confront the immanence and totalizing purview of neo- panopticism, which is both pragmatic and positive (in the sense that it doesn’t attempt to destroy neo-panopticism and escape to a life that is “outside,” but tries to reconfigure space into an alternative discipline). Moreover, for those skeptical of the mysticism of feng-shui, and, furthermore, its co-option by big capital, Vetter claims that feng-shui must be radicalized and politicized through a patient engagement with Western anti-modern architectural disciplines. Feng- shui must declare itself faithful to a number of political commitments if it is to co-ordinate its efforts and achieve anything like a meaningful resistance to neo- panopticism.\n\nNevertheless, such an embryonic discussion of the project can’t offer the reader a formulation for resistance in concrete terms. It struggles to detail what resistance might actually look like, offering only a couple of open-ended avenues for future investigation. This weakness is particularly prevalent when Vetter makes some determinations about how the alliance between feng shui and anti-modern architecture might work. For example, we are told the feng-shui School of Forms “... might be a mode to (re)consider the substantive effects of placement outlines and structuration in relation to the contours of Neo-panoptic control.”7 While this is certainly a legitimate avenue of investigation, it feels a little disappointing that it offers nothing more concrete, especially given the size and scale of the project being proposed. It might have been better to offer one or more of these avenues as a detailed case-study, or an analysis of this “radicalization” of feng-shui in detailed, practical terms. Such a move would have, no doubt, done more to ease the concerns of those who might think that the practice of feng-shui is either too mystical to offer anything to the “modern” or too easily co-opted to offer substantial resistance.\n\nFurthermore, Vetter’s response to his own claim that resistance to neo- panopticism must be interdisciplinary (which clearly informs the rationale for setting up a site of resistance around feng-shui as an “Eastern” discipline, brought into dialogue with Western “anti-modern” architectural principles) is problematic. Given that much of what Vetter has identified as “neo-panoptic” refers to the increasing presence of emerging computer technologies and media practices, it feels awkward that much of what Vetter posits as resistance is presented in architectural terms. This is not to say that an architectural approach should not be part of any solution to the effects of neo-panopticism, but, rather, that the analysis could benefit from a wider approach to resistance. Accommodating hackers and computer programmers, for example, who could work within the same “profaning” framework that Vetter sets out would make for a truly interdisciplinary approach to resisting neo-panoptic forms that deals with virtual as well as geographic conceptions of space.\n\nCriticism aside, Vetter’s Architecture of Control is an ambitious book that uses a number of colourful cultural references (The Dark Knight, and Nightmare on Elm Street among them), to achieve an accessible “architectural drawing” of our contemporary control society. It provides a thought provoking analysis of how neo-panopticism, as the apparatus of hyper-capitalism, has achieved the total colonization and commodification of public and private spaces. As such, it is a compelling read for any Foucauldian, but particularly for academics working in the field of security studies, or on critiques of our contemporary control society, outlining a “complete” understanding of this contemporary phenomenon, its totalizing web, and its material, subjectivizing effects.\n\nEndnotes.\n\n1\u0002Deleuze, G., Negotiations 1972-1990, New York: Columbia University Press (1990), 178.\n\n2\u0002Vetter, G., Architecture of Control: A Contribution to the Critique of the Science of Apparatus, Winchester and Washington: Zero Books (2012), 47.\n\n3\u0002Ibid., 98.\n\n4\u0002Ibid., 99.\n\n5\u0002Ibid.,109.\n\n6\u0002Ibid. 7\u0002Ibid., 148 ~ Josh Bowsher, Interstitial Journal"", ""Vetters work is a timely inquiry into the dynamics of power associated with techno-panopticism.\n\n~ Mark Poster"", ""Grant Vetter s book is remarkable not only for its brilliant mapping of neo-Panoptic architectures and the evolution of intensive controls over life and social energies, but for its deep and sustained meditation on the historical relevance and potential of Feng Shui as a creative and practical mode of resistance.\n\nWilliam Bogard, author of \""The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in telematic societies\"". ~"", ""Confronting cartographies of subjectivation, Vetter presents an exciting and timely series of meditations on the development and implications of surveillance architectures. Guiding the discussion is a quest for the emancipatory potentials in the relationships between people and the architectonic forces shaping contemporary life. In this book one will encounter the obvious figures such as Bentham and Foucault, as well as Batman, and Japanese horror films. An important discussion of how subjectivity can be understood and how that can be controlled is opened here.\n\nPaul Boshears, Co-editor of \""Continent journal\"". ~""]" "Architecture of Failure, The","[""Douglas Murphy""]",This book proposes a theory of architectural failure; a radical way to approach memory and history in the city.,"Against those who consider architecture to be a wholly optimistic activity, this book shows how the history of modern architecture is inextricably tied to ideas of failure and ruin. By means of an original reading of the earliest origins of modernism, The Architecture of Failure exposes the ways in which failure has been suppressed, ignored and denied in the way we design our cities. It examines the 19th century fantasy architecture of the iron and glass exhibition palaces, strange, unprecedented, dream-like structures, almost all now lost, existing only as melancholy archive fragments; it traces the cultural legacy of these buildings through the heroics of the early 20th century, post-war radicals and recent developments, discussing related themes in art, literature, politics and philosophy. Critiquing the capitalist symbolism of the self-styled contemporary avant-garde, the book outlines a new history of contemporary architecture, and attempts to recover a radical approach to understanding what we build. Douglas Murphy blogs at http://www.youyouidiot.blogspot.com/","Against those who consider architecture to be a wholly optimistic activity, this book shows how the history of modern architecture is inextricably tied to ideas of failure and ruin. By means of an original reading of the earliest origins of modernism, The Architecture of Failure exposes the ways in which failure has been suppressed, ignored and denied in the way we design our cities. It examines the 19th century fantasy architecture of the iron and glass exhibition palaces, strange, unprecedented, dream-like structures, almost all now lost, existing only as melancholy archive fragments; it traces the cultural legacy of these buildings through the heroics of the early 20th century, post-war radicals and recent developments, discussing related themes in art, literature, politics and philosophy. Critiquing the capitalist symbolism of the self-styled contemporary avant-garde, the book outlines a new history of contemporary architecture, and attempts to recover a radical approach to understanding what we build. Douglas Murphy blogs at http://www.youyouidiot.blogspot.com/",5,"[""\""The author’s powerful critique of the supposedly radical proponents of architecture is brutal and incisive, a welcome move away from the well-trodden cultural clichés.\""\n\n\""The Architecture of Failure stands out in the growing contemporary literature on ruins for not communicating merely through the frisson of aesthetic delight and for choosing buildings of the late 19th century as its subject rather than those of the post-World War II period. Even if it were for these reasons alone, it is a useful addition and a corrective.\""\n\n\""As soundly rooted in theory as this book might be, it is also something of a call to arms, and one hopes that it is a but a taster for a much larger work to come.\"" ~ Rosa Ainley, Review 31, http://review31.co.uk/article/view/45/future-past-tense"", ""The triumph of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace as a pre-eminent demonstration of a new means of iron and glass construction, and of a resulting new kind of space, is central to the narrative of Modernism. Less well known, save for the fire that consumed it in 1936, is the structure’s bizarre and ultimately degrading after-life at Sydenham. Re-appropriated into the eclectic culture of its time, the reconstructed – and significantly reconfigured – building was transformed into what Douglas Murphy describes as an ‘immersive educational environment’.\n\nThis was replete with ‘improving’ sculptures, two dozen courts modelled on historic architecture across the world, a chamber music space where many works by leading continental composers such as Schubert, Schumann and Brahms were performed in the UK for the first time, and finally, at the end of one transept, a performance space with a capacity for more than 20,000 that became famous for the Triennial Handel Festival, in which choirs of up to 3,000 would perform Messiah.\n\nRecent parallels for this ‘multimedia environment’ are not hard to find: the retrofitting of rooms to tame the vast spaces of the Beaubourg and adaptation of the Millennium Dome to form the O2 Arena being the most obvious.\n\nYet Murphy’s argument is more far-reaching and provocative. He sees the ‘heroic’ iron and glass structures of early Modern architecture as paradigms of a condition that pervades recent practice, from the reductive ‘Solutionism’ of Cedric Price and High-Tech – with their roots in the 19th-century idolisation of the engineer – to the ‘iconic’ structures of Frank Gehry; from the trivialisation of ‘theory’ by Peter Eisenman to the digital adventures of Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher.\n\nThe skewer through the kebab of Murphy’s argument rests on the idea of ‘spectrality’, a term invoked by Jacques Derrida to describe ‘the inconsistent presence of objects and their mediated being’. Although conventionally thought of as solid, stable and long-lasting, all architecture is, in some sense, Murphy argues, ‘spectral’, endlessly fragmented by its partial transmission through different media.\n\nThe ‘abstract ruins’ of early iron and glass buildings epitomise this condition, physically as well as metaphorically, not least because we know many of the most splendid – such as the Crystal Palace and Dutert’s Galérie des Machines – only through photographs and other descriptions. Similarly spectral was the related ‘lost’ aesthetic of girders and cables of the Festival of Britain – exemplified by Ralph Tubbs’ Dome of Discovery and the Skylon – that was to haunt a new generation of architects, including Archigram, Foster and Rogers.\n\nA consequence of eulogising this imagery and the reductive ‘Solutionist’ view of architecture it encourages is, Murphy argues, everywhere apparent: ‘The high-tech spaces we walk through now are fit only for the smiling ghosts of computer visualisations, a purgatory of “aspirational but accessible” restaurants and bars, “media walls” and “public art” of unremitting dreariness.’\n\nMurphy’s next targets are the apparent inverses of the ‘abstract ruins’ of iron and glass, the all-too-tangible bespoke sculptural icons of the credit-fuelled boom years that Jonathan Meades has aptly dubbed ‘sight-bites’. He addresses them under the heading ‘Iconism’ and begins with the ‘puerile nihilism’ of Eisenman, with his early efforts to ‘de-centre’ architecture from its humanist traditions and later, risible determination to found a new architecture upon the improbable foundations of the deconstructive theories of Derrida.\n\nWhat opaque intellectualism had done in promoting Eisenman’s reputation within academic and cultural circles, ‘frightfully banal paintings’ did for Hadid, and both were celebrated in the Deconstructivist Architecture show at MOMA alongside the leading master of sight-bite architecture, Frank Gehry.\n\nConcluding with thoughts about the ‘Virtualism’ of recent digital architecture Murphy neatly combines the two strands of his argument. Intellectually, we enter the world of flows, fluxes and animistic desire in which the writings of Deleuze and Guattari loom large, while operationally the same parametric software is rendering the unique generic as similar fluid, folding forms pour on to the screens of architects of otherwise very different lineages, generally supported by much the same spurious arguments about ‘emergent complexity’ as a reflection of the age, and ‘fluidity’ as an analogue for natural forms and processes.\n\nThe fact that biomimicry is yielding extraordinary inventions at the micro-scale, or offering useful models for energy-efficiency, is no reason to suppose it has large-scale formal lessons for architecture. Similarly, it is far from self-evident, as Schumacher of Zaha Hadid’s office claims, that what he terms ‘Parametricism’ is the necessary expression of a ‘post-Fordist network economy, globalisation and… lifestyle diversification’ celebrated, ironically, in more or less the same spatial types as the original iron and glass structures with which Murphy’s book began.\n\nThis is a neat convergence, but the attempt to shoehorn together two arguments, one born from detailed research into the cultural legacy of the architecture of iron and glass, the other a more sweeping and enjoyably trenchant critique of architecture’s recent past, feels uneasy. Both are provocative, and in places brilliant, and though I don’t find the thread Murphy weaves between them is as continuous as perhaps he would like, The Architecture of Failure can be recommended as a lively piece of critical history and a stimulus to constructing something more durable from the ruins of the present.\n\n~ The Architects' Journal, http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/home/critics/object-failure/8631752.article?blocktitle=Culture&contentID=35"", ""In the latest Architecture Today magazine:\n\n'Against those who consider architecture to be a wholly optimistic activity, this book shows how the history of modern architecture is inextricably tied to ideas of failure and ruin.' Douglas Murphy's short, trenchant book comes in two parts. First is a reading of Victorian iron and glass exhibition halls that attempts to draw out their melancholy character - the ways in which socially and materially the buildings embodied a presentiment of their own ruin.\n\nSecond is an assault on recent movements in architecture - high-tech, deconstruction, 'iconism', parametricism - whose naive faith in novelty and technology, divorced from broader political concerns, has failed to learn the right lessons from the crystal palaces.\n\nMurphy's dissections of the heirs to the Vicotrian engineer-genius, of the fashionable adoption of critical theory for formal inspiration rather than critique, and of the empty promises of the prophets of digital architecture, are both acute and entertaining. The link between the failures of today and Victorian ferro-vitreous architecture remains debatable, but Murphy's polemic is both informed and persuasive. ~ Unknown, Architecture Today"", ""Review in RIBA Journal April 2012 edition - 'Editors' selection':\n\n\""The failure in designing what was once called ‘a better tomorrow’. The mismatch between what architects say and the built work that survives is vast: illustrated by the Victorian obsession with iron and glass structures.\"" ~ Hugh Pearman, RIBA Journal"", ""\""This book convincingly addresses architecture’s recurring weakness for the brave new world\n\nThis book marks a generational shift. At last, here is someone who can write dispassionately about Buckminster Fuller and Cedric Price and their hilarious assertions about the future because he’s never met them and never been swayed by their charisma.\n\nMurphy’s view of them is that they were “solutionists” who carried on the modernist trust in newness and progress so naively, so bereft of political depth, that nothing could possibly come of their ideas. Murphy’s verdict on the future demonstrated by the InterAction Centre: fantastically dreary. It reminds me of when the helicopters left Vietnam in 1973 and the cold war started to shut down and we all started to talk about what buildings looked like again. Except that here it’s the reverse. Now, we all need to talk about politics again.\n\nWhen you get onto the next chapters, Iconism and Virtualism, the dispassion cranks up a notch. Now it is the concern of a philosopher who sees philosophy being treated as deep litter in architecture’s battery farm. All that work put into getting past structure done by Derrida thrown away on the deconstructivists’ smug political disengagement, and all the energetic detail of Deleuze and Guattari’s emergency squandered on parametric banalities.\n\nMurphy knows his material well and gives a detailed account of the terms icon and virtual that puts most architectural meanderings in this area to shame. He quotes the philosophers themselves on architects’ clumsy misuse of their concepts, presumably watching with disgust as speculative realism and object oriented ontology take their turn as explanation fodder. But since both philosophy and art have borrowed from science for the last hundred years and science is resolutely materialist even when examining things that are materially impossible, should it be a surprise that things have gone this way? Yes. Music and literature, suggests Murphy, have been able to be modern without architecture’s traumas not because of immateriality but because of their freedom from heavy investment. That’s architecture’s real problem — only capitalists or governments can afford to do it. And that’s why it can’t be apolitical.\n\nWhich leaves politics wide open. In all Murphy’s talk of the elusiveness of a radical architecture, something sticks. Riots may be made of despair but revolutions are made of hope; the revolutionary impulse is itself stuck in the future. It’s a picture of a new world set down into an empty space, bound to end in tears when the actual future arrives.\n\nSo what’s the radical alternative to revolution? There could be another chapter here, and one that Murphy could deal with very well. It would be an assessment of those architectures that don’t use borrowed ideas to fill themselves up but remain concerned with architectural matters. The space agents, for example. Contextualists. Primitivists.\n\nThe question would be: what happens when you try to situate architecture in the present? Are the explanations any less nonsensical? The examination might demonstrate that rhetoric gets in just about everywhere and spoils just about everything. Or, it might show that the world is whole and good and that you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the spiels.\n\nThe best thing about this book is that it steps out of the partisan mudslinging we’re used to. This is not sloganeering, there’s no axe being ground here. Nor is it anti-theory. It contextualises the furore of contemporary architectural debate with a detailed consideration of the great iron and glass buildings of the 19th century.\n\nMurphy concludes that their blank, utilitarian technologies lent themselves to an optimism about the future that continues with architects to this day; whose products, like the iron and glass of Victorian times, are but fragments of the drive towards a better world that did not and will not come to pass.\n\nThat’s the “failure” of the title. The subject is so complicated, so emotional, so ironic and so melancholic altogether that it really does take a writer of some skill to explain. And it gets it with this book.\""\n\nReview is currently on the website but will be published in print this week. Paul Shepheard is a well respected architectural writer ~ Paul Shepheard, Building Design (bdonline.co.uk)""]" "Art Kettle, The","[""Sinead Murphy""]",Is art a mode of control? Does our desire to create constrain us as effectively as our desire to consume?,"In contemporary society, art is that which appears to open up all of those possibilities that our daily lives would close down, with developments in community art, art therapy, and public art extending this seemingly liberating effect to us all. But what if art is a mode of control? What if art operates to kettle us as effectively as, if much more subtly than, recent police curtailment of protestors in public squares in London? The Art Kettle argues that our capacities for imagination, creativity, even resistance, in being apparently fostered by art are being channelled safely and to no purpose, all the better for our continued subjection to the round of means and ends that defines our profit-driven Western democracies. Through analysis of contemporary artworks and an intriguing account of the later decades of the Victorian age, The Art Kettle would convince us to question the ways in which we currently feel ourselves to be free and to begin to practice for a better future, a future founded in our past, when fundamentalism was a kind of courage, art a kind of craft, and needlepoint a kind of revolution.","In contemporary society, art is that which appears to open up all of those possibilities that our daily lives would close down, with developments in community art, art therapy, and public art extending this seemingly liberating effect to us all. But what if art is a mode of control? What if art operates to kettle us as effectively as, if much more subtly than, recent police curtailment of protestors in public squares in London? The Art Kettle argues that our capacities for imagination, creativity, even resistance, in being apparently fostered by art are being channelled safely and to no purpose, all the better for our continued subjection to the round of means and ends that defines our profit-driven Western democracies. Through analysis of contemporary artworks and an intriguing account of the later decades of the Victorian age, The Art Kettle would convince us to question the ways in which we currently feel ourselves to be free and to begin to practice for a better future, a future founded in our past, when fundamentalism was a kind of courage, art a kind of craft, and needlepoint a kind of revolution.",0,[] "Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism","[""Bojana Kunst""]",Examining the recent changes in the labour of an artist and addressing them from the perspective of performance.,"The main affirmation of artistic practice must today happen through thinking about the conditions and the status of the artist's work. Only then can it be revealed that what is a part of the speculations of capital is not art itself, but mostly artistic life. Artist at Work examines the recent changes in the labour of an artist and addresses them from the perspective of performance.","The main affirmation of artistic practice must today happen through thinking about the conditions and the status of the artist's work. Only then can it be revealed that what is a part of the speculations of capital is not art itself, but mostly artistic life. Artist at Work examines the recent changes in the labour of an artist and addresses them from the perspective of performance.",4,"[""Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism\n\nBojana Kunst\n\nZero Books\n\nc/o John Hunt Publishing, Ltd.\n\nLaurel House, Station Approach, Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK\n\nwww.johnhuntpublishing.com\n\nPR: [email protected]\n\n9781785350009, $25.95, 241pp, www.amazon.com\n\nSynopsis: The main affirmation of artistic practice must today happen through thinking about the conditions and the status of the artist's work. Only then can it be revealed that what is a part of the speculations of capital is not art itself, but mostly artistic life. In \""Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism\"", philosopher, dramaturg and performance theoretician Bojana Kunst (a professor at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Justus Liebig University, Giessen, where she is leading an international master program in Choreography and Performance) deftly examines the recent changes in the labor of an artist and then addresses them from the perspective of performance.\n\nCritique: As informed and informative as it is thoughtful and thought-provoking, \""Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism\"" is exceptionally well written and will prove to be of immense interest to both scholars and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the role and condition of the artist in a capitalist society. A work of impeccable scholarship, \""Artist at Work\"" is very highly recommended for professional, community, and academic library collections. For personal reading lists it should be noted that \""Artist at Work\"" is also available in a Kindle edition ($13.59).\n\nMary Cowper\n\nReviewer\n\n~ Mary Cowper, Midwest Book Review"", ""\""This critically coruscating exposure of what it means to have come 'after the event' yet always prepared to work on contemporary art's implications, is everything one might have hoped from one of Europe's most incisive performance writers. Like all treasures it shines with the brilliance of a wholly unexpected economy.\"" ~ Alan Read, Professor of Theatre, Director Performance Foundation, King's College London"", ""\""Bojana Kunst, one of the most compelling writers today, has produced a book that will inform the critical discourse on art’s political ambitions for years to come. Artist At Work is a vital, searching treatise on the relation between artistic work and artistic labor in the proximity of capitalism. By challenging and scrutinizing the conditions of artistic practice, Kunst re-affirms artistic life with an unflinching determination and a tireless level of expertise, attentiveness and care.\""\n\n~ Lin Hixson, Professor, Performance, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Director, Every house has a door"", ""\""Artist At Work by Bojana Kunst turns the neoliberal perspective upside down and thus has a perfect timing, i.e. in the period of austerity measures. It draws its conclusions mainly from the argument that art no longer ne eds to re-affirm itself as a socially relevant and useful activity because this would lock it with in immanent capitalist and populist production of value. Instead, art has to rediscover its material basis and 'occupy' exactly those abstractions which enable the preservation of the capitalist system and reproduction of capital.\""\n\n~ Goran Sergej Pristaš, Dramaturg, BADco, Zagreb""]" Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts,"[""Leigh Phillips""]",Modernity is not the cause of our ecological woes. Only through a deepening of our modernity can we save the planet.,"Economic growth, progress, industry and, erm, stuff have all come in for a sharp kicking from the green left and beyond in recent years. Everyone from black-hoodied Starbucks window-smashers to farmers' market heirloom-tomato-mongers to Prince Charles himself seem to be embracing 'degrowth' and anti-consumerism, which is nothing less than a form of ecological austerity. Meanwhile, the back-to-the-land ideology and aesthetic of locally-woven organic carrot-pants, pathogen-encrusted compost toilets and civilisational collapse is hegemonic. Yet modernity is not the cause of climate change and the wider biocrisis. It is indeed capitalism that is the source of our environmental woes, but capitalism as a mode of production, not the fuzzy understanding of capitalism of Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Derrick Jensen, Paul Kingsnorth and their anarcho-liberal epigones as a sort of globalist corporate malfeasance. In combative and puckish style, science journalist Leigh Phillips marshals evidence from climate science, ecology, paleoanthropology, agronomy, microbiology, psychology, history, the philosophy of mathematics, and heterodox economics to argue that progressives must rediscover their historic, Promethean ambitions and counter this reactionary neo-Malthusian ideology that not only retards human flourishing, but won't save the planet anyway. We want to take over the machine and run it rationally, not turn the machine off.","Economic growth, progress, industry and, erm, stuff have all come in for a sharp kicking from the green left and beyond in recent years. Everyone from black-hoodied Starbucks window-smashers to farmers' market heirloom-tomato-mongers to Prince Charles himself seem to be embracing 'degrowth' and anti-consumerism, which is nothing less than a form of ecological austerity. Meanwhile, the back-to-the-land ideology and aesthetic of locally-woven organic carrot-pants, pathogen-encrusted compost toilets and civilisational collapse is hegemonic. Yet modernity is not the cause of climate change and the wider biocrisis. It is indeed capitalism that is the source of our environmental woes, but capitalism as a mode of production, not the fuzzy understanding of capitalism of Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Derrick Jensen, Paul Kingsnorth and their anarcho-liberal epigones as a sort of globalist corporate malfeasance. In combative and puckish style, science journalist Leigh Phillips marshals evidence from climate science, ecology, paleoanthropology, agronomy, microbiology, psychology, history, the philosophy of mathematics, and heterodox economics to argue that progressives must rediscover their historic, Promethean ambitions and counter this reactionary neo-Malthusian ideology that not only retards human flourishing, but won't save the planet anyway. We want to take over the machine and run it rationally, not turn the machine off.",0,[] Awkwardness,"[""Adam Kotsko""]",Argues that the awkwardness of our age is a key to understanding human experience.,Awkwardness has been one of the defining traits of the awkwardly unnamed first decade of our young century dominating comedy on both the big and small screens. Could this trend point toward something deeper? In Awkwardness Adam Kotsko answers that question with a resounding yes. Drawing on key insights of cultural theory he argues that awkwardness is a structuring principle of human experience something that the particular conditions of our time allow us to see with greater clarity than ever before. In an analysis that begins with the difference between the US and UK versions of Ricky Gervais's The Office then passes through the films of Judd Apatow and culminates in the apotheosis of awkwardness Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm Kotsko looks at the ways we cope with our awkwardness and the unexpected opportunities awkwardness opens up when we stop resisting it and learn to enjoy it.,Awkwardness has been one of the defining traits of the awkwardly unnamed first decade of our young century dominating comedy on both the big and small screens. Could this trend point toward something deeper? In Awkwardness Adam Kotsko answers that question with a resounding yes. Drawing on key insights of cultural theory he argues that awkwardness is a structuring principle of human experience something that the particular conditions of our time allow us to see with greater clarity than ever before. In an analysis that begins with the difference between the US and UK versions of Ricky Gervais's The Office then passes through the films of Judd Apatow and culminates in the apotheosis of awkwardness Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm Kotsko looks at the ways we cope with our awkwardness and the unexpected opportunities awkwardness opens up when we stop resisting it and learn to enjoy it.,4,"[""Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness is the kind of criticism — pertinent, witty, sophisticated but without sophistry — in which one can glimpse a culture that doesn’t quite exist. As with the other essays adapted from blogs and published by Zero Books. Awkwardness, in a different America, would supplant the dumbed-down pop and self-help schlock atop the nonfiction best-seller lists. Kotsko’s greatest achievement might be this slim volume’s readability.\n\n~ Malcolm Harris, The New Inquiry"", ""Awkwardness , like others in publisher Zero’s O line, is a short (a mere 90 pages) accessible philosophical/cultural examination of the phenomenon of awkwardness aimed at an popular audience. A Th This This is a great short work of criticism, intelligent without being unnecessarily jargony, often insightful and a pleasure to read.\n\n~ Emmy Manuel, globulcomment.com"", ""Awkwardness is just what a work of philosophy should be. Its subject is relevant and its thesis is audacious: awkwardness is more than a funny feeling—it tells us about ourselves, and it might even be the basis of a utopian practice, “an awkwardness that is so awkward it becomes its own kind of grace.”\n\n~ Tony Cuttenham, Oxonian Review"", ""It is easy to write a deep book on a big crucial concept like anxiety love or evil but it takes a true master to do for awkwardness what Heidegger in his Sein und Zeit did for anxiety and this is what Kotsko does. In his book which combines philosophical stringency with references to popular culture awkwardness is elevated into a universal singularity: a prismatic knot in which our entire historical moment is reflected. If this will not become an instant classic then we really live in awkward times.\n\n~ Slavoj Zizek, Slovenian continental philosopher & Professor at the European Graduate School""]" Babbling Corpse,"[""Grafton Tanner""]","In the age of global capitalism, vaporwave celebrates and undermines the electronic ghosts haunting the nostalgia industry.","In the age of global capitalism, vaporwave celebrates and undermines the electronic ghosts haunting the nostalgia industry. Ours is a time of ghosts in machines, killing meaning and exposing the gaps inherent in the electronic media that pervade our lives. Vaporwave is an infant musical micro-genre that foregrounds the horror of electronic media's ability to appear - as media theorist Jeffrey Sconce terms it - ""haunted."" Experimental musicians such as INTERNET CLUB and MACINTOSH PLUS manipulate Muzak and commercial music to undermine the commodification of nostalgia in the age of global capitalism while accentuating the uncanny properties of electronic music production. Babbling Corpse reveals vaporwave's many intersections with politics, media theory, and our present fascination with uncanny, co(s)mic horror. The book is aimed at those interested in global capitalism's effect on art, musical raids on mainstream ""indie"" and popular music, and anyone intrigued by the changing relationship between art and commerce.","In the age of global capitalism, vaporwave celebrates and undermines the electronic ghosts haunting the nostalgia industry. Ours is a time of ghosts in machines, killing meaning and exposing the gaps inherent in the electronic media that pervade our lives. Vaporwave is an infant musical micro-genre that foregrounds the horror of electronic media's ability to appear - as media theorist Jeffrey Sconce terms it - ""haunted."" Experimental musicians such as INTERNET CLUB and MACINTOSH PLUS manipulate Muzak and commercial music to undermine the commodification of nostalgia in the age of global capitalism while accentuating the uncanny properties of electronic music production. Babbling Corpse reveals vaporwave's many intersections with politics, media theory, and our present fascination with uncanny, co(s)mic horror. The book is aimed at those interested in global capitalism's effect on art, musical raids on mainstream ""indie"" and popular music, and anyone intrigued by the changing relationship between art and commerce.",2,"[""The concept of vaporwave is a function of franken music. Taking samples of other music, endlessly repeating sounds, words and phrases either spoken or musical, and slapping them all together into an mp3 package, vaporwave can infuriate, bore or be completely ignored. It can have zero musical value, or appear as outright theft. It is a rebellion of sorts against the powerful commercial music establishment that dictates our tastes. To Grafton Tanner, it is the poster child of the decline and fall of western civilization. It is at very least yet another symptom.\n\nVaporwave music can be created by anyone, alone, with a computer. No musical talent, training or inspiration is necessary, and rarely is any evident. Ironically, the best vaporwave takes a community, a very real group of people to make it work. Unlike the world of social media, these artists actually had to get together. It was a revelation, they say. Beyond this small exception, we find ourselves more and more alone, perhaps followed by a troll online, posting here and there, continually proving there is nothing social about social media.\n\nIt all boils down to rampant, uncontrolled capitalism. Capitalism has not delivered us from oppression, Tanner says. We mock it, we vilify it, but it owns us, bores us, and drains us. It is depressingly smothering. Tanner rightly points out that while Americans live in fear of attack, of drugs, of crime. of economic turmoil, of government intrusion – “the culture industry still peddles ludicrous, infantile fantasies”. The standard cinematic diet is of comic superheroes meant for teenage boys in the 1950s. There is so much bad, retrospective music everywhere it is invisible, and some of us have given up on it entirely.\n\nIn this brief but densely packed book, Tanner expresses his frustration with a series of pop culture examples and insights on American Kultur. His writing is straightforward, simple, economical and powerful. He acknowledges and appreciates pop culture critics from the Left. His own observations are far clearer and deeper than the usual pabulum of the blogosphere and forum comments. He is perceptive, challenging, and authoritative. His positions are well founded. Thinking is required if you venture here. It was a distinct pleasure to read this little book.\n\nGrafton Tanner is a new voice very much worth listening to.\n\nFive stars. ~ David Wineberg, Amazon vi NEtGalley"", ""\""[Babbling Corpse] stands sturdy as a deconstruction of an enigmatic and confounding artistic movement.\"" ~ Under the Radar, http://www.undertheradarmag.com/reviews/babbling_corpse/""]" Bells and Whistles,"[""Graham Harman""]","In this diverse collection of sixteen essays, lectures, and interviews Graham Harman lucidly explains the principles of Speculative Realism, including his own object-oriented philosophy.","In this diverse collection of sixteen essays, lectures, and interviews dating from 2010 to 2013, Graham Harman lucidly explains the principles of Speculative Realism, including his own object-oriented philosophy. From Brazil to Russia, and in Poland, France, Croatia, and India, Harman addresses local philosophical concerns with the energy of a roving evangelist. He reflects on established giants such as Greenberg, Latour, and McLuhan, while refining his differences with such younger authors as Brassier, Bryant, Garcia, and Meillassoux. He speaks to philosophers in Paris, hecklers in New York, media theorists in Berlin, and architects in Curitiba, as object-oriented philosophy consolidates its position as the most widespread form of Speculative Realism. There has never been a more upbeat introduction to one of the most challenging philosophical schools of our time.","In this diverse collection of sixteen essays, lectures, and interviews dating from 2010 to 2013, Graham Harman lucidly explains the principles of Speculative Realism, including his own object-oriented philosophy. From Brazil to Russia, and in Poland, France, Croatia, and India, Harman addresses local philosophical concerns with the energy of a roving evangelist. He reflects on established giants such as Greenberg, Latour, and McLuhan, while refining his differences with such younger authors as Brassier, Bryant, Garcia, and Meillassoux. He speaks to philosophers in Paris, hecklers in New York, media theorists in Berlin, and architects in Curitiba, as object-oriented philosophy consolidates its position as the most widespread form of Speculative Realism. There has never been a more upbeat introduction to one of the most challenging philosophical schools of our time.",2,"[""Attractive Additional Features\n\nGraham Harman, Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism\n\nZero Books, 303pp, £15.99, ISBN 9781782790389\n\nreviewed by Sarah De Sanctis\n\nThe title chosen by Graham Harman for his latest book couldn't have been more appropriate. It is a collection of 16 essays, blog pieces, interviews and lectures that constitute (I quote from the Oxford English Dictionary) 'attractive additional features' to his theory. What you get, in short, is precisely more speculative realism, so if you're new to the subject this is probably not the right place to start. The title also refers to the different kinds of writings included in the book: bells are the long, more complex pieces, while whistles are shorter, like posts and fragments.\n\nGraham Harman is an influential American philosopher working in Cairo, who has attached his name to the so-called 'Object-Oriented-Ontology' (OOO). This theory belongs to a broader current of thought that has been increasingly taking over continental philosophy since the early 1990s. Basically, what has been going on is a broad call for a return to realism after the postmodern anti-realist hegemony. One of the ways in which this has taken place is through ‘speculative realism’, the most famous proponents of which are Quentin Meillassoux, Iain Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier and Levi Bryant.\n\nWhat ties all these people together is a wish to go beyond Immanuel Kant and his claim that, in Harman's words, 'human beings cannot make direct contact with the things-in-themselves, but only with phenomena.' To put it simply, I can never know what this ‘chair’ really is, but only what it superficially looks like to me, to my limited and biased human perspective. Now, what these thinkers wish to demonstrate is that this is not true. Meillassoux’s notion of 'correlationalism' (see his After Finitude) describes precisely this Kantian dogma, and his clarion call is that we reject the idea that we can only have access to the relation between us and reality, but not reality itself.\n\nHarman, in particular, sets his similar position against what he calls the 'Philosophy of Access'. The problem with this view, in Harman's opinion, is that it engages in a vicious circle - we cannot think something without thinking it. In other words, I cannot think of a tree as separated from my thought of it (as unthought) because if I think about it as unthought I’m still thinking about it. In the same way, I can think of a tree (consider it) without thinking it (as apart from my own thinking of it, as an ‘in-itself’). The underlying problem, I believe, is what the Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has defined as the confusion between ontology (what exists) and epistemology (the discourse about what exists): philosophers of access cannot imagine being outside of thought and confuse the thought of a tree with the tree itself. According to speculative realists, on the contrary, there is the tree in-itself.\n\nNow, in Harman's specific view, there is also another problem with the Philosophy of Access: namely, it places the human-world relation on a pedestal. What Object-Oriented Ontology is all about, as the name suggests, is valorising objects instead. Harman feels they have been somehow neglected throughout the history of philosophy, or rather they have been either undermined (by thinkers who posited that there is something 'deeper' than the objects, such as some kind of one, ultimate reality) or 'overmined' (by those who saw the objects as nothing more than the sum of their qualities, which gain relevance only when they are given a structure by the human mind).\n\nHarman's focus, in particular, is on the fact that any kind of relation – whether between humans and objects, or between objects – is of equal importance: the human-world relation, which Kant regarded as crucial, is placed at the same level as any other, following Alfred North Whitehead's claim that 'all human and non-human entities have equal status insofar as they all prehend other things, relating to them in one way or another'.\n\nThis, of course, is nothing but a very basic sketch of Harman's philosophy. If you want to know more, from a strictly theoretical point of view, you should probably go for Tool-Being (Open Court, 2002) or The Quadruple Object (Zero, 2011). Bells and Whistles is for people who are already acquainted with speculative realism, and ideally for those who have read his 2010 book Toward Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures, of which it is a sort of sequel. Toward Speculative Realism collected Harman's early essays, and introduced the very interesting feature of prefacing every writing with a more ‘personal’ context. A postgraduate student could find in the young Harman the same struggles and frustrations that she was probably going through: the graduate student refines his theory and becomes a well-established philosopher despite his early invisibility, enfeebled productivity, rejection by conferences and publishers, and struggles with tyrannical advisors.'\n\nBells and Whistles presents us with the second part of this successful story, collecting his writings from 2010 to 2013 and maintaining the 'personal preface' structure we found in the prequel. In these later writings, which give us a glimpse into Harman's recent career, the OOO theory is already well formed, and the personal anecdotes are perhaps less appealing. The greatest strength of this book, I feel, is that it tests Harman's thought against several objections (including those from fellow speculative realists) and other areas of research, thus clarifying and further refining the initial project. There is also a very useful aphoristic summary of his OOO in the fifth essay: 'Seventy-six theses on Object-Oriented Philosophy', which will succinctly tell you 'everything you always wanted to ask about OOO but were too lazy to read in full'.\n\nIf you want to know more about speculative realism, if you were left perhaps a bit confused or overwhelmed by Tool-Being and The Quadruple Object, or if you want to see how the story of Toward Speculative Realism goes on, this book is ideal; otherwise you should start elsewhere. For aficionados only.\n\nSarah De Sanctis works as a translator for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Turin. She is currently a Doctoral Research Student at the London Graduate School, and part of the LabOnt research centre. ~ Graham Harman, http://review31.co.uk/article/view/202/attractive-additional-features"", ""Graham Harman is one of the most important philosophers to emerge in the last twenty years. He is one of those thinkers who force you to see the world in a whole new light. If you are truly interested in what happens after modernity—or even if you are only interested in beautiful sentences—you really should read this effervescent collection of sixteen essays and talks, pervaded with insight and laughter. ~ Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English, Rice University""]" Between,"[""Martin Lee""]",Welcome to the spaces between.,"Forget any idea of a fixed, dependable centre ground. The suggestion in this book is that the real story of modern life is found in and along edges, cracks, and boundaries. It’s in these places of ambiguity and glorious uncertainty where the richness is, and often where the fun stuff happens. By providing a wide-ranging look at a variety of contexts, Martin Lee invites readers to step into a broad set of distinctive borderlands — some physical and geographic, some emotional and personal, some having to do with the world of ideas, nature, time, or language and stories — and reflect on what it means for us to live our lives in these contemporary transitional zones.","Forget any idea of a fixed, dependable centre ground. The suggestion in this book is that the real story of modern life is found in and along edges, cracks, and boundaries. It’s in these places of ambiguity and glorious uncertainty where the richness is, and often where the fun stuff happens. By providing a wide-ranging look at a variety of contexts, Martin Lee invites readers to step into a broad set of distinctive borderlands — some physical and geographic, some emotional and personal, some having to do with the world of ideas, nature, time, or language and stories — and reflect on what it means for us to live our lives in these contemporary transitional zones.",1,"[""Lee showed me something wonderful. However uncertain our world feels, there always is the opportunity to celebrate ‘being between’. It's a deep, fresh way of making sense of modern life. ~ David Bodanis, science author, including Einstein’s Greatest Mistake""]" Beyond Capitalism?,"[""Simon Hardy"", ""Luke Cooper""]","An in-depth examination into the social nature of the austerity crisis and how we can move ""Beyond Capitalism"".","How to move 'beyond capitalism' and whether indeed it is possible to do so, has become a question of general interest, rather than simply the preserve of left-literary discussion, since the credit crisis of 2008. This book examines the social nature of the austerity crisis, and whether an anticapitalist message can successfully intersect and create a new virtuous dynamic for the radical left after decades of retreat. Intended as a contribution to debates around fundamental social change which have emerged in the wake of Occupy and the Arab revolutions, Beyond Capitalism is a book which combines 'historical sociology' with the politics of social emancipation. The question these movements have posed is how can the radical left marshal its often meagre forces to create a new counter hegemony to the ethos and culture of capitalism?","How to move 'beyond capitalism' and whether indeed it is possible to do so, has become a question of general interest, rather than simply the preserve of left-literary discussion, since the credit crisis of 2008. This book examines the social nature of the austerity crisis, and whether an anticapitalist message can successfully intersect and create a new virtuous dynamic for the radical left after decades of retreat. Intended as a contribution to debates around fundamental social change which have emerged in the wake of Occupy and the Arab revolutions, Beyond Capitalism is a book which combines 'historical sociology' with the politics of social emancipation. The question these movements have posed is how can the radical left marshal its often meagre forces to create a new counter hegemony to the ethos and culture of capitalism?",2,"[""Luke Cooper and Simon Hardy's vivid and invigorating Beyond Capitalism builds upon the analysis of leftist paralysis I started to develop in Capitalist Realism. Writing from the perspective of experienced activists, Cooper and Hardy offer an incisive and clear-eyed explanation of why the left has so far failed to take advantage of the current major crisis of capitalism. But this analysis is not just another jeremiad; it is a contribution to a leftist renewal which Cooper and Hardy believe is within our grasp. The future is ours for the reclaiming, and Beyond Capitalism outlines some concrete strategies for how we can win it back. ~ Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism"", ""John McDonnell, the new Shadow Chancellor, made this comment on Beyond Capitalism in 2013: \""A superb analysis of where the Left has got to and why, this book offers an insightful agenda to be addressed by the anti capitalist movement.\""\n\n~ John McDonnell , Email""]" Beyond the Left,"[""Stephen Harper""]","Attacking the cherished assumptions of liberal media criticism, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.","The ideological distortions of the conservative media, from Fox News to the Daily Mail, are widely acknowledged and often denounced among contemporary critics and commentators. But what if The Guardian newspaper and BBC news, in fact, constitute the most insidious forms of capitalist propaganda? In a wide-ranging and erudite polemic, Beyond the Left analyses capitalist news and current affairs media from a radical perspective. The book rejects the liberal and pluralist paradigms that often underpin critiques of the media, showing how media texts reflect and reinforce the material interests of the ruling class and arguing that the principal ideological menace today is posed not by the right wing, but by the left-liberal media, as it co-opts and obscures radical political positions and reinforces a range of mystifications, from anti-fascism and humanitarian war to green politics. Drawing on the work of radical media critics as well as the writings of revolutionary communist groups and considering the recent reporting of war, industrial action, immigration and the environment, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.","The ideological distortions of the conservative media, from Fox News to the Daily Mail, are widely acknowledged and often denounced among contemporary critics and commentators. But what if The Guardian newspaper and BBC news, in fact, constitute the most insidious forms of capitalist propaganda? In a wide-ranging and erudite polemic, Beyond the Left analyses capitalist news and current affairs media from a radical perspective. The book rejects the liberal and pluralist paradigms that often underpin critiques of the media, showing how media texts reflect and reinforce the material interests of the ruling class and arguing that the principal ideological menace today is posed not by the right wing, but by the left-liberal media, as it co-opts and obscures radical political positions and reinforces a range of mystifications, from anti-fascism and humanitarian war to green politics. Drawing on the work of radical media critics as well as the writings of revolutionary communist groups and considering the recent reporting of war, industrial action, immigration and the environment, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.",3,"[""Even if you find yourself disagreeing with certain portions of this book -- as I have -- you will find much in it that is well reasoned and historically informed, a valuable critique of how the mainstream media serves the capitalist plutocracy.\n\n~ Michael Parenti, author of The Face of Imperialism and Contrary Notions."", ""Stephen Harper cuts through mystifying accounts of the media with a steady hand, placing a real left politics firmly at the centre of any productive understanding of the daily circulation of casual idiocies and pernicious ideologies.\n\n~ Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Roehampton University"", ""In an accessible and robust polemic Harper shows why we must go beyond the left and embrace a communist critique of both the capitalist media’s news agenda which disempowers and disinforms and the un-reformable system that shapes its ideological universe – the capitalist system itself. In this sense Harper’s book is vulgar, unrealistic and deeply unfashionable: it is in short essential reading in an increasingly insane world.\n\n~ Mike Wayne, Professor of Screen Studies, Brunel University""]" Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant,"[""Joshua David Gonsalves""]","Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant explicates the ethnic, racial and sexual ambiguity of Cary Grant’s star persona as both an inculcation of (and resistance to) biopolitical imperatives in fifties-era “America”.","Who will Cary Grant have been when the future runs out? In the atrocity-rich wake of Hiroshima, Cold War America is enriched beyond belief. Hollywood radiates, in turn, images of a consumer utopia criss-crossed by segregation, social mobility, racial passing, anxieties about ethnicity and “white panic”. Cary Grant’s class-less classiness seems to denote this (sub)urban leisure class without an effort, yet he signifies more than this: ambivalent, bi-sex’d, inter-sected by the biopolitics of racialization, the policing of sexual agency and stereotypical ethnic identifications (including the invisible Anglo instanced by the high-angle shot). If biopolitics signifies the individuated control of populations, Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant: Pressing Race, Class and Ethnicity into Service in Amerika locates this anxious racialization of service persons, interracial sexuality and social mobility (passing) in an Americanized simulacrum of the Mediterranean world in To Catch a Thief (1955) and in a New York/Northeast-centered USA in North by Northwest (1959). Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant queries the criticism of Alfred J. Hitchcock’s films so as to historically situate one of the first free agents in Hollywood. Yet this semblance of freedom pays a price in meat, murder, massification and the organized homicide of Cold War geopolitics. The book explicates, in sum, the ethnic, racial and sexual ambiguity of Cary Grant’s star persona as both an inculcation of (and resistance to) biopolitical imperatives in fifties-era “America”.","Who will Cary Grant have been when the future runs out? In the atrocity-rich wake of Hiroshima, Cold War America is enriched beyond belief. Hollywood radiates, in turn, images of a consumer utopia criss-crossed by segregation, social mobility, racial passing, anxieties about ethnicity and “white panic”. Cary Grant’s class-less classiness seems to denote this (sub)urban leisure class without an effort, yet he signifies more than this: ambivalent, bi-sex’d, inter-sected by the biopolitics of racialization, the policing of sexual agency and stereotypical ethnic identifications (including the invisible Anglo instanced by the high-angle shot). If biopolitics signifies the individuated control of populations, Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant: Pressing Race, Class and Ethnicity into Service in Amerika locates this anxious racialization of service persons, interracial sexuality and social mobility (passing) in an Americanized simulacrum of the Mediterranean world in To Catch a Thief (1955) and in a New York/Northeast-centered USA in North by Northwest (1959). Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant queries the criticism of Alfred J. Hitchcock’s films so as to historically situate one of the first free agents in Hollywood. Yet this semblance of freedom pays a price in meat, murder, massification and the organized homicide of Cold War geopolitics. The book explicates, in sum, the ethnic, racial and sexual ambiguity of Cary Grant’s star persona as both an inculcation of (and resistance to) biopolitical imperatives in fifties-era “America”.",1,"[""I have been enjoying your essay on a too-quick-first read and will re-read it with more leisure when I have a chance. I think it opens some new angles, while having a variety of dossiers juggling, ethnicity, Grant’s imago, “Hitchcock,” race of course. A pleasure to read. ~ Tom Cohen, author of Hitchcock's Cryptonomies: 2 vols.""]" Biopolitical Imperialism,"[""Mark G. E. Kelly""]","The First World is a parasite, subsisting on life imported from the Third World, and exporting death in return.","Biopolitical Imperialism is a book about international politics today. The core, eponymous thesis is that our world is marked by a pattern of biopolitical parasitism, that is, the enhancement of the life of wealthy populations of First World countries on the basis of an active denigration of the lives of the poor mass of humanity. The book details how this dynamic plays out both inside wealthy countries and internationally.","Biopolitical Imperialism is a book about international politics today. The core, eponymous thesis is that our world is marked by a pattern of biopolitical parasitism, that is, the enhancement of the life of wealthy populations of First World countries on the basis of an active denigration of the lives of the poor mass of humanity. The book details how this dynamic plays out both inside wealthy countries and internationally.",1,"[""A very strong book, exceptionally clear, incisive, and terrifying. ~ Justin Clemens""]" BioShock,"[""Robert Jackson""]","A historical, critical look at the famous videogame franchise BioShock.","A historical, critical look at the famous videogame franchise BioShock, understanding it through philosophical, ideological and computational interpretations of systems, decisions and 'propaganda'.","A historical, critical look at the famous videogame franchise BioShock, understanding it through philosophical, ideological and computational interpretations of systems, decisions and 'propaganda'.",3,"[""One interesting aspect of the New Materialism is the use of digital cultural artifacts such as video games as things to think with philosophically. A good example of this is Bioshock: Decision, Forced Choice and Propaganda by Robert Jackson. In this short book Jackson takes the game franchise Bioshock as a means with which to think about questions of choice, causality and decision both within and outwith the playing of such a game. ~ Charlie Gere, Oxford University Press Journals: Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, vol 23, no 1, 2015"", ""Robert Jackson avoids the dilettantism that normally accompanies studies of the aesthetic and cultural accomplishment of videogames, and instead offers a thoroughgoing critique of the ideology of decision in contemporary society: it is not a capacity of the individual, but of systems and collectives. ~ Ian Bogost: Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology., Author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames and How To Do Things with Videogames"", ""Don't be mistaken to think this is a book about a computer game franchise. It is about the world of forces and forced choice, of decision over choice and the complex nested structurations that define our contemporary political moment. It shows how any question of the so-called self is by necessity already decided outside it. Decisions are automated, algorithmic and systemic. A constant cascade of decisions. Robert Jackson's extremely smart book elaborates this moment through BioShock in a provocative way. ~ Jussi Parikka: Reader in Media & Design, at University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art., Author of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses, Insect Media and What is Media Archaeology?""]" "Blood-Stained Poppy, The","[""Kevin Rooney"", ""James Heartfield""]","The Poppy is a symbol of British militarism, not a badge of peace.","For a century the war dead have been honoured with Red Poppies on Remembrance Day. The Poppy is part of a cult of death that celebrates the slaughter of the 'Great War' of 1914-18. The Poppy and the Remembrance Day ceremony turn grief to sanctify war. Here we expose the truth about the First World War, and about the century of militarism that followed. The war was not fought to make the world safe, but out of hatred and imperial greed. In the hundred years since the end of the First World War, Britain's military ventures have continued to wreak havoc across the world. The Poppy is a symbol of British militarism, not a badge of peace.","For a century the war dead have been honoured with Red Poppies on Remembrance Day. The Poppy is part of a cult of death that celebrates the slaughter of the 'Great War' of 1914-18. The Poppy and the Remembrance Day ceremony turn grief to sanctify war. Here we expose the truth about the First World War, and about the century of militarism that followed. The war was not fought to make the world safe, but out of hatred and imperial greed. In the hundred years since the end of the First World War, Britain's military ventures have continued to wreak havoc across the world. The Poppy is a symbol of British militarism, not a badge of peace.",1,"[""Praise for Rooney and Heartfield's previous work from Zero Books, Who's Afraid of the Easter Rising? 1916-2016: 'A penetrating reflection on the controversies surrounding the Dublin revolt of 1916.' ~ Michael Fitzpatrick, Spiked Online""]" Blowing the Lid,"[""Stuart Feather""]",The queer fight for Gay Liberation; authentic identities and modern roles for lesbians and gays that enhanced British society.,"The Gay Liberation Front founded in 1970 urged gay men and gay women to unite around a simple set of demands among which were calls for an end to discrimination against homosexuals in employment, in sex education, in the age of consent and in being treated as sick by the medical establishment. GLF saw itself as a people’s movement for gays, socialist by virtue of its demand for social change, and revolutionary in recognizing the rights of other oppressed minorities to determine the fight for their own demands. All history is personal. The author of this political memoir is the first participant of the Front to write a history of the lesbians and gay men who joined Gay Liberation and through a process of Coming Out and radicalization initiated an anarchic campaign that permanently changed the face of this country.","The Gay Liberation Front founded in 1970 urged gay men and gay women to unite around a simple set of demands among which were calls for an end to discrimination against homosexuals in employment, in sex education, in the age of consent and in being treated as sick by the medical establishment. GLF saw itself as a people’s movement for gays, socialist by virtue of its demand for social change, and revolutionary in recognizing the rights of other oppressed minorities to determine the fight for their own demands. All history is personal. The author of this political memoir is the first participant of the Front to write a history of the lesbians and gay men who joined Gay Liberation and through a process of Coming Out and radicalization initiated an anarchic campaign that permanently changed the face of this country.",4,"[""'This is a wonderfully rich and evocative account of an important moment in gay history. Stuart Feather has \""brought it all back\"" in a marvellous narrative that is a great gift to posterity.' Ken Plummer, University of Essex. ~"", ""Hegel is a Drag: Thesis: scores of Wests, Garlands, and boas (and I don't mean Franz). Antithesis: gay, feminist - leftist boos to anything that hobbles in heals. Synthesis? With a vengeance, in a viciously modern attack on sex roles, liberation prudery, and boredom in the orchestra. It's proof that rhinestones and politics can live together, but that they must. ~ Weinstein, Village Voice"", ""Invaluable as well as entertaining first hand radical testimony from the period, essential for anyone who wants to understand how this country has changed and who wants to think about how it could be changed more. ~ Neil Bartlett, author and playwright"", ""I think Feather provides an interesting lens to understand the movement’s internal debates, divisions and problems. This is a very rich understanding of how a social movement emerges and works through internal differences. So I have no doubt that this work will contribute to a lot of discussions on civil society and social movements. ~ Dr. Hakan Seckinelgin, Gender Institute, London School of Economics""]" "Blue in the Air, The","[""Marcello Carlin""]","A retrieved man tells how music, from Patrick Cargill to Jay-Z, retained the power to change the world in 2008.","A former widower whose life was saved by writing about music spends a year waiting for his new wife to fly over from Toronto and join him in London. While he waits he observes that the world is subtly changing and that music has played a key part in these changes. A galaxy of characters, ranging from Marty Wilde to Jay-Z via Glenn Gould, Dorothy Squires, Britney Spears, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Patrick Cargill, Orson Welles and many forgotten others, conspire to alter his perspective, leading to a climax where he is finally united with his wife and the world chooses a new and better leader. The Blue in the Air is a gesture of defiance from a tiny but meaningful tugboat of resistance. At a time when we are repeatedly encouraged for reasons of demographic convenience to believe that music can change nothing and mean nothing, this writer demonstrates comprehensively that for those who stay awake, alert and alive, music still retains the power to change the fabric of the air we choose to breathe.","A former widower whose life was saved by writing about music spends a year waiting for his new wife to fly over from Toronto and join him in London. While he waits he observes that the world is subtly changing and that music has played a key part in these changes. A galaxy of characters, ranging from Marty Wilde to Jay-Z via Glenn Gould, Dorothy Squires, Britney Spears, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Patrick Cargill, Orson Welles and many forgotten others, conspire to alter his perspective, leading to a climax where he is finally united with his wife and the world chooses a new and better leader. The Blue in the Air is a gesture of defiance from a tiny but meaningful tugboat of resistance. At a time when we are repeatedly encouraged for reasons of demographic convenience to believe that music can change nothing and mean nothing, this writer demonstrates comprehensively that for those who stay awake, alert and alive, music still retains the power to change the fabric of the air we choose to breathe.",2,"[""Why not just let the song speak for itself? Here are some answers.” ~ Mark Sinker"", ""Marcello Carlin lures or impels us through an astonishing maze of music, much of it very likely unfamiliar with, from radical free improv to one off novelty pop, via every imaginable sheeptrack or rat run or scenic bus ride.\n\n~ Mark Sinker""]" Borderlines,"[""Daniel Melo""]","Through different facets of the U.S. immigration system, Borderlines explores how power and profit are perpetuated by the divisions between migrant and citizen and the resulting dehumanization of both.","The current U.S. immigration nightmare is a product of capitalism. The familiar, heartbreaking stories of dangerous treks, migrant exploitation, asylum, family separation and detention all have their roots in the material conditions of the dominant economic system. Immigrants’ place in American democracy has long been intertwined with questions of cheap labor and exploitation, sovereign power, and the preservation of class relations. Through different facets of the immigration system, Borderlines explores how power and profit are perpetuated by the divisions between migrant and citizen and the resulting dehumanization of both. It demonstrates the necessity of a radical working-class demand for economic and political justice across borders and the edges of democracy.","The current U.S. immigration nightmare is a product of capitalism. The familiar, heartbreaking stories of dangerous treks, migrant exploitation, asylum, family separation and detention all have their roots in the material conditions of the dominant economic system. Immigrants’ place in American democracy has long been intertwined with questions of cheap labor and exploitation, sovereign power, and the preservation of class relations. Through different facets of the immigration system, Borderlines explores how power and profit are perpetuated by the divisions between migrant and citizen and the resulting dehumanization of both. It demonstrates the necessity of a radical working-class demand for economic and political justice across borders and the edges of democracy.",0,[] Boredom and Art,"[""Julian Jason Haladyn""]","Examines the manners in which modern artists use boredom as a form of aesthetic resistance that, at its most positive, is the will to boredom.","Boredom and Art examines the use of boredom as a strategy in modern and contemporary art to resist or frustrate the effects of consumerism and capitalism. This book traces the emergence of what Haladyn terms the will to boredom in which artists, writers and philosophers actively attempt to use the lack of interest inherent in the state of being 'bored' to challenge people. Instead of accepting the prescribed meanings of life given to us by consumer or mass culture, boredom represents the possibility of creating meaning: ‘a threshold of great deeds’ in Walter Benjamin’s memorable wording. It is this conception of boredom as a positive experience of modern subjectivity that is the main critical position of Haladyn's study, in which he proposes that boredom is used by artists as a form of aesthetic resistance that, at its most positive, is the will to boredom.","Boredom and Art examines the use of boredom as a strategy in modern and contemporary art to resist or frustrate the effects of consumerism and capitalism. This book traces the emergence of what Haladyn terms the will to boredom in which artists, writers and philosophers actively attempt to use the lack of interest inherent in the state of being 'bored' to challenge people. Instead of accepting the prescribed meanings of life given to us by consumer or mass culture, boredom represents the possibility of creating meaning: ‘a threshold of great deeds’ in Walter Benjamin’s memorable wording. It is this conception of boredom as a positive experience of modern subjectivity that is the main critical position of Haladyn's study, in which he proposes that boredom is used by artists as a form of aesthetic resistance that, at its most positive, is the will to boredom.",0,[] Brad Pitt's Dog,"[""Johan Kugelberg""]",A Punch and Judy show of intellectual diaspora making mincemeat of some pop culture sacred cows,"The first book of essays by a long-time renowned chronicler of underground culture. Johan Kugelberg's book on the early history of hip hop won the NYPL books for the teen age award 2008 and his book on the Velvet Underground won the Foreword silver medal for music 2010. The way this book mashes up lo-bro and hi-bro is readable, funny and thought-provoking, and also downright provoking. Johan Kugelberg's essays on punk, style and pop culture have entertained readers of international publications including Dazed and Confused, Another Man, Ugly Things, Perfect Sound Forever, Spin, Raygun and Fact over the last couple of decades.","The first book of essays by a long-time renowned chronicler of underground culture. Johan Kugelberg's book on the early history of hip hop won the NYPL books for the teen age award 2008 and his book on the Velvet Underground won the Foreword silver medal for music 2010. The way this book mashes up lo-bro and hi-bro is readable, funny and thought-provoking, and also downright provoking. Johan Kugelberg's essays on punk, style and pop culture have entertained readers of international publications including Dazed and Confused, Another Man, Ugly Things, Perfect Sound Forever, Spin, Raygun and Fact over the last couple of decades.",2,"[""I laughed out loud five times. ~ Bob Stanley"", ""An eclectic assembly of perspectives from one of our more singular sockets, it may increase the readers bandwidth in quite unexpected ways.\n\n~ William Gibson""]" Brave New Avant Garde,"[""Marc James Léger""]",Brave New Avant Garde provides an unexpected exploration of critical strategies for anticapitalist cultural theory and practice.,"Brave New Avant Garde is a collection of essays that ask the questions: what is an adequate model of contemporary avant garde practice and what are its theoretical premises? With this it asks the related question, echoing Alain Badiou: must the avant garde hypothesis be abandoned? Brave New Avant Garde stands in opposition to postmodern post-politics and the view that radical practice has no other future than its reduction to the workings of the free market in the form of the simple process of cultural production or to variations on the cultural politics of representation. Today's avant garde, formed in the wake of the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of the anti-globalization movement, represents a counter-power that rejects the inevitability of capitalist integration. The way out for artists in today's world of creative industries is defined in these pages as a psychoanalytically informed sinthomeopathic practice, a critical identification with prevailing conditions of production that avoids the surplus enjoyment of the ideology of postmodern pluralism.","Brave New Avant Garde is a collection of essays that ask the questions: what is an adequate model of contemporary avant garde practice and what are its theoretical premises? With this it asks the related question, echoing Alain Badiou: must the avant garde hypothesis be abandoned? Brave New Avant Garde stands in opposition to postmodern post-politics and the view that radical practice has no other future than its reduction to the workings of the free market in the form of the simple process of cultural production or to variations on the cultural politics of representation. Today's avant garde, formed in the wake of the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of the anti-globalization movement, represents a counter-power that rejects the inevitability of capitalist integration. The way out for artists in today's world of creative industries is defined in these pages as a psychoanalytically informed sinthomeopathic practice, a critical identification with prevailing conditions of production that avoids the surplus enjoyment of the ideology of postmodern pluralism.",4,"[""“Canadian artist and theorist Marc James Léger’s recent collection of essays, Brave New Avant Garde, is … a timely attempt to bring thinking on avant-gardism to bear on this resurgence [of socially engaged art]. As Léger frames the matter towards the end of his book, the present decoupling of activist art and the discourse of avant-gardism may speak to the possibility that ‘extra-institutional socially engaged art has become, for good and bad, the order of the day’.”\n\n“Elaborating a theoretical framework of sinthomeopathic art across seven closely linked essays, Léger’s book argues that practices as diverse as those of Fraser, Thomas Hirschhorn, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), Christoph Schlingensief, Komar and Melamid and The Yes Men are all marked by an over-identification with the ‘pathological particularity of culture in the age of late neoliberal capitalism’.”\n\n“Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of art’s central role in the reproduction of class inequality is a key touchstone for Léger’s book. Hence, his polemic is ... directed against ... the disappearance of the problematic of class at work in the ‘post-structural reduction of art to a cultural politics of representation’.”\n\nhttp://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/good-old-avant-garde.\n\n~ Bill Roberts, Mute online"", ""Léger gathers up what remains of the avant garde's once-vaunted radicality and hurls it into a whirling Žižekian accelerator. Like a \""pervert's guide\"" to contemporary art, Brave New Avant Garde reveals a multitude of interventionist practices and rapidly revolving dark particles that in light of recent events in Tunisia and Egypt no longer appear exotic, but instead vibrate prognostic, as if heralding the dawn of a sweeping phase change in twenty-first century art and politics.\n\n~ Gregory Sholette, author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture"", ""In this critical tour de force, Marc Léger successfully exposes the contradictions that animate contemporary art and that govern the actions of those who \""participate in the game of culture\"" in the age of neoliberalism. And yet Léger is not content to simply critique, he also proposes alternatives through the medium of his concept of a sinthomeopathic cultural praxis , the product of a successful act of balancing on and moving along a pro-avant-gardist tightrope woven of recent politically and socially engaged art practices.\n\n~ David Tomas, author of Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Visual Technologies"", ""Marc James Léger’s informed and thought-provoking analysis of critical art practices and related theories provides essential orientation for anyone looking for ways to resist and subvert what Peter McLaren has defined as the two thieves of capitalism and representative democracy.\n\n~ Oliver Ressler, artist and filmmaker, author of Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies""]" Brexit: The Establishment Civil War,"[""Josh Hamilton""]",How dark money and big data were unleashed upon a divided and austerity ravaged population. They reached into our social divides and pulled us apart all for their own gain.,"Wrapped up in a story of the British public's' rejection of the establishment is a much darker story about shady money, untoward digital campaign tactics, and a fraught battle exploding from the highest rungs of British politics and society. Brexit: The Establishment Civil War is a crucial examination of what is now driving British politics, the dark money and forces attempting to manipulate it, and the online warfare techniques that are being deployed in modern politics. Brexit is nothing more than an establishment civil war that erupted from the upper echelons of the Conservative party and engulfed the entire country. It unleashed the growing power of big data on a divided and austerity ravaged population by pouring petrol on hot button issues like immigration and sovereignty. The Leave campaigns reached into our social divides and pulled us apart all for their own gain. Josh Hamilton examines the underlying factors that led to the Brexit vote, how technology made us more vulnerable to manipulation, how both sides of the establishment went to war over their own self-interests, and how disaster capitalists will use Brexit to further enrich themselves at the expense of the entire country.","Wrapped up in a story of the British public's' rejection of the establishment is a much darker story about shady money, untoward digital campaign tactics, and a fraught battle exploding from the highest rungs of British politics and society. Brexit: The Establishment Civil War is a crucial examination of what is now driving British politics, the dark money and forces attempting to manipulate it, and the online warfare techniques that are being deployed in modern politics. Brexit is nothing more than an establishment civil war that erupted from the upper echelons of the Conservative party and engulfed the entire country. It unleashed the growing power of big data on a divided and austerity ravaged population by pouring petrol on hot button issues like immigration and sovereignty. The Leave campaigns reached into our social divides and pulled us apart all for their own gain. Josh Hamilton examines the underlying factors that led to the Brexit vote, how technology made us more vulnerable to manipulation, how both sides of the establishment went to war over their own self-interests, and how disaster capitalists will use Brexit to further enrich themselves at the expense of the entire country.",0,[] BrexLit,"[""Dulcie Everitt""]",How post-Brexit referendum literature (re)imagines what Englishness means in a globalized world.,"In this highly readable and convincing exploration of Englishness as a problematic concept, Dulcie Everitt combines historical, political, and literary analysis to re-examine the nature of Englishness. BrexLit offers readers the opportunity to step outside of the chaos, to reflect, and in many cases, to heal from the dismal anxiety of the present.","In this highly readable and convincing exploration of Englishness as a problematic concept, Dulcie Everitt combines historical, political, and literary analysis to re-examine the nature of Englishness. BrexLit offers readers the opportunity to step outside of the chaos, to reflect, and in many cases, to heal from the dismal anxiety of the present.",6,"[""Spanning political science, history, and literary studies, BrexLit features dedicated, engrossingly cultured viewpoints and, perhaps at its soul, simply tries to better articulate the subtle (and perhaps not so subtle) nuances of the landscape of works she brings before us. ~ Anne Carlini, Exclusive Magazine"", ""“The Financial Times may have coined the term “BrexLit,” but Dulcie Everitt has written the book on it.”\n\n“BrexLit: The Problem of Englishness in Pre- and Post-Brexit Referendum Literature” is a work of great originality, interdisciplinary sophistication, profound insight, and immediate relevance. Its 190 pages combine political science, history, literature, and a touch of art history to answer thorny questions of nationalism in an age of global capital and xenophobia. It does so while producing brilliantly sensitive close and contextual readings of an impressive range of contemporary British literature: six novels, one play, and one book of poetry, most of them published after June 23, 2016, the date of the Brexit referendum.\""\n\n\""Dulcie demonstrates throughout a rare ability to say difficult things, i.e., to make precise, definite claims about matters that have eluded articulation by others.\""\n\n\""a powerful analytical mind at work\"" ~ Jeff Strabone, Nomination Report"", ""\""a remarkable piece of work\""\n\n\""it is outstanding by all ofthese measures: its scale and scope are remarkable; its originality is unmistakable; its interdisciplinarity (spanning political science, history, and literary studies) is rare; the quality of its close readings is a continual pleasure; the polished elegance of its prose is like nothing I’ve seen from an undergraduate; and its timeliness and importance argue for its wider dissemination.\"" ~ Julie Rivkin, Reader's Report"", ""\""compelling and moving\""\n\n\""Dulcie's writing pulses with an assured rhythm that is attuned both to the larger vision she is seeking to articulate and the local nuances of the works under discussion. To write so powerfully and well is an achievement to be commended.\"" ~ Steven Shoemaker, Reader's Report"", ""I read with pleasure \""BrexLit: The Problem of Englishness in Pre- and Post-Brexit Referendum Literature.” I was struck by its skillful intertwining of theories of nationalism, post-war British history and recent literature on Englishness. I was moreover impressed by Dulcie’s ability to tie together scholarship on nationalism, the UK-EU relationship, peripheral nationalism in the Celtic fringe, rising English nationalism and a sophisticated analysis of different literary genres.\n\nIt has often been noted that supranationalism and sub-nationalism are hollowing out nation-states from both above and below. As one arguably sees in the UK and in the decline of British identity, these trends feed off one another—Westminster has been squeezed from Brussels and from Holyrood, Cardiff and Stormont. Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism are pro-EU given that “Europe” seems to offer the promise of security and prosperity for small, independent states in the international arena. In contrast, as Dulcie shows in pre-Brexit and Brexit literature, English nationalism has a very different focus than the others. It is rightwing rather than leftwing; anti-EU rather than pro-EU, and unionist rather than separatist. Of all the rising nationalisms of the British Isles, English nationalism is the most like the rightwing populism that one sees resurgent on the continent and in the US, among many other places. It presents itself as emancipatory, but it seems to lack a positive vision of the future. ~ David Patton, Reader's Report"", ""“Nationalism is an increasingly worrying phenomena. Dulcie gets to the heart of this issue with an academic review of the literature centred on Brexit and the English people’s understanding of their own identity and how it sits alongside the concept of being British.” ~ Mark Glover, FPRCA, Chief Executive, Newington Communications; Executive Director SEC Group""]" "British Marxist Historians, The","[""Harvey J. Kaye""]","The first and most complete study of the work of the British intellectuals whose studies and stories of popular resistance, rebellion, and revolution from the bottom up radically transformed our understanding of the making of history.","The British Marxist Historians remains the first and most complete study of the founders of one of the most influential contemporary academic traditions in history and social theory. In this classic text, Kaye looks at Maurice Dobb and the debate on the transition to capitalism; Rodney Hilton on feudalism and the English peasantry; Christopher Hill on the English Revolution; Eric Hobsbawm on workers, peasants and world history; and E.P. Thompson on the making of the English working class. Kaye compares their perspective on history with other approaches, such as that of the French Annales school, and concludes with a discussion of the British Marxist historians’ contribution to the formation of a democratic historical consciousness. The British Marxist Historians is an indispensable book for anyone interested in the intellectual history of the late twentieth century.","The British Marxist Historians remains the first and most complete study of the founders of one of the most influential contemporary academic traditions in history and social theory. In this classic text, Kaye looks at Maurice Dobb and the debate on the transition to capitalism; Rodney Hilton on feudalism and the English peasantry; Christopher Hill on the English Revolution; Eric Hobsbawm on workers, peasants and world history; and E.P. Thompson on the making of the English working class. Kaye compares their perspective on history with other approaches, such as that of the French Annales school, and concludes with a discussion of the British Marxist historians’ contribution to the formation of a democratic historical consciousness. The British Marxist Historians is an indispensable book for anyone interested in the intellectual history of the late twentieth century.",1,"[""Harvey Kaye's The British Marxist Historians... is a lasting contribution to the history of twentieth-century Marxism, to a corner of British cultural history, and to the study of how history and historians work. ~ Eric Hobsbawn, author of The Age of Revolution""]" "British State, The","[""Chris Nineham""]",The first attempt since the 1980s to analyse the British state's capacity to block change and derail social movements. A riposte to those who said there could never be a very British coup.,"What happens if a radical government gets elected in Britain? How will the banks, the civil servants, the media and the military react? Is the idea of a British coup far-fetched? How can the left prepare? Chris Nineham addresses these questions by looking behind the myths at the reality of two hundred years of British state rule. He brings us a warning from history. Don’t be fooled again, read this book.","What happens if a radical government gets elected in Britain? How will the banks, the civil servants, the media and the military react? Is the idea of a British coup far-fetched? How can the left prepare? Chris Nineham addresses these questions by looking behind the myths at the reality of two hundred years of British state rule. He brings us a warning from history. Don’t be fooled again, read this book.",8,"[""5 out of 5 stars: An excellent eye-opening straight-to-the-point summary of the real history of the British state and how far it differs from the benign narrative we would prefer to believe. If you thought the establishment had attacked Corbyn enough over bad clothes, mixing with terrorists, not bowing low enough to the Queen, being in chronic bad health etc then read this book to prepare for the onslaught of attacks from the establishment should Corbyn get elected. Short, sharp and accessible - it doesn't pull its punches and nor should we! ~ Sofie Mason, Amazon"", ""5 out of 5 stars: The British deep state despises democracy and will act to protect itself against any interference by us. Winning an election is one thing. But then what? This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to know. ~ Shaun Wilde, Amazon"", ""5 out of 5 stars: This is really excellent. I really can’t recommend this enough to everyone involved in campaigning and who wishes to change the world for better. Dispels a lot of woolly headed thinking about our essentially sound and benign institutions. The British State is of course neither of those things, and this book explains why brilliantly. Buy yourself and your colleagues a copy. ~ , Amazon"", ""This gripping, fast-paced and provocative book is an alternative history of Britain. It shows how the carefully nurtured image of British fair play and liberalism has in fact concealed the real drama: the raw manipulation of power by and for a small number of people. British capitalism has, historically, actively undermined and suppressed any real change to the balance of power: this book warns that a future progressive government will face the same intransigence. ~ Brian Eno, musician and author of A Year with Swollen Appendices"", ""An outstanding primer about one of the most urgent issues of the day. ~ John Pilger, author of Hidden Agendas"", ""Fascinating and insightful. A timely and important book. ~ Francesca Martinez"", ""A concise, salutary and very valuable history. The state as it really is not how it would like to appear. ~ Mike Wayne"", ""Home Truths deftly told. ~ Danny Dorling""]" Can Architecture Be an Emancipatory Project?,"[""Nadir Z. Lahiji""]","Can architectural discourse rethink itself in terms of a radical emancipatory project? And if so, what would be the contours of such a discourse?","Can architectural discourse rethink itself in terms of a radical emancipatory project? And if so, what would be the contours of such a discourse?","Can architectural discourse rethink itself in terms of a radical emancipatory project? And if so, what would be the contours of such a discourse?",1,"[""Can architecture be an instrument of emancipation? Can architects unchain themselves from their own instrumentalisation within capitalism? In a format as provocative as the questions Lahiji asks of his interlocutors - Andreotti, Cunningham, Deamer, Swyngedouw and Ockman - these are given a platform to ask searching questions of architecture, the Left, and each other. Their arguments and exchanges over issues of autonomy and activism, over the relationship between the political and the economic, over form and abstraction, are passionate, insightful and contentious. The critical engagement of its authors illuminates, for the theory and practice of architecture, what is at stake in the central question of Can Architecture be an Emancipatory Project? ~ Douglas Spencer, Professor of Architecture, Architectural Association, London.""]" Can The Market Speak?,"[""Campbell Jones""]","This book attacks the ideological foundations of capitalism, starting with the mystifications surrounding the idea of ‘the market’.","It is said the market has moods and desires. It is said that we must listen to it and must anticipate how it will respond to our actions. What is the significance of these peculiar forms of speech? This book investigates the conceptual underpinnings of the idea that the market has intentions, consciousness and speech, and identifies the social and political consequences of this attribution to the market of capacities generally thought to be uniquely human. At once a work of philosophy, a cultural and social archaeology and a diagnosis of one of the central ideologies of our times, this book cuts to the heart of the linguistic forms through which our collective futures are decided.","It is said the market has moods and desires. It is said that we must listen to it and must anticipate how it will respond to our actions. What is the significance of these peculiar forms of speech? This book investigates the conceptual underpinnings of the idea that the market has intentions, consciousness and speech, and identifies the social and political consequences of this attribution to the market of capacities generally thought to be uniquely human. At once a work of philosophy, a cultural and social archaeology and a diagnosis of one of the central ideologies of our times, this book cuts to the heart of the linguistic forms through which our collective futures are decided.",3,"[""In conclusion, Campbell Jones work raises a number of pertinent questions in regard to concepts such as hegemony, reification and the balance of forces between labour and capital. His book might not have all the answers to those questions but it can allow the kind of discussions which might arrive at them. Having had our tongues cut out by property developers and the priests of high finance, we will need books like Can the Market Speak? that believe in zombies’ ability to speak. ~ The Berlin Review of Books, http://berlinbooks.org/brb/2013/04/can-the-market-speak/"", ""‘This remarkable little book teases apart modern market language, and offers a compelling critical reading of the personification of financial markets. There could have been no better time for its publication than in the midst of the current financial crisis. Through its reflections on the culture and history of the market’s personhood and personality, Campbell Jones offers new modes and avenues for dissent and resistance.’ ~ Professor Marieke de Goede, University of Amsterdam, author of Virtue, Fortune and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance."", ""‘The wisdom of our age tells us “Shut up and let the market speak”, but market talk betrays a certain mindlessness. In this piercing and piquant book, Campbell Jones invites us to “think the market” when it can’t actually think itself. This book will unleash the critical spirits to keep the beasts at bay and engage the most salient philosophical entailments of our moment along the way.' ~ Professor Randy Martin, New York University, author of Financialization of Daily Life""]" Canceling Comedians While the World Burns,"[""Ben Burgis""]","We need a smarter, funnier, and more strategic left.","Between the decline of the labor movement, the aftershocks of the falls of so-called ""actually existing socialism,"" and the long exile of even social democrats from the levers of real power, we have gotten far too used to thinking of leftism as a performative exercise in expressing our political commitments rather than a serious effort to achieve left-wing goals in the real world. Cancelling Comedians While the World Burns calls for a smarter, funnier, more strategic left.","Between the decline of the labor movement, the aftershocks of the falls of so-called ""actually existing socialism,"" and the long exile of even social democrats from the levers of real power, we have gotten far too used to thinking of leftism as a performative exercise in expressing our political commitments rather than a serious effort to achieve left-wing goals in the real world. Cancelling Comedians While the World Burns calls for a smarter, funnier, more strategic left.",10,"[""Depending on where you stand, ‘cancel culture’ is either deserved payback for those who have enjoyed their privilege for too long, or a serious threat to free speech and public life. In his lively and thoughtful book Canceling Comedians, Ben Burgis, philosopher, socialist and regular contributor to the US leftwing website Jacobin, analyses why cancel culture is, in fact, a political problem for the left, even if it appears to originate in progressive sentiments that take reactionary attitudes and rightwing politics as their target.\n\nBurgis opens with a defence of comedians such as David Chappelle, arguing that comedy, when it becomes ‘art’, functions ‘to make our inner lives more interesting by making us extremely uncomfortable’. Some will object that what comedians say is offensive and even hurtful, but this says less about the nature of what is said than it does about how it is received. Burgis’s broad point is that the narrow focus on policing offensive speech hides a wider loss of belief in the possibility of really changing anything.\n\nCanceling Comedians tries to understand the psychological investments that make cancel culture so histrionic and intolerant as a failure of the left to rally people to a politics that’s more material than it is moralising. Burgis draws heavily on the late British theorist Mark Fisher’s prophetic 2013 essay ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’, and his bleak analysis of the increasingly divisive and disciplinarian tone of leftwing politics, which anticipated the paranoid and censorious atmosphere that has come to dominate public life in the years since.\n\nQuoting Fisher, Burgis points out that the inhabitants of the ‘Vampire Castle’ (those obsessed with cancelling others) pretend ‘to care about structural issues but “in practice it never focuses on anything but individual behaviour.”’ ‘If you don’t really believe in changing the world,’ Burgis argues, ‘and deep down you see your politics as a symbolic performance, a way of “taking a stand”’, then it’s only natural that you’ll end up ‘trying to prove your personal virtue and examining the virtue of others’. ~ J.J. Charlesworth, Art Review"", ""“Between runaway capital accumulation and levels of material inequality that might match or exceed any in human history, you might think socialists would be formulating strategies for material redistribution and closing in on taking power in real and meaningful ways. Instead, with honorable exceptions, the left continues to have difficulties building real institutional power, instead producing mean-spirited and toxic subcultures, infused with HR politics and Silicon Valley algorithms. Ben Burgis has written a clarifying, humorous, and sharp as hell wake up call for the left and political culture at large. Read this book to get strategic about power and human about your fellow humans.” ~ Michael Brooks, Co-Host of the Majority Report, Host of The Michael Brooks Show, and Author of Against the Web"", ""“Ben Burgis provides a brutally honest and undeniably important critique of the left in this book. He rightly calls for a critical moment of self-reflection and strategy, making his book mandatory reading for serious leftists who want to accomplish their vision of a just world for workers beyond thought experiments and online activism. Burgis understands the importance of building a broader coalition on the left - one with less judgement and more emphasis on shared goals. By drawing on history, current events and his academic training in logic, Burgis provides a guide on how to make the movement more persuasive and appealing.\"" ~ Ana Kasparian, Producer and Host at The Young Turks"", ""\""The pathologies of the contemporary left, including cancel culture, are all too real and self-sabotaging. But they tend to be denied by those suffering from such afflictions, exploited by conservative enemies as a means to undermine the left, or pounced upon by ostensible friends as supposed evidence of the need for the left to take a conservative cultural turn. With his customary wit and logic, however, Burgis carefully navigates between the Scylla, Charybdis—and whatever a third maritime monster would be if this Greek mythological cliché came in a three-pack—of these ruinous responses. I just hope he doesn’t get cancelled himself for writing this utterly essential book.\"" ~ Leigh Phillips, Co-Author of"", ""\""Ben Burgis' Cancelling Comedians While the World Burns is, appropriately enough, a very funny and stinging rebuke to some unhelpful strands of left wing thinking and activism. With his characteristically accessible and down to earth style Professor Burgis points out that winning the war of ideas isn't just about having the right ideas, but presenting them in a way that makes them appealing. This is something the left has been rather bad at over the past decades. This book gives one hope that things are changing.\"" ~ Matthew McManus, Author of What is Post-Modern Conservatism"", ""\""Professor Ben Burgis has taught me how to question everything. He has sharpened my critical thinking. So imagine my disappointment after finishing this book and finding absolutely nothing to question or criticize... It’s fantastic! And I can’t even count the number of times I reference it in conversation.\"" ~ David Feldman, Comedy Writer, Standup Comedian, Host of The David Feldman Show and Co-Host of The Ralph Nader Radio Hour"", ""\""Ben Burgis knows we have a world to win, which is why he wants us in the newly reborn American left to be as effective and powerful as we can be. We can't build that power without abandoning the kind of vicious, exhausting, and downright mean behavior that so many of us have adopted towards our comrades and allies. Burgis makes the case here, in his trademark clear and readable style, for a much more politically serious — and much more personally pleasant — approach to building that movement. Who could be against that?\"" ~ Micah Utrecht, Managing Editor of Jacobin"", ""\""Ben Burgis has recently emerged as one of the most insightful intellectuals of the democratic socialist left. In this essential new book, he turns his gaze on his own side, revealing and criticizing the underlying pathologies that prevent the American left from winning adherents, and, ultimately, winning power. Anyone seriously interested in creating a post-capitalist society must read this book.\"" ~ Daniel Bessner, Author of Democracy in Exile"", ""As the doors of political possibility swing wide open for the Left, Ben Burgis asks a movement that’s germinated while shut out from power to think of itself as one that will someday win and wield it: one that’s not just informed, but smart; not just righteous, but strategic; and one that condemns less than it persuades. With his breadth of knowledge and deep commitment to the movement, there’s no one better to deliver this vital critique of the Left. ~ Branko Marcetic, Author of Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden"", ""\""Ben Burgis has written a wonderfully terse critique of some of the smelly little pathologies that plague the contemporary left. Using tight argumentation, one by one he dissects what exactly is problematic within trends such as the excesses of antifa, cancel culture, tankieism, privilege theory and a pervasive pseudo religious form of left moralism and how they are not only counterproductive, but positively harmful to any prospective project to reconstitute a socialist movement dedicated to increasing the power of the working class.\"" ~ Ralph Leonard, Nigerian-British writer and cultural critic""]" Capitalised Education,"[""David R. Cole""]",Understanding how Kate Middleton can be conceived in the current geopolitical situation,"Capitalised Education is not a biography of Kate Middleton, but, rather, understands her wedding on April 29th 2011 as a 'plateau', wherein a complex knot of social, political and economic forces collided. The chapters of the book make up a non-linear history of the royal wedding, a history that is underpinned by the ways in which power has been handled by the British royal family through time.","Capitalised Education is not a biography of Kate Middleton, but, rather, understands her wedding on April 29th 2011 as a 'plateau', wherein a complex knot of social, political and economic forces collided. The chapters of the book make up a non-linear history of the royal wedding, a history that is underpinned by the ways in which power has been handled by the British royal family through time.",6,"[""In his book, Capitalised Education: An Immanent Materialist Account of Kate Middleton, David R. Cole thoughtfully and thoroughly engages in an analysis that extends beyond the modern era to take into account a multiplicity of events and forces, which in their encounters produce social and cultural phenomena. Cole’s work is explicitly political as he engages in applied philosophy to elaborate upon the flows of capitalism and the emergence of Kate Middleton as a media object. The book, in its entirety, both is and is not about Kate Middleton. Through detailed and beautiful storytelling, Cole explores various historical plateaus (e.g., the death of Princess Diana, and monarchies of King George VI, Henry II and Lady Eleanor, the rise of industrialism, attitudes towards and about teaching) and describes the ways in which those plateaus are still at work, in some cases almost one thousand years later, to construct a capitalised education. Elaborating on the notion of capitalised education, Cole describes his project as a consideration of “the ways in which the factors analysed and revealed...come together and produce palpable social and cultural effects through Kate Middleton as media object” (p. 2). In his elaborations, Cole develops an immanent materialist analysis that is informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notions of assemblage, the rhizome, desire, and the Body without Organs, to name a few, though Cole does not get bogged down in explaining the theory itself. Rather, Cole embodies a Deleuzoguattarian ontology as he seeks to move beyond origins and causation and instead focuses on the at times more unfamiliar, but ever-proliferating intensities that impact the ways in which we emerge with that which we encounter, at times unconsciously. Students of philosophy, history, and education, and researchers who are interested in Deleuzoguattarian-influenced work will find Cole’s work both compelling and thoroughly enjoyable. ~ anonymous, Amazon site"", ""This is a book about many things, but it is not about Kate Middleton the human being and her path to individual fulfilment. Rather it is about KM the media object and her path to financial and semiotic hegemony. It is not about her individuation but rather about her capitalised education. It is not just about social and economic power, but about psycho-power and bio-power, about the production of desire and subjectivity in a capitalist society, and about the economic and semiotic war to control subjectivity and to reorganize our very drives so as to serve only capital and to desire according to its models. For David Cole our global post-industrial capitalist society is not the society of the spectacle but semiocapitalism, where the economic struggle for control of the market is relayed, intensified, and completed by the semiotic struggle for control of subjectivities. The royal family is not some medieval atavism artificially maintained as spectacle by the media for a world that has left such things far behind. The royal family is a formidable financial and semiotic assemblage of elements from diverse historical epochs, converging on a new iteration of the power to control financial fluxes and to define our desire not just for the consumption of the spectacle of the royal family and of its associated products but also for the sort of capitalised education writ large that KM benefited from and that we can experience at our own level and on our own scale as we live out, or try to live out, our own success story. It is a book about education, that educates us into immanence even while it lays bare the capitalised education that edifies such semi-transcendent models as KM. Kate Middleton media object is neither an instance of purely transcendent royalty (unattainable and so incapable of mobilising our desire), nor an example of purely immanent caring for one's life and one's loved ones (attainable by quite other means than frenetic capitalisable consumption). The book is also a reply to the claim that the age of immanent materialism as exemplified in Deleuze and Guattari's works is dead, and that academic commentary is the best that we can hope for from that direction. Cole does not comment Deleuze and Guattari, he uses them, as he uses Laruelle and Berardi, Agamben and Zizek, Marazzi and Lazzarato, but also William Burroughs and Philip José Farmer, and many other writers and thinkers in the mobilisation of his own immanent education for the task of understanding the KM-effect in all its multi-layered amplitude. This is a very rewarding read, and can only make us more thoughtful about the motivations that guide our lives ~ Terence Blake, Amazon"", ""The pomp and ceremony of a royal wedding might seem a strange anachronism in a world of global finance and cyber-capitalism. Yet, as David Cole demonstrates, the two are folded intricately into each other. Through an immanent materialist analysis that brings together key recent and historical moments or ‘plateaus’ in the emergence of capitalism, liberalism, and constitutional monarchy, and culminating in Kate Middleton’s 2011 marriage to Prince William, Cole’s wide ranging and provocative work reveals the complex and subtle ways in which capitalism’s decoding and deterritorialization go hand-in-hand with the continuation of social privileges and hierarchies. Along the way he speaks to the major political movements of the last century (liberalism, communism, fascism, empire, and decolonization), the globalization of media, the 2008 financial crisis, and more. Linking these to both established and emerging theories of radical political action, Cole traces the moments of rupture that might allow another politics to come to the fore. ~ Nathan Widder, Royal Holloway, University of London"", ""Kate Middleton is an international celebrity, as well as a crucial figure in the biological, economic, and cultural reproduction of the British class system. In this book, David R. Cole offers us a multifaceted analysis of Middleton as \""media object.\"" Touching on topics as diverse as courtly love in medieval Europe and derivatives markets in contemporary finance, Capitalised Education traces a web of far-flung relationships that fatally lead us back to the absurdities of our collective fascination with the British Royal Family. ~ Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University"", ""Cole has produced a masterful and critical evaluation of how the British Monarchy continues to assert and grow its influence in the 21st century. He significantly contributes to an almost muted discourse which critically explores how this influence is achieved and what is risked and gained in its attainment. The reader can’t but be left with a desire to question whether we should be comfortable with the process and effects this has on our behaviour, development and socialisation. ~ Roberto H. Parada, University of Western Sydney"", ""“Capitalised Education” by David R. Cole is a highly original, fascinating and thought-provoking study on capitalism and its symbolic use of Kate Middleton. Mr. Cole is an Australian academic whose brilliant scholarship draws inspiration from the masters of French post-structuralism, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This excellent book helps us see through the capitalist media spectacles of our time while encouraging us to speak truth to power.\n\nTo provide perspective on Kate Middleton as media sensation, Mr. Cole discusses a number of significant ‘plateaus’ from British and world history. These include Diana Spencer’s death on August 31, 1997; King George VI’s speech to the commonwealth on September 3, 1939; the rise of communism and fascism in the early 20th century; the declaration of Queen Victoria as Empress of India in 1877; the Industrial Revolution of 1815-1825; the struggles of Henry II and Lady Eleanor on 1150-1200; and of course, Kate Middleton’s wedding on April 29, 2011.\n\nIn the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari, Mr. Cole eloquently analyzes the various cultural, political and social forces that have shaped our perceptions of these historic plateaus. In particular, I found Mr. Cole’s discussion of the plateau of King George VI to be enlightening. Drawing upon his own family’s history to flesh out the narrative, Mr. Cole muses about the relationship of monarchy to a fading empire; the ‘tobacco death wish’ of a generation addicted to nicotine and the impending dread of total war; and the state’s institutionalized persecution of conscientious objectors who were opposed to war.\n\nThe end result is a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of the various meanings we have come to associate with the British royal family. Of course, Kate Middleton can be understood as personifying the ordinary person’s aspirations for upward mobility. More importantly, Mr. Cole connects capitalism with the scripted theatrics of the royals to explain how the working class has been pacified by media projections of corporate power, wealth and privilege.\n\nI highly recommend this outstanding book to everyone. ~ Malvin, Amazon""]" "Capitalism on Campus: Sex Work, Academic Freedom and the Market","[""Ron Roberts""]","Sex, bureaucracy and money; the death of the university.","Capitalism on Campus examines the university’s journey into market hands and the sexual sell-off of students, which has come with it. It raises critical questions about the forces which conjoin higher education to both sex work and declining academic freedom. In so doing it questions the role our institutions of learning have in the cultivation of resistance to capitalism. This is a call to rediscover the emancipatory potential of knowledge.","Capitalism on Campus examines the university’s journey into market hands and the sexual sell-off of students, which has come with it. It raises critical questions about the forces which conjoin higher education to both sex work and declining academic freedom. In so doing it questions the role our institutions of learning have in the cultivation of resistance to capitalism. This is a call to rediscover the emancipatory potential of knowledge.",5,"[""Sex and student debt are viewed as two inevitable facets of university-student life. Kingston University’s Dr. Ron Roberts writes about the disturbing connections between these two and the state of academia as a whole in Capitalism on Campus.\n\nDr. Roberts writes about the growing phenomenon of uni students partaking in sex work (mainly stripping, camming & prostitution). The book cites multiple UK surveys conducted between 2012-2017 which, found that between 5-6% of students were engaging in sex work. Furthermore, many of these admitted sex workers came from middle-class backgrounds. Another survey found that 30% of students personally knew of another student(s) engaged in sex work, while another found that 16% of students were considering entering the adult industry.\n\nThese figures have reliably been rising in tandem with UK tuition hikes that started under New Labour in the late 90s. Such a trend hasn’t been isolated to the UK, of course. American rappers like Jay-Z and Juicy J and the Canadian Drake have been rapping about women stripping to pay their tuition for decades. Across much of the West, college has become exponentially more expensive. Young people in both the US and UK are shouldering total student loan debts in excess of $1 trillion.\n\nThis debt explosion, combined with poor job prospects for “inexperienced workers,” soaring urban housing costs and the remnants of the recession have compelled many young women (and surprisingly high numbers of men) to take up sex work. Rather than addressing this crisis, schools, by and large, have chosen to ignore it. Worse, many universities and academic associations actively try to whitewash research and reporting about student sex work. Dr. Roberts cites personal experiences, as well as the experiences of other academics, of being stonewalled and threatened by administrators for daring to try to study the issue.\n\nUniversities are obsessed with maintaining a façade. Ever since universities went from being a public utility to a privatized cash cow, schools have felt the need to sell themselves as a product. Dr. Roberts writes that, “The largely uncritical domestic support offered by university vice-chancellors to tuition fee increases and marketisation suggests not merely a lack of vision and subservience, but a propensity to keep one eye on the huge salary and another on possible rewards from the honours system.” This prioritization of bringing in money over student welfare means an obsession with public imaging and maintaining a high rating in places like the U.S News and World Report Best Colleges Rankings and The Princeton Review.\n\n‘Capitalism on Campus: Sex Work, Academic Freedom and the Market’ by Ron Roberts. 164 pp. Zero Books\n\nMuch of the weight for these rankings comes from student surveys. Several university teachers and administrators have been caught telling students to give disingenuous good reviews on such surveys. The exponentially rising tuition rates at these school means that front offices are largely beholden to prospective parents of students and donors. Thus, the administrator line of thinking goes: What parent or affluent donor is going to want donate to or to send their precious child to a school that’s been exposed for having loads of students who sell their bodies just to get by? Uni students who have to resort to such means are consequently not just deprived of help by administrators, but often threatened with disciplinary action.\n\nSociety foists upon its future workers not just serf-like levels of debt, but substantial psychological baggage, as well. Soaring rates of depression, anxiety and suicide among Western youth is, according to Dr. Roberts, better understood not as an index of personal failure, but as a consequence of the brutal circumstances which have seen cuts in investment, training and job opportunities for young people, low wages, exorbitant student loans and tuition fees, cuts to mental health and welfare services, as well as a savage primary and secondary school system where endemic testing has become the norm.”\n\nIn an attempt to paper over these systemic problems, universities are increasingly endeavoring to coddle their students. This helps to assuage nervous parents and ensure good reviews from students on ranking surveys. There is a lot of conjecture from academics like the author and Russell Blackford that this is only further damaging the psyche of the student body. There’s also a new practice of millennial-bashing, partaken by administrators and the media. This seeks to absolve academia and society for the plight of the youth, instead blaming “entitled and lazy” millennials. Dr. Roberts writes about the role that modern therapy plays in this victim-blaming mindset: “Psychology has been a willing accomplice in the privitisation of stress, supplementing the neoliberal destruction of the welfare state with an enforced diet of positive thinking, psychotherapy, counseling, CBT [cognitive behavioral therapy] and mindfulness.”\n\nCapitalism on Campus is a passionate ode to the decline of higher education’s integrity and the price that this exacts on its pupils. When people like George W. Bush and Tony Blair started the transferring of costs of university education from the people to individual students, it unleashed effects well beyond student debt. Many university students are now staring at underemployment, low credit scores resulting in poor access to loans, and even the prospect of being financially forced to drop out altogether. This noxious cocktail has compelled many students to take up work in the adult entertainment industry. Meanwhile, the universities who pocket the earnings from this oftentimes dangerous and degrading work stick their heads in the sand. One can only hope that society starts to listen to the voices of student protestors in London and grassroots groups like Our Revolution, for the sake our children and future children. ~ Russel Whitehead, https://intpolicydigest.org/2018/12/01/book-review-capitalism-on-campus-sex-work-academic-freedom-and-the-market/?fbclid=IwAR17uaYbaIUA4VtjR-xaAvbdLcUJ7zTuUe7gAC3SlH0PMkq3oIW3_lE8nNI"", ""This is not for the faint of heart or for the overly sensitive reader. Roberts touches on strong issues and expresses his opinion with fervor and intensity. Recommended for a reader with an open mind, who is willing to see and try to understand another's viewpoint on a hot button topic. ~ Erica Watkins, NetGalley"", ""Capitalism on Campus: Sex Work, Academic Freedom, and the Market by Ron Roberts is an examination of the recent changes in British universities. Roberts is Chartered Psychologist with over thirty years experience in higher education. He has previously worked at King’s College, University College London, St Bartholomew’s Medical College, The Tavistock Institute, QMW, the University of Westminster, and Kingston University.\n\nHigher education is making the news in the US and Britain seems to mirror the US example. In the US there is almost $1.5 Trillion in student debt the number is lower for Britain but the debt per student is higher, in fact, the highest in the world. In 1997 the average debt was under 5,000 Pounds today it is over 50,000 Pounds. The education process has become warped. No longer are universities places to encourage thinking and discovery but have become places where ratings override learning. It is seen in American public schools with standardized testing where teachers are pressed to teach students how to pass exams rather than learn. Colleges have a ranking system that is somewhat similar. The better your school the better your chances of landing a good job. The problems occur when students are coached into making the school appear better than encouraging learning. Schools are being administered by bureaucrats that care more for image than substance.\n\nAlthough sex work takes the first position in the subtitle it is not the main concentration of the book. In 1970s movies occasionally a detective would be searching for the bad guy and end up in a strip club. He would talk to one of the girls and find out she was a university student, usually sociology, she would pass on the information and hint that tuition, job outlook, or some other reason forced her to work as a dancer, but she would conclude it is going to make a great thesis. Today that rarity has become much more common with an alarming amount of students who know someone involved in sex work. The internet makes it even easier today. Sex work offers a temporary, high paying job that takes less time than a traditional campus job. Also, students involved in sex work spend more time studying according to the research. Universities fight against sex work as immoral but really it has more to do with the school’s image than a students reputation.\n\nEducation has evolved from learning institutions to marketable products that care more about image and standing rather than the quality of the output. America boomed after WWII when returning GIs went to college. A higher education was the ticket out of the factory job. Today in the US education is costly and seen by many as a waste. To complicate that the factory jobs are also gone. What was once a large middle class is now an endangered species. The good paying jobs are gone and education is too expensive. Roberts’ look at the British example is scholarly. It is not light reading but more akin to a research paper. Documentation runs through the text which primary purpose is to present facts rather than deliver a smooth narrative.\n\n~ Evil Cyclist, https://evilcyclist.wordpress.com"", ""Robert’s text provides an accessible expose of the impact that market relations have upon British Universities and their students and makes a significant contribution to the body of work concerned with students' involvement in the commercial sex industry. Highly recommended. ~ Dr Billie Lister, University of Hull"", ""Making unique links between higher education and commercial sex, this book pushes the boundaries of both economic thinking and the politicisation of our universities. A much needed critique of what has become of our universities, which lays bare the bleak scenario for students. Engaging commentary is backed up by detailed reflections on the empirical knowledge we have on student sex work. This is essential reading for those concerned with economics, politics and student life as we enter new territory in both education and the sex industry. ~ Prof. Teela Sanders, University of Leicester""]" Capitalism vs. Freedom,"[""Rob Larson""]","A single-handed debunking of libertarian economics and ""the age of Friedman"".","For years, we’ve been taught that capitalism is good for freedom. Dominant right-wing talk radio hosts to this day recommend “libertarian” classics like Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom that claim markets free us, and this picture still dominates the schools and the political spectrum. Well get bent, one percent, because Rob Larson’s Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom puts big business under a microscope. This book debunks the conservative classics while demonstrating that the marketplace has its own great centers of power, which the libertarian tradition itself claims is a limit to freedom. In fact, Larson illustrates how capitalism fails both this and other concepts of human liberty, not just failing to establish a right to a share of society’s production, but also leaving us subject to the great power plays of the one percent’s corporate property.","For years, we’ve been taught that capitalism is good for freedom. Dominant right-wing talk radio hosts to this day recommend “libertarian” classics like Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom that claim markets free us, and this picture still dominates the schools and the political spectrum. Well get bent, one percent, because Rob Larson’s Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom puts big business under a microscope. This book debunks the conservative classics while demonstrating that the marketplace has its own great centers of power, which the libertarian tradition itself claims is a limit to freedom. In fact, Larson illustrates how capitalism fails both this and other concepts of human liberty, not just failing to establish a right to a share of society’s production, but also leaving us subject to the great power plays of the one percent’s corporate property.",5,"[""I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I reckon anyone interested in how the world works financially would get a lot out of it. Larson takes the views of Milton Friedman, the esteemed economist, and dissects them in a context of the present day. He starts with definitions of freedom - both positive and negative freedoms. One gives us freedom to do as we choose and the other gives freedom from being interfered with. Both these are important in a market economy.\n\nWe think we make choices every day because we live (at least in most of the west) in a capitalist society but if you actually look at what we buy, the choice is between different brand names owned by a very few large companies. They then set prices as the supplier rather than us as the consumer. The 'free market' is a fraud.\n\nMr Larson writes at a fair pace and in an entertaining fashion. You will either like his style or you won't - I loved it. \""Meanwhile the radio empire Clear Channel carries Rush Limbaugh and a parade of other similar idiot radio hosts who put the blame for our economic problems on our \""heavily regulated\"" economy. But the huge size and power of Clear Channel, their employer, is a direct result of the deregulation of radio and other media following the 1996 law. Irony loves company!\"" How can you not love a writer who can use exclamation marks!\n\n\""Fox News, then, has built up its empire of feverish right wing political reporting thanks to a (then) privileged exemption to the allegedly repressive-of-business power of the government. Yet the channel still runs \""Regulation Nation\"" segments, claiming that the economy's weak job market is caused by the government's rigid regulations, which were no obstacle to building its own empire.\""\n\nWe have Friedman, we have Hayek, we have the fact that media that relies on advertising cannot speak freely in their editorials as they may lose revenue from advertisers. We have clear and concise arguments about where the faults exist and what should be done to fix them. So a vicious circle of propping up the capitalist way so the few rich capitalists at the top can continue to feed us (in every sense of the word) what they choose while we give away our freedoms, needs to be broken. And this is an excellent rallying cry.\n\nRecommended if you are starting to get a little uncomfortable with the way your choices are being eroded by a few large conglomerates and media moguls.\n\n~ Anne Maguire , NetGalley"", ""Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman wrote a very influential book called Capitalism and Freedom. It implies that freedom is a product of capitalism. Capitalism vs Freedom refutes it and more in a blistering litany of well-documented counterattacks. It is a 240 page rebuttal.\n\nRob Larson quotes directly from Friedman, and the claims self-destruct before your eyes:\n\n-Where Friedman saw freedom of choice for shoppers, Larson sees enormous concentration, limiting choice to (sometimes) one sole vendor or manufacturer, operating numerous brands it has taken over. For example, almost all beer is sold by two companies. Almost all eyewear comes from Luxottica. Throwing cable into deregulation resulted in megamergers, not consumer choice. Consumers are not offered repairable products they prefer or even sufficient legroom on flights. Forced arbitrations denies consumers even their day in court. Larson says we aren’t so much free to choose as free to imagine we are free to choose.\n\n-Friedman saw freedom for workers to choose their employers. They could like their bosses and love their work, at will. Larson sees the labor market running on fear, not free choice. He sees offshoring and outsourcing at the slightest sign of wage savings or unionization, not to mention interminable internships, and 48% of US jobs paying minimum wage or less. Non-compete “agreements” enslave. Barring unions keeps wages below labor’s value. In the gig economy of capitalism, choice is a bitter laugh.\n\n-Friedman argued bizarrely that inheritance of a fortune was no different than inheritance of talent. How can you criticize inherited wealth if you’re not against inherited talent?\n\n-“Economic power can be widely dispersed. There is no law of conservation which forces the growth of new centers of economic strength to be at the expense of existing centers.”\n\n-“The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom, because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.”\n\nLooking at these statements today, Larson’s job is like shooting fish in a barrel. As he piles up the knockouts, he keeps repeating : ”Irony loves company!”\n\n“Treating labor as an asset priced by supply and demand, like toasters or toothbrushes, is a gross insult to the human spirit, and is indeed responsible for some of the gravest crimes committed against humanity in our history,” Larson says. 42 He calls Friedman an intellectual opportunist, and shows repeatedly how the very opposite of what he said is what is true. “Today’s libertarians follow in a long line of defense of power.”\n\nFor good measure, Larson collars Friedman’s co-conspirators Ludwig Von Mises and Paul Collier. In a letter to Atlas Shrugged author Ayn Rand, Von Mises said: “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort o men who are better than you.”\n\nFor Von Mises, who created the Austrian School that inspired Friedman’s Chicago School, the capitalist is a romantic hero and martyr to be exalted: “Creating for him is agony and torment, a ceaseless excruciating struggle against internal and external obstacles; it consumes and crushes him.”\n\nLarson ranges far and wide. He criticizes capitalist colonialists for never giving the colonized infrastructure like sanitation or drinking water, while piling up trash on land, sea and in the air until it is unbearable for the locals. In contrast, libertarian Oxford economist Paul Collier, considered a “bold thinker” among neoliberals, said in his book The Plundered Planet: “We are not here to serve nature. Nature is here to serve us. “ 168 For Larson, these are neoliberals’ true colors showing through.\n\nFor all of these reasons, and many more, Larson thinks the concentration of capitalism is taking away our freedoms – both the negative freedom to live without fear and the positive freedom to do what we like.\n\nHis conclusion is that nothing has ever been achieved without a struggle. Labor is clearly not out to fight to for fewer benefits and more neoliberal libertarian “freedoms”. Sadly, it’s not out to fight anything. At some point, labor must awake to its pathetic situation and activists will bloom again.\n\nDavid Wineberg ~ David Wineberg, NetGalley"", ""Are we really free in a capitalist system? Neoliberals such as Friedman and Hayek would say yes, because they claim free-market capitalism is the social arrangement that most encouraged human freedom. Rob Larson’s book demonstrates that they were wrong, because capitalism and freedom are two antagonistic concepts, as suggested in the title of this book. Many people in the world are beginning to suspect that they are not free to choose what they want to do with their life and others don’t feel free to safely express their opinion online.\n\nLarson’s book shows us how free-market capitalism based on a competitive market is not creating an overall freedom, but is concentrating more power in the hands of bigger firms and creating towering corporations with full monopoly all by itself.\n\nWhat is even more surprising is that capitalism is putting at risk one of the most important among our freedoms. The practice of controlling information is becoming more and more prevalent. Free markets are not allowing a free flow of information, but instead are creating a more consolidated industry, less diverse. Free-market forces narrowed the diversity of opinion in the media, because media firms’ owners and advertisers warp and shape the information that reaches the average citizen. The philosophy of the market is not to share real information, but to supply the right information, that which is most conducive to immediate profit-making. The media markets bring us information warped by concentrated ownership and by their advertising revenue-based business model.\n\nConcentrated power is also making difficult for the average citizen to freely express his political opinion, because dollars in the market give far more votes to those with a lot of money. Our having to say is being flooded by money surging through the electoral and political process. Most working people have not the necessary resources required to fight political confrontations. Parties are no longer debating about ideas, because gigantic amounts of cash are involved in shaping policy today. Therefore, average citizens’ preferences are non-significant. Ordinary people do not have any power over policy decisions. Policies are all driven by decisions and strategic maneuvers of coalitions of political investors in shifting economic conditions.\n\nCapitalism has also a great impact on the environment, therefore it has power over future generations. The decisions made through the modern period of capitalism have rarely taken into account the welfare of the people who must live in the world we leave them. The side-effects of capitalism are very serious, but neoliberals tend to ignore them. Among the side-effects of capitalism are climate change, the extinction of some species, the over-consuming of natural resources and pollution. The actual economic system needs to be more sustainable, otherwise the future generations will not have the possibility to enjoy adequate fresh air and water, and will not have the freedom to enjoy nature.\n\nLarson’s solution is to eradicate capitalism abolishing private ownership of productive capital and gigantic power arising from it and limiting concentrated power and maximizing freedom. A socialist society can limit the scale of private property and workers can cooperate and collaborate in the decision-making. A collaboration of equal companions can replace the command of masters and obedience of servants. A socialist economy can be created by the solidaric collaboration of the workers with hand in each special branch of production. Socialism, according to Larson, can contribute to a spiritual change among humanity, because it gives ordinary people the possibility to contribute in the economic process.\n\n~ Francesco Camodeca , NetGalley"", ""The ravages of the neoliberal assault on the global population have by now reached the point where they are literally threatening decent survival, not in the distant future. This eloquent study reveals clearly the roots of the problems and their severe dimensions, and calls for renewal of the inspiring vision of libertarian socialism that was displaced and marginalized through the past century but can be revived within the guidelines that are outlined here, expanding on important initiatives already underway. ~ Noam Chomsky"", ""In many ways the consciousness and propensities of young people in the US give reason to be optimistic about the future. On average our young generation is less racist, less homophobic, less sexist, and less militaristic than its forbearers. In addition to these admirable characteristics, young Americans are also freedom loving, which is where Larson’s book comes in. In the US more than anywhere else the cause of “freedom” has been appropriated by right-wing libertarians as a powerful ideological vehicle to gain political support for a conservative political agenda -- to the point where if you tell a young American that you are a “libertarian socialist” they look at you in utter confusion, as if you have contradicted yourself in only two words. With a welcome sense of humor, Larson focuses on examining what freedom means and does not mean, why the right-wing libertarian political agenda subverts freedom rather than promotes it, and why a libertarian socialist program is how young Americans can achieve the freedom they long for. ~ Robin Hahnel""]" Capitalist Realism (New Edition),"[""Mark Fisher""]",An analysis of the ways in which capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system.,"After 1989, capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political economic system. What effects has this “capitalist realism” had on work, culture, education and mental health? Is it possible to imagine an alternative to capitalism that is not some throwback to discredited models of state control? FOREWORD BY ZOE FISHER, INTRODUCTION BY ALEX NIVEN AND AFTERWORD BY TARIQ GODDARD.","After 1989, capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political economic system. What effects has this “capitalist realism” had on work, culture, education and mental health? Is it possible to imagine an alternative to capitalism that is not some throwback to discredited models of state control? FOREWORD BY ZOE FISHER, INTRODUCTION BY ALEX NIVEN AND AFTERWORD BY TARIQ GODDARD.",14,"[""...the book contains some interesting insights and neo-Marxist references, worth a look to update your own ideas. Fisher is dead set against the heroic nostalgia of 1870, 1917, the 1930s or the 1960–1970s, and that makes sense. The present and future is the thing. ~ Gregg Gibbs, May Day Books & Blog"", ""I've reviewed \""Capitalist Realism\"" and put it front of store (it started to sell pretty much instantly, not surprising considering how great it is!) and intend on doing so with more of your Zer0 books. ~ Terry Thomson, Senior Bookseller, Waterstones Trafalgar Square"", ""Finally, an analysis of contemporary capitalism that combines rigorous cultural analysis with unflinching political critique. Illustrating the deleterious effects of 'business ontology' on education and 'market Stalinism' in public life, Fisher lays bare the new cultural logic of capital. A provocative and necessary read, especially for anyone wanting to talk seriously about the politics of education today. ~ Sarah Amsler, lecturer in sociology at Aston University, in The Times Higher Education Supplement"", ""One of the most exciting publishing events of 2009 was the emergence of the new imprint Zero Books. It publishes short, intelligent polemics on politics and culture, packing a lot of punch into about 80 pages and they are masterclasses in how supposedly tough theory can be made accessible and help us to understand society. The latest of these is Capitalist Realism by leading radical blogger Mark Fisher who has been blogging under the name k-punk for the past few years. It's a sharp analysis of the post-ideological malaise that suggests that the economics and politics of neo-liberalism are givens rather than constructions. \""It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism\"", Fisher spits, and his book takes in film, Baudrillard, Kurt Cobain, science fiction, mental health, bureaucracy and economics. Zer0 Books are ... must-reads. ~ Rowan Wilson, Verso Publishing and ReadySteadyBook blogger"", ""One might be tempted to assume that a book that so devastatingly diagnoses the abysmal conditions of the present would be heavily laden with nostalgic melancholy, perhaps full of bitter condemnatory memories about a different, better world that once was. However, you would be very wrong to make such an assumption. Fisher's book is not at all a work of nostalgia or mourning for such a lost world, and probably shouldn't even be described as simply just another piece of critical diagnosis. In short it is a rich, passionate, militant and wholly optimistic polemic that is all too aware of the excremental machine of capitalism that spreads its banal ontological coordinates across virtually every aspect of our daily lives, thoughts, desires, dreams, hopes and beliefs. ~ Darren Ambrose, http://lombard-street.blogspot.com/"", ""Capitalist Realism is the most important document the British left has produced so far this century. ~ Aaron Bastani, Novara Media"", ""This second edition is a timely excuse to re-read Capitalist Realism.\n\nWhile some of the book’s contexts and references may have moved on, its underlying analysis of how politics and culture converge on the same stagnation remains of great importance to those of us continuing to wonder whether there might not be a better way.\n\nCapitalist Realism remains the centrepiece of Fisher’s comparatively short but indispensable contribution to British cultural theory. ~ Adam Harper, ArtReview"", ""The best guide to British politics today. ~ Bagehot, The Economist"", ""The beauty of Mark Fisher's laser sharp critique of the destructive effects of life under Neo-Liberalism was that it spoke to ordinary people in plain language that went beyond the often hermetic intellectual world of Academia. He is greatly missed. We need voices like Mark's more than ever. ~ Bobby Gillespie, Primal Scream"", ""Let's not beat around the bush: Fisher's compulsively readable book is simply the best diagnosis of our predicament that we have! Through examples from daily life and popular culture, but without sacrificing theoretical stringency, he provides a ruthless portrait of our ideological misery. Although the book is written from a radically Left perspective, Fisher offers no easy solutions. Capitalist Realism is a sobering call for patient theoretical and political work. It enables us to breathe freely in our sticky atmosphere. ~ Slavoj Žiźek"", ""What happened to our future? Mark Fisher is a master cultural diagnostician, and in Capitalist Realism he surveys the symptoms of our current cultural malaise. We live in a world in which we have been told, again and again, that There Is No Alternative. The harsh demands of the 'just-in-time' marketplace have drained us of all hope and all belief. Living in an endless Eternal Now, we no longer seem able to imagine a future that might be different from the present. This book offers a brilliant analysis of the pervasive cynicism in which we seem to be mired, and even holds out the prospect of an antidote. ~ Steven Shaviro, author of Connected and Doom Patrols"", ""The best diagnosis of our predicament that we have. ~ Slavoj Žiźek"", ""Fisher defines \""capitalist realism\"" as a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning the production of culture, and the regulation of work and education\"", something which acts as an \""invisible barrier constraining thought and action\"". The reality certainly exists, vouched for by the symptomatic analysis Fisher performs on a multitude of cultural phenomena; and yet, crucially, a reality that always includes, and depends upon, our implicit acknowledgment of it as delineating the realms of the possible. \""Being realistic\"" is often a case of \""reflexive impotence\"": seeing as we are helpless to change anything, why bother trying? This attitude is evidently true — think of the Iraq War protest — but nevertheless self-fulfilling. With this in mind, Fisher's book is, despite the oppressive diagnosis, a much-needed plea that the present economic crisis be seized as an opportunity; a tipping point that allows us to build an alternative to this increasingly intolerable and ultimately unsustainable mode of living. ~ Dean Kenning, Art Monthly"", ""Packs more original ideas in its 81 pages then a year's worth of issues of The Guardian newspaper or New Left Review. It deals with a subject that has frustrated and haunted me all my adult life-the seeming social, economic and cultural totality of late capitalism and the corresponding impossibility of offering any alternative to the system without hitting a brick wall of 'being practical' or 'realistic,' translated as 'there is no alternative to the market.' Mark Fisher calls this totality 'capitalist realism' and the book could not come at a better time, when neoliberalism has at its most basic, material level been shown conclusively not to be working. Deeply intellectual but not abstract, giving concrete examples from everyday life and the popular culture of western societies. It's this that differentiates Mark Fisher from many writers of the left, who tend to look pityingly or voyeuristically elsewhere (Palestine, South America) and bypass the 'mundane' and 'ordinary' frustrations and struggles of work and leisure, situated in the very society most of these worthy and sometimes moralistic writers come from. ~ Underground Man, http://undergroundmangeomatt.blogspot.com/""]" Capitalist Superheroes,"[""Dan Hassler-Forest""]",The blockbuster superhero movie: popular entertainment or capitalist propaganda? This book investigates the 21st-century superhero's underlying political agenda.,"In the same way that Stallone and Schwarzenegger played film heroes who came to embody the values of Ronald Reagans aggressive conservative agenda in the 1980s, the 21st-century film narratives of Batman, Spider-Man and Superman reflect the policies of the Bush Doctrine after 9/11. This book offers a groundbreaking study of the relationship that exists between post-9/11 American politics and the contemporary superhero movie phenomenon. No other Hollywood subgenre was as consistently popular during the George W. Bush presidency, as films such as Spider-Man, Superman Returns, Iron Man, and The Dark Knight embodied the key contradictions that inform the cultural and political life of the post-9/11 years. By combining in-depth analyses of numerous major superhero films from this era with astute readings of contemporary critical theory, this book offers accessible and academically potent insight into the complex interplay between politics, ideology, and entertainment in the 21st century.","In the same way that Stallone and Schwarzenegger played film heroes who came to embody the values of Ronald Reagans aggressive conservative agenda in the 1980s, the 21st-century film narratives of Batman, Spider-Man and Superman reflect the policies of the Bush Doctrine after 9/11. This book offers a groundbreaking study of the relationship that exists between post-9/11 American politics and the contemporary superhero movie phenomenon. No other Hollywood subgenre was as consistently popular during the George W. Bush presidency, as films such as Spider-Man, Superman Returns, Iron Man, and The Dark Knight embodied the key contradictions that inform the cultural and political life of the post-9/11 years. By combining in-depth analyses of numerous major superhero films from this era with astute readings of contemporary critical theory, this book offers accessible and academically potent insight into the complex interplay between politics, ideology, and entertainment in the 21st century.",4,"[""Just read this excellent book which echoes my mind-set in Marshal Law. Law was always more than a satire on men in capes, it is also a critique on the fortresses of the establishment – hence the hero hunter’s attack on the US corporations trading with the enemy in World War 2 and the role of the US in Vietnam.\n\nSo it was good to see this book once again delineate how these costumed crusaders have a questionable and unwholesome role in society. They are so much more than a harmless power fantasy designed for our entertainment: in reality a disguise and an endorsement for much that is wrong on our planet, which is why I/Marshal Law loathe them. I explore this further in the afterword to the Marshal Law deluxe edition due out this April, but in the meantime here are a few gems from Capitalist Superheroes: ~ Pat Mills, Creator and first editor of 2000AD, champion of girls' and political comics, co-creator of Requiem Vampire Knight, Marshal Law, Accident Man, Nemesis and many more."", ""Capitalist Superheroes peels back the glamorous façade and shows us what fantasy characters like Batman, Superman and Iron Man truly are: the horrific embodiments of neoliberal capitalism. By making us sympathize with powerful but all-too-human billionaires, these films legitimize the power of the Berlusconis and Rupert Murdochs of the world. Dan Hassler-Forest strips down the superhero fantasy to show us that this new emperor is wearing no clothes - or rather: that what is hidden behind the superhero's colorful costume is in fact the true power of Capital. ~ Slavoj Žižek , philosopher"", ""This brilliant and lively book shows that the superhero films so familiar to us as Hollywood blockbusters are by no means just innocent entertainment; on the contrary, they engage, in quite malign ways, some of the fundamental political and socio-economic issues of our time. Superheroes of one sort or another are as old as literature itself, but no one has done more than Dan Hassler-Forest to help us understand the pre-eminent modern versions of the type: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and the like. Though his book will immediately find readers among everyone with a particular interest in superhero film and fiction, it deserves a much wider audience as well. ~ Carl Freedman, Professor of literature and author of The Age of Nixon(Zero Books 2012)"", ""Stylish, perceptive, and engaging, Hassler-Forest's Capitalist Superheroes reminds us that even in the glimmer and glow of new technologies and special effects, movies are still permeated with politics and ideologies. ~ Timothy Corrigan""]" Cartographies of the Absolute,"[""Alberto Toscano"", ""Jeffrey Kinkle""]",An aesthetics of the economy for the twenty-first century.,"Can capital be seen? Cartographies of the Absolute surveys the disparate answers to this question offered by artists, film-makers, writers and theorists over the past few decades. It zones in on the crises of representation that have accompanied the enduring crisis of capitalism, foregrounding the production of new visions and artefacts that wrestle with the vastness, invisibility and complexity of the abstractions that rule our lives.","Can capital be seen? Cartographies of the Absolute surveys the disparate answers to this question offered by artists, film-makers, writers and theorists over the past few decades. It zones in on the crises of representation that have accompanied the enduring crisis of capitalism, foregrounding the production of new visions and artefacts that wrestle with the vastness, invisibility and complexity of the abstractions that rule our lives.",6,"[""How much of capitalism can we see from the moon? This remarkable, unclassifiable book sets out to map the ways. Cartographies takes as its object representation as such, which it tracks through theories, models, visual works, films, novels, engineering projects and whole cities: it is an immense museum exhibition of artefacts material and mental which attempt, consciously or not, to convey the totalisation implacably at work everywhere in late capitalism. But this is also a profoundly theoretical work: indeed, it summons us to think new philosophical thoughts about this system and how to make it visible. We ought to emerge from it with a new conception of the tasks of criticism and the production of art itself.\n\n~ Fredric Jameson, author of Representing Capital and The Antinomies of Realism​"", ""Cartographies of the Absolute is an essential guide to the most formidable and urgent questions about how we see, represent and try to understand the greatest forces shaping our historical moment.\n\n~ Trevor Paglen, artist and author of Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World"", ""Cartographies of the Absolute takes us beyond current fashions for perspectivalism and flat ontologies, and beyond the tired (and often quietistic) formulae that argue how capitalism’s modern complexities must remain forever beyond human grasp. Bringing vital insights to a range of aesthetic practices – and recognising the torsions, refractions and ruses required to puncture the reified social forms before us - Toscano and Kinkle elaborate a praxis of dissident totalisation to counter capital’s limited horizons.\n\n~ Gail Day, author of Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory"", ""Culture, in the last decade, has had a simple duty: to be the dreamlife of the bust. It has answered this call in ways uneven, tawdry, messed up, beautiful — but it has finally not failed to make a veiled reading of this obscene catastrophe. But how then to wake from the purling images, how to leap from dream to map of the present? Here we need ideal readers of culture's readings, and none have come closer than Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle. Their bravura cleavings of spectacular representation and the transformations of global capital become themselves a kind of new knowledge, a kind of psychelocation from which we might take an orientation and a sense of possibility.\n\n~ Joshua Clover, author of the Totality for Kids and 1989"", ""How this complex, chaotic, vicious system of exploitation called capitalism has been rendered by TV writers, Hollywood directors, and glamorous or struggling artists forms the theme of this book. From box sets to boxes floating across the seas, from dialectical thinking to diabolical reckoning: it is all here, laid out, picked out and unpicked, absorbed and turned over. Rubbish practices are called out, whether they originate in governments or the artworld. Cognitive mapping, which may be the poor analyst's conspiracy theory, gets its abstractions made real. Read it and move more consciously and dialectically through the globe.\n\n~ Esther Leslie, author of Walter Benjamin and Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry"", ""A grand tour de force of western cognitive maps and a searching dérive through anti-capitalist dimensions of theory, media and art - now pulsing on the rotting flesh of the world system. With critical acumen, serious political commitment and more than a modicum of erudite cool, Toscano and Kinkle revisit Jameson's landmark work on cognitive mapping and, by drawing extensively on the Marxist critical tradition, forward the life and death project of teaching readers to read in a dialectical mode. Grasping the aesthetic as at once program and battleground, they clearly manifest the necessity, the stakes, and the fine-grained resolution of a radical critical practice.\n\n~ Jonathan Beller, author of The Cinematic Mode of Production""]" "Cauldron of Anxiety, A","[""William Briggs""]","Capitalism has passed its use-by-date, but a better, saner world is possible.","The veritable tsunami of anxieties that are affecting individual lives, the increasingly dysfunctional nature of society and the potential catastrophes of global conflict and of climate change, have a common cause. The inability of capitalism or the state to respond to existential crises and internal contradictions is the cause of what William Briggs terms A Cauldron of Anxiety. Briggs defends a Marxist perspective that would challenge this and provides an optimistic vision for the future.","The veritable tsunami of anxieties that are affecting individual lives, the increasingly dysfunctional nature of society and the potential catastrophes of global conflict and of climate change, have a common cause. The inability of capitalism or the state to respond to existential crises and internal contradictions is the cause of what William Briggs terms A Cauldron of Anxiety. Briggs defends a Marxist perspective that would challenge this and provides an optimistic vision for the future.",1,"[""A Cauldron of Anxiety is a book for anyone left feeling wretched by the state of our world: the poverty, the degradation of our environment, the brutality of our rulers. Briggs blames all our ills singly and compellingly on the capitalist system, insisting that it is the monster against which all of us should unite. He helps us to see a world beyond the misery of our present. ~ David Renton, author of The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right""]" Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews,"[""Jeff Bursey""]",Neglected and obscure writers are at the fore in this incisive collection of critical essays.,"Centring the Margins is a collection of reviews and essays written between 2001 and 2014 of writers from Canada, the United States, the UK, and Europe. Most are neglected, obscure, or considered difficult, and include Mati Unt, Ornela Vorpsi, S.D. Chrostowska, Blaise Cendrars and Joseph McElroy, among others.","Centring the Margins is a collection of reviews and essays written between 2001 and 2014 of writers from Canada, the United States, the UK, and Europe. Most are neglected, obscure, or considered difficult, and include Mati Unt, Ornela Vorpsi, S.D. Chrostowska, Blaise Cendrars and Joseph McElroy, among others.",21,"[""Jan 16, 2018: Daniel Green | http://www.thereadingexperience.net/tre/2018/01/unruly.html edit | delete\n\nIn Praise of the Unruly\n\nCollections of book reviews are inherently difficult to present as sufficiently unified to warrant republication as a book. Whatever unity of theme, style, or approach the reviews possess first of all reflect such unifying qualities as they manifest themselves in the reviews to begin with, which of course requires a critic who pursues particular themes or maintains a particular approach. Books like John Domini's The Sea-God's Herb and David Winters's Infinite Fictions illustrate how a well-chosen and well-arranged compilation of reviews can reinforce the insights provided by skilled and perceptive critics.\n\nOften the critical perspective a reviewer offers is given its most characteristic expression when considering certain kinds of writers or a particular literary mode or genre (as is the case with both Domini and Winters). Jeff Bursey's Centring the Margins: Essays and Review exemplifies this tendency, which is signaled clearly in the book's title. Bursey generally examines works of fiction outside the mainstream (outside the U.S. mainstream, at least), including works of formally transgressive fiction, translated fiction, and lesser-known Canadian books, and certainly to the extent the book succeeds in calling attention to this work it is a worthwhile effort for that reason alone.\n\nBursey makes his purpose quite clear in the book's prefatory essay: \""Where Margaret Atwood and other brand names are granted much leeway in sentiment and space in the press no matter if what comes out is average or bad, novels that don't adhere to some perceived notion of normal writing are received in a less friendly way. They are sometimes considered not art but an affront.\"" Further:\n\nI don't deny the mainstream authors their audience. However, others will seek to create new work in new forms, and if they're viewed as rude threats, that's not a bad thing. These reviews were often written with the explorers and the unruly in mind.\n\nIn collecting the reviews, Bursey expresses the hope that they might help in \""bringing less popular works into the centre of the conversation\"" about books. However, I'm not sure that this is an altogether realistic, or desirable, goal if it means achieving an easy, automatic acceptance of such works in the \""mainstream.\"" Better that adventurous and iconoclastic works remain an \""affront,\"" as threats to established practice lest they become reflexively amalgamated into a bland and uncritical literary culture. Such works should remain unruly, even if that means some very good writers might not get the immediate recognition they deserve. Such a book as Centring the Margins is valuable because it provides access to readers who might be interested in exploring the margin, discovering it can be quite an interesting place.\n\nIf there is a drawback to emphasizing reviews that in effect seek to champion the writers and works surveyed it would be that eventually the tone of consistent approbation can become somewhat wearing, and I would have to say that Centring the Margins doesn't always avoid this problem. Bursey is certainly willing to point out flaws and missteps in the books he considers, but in most cases it is in the context of coming to an ultimately appreciative conclusion. As well, I found myself occasionally looking for more detailed analysis of the writing strategies and their effects in the works considered, somewhat less reliance on longer quotation. (In the review of Gaddis's Agape Agape, for example, we are told at the end that the book is filled with \""jagged rhythms and darting wit,\"" and that Gaddis is a \""superb stylist,\"" but there isn't much critical commentary in the review that explicates these qualities.) On the other hand, the pieces on Blaise Cendrars and the Estonian writer Mati Unt introduce me to writers about whom I know little and definitely make me want to get better acquainted with their work.\n\nI can't say I always agree with Bursey's estimations of the writers under review (I can't bring myself to admire either William Vollmann or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as much as he does), but of course this is an inevitable reaction to the views of any critic (especially when they are expressed in such a relatively large number of reviews). The breadth of his reading is impressive, however, lending credibility and authority to his reviews, both individual reviews of books he has clearly carefully considered (both text and context) and the assembled reviews as a whole, which collectively leave the impression that their author reads comprehensively across formal and linguistic boundaries, and against the grain of entrenched assumptions about what books are worthy of our attention. Certainly readers will conclude from these reviews that Jeff Bursey has given the books his engaged attention, and those who would like to expand their own reading horizons beyond the books reflexively covered in the high-profile book review sections would be making a good start by consulting Centring the Margins. ~ Daniel Green, http://www.thereadingexperience.net/tre/2018/01/unruly.html"", ""4 star review\n\nCentring the Margins: Essays and Reviews\n\nby Jeff Bursey (Goodreads Author)\n\nMichelle Hallett's review Feb 03, 2017\n\nThese thoughtful and meaty essays introduced me to many writers and got me thinking, sometimes in new ways, about how fiction can work. Bursey is a careful and thorough reader, and his passion and intelligence shine in this collection. Like others, I wish he'd reviewed more obscure women writers, not because I feel we need to fill a quota, but because, as VIDA and CWILA numbers show, women writers still have trouble getting reviewed at all, and I would expect women who write exploratory fiction have an even harder time.\n\nBursey's review of my first novel, Double-blind, is reproduced in Centring the Margins. While I don't agree with everything he writes about my fiction, particularly how I employed realism in that novel, I do want to acknowledge how his writing gets me thinking. Reading a Bursey essay is never a passive experience, never one of simple consumption.\n\nWhatever I think of a book discussed by Bursey, or of the discussion itself, Bursey's vigorous and intelligent prose is a delight to read. ~ Michelle Butler Hallett, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1886680100"", ""Broken Pencil Magazine; Issue 74, News, Norman Feliks, Saturday, January 14th, 2017\n\nCentring the Margins: Essays and Reviews, Jeff Bursey, 189 Pages, Zero Books, zero-books.net\n\nAs Jeff Bursey contends, we are endlessly taught that, “[l]iterature contains singular imagery, the perfect word lodged in its perfect spot, rounded characters, believable settings, a confident narrative (if not a confident narrator).” The stuffy English Lit cannon morphed into a similarly narrow mainstream publishing consensus. As a result, alternative styles of writing, which are for Bursey innovative, are tarred with the warning term, “experimental.”\n\nBursey’s crusade can be a smidge too present, yet often it is framed in an eye-opening way, such as when he notes that for typical critical writing, “[t]he excitement will be intellectual, but won’t commit someone’s blood and soul to the works, which [William] Vollmann, with Steinbeck in mind, has written from the fibre of his being, as used to be said before the author supposedly disappeared.” Here Bursey reminds us that there isn’t only one way to write and that readers may be rewarded for delving into the unfamiliar. The strength of this collection is that it drives us to seek out neglected voices, even if it means having to read an occasional paragraph twice before we get it. Bursey inspires us to seek out important writing instead of settling for the typical and easy to digest.\n\nIf there is a weakness, aside from some unclear sentences, it is that a wide variety of works are looked at through a personal lens informed by an ironically narrow spectrum of writers. For instance, Bursey compares all sorts of people to Henry Miller, Miller representing his literary awakening. Other favoured reference points are Pynchon, the Powys’, Dos Passos – and all sorts of stories are referred to as Oulipian. On the other hand, the wide variety of matter covered made a consistent measuring stick a welcome tool. (Norman Feliks) ~ Norman Feliks, http://www.brokenpencil.com/news/book-review-centring-the-margins"", ""John's Reviews > Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews\n\n5 stars\n\nCentring the Margins: Essays and Reviews\n\nby Jeff Bursey (Goodreads Author)\n\nreviewed by John Domini\n\nJan 07, 2017\n\nRead from November 01 to December 01, 2016\n\nBy any fair standard, Bursey's selection of reviews & criticism must be counted insightful, wide-ranging, & humane -- a winner, really. Still, I suppose I must own up to being the recipient of his enlightened reading myself. My own SEA-GOD'S HERB is one of the books he considers here. So, there's full disclosure, and it doesn't in any way lessen Bursey's accomplishment. The first word in the book's title alone, CENTRING, conveys something of the book's special qualities: idiosyncratic & yet entirely correct. For example, the long & brainy essay on William Vollman, nothing less than an essential overview, has a scope few critics would risk, looking over a wide of work in prose, perhaps twenty titles all told, & yet it never loses sight of Vollman's bedrock values: his commitment to \""important human problems\"" & to writing that does more than merely make him famous. The same sense of how literature can matter infuses Bursey's series pf briefer reviews of fiction out of his own homeland, Canada. I've never read Chris Eaton, for instance, but Bursey's treatment of his BIOGRAPHY has prompted me to seek out the man's \""much-needed light on the lighthearted North.\"" As for writers out of cultures far different, see, especially, his perspicacious review of César Aria. In claiming \""our complacency is rebutted\"" in Aria, actually Bursey might be speaking of his own sharp yet sensitive interpretations -- booting us out of comfy mindsets, waking us to more challenging pleasures of the text. ~ John Domini, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1870644807"", ""Dec 12, 2016:\n\nJeff Bursey’s Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews\n\nby Alex Good\n\nMany years ago, as a graduate student of English, I was told something about where the discipline was headed by one professionally minded (but not cynical) academic. “You have to be on the margins,” he said. “That’s where the action is. If you’re not on the margins, you’re nowhere.”\n\nBy the margins he meant the space that was becoming exclusively occupied by identity politics. The Dead White Men of the unholy patriarchy were the centre, so being on the margins was the result of having been forcibly marginalized or oppressed. The “action” was all about identifying with minorities and victim groups.\n\nJeff Bursey is a survivor of a graduate English program but the title of this collection of critical writings, Centring the Margins, indicates something very different than a rush to where the action is. For Bursey, the marginal is associated more with aesthetics than politics. At university he was subjected to a conservative curriculum that “reflected staid, English, or with-it taste that would never really upset anyone or anything.” This is what constituted (and perhaps to a large extent still constitutes) the core, the canon, the centre. After an awakening brought about through exposure to the writings of Henry Miller, what Bursey as essayist and reviewer wants to talk about are obscure or neglected figures, writers who seek to innovate, explore, experiment, and challenge readers by daring to be unruly and difficult.\n\nA clear statement of Bursey’s own marginal aesthetic credo, and its rejection of what we might paradoxically refer to as orthodox marginalism (not the same thing as political correctness, but bearing some relation to that label), is laid out in his review of Herb Wyile’s Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature.\n\nWhen it comes to aesthetics, this book resolutely shies away from declaring that a novel is good or bad or inferior. The roaring of those “political, social, and economic” engines largely has drowned out the poetry and the craft of the writers Wyile has chosen. He does a good job elucidating novels and plays (a welcome aspect) on the topics that concern him, but do these books have intrinsic properties that make them Art? The books chosen, or at least some of them, took effort on the part of the writer as he or she fashioned a sentence. By leaving out the aesthetic qualities of the books under consideration, and concentrating on class, race, gender issues, and consumerism, Wyile leaves untouched a pertinent question: If the books aren’t artful, how will they do whatever he wants them to do? They might as well be tracts left to molder on a doorstep. Wyile’s earnestness, coupled with his thesis, tells the reader little about the literary aspect of literature.\n\nBursey’s preferred approach is, in relation to our dominant modes of critical discourse, marginal: it’s basically in line with what John Metcalf dubbed the “aesthetic underground.” This is a method that enjoys no favour in academia or the media today, such practices as close reading and value judgments being now viewed as archaic, misguided, and unworkable. The “literary aspect of literature” is no longer the province of the professional critic.\n\nThis critical marginality is, in turn, addressed to what are – and I say this without prejudice – a number of marginal authors. The titles Bursey reviews here are, for the most part, well outside the mainstream. They are not award winners or books by established, canonical names but more often works in translation and/or the products of small presses. As already noted, Bursey prefers books that challenge, experiment, and take chances rather than those with mass appeal and genial charm. A more poetic approach is commended over the verities of staid realism. Steven Galloway’s Ascension is finally damned for being written in a style of “earnest fidelity” and “flat verbal photographs” that is “all net, no wire,” while Michelle Butler Hallett’s “particular kind of realism” in Double-Blind “is objectionable because it clearly overlooks the more tender aspects of life, and relegates much of the world’s artwork to the ashbin.” Of course realism is a difficult term to pin down, but in insisting on an expansive definition that includes spiritual values, Bursey does no harm.\n\nMany of the names surveyed I freely admit to never having heard of. This isn’t a problem, indeed it might even be considered a good thing, but if Centring the Margins comes up a bit short in anything it’s in not making me want to seek more of them out. While Bursey’s championing of obscure titles performs a valuable critical service, and he is always an insightful and well-expressed advocate, I came away unconvinced that the conceptual author Davis Schneiderman really needs my attention, or that Marja-Liisa Vartio’s The Parson’s Widow would be worth the hard slog Bursey admits it to be. But to each their own. Though often constrained by the limits of the review form (his longer pieces are the best), Bursey does make a respectable case for and against the objects of his attention.\n\nAnother point – that’s again more of a personal response – is that Bursey doesn’t spend more time dealing with Canadian writers and the Canadian literary landscape, and examining the question of where and why Canadian literature rates in his scale of values vis-à-vis the rest of the world. To be fair, Centring the Margins doesn’t attempt an overview of contemporary Canadian writing, so I don’t want to take it to task for being something it never intended to be. That said, Bursey is, as his introductory remarks lay out, very much a product of (in the sense of a reaction against) our home and native cultural environment and its conservative values. Which, I think, is something both ironic and germane to his thesis.\n\nCanadian culture has always had a special relationship with the margins. It begins with the fact that Canada is a marginal country, literally appearing as such on the map: a ribbon of population stretched out along the border with our imperial neighbour. Our cultural productions have been almost by definition marginal, at least in terms of audience and influence, to what has been the dominance of British and then American literature, music, and film both in this country and globally.\n\nWithin Canada, however, we have the phenomenon I’ve already mentioned, orthodox marginalism, with its own critical and cultural establishments. Bursey is, in Canada, a marginal critic. His aesthetic approach is marginal to the identity politics of the academic-media mainstream and his reading interests are marginal, bordering on invisible, to the public taste. It is precisely this that makes him essential. The centre of Canadian culture is a hole being dug to nowhere. Bursey’s criticism isn’t another shovel but a rope.\n\n—A CNQ Web Exclusive, December 2016 ~ Canadian Notes and Queries, http://notesandqueries.ca/reviews/jeff-burseys-centring-the-marginsby-alex-good/"", ""‘Centring The Margins: Essays and Reviews’ by Jeff Bursey\n\nPosted: DECEMBER 5, 2016\n\nReviewed by Spencer Gordon\n\nBook reviews in Canada are, like most literary events in this country, the cause of much conflict and anxiety amongst Canadian writers. Of course, they enjoy the status of “non-events” for just about everyone else.\n\nTo the wider public—readers and non-readers alike—the review is almost never the site of what one might call political or aesthetic urgency. To most folk, books are consumer objects, showcased on Amazon or Indigo, Goodreads or Walmart; they receive colourful reviews from buyers—savage dismissals, glowing endorsements, and everything in between—that help guide happy purchases.\n\nThis sort of ‘review’ has utility: it helps clarify genre, characterize tone and setting, set up expectations. And if you consume only a handful of books per year, your reading time is precious; you want to maximize your chance at satisfaction. One might therefore argue that a bad book (or a misleading book, a challenging or disappointing book, or however else one might define ‘bad’) is even more egregious to the non-engaged than to the active critic, who might learn from its errors, or at least be entertained by its failure. Truly bad books are painful and hilarious—but not if you’re reading only five titles per year.\n\nFor the rest of us, here in our drippy dungeon of critics and writers and publishers, the review as criticism is perennially considered to be in a delicate, if not parlous, state—if books mean everything to us, then so too do reviews, even as none of us can make a career from reviewing, and even as reviews have a doubtful correlation with book sales or publishing contracts or “reality.”\n\nUltimately, we review for each other. We write for, or against, our friends and adversaries, imagined and otherwise. We write to be heard; we write for ourselves. Even if arguments about cultural service and public integrity grow ever more meaningless, we want our own homes in order. So we draw up battle lines and take to the field with our own flag—and sometimes several at once.\n\nFor groups like CWILA (Canadian Women in the Literary Arts) and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, quite legitimately, reviews are emblematic of wider problems of stark gender and racial imbalance in North American publishing (i.e., straight white cisgender males dominate the scant column spaces of our magazines, more predominantly review the works of other straight white cisgender males, and thereby exclude, intentionally or not, a huge swath of books produced in this country). Everything is political, after all. There is no pure space for reviews—and whom we choose to write about can have enormous consequences for the equity and agency of our writers.\n\nFor others, book reviews are too often instances of glad-handing or back-scratching (or whatever grody word best sums up the act). The gist being: the Canadian literary community is so enclosed that impartiality is pretty much impossible. We put one another over—to use a term lifted from pro-wrestling—in order to receive the same benefit down the road. A negative review means a torched bridge, a lost opportunity, even a severed friendship—and these acts can have real social and financial fallouts (though let’s be honest: nobody’s banking any real money unless your name is Atwood or Boyden).\n\nThis very common critique bemoans the over-the-top positivity of book reviews and the bland puff-pastry that tries to pass as a negative take. In response, advocates argue, we should cultivate more rigorous analytic vocabularies, and expect the highest from our writers; we should have pure critics who are not, in fact, also small press poets and fiction-writers with stakes in the game; and we should treat dishonesty as betrayal.\n\nStill others insist that the negative review harms more than it heals. A glowing review is so much more empowered by passion, wit, and gusto than a negative or half-hearted summation. As there are no pure spaces, and as there is no objectivity in criticism, the negative review reveals so much more about the critic than it does the work: it brings forward what they feel, not what the writer did or didn’t do.\n\nAn endorsement—passionate engagement—is like the light and melodious sound of genuine dialogue, these advocates insist. Besides, the stakes are so pitifully low in publishing that savaging a book of poetry that, say, sells a few hundred copies at most is akin to picking on the runt of the litter. It’s unsocial, unbecoming. Books that may appear popular are still at the bottom of the food chain in terms of cultural power. Why fill our dwindling and marginal spaces with even more vitriol and disgust? Why not bring to bear the higher powers of our intellect and celebrate the shinier exemplars of our craft? Ultimately, negativity is boring. As LMFAO once quipped, “Hate is bad.”\n\nAnother routine complaint, easily backed up, is that book reviews are given far too little space in magazines and newspapers to offer meaningful commentary. A 400-word review does next to nothing—especially when it’s obligated to digest and report 400 pages of plot (it does something, of course; it might serve as a blurb, an ego-stroke, a publishing credit, or a middle finger—but it’s just not criticism). Digital publishing should have solved this dilemma, as online magazines don’t have the page and column restrictions of print publications. But even on the web, it’s rare to encounter involved, long-form reviews—lack of remuneration for the reviewer, a lack of interest on the part of editors, a fear of dwindling attention spans, and other sundry forces conspire to make online reviews often as short and futile as their print-only counterparts.\n\nThere are more complaints, surely—the cliché “praise-criticism-praise” formula (a kind of digestible sandwich that can accommodate any book); the frequent barb against Canadian critics that we’re just too damn navel-gazing to reflect upon global trends and patterns. But let’s set these aside for now. Let’s turn to the issue that’s most vital and personal to Jeff Bursey, author at hand, whose collection Centring the Margins sets its scope on another persistent problem—with not so much how or who, but what we choose to review.\n\n***\n\nAnd that is: the books that receive the lion’s share of critical attention in Canada—negative, positive, or otherwise—are all part of a generic and aesthetic majority that few of us accept as total and fewer know how to combat. These works of fiction (we can’t talk about poetry the same way, though some have tried) are what you might call works of conventional narrative, wherein storytelling, linearity, recognizable structures, and other conservative devices are used to denote “realism” (‘realistic’ characters, with convincing dialogue, relatable motivations, and familiar backgrounds). And they fit into the average reader’s expectations of plot and revelation without too many hiccups along the way.\n\nConventional realism, applied in a literary context, or to science fiction or romance or horror or whatever, is the sole genre that makes money—that should be obvious. But literary realism also dominates the longlists of all our major awards. Every Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning book, and almost every book on each year’s shortlist, has been a “tale well told.” Some have been genuinely fantastic novels, of course. But regardless of their narrative power, theme, tonal register or emotional terrain, they have been works of conventional realism. The same goes for the Governor General’s Awards, the Man Booker, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Awards, smaller prizes like Ontario’s Trillium, and our annual media blitz, CBC Canada Reads. And prizes generate publicity and income—limited as it all is—so periodicals aren’t foolish enough to pass up running reviews and features of these books in their pages.\n\nBut the implicit suggestion, from all that money and prestige, and all those awards, and all that column space, is that conventional, late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century storytelling is the only underlying denominator for quality in literature, according to the agents who bestow power. Prizes and reviews go to realism, because works of realism “supposedly matter more,” to quote Jeff Bursey; it’s the only worthwhile, the only serious genre. Period.\n\nFor Bursey, this mostly unspoken preference for one kind of writing is devastating: to students, to readers, and to writers of all stripes. His reflections on the topic are peppered throughout the 30 reviews found in Centring the Margins—all published between 2001 and 2014, in places like American Book Review, Books in Canada, Literary Review, and here, The Winnipeg Review—but are most eloquently stated in an introduction that both foregrounds the pieces and articulates his critical philosophy.\n\nThis ten page preface is the most inspiring and memorable part of the collection—not to suggest that I didn’t enjoy the reviews themselves, or Bursey’s candour and sophistication. It is, I suppose, simply invigorating to read about a topic that so few of us can meaningfully grapple with. How can we discover, let alone champion or emulate, books that are ignored—even by the meager spheres of power that deign to engage with literature? These are works ignored within a cultural sphere that’s already ignored by the wider world. So what of books that receive little to zero attention in print or online; books that never appear on radio or television, and hardly ever appear in Chapters or Indigo? Books that, as Bursey writes, “have a hard time getting published” to begin with? How to promote on behalf of the overlooked and crooked, the unread and underrated—weirder and more challenging, more aesthetically daunting stories and novels? Books that defy classification within one genre—books that attempt to further the dialogue about where art is and where it’s come from?\n\nCentring the Margins is Bursey’s attempt to do so, at any rate. As a reviewer, he sets to his task “with the explorers and the unruly in mind.” While wary of critical apparati, political projects, and other organizational tools, he does “take on the role of the advocate” for texts he feels “require defending”—the works that “deserve to be brought to the attention of others” because “they would not be featured in the national newspapers or even in specialized publications when they had every right to be there.”\n\nIn other words, Bursey focuses on innovative texts, which he calls “exploratory”—a word with a wonderful freshness to it, and stripped of the negative connotations of the term “experimental.” And he does so for two principle reasons: to share works that might otherwise go unnoticed, and to counter a prevailing, condescending attitude amongst the writers and agents who directly benefit from the fact that only conservative approaches will ever receive admiration and power.\n\nFor the first cause, Bursey is a commendable campaigner, driven by “an erratic compulsion to educate the public, as well as to counter the forests of press devoted to the Dan Browns and Alice Munros who are always with us.” He embodies the role of the devoted, the evangelical, often with reference to personal discoveries and life-altering encounters with literature: chance meetings with figures like Henry Miller, who seemed to have swept in and rescued his ho-hum existence as a student at a conservative institution. “We need more pamphleteers for writers we believe in who are not seen much by the general audience to bring them into visibility,” he writes, “not because these authors need us (though they might) but because we need these authors who explore new terrain with equipment of their own devising.”\n\nLet’s be clear: it’s not that we should force readers into appreciating divergent literature—all purveyors and writers of such work know, quite intimately, that no money or prestige can come from it. Bursey is worldly enough to understand that foisting challenging material upon a casual reader, or one with clearly defined tastes, is never going to work. “For those who want good manners there’s no shortage of books to choose from,” he writes. “I don’t deny the mainstream authors their audience.” And no—it’s also not to have weirder books start eating up prizes, or climbing bestseller lists, as if that were ever possible. These constructions were made to perpetuate power, as bluntly as ever.\n\nWhat it is all about is offering alternatives, opening doors, and changing lives—or at least creating opportunities to do so. And so, who does Bursey feature? He goes far afield, aesthetically, in his assessment of works from beyond our borders—books like Davis Schneiderman’s [SIC], William T. Vollmann’s Expelled from Eden, Gilbert Sorrentino’s The Abyss of Human Illusion, Alexandra Chasin’s Kissed By, César Aire’s Shantytown, or William Gaddis’s Agapē Agape. Indeed, it’s his self-described “panorama” of texts from global writers that really seems to have something urgent to say: a refreshing counterpoint to our renowned insularity, a crusading effort to bring more Canadian eyes to international, and truly innovative, texts. Most Canadian writers, I would imagine, are not familiar with Blaise Cendrars, Mati Unt, Ornela Vorpsi, and other names—and bringing these to our attention in 2016 can only mean unique pathways and opened avenues for new, potentially life-long readers and artists.\n\nFrom Canada, Bursey turns to Chris Eaton’s Chris Eaton: A Biography, S.D. Chrostowska’s Permission, Michelle Butler Hallet’s Double-Blind, Chris Benjamin’s Drive-By Saviours, Jessica Westhead’s And Also Sharks, Steven Galloway’s Ascension, and Rebecca Rosenblum’s The Big Dream. Here, the engaged reader will note a considerable pivot from Bursey’s international cohort. Not all of these books line up with his stated mission to illuminate the exploratory—Permission and Chris Eaton: A Biography, surely, but the rest?\n\nA major missed opportunity, I think, to engage with genuinely experimental texts, as difficult to find here in the north as they are. This might not be totally Bursey’s fault, though—as Russell Smith and many others have argued, there’s little debate about experimental fiction in Canada. (Like, is ‘experimental’ even a word anymore?) All major conversations about fiction are constrained to the boundaries of conservative realism—they’re just divided along the lines of tone, content and theme, or to biographical reference to the author (i.e., is your realist novel about the prairies, the immigrant experience? Is your realist novel kind of, like, poverty porn, or is it about big city dwellers on their smartphones? How much money did your family make, growing up? Did you go to school? Are you writing a realist novel as a person of colour, trying to translate your individual experience, or are you just another white guy from an MFA?). It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a Canadian Padgett Powell, Lydia Davis, David Foster Wallace, Eimear McBride, Ben Marcus, Giannina Braschi, or even George Saunders. As Christian Bök has argued, post-modernism barely happened here—the 60s, 70s and 80s novelists we tend to associate with the term are actually modernists, and our real post-modern writers have been systematically buried by academics and the mainstream press.\n\nSo, we’re impoverished, sure. But where was Lynn Crosbie or Tony Burgess in Bursey’s survey? How about Lance Blomgren or Ken Sparling? Barry Webster, rob mclennan, Sheila Heti, Derek McCormack, Tim Conley, Joey Comeau, or Nathaniel G. Moore? Nelly Arcan, Michael Blouin, Ian Williams, Tamara Faith Berger, or Jacob Wren? Even Zsuzsi Gartner and Douglas Glover seem to offer more variety, more elasticity of form and voice, than most of the CanLit Bursey actually reviews.\n\nThroughout Centring the Margins, the word “overlooked” thus also applies to out-of-the-way, mostly ignored titles, with relatively limited print runs—not merely the books that attempt ambitious feats with prose. But this distinction is kind of confusing, too. Westhead’s And Also Sharks was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award, listed as a Globe and Mail best book, one of Kobo’s best e-books, and, from what I can tell, received praise in all of our major newspapers and outlets. It’s a good book—but overlooked? Steven Galloway is, I believe, a semi-household name (now more than ever for his disturbing tenure at the UBC)—so why include a review of Ascension? Though Bursey eviscerates it—a precise and well-deserved take-down for a bad book—adding to the word-hoard heaped at Galloway’s feet doesn’t seem to solve the problems the author ostensibly set out to solve.\n\nOn another note of discord, I’m not sure I agree with Bursey on the notion that weirder materials “have every right to be” featured in newspapers and magazines (or ceremonies, for that matter); this assertion seems simplistic, and unaware of the reasons why the books were rejected in the first place. And no—I don’t believe the sterling, representative author of exploratory texts “deserves a wider audience,” as he states. We as authors deserve the audiences we find ourselves coupled with: if they are tiny and devoted, ignored by capital, then a sudden visit from money and mass appeal isn’t what we deserve out of some ethical reparation. We deserve, in the end, the people who like us, and that’s all. I think a mass audience for an experimental writer might be their doom. And I think Bursey knows this, too, and falls into the “deserves a wider audience” line as we all invariably fall into cliché now and then. In fact, he quotes Gilbert Sorrentino as saying, quite rightly, that “Essentially, the novelist, the serious novelist, should do what he can do and simply forgo the idea of a substantial audience”—which is a much healthier perspective for anyone in the process of banging their head on the altar of praise.\n\n* * *\n\nLet’s move on to Bursey’s second campaign, tied intimately to the first—a more polemical rebuttal to dismissals of exploratory writing, stemming not from your average “Heather’s Picks” reader, but from those in positions of authorial and critical responsibility. And this, far from setting me up for disappointment by failing to engage with what’s truly rotten in Canada, manages to bracket my full attention.\n\nBursey begins his argument by quoting Writers’ Trust judge and award-winning writer Rabindranath Maharaj, whose description of the 2011 shortlist is included below:\n\n… what these writers have done and what they’re doing is they’re very quietly innovative without drawing attention to their innovation. And they’re innovative in the sense that their books are more accessible—it’s more reader-friendly in many ways … The elements of good storytelling are still there.\n\nGiven the imprecise foolishness of the quotation, it’s fun to watch Bursey launch into a very entertaining and almost painfully true rebuttal—against a lazy, half-baked connection between quality in literature and the all-redeeming factor of “good storytelling.” Innovation, as Maharaj seems to be saying, should come second, and only second, to “more accessible” and more “reader-friendly” stories. Innovation, if it must be employed at all, should go quietly; it should bow its head meekly, and submit to what all discerning readers (and juries) actually want, don’t you know—a tale well told, with all the hallmarks of the old-fashioned yarn, or the “old, preserved cherry,” as Bursey puts it. “Drawing attention” to innovation is akin to an embarrassing display—a misguided flash of showy, impudent skin. It alienates the gentle and polite reader, and that equals immediate artistic (and commercial) failure—even exile. Given this prescription, it’s a wonder why you’d seek out ‘innovation’ at all. When it’s “sometimes considered not art but an affront,” why would anyone bother?\n\nBursey illuminates the unthinking elitism on display—the subtle appeal to populism that writers of prestige often employ to justify their success. The preference for reader-friendly, unchallenging narratives—for Maharaj, for awards jurists, and for others—“can be interpreted as a chiding dismissal of those who aim to write something unusual,” Bursey writes. “He [Maharaj] is saying that innovative (Canadian) writers who are too upfront and pushy about their work should dial it down, on the way to knocking it off entirely.” The insinuation is there, too, that exploratory writers are simply failed realists, “as if the style and structure got in the way of the only important thing: the story.”\n\nThe sentiment shouldn’t be too alien to us—we’ve heard it before in debates (the classic Marcus vs. Franzen fracas comes to mind), witnessed the eye-rolls, and watched the writers granted a measure of mainstream success gather round one another at the wine-breath ceremonies, at the dress-up galas, on the big box bookshelves, as well as in open letters. And Bursey finds enough support from other writers who’ve intuited the same. He invokes Josipovici’s jest that “reviewers view experimental writing as ‘a sub-branch of fiction, rather like teenage romances or science fiction,’” and Gilbert Sorrentino’s jibe that, to most mainstream reviewers, the word ‘experimental’ is a “euphemism for that work which cannot be called serious.” Much like comedy, experimentalism is the greasy, mutant, fish-head-eating brother in the attic of lit.\n\nSo what to do to counteract this bias? For critics, it’s again to spotlight neglected work—but here invigorated with the mission of creating a world for others to inhabit. To say, yes: other worlds do exist, reserved and waiting for those who might bristle against cookie-cutter, consumable, pleasing artifacts—the shit that makes all the money. And authors should own their own exile, rather than get angry and jelly; they should turn their sense of inferiority into a weapon they can wield without mercy, with jouissance and gaiety (or as much jouissance and gaiety as your average Canadian writer can muster—I mean, really). In an exhortation and encouragement to artists, Bursey quotes the critic Warren Mott, who states that we “can take the notion that we inhabit the margins of things and turn it to our advantage.” We can imagine exile as something that “frees us and expands our horizon of possibility.”\n\nThis impassioned opening gives the reviews throughout Centring the Margins a more electric imperative—a reason for being, and an importance beyond the joys of writing criticism in an imagined vacuum. It should make all of us pause, at least, and re-assess how we imagine our fields of power and hierarchies to be arranged. Bursey puts it best, though, so I’ll leave the last word on the subject to him:\n\n“Stepping away from the regular formulas alarms those who think that this act means a writer is not being realistic (as if we could all agree on what’s real). If writers are encouraged to create versions of the world in whatever fashion they choose—and some versions may take work to decipher—then there can only be anarchy, in their minds. To write against the order—against corporatism, bland politeness, and muted approaches—is now to be reader-unfriendly.”\n\n* * *\n\nAs for the reviews themselves—they are quite good. Bursey can put on a clinic for aspiring writers looking to balance plot summary (a necessary evil when reviewing prose) with substantive evaluation. He translates his empathies and hesitations in clear language, imparts the historic context of authors and their texts, and often relates the conflicts inherent in fiction to our real-world political and cultural climate. His love for writers like Solzhenitsyn or Sorrentino is glowing, obvious—it is, like all good critical writing, affecting. He is an excellent teacher—he makes fiction sound like the most important thing.\n\nMost gratifying is Bursey’s impulse to look at syntax: words and sentences themselves. It’s a surprise to me to read so many reviews of fiction that skip past sentence structure—after all, words and punctuation are the medium, the LEGO blocks of our prose castles. Beyond subject matter, it’s what separates a Madeleine Thien from a Cormac McCarthy, an Amy Hempel from a Ta-Nehisi Coates. Yet so many reviewers, working for high-profile publications, overlook the nuts and bolts of sentences—as if pausing to savour or critique a mellifluous or deadening line were a dilettante’s distractions, mere obstacles to getting to the only thing that matters.\n\nAnd what’s that supposed to be again? The story? What happens, and in what order? It seems like ignoring how prose sounds and is structured, in the wake of Bursey’s introductory jousts, seems all the more an act of unconscious complicity with that elite preference (masquerading as simplicity) for story alone. Looking closely at the prose—whether “fluid” or in “magazine speak,” “lecturing” or with a “tin ear,” “measured in tone” or, as almost no prose reviewer today dares to write, demonstrating “fluid breath control,” thank you Mr. Bursey!—is crucial to knowing if, and how, a book works. All great fiction needs to “succeed at the level of the line,” he writes—and it’s with great admiration that I read his enthusiastic tackling of that indispensible element.\n\nNot all reviews and reviewers can please everyone, though—and perhaps we should return to our earlier list, by no means exhaustive, of common complaints with reviews to see how Bursey may or may not live up to expectations.\n\nHis pieces do lean toward the almost unanimously positive—and when he does offer some criticism, it’s usually fairly gentle. I don’t begrudge him this; balance and caution are often signs of acumen. And he does include some extremely short—nearly ‘hot’—takes on books: reviews so truncated as to offer little more than a cursory plot recap and some elementary criticism. Why these couldn’t be expanded in a full-length collection goes unanswered. These snapshots seem even more inadequate when placed beside his longer essays on Solzhenitsyn, Vollmann, or Wyile, which manage to breathe and range, seem like self-contained works of art themselves, and even allow several opportunities for self-reflection and personal anecdote. A more engaged editor would have helped Bursey come to this conclusion— I’m looking at you, Zero Books!\n\nBursey would also fail a CWILA count, flat-out. Out of the 30 reviews included, only eight are dedicated to women. Furthermore, only César Aire, Argentinean, might be considered a person of colour—the rest are “white” Canadians, Americans, and Europeans. For a book to emerge in 2015 so blissfully unaware of what we need from collections of criticism is kind of mind boggling, to be honest. I’m not trying to throw stones from glass houses—my own record is poor, and here I am reviewing the work of another white dude. But I don’t call myself a critic, won’t be publishing a collection of reviews dedicated to “neglected, obscure, or … difficult” writers. And it’s up to all of us to try to do better, even if that means taking someone else to task.\n\n“In a sense,” Bursey writes, “these reviews incorporate my failures, and hopefully a fruitful kind that encourages other critics to be more successful.” We can’t hold any critic up as a paragon for everyone. We should also feel fortunate enough to have as sensitive, erudite, and caring a critic as we do in Jeff Bursey. I was not aware of his work as a reviewer or novelist before reading Centring the Margins, but in doing so, I feel as though I’ve been gifted the discovery of another compelling voice—and another key. Reading this book has opened another doorway into my own practice. And for that I am grateful, emboldened, and buoyed: to write reviews no one will care about; to be ignored, if necessary; and to make art with no fucks given.\n\nZero Books | 200 pages | $29.95 | paper | ISBN# 978-1785354007 ~ Spencer Gordon, The Winnipeg Review"", ""Published on November 12, 2016\n\nCentring the Margins: Essays and Reviews\n\nBy Jeff Bursey\n\nZero Books\n\n190 pages; $22.95\n\n“Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews” is another non-fiction collection, and again a highly specialized selection. Jeff Bursey is a deft and engaged critic, and these reviews cross genres and span a decade or more.\n\nThey include “John Domini, The Sea-Gods’ Herb: Essays and Criticism, 1975–2014” and “Ornela Vorspi, The Country Where No One Ever Dies.”\n\nThe somewhat esoteric material is written by a reader with a sharply observant eye and wry voice: “In 1986 (British literary theorist) Terry Eagleton gave what was called the Pratt lecture at MUN. Dressed in a loose-fitting, or possibly sagging, cardigan seemingly made from oatmeal or at least that colour, Eagleton spoke at length, in dry tones, no affectation of style or vocal modulation permitted, on ‘the End of English.’”\n\nBursey to Eagleton: not so fast.\n\nJoan Sullivan is editor of Newfoundland Quarterly magazine. She reviews both fiction and non-fiction for The Telegram. ~ Joan Sullivan, http://www.thetelegram.com/living/2016/11/11/almanac-records-womens-voices-stories-4684452.html"", ""Sep 28, 2016\n\nflowerville rated it really liked it\n\ndisclaimer 1.: i’m a continental academic foreigner not primarily operating in english, who is almost all the time well baffled by the stuff that goes on in the anglosaxian literary world; & as someone who’s always indiscriminately read everything i have a hard time getting my head round all those positions, genres and things. those books like bursey’s are written in a culturally different background and as an outsider to those debates the literary crusades going on in there aren’t mine. re the great modernism vs third person omniscient divide bursey is firmly on the josipovici kind of side.\n\nthat said, i got something out of the book, i like the stuff underneath the crusades.\n\nproblem/bafflement 1.: where’s the obscure stuff? book is announced as containing crazy difficult and obscure writers with the goal of bringing the margins/marginalized writers to the centre. yet none of the writers reviewed was unknown to me (as in i heard the name before) and i’ve probably read about 2 thirds of them.\n\nthat said, the principle of the insights coming from the margins is one i heartily agree with.\n\nproblem 2.: the number of books by female writers (not quite a third) reviewed is nothing to write home about.\n\nthe book is embraced by a preface and postface outlining the ! author’s intentions ! - methodically the book is in the szondi tradition (although szondi is not invoked by bursey), immanent criticism, in bursey’s very own words:\n\n“There is no theoretical apparatus underlying the approach taken herein, as each book, to my way of thinking, requires its own approach, if you want to view them as artworks and not treat them as exemplars of this or that critical discourse.”\n\nin the postface bursey writes the following: \""The opinions expressed may be agreed with or termed uninteresting or rebarbative, but in any event they are meant to spark discussion as to what the author meant, what he or she achieved, and what transpired within me on first reading. Never perceived as the final word, they invite a long and wide-ranging conversation. Nor were the reviews written with the daft notion of capturing everything that resides in a work of art. As Eric Ormsby wrote, “if the work is truly good, something will always elude our analysis.” In a sense, these reviews incorporate my failures, and hopefully a fruitful kind that encourages other critics to be more successful.”\n\ni entirely concur with those reviewing principles outlined by bursey, i’ve always thought this is how it should be done and this is also how it is done by bursey, the book is in the foreground, it is looked at according to its own merits, there is lots close reading of the book (within whatever space allows), accompanied by ‘secondary literature’, a good mixture of detail and ‘grand overview’ - balanced viewpoints, calm reasoning, the books are read in good faith and discussed fairly.\n\nthere’s always stuff that escapes, some due to space constraints, some due to the very nature of art itself and that means that the conversation is never finished. bursey’s insistence on there being no final word in those reviews is a sign of theoretical humbleness, and also necessary humbleness that is at the same time a kind of generosity. one could say there are two worldviews, one assumes to know everything and that everything can be known and another worldview that allows some space for something else, whatever that is. this openness is the thing, for the books to come alive again in reading, in reviewing and in escaping again, just for it, the book (and bursey’s reviews, in this case), to welcome you on a different page all the same.\n\nbursey’s reviews are nice to read, friendly, sincere, engaging and make one think. his reviews approachable not in the sense as in cringy, but as in: hang on, i need to look this up and there one goes, starts reading and is immediately drawn into the longlong unending conversation of literature. approaching as in looking: what is this book really, what is it about. like, walking round it and looking at it from all angles with wonder and depth, and the aim to do justice to it, to its failings and achievements, approaching them in equal measure. in this sense, the last paragraph of the last review (aira) is very apt.\n\nall in all i prefer the longer reviews, especially the one about the letters between cowper powys & dorothy richardson.\n\ndisclaimer 2.: mr bursey positively reviewed a book (mr mitchelmore’s this space of writing) to which i supplied the coverimage. ~ flowerville, Goodreads"", ""https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1575026258?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1\n\n+ + + +\n\nRead from July 04 to 06, 2016\n\nMy reading choices don't so much go against the popular taste as pass it by. --Jeff Bursey\n\nSo immediately you see the affinity.\n\nJeff Bursey is a gr=Friend of mine and I've read both his two novels and loved them*. So everything that follows, you'll know, is a lie.\n\nWhat's convenient here is that if any little thing interests you in even the slightest regarding what I say about Bursey and his book reviewing and book commentatoring, you can head off into the vast range of the internetz, via this link :: Jeff Bursey ;; and click into his gr=reviews where you'll likely be linked to the on-line publication of some of his thoughts on books. And there's good reason to do so ; you've never even heard of most of these things he reviews. [I had fun these past few days Liking his Reviews into your Feeds, so you know you'll have seen these titles and names at least once in your life].\n\nJust listen (I mean to say, this is the kind of issue Bursey's reviews are likely to address ; it's not about some nit's feelings being hurt when a critic disparages her favorite YA novel, but rather addresses the question of a POVERTY OF LITERARY KNOWLEDGE) ::\n\nBut there is a bottomless chasm . . . no, that's not a very nice image . . . An endless horizon? A galaxy of literary stars? All these influential books and writers I've not only never read, I've NEVER HEARD OF. And when I do learn of someone, I'm all WHY has no one mentioned him/her before? Was I just not listening? --an innocent=anonymous gr'r\n\nBecause really who needs to \""debate\"" whether the latest breast=seller, noble=winner, N=Basketcase=A winner is good or not and whether 'good' is subjective or not when we are faced with the very real and very objective question whether Reader X has even had the opportunity to have heard the name Rikki Ducornet (my example) even once in her life? Frankly, Donna Tartt and her ilk can continue to take flying=friggin' leaps so long as millions of voracious readers have not even once in their lifetime even had the chance to have heard the names Marguerite Young and Dorothy Richardson (again, my examples).\n\nSo then this is where Bursey comes in. He's doing what I think any serious book reviewer ought to do. Talk about books that deserve to be spoken of, to be read, to be dissemination but which are ignored almost entirely by the machine. Today, right now on gr among this little Corner Collective of readers of the experimental and exploratory (Bursey's better term) it sounds out=right damn'd silly to speak of no one never having heard the names William T. Vollmann or William Gaddis or Joseph McElroy or Blaise Cendrars or Gilbert Sorrentino or Cesar Aira. But truly folks, in the spirit of Bearing Honest Witness, this was my state a mere ten years ago ; and I came from a literary education, from a clique that read books, serious books, and literary books. What any serious book reviewer ought to do is WIELD that mighty SPADE in the name of righteous indignation that so many longing and lovely readers are being denied the knowledge of the existence of books they're gunna fall in love with and spend their life with. And, folks, I've seen it happen again and again and again and again.\n\nAt any rate, let's do the list -- I challenge you to look at the numbers and you'll see what I'm talking about. [Bursey doesn't advocate on behalf of each and every author/book listed below because too he's astute and evenhanded of a reviewer for that ;; but when he does advocate you'll want to pay attention because his aesthetics=dar is well tuned as witness those names in the previous paragraph] ::\n\nDavis Schneiderman\n\nJohn Domini (he's here around these gr=parts)\n\nHerb Wyile\n\nBill\n\nSolzhenitsyn (the only name here I'd expect a general readership to have acquaintance with)\n\n[followed by some Canadian names that are not Munro or Atwood because Canada's bigger than that]\n\nRebecca Rosenblum\n\nSteven Galloway\n\nJessica Westhead\n\nChris Benjamin\n\nMichelle Butler Hallett\n\nS.D. Chrostowska (again in the spirit of Bearing Honest Witness I can Testify to the value and accuracy of Bursey's recommendations. Permission should not be missed and I'm looking forward to Matches: A Light Book)\n\nChris Easton\n\n[some more stuff follows the ToC heading \""Realism and Suffering\""]\n\nMarja-Liisa Vartio\n\nRobert Newman\n\nLarry Fondation\n\nHans Erich Nossack\n\nJoseph Roth\n\nOrnela Vorpsi\n\nSam Savage\n\nMichelle Latiolais\n\n[and the last section where it really kicks into Pay=Attention=Bursey=Is=Speaking territory ;; ie, \""Outliers, Innovators, and Explorers\""]\n\nBlaise Cendrars (a Bursey staple)\n\nWilliam Gaddis (I think this is where Bursey and I first met due to an amazon rec that went from Gaddis ---> Verbatim: A Novel)\n\nJohn Cowper Powys & Dorothy Richardson, their letters\n\nGilbert Sorrentino (seeing this name in a context like this means that the person speaking/etc is serious)\n\nMat Unt -- Estonian stuff, if you can believe it.\n\nJoseph McElroy (should be named every time you make a list like Joyce, Proust, Woolf)\n\nJean-Philippe Toussaint\n\nAlexandra Chasin\n\nMarek Waldorf\n\nCesar Aira\n\nFor your pleasure ::\n\nBursey's interview with Steven Moore\n\nhttp://www.musicandliterature.org/fea...\n\nLots more Bursey at http://www.jeffbursey.com/ which provides, among however many more reviews, a youtube of a reading that'll bind-your-spell.\n\nAnd here's where to get the book presently under consideration ::\n\nhttp://www.zero-books.net/books/centr...\n\n* He's about as good as Evan Dara and even twice as obscure/unread. Hell, he's Gaddis=good! ~ Nathan 'N.R.\"" Gaddis, Goodreads"", ""https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1943696742\n\n5-star review\n\nAddressing widespread resistance to William Gaddis’s books, to his so-called difficult fiction, Jeff Bursey writes: “[A]ll that’s required is patience and an active participation of a reader.” Bursey is just such a patient and actively participating reader, repeatedly demonstrating these qualities to marvelous effect in his criticism. Centring the Margins is the perfect title for this smart, generous, empathetic book, Bursey privileging writers writing against convention, against the mainstream, writers like César Aira, Alexandra Chasin, Joseph McElroy, Sam Savage, Davis Schneiderman, Gilbert Sorrentino, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Mati Unt, William T. Vollmann, and many more besides. Bursey also engages a number of fellow critics, like Marcelo Ballvé, John Domini, and Scott Esposito, whose thoughts largely align with his own, as well as critics with whom he disagrees, that is, disparate voices, not to mention the voice of the author of whichever text or texts are under scrutiny, all of which makes for an expansive, almost democratic conversation. That said, Bursey’s analyses and conclusions set him apart, distinguish him as a singular critic, one who balances aesthetics and politics, one as equally enamored of artful sentences as of playful disruptions of narrative form. Over and over again, Bursey succeeds in bringing deserving but largely unknown writers to greater visibility, effectively demonstrating that, as he writes, “we need these authors who explore new terrain with equipment of their own devising.” Concomitantly, we need critics like Jeff Bursey, who seek out and engagingly write about writers outside of the margins: writers from small presses, writers-in-translation, the many un- and under-recognized “Outliers, Innovators, and Explorers” (the title of one of the book’s sections). ~ John Madera, Goodreads"", ""2 May 2017\n\nhttps://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1930796343\n\nI love the way Bursey reviews these books. There are many writers he expresses a certain reverence for, even as he points out the occasional flaw. William T. Vollmann stands out in my mind, what with Bursey's in-depth review of a Vollmann reader.\n\nBut what is even more resonant with me than Bursey's passion, is that much of his analysis hones in, intentionally or not, on theme, on the ideas a work raises or deals with, the very things that make the stories matter. To me, it's less the obscurity or even originality of a work that gets me, it's what it says. And to say something, anything, a book has to have a good way with words. Its structure may be unusual, daring and innovative. But it succeeds most when it has some insight on the world, perhaps an ability to instill in me sympathy for those I hadn't considered before.\n\nBursey's criticism covers that thematic ground very well, to the point I feel I've read some of the books I actually haven't. The downside: my already cumbersome to-read list has gotten considerably longer. But whether I ever get to them all or not (surely I won't, because it always grows), this kind of review and analysis of books is in itself a pleasurable read, itself saturated with ideas and perspectives about the world we live in, the people who inhabit it, and the way we have been, are and may be in the future. It is an homage to reading itself, and why it is such a privilege and delight to have this power.\n\nAnd I should note that there are other kinds of literary criticism that don't accomplish this. They either move too quickly to conclusions, remain mired in plot summary, or obsess over details of technique without moving to the bigger picture. I found CtM nicely balanced discussions of technique without forgetting why technique (and a willingness to break formula) matters. ~ Chris Benjamin, Goodreads"", ""For years I've been reading Jeff Bursey's well-informed, well-written reviews whenever I see them, and I welcome the opportunity to catch up on all of the ones I've missed, and to see my favorites preserved in permanent form. Bursey brings to each review or essay a wide background in modern literature, an honest effort to understand an author's intentions and aesthetics, and a generosity of judgment, always finding more to praise in an author than to censure. I've picked up several books he has recommended over the years, for I've learned to trust his taste, and even those I passed over left me better informed, for he often focuses not on the big authors that are reviewed everywhere, but on the fascinating innovators who are reviewed hardly anywhere. Bursey's collection is a first-rate guide to some of the most interesting fiction and criticism written in the 21st century. ~ Steven Moore, author of The Novel: An Alternative History"", ""Jeff Bursey is a writer’s reviewer. He comprehends the mechanics of fiction and the artistry of the novel, and his reviews reflect this understanding and this fascination. Bursey highlights why a book matters, why a reader should read it (or not), and elucidates how the author was able to craft the book – giving readers more than a critique but also a reason to read. ~ Christopher WunderLee, author of Moore's Mythopoeia and The Loony"", ""In Jeff Bursey’s reviews, not only do we learn about books and meet authors we might not normally come across, but we are given a unique perspective on the work itself. Bursey’s penchant for subversive literature that blazes its own path heralds a fresh voice in the world of literary criticism, one that champions in-depth analysis and erudite commentary. More than mere reviews, these are signposts for those who want to be challenged in their reading material.\n\n~ Steven Mayoff, author of Our Lady Of Steerage and Fatted Calf Blues, winner of the PEI Book Award for Fiction"", ""Nobody would accuse Jeff Bursey of being lax in his demands on literature. In much of his book reviewing and other literary criticism … Bursey argues vehemently against a prescriptive approach to fiction. He trumpets the elasticity of form; he challenges his fellow novelists to eschew tried-and-true strictures on structure; he shames those who take a paint-by-colours approach to characterization; he begs us to embrace experimentation in the truest sense of the term. ~ Mark Sampson, author of Sad Peninsula and The Secrets Men Keep, http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2015/08/14/small-city-chatter-review-of-jeff-burseys-mirrors-on-which-dust-has-fallen-mark-sampson/"", ""As an essayist and book reviewer, Jeff Bursey travels the intellectual globe of fiction and comes back with original, even exotic observations. He is not a me-too commentator for experimental work, nor does he dress up the latest historical romance as literature. Instead he celebrates the genuine, the artists who don’t even see the box that others try to think outside. ~ Maurice Mierau, author of Detachment: An Adoption Memoir"", ""Insightful, yes, but also inciting: Bursey's reviews make me think. The reader is no passive consumer as Bursey brings together diverse ideas and nuanced criticism in a singular voice. ~ Michelle Butler Hallett, author of The shadow side of grace, Double-blind, Sky Waves, deluded your sailors, and the forthcoming This Marlowe"", ""Jeff Bursey is a highly astute literary critic. What I particularly appreciate about his reviews is the marriage of lucid thought, careful attention to detail and genuine heartfelt vision that goes into his work. Here's someone who is passionate about literature - what it can do for us and how it should be. ~ Victoria Best, author of An Introduction to Twentieth Century French Literature and co-editor of Shiny New Books"", ""Jeff Bursey has distinguished himself for reading books deeply, trying to figure out what makes them tick and then telling this story to the reader. In an age of superficial criticism, it's a lesson many critics could learn from. ~ Scott Esposito, editor of The Quarterly Conversation and co-author of The End of Oulipo?"", ""I think of Bursey to be one of the most active and knowledgeable fiction critics going when it comes to what I’ll call here, for reasons of brevity, the “postmodern novel.” He has a huge repository of very strong (and in some cases, quite lengthy) pieces on the world’s best modern writers and has published them in respected venues. I’m not sure his criticism is appreciated at a level commensurate with his talent, and I’d recommend his Offshore Drilling column on TWR as a quick primer on both his talent, appetite, and taste. That he usually looks abroad is perhaps part of his lack of renown in Canada, but for me it’s a great recommendation. So few Canadian critics are doing the work that he does so well. ~ Shane Neilson, author of Will: Stories and On Shaving Off His Face: Poems, http://winnipegreview.com/2015/12/difficult-narratives-an-interview-with-jeff-bursey/"", ""There may be only a handful of Canadian authors with as rigorous an approach to fiction as Jeff Bursey. ~ Lee D. Thompson, editor, short fiction writer, and author of S., a novel in [xxx] dreams, http://winnipegreview.com/2015/12/difficult-narratives-an-interview-with-jeff-bursey/""]" Chaos Ethics,"[""Chris Bateman""]",Facing ethical disaster perhaps what we need isn't moral law but moral chaos.,"Balance has no meaning for a politics that is merely the continuation of war by other means. Both religious zealots and defenders of scientific fact declare a monopoly on truth and the moral law, while radicals are powerless to resist since they have lost faith that ethics can be anything but arbitrary. Meanwhile, insane bureaucracy devastates life while nations fall into dishonor as they abandon their promises of justice. If the moral law cannot save us, perhaps it is time to try moral chaos. Chaos Ethics collides philosophers such as Kant, Nietzsche, Levinas, Mary Midgley, Alasdair MacInytre, Alain Badiou, Isabelle Stengers, and Bruno Latour with everything from cyberpunk science fiction and the fantasy novels of Michael Moorcock to Google, gay marriage, drone assassinations, and the ethics of cats and dogs. A strange and wondrous journey through morality viewed as a facet of imagination that offers a new perspective in which the diversity of ethics is a strength not a weakness, hesitation is more noble than certainty, and virtue can be expressed in both law and chaos.","Balance has no meaning for a politics that is merely the continuation of war by other means. Both religious zealots and defenders of scientific fact declare a monopoly on truth and the moral law, while radicals are powerless to resist since they have lost faith that ethics can be anything but arbitrary. Meanwhile, insane bureaucracy devastates life while nations fall into dishonor as they abandon their promises of justice. If the moral law cannot save us, perhaps it is time to try moral chaos. Chaos Ethics collides philosophers such as Kant, Nietzsche, Levinas, Mary Midgley, Alasdair MacInytre, Alain Badiou, Isabelle Stengers, and Bruno Latour with everything from cyberpunk science fiction and the fantasy novels of Michael Moorcock to Google, gay marriage, drone assassinations, and the ethics of cats and dogs. A strange and wondrous journey through morality viewed as a facet of imagination that offers a new perspective in which the diversity of ethics is a strength not a weakness, hesitation is more noble than certainty, and virtue can be expressed in both law and chaos.",3,"[""A revelatory reading of both my own and other's work - a genuine philosophy for the 21st century. ~ Michael Moorcock, award-winning fantasy and literary author"", ""Provocative, lively, engaging and erudite. ~ Allen W. Wood, Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor emeritus at Stanford University"", ""An elegant yet passionate defence of ethics, the book carefully considers various conflicting accounts of what it means to live a good life before settling on imagination and narrative as chaotic and transient foundations of ethical thinking. Ethics for Bateman is both necessary and necessarily tumultuous; it is also a story which we should try and tell as best we can. Thought-provoking, engaging even if at times controversial, Chaos Ethics is a pleasure to read - and to agree and disagree with. ~ Joanna Zylinska, Professor of New Media, Goldsmiths, and author of Bioethics in the Age of New Media and and The Ethics of Cultural Studies""]" "China, the USA and Capitalism's Last Crusade","[""William Briggs""]","As the sun rises on China and sets on America, the world holds its breath.","As the sun rises on China and sets on America, the world holds its breath. China, the USA and Capitalism's Last Crusade looks at the rise of China and the decline of the USA but from a different angle. William Briggs argues that this struggle for economic supremacy is being played out against a much bigger backdrop; the decline of the economic structure of capitalism. In this sense, the decline of the USA is portrayed as that larger economic decline in microcosm. Briggs examines the relationship between state and capital, of how capitalism came to dominate the world, and of the historical, political and economic rise of both the USA and China. He shows that the struggle between the two nations has little to do with cultural, historical, demographic, political or ideological differences, but with what they have in common. Despite the portrayal of China as being ‘socialist’ it functions as a capitalist economy in the globalised capitalist world. While its journey to capitalism may have differed, the end point is the same and this is why there is such animosity, such conflict, such acrimony between the two states.","As the sun rises on China and sets on America, the world holds its breath. China, the USA and Capitalism's Last Crusade looks at the rise of China and the decline of the USA but from a different angle. William Briggs argues that this struggle for economic supremacy is being played out against a much bigger backdrop; the decline of the economic structure of capitalism. In this sense, the decline of the USA is portrayed as that larger economic decline in microcosm. Briggs examines the relationship between state and capital, of how capitalism came to dominate the world, and of the historical, political and economic rise of both the USA and China. He shows that the struggle between the two nations has little to do with cultural, historical, demographic, political or ideological differences, but with what they have in common. Despite the portrayal of China as being ‘socialist’ it functions as a capitalist economy in the globalised capitalist world. While its journey to capitalism may have differed, the end point is the same and this is why there is such animosity, such conflict, such acrimony between the two states.",3,"[""A book that anyone concerned about the human future would do well to read. Written lucidly and rich in its insights, it offers a distinctive interpretation of the US-China relationship, in many ways the defining relationship of our time. Though the two societies may have vastly different cultures and histories, William Briggs is at pains to show that both are set on a capitalist trajectory, and that neither the American neo-liberal or Chinese authoritarian model has much to commend it. These two capitalist titans, he tells us, are now locked in an increasingly turbulent relationship which, if mismanaged, could inflict immense devastation on an already deeply fractured world. His thought provoking yet dispassionate analysis is a welcome antidote to the now fashionable but highly dangerous sport of China bashing. ~ Professor Joseph Camilleri, Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne and one of Australia's leading International Relations scholars and authors."", ""We live in a precarious time. As insecurity, poverty, and inequality are growing, the world is engulfed by the antagonisms between capital and labor as well as between nation-states. Capitalism has brought the planet to the brink through climate change and pandemics. Briggs correctly argues that the rise of China has been based on a capitalist economic system. Rather than helping to resolve the world’s urgent problems, China’s challenge to the US hegemony brings the world closer to the dangerous interplay between two superpowers. Will the current historical era prove to be capitalism’s last crusade and what has to change to bring hope to the future? To understand these important questions, one has to read this book. ~ Professor Minqi Li, Professor Minqi Li, Department of Economics, University of Utah, author of The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy 2015 Monthly Review Press"", ""What I like about this book is that it looks at China, the United States and their relations through the lens of big-picture history. I like the way it considers not only countries, but more importantly economic and political systems.\n\nThe role of capitalism in the rise of the American state is well known, and Briggs’s interpretation is well worth looking at. Even more interesting is his portrayal of contemporary China, which claims to be “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, as essentially a capitalist state in a globalised capitalist world. He contends, rightly in my view, that the “threats” are more against China than from it, the threatener being a state that sees its hegemony challenged by any rising power. We don’t know if it will lead to war, but we’d best watch out.\n\nThe author is an extraordinarily prolific and capable author, who has written very widely on many topics relating to political theory and economy.\n\nThis is an excellent account by somebody who really knows what he is talking about and provides an enlightening alternative to the heavily biased mainstream press. ~ Emeritus Professor Colin Mackerras, Foundation Professor Griffith University, School of Modern Asian Studies, Department of International Business and Asian Studies""]" Christopher Hitchens,"[""Ben Burgis""]","Ten years after the death of Christopher Hitchens, it's time for the left to take another look at his complicated legacy.","While his post-9/11 turn to the right has defined Christopher Hitchens for the last two decades, we may now be in a position to rehabilitate his long pre-9/11 career as a left-wing polemicist. Burgis reminds readers about what was best in Hitchens's writings and helps us gain a better understanding of how someone whose whole political life was animated by the values of the socialist left could have ended up holding grotesque positions on Iraq and the War on Terror. Burgis' book makes a case for the enduring importance of engaging with Hitchens' complicated legacy.","While his post-9/11 turn to the right has defined Christopher Hitchens for the last two decades, we may now be in a position to rehabilitate his long pre-9/11 career as a left-wing polemicist. Burgis reminds readers about what was best in Hitchens's writings and helps us gain a better understanding of how someone whose whole political life was animated by the values of the socialist left could have ended up holding grotesque positions on Iraq and the War on Terror. Burgis' book makes a case for the enduring importance of engaging with Hitchens' complicated legacy.",9,"[""Burgis’ book is one of most interesting and informative books I’ve read in the last several years. His research ability, good faith, and concern for his readers provide us with what’s possibly the best tribute to a man who shared those same qualities. ~ Leon Garber, existentialcafe.blog"", ""Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters is written in a style that one suspects Hitch would have admired: it is both a loving tribute, and a relentlessly unsentimental, frank account of what Burgis sees as Hitchens’ many character flaws and political missteps.\n\nBurgis’ book is a well written and often very funny testament to a complicated leftist who was never anything less than fascinating, even when that meant being infuriating to friend and foe alike. We shall not look upon his like again—and it is a testament to Hitch’s legacy that reading Burgis’ book deeply impresses on us how tragic that is. ~ Matt McManus , Areo Magazine"", ""Burgis peeks at the consistency rather than the dissonance between Hitchens’ earlier and later views. He stops no more than half a step away from what the premises entail: that Hitchens did not change as much as the world around him did.\n\nOne of the causes of tension with Noam Chomsky, for example, Burgis observes, was Hitchens’ recognition that the forces of anti-imperialism today are dissimilar to “Ho Chi Minh or the Sandinistas.” ~ Vahaken Mouradian, Merion West"", ""“Burgis offers a fascinating and nuanced dive into the life, work, and political views of Christopher Hitchens. It’s rare to come across a book that manages to combine an enjoyable and informative mix of history, philosophy, religion, and biography. Burgis accomplishes this difficult task well, and also helps the reader to interpret today’s political climate.” ~ Ana Kasparian, host and executive producer, The Young Turks"", ""\""Ben Burgis has written a compelling account of the political and philosophical thought of Christopher Hitchens. Though many on the left would rather forget Hitchens, who in the last decade of his life made a decidedly imperialist turn, Burgis reveals that Hitchens remains an important thinker with whom anyone interested in the history of ideas should wrestle. An important book that will no doubt serve as a starting point for the many books likely to be written about Hitchens in coming years.\"" ~ Daniel Bessner, Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft"", ""[Note: This one should definitely be on the cover.]\n\n\""Ben Burgis is invaluable to the socialist movement, not only because he has the ability to speak beyond the already converted, but because of his range and intellectual curiosity. His book on Hitchens shows this range, giving a fair analysis of a man who badly lost his bearings.” ~ Bhaskar Sunkara, Editor & Publisher, Jacobin Magazine"", ""[Note: This should definitely be on the cover.]\n\n\""People who think Christopher Hitchens was god-like will be pissed. People who think Christopher Hitchens was nothing but a war-mongering scumbag will be pissed. For the rest of us, who loved Hitch but thought him deeply flawed, Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters is gold.” ~ Ed Buckner, President, American Atheists (2008-2010) and Executive Director, Council for Secular Humanism (2001-2003)"", ""\""This is a must read for anyone on the Left who admired Christopher Hitchens but wondered what the hell happened to him in the last decade or so of his life. With his characteristic rigor, clarity, and wit, Burgis offers a persuasive account of Hitch’s evolution from young Trotskyist to neocon.\n\n\""What is perhaps most impressive about this book—both its subject and its author—is the range on display. Burgis is happy to meet Hitchens on any field, whether it’s the invasion of Iraq, a materialist critique of Said’s Orientalism, or the intricacies of the Kalām cosmological argument for God’s existence.\"" ~ Mark Warren, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Daemen College"", ""\""Written in his trademark deliberative style, Ben Burgis’ book is an engaging and worthwhile excavation of a writer now largely known for the reactionary turn he took in the final decade of his life. With care and thoroughness, Burgis offers us a more complete portrait of Christopher Hitchens’ vast body of work — and mounts a compelling case that the best of it is still worth reading today.\"" ~ Luke Savage, author, \""The Dead Center\""""]" "Circle of the Snake, The","[""Grafton Tanner""]",Why are we more nostalgic in the digital age than ever before?,"Shocked by 9/11, the Great Recession, digital anxiety, and ecological collapse, the West suffers from nostalgia. People everywhere yearn for a utopian version of the past that never existed. Desperate for relief, many long to escape from the present. Some will stop at nothing to achieve it. In his essential new book, Grafton Tanner, author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, argues that our nostalgia today is partly a consequence of the attention economy. At a time when historical literacy is crucial, and old prejudices are percolating into the present, Big Tech’s predictive algorithms are locking us into nostalgic feedback loops. The result is a precarious society with its gaze fixed on the good old days. Spanning from the ancient Sophists to Black Mirror, The Circle of the Snake is at once a reckoning with the myth of digital utopia and an incisive analysis of nostalgia as a weapon to spread fascism.","Shocked by 9/11, the Great Recession, digital anxiety, and ecological collapse, the West suffers from nostalgia. People everywhere yearn for a utopian version of the past that never existed. Desperate for relief, many long to escape from the present. Some will stop at nothing to achieve it. In his essential new book, Grafton Tanner, author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, argues that our nostalgia today is partly a consequence of the attention economy. At a time when historical literacy is crucial, and old prejudices are percolating into the present, Big Tech’s predictive algorithms are locking us into nostalgic feedback loops. The result is a precarious society with its gaze fixed on the good old days. Spanning from the ancient Sophists to Black Mirror, The Circle of the Snake is at once a reckoning with the myth of digital utopia and an incisive analysis of nostalgia as a weapon to spread fascism.",1,"[""Whether it is dissecting the utopian fantasies of Big Tech gurus, revealing the political economy of the nostalgia industry, or uncovering exploitation in the global division of digital labour, The Circle of the Snake is just the guide we need to navigate, resist, and transform the online world. In precise, accessible prose, Grafton Tanner offers a much-needed vision of democratic alternatives to surveillance capitalism. ~ Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World""]" Circus Philosophicus,"[""Graham Harman""]","Platonic myth meets American noir in this haunting collection of philosophical images, from gigantic Ferris wheels to offshore drilling rigs.","Platonic myth meets American noir in this haunting series of philosophical images from gigantic ferris wheels to offshore drilling rigs. It has been said that Plato Nietzsche and Giordano Bruno gave us the three great mythical presentations of serious philosophy in the West. They have spawned few imitators as philosophers have generally drifted toward a dry scholarly tone that has become the yardstick of professional respectability. In this book Graham Harman tries to restore myth to its central place in the discipline. In Chapter One the narrator considers the motion of a Ferris wheel of many miles in diameter which generates disasters and other events in its endless revolutions. In Chapter Two he moves from the Chesapeake Bay to the depths of Hell where he observes the show trial of pre Socratic thinkers. In Chapter Three the narrator encounters a battered steam calliope in India that may summon tsunamis solar flares and other catastrophic forces. In Chapter Four he tries to explain reports of a ghostly boat in Japanese waters. In Chapter Five he discusses causation on an offshore drilling platform. And in Chapter Six amidst a deadly Paris hailstorm he proposes a theory of objects without relations.","Platonic myth meets American noir in this haunting series of philosophical images from gigantic ferris wheels to offshore drilling rigs. It has been said that Plato Nietzsche and Giordano Bruno gave us the three great mythical presentations of serious philosophy in the West. They have spawned few imitators as philosophers have generally drifted toward a dry scholarly tone that has become the yardstick of professional respectability. In this book Graham Harman tries to restore myth to its central place in the discipline. In Chapter One the narrator considers the motion of a Ferris wheel of many miles in diameter which generates disasters and other events in its endless revolutions. In Chapter Two he moves from the Chesapeake Bay to the depths of Hell where he observes the show trial of pre Socratic thinkers. In Chapter Three the narrator encounters a battered steam calliope in India that may summon tsunamis solar flares and other catastrophic forces. In Chapter Four he tries to explain reports of a ghostly boat in Japanese waters. In Chapter Five he discusses causation on an offshore drilling platform. And in Chapter Six amidst a deadly Paris hailstorm he proposes a theory of objects without relations.",2,"[""Graham Harman’s Circus Philosophicus is that rarest of beasts, a philosophical treatise that is also deeply personal. Although it seems to have been intended both as an approachable explication of Harman’s object-oriented ontology and as an attempt to restore mythic vision to the philosophical tradition, it is simultaneously a slightly fictionalised account of the author’s personal journey both through life and throughout the world. As such, it is currently a one-of-a-kind work – as short as the most restrained scholarly essay yet written in an accessible, narrative style that feels oddly comfortable.\n\nThe book is comprised of seven myths – six philosophical metaphors constructed to illuminate elements of Harman’s object-oriented thinking, and one final myth concerning the origin of the book. There is a slightly uneven quality to the chapters, in that the direction of the book transforms from distant to intimate. The opening myth, The Ferris Wheel, concerns a colossal structure presented as a thought experiment, and constitutes the most memorable image that the book has to offer. Unfortunately, the connection with the philosophical model it represents is let down by serving the principle role of disputing other people’s models – namely Alfred Whitehead and Bruno Latour – and as such a reader not already somewhat familiar with ontology (the field which studies the nature of existence) is likely to be left quite uncertain what they are being shown.\n\nHowever, the second myth changes the style directly into a more biographical context, which is retained for the rest of the book. The story embedded within this tale of love lost is a Dante-inspired, Hieronymus Bosch-esque fantasy in which the devils of hell throw the pre-Socratic philosophers off a bridge into a pool of molten lead as one by one they fail to meet the challenge set before them. Even if one is unfamiliar with Greek philosophy, there is a charm to the way the fable unfolds that helps raise the appeal of the book above its slightly distanced opening. Harman is revealed here, more than anywhere else in the book, as being more than just a collection of thoughts and ideas. He is shown to be human.\n\nThe reader is taken both around the world and throughout the history of the Western philosophical tradition as the various myths are presented in turn. Leibniz’s ideas are connected to a macabre mechanical organ in India; Husserl is vindicated via a ghost story on a Japanese ferry; and Latour – the “enemy” of the first myth, appears as a friend and colleague in the Parisian reverie of the last. There is also a rather curious tale of Harman and science fiction author China Miéville marooned on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico during a hurricane. This chapter begins with a recitation of the autopsy of the Elder Thing from H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness , which despite being entirely out of place seems to fit into the tempo of the work with baroque ease.\n\nI confess to being quite beguiled by the whole endeavour by the time I reached the end of its incredibly short 83 pages, and the afterward – a larger than life account of the origins of the book – is far harder to believe than some of the myths themselves, despite being presented as purely factual! My chief reservation in recommending the book is the uncertainty as to who might enjoy it – since I am far from certain that anyone with no prior experience of ontology will be able to extract anything useful about Harman’s model without having invested in some of his other books. Here again I have a concern, since key terms in Harman’s work, such as tool-being, are referenced only in passing, yet surely the audience for this book should not be expected to have read his earlier, heavier treatises?\n\nBut perhaps the point of attempting to “restore myth to its central place in the discipline” (as the blurb states) is to allow some hint of philosophical thinking to be expressed in a manner far more easily grasped. This surely was part of what motivated Plato to use allegory and mythic image in so many of his works. Harman’s myths are perhaps less enduring than Plato’s, and certainly less bold than Nietzsche’s, but they are timely and charmingly presented. I can think of no greater praise than my fervent hope that Circus Philosophicus will encourage other modern philosophers to eschew the arid formalism of the academy and adapt their ideas for a wider audience via allegory and fable. And if it does not, then it can be enjoyed all the more as an oddity, a curio shop for the curious, and, indeed, a circus of ideas.\n\nGraham Harman's Circus Philosophicus is published by Zer0 Books, ISBN 978-1-84694-400-0.\n\n~ Chris Bateman, Zero author, on his website, http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2011/03/circus-philosophicus.html"", ""Harman's style often evokes that of a William James merged with the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft.\n\n~ Olivier Surel, Actu Philosophia""]" Clampdown,"[""Rhian E. Jones""]","Class and gender in Britpop and after, and why 'chav' is a feminist issue.","Why have both pop and politics in Britain become the preserve of an unrepresentative elite? From chav-pop pantomimes to retro-chauvinist ‘landfill indie’, the bland, homogenous, and compromised nature of the current 'alternative' sector reflects the interests of a similarly complacent and privileged political establishment. In particular, political and media policing of female social and sexual autonomy, through the neglected but significant gendered dimensions of the discourse surrounding ‘chavs’, has been accompanied by a similar restriction and regulation of the expression of working-class femininity in music. This book traces the progress of this cultural clampdown over the past twenty years.","Why have both pop and politics in Britain become the preserve of an unrepresentative elite? From chav-pop pantomimes to retro-chauvinist ‘landfill indie’, the bland, homogenous, and compromised nature of the current 'alternative' sector reflects the interests of a similarly complacent and privileged political establishment. In particular, political and media policing of female social and sexual autonomy, through the neglected but significant gendered dimensions of the discourse surrounding ‘chavs’, has been accompanied by a similar restriction and regulation of the expression of working-class femininity in music. This book traces the progress of this cultural clampdown over the past twenty years.",17,"[""\""This is it. This is what cultural studies scholars should have been writing in the last ten years. Instead of walking away from discussions of the political economy or - even worse - becoming apologists (cheerleaders?) for the neoliberal reclamation of power after the Global Financial Crisis, cultural studies scholars should have got angry, got political and got busy to understand class, gender and race through the 2010s. [...] Jones investigates what has happened to working class women (and men) in and through popular culture in the last two decades. This is not a book about representation. This is a book about invisibility. \"" ~ Tara Brabazon, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1543240209?book_show_action=true"", ""Something I have been thinking about for some time in terms of stand up comedy, being quite aware of my comfortable background and looking around and wondering of the middle class have taken over comedy and dominated it with their values... I worry that Rhian is correct in saying we are increasingly informed that to discuss or research modern class issues and differences is deemed to be paranoid. ~ Robin Ince, http://robinince.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/mixing-pop-and-pottery-they-ask-me-what-the-use-is/"", ""I think previous books on Britpop have tended to be either by people working as journalists at the time (John Harris), or by those who were involved in the music business (Luke Haines). People who were actually informed by that culture during their teenage years logically have a different take, one that is only now starting to emerge. In Ms Jones’s case she talks about the importance to her of Kenickie and Shampoo as signifiers of female agency. But there’s so many other points in the book: many of which just hadn’t occurred to me. I could argue with some of her conclusions, but then I was never a working class teenage girl in the 90s. It’s an essential text for anyone trying to make sense of that ludicrous era. ~ Dickon Edwards, http://www.dickonedwards.com/diary/index.php/archive/slow-excavations/"", ""This refreshingly pungent polemic discusses the disappearance of dissident working-class voices in mass culture articulating resistance to the status quo - replaced by poverty-pantomimes of ersatz simulations perpetrated by relatively privileged 'artistes' which reinforce the prejudicial caricatures peddled by the rest of the chattering and political classes. Early chapters convincingly chart changing UK media representations of the lower-classes since the 1980s, focusing on now-universal 'chav' mythologies and the demonisation of rough femininity deployed to legimitise the withdrawal of welfare and related punitive neoliberal governance based on individualised moral judgement and disgust and the differentiation of an abject absolute 'other' justifying austerity for everyone except elites. Clampdown then recapitulates these developments in the cultural terrain of pop music - or, at least, that fraction involving 'indie' guitar bands who progressively lost sight of post-punk's grass-roots DIY ethos, yielding today's exceptionally anodyne corporate offerings exemplified by the execrable 'nu-folk' which, like most best-selling homegrown genres, is largely produced by comfortable children of the aforementioned elites.\n\nExploring this trajectory, Jones sets the 1990s unravelling of explicit Thatcherite class-war against sympathy for Lady Di mobilised by New Labour in class-blind nationalist sentimentality. So 'Cool Britannia' counterposed the exaggerated swagger of Oasis against pretentious hipsters like Blur, but artistic 'substance' (such as it was) for all of their ilk lay in rehashing 1960s styles with minimal echoes of punk's raw anger to signify residual resonance with popular dissatisfaction. Throughout this postmodern masquerade implying political passivity and acceptance of the mainstream consensus, rebellious exceptions such as the Manic Street Preachers - and especially those expressing young women's perspectives, from the riot grrl phenomenon to indie outfits like Shampoo and Kenickie - were condescended to, patronised, recuperated or sidelined irrespective of mass appeal or sales. Meanwhile, superficial alternatives amenable to prevailing hegemonies, from Britpop to Spice Girls, flooded markets with New Lads and Barbies with 'girl power', domesticating or ironising stances otherwise associated with threats to capitalist order.\n\nThe book's treatment of its chosen genre represents a compelling case study of dovetailing discourses accompanying epochal developments in political-economy with trends in cultural commodification. A particular strength is the incorporation of biographical reflections on the author's emotional investment since adolescence in both musical and intellectual journeys.* But this can also be a weakness, evidenced in even stronger final sections concerning the present conjuncture - necessarily broadening the scope to encompass popular culture as a whole while revealing significant limitations in the thematic thrust of the foregoing analysis. After all, isolated provincial white teens glued to the radio reading the NME scarcely captures the scenes, subcultures and innovations of collective youth culture - witness the arguably far deeper and potentially radical upheavals of hip-hop and techno mobilising millions who shunned the miserable grungy dirges favoured by student union tastemakers. Nevertheless, as a demonstration of how class composition and stratification - intrinsically riddled with gendered and (by omission, here) raced discriminations - is central to late-capitalism's social regulation, Clampdown is exemplary.\n\n~ Tom Jennings, libcom.org, http://libcom.org/blog/clampdown-pop-cultural-wars-class-gender-rhian-e-jones-18012014"", ""Online discourse about music is more politicised than ever, and blogger Rhian E Jones captures its flavour in Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender (Zero), a speedy polemic against the gentrification of indie-rock and simultaneous cultural hostility towards the working class, especially women. Essentially Chavs for feminist music fans, it celebrates not just the class-conscious 90s hits of Pulp and the Manic Street Preachers, but the vivid, unapologetic charisma of Kenickie and Shampoo, and leaves you craving similar voices today. ~ Dorian Lynskey, Guardian Best Music Books of 2013, Guardian Best Music Books of 2013"", ""Jones offers a socialist-feminist critique of contemporary pop music with flair and wit. ~ Mike Cowley, The Citizen, http://www.thecitizen.org.uk/?p=565"", ""[A] cogent, damningly articulate, and troubling investigation of the problematic interaction between music, media and politics... Jones’s real talent is for the expression of complex ideological interaction in a single, pithy sentence. ~ Sasha Garwood, Marylebone Journal, http://marylebonejournal.com/uploads/images/Magazine%20page/MJ%20Apr%2013.pdf"", ""Amongst other things, Clampdown is a demand for more intersectional thinking, a larger dose of feminist analysis in mainstream leftist thinking, and a stronger recognition of class in feminist discussions... tremendously fun, combining the long, epithet-laded sentences of music journalism with the outrage and epithets of political polemic, and intercutting both with the language of social analysis... It has the same effect on me as reading Barbara Ehrenreich: I just want to get the pints in and demand “So what happened *then*?” ~ Jem Bloomfield, https://quiteirregular.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/clampdown-pop-cultural-wars-on-class-and-gender-by-rhian-e-jones/"", ""[A] minimalist and heroically uncompromising powder keg of a book; a timely and single-minded exposition that seeks to lay bare, and ultimately skewer, the false prophets and unabashed hypocrisies of British pop culture post-Britpop. In much the same way that Burchill and Parsons picked over the rotting carcass of punk rock in their inflammatory 1978 call-to-arms The Boy Looked at Johnny (like Jones’s book, a slim publication in terms of its pages, yet a broad undertaking in the scope of its ambition), the author trains her sights upon the unseemly bastardisation of alt-pop culture via the twin cross-hairs of class and gender; in themselves, the motivation and inspiration for much of this nation’s greatest ever pop music output. ~ Craig Austin, Wales Arts Review, http://www.walesartsreview.org/clampdown-pop-cultural-wars-on-class-and-gender-by-rhian-e-jones/"", ""The battle over the Nineties and the 00s continues in Clampdown, Rhian E Jones' prodigious, mordant take on the past twenty years cultural and political stagnation.\n\nClampdown consolidates, synthesizes and extends on several recent-ish books both Zero (Capitalist Realism, One-Dimensional Woman, Uncommon, Folk Opposition) and non-Zero (Chavs, The Last Party, among others) while at the same time offering an extension of their concerns, by building up its own canon of the subversive and politically hopeful and by explicitly focusing on the construction of female identity and the discourse around the abject figure of the female Chav as a kind of Uber or Unter Chav, the very quintessence of Chavdom.\n\nWhat Clampdown admires is a messy, engaged, and enraged working class feminism that refuses to be disciplined by classed representations of femininity, a feminism that also refuses to be internally divided by those structures. Here actually I am struck by a moment in the film Made in Dagenham (briefly alluded to and worth a close analysis) in which the posh, frustrated middle class graduate goes round to the working class unionist's flat to tell her to keep fighting for the sake of all women. What Clampdown wants is a return to the notion, perfectly prominent up to the mid-nineties that working class women are the vanguard, culturally, politically. What's feared in the figure of the fat, baseball hatted, baggily track-suited, gobby female Chav on a big night out is the genderless and sexually liberated, non-neurotic and undisciplined female subject, object of horror, fascination and dismay and Clampdown flirts with, but doesn't quite fully engage with the radical possibilities therein. And in that sense it also opens up new vistas for speculation.\n\nToo many brilliant insights and witty asides to mention really, but I will say that these lines represent an early highlight.\n\n“In the slice of south Wales where I grew up, the most substantial attempts at economic regeneration seemed to be the daffodils planted along the M4 corridor to improve the view for commuters.”\n\nYes, yes and a thousand times yes. ~ Carl Neville, http://theimpostume.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/page-margin-0.html"", ""Clampdown then, is a celebration of the disposable, the ephemeral, the kitsch of Britpop, and a recovery of the political potential inherent in these values. When these largely working-class mores at the centre of British culture, something must be going right somewhere along the lines. The working-class cultural upsurge of the mid-'90s that was briefly epitomised in Britpop was widespread and profound. If its energy was quickly siphoned off by Cool Britannia, that shouldn't stop us from trying to recover something from the rubble.\n\nYou must read this astonishing book. ~ Alex Niven, http://thefantastichope.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/rhian-e-jones-nails-britpop.html"", ""What makes Jones’ angle very interesting is that she connects dots that very often aren’t put into context: The economic crisis, the demonisation of a new underclass and the appropriation of working class traditions and expressions. [...] The book is important for a variety of reasons: At one hand it represents a small crack in the monovoice driven cultural scene and looks at how pop culture has been manufactured in order to suppress its audience. On the other it is one of the signs that there is a new kind of engagement with the current status quo, challenging what many people see as ‘unchangeable’. ~ , http://hovezak.com/blog/2013/06/review-clampdown-rhian-jones/"", ""A fierce and valuable book that charts the sell-out of pop culture since the 1980s ~ John Harris, The Guardian"", ""I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to side-step recollections and simplifications of their own youth or by into the legislated nostalgia of their elder peers, but actually approach history as a continuation and a continuum, and the rock-myth of monumental, moment-based events are in denial of the wider sweep of history. Or less wankily, if you want to know the other side to the media fairy-tale, this is where to look. In short, in a time when Britain is in a retro period, it’s a necessary purgative. ~ Kieron Gillen, http://kierongillen.tumblr.com/post/83315660182/clampdown"", ""Helped me understand the 90s I lived through. ~ Lauren Laverne"", ""Gets a lot of things absolutely right. ~ Simon Price, music writer"", ""Traces the links between politics and pop music in order to interpret why we are where we are, in terms of class, gender and representation and the wider grim political situation we find ourselves in. The book made me angry and a bit nostalgic, but probably nostalgic for something that was never fully realised. ~ Emmy-Kate Montrose, formerly of Kenickie""]" Classless,"[""Carl Neville""]","Why nobody who knows Britain recognises the Britain represented in British films.A general-interest, polemical book on contemporary British Cinema that focuses heavily on cult movies like ""Withnail and I"" and ""Sexy Beast"" both of which have committed audi","Why has mainstream British film been so unrepresentative of the changes in British society over the past twenty years? Classless looks at the erasure of key issues of class and class struggle in recent British film as well as the flattening out of the rich variety of English social types into the bland middle-mass of Love Actually. By analysing a number of key films and emergent genres the ideological character of the Major years on into the false dawn of Blairism and Cool Brittania will be elaborated, and it will be argued that even works that are ostensibly subversive, such as Trainspotting (Danny Boyle), serve to promote the underlying myths of neo-liberalism. The films under discussion will range from The Queen (Steven Frear) to Sexy Beast (Jonathon Glazer). The book will also consider popular genres such as the recent Football Hooligan films along with more recondite works.","Why has mainstream British film been so unrepresentative of the changes in British society over the past twenty years? Classless looks at the erasure of key issues of class and class struggle in recent British film as well as the flattening out of the rich variety of English social types into the bland middle-mass of Love Actually. By analysing a number of key films and emergent genres the ideological character of the Major years on into the false dawn of Blairism and Cool Brittania will be elaborated, and it will be argued that even works that are ostensibly subversive, such as Trainspotting (Danny Boyle), serve to promote the underlying myths of neo-liberalism. The films under discussion will range from The Queen (Steven Frear) to Sexy Beast (Jonathon Glazer). The book will also consider popular genres such as the recent Football Hooligan films along with more recondite works.",1,"[""This book gave me a welcome slap in the face. Impassioned argumentation and impressively cineliterate.\n\n~ Emmet O'Cuana, http://abookadaytillicanstay.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/219-classless-recent-essays-on-british-film-by-carl-neville/""]" Claude Cahun,"[""Gavin James Bower""]",Claude Cahun is the most important artist you've never heard of - until now.,"Claude Cahun is the most important artist you've never heard of - until now. Writer, photographer, lesbian; revolutionary activist, surrealist, resistance fighter - Cahun witnessed the birth of the Paris avant-garde, lived through two World Wars and, as 'Der Soldat ohne Namen', risked death by inciting mutiny on Nazi-occupied Jersey. And yet, she's until recently been merely a peripheral figure in these world-shaping events, relegated by academics to the footnotes in the history of art, sexual politics and revolutionary movements of the last century. Now more so than ever, Cahun demands a significant presence in the history of surrealism and the avant-garde - even, in the canon of early twentieth-century literature. Indeed her one major book, ""Disavowals"", is a masterpiece of anti-memoir writing. Much has been made of her as a photographer, but Claude Cahun 'the writer' was both radical and prescient. At a time when her star is rising like never before ""Claude Cahun: The Soldier with No Name"" represents the first explicit attempt in English to posit Cahun as an important figure in her own right, and to popularise one of the most influential artists of her generation.","Claude Cahun is the most important artist you've never heard of - until now. Writer, photographer, lesbian; revolutionary activist, surrealist, resistance fighter - Cahun witnessed the birth of the Paris avant-garde, lived through two World Wars and, as 'Der Soldat ohne Namen', risked death by inciting mutiny on Nazi-occupied Jersey. And yet, she's until recently been merely a peripheral figure in these world-shaping events, relegated by academics to the footnotes in the history of art, sexual politics and revolutionary movements of the last century. Now more so than ever, Cahun demands a significant presence in the history of surrealism and the avant-garde - even, in the canon of early twentieth-century literature. Indeed her one major book, ""Disavowals"", is a masterpiece of anti-memoir writing. Much has been made of her as a photographer, but Claude Cahun 'the writer' was both radical and prescient. At a time when her star is rising like never before ""Claude Cahun: The Soldier with No Name"" represents the first explicit attempt in English to posit Cahun as an important figure in her own right, and to popularise one of the most influential artists of her generation.",1,"[""Praise for Gavin James Bower's debut novel, Dazed & Aroused:\n\n'Less Than Zero for the Off-Beat Generation'\n\n3:AM Magazine\n\n'A writer with the ability to cut through the hype and reveal the dark heart of everyday life'\n\nIndependent\n\n'A stunning debut novel'\n\nAndrew Gallix, FLUX\n\nPraise for Made in Britain:\n\n'A poignant tale of the \""feral underclass\""...what makes the book special is its portrayal of the particular fates of three teenagers who stand for a generation while being utterly and completely themselves'\n\nJenn Ashworth, Guardian\n\n'In a world of closed factories and stinking canals, of sex in the school loos, of knives and drugs and moral and economic disintegration, this novel could have been one enormous cliché. It isn’t, though. While not excusing, or attempting to excuse, its protagonists it does succeed in explaining and humanising them. A visceral look at modern society...it will haunt the reader'\n\nObserver\n\n'Our disgustingly out of touch prime minister would do well to read this shocking, heart-wrenching tale of no-hope in the recession hit, morally devalued North'\n\nDaily Mirror\n\n'A beautifully written story of post-industrial youth'\n\nOwen Jones, author of CHAVS\n\n'Drugs and sex and violence are simply something to pass the time with in places where manufacturing has died. This novel doesn’t shy away from the unpretty racial tension, either. It’s a lean book about having to survive but not quite letting your dreams go. Gavin James Bower evokes the escape exits from those post-industrial towns so well. Sadly for many they remain simply chemical'\n\nSuzanne Moore\n\n'Thanks to the riots, you can't move for hapless explanations for disaffected teenagers. Bower knows what he's talking about. The dark young novelist is the writer pontificating politicians should have on the bedside table'\n\nGQ\n\n'Bloody, brutal and swift...like Brighton Rock with sexting'\n\nGay Times\n\n'A subtle yet powerful insight into the type of youngsters society normally marginalises...there is an Orwellian anger about this book that makes it hard to put down' Huffington Post ~""]" Cloud Time,"[""Rob Coley"", ""Dean Lockwood""]",This book maps capitalisms mobilization of cloud computing in its bid to archive and enclose the future.,"The Cloud, hailed as a new digital commons, a utopia of collaborative expression and constant connection, actually constitutes a strategy of vitalist post-hegemonic power, which moves to dominate immanently and intensively, organizing our affective political involvements, instituting new modes of enclosure, and, crucially, colonizing the future through a new temporality of control. The virtual is often claimed as a realm of invention through which capitalism might be cracked, but it is precisely here that power now thrives. Cloud time, in service of security and profit, assumes all is knowable. We bear witness to the collapse of both past and future virtuals into a present dedicated to the exploitation of the spectres of both.","The Cloud, hailed as a new digital commons, a utopia of collaborative expression and constant connection, actually constitutes a strategy of vitalist post-hegemonic power, which moves to dominate immanently and intensively, organizing our affective political involvements, instituting new modes of enclosure, and, crucially, colonizing the future through a new temporality of control. The virtual is often claimed as a realm of invention through which capitalism might be cracked, but it is precisely here that power now thrives. Cloud time, in service of security and profit, assumes all is knowable. We bear witness to the collapse of both past and future virtuals into a present dedicated to the exploitation of the spectres of both.",3,"[""A new kind of anthropophony: the deafening \""informatic white noise\"" of constant push-messaging and gadget updates over the airwaves. The \""cloud\"" – remote storage, \""software as a service\"", pervasive mobile data – is here the subject of a rivetingly angry denunciation. The authors kick off with a reading of Christopher Nolan's film Inception, and go on to employ Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, China Miéville (on tentacle fiction), Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder, and Derrida: the cloud, they say, is a hideous meta-archive that attempts to impose a new \""hygiene of time\"".\n\nParticularly interesting is the authors' analogy between consumer interaction with the \""cloud\"" and videogames, in both of which the user submits to \""systemic imperatives\"". The persuasive upshot is that the cloud, with its \""techno-messianism\"", constitutes an enclosure of the \""digital commons\"". The book is enjoyably creative in its theoretical spleen, and has the good humour, after one flight of fancy, to admit: \""Okay, maybe this goes too far.\"" But glib flag-wavers for corporate control of your data have been going too far the other way for longer. ~ Steven Poole, The Guardian"", ""Cloud Time positively fizzes and crackles with energy and ideas, drawing in a compelling archive of other thinkers, fellow travellers. It reads like a fiction and manifesto, but also as a kind of survey – of what lies at the outer rim...The book has a visceral quality – you can see, feel the tentacular novum. It’s this that I’m left with – a strong sense of the cloud as alive and reptilian...I was reminded of some of Nick Land and CCRU’s writings; certainly, at its best moments, the fictioning element of the book outruns the critique and we get something utterly compelling, an SF dystopia in which friends and enemies all exist in a grey zone. It’s a pessimistic thesis, but there is a kind of joy in the writing. ~ Simon O’Sullivan, Author of 'Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari' (2005), 'On the Production of Subjectivity' (2012) and co-editor of 'Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New' (2008)"", ""It’s not only your head that is in the Cloud, but your whole body in its desires, actions, reactions, hiccups and errors too. Coley and Lockwood show in their strong theoretical take on cloudy media cultures that the more invisible control becomes, the more we need to develop fresh theoretical tools to open it up. Cloud Time offers a much-needed analysis of contemporary capitalism as a perverse form of informationalization and quantification of life to which we happily, voluntarily contribute. Even Microsofts Steve Ballmer has admitted to the difficulty involved in clearly defining the Cloud – and yet, Coley and Lockwood give us excellent clues.\n\n~ Jussi Parikka, Author of 'Insect Media' and 'Digital Contagions'""]" Cold World,"[""Dominic Fox""]","A scintillating critical survey of the ""cold worlds"" of Romantic poetry, black metal, teenage angst and terrorism.","To live well in the world one must be able to enjoy it: to love, Freud says, and work. Dejection is the state of being in which such enjoyment is no longer possible. There is an aesthetic dimension to dejection, in which the world appears in a new light. In this book, the dark serenity of dejection is examined through a study of the poetry of Hopkins and Coleridge, and the music of ""depressive"" black metal artists such as Burzum and Xasthur. The author then develops a theory of ""militant dysphoria"" via an analysis of the writings of the Red Army Fraction’s activist-theoretician, Ulrike Meinhof. The book argues that the ""cold world"" of dejection is one in which new creative and political possibilities, as well as dangers, can arise. It is not enough to live well in the world: one must also be able to affirm that another world is possible.","To live well in the world one must be able to enjoy it: to love, Freud says, and work. Dejection is the state of being in which such enjoyment is no longer possible. There is an aesthetic dimension to dejection, in which the world appears in a new light. In this book, the dark serenity of dejection is examined through a study of the poetry of Hopkins and Coleridge, and the music of ""depressive"" black metal artists such as Burzum and Xasthur. The author then develops a theory of ""militant dysphoria"" via an analysis of the writings of the Red Army Fraction’s activist-theoretician, Ulrike Meinhof. The book argues that the ""cold world"" of dejection is one in which new creative and political possibilities, as well as dangers, can arise. It is not enough to live well in the world: one must also be able to affirm that another world is possible.",3,"[""Dominic Fox discusses different types of rebellion in his scholarly Cold World: The Aesthetics of Rejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria (out from the fantastic Zer0 Books).\n\n~ Devin King, http://makemag.com/reviews-online"", ""We have been told by the living that the idea of a vital world is that of comfort and warmth. Dominic Fox assures us that this is not the case. With an unparalleled militant efficiency, Cold World blackens the lines between poetics and politics, music and negative resistance. It is a haunting sermon from the world of the dead exhorting the living to revolt in the name of a life whose vitality has been disenchanted by coldness and whose sacredness has been profaned by nigredo. ~ Reza Negarestani, Author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials"", ""Dominic Fox's timely and important Cold World pinpoints the fundamental issue underlying contemporary debate about the possibility of revolutionary politics in a culture suffused by paralysing despondency. Drawing on a remarkable array of sources from Coleridge and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Xasthur and Ulrike Meinhof, Fox explores the necessary yet apparently contradictory link between refusal and revolution. While refusal without revolution perpetuates the very condition it would negate, revolution without refusal quickly lapses into phantasmatic utopianism. The quandaries of this particular dialectic have never been as lucidly charted as they are here. ~ Ray Brassier, Author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction""]" Colloquium: Sound Art and Music,"[""Thomas Gardner"", ""Salomé Voegelin""]","Declares the relationship between sound art and music “colloquial”: spoken and accessible, rather than locked behind disciplinary boundaries.","In 2012, Thomas Gardner and Salomé Voegelin hosted a colloquium, entitled ""Music - Sound Art: Historical Continuum and Mimetic Fissures"", at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. This colloquium dealt with the current fervent debate concerning the relationship between sound art and music. This book proposes the opening of the colloquium to a wider readership through the publication of a decisive range of the material that defined the event.","In 2012, Thomas Gardner and Salomé Voegelin hosted a colloquium, entitled ""Music - Sound Art: Historical Continuum and Mimetic Fissures"", at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. This colloquium dealt with the current fervent debate concerning the relationship between sound art and music. This book proposes the opening of the colloquium to a wider readership through the publication of a decisive range of the material that defined the event.",2,"[""“The act of listening is a complex web of interconnected behaviour and mental manoeuvring between music, pure sound and historical context. This book is an important tool to negotiate the gap between the history of music and the wider panorama of sonic art.” ~ Anne Hilde Neset, writer, broadcaster and artistic director, nyMusikk, Oslo"", ""“Of course we need this book! Why? Because we take too much for granted about the relationship between sound art and music. Because we need incisive, creative thinkers, like the ones gathered in these pages, to help us separate the conjoined twins of sonic practice, such that they might – via their independence – contrive a more salubrious kinship.” ~ Seth Kim-Cohen, Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago""]" "Color, Facture, Art and Design","[""Iona Singh""]",How is technique political?,"With its appeal to the most subterranean aspects of perception art was always destined to be one of the last bastions of the transcendental in the 21st century. Color, Facture, Art and Design investigates the ""beauty"" of art based on the somatic ""magic"" of the physical body and its relationship to nature, arguing that the sensual affect of expert artistic combinations of art materials: pigments and resins, in some paintings exploits a bridge between the intricacies of human sentience and the external world. Art is thus more accurately located next to the sciences of language, mathematics, physiology and psychoanalysis. As the ""pure mathematics"" of the discipline, this materialist definition of fine-art develops guidelines for architecture, design, cultural-studies and ultimately social change.","With its appeal to the most subterranean aspects of perception art was always destined to be one of the last bastions of the transcendental in the 21st century. Color, Facture, Art and Design investigates the ""beauty"" of art based on the somatic ""magic"" of the physical body and its relationship to nature, arguing that the sensual affect of expert artistic combinations of art materials: pigments and resins, in some paintings exploits a bridge between the intricacies of human sentience and the external world. Art is thus more accurately located next to the sciences of language, mathematics, physiology and psychoanalysis. As the ""pure mathematics"" of the discipline, this materialist definition of fine-art develops guidelines for architecture, design, cultural-studies and ultimately social change.",9,"[""Recommended. ~ Adrian Heathcote, Academia.edu"", ""...I am struck by the novelty and ingenuity of the author's arguments about the physical construction of Vermeer's work and the anti-transcendence that attention to this material aspect makes possible. I like very, very much as the argument that Vermeer shows the way to a sensuous-and not narrated-appreciation of a work of art, and that this sensuousness, shown to be the result of manual labour and manipulation of the materials, helps to de-construct the narrative of transcendence. This is really brilliant stuff,.... ~ Jack Ameriglio, Rethinking Marxism"", ""\""Beautifully written...\"" ~ Deborah Wells"", ""Il a donc superposé de la peinture à l’huile sur une base blanche et épaisse, par des couches fines et des tons clairs, créant des effets de transparence. Iona Singh a d’ailleurs écrit une étude sur cette technique de Turner et la perception physique dans son livre Color, Facture, Art and Design. ~ Les œuvres en prisme de William Turner - Première rencontre avec Turner, by Agnès Tedman - Dieuxième Temps review"", ""\"" it is precisely this breaking down of rigid disciplinary categorisations that gives the book its appeal, and in this respect it follows in a fine tradition of materialist/Marxist histories...\""\""combines scholarly insight and critical engagement.\"" ~ Houman Barekat"", ""Speaking for myself, this constitutes a definite advance into the very poorly theorized area of the \""sensuous\"", that is, ecology as the human being and nature directly interact through the senses....the sensuous is precisely the point at which Marx's materialism distinguishes itself from idealism and mechanical materialism, and becomes historical. So you are working with something very profound here, yet with a firm grip on something very empirical as well. ~ Joel Kovel, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology"", ""This is a book worth arguing with and an author\n\nwho demands the attention of those who are interested\n\nin the possibilities of a materialist approach to\n\nunderstanding art as well as design or other built forms.\n\nSingh managed to provoke me about issues I did not\n\neven realize I had passionate feelings about and, in so\n\ndoing, caused me to begin to refine and even re-define\n\nmy own thoughts in relation to my love of art and its\n\nrelationship to class and other social issues. It strikes\n\nme that this is exactly what she meant to do.\n\nWayne Fife\n\nMemorial University of Newfoundland ~ Dr. Wayne Fife, What Might a Materialist Approach to Art Look Like: review of Color, Facture, Art and Design by Iona Singh, New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry Vol. 10, No. 1 (April 2019) Pp. 58-6"", ""\"".... Iona Singh argues that, in a world saturated with industrially produced synthetic colours: dyes made from coal tar, a by-product of oil production, we are losing touch with any meaningful connection with the materiality and facture of colour and our sensory perception. ‘Use of these strong, lightfast and inexpensive synthetic colors are at the expense of nuance, tincture and the plenitude of natural formation.’ She suggests that the ubiquity of coal tar colours in the built environment has contributed to the alienation of the senses and our estrangement of colour on an aesthetic level – colour is divorced from structure and does not appeal to the body in any real material sense anymore: relationships are lost and thereby the ‘sensual ground of related cognitive processes....\"" ~ Katrina Blannin, Monochrome/Duochrome, Abcrit blog #5, https://abcrit.wordpress.com/2015/03/01/5-monochromeduochrome-thoughts-on-colour-materiality-and-dependency-part-1-organised-by-katrina-blannin/"", ""I think the author has the potential to make quite a splash with the presently well-argued thesis about how the materials aspects of the construction of Vermeer's paintings account to a large degree for the \""aesthetic effect\"" that is seized on for questionable purposes-by many bourgeois and even Marxist critics. This paper serves as a great corrective regarding the exclusively \""narrative\"" focus of contemporary cultural criticism and the neglect of the material \""determinants' of narrative in painting and more generally, in all forms of creative production. ~ Jack Ameriglio, Rethinking Marxism""]" Combined and Uneven Apocalypse,"[""Evan Calder Williams""]","From salvagepunk to zombie hordes, wastelands to plagued cities, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse grapples with the apocalyptic fantasies of our collapsing era.","From the repurposed rubble of salvagepunk to undead hordes banging on shopping mall doors, from empty waste zones to teeming plagued cities, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse grapples with the apocalyptic fantasies of our collapsing era. Moving through the films, political tendencies, and recurrent crises of late capitalism, Evan Calder Williams paints a black toned portrait of the dream and nightmare images of a global order gone very, very wrong. Situating itself in the defaulting financial markets of the present, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse glances back toward a messy history of zombies, car wrecks, tidal waves, extinction, trash heaps, labour, pandemics, wolves, cannibalism, and general nastiness that populate the underside of our cultural imagination. Every age may dream the end of the world to follow, but these scattered nightmare figures are a skewed refraction of the normal hell of capitalism. The apocalypse isn't something that will happen one day: it's just the slow unveiling of the catastrophe we've been living through for centuries. Against any fantasies of progress, return, or reconciliation, Williams launches a loathing critique of the bleak present and offers a graveside smile for our necessary battles to come.","From the repurposed rubble of salvagepunk to undead hordes banging on shopping mall doors, from empty waste zones to teeming plagued cities, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse grapples with the apocalyptic fantasies of our collapsing era. Moving through the films, political tendencies, and recurrent crises of late capitalism, Evan Calder Williams paints a black toned portrait of the dream and nightmare images of a global order gone very, very wrong. Situating itself in the defaulting financial markets of the present, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse glances back toward a messy history of zombies, car wrecks, tidal waves, extinction, trash heaps, labour, pandemics, wolves, cannibalism, and general nastiness that populate the underside of our cultural imagination. Every age may dream the end of the world to follow, but these scattered nightmare figures are a skewed refraction of the normal hell of capitalism. The apocalypse isn't something that will happen one day: it's just the slow unveiling of the catastrophe we've been living through for centuries. Against any fantasies of progress, return, or reconciliation, Williams launches a loathing critique of the bleak present and offers a graveside smile for our necessary battles to come.",2,"[""More than a blueprint for liberation, Williams’s limpid and creative dissection of these cultural artefacts is an exemplary illustration of the serious scrutiny we should apply to our imaginative lives.\n\n~ The Oxonian Review"", ""Yes, another book about zombies and the end of the world. But this is not just another book about zombies and the end of the world. Like one of the junk-suturing recusants whose philosophy he has been central to constructing, Evan Calder Williams builds something rageful and compelling and quite new out of all this fucking wreckage.\n\n~ China Miéville""]" Coming From Nothing,"[""Matthew McKeever""]",A tragi-comic philosophical novella about how the internet is reshaping our notions of personal identity.,"Coming From Nothing is a tragi-comic love story concerned with notions of identity, such as Judith Butler's idea that sexual identity isn't determined by the body, and John Locke's that personal identity is a question of memory. The first novella in Zero Books new series of Thought Experiment Novellas, these are books that work out philosophical arguments in their plots. Whether focusing on William James' determinism, Descartes' mind/body dualism, or Judith Butler's argument for gender performativity, these short books attempt to flesh out philosophical problems. They are stories wherein philosophical ideas have consequences, at least in the lives of the characters.","Coming From Nothing is a tragi-comic love story concerned with notions of identity, such as Judith Butler's idea that sexual identity isn't determined by the body, and John Locke's that personal identity is a question of memory. The first novella in Zero Books new series of Thought Experiment Novellas, these are books that work out philosophical arguments in their plots. Whether focusing on William James' determinism, Descartes' mind/body dualism, or Judith Butler's argument for gender performativity, these short books attempt to flesh out philosophical problems. They are stories wherein philosophical ideas have consequences, at least in the lives of the characters.",2,"[""The first novella in Zero Books new series of 'Thought Experiment Novellas', \""Coming From Nothing\"" works out philosophical arguments in it's plot. Successfully fleshing out philosophical problems, \""Coming From Nothing\"" is a deftly crafted story where philosophical ideas have consequences in the lives of its characters.\n\nDeftly crafted, entertainingly thoughtful and thought-provoking, \""Coming From Nothing\"" is an ideal vehicle for launching the new Zero Books 'Thought Experiment' series of novellas and will prove to be a welcome and enduringly popular addition to both community and academic library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections. ~ Julie's Bookshelf, Midwest Book Review"", ""Coming from Nothing is a literary beignet sweetened by a rich powdering of philosophical speculation. The metaphysics of gender, the nature of personal identity, the relations among mind, body, information, and society - all of these contribute to a central philosophical enigma. Are Carrie’s and Jules’s driftingly intersecting lives governed by the causal powers of absences, or by the absence of causal powers? ~ Josh Dever, Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin""]" "Coming Revolution, The","[""Ben Reynolds""]",A technological revolution is driving capitalism toward crisis and collapse – can our society evolve in time to rescue the future?,"A technological revolution is driving capitalism toward crisis and collapse. Can our society evolve in time to rescue the future? Radical advances in automation, robotics, and computer technology have thrown millions out of work and will only continue to do so in the years to come. At the same time, cheap, individually-accessible machines will wrestle for primacy with both gleaming highly-automated factories and sweatshops alike, ultimately eroding the dominance of industrial production. Economic growth is slowing down, and it is not going to speed up again. The pressures fueling today's global unrest will not go away and are only going to get worse as wages stagnate in many countries, solid employment becomes harder to find, and cuts to social benefits continue. Competing radical and reactionary ideologies will clash as political consensus crumbles and the world's peoples search for answers to these challenges. In its opening decades, the 21st will be a century of war and revolution. By the end of the 21st century, capitalism will be consigned to the history books. Despite the seeming darkness of our era, our future is filled with incredible possibility. If working people join together, we can create a world of freedom, beauty, and abundance, where poverty and tyranny are merely distant memories for our grandchildren. This is the story of The Coming Revolution.","A technological revolution is driving capitalism toward crisis and collapse. Can our society evolve in time to rescue the future? Radical advances in automation, robotics, and computer technology have thrown millions out of work and will only continue to do so in the years to come. At the same time, cheap, individually-accessible machines will wrestle for primacy with both gleaming highly-automated factories and sweatshops alike, ultimately eroding the dominance of industrial production. Economic growth is slowing down, and it is not going to speed up again. The pressures fueling today's global unrest will not go away and are only going to get worse as wages stagnate in many countries, solid employment becomes harder to find, and cuts to social benefits continue. Competing radical and reactionary ideologies will clash as political consensus crumbles and the world's peoples search for answers to these challenges. In its opening decades, the 21st will be a century of war and revolution. By the end of the 21st century, capitalism will be consigned to the history books. Despite the seeming darkness of our era, our future is filled with incredible possibility. If working people join together, we can create a world of freedom, beauty, and abundance, where poverty and tyranny are merely distant memories for our grandchildren. This is the story of The Coming Revolution.",7,"[""Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Thorough and detailed history of capitalism and predictions for its (lack of a) future. Convincing and compelling, particularly in its discussions of the impact of technology. Worth your time. ~ Michael J (Educator) , NetGalley"", ""What is encouraging about books such as Reynolds’ is that they represent a return to discussing a society without production for sale, measurement by labour time, and value, as a practical possibility opened up by the continuing development and application of science and technology to production. ~ Adam Buick, https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2019/no-1376-april-2019/is-capitalism-collapsing/"", ""Reynolds offers the first complete hypothesis for the malady of inflation that swept post-World War II capitalism, based solely on the premises of Marx’s labor theory of value. This is a remarkable achievement in its own right and one deserving of praise for Reynolds work... Reynolds' book thus calls for a complete re-evaluation of the role of the state in post-war capitalism. ~ Jehu Eaves, https://therealmovement.wordpress.com/2018/07/20/the-coming-apocalypse-ben-reynolds-explains-why-wage-labor-has-no-future/"", ""The social and economic explanations of how we got here especially regarding the industrial revolution and the Great Recession are great. ~ Diane Hernandez , dianereviewsbooks.com"", ""A well-written history and projection of capitalism and hope for the future without revolution. ~ Joseph Spuckler, https://evilcyclist.wordpress.com/2018/05/27/book-review-the-coming-revolution-capitalism-in-the-21st-century/"", ""This release from Zero Books has an impressively large scope despite the time-specific title. In this sense, it is a remarkable exercise in Marxist methodology. Over thirteen relatively short chapters, Reynolds manages to cover the way the early printing press transformed the European production model, how twentieth-century automation affected labour around the world, outline a radical socialist ecology, concisely analyse the strengths and weakness of ‘really existing socialist’ projects, propose a model for a revolutionary future, and more.\n\nIn many ways, this book reveals itself to be a handbook for Marxists in the twenty-first century in the way it integrates an understanding of the economic forces of the past with an analysis of the present situation and a rallying call for a truly revolutionary approach to the future. ~ Counterfire, https://www.counterfire.org/articles/book-reviews/20746-the-coming-revolution-book-review"", ""Tracing developments and revolutions through time, author Ben Reynolds shows he has done his citational homework. I recommended pairing this book with Kuhn’s work on paradigms. ~ JD De hart, NetGalley""]" Concepts for a Democratic and Ecological Society,"[""Yavor Tarinski""]",A book about the fundamental conflict between democratic aspirations and the imposed norms of capitalism.,"Yavor Tarinski examines the fundamental conflict between democratic aspirations and the imposed norms of capitalism, the potential for directly democratic and ecologically designed cities, the imperative to renew the commons, and the prospects for a genuine solidarity economy to overturn the ravages of capitalist economic growth. It critiques bureaucratic, technocratic and conspiracist tendencies both in mainstream discourse and on the Left, and offers a compelling and uplifting vision of a thoroughly transformed social order.","Yavor Tarinski examines the fundamental conflict between democratic aspirations and the imposed norms of capitalism, the potential for directly democratic and ecologically designed cities, the imperative to renew the commons, and the prospects for a genuine solidarity economy to overturn the ravages of capitalist economic growth. It critiques bureaucratic, technocratic and conspiracist tendencies both in mainstream discourse and on the Left, and offers a compelling and uplifting vision of a thoroughly transformed social order.",6,"[""I encourage you to read Yavor Tarinski's new book \""Concepts for Democratic and Ecological Society\"". Regardless of your political beliefs, you will learn vital facts concerning direct democracy and social ecology.\n\nTarinski is relentless in his analysis and criticism of the destruction of the environment. He understands and describes how we have no choice but to go beyond capitalism and mass consumption. Social Ecology is the answer!\n\nThis is exactly why I mess with Yavor and his books. He drops knowledge on a deep level combining his effluences in Bookchin and Castoriadis and others. He lays out solutions that will work to help us build a new and better life for everyone. ~ J. H. Kagi, libcom.org"", ""The last work of Yavor Tavinski, Concepts for a democratic and ecological society is a great and holistic contribution to the change we urgently need to make in face of the anthropocene era rooted in statecraft, capitalism and authoritarianism. Based on the exploration of emancipatory movements of the last decades, from the alter-globalist struggles to recent local practices of resistance and mutual aid from all over the world, Yavor shares through his deep and simple words the meaningful path of social ecology. An invitation to free ourselves in all the fields of life, from democracy and education to the economic relations of domination. Through his accurate analysis of the current global situation based on many references to important intellectual figures like Bookchin, Castoriadis, Henri Lefebvre, etc, he invites us to begin to believe in the “magnificent life, waiting just around the corner” and create it, here and now. ~ Magali Fricaudet, member of Institut d’écologie sociale et de communalisme"", ""Never has the vital vocabulary of socioeconomic integration and participation been more important. Yavor Tarinksi has delivered us from forms of corporate cognitive conscription. Now, superfluous labels fall away. Let us take up appropriate direct action in the historical context of liberation struggles. Authenticity and autonomy arise. ~ Mark Mason, international commentator"", ""Yavor Tarinski’s Concepts for a Democratic and Ecological Society challenges your mind on the most significant questions such as direct democracy, de-growth, solidarity economy, and libertarian municipalism. This is a necessary revolutionary work which should be in your library to make you think more in depth about your future, about utopias, and ultimately about the perspectives of a democratic and ecological society. ~ Emet Değirmenci, author of Women’s Activism in Ecological Transformation"", ""Yavor Tarinski’s book gives us a good thrill of citizen empowerment and grassroots resistance. It presents direct democracy as a modern project for a new politics of equality and solidarity. Just what we need today. ~ Vincent Gerber, author of Bookchin and Social Ecology: An Intellectual's Biography"", ""In his past writings, the Bulgarian social activist and political researcher Yavor Tarinski has demonstrated a singular talent for explaining concepts in political and social theory in an engaging and highly accessible manner. Now he has put forward a compelling manifesto for radically transforming society toward a non-statist model of ecological direct democracy. This work draws substantially upon Tarinski’s two main influences, the social theorists and critics Cornelius Castoriadis and Murray Bookchin, and also synthesizes ideas from such well known thinkers as Hannah Arendt, David Graeber, Elinor Ostrom, David Harvey, and a host of other European and international sources.\n\nTarinski’s text examines the fundamental conflict between democratic aspirations and the imposed norms of capitalism, the potential for directly democratic and ecologically designed cities, the imperative to renew the commons, and the prospects for a genuine solidarity economy to overturn the ravages of capitalist economic growth. He critiques bureaucratic, technocratic and conspiracist tendencies both in mainstream discourse and on the Left, and offers a compelling and uplifting vision of a thoroughly transformed social order. This book is an important contribution to the expanding international literature in social ecology and democratic theory, and deserves to be read and discussed widely.\n\n~ Brian Tokar, author of Towards Climate Justice""]" "Conscience of a Progressive, The","[""Steven Klees""]","Prof. Steven Klees draws on 45 years of worldwide analysis as an economist and international educator to paint a detailed picture of conservative, liberal, and progressive views on a wide range of social issues.","The Conscience of a Progressive begins where Senator Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) and Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal (2007) leave off. Prof. Klees draws on 45 years of work around the world as an economist and international educator to paint a detailed picture of conservative, liberal, and progressive views on a wide range of current social issues. He takes an in-depth look at his specializations: education, economics, poverty and inequality, international development, and capitalism. He examines major social problems like health care, the climate crisis, and war. Throughout the book, Prof. Klees tries to give a fair and careful depiction of how conservatives and liberals see these issues, whilst focusing on critiques by progressives, and on the alternatives they offer.","The Conscience of a Progressive begins where Senator Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) and Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal (2007) leave off. Prof. Klees draws on 45 years of work around the world as an economist and international educator to paint a detailed picture of conservative, liberal, and progressive views on a wide range of current social issues. He takes an in-depth look at his specializations: education, economics, poverty and inequality, international development, and capitalism. He examines major social problems like health care, the climate crisis, and war. Throughout the book, Prof. Klees tries to give a fair and careful depiction of how conservatives and liberals see these issues, whilst focusing on critiques by progressives, and on the alternatives they offer.",7,"[""In this new study Professor Klees draws on 45 years of work around the world as an economist and international educator to paint a detailed picture of conservative, liberal, and progressive views on a wide range of current social issues. He takes an in-depth look at his specializations: education, economics, poverty and inequality, international development, and capitalism.\n\nProfessor Klees also examines major social problems like health care, the climate crisis, and war. Throughout this informed and informative study, Professor Klees tries to give a fair and careful depiction of how conservatives and liberals see these issues, whilst focusing on critiques by progressives, and on the alternatives they offer.\n\nExceptionally well written, reasoned, reported, organized and presented, \""The Conscience Of A Progressive\"" is especially and unreservedly recommended for both community and college/university library Comparative Politics, Economic Policy, and Political Philosophy collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists. ~ Steven Klees, Mid West Book Review"", ""Steven Klees has written an ambitious and fascinating book, his crisp and engaging words cover everything from debates around sexuality to economic justice, education and development. The ‘progressive’ contrasts with the ‘conservative’ by standing for a more equal and ecological society, and the ‘liberal’ in arguing that structural alternatives are necessary. This book will attract attention and readers in an America where progressive and practical policy solutions are increasing in demand. ~ Derek Wall, author of Economics After Capitalism: A Guide to the Ruins, former principal spokesperson for the U.K. Green Party"", ""Prof. Klees’ book is a must read for anyone interested in politics, economics, and education today. During the latter part of the 20th century, in far too many countries we have witnessed an unconscionable and steady shift to the right by liberals and social democratic parties resulting in a neoliberal consensus. Prof Klees’ critique from a progressive perspective is extremely timely as it contributes to a necessary strategic reflection on how to rebuild a truly progressive movement. ~ David Edwards, General Secretary, Education International, the global teachers’ union"", ""Steven Klees has written an important and well-argued case for a new left politics that draws on the best of the old. He draws on his deep and extensive knowledge of education, and therefore of the potential of human beings if given the resources and encouragement to realise this potential, to present an original perspective on what it means to be progressive in the US today. It's a book which should be published and published soon as the issue of political alternatives to the present chaos gets urgent! ~ Hilary Wainwright, Author of A New Politics from the Left, former member of the editorial board of the New Left Review, current editor of Red Pepper, and Fellow at the Transnational Institute"", ""Professor Steven Klees, through succinct and accessible prose, delivers, from the perspective of a progressive worldview a lively commentary on the key issues of our time – education and socio-economic development but also climate change, healthcare, war, and more…. His refreshing analysis comes at a time when it is most needed – a time when the dominant neoliberal discourse stifles the search for alternatives and remains largely unchallenged. A time when social development, the environment and reason face sustained assault and when the world lurches inexorably and dangerously toward ecological disasters and the barbarism of devastating wars. Klees lucidly unravels the basis for the global triple scourge of poverty, inequality, and discrimination and reveals the threads connecting class inequality with racism, sexism, heterosexism and ableism that make up the social fabric of the global order while suggesting much-needed alternatives. He brings to bear his considerable experience of five decades of professional life and his rich body of work spans 30 countries. This crucial book answers critical questions for anyone seeking progressive change. It is also a spur to new struggles – and to new possibilities. ~ Salim Vally, Professor, University of Johannesburg and Director, Center for Education Rights and Transformation, co-author of Education, Economy and Society"", ""In these very troubling times Klees' book avoids merely cataloging crimes to smartly critique conservative and liberal perspectives and reflect on...positive contributions of progressives on many critical issues. ~ Michael Albert, Author of Practical Utopia: Strategies for a Desirable Society and co-founder Z Magazine and South End Press"", ""The Conscience of a Progressive is…essential reading in our current political moment. Steven Klees parses the foundational differences between conservative, liberal and progressive analysis, worldview and policy programs….This book is a substantive primer to ideas and programmatic distinctions that goes beyond horse-race political reporting. A valuable roadmap to the power of progressive thinking and policy. ~ Chuck Collins, Institute for Policy Studies, co-editor, Inequality.org, author, Born on Third Base""]" Continental Realism,"[""Paul J. Ennis""]",In Continental Realism Paul Ennis tackles the rise of realist metaphysics in contemporary continental philosophy.,"In Continental Realism Paul Ennis tackles the rise of realist metaphysics in contemporary continental philosophy. Pitted against the dominant antirealist and transcendental continental hegemony Ennis argues that continental thinking must establish an alliance between metaphysics, speculation, and realism if we are to truly get back to the things themselves.","In Continental Realism Paul Ennis tackles the rise of realist metaphysics in contemporary continental philosophy. Pitted against the dominant antirealist and transcendental continental hegemony Ennis argues that continental thinking must establish an alliance between metaphysics, speculation, and realism if we are to truly get back to the things themselves.",3,"[""Aan excellent introduction to a fascinating new development in philosophical thinking.\n\n~ Emmet O’Cuana, abookadaytillicanstay"", ""Paul J. Ennis has given us the first general overview of the theses of After Finitude , and of their reception in the Anglo-American philosophical field. The theses in question - speculative and correlationist - are here exposed with clarity and fidelity. An indispensable introduction to speculative realism.\n\n~ Professor Quentin Meillassoux, Le Département de philosophie, École normale supérieure"", ""In its brief compass Ennis’s book gives a lively, sympathetic though critical account of a newly emergent movement of thought - speculative realism - that looks set to transform received ideas of what counts as “continental” philosophy.\n\n~ Professor Christopher Norris, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University""]" Continuity and Rupture,"[""J. Moufawad-Paul""]",A philosophical examination of the theoretical terrain of contemporary Maoism premised on the counter-intuitive assumption that Maoism did not emerge as a coherent theory until the end of the 1980s.,A philosophical examination of the theoretical terrain of contemporary Maoism premised on the counter-intuitive assumption that Maoism did not emerge as a coherent theory until the end of the 1980s.,A philosophical examination of the theoretical terrain of contemporary Maoism premised on the counter-intuitive assumption that Maoism did not emerge as a coherent theory until the end of the 1980s.,5,"[""This is a fascinating must read and highly readable book; even if you disagree with the author's arguments, you will reconsider much of the rhetoric that we take for granted regarding Maoism. ~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States"", ""Capitalism is headed for disaster. Any serious attempt to alter the course of history requires revolutionary theory. Whether you agree with Joshua Moufawad-Paul's conclusions or not, this book raises the questions we all need to ask. ~ Gabriel Kuhn, author of Playing as If the World Mattered"", ""\""Continuity and Rupture\"" is Moufawad-Paul’s theorization of a political and revolutionary thought of today. This book offers an active framework for understanding the Maoist turn in Marxism, which the author grounds in a challenging vision of history and a necessity for social change. ~ Julian Jason Haladyn, author of Boredom and Art"", ""Moufawad-Paul's *Continuity And Rupture* is a much welcome attempt to bring philosophical clarity to political debates which all too often are wrapped around vague terms at the expense of conceptual clarity. Its central thesis claims that Maoism is a coherent theoretical development that both continues the revolutionary content of Leninist theory and breaks with its historical limitations, thus opening up a new set of theoretical possibilities ultimately rooted in the scientific propositions of historical materialism. It is a provocative thesis, but one that is lucidly explored by Moufawad-Paul. This is a book that should renew interest in historically concrete forms of Marxist theory and produce spirited, but invaluable debate, on the nature of Maoism. Highly recommended for both practical and philosophical reasons!\n\n~ Esteve Morera, author of \""Gramsci's Historicism\"" and \""Gramsci, Materialism and Philosophy\"""", ""Calling all organizers, anti-capitalists, and people who care about anticolonial struggle—this book is for you. Beautifully clear, Moufawad-Paul lays out the concepts that we almost never get to learn in our schools or in our social movements—the concepts that many have struggled to grasp and apply—the concepts that are necessary for revolution. Placing the tools of western philosophy in the service of explicating the significance and necessity of actually-existing Maoism, this book is an accessible and compelling primer in science, theory, philosophy, and revolution. This book is just in time. At its heart, it is an historical materialist account of the unfolding of revolutionary praxis through the rupture and continuity of Marxist-Leninism and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Moufawad-Paul begins his periodization and clarification of Maoism from the revolutionary theory of the Community Party of Peru and the Communist Party (Maoist) of Afghanistan, situated in the global struggle against capitalism-imperialism. And for you, eurocentric academic Marxists: you have been put on notice—you can’t say you haven’t been told. ~ Rachel Gorman, Associate Professor in Critical Disability Studies, York University""]" "Corona Generation, The","[""Jennie Bristow and Emma Gilland""]",How teenagers' experiences of lockdown will impact on their future.,"It is already clear that the COVID-19 crisis will have huge social and economic implications. The Corona Generation considers its effect on the generation currently coming of age: the demographic currently known as ‘Generation Z’. A generation that was already considered to be teetering on the brink of an uncertain political, economic, and environmental future now finds itself entering an adulthood in which nothing can be taken for granted; where continuous crisis management is already presented as the ‘new normal’.","It is already clear that the COVID-19 crisis will have huge social and economic implications. The Corona Generation considers its effect on the generation currently coming of age: the demographic currently known as ‘Generation Z’. A generation that was already considered to be teetering on the brink of an uncertain political, economic, and environmental future now finds itself entering an adulthood in which nothing can be taken for granted; where continuous crisis management is already presented as the ‘new normal’.",4,"[""\""One of the UK's leading sociologists of generation uses both her scholarship and her ability to write beautifully to give meaning to the experience of Spring and Summer 2020. Together her daughter Emma, whose insights display maturity well beyond her years, Bristow helps us think and reflect on what social crisis means, and how we move forwards.\"" ~ Professor Ellie Lee, Director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, University of Kent"", ""\""As a teacher who watched her Year 6 class lose a special end of primary school time, and the mother to a 16-year-old who lost the rite of passage given by GCSEs, this book chimed with me and raised some important issues for the future that we should all be discussing.\"" ~ Josephine Hussey, teacher and parent"", ""Given its timely and responsive quality, this proposed book is very much of the moment. It deals with a theme that is widely discussed and in which there is widespread interest. Its generational angle will provide a much needed and original take on the politics of a pandemic. ~ Professor Frank Furedi, University of Kent"", ""The proposed book promises to read wide audience, responding intelligently to the present situation, with a focus on an aspect of social life that touches everyone. The issues and problems identified for the future of interactions between generations are critical ones, about which the author already has a well-established track record of writing (both academic and popular). This track record also includes publication based around writing high quality text at speed, making this proposal ideal for the requirements of this point in time. It is to be expected that the book can sell well, appealing to a diverse audience. ~ Professor Ellie Lee, Director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, University of Kent""]" Creepiness,"[""Adam Kotsko""]","A sequel to Awkwardness and Why We Love Sociopaths, Creepiness explores popular culture to examine the worst character trait of all.","A specter is haunting contemporary television—the specter of creepiness. In our everyday lives, we try to avoid creepiness at every cost, shunning creepy people and recoiling in horror at the idea that we ourselves might be creeps. And yet when we sit down to watch TV, we are increasingly entranced by creepy characters. In this follow-up to Awkwardness and Why We Love Sociopaths, Adam Kotsko tries to account for the strange fascination of creepiness. In addition to surveying a wide range of contemporary examples—from Peep Show to Girls, from Orange is the New Black to Breaking Bad—Kotsko mines the television of his 90s childhood, marveling at the creepiness that seemed to be hiding in plain sight in shows like Full House and Family Matters. Using Freud as his guide through the treacherous territory of creepiness, Kotsko argues that we are fascinated by the creepy because in our own ways, we are all creeps.","A specter is haunting contemporary television—the specter of creepiness. In our everyday lives, we try to avoid creepiness at every cost, shunning creepy people and recoiling in horror at the idea that we ourselves might be creeps. And yet when we sit down to watch TV, we are increasingly entranced by creepy characters. In this follow-up to Awkwardness and Why We Love Sociopaths, Adam Kotsko tries to account for the strange fascination of creepiness. In addition to surveying a wide range of contemporary examples—from Peep Show to Girls, from Orange is the New Black to Breaking Bad—Kotsko mines the television of his 90s childhood, marveling at the creepiness that seemed to be hiding in plain sight in shows like Full House and Family Matters. Using Freud as his guide through the treacherous territory of creepiness, Kotsko argues that we are fascinated by the creepy because in our own ways, we are all creeps.",1,"[""Rarely do we find a book which combines detailed analysis of a concrete pop-cultural phenomenon – the rise of creepy characters in today’s sitcoms and TV series, from Sex and the City and Breaking Bad to Mad Men and Louie – with properly metaphysical reflections on the traumatic core of subjectivity. And, on the top of it all, the books is immensely readable, simply unputdownable, without sacrificing any of its theoretical stringency. Adam Kotsko not only provides the social and ideological context for the fascinating figure of a creep, as well as the Freudian account of what makes a subject creepy. His ultimate insight is that creepiness is a name for the uncanny dimension in all of us which makes us strangers to ourselves – a creep is ultimately our name for what the Judeo-Christian tradition calls a neighbor. Even creeps will enjoy this book… and only real creeps will not buy it! ~ Slavoj Zizek, philosopher and psychoanalyst""]" Cyber Disobedience,"[""Jeff Shantz"", ""Jordon Tomblin""]","Few activities have captured the contemporary popular imagination as hacking and online activism, from Anonymous and beyond. Few political ideas have gained more notoriety recently than anarchism. Yet both remain misunderstood and much maligned.","Few activities have captured the contemporary popular imagination as hacking and online activism, from Anonymous and beyond. Few political ideas have gained more notoriety recently than anarchism. Yet both remain misunderstood and much maligned. /Cyber Disobedience/ provides the most engaging and detailed analysis of online civil disobedience and anarchism today.","Few activities have captured the contemporary popular imagination as hacking and online activism, from Anonymous and beyond. Few political ideas have gained more notoriety recently than anarchism. Yet both remain misunderstood and much maligned. /Cyber Disobedience/ provides the most engaging and detailed analysis of online civil disobedience and anarchism today.",2,"[""One thing is clear: the Internet is likely the largest decentralized project in all of human history. Shantz and Tomblin hone in on the Internet’s renegades and radicals, who utilize the Internet’s unprecedented power for the purposes of resisting authority, creating international solidarity, and spreading the meme of anarchy. /Cyber Disobedience/ describes hacktivists, the free software and anti-copyright movements, digital whistleblowing, and other efforts to create a freer and more just future, both online and offline. This book truly captures the rebel spirit at the heart of the Internet Age. ~ Dana M. Williams, California State University, Chico."", ""Beyond the restrictive and narrow politics-as-usual from both left and right, the authors demonstrate the passionate and creative forces of contemporary anarchism that fly in the face of both corporate media and traditional academic accounts alike that perpetrate the mythical popular image of anarchism as utopic and disorderly. Providing discussions on everything from the rise of Anonymous, the Arab Spring, and demonization of whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, to the coining of the term “hacktivism” in 1998, Cyber Disobedience explores the role of social media in information-sharing and movement-building possibilities. Activists, students, scholars - anyone interested in anti-capitalist social movements and digital resistance from below - will benefit from reading Shantz and Tomblin’s arguments that are theoretically sophisticated, empirically rigorous and historically significant. A lucid, compelling and provocative account of the potential of the digital revolutionary spirit, the text sets a very high standard for debates in the social studies of power, knowledge and technology. Overall, Cyber Disobedience constitutes a significant and timely contribution - a must-read for anyone concerned with freedom, technology, social justice and state repression in the twenty-first century. ~ Dr. Heidi M. Rimke, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Winnipeg.""]" Daniel Defoe and the Bank of England,"[""Val Hamilton"", ""Martin Parker""]",Why is a novel like a corporation? How is Daniel Defoe connected to the Bank of England?,"This little book tells the truthful story of how the Bank of England actually came into being. It is a story of pirates, treasure, random good fortune and sheer determination. This is an institution founded on risk, daring and imagination. The tale is entangled with that of the early novel, in particular the fortunes of one Moll Flanders, an entrepreneur of sexual relations in the growing London market for capital in the early eighteenth century. These accounts are woven together with the life-stories of Daniel Defoe and William Paterson, founders of two of the key institutions of our modern age, the novel and the corporation. This reveals connections which are nowadays forgotten, and which the fractured specialisms of ‘Literature’, ‘History’ and ‘Business’ can rarely see. These tales are set against the backdrop of the long eighteenth century - fervent years of inventiveness, high risk gambling, and political revolution. The authors show that the dark arts of deceit, and the credibility of fictions, are requirements for any creative enterprise, and that all organizations are fictions. Listen to Mark Watson's BBC Radio 4 documentary featuring 'Daniel Defoe and the Bank of England': http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07k01bf","This little book tells the truthful story of how the Bank of England actually came into being. It is a story of pirates, treasure, random good fortune and sheer determination. This is an institution founded on risk, daring and imagination. The tale is entangled with that of the early novel, in particular the fortunes of one Moll Flanders, an entrepreneur of sexual relations in the growing London market for capital in the early eighteenth century. These accounts are woven together with the life-stories of Daniel Defoe and William Paterson, founders of two of the key institutions of our modern age, the novel and the corporation. This reveals connections which are nowadays forgotten, and which the fractured specialisms of ‘Literature’, ‘History’ and ‘Business’ can rarely see. These tales are set against the backdrop of the long eighteenth century - fervent years of inventiveness, high risk gambling, and political revolution. The authors show that the dark arts of deceit, and the credibility of fictions, are requirements for any creative enterprise, and that all organizations are fictions. Listen to Mark Watson's BBC Radio 4 documentary featuring 'Daniel Defoe and the Bank of England': http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07k01bf",3,"[""Though whisper it quietly, much of research in business would bore the bum off a buffalo. This on the other hand is an interdisciplinary masterpiece standing between English literature and Management which is an exciting tale of risk, danger, piratical endeavour, plunder, deceit and daring-do in the Age of Projects. It is a beautifully realised narrative interweaving the rise of the Bank of England with the economy of Scotland, Daniel Defoe’s biography and the story of Moll Flanders. It provides literary enjoyment and real insight into the contemporary world in equal measure. It’s a treasure. ~ Professor Gibson Burrell, Management, University of Leicester"", ""This is an engaging and distinctive book about the links between the history of the novel and the Bank of England. Hamilton and Parker's work is an original contribution to our growing critical understanding of the fictional dimensions of finance and financial institutions. ~ Professor Nicholas Royle, Literature, University of Sussex"", ""A bold and exciting fusion of literary and financial history, this provocative organisational study takes us to the very heart of the modern. ~ David Kynaston, Author and Social Historian""]" Dark Futures,"[""Nick Dunn""]","We dream in darkness. Yet light is everywhere, blazing its way through our lives and thoughts. We urgently need new ways to think of futures to save the planet, other species, and ourselves. What might happen when the lights go down?","Dark Futures provides a new way of thinking about the world. Light is everywhere, often uninvited as a by-product of our contemporary lives. Darkness meanwhile appears unwanted, yet is essential to our wellbeing, other species, and our planet. When we consider what futures are possible, they tend to direct us to visions of either a shiny, frictionless world which is light and bright, or at the other end of the spectrum they are fearsome, shadowy dystopias. This book reclaims darkness to think through alternative futures which are neither environmentally catastrophic nor technologically evangelical. Dark Futures proposes a new philosophy, in which darkness is embraced as an emancipatory space for positive thought and creative expression. By revealing fresh ideologies that can empower sustainable and ethical relationships with our ecologies and our technologies, this book sets out a new vision for the futures of collective life.","Dark Futures provides a new way of thinking about the world. Light is everywhere, often uninvited as a by-product of our contemporary lives. Darkness meanwhile appears unwanted, yet is essential to our wellbeing, other species, and our planet. When we consider what futures are possible, they tend to direct us to visions of either a shiny, frictionless world which is light and bright, or at the other end of the spectrum they are fearsome, shadowy dystopias. This book reclaims darkness to think through alternative futures which are neither environmentally catastrophic nor technologically evangelical. Dark Futures proposes a new philosophy, in which darkness is embraced as an emancipatory space for positive thought and creative expression. By revealing fresh ideologies that can empower sustainable and ethical relationships with our ecologies and our technologies, this book sets out a new vision for the futures of collective life.",3,"[""This bold vision questions the outdated view of darkness as something to be feared and designed against and, by doing so, proposes a reconnection of humans within the wider world – a true multispecies coexistence that is in tune with our body clocks and nature’s rhythms. ~ , Eurasia Review"", ""Professor Nick Dunn of Lancaster University proposes a different path – one that invites darkness back into our lives. His idea may sound strange in a world obsessed with visibility and brightness. But at its heart lies a radical rethinking of what it means to live well, together, on a shared Earth.\n\nThis is not a plea for darkness out of nostalgia. It is a vision grounded in science, architecture, health, ecology, and culture. It suggests that turning down the lights might brighten our future in unexpected ways.\n\nDark Futures blends personal story with architectural insight. It explores how embracing darkness shaped Professor Dunn’s own thinking. And it shows how we might use design to imagine new, hopeful possibilities. ~ Sanjana Gajbhiye, Earth.com"", ""Praise for Dark Matters: A brilliant book. Dark Matters is an adventure into the heart of the city at night - the time when the true nature of the beast reveals itself. ~ John Robb, Louder Than War""]" Dark Matters,"[""Nick Dunn""]","Where now for the secret, the contemplative, the quiet and subterranean in our cities? The question may no longer be what spaces we wish to engage with but when we do.","Dark Matters explores the city at night as a place and time within which escape from the confines of the daytime is possible. More specifically, it is a state of being. There is a long history of nightwalking, often integral to shady worlds of miscreants, shift workers and transgressors. Yet the night offers much to be enjoyed beyond vice. Night by definition contrasts day, summoning notions of darkness and fear. But another night exists out there. Liberation and exhilaration in the urban landscape is increasingly rare when so much of our attention and actions are controlled. Rather than consider darkness as negative, opposed to illumination and enlightenment, this book explores the rich potential of the dark for our senses. The question may no longer be about what spaces we wish to engage with but when we do?","Dark Matters explores the city at night as a place and time within which escape from the confines of the daytime is possible. More specifically, it is a state of being. There is a long history of nightwalking, often integral to shady worlds of miscreants, shift workers and transgressors. Yet the night offers much to be enjoyed beyond vice. Night by definition contrasts day, summoning notions of darkness and fear. But another night exists out there. Liberation and exhilaration in the urban landscape is increasingly rare when so much of our attention and actions are controlled. Rather than consider darkness as negative, opposed to illumination and enlightenment, this book explores the rich potential of the dark for our senses. The question may no longer be about what spaces we wish to engage with but when we do?",3,"[""A brilliant book. Dark Matters is an adventure into the heart of the city at night – the time when the true nature of the beast reveals itself. ~ John Robb, Louder Than War"", ""A must read for anyone who's starting with hauntology, dérive or urbanism in general. It's short, urgent and written with poetic sensibility. ~ Nicolas Diaz, NetGalley"", ""Dunn trained as an architect and this is a crucial part of what is at play here: Out in the dark, walking himself to sleep – he hopes – the architect coincidentally has the buildings removed for him by the lack of light, and then delivered again anew, in flashes. Here, sleepless, the city becomes something else. Another nocturnal Manchester urbanaut, Mark E. Smith, wrote of ‘entrances uncovered’ and ‘street signs you never saw’, all ‘courtesy of winter.’ There is nothing gothic about this book, despite its dark title and cover. In some ways, night time does exactly what snow does to the urban landscape. It makes it strange, it makes you see anew.\n\nWhiteout or blackout, the space is transformed, momentarily, and this impermanence of states is important to its power to ‘other’ your view of it. If it were always daytime there would be no other side to cast this transformed view against. The title implies the night as another dimension, ‘dark matter’ as the invisible glue of the social. But that is not all this book does. It ‘makes manifest’ the urban night by shuttling between theory and description.\n\nSo much leftist writing hides what it really thinks in abstraction, or older, tried and tested rhetorics. This book does not make any wincingly worthy cultural capital out of hauntology, the problem seems to be, actually – and chillingly – that in the night city there are no ghosts left and the few that remain are becoming even more fugitive: ‘Far better to embrace the world and its contradictions, difficulties, untidiness and dirtiness, physical and psychic, than to summon long-vanished ghosts.’\n\nThe equally chilling thesis is that the only way to escape from the ‘intoxicating pathologies’ of the city, is to vanish into ‘night practices beyond consumption’, to an edge zone almost completely drained of light, in order to ‘be’. But this is the manifesto, that in nightwalking the city we might find the black mirror of the everyday, which might teach us more about that everyday than we could have imagined before going out there. ‘Urban areas are pathological’, the ‘nocturnal dowser can summon these neuroses…’\n\nThis book is useful, it is both open and closed. Closed in that its form as a manifesto really puts its cards on tables. Open in that it advises particular spatial practices in the interests of seeing anew. Open in that it encourages others to develop that way of working further.\n\nNow it’s over to you, on the night shift. ~ Steve Hanson, Manchester Review of Books""]" Dead Man Working,"[""Peter Fleming"", ""Carl Cederstrom""]",An analysis of the dead man working and the way in which capital is now colonizing life itself.,"Capitalism has become strange. Ironically, while the ‘age of work’ seems to have come to an end, working has assumed a total presence – a ‘worker’s society’ in the worst sense of the term – where everyone finds themselves obsessed with it. So what does the worker tell us today? ""I feel drained, empty… dead."" This book tells the story of the dead man working. It follows this figure through the daily tedium of the office, to the humiliating mandatory team building exercise, to awkward encounters with the funky boss who pretends to hate capitalism and tells you to be authentic. In this society, the experience of work is not of dying...but neither of living. It is one of a living death. And yet, the dead man working is nevertheless compelled to wear the exterior signs of life, to throw a pretty smile, feign enthusiasm and make a half-baked joke. When the corporation has colonized life itself, even our dreams, the question of escape becomes ever more pressing, ever more desperate.","Capitalism has become strange. Ironically, while the ‘age of work’ seems to have come to an end, working has assumed a total presence – a ‘worker’s society’ in the worst sense of the term – where everyone finds themselves obsessed with it. So what does the worker tell us today? ""I feel drained, empty… dead."" This book tells the story of the dead man working. It follows this figure through the daily tedium of the office, to the humiliating mandatory team building exercise, to awkward encounters with the funky boss who pretends to hate capitalism and tells you to be authentic. In this society, the experience of work is not of dying...but neither of living. It is one of a living death. And yet, the dead man working is nevertheless compelled to wear the exterior signs of life, to throw a pretty smile, feign enthusiasm and make a half-baked joke. When the corporation has colonized life itself, even our dreams, the question of escape becomes ever more pressing, ever more desperate.",3,"[""A bracing thesis to consider on your tightly regulated lunchbreak.....\n\nGathering examples from Žižek to Woody Allen or film adaptations of Stephen King, the book is mordantly entertaining.\n\n~ Stephen Poole, The Guardian"", ""Cederström and Fleming, like a present day Virgil, bravely venture into an underworld full of shades whose entire lives have been put to work, who throw themselves heart and soul into the job, and who are constantly implored by management gurus to “be themselves,” “feel free,” and “have fun” in the office. This fascinating and dark little book is an excellent and disturbing introduction to what increasingly large realms of the world of work have become.\n\n~ Michael Hardt, Co-author of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth."", ""What has work done to us? Cederström and Fleming’s brilliant dark and witty book tells us the truth. Working in our sleep? Dressing up as infants? Deprivation tank addiction? Fitness centrers? Suicide? Email? If you didn’t already know what work has made you become then this book might have a devastating effect on your life. Read it!\n\n~ Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor, New School for Social Research""]" Dead People,"[""Stefany Anne Golberg"", ""Morgan Meis""]",A book of unorthodox obituaries from David Foster Wallace to Osama bin Laden.,"Dead People is a book of eulogies, written for an eclectic assortment of famous and interesting people who died in recent years. The essays were written by Stefany Anne Golberg and 2013 Whiting Award winner Morgan Meis. The book covers twenty-eight dead people in all, including intellectuals like Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens and Eric Hobsbawn; musicians like Sun Ra, MCA (Beastie Boys) and Kurt Cobain; writers like David Foster Wallace, John Updike and Tom Clancy; artists like Thomas Kinkade and Robert Rauschenberg; and controversial political figures like Osama bin Laden and Mikhail Kalashnikov.","Dead People is a book of eulogies, written for an eclectic assortment of famous and interesting people who died in recent years. The essays were written by Stefany Anne Golberg and 2013 Whiting Award winner Morgan Meis. The book covers twenty-eight dead people in all, including intellectuals like Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens and Eric Hobsbawn; musicians like Sun Ra, MCA (Beastie Boys) and Kurt Cobain; writers like David Foster Wallace, John Updike and Tom Clancy; artists like Thomas Kinkade and Robert Rauschenberg; and controversial political figures like Osama bin Laden and Mikhail Kalashnikov.",6,"[""What a fine, thoughtful and quietly courageous [essay about Osama bin Laden], Saddam's end and the rituals of death. It moved and persuaded me, both. ~ Adam Gopnik, New Yorker Staff Writer, winner of three National Magazine Awards and the George Polk Award for magazine reporting"", ""These tart, funny, sad, occasionally angry and always surprising essays about recently departed writers, artists, musicians, and terrorists are much more than obituaries. Taken together, they form an intellectual, artistic, and political history of the 20th century. It was, for the most part, a rotten century, but it's where we came from, and very much worth revisiting through the eyes and minds of Golberg and Meis. ~ Keith Gessen, co-editor of n+1, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men"", ""Read this book first for the tart, surprising sentences: \""You could call it a theological problem,\"" on the Beastie Boys; \""You can't overestimate how difficult it is to write about McDonald's that well,\"" on Updike; \""There is nowhere to stray when all is one,\"" on Tom Clancy, of all people. Then read it again to encounter two minds beautifully surveying our hideous, glorious last century passim. I both admire and teeth-grindingly envy this beautiful little book. ~ Tom Bissell, Harper's Magazine Contributing Editor, Rome Prize, Anna Akhmatova Prize"", ""Are the essays collected here literary obituaries or just occasional pieces (death being the final occasion for us all)? Whatever they are they’re smart, generous, honest, and probing. By giving equal attention and care to movie stars and terrorists and both famous and obscure intellectuals, Golberg and Meis offer us a bracing self-portrait of our time. In honoring the dead, they make us all feel more alive. ~ Gregory Wolfe, Editor, Image Journal"", ""They say the dead are at the mercy of the living. Taking the measure of recently deceased notables, Golberg and Meis dazzle with their exuberant acumen, passionate range of interests, and, perhaps most remarkably, their empathy. Treasuring the arts and a life of the mind, they read the lives of the no-longer-with-us with phenomenally articulate, almost ecstatic joie de vivre. ~ Thomas Farber, author of The End of My Wits and Here and Gone; Guggenheim Fellow"", ""The word ‘eulogy’ means, literally, ‘to speak well,’ ” write Stefany Anne Golberg and Morgan Meis. They speak very well, but they do more than eulogize. Somehow, in distilled yet informal essays about these 29 people, they resurrect the deceased. This isn’t eulogy. It’s necromancy. In elegant prose, with the briefest of invocations, they summon before us Charlton Heston’s charisma and Mikhail Kalashnikov’s guilt.They contrast Chinua Achebe’s anger toward and Joseph Conrad’s pessimism about the West. The authors’ unblinking eloquence triumphs especially in thoughtful looks at the deaths of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. “There is a kind of deep metaphysical democracy to Updike's prose,” writes Meis in a tribute to the novelist, and the same embrace of diversity animates this volume. Name another party host who invited both Cy Twombly and Thomas Kinkade, or Tom Clancy and Kurt Cobain. It’s a wonderful wake. ~ Michael Sims, author of The Adventures of Henry Thoreau and The Story of Charlotte's Web""]" Debunking the Myth of America's Poodle,"[""Nu'man Abd al-Wahid""]",True understanding of contemporary British militaristic foreign policy begins with a rejection of perceived subservience to the United States.,"Most writing today by activists and opponents of foreign policy is rooted in the 1960s. Underpinning many of these books is the unquestioned assumption that contemporary British imperialism is an adjunct to American foreign policy. Wherever the United States invades and bombs, Great Britain lays out the carpet and obediently follows. This subservience is jubilantly referred to as a “special relationship” by its supporters; by its detractors it is disparagingly depicted as “America’s poodle”. This book argues that a true understanding of contemporary British militaristic foreign policy begins with a rejection and a historical unpacking of this perceived subservience to the United States.","Most writing today by activists and opponents of foreign policy is rooted in the 1960s. Underpinning many of these books is the unquestioned assumption that contemporary British imperialism is an adjunct to American foreign policy. Wherever the United States invades and bombs, Great Britain lays out the carpet and obediently follows. This subservience is jubilantly referred to as a “special relationship” by its supporters; by its detractors it is disparagingly depicted as “America’s poodle”. This book argues that a true understanding of contemporary British militaristic foreign policy begins with a rejection and a historical unpacking of this perceived subservience to the United States.",3,"[""This illuminating, scalding and scorching takedown of British Imperialism is simultaneously a cautionary reminder that post-Brexit London should be pressured relentlessly in order to avoid a replication of its multiple sins and transgressions of the recent past. ~ Gerald Horne, author, 'White Supremacy Confronted: U.S. Imperialism and Anticommunism vs. the Liberation of Southern Africa, from Rhodes to Mandela.', Private correspondence."", ""Nu'man Abd al-Wahid’s Debunking the Myth of America’s Poodle: Great Britain Wants War serves as a useful reminder that Britain's foreign policy is driven by a distinct imperialist dynamic that continues to the present day, especially in the Middle East. ~ Arun Kundnani, author of 'The Muslims are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror'"", ""An important book that everyone concerned with the history of and the fight against British Imperialism needs to read. Both scholarly and politically committed. A fine piece of work. Highly recommended. ~ John Newsinger, author of The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire""]" Deconstructing Dirty Dancing,"[""Stephen Lee Naish""]",It's time to take Dirty Dancing out of the corner and place it under the microscope.,"Renowned film critic Roger Ebert said Dirty Dancing ""might have been a decent movie if it had allowed itself to be about anything."" In this broadly researched and accessible text, Stephen Lee Naish sets out to deconstruct and unlock a film that has haunted him for decades, and argues that Dirty Dancing, the 1987 sleeper hit about a young middle-class girl who falls for a handsome working-class dance instructor, is actually about everything. The film is a union of history, politics, sixties and eighties culture, era-defining music, class, gender, and race, and of course features one of the best love stories set to film. Using scene-by-scene analyses, personal interpretation, and comparative study, it's time to take Dirty Dancing out of the corner and place it under the microscope.","Renowned film critic Roger Ebert said Dirty Dancing ""might have been a decent movie if it had allowed itself to be about anything."" In this broadly researched and accessible text, Stephen Lee Naish sets out to deconstruct and unlock a film that has haunted him for decades, and argues that Dirty Dancing, the 1987 sleeper hit about a young middle-class girl who falls for a handsome working-class dance instructor, is actually about everything. The film is a union of history, politics, sixties and eighties culture, era-defining music, class, gender, and race, and of course features one of the best love stories set to film. Using scene-by-scene analyses, personal interpretation, and comparative study, it's time to take Dirty Dancing out of the corner and place it under the microscope.",12,"[""Released in 1987, Dirty Dancing is one of those films that is almost impossible to not know about, but it’s also one that’s probably not taken very seriously. The story of privileged Frances “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey) and hunky heartthrob Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) has been watched over and over again, gaining a larger audience as the years have passed by. Certain songs have become synonymous with the film, dialogue will be quoted, and how could any of us ever forget some of the most iconic scenes of the film. It’s a fantastic film, but one that most people will dismiss as a “chick flick”. At least you will until diving into author Stephen Lee Naish’s book, “Deconstructing Dirty Dancing“, available from Zero Books.\n\nNaish looks at the film through a new lens. By exploring the political subtext, the way the film celebrated women at a time where this was a rarity in Hollywood, gender, class, race, and how Dirty Dancing was a perfect blend of the ’60s and the ’80s, Naish will make you think a lot more deeply about the movie. He breaks the film down scene by scene, picking some of the larger moments as well as the tiniest bit of dialogue to make his points. It’s not only a wonderful look back on the movie, but a fantastic way to see the themes many of us have probably missed.\n\nComing in at under 100 pages, “Deconstructing Dirty Dancing” is also a very brisk read. Naish doesn’t slow things down with overly intellectual text. There’s no need to have completed your thesis to enjoy the book. However, Naish doesn’t just offer a surface level reading of the film either. He’s even bold enough to compare the film to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in a mostly convincing way. While I’m still not completely on board with that comparison, Naish does manage to point out the similarities with certain characters effectively.\n\nIn a year dominated by aggressively macho films like Predator, Running Man, RoboCop, and Lethal Weapon, Dirty Dancing seemed to come out of nowhere. At the time, few people probably even bothered to wonder why. That’s what makes Naish’s book so interesting. He looks at how the film was able to capture the hearts and minds of people by exploring the way it fit so perfectly into the culture of the ’80s, even though the film is set in the ’60s. The problems presented in the film were things that may not have been as large in the ’80s, but they were still problems we continued to face. Class, gender, and race are still incredibly relevant social problems, so Dirty Dancing continues to be a film we can look at now, 30 years later. Thanks to Naish, it’s even easier to see how those themes are explored in the film.\n\nSince “Deconstructing Dirty Dancing” is a rather short book, it’s quite easy to get swept up in reliving the film and read from beginning to end. In the same amount of time you would spend watching the movie, you are able to relive every important moment while also gaining a better understanding of the film. Naish’s words bring the film to life, and although I haven’t watched this movie in years, I felt as if I had just watched it yesterday. That speaks not only to Naish’s talent, but also the power of the film. I can remember all the little moments of the movie, despite having only watched it a handful of times. For diehard fans of Dirty Dancing, this book will certainly be appreciated even more.\n\nNaish finally makes Dirty Dancing more than just a “chick flick” that is overlooked. Whether you’re a huge fan of the film or not, I can’t recommend “Deconstructing Dirty Dancing” more highly. ~ Will Brownridge, Toronto Film Scene"", ""I accidentally ended up with this book from NetGalley and I was in two minds about whether to read it or to just contact the publisher and explain my error. In the end I decided to read it. I think everyone my age will have watched and loved Dirty Dancing when they were around their early teens. I know so many people who still consider this one of their favourite films. It was my favourite feel-good film for many years.\n\nThis is a wonderful book for anyone who considers themselves a fan of the film as it really does look at all the key moments, and allows you to re-live them. I liked the descriptions of some of the deleted scenes from the film and the discussion on how they may or may not have added to the storyline had they have been left in – it’s made me want to buy the special edition DVD so I can see those deleted scenes now! Occasionally there are really interesting references to other studies that have discussed Dirty Dancing and I would have loved more of that, but it has led me to look at the bibliography at the back of this book so that I can maybe read more on the subject another time...\n\nI found the author’s analysis of the end of Dirty Dancing utterly fascinating. I’ve watched the film numerous times and I’ve always thought that the ending was just super romantic and a perfect end to the film. Naish considers the idea that the whole ending was just a fantasy that Baby was having, it was what she imagined happened and that really the love story between her and Johnny was over when he left Kellermans earlier in the the film. I actually see that this is entirely plausible and it has made me really think about whether this is more likely than how I’ve always viewed it.\n\nAll in all this is an interesting, nostalgic look back on a great film and if you’re a Dirty Dancing fan I think you’ll very much enjoy this book – I definitely recommend it.\n\n~ Hayley C, Rather Too Fond Of Books"", ""Dirty Dancing is just a chick flick, right? Stephen Lee Naish argues that the movie is more than that. In his book, he explores the topics of gender, class and transitioning from child to adult that can be found in the movie. He even compares Dirty Dancing with a movie by David Lynch.\n\nThat may sound a little crazy and I was wondering how he was going to do this. But his argumentation is comprehensible and a lot less far-fetched than I feared it might be. He takes the reader through the movie scene by scene, explaining quickly what happens in that scene before analysing it. That made it easy to follow even though I watched the movie only once some time ago.\n\nIn the end, there's a short essay on his personal experience watching Dirty Dancing several times in his life.\n\nI really appreciated a male's perspective on what is considered to be a movie that only women like. And I also enjoyed learning about the underlying topics in the movie and seeing that it's more complex than it seems to be at first sight. Another thing that I thought was interesting was that he showed how the lyrics of the soundtrack correspond to the story because I hadn't paid attention to that. Now I'm looking forward to watching the movie again and finding some new details that I hadn't noticed before.\n\nI would recommend this book to anyone that likes or even loves the movie. It might also be helpful for students that want to write a paper on Dirty Dancing or movie analysis in general. ~ Ylva Schauster , NetGalley/GoodReads"", ""A must for an Dirty Dancing or film critic! I read the whole piece in one sitting and was fascinated by the nuances of the film that I had never noticed before. I loved how the author not only analysed each scene but also defended the plotline choices made to show why they were vital for the audience's reaction to the film. ~ Kate Klassa, NetGalley/GoodReads"", ""5/5 Stars - My library will purchase this book.\n\nThankful for early access to this little gem through NetGalley. As someone who can't count how many times I've watched this movie, it's nice to have it legitimized with some well thought out explanations of the cultural and political representations portrayed in the film, as well as the enduring impact it has had on so many. Naish walks through the movie in sequence by film timing, and I found myself reciting the lines in my head before he could even get to them. While I didn't gain any mind-blowing insights from his meditation on Dirty Dancing, I delighted in reliving the movie (yet again) from a different perspective and felt a justifiable camaraderie with him and my other (probably secret) Dirty Dancing loving peeps. ~ Stephanie Rosso, Librarian, NetGalley"", ""Dirty Dancing is one of those movies that I have seen a hundred times, but maybe only watched from the beginning a handful of those times. It is one of those movies that you just start watching wherever it is in the film and you get sucked in all over again.\n\nI was really excited to read this book, because, like many others, I love the movie so much. I really enjoyed the scene by scene breakdown and I could envision the movie the entire time I was reading. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of the movie. And I especially liked the alternative interpretation of the ending. It made me think and makes me want to watch the movie again to see. ~ Jennifer Giles, NetGalley"", ""In the blurb for Deconstructing Dirty Dancing, the author Stephen Naish describes it “as a film that has haunted him for decades” and it’s a feeling that I can more than identify with. Whole sections of dialogue can be recalled verbatim just from a chance phrase encountered in day-to-day life. I find myself humming the Kellerman Anthem while washing up. Hearing a song from the soundtrack instantly triggers an overwhelming wave of nostalgia for the late eighties when I first encountered the film, which I went on to watch, with my sister, over a hundred times. I’m probably quite a tough audience for a book on Dirty Dancing.\n\nNaish’s basic premise is of Dirty Dancing as a story about the loss of personal innocence that reflects the societal loss of innocence in 1960s America. It may not be a staggeringly original one, but it’s a valid argument which he reiterates through a scene-by-scene interpretation of the film. He highlights some interesting parallels with Lynch’s Blue Velvet, another film which exemplifies the innocence lost in the transition from childhood to adulthood, the corruption of the American Dream and which stylistically draws on the distinctive early 60s and late 80s periods... I was particularly struck by the suggestion that Penny’s interception of Dr Houseman during the merengue class he and Baby attend symbolises the role she will play in coming between the two characters. Similarly, the idea that Plight of the Peasants, the book Baby is reading at the start of the film foretells her own critical reevaluation of the role of class plays in her life I found fascinating. I’d never even noticed the title of the book before, perhaps I can blame the dodgy quality of VHS. The biggest revelation for me, however, was Naish’s suggestion that the final scene is interpreted as fantasy. It had never occurred to me how my own nostalgia for the film had blinkered my interpretation of it, which has always been as a straight narrative. Naish persuasively argues that Johnny driving away is the ‘real’ ending of the film, pointing out the signposts that indicate we are leaving reality and entering cinematic fantasy courtesy of Baby’s imagination. A suitably Lynchian interpretation and one which has for me ignited a desire to re-watch Dirty Dancing in a completely new way, which considering my history with the film is high praise indeed.\n\n~ Hazel Smoczynska , GoodReads/ThePloughmans Lunch"", ""I read this all in one sitting! A must for any Dirty Dancing fan! I particularly liked the snippets of information that I did not know existed such as alternate deleted scenes and the reasons for their exclusion. The romantic in me would like to believe that the ending is real to the film's narrative though and is not just Baby's fantasy! Interesting and enlightening read! Would recommend!\n\n~ Jo Cameron-Symes, NetGalley"", ""Many, many philosophical interpretations in addition to the plain-Jane synopsis/behind-the-scenes info that other movie-related books usually offer. Lee Nash does a full, scene-by-scene watch-thru of the movie and intersperses his writing with input from the screenwriter, Eleanor Bergstein, and other cinema writers; particularly Michele Schreiber and her book, American Post-Feminist Cinema (which I should really try and track down to read, too). I really enjoyed the reference to Dirty Dancing as being 'Star Wars for girls,' commonalities between it and that of the movie 'Blue Velvet,' Schreiber's interpretation of the plot as being First Meeting/Courtship/Consummation/Problem/Resolution/End (with the Transformation being love as a transformative agent for someone to become a better version of themselves), the character Robbie being a Randian Egoist and a literal Fountain of water being poured on his Head, Patrick Swayze's belief in Johnny & Penny's relationship being the one that lasts after the events of the movie occur, and deleted scenes that would've changed an audience opinion against Johnny or the owner's nephew, Neil.\n\n~ Kristine Fisher, GoodReadins"", ""For all those inexplicably drawn to Dirty Dancing again and again, here's a book that will finally make it feel like more than a \""guilty pleasure,\"" that will intellectually legitimize your love for the movie you'd never previously admit is your real and forever favorite, at least not in front of polite company. Stephen Lee Naish helps the 80s gem rise up the cinema ranks. The moment you put the book down, you'll want to put Dirty Dancing on for another spin. ~ Holly Grigg-Spall, author of Sweetening the Pill: or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control"", ""This is a remarkable achievement. Using a single film as a case-study, it asks the reader to re-think their own relationship to cinema, calling into question the narratives, memories and assumptions we construct through and about popular culture. This unique and innovative analysis offers a great deal to any reader, from the film studies professor to the occasional cinema goer. A must-read book or anyone interested in popular film. ~ Alfie Brown, University of Manchester and Editor at Everyday Analysis"", ""Dirty Dancing has quietly evolved from a film to enjoy, to one you can admire -- helped along by Stephen Lee Naish's Deconstructing Dirty Dancing. A model of detailed textual analysis, Deconstructing Dirty Dancing reveals what Dirty Dancing’s devoted fanbase has known for years: that the film tackled sophisticated, progressive themes with dignity, courage, and a catchy soundtrack. Rest assured, the political can indeed be pleasurable ~ Liza Palmer, Managing Editor of The Moving Image, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Film Matters, Contributing Editor of Film International""]" Defiance: Greece and Europe,"[""Roger Silverman""]",The story of Greece's resistance to European domination past and present.,"This socialist history of modern Greece tells the story of its rebirth in struggle, the heroic resistance to Nazi occupation, the civil war and its aftermath, the colonels' dictatorship and its overthrow, the rise and fall of PASOK, the debt crisis, the popular uprising of 2010-12, the election of SYRIZA, the referendum and the subsequent capitulation. What lessons can Greece's experience teach those campaigning against austerity throughout Europe? This book includes an Appendix by Eric Toussaint.","This socialist history of modern Greece tells the story of its rebirth in struggle, the heroic resistance to Nazi occupation, the civil war and its aftermath, the colonels' dictatorship and its overthrow, the rise and fall of PASOK, the debt crisis, the popular uprising of 2010-12, the election of SYRIZA, the referendum and the subsequent capitulation. What lessons can Greece's experience teach those campaigning against austerity throughout Europe? This book includes an Appendix by Eric Toussaint.",4,"[""If Europe gets torn apart, it will start at the bottom corner. Greece, the first country in modern times to elect a radical leftwing government, faces economic war from Brussels and a tide of refugees from collapsing states to its east. At this critical moment Roger Silverman’s book views the origins of the Greek crisis using the lens missing from most media coverage: class, class conflict and the problems of a democratic system balanced on deep corruption and oligarchic power. ~ Paul Mason, Economics Editor of Channel 4 News, author of Postcapitalism: A Guide To Our Future and Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere"", ""In the last 4-5 years, I have been asked many times by friends from Europe and even Latin America to recommend them a book\n\non postwar Greece. Unfortunately, I always had to answer that there is no such book, not at least in the major European languages, and that there is an enormous gap in the international bibliography of modern Greece. Now Roger Silverman’s book not only fills this gap but goes even further, by covering Greece’s recent political and economic turmoil with up-to-date first-hand information. But this is not its only virtue. Silverman prefers to give the floor to the protagonists and actors in these cataclysmic Greek events, leaving the reader free to judge and draw the lessons of this emblematic modern Greek tragedy. It goes without saying that such a book, written not only for specialists but accessible to almost anyone with an interest in the recent Greek crisis, needs to be translated into other languages as soon as possible. ~ Yorgos Mitralias, Athens. Journalist and member of the Greek Debt Truth Commission"", ""Roger Silverman’s excellent and most accessible book engages with the exciting advances and the devastating setbacks of Greek popular movements facing down the powerful and vindictive forces of international finance over the last five years. His analysis of the real possibilities in the first year of the SYRIZA Government is developed from a much needed popular history of the resistance of the Greek people from the War of Independence in 1821 to the present, and from an appreciation of similar developments across the world today. ~ Paul Mackney, Co-chair, Greece Solidarity Campaign"", ""Roger Silverman’s book is the only one I have found which answers the fundamental questions I wanted answered about the tragedy of the Greek people. Nothing happens without reasons, but there are few writers who know how far back to go to provide a clear, honest and readable analysis of the corruption and mismanagement which led to a whole country being pauperised. Clearly written and with hair-raising details of the crisis which has brought Europe close to disintegration, this is a book to learn from. ~ Bill Boyle, Editor, DatacenterDynamics""]" Degrowth in Movement(s),"[""Nina Treu"", ""Matthias Schmelzer"", ""Corinna Burkhart""]","A dictionary of social movements and alternatives for a future beyond economic growth, capitalism, and domination.","Degrowth is an emerging social movement that overlaps with proposals for systemic change such as anti-globalization and climate justice, commons and transition towns, basic income and Buen Vivir. Degrowth in Movement(s) reflects on the current situation of social movements aiming at overcoming capitalism, industrialism and domination. The essays ask: What is the key idea of the respective movement? Who is active? What is the relation with the degrowth movement? What can the degrowth movement learn from these other movements and the other way around? Which common proposals, but also which contradictions, oppositions and tensions exist? And what alliances could be possible for broader systemic transformations? Corinna Bukhart, Matthias Schmelzer, and Nina Treu have curated an impressive demonstration that there are, beyond regressive neoliberalism and techno-fixes, emancipatory alternatives contributing to a good life for all. Degrowth in Movement(s) explores this mosaic for social-ecological transformation - an alliance strengthened by diversity.","Degrowth is an emerging social movement that overlaps with proposals for systemic change such as anti-globalization and climate justice, commons and transition towns, basic income and Buen Vivir. Degrowth in Movement(s) reflects on the current situation of social movements aiming at overcoming capitalism, industrialism and domination. The essays ask: What is the key idea of the respective movement? Who is active? What is the relation with the degrowth movement? What can the degrowth movement learn from these other movements and the other way around? Which common proposals, but also which contradictions, oppositions and tensions exist? And what alliances could be possible for broader systemic transformations? Corinna Bukhart, Matthias Schmelzer, and Nina Treu have curated an impressive demonstration that there are, beyond regressive neoliberalism and techno-fixes, emancipatory alternatives contributing to a good life for all. Degrowth in Movement(s) explores this mosaic for social-ecological transformation - an alliance strengthened by diversity.",9,"[""\""This volume is simultaneously an anticipation and celebration of an alternative world.\"" ~ Manu V. Mathai & Dimitris Stevis, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/04866134211045140"", ""5 Star rating: The ideas expressed in this thought provoking collection of essays all have behind them the realisation that we live on a planet with finite resources and therefore perpetual economic growth is logically impossible. The environment should be protected and repaired and not destroyed as is happening under the current capitalist market driven world economy.\n\nThe fight to make people realise that there are other ways of living than by constantly wanting to increase GDP will be a very hard to win. However, the various ideas shown and the fact that the regrowth movement gives heart and hope for future generations. Attitudes must change and this book gives ideas for a more sustainable and fairer world.\n\nThe book does not pretend to be the answer to the degrowth challenge but if you have any interest in this area, or would like some further information then this a great place to start or further educate yourself. ~ George Monck, Amazon"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. The ideas expressed in this thought provoking collection of essays all have behind them the realisation that we live on a planet with finite resources and therefore perpetual economic growth is logically impossible. The environment should be protected and repaired and not destroyed as is happening under the current capitalist market driven world economy.\n\nThe fight to make people realise that there are other ways of living than by constantly wanting to increase GDP will be a very hard to win. However, the various ideas shown and the fact that the regrowth movement gives heart and hope for future generations means attitudes must change and this book gives ideas for a more sustainable and fairer world.\n\nThe book does not pretend to be the answer to the degrowth challenge but if you have any interest in this area, or would like some further information then this a great place to start or further educate yourself. ~ Steven Pipe (Reviewer) , NetGalley"", ""Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. I wish I had a hard copy of this book. Degrowth is a very new concept to me and while reading this book and knowing that it's not just a movement, but a coalition of social movements seeking to remove privileges of those who currently live at the expenses of others, was a bit new to me in terms of how these groups go about it. I love that there was the focus on 'going green' and also looking at the systems that are in place in what we deem as globalization. Honestly speaking, I wish I had more time to read and analyze the chapters herein because I have more questions especially now that we can see the impact the current COVID-19 has and will be having on the economy, mental health and government structures all over the world. ~ Dora Archie Okeyo (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""How to get beyond the Green Economy? This rich account of the global degrowth alliance, in all its socio-ecological dimensions - horizontal and prefigurative, shows us how. Give this book to your neighbours and friends, and let degrowth grow! ~ Ariel Salleh, author of From Eco-Sufficiency to Global Justice"", ""This is a powerfully important topic to engage. Physics and chemistry are indicating that we’re going to have to inhabit this planet differently - here are some ideas on how we might do that. ~ Bill McKibben, author and activist with 350.org"", ""As many struggle to imagine worlds shaped by desires other than economic growth, this collection shows that multiform pathways are possible, and already in practice. The pluriversal approach supports readers to learn with wildly diverse initiatives and ideas. ~ Susan Paulson, editor of Degrowth: Culture, Power and Change"", ""Moving beyond the growth economy needs a movement of movements. This is an excellent anthology, establishing a much needed dialogue between the different groups struggling for a good life for all within planetary limits. ~ Giorgos Kallis, author of Degrowth and co-editor of Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era"", ""Everyone knows the years ahead will be challenging, but they can also be filled with the praxis of hope. In writing a rich guide for how to change the world these chapters have, for some of their authors, been a process of metamorphosis. The same can be true for you. Think of this is a book as a flint. Find some friends, read it, and use it to spark your own transformations. ~ Raj Patel, co-author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things""]" Demarcation and Demystification,"[""J. Moufawad-Paul""]","Operating as a machine upon the terrain of theoretical truth procedures, philosophy's radical potential describes a militant cartography: interpretation, demarcation, clarification, and demystification.","Marx once declared that philosophers have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it. Demarcation and Demystification examines the ways in which a radical practice of philosophy is possible under the aegis of Marx's 11th thesis, arguing that philosophy's radicality is discovered by understanding that it can only ever interpret the world; that social transformation lies beyond the sphere of its operations. 'Demarcation and Demystification is a major statement on the gulf between what philosophers actually do, and what they think they do.' Matthew R. McLennan, author of Philosophy and Vulnerability","Marx once declared that philosophers have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it. Demarcation and Demystification examines the ways in which a radical practice of philosophy is possible under the aegis of Marx's 11th thesis, arguing that philosophy's radicality is discovered by understanding that it can only ever interpret the world; that social transformation lies beyond the sphere of its operations. 'Demarcation and Demystification is a major statement on the gulf between what philosophers actually do, and what they think they do.' Matthew R. McLennan, author of Philosophy and Vulnerability",4,"[""5 out of 5 stars: Having kept up with JMP's work since Continuity and Rupture, he generously would answer my questions and have conversations with me via social media. When I found out about this book, I was very excited because I fell into the trap of wanting an Ontology, and still had vestiges from my philosophical upbringing.\n\nDemarcation and Demystification provides the context that JMP operates from. It's a wonderful insight and I look forward to reading this many times. ~ Red Hedgehog, Amazon"", ""In Demarcation and Demystification, J. Moufawad-Paul advances a militant approach to philosophy against (at least) two contending schools of thought. Against some Marxist interpretations of Marx's famous 11th thesis, those sweeping accusations that philosophy tout court is idealist, he defends philosophy as a practice of clarity. And against those new materialists who have mistaken their construction of speculative metaphysics, \""new\"" ontologies, and idiosyncratic objects as synonymous with, or even more important than, transforming the world, he defends a philosophical method grounded in historical materialism and engaged in social struggle. Read this book; it's a manifesto for philosophy. ~ Devin Zane Shaw, author of Egalitarian Moments: From Descartes to Rancière"", ""J. Moufawad-Paul's wide-ranging intervention is a timely and fresh return to the 11th thesis. It forces philosophers to recognize the extent to which their historically recurrent pretension to rise above politics has produced propaganda for the status quo in general, and now liberal propaganda in particular. Deftly unpacking why seemingly radical currents in contemporary ontology actually amount to an occulting, reactionary retreat, the book returns to basics as a means of developing struggle. Whether or not one practices or wishes to practice philosophy in the Maoist terrain, Demarcation and Demystification is a major statement on the gulf between what philosophers actually do, and what they think they do. ~ Matthew R. McLennan, author of Philosophy and Vulnerability and Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy"", ""In this stimulating book, Moufawad-Paul makes a good case that a philosophy of Marxism, a radical practice of interpretation, clarification, and demarcation, is the only way that philosophy can continue in line with the meaning of philosophy after Marx ‘s celebrated 11th thesis. He also confronts head-on the problem of thinking through the relationship between concrete practice, theory, and philosophy and offers a valuable account of the pitfalls of conflating each of these in our work as scientists, theorists, and philosophers. From the standpoint of the critique of bourgeois philosophy, Moufawad-Paul’s book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the meaning of philosophical practice and its place in social transformation. ~ Mateo Andante, founder of The Bourgeois Philosophy Project and Twitter’s @logicians""]" Democracy Under Siege,"[""Frank Furedi""]",Challenging the claim that democracy is a means to an end rather than an important value in and of itself.,"Frank Furedi examines the frequent claim that democracy is a means to an end rather than an important value in and of itself. The prevalence of this sentiment in the current era is not surprising, given that the normative foundation for democracy is fragile, and there is little cultural valuation for this outlook. Until recently, virtually every serious commentator paid lip-service to democracy. However, in recent times the classical elitist disdain for democracy and for the moral and intellectual capacity of the electorate has acquired a powerful influence over public life. Democracy Under Siege outlines the long history of anti-democratic thought, explains why hostility to democracy has gained momentum in the current era, and offers a positive affirmation of the principle and the value of democracy.","Frank Furedi examines the frequent claim that democracy is a means to an end rather than an important value in and of itself. The prevalence of this sentiment in the current era is not surprising, given that the normative foundation for democracy is fragile, and there is little cultural valuation for this outlook. Until recently, virtually every serious commentator paid lip-service to democracy. However, in recent times the classical elitist disdain for democracy and for the moral and intellectual capacity of the electorate has acquired a powerful influence over public life. Democracy Under Siege outlines the long history of anti-democratic thought, explains why hostility to democracy has gained momentum in the current era, and offers a positive affirmation of the principle and the value of democracy.",0,[] Designs on Democracy,"[""Stuart MacDonald""]","Disasters, pandemics, the War on Terrorism? Whatever your memories of the Noughties, this was also a Scottish decade. Design, politics and identity came together.","Whilst there are some studies of architecture in Scotland post-devolution, writings on design are largely non-existent. Designs on Democracy seeks to fill that gap and ranges over the debates concerning architecture, urbanism, design and the Creative and Cultural Industries and the policies, people and places that stimulate and animate them. The book also tells a story about Scotland’s creatives –where they work and how their ideas and what they create and design contribute to Scotland’s democratic culture and identity.","Whilst there are some studies of architecture in Scotland post-devolution, writings on design are largely non-existent. Designs on Democracy seeks to fill that gap and ranges over the debates concerning architecture, urbanism, design and the Creative and Cultural Industries and the policies, people and places that stimulate and animate them. The book also tells a story about Scotland’s creatives –where they work and how their ideas and what they create and design contribute to Scotland’s democratic culture and identity.",0,[] Did You Kill Anyone?,"[""SCOTT BEAUCHAMP""]",Did You Kill Anyone? asks the question that is rarely discussed publicly: ‘why do soldiers miss war?’.,"Most American soldiers in Iraq had a deep, thick plastic box called a “guerrilla box” which usually sat at the end of their cot. Soldiers would keep all kinds of things in their box. Weapon cleaning kits. Extra equipment. Blankets and pillows from home. Footballs. Protein powder. Mine was full of books. These are not confessions. Nor are they essays. Nothing is off the table in Did You Kill Anyone?, a hybrid compendium of thoughts and observations whose narrative thrust is propelled and shaped by the inquiry itself. Drawing from and elaborating on years of the author’s work on the peripheries of this subject, published in such outlets as The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and The American Conservative, Did You Kill Anyone? asks a question that is rarely, if ever, discussed publicly: ‘why do soldiers miss war?’. With the intimacy of a memoir and the force of a critical analysis, Scott Beauchamp gives his daring, counterintuitive take, interrogating the frivolous conformity of our increasingly inhuman(e) culture.","Most American soldiers in Iraq had a deep, thick plastic box called a “guerrilla box” which usually sat at the end of their cot. Soldiers would keep all kinds of things in their box. Weapon cleaning kits. Extra equipment. Blankets and pillows from home. Footballs. Protein powder. Mine was full of books. These are not confessions. Nor are they essays. Nothing is off the table in Did You Kill Anyone?, a hybrid compendium of thoughts and observations whose narrative thrust is propelled and shaped by the inquiry itself. Drawing from and elaborating on years of the author’s work on the peripheries of this subject, published in such outlets as The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and The American Conservative, Did You Kill Anyone? asks a question that is rarely, if ever, discussed publicly: ‘why do soldiers miss war?’. With the intimacy of a memoir and the force of a critical analysis, Scott Beauchamp gives his daring, counterintuitive take, interrogating the frivolous conformity of our increasingly inhuman(e) culture.",0,[] "Diet of Austerity, A","[""Elaine Graham-Leigh""]","How and why the working class are being blamed for climate change, and what we can do about it.","Received wisdom is increasingly that we all have to eat less to save the planet, but received wisdom is wrong. A Diet of Austerity argues that, just as the poor are blamed for the economic crisis, Malthusian conceptions about food and ecology are being used to hold the working class responsible for climate change and global hunger. Challenging existing dogmas about overconsumption and personal responsibility, it shows that what we need to stop climate change is system change.","Received wisdom is increasingly that we all have to eat less to save the planet, but received wisdom is wrong. A Diet of Austerity argues that, just as the poor are blamed for the economic crisis, Malthusian conceptions about food and ecology are being used to hold the working class responsible for climate change and global hunger. Challenging existing dogmas about overconsumption and personal responsibility, it shows that what we need to stop climate change is system change.",4,"[""Elaine has a produced a must-read book for all of us concerned with combatting climate change. We can't diet our way to a better world but we can and must change the system to sustain the future. This book is well written, fascinating, controversial and essential. ~ Derek Wall, Former Green Party of England and Wales Principal Speaker and author of The Rise of the Green Left"", ""Who is to blame for climate change? Graham-Leigh says it's not fat people, cows or the working class. A challenging and interesting book, packed with new ideas to make you think again about what you thought you knew. ~ Jonathan Neale, Author of Stop Global Warming, Change the World"", ""Food production and consumption is increasingly recognized as a major driver of global climate change, but where does the balance of blame lie? Elaine Graham-Leigh’s book makes an important and timely contribution to the debates swirling around food production systems, 'overconsumption' and climate change. The class-based ideological assault on working people as the culprits of our multi-faceted ecological crisis, are elucidated with great clarity by the author. For people who believe combining social justice with ecological sustainability is an essential part of the answer, Graham-Leigh’s book provides essential ammunition as to why it is our system of food production for commodity exchange, and the waste inherent in it, rather than individual behavior and food choices, that lies at the heart of the crisis. ~ Chris Williams, Author of Ecology and Socialism"", ""An excellent, polemical book; enjoyable, interesting and very, very well-written. A really new contribution to theory and an incisive argument. ~ Chris Nineham, Author of The People v Tony Blair""]" Digesting Recipes,"[""Susannah Worth""]","Chapters become courses in this curious feast, exploring the form of the recipe from post-war to today.","Digesting Recipes: The Art of Culinary Notation scrutinises the form of the recipe, using it as a means to explore a multitude of subjects in post-war Western art and culture, including industrial mass-production, consumerism, hidden labour, and art engaged with the everyday. Each chapter is presented as a dish in a nine-course meal, drawing on examples from published cookbooks and the work of artists such as Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, Annette Messager, Martha Rosler, Barbara T. Smith, Bobby Baker and Mika Rottenberg. A recipe is an instruction, the imperative tone of the expert, but this constraint can offer its own kind of potential. A recipe need not be a domestic trap but might instead offer escape – something to fantasise about or aspire to. It can hold a promise of transformation both actual and metaphorical. It can be a proposal for action, or envision a possible future.","Digesting Recipes: The Art of Culinary Notation scrutinises the form of the recipe, using it as a means to explore a multitude of subjects in post-war Western art and culture, including industrial mass-production, consumerism, hidden labour, and art engaged with the everyday. Each chapter is presented as a dish in a nine-course meal, drawing on examples from published cookbooks and the work of artists such as Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, Annette Messager, Martha Rosler, Barbara T. Smith, Bobby Baker and Mika Rottenberg. A recipe is an instruction, the imperative tone of the expert, but this constraint can offer its own kind of potential. A recipe need not be a domestic trap but might instead offer escape – something to fantasise about or aspire to. It can hold a promise of transformation both actual and metaphorical. It can be a proposal for action, or envision a possible future.",6,"[""Digesting Recipes switches beautifully between questions of genre, language, art and meaning. Susannah Worth thinks carefully and fruitfully about feminist arguments relating to art history and domesticity in particular, with sensitivity and great insight. Her sparkling prose is smooth and engaging, with fresh readings of some by-now classic feminist artworks as well as more recent and obscure pieces. Her focus is acute and laser-like, moving with ease between politics, history and aesthetics. The format of the piece – presented as courses of a meal – is ingenious and highly successful, allowing the inclusion of an interview, short critical entries, readings of specific artworks, an excellent cookbook bibliography, and so on. ~ Nina Power, author of One-Dimensional Woman"", ""This is a wonderful book. As with the most seemingly casual of chefs, such acute intuition comes as the result of a great deal of work and a complete understanding of materials. The range of sources is expansive, and across many disciplines, and they are handled with confidence and an easy familiarity. As with many dishes, the simple things are the most difficult to achieve well, as there is no means of hiding bad ingredients or poor method. Neither is found here; indeed, good ideas, well presented are to be found on every page. This is a work that somehow manages to be both well done and rare. ~ Jeremy Millar, artist and writer"", ""Food and hunger have long been recurrent themes in my own work. But I am not the only one! We are all hungry for guidance and recipes and instructions which make it easier for us to get out of bed in the morning, easier for us to swallow the media’s news, National Enquirer’s fibs, easier for us to face our aging faces and IT-ed minds. Thankfully, Susannah Worth’s book, Digesting Recipes, helps to get us to the truth of ART+LIFE. ~ Linda Mary Montano, performance artist and author"", ""Susannah Worth sifts and pares the familiar genre of the recipe so that we might better appreciate how politically calorific this bearer of cultural codes really is. The manifold approach of Digesting Recipes to an apparently singular subject is invigorating, its visual art and literary leanings enriching. At a time when competitive leisure cooking, not to mention eating, saturates the television, the high street and the more prosaic channels of the brain, the book performs the important job of re-establishing critical and historical perspectives onto a quotidian authoritarian form. ~ Sally O'Reilly, writer of The Body in Contemporary Art (World of Art)"", ""Digesting Recipes takes an off-beat and highly refreshing post-modern look at cookbooks as markers of cultural identity. Recipes, it makes clear, are far more than cooking directions. After reading this, I have a whole new appreciation for what recipes can tell us about the deeper meanings of modern society. ~ Marion Nestle, Professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of What to Eat"", ""Digesting Recipes by Susannah Worth is lively, evocative and diverse. It gives a generous helping of the sense of the recipe's power and cultural significance. ~ Laurel Forster, co-editor of The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contex""]" Disconsolate Dreamers,"[""Rachid M'Rabty""]",It's time for the Left to consider the pessimist a helpful guide out of the somnolence of capitalist realism.,"Our world is increasingly sceptical of happy endings. Notions of resistance or alternatives - of hope - seem evermore ill-fated as we resign to a slow and painful descent further into capitalism. However, from a critical position, one that does not shy away from the scale of the horror facing us, we can begin to rethink utopianism, and plot new and speculative pathways for collective escape. Through quiet acts of naysaying to the world, of nihilistic or self-destructive events, or in wider-ranging renegotiations of what’s acceptable and possible at the limits of reason, pessimism revives the possibility for radical change. It calls for a disentanglement from the world and, in so doing, offers a glimpse at the utopian impossible. Against the pernicious machinations of modern-day capitalism and a perverse optimism that sustains it, Disconsolate Dreamers explores the extent to which pessimism is compatible with a radical utopian goal - namely, a collective escape from the misery of modern existence. It shows that, in a thoroughly hopeless world devoid of rational alternatives, it is time for the Left to consider the pessimist a helpful guide out of the somnolence of capitalist realism, revealing how pessimism necessitates a radical revision of utopian alterity.","Our world is increasingly sceptical of happy endings. Notions of resistance or alternatives - of hope - seem evermore ill-fated as we resign to a slow and painful descent further into capitalism. However, from a critical position, one that does not shy away from the scale of the horror facing us, we can begin to rethink utopianism, and plot new and speculative pathways for collective escape. Through quiet acts of naysaying to the world, of nihilistic or self-destructive events, or in wider-ranging renegotiations of what’s acceptable and possible at the limits of reason, pessimism revives the possibility for radical change. It calls for a disentanglement from the world and, in so doing, offers a glimpse at the utopian impossible. Against the pernicious machinations of modern-day capitalism and a perverse optimism that sustains it, Disconsolate Dreamers explores the extent to which pessimism is compatible with a radical utopian goal - namely, a collective escape from the misery of modern existence. It shows that, in a thoroughly hopeless world devoid of rational alternatives, it is time for the Left to consider the pessimist a helpful guide out of the somnolence of capitalist realism, revealing how pessimism necessitates a radical revision of utopian alterity.",1,"[""Pessimism all along the line - that was the cry of Walter Benjamin, and it is one Rachid M'Rabty takes up in this provocative, stylish theoretical intervention. Expertly drawing on a range of cultural and theoretical touchstones, this short book rejects both the vapid optimism of neoliberalism and the easy avenues of 'Some revolution to come.' M'Rabty forces us into the abyss. His aim is not to collapse all hope into annihilation but to show the true scale of the disaster we face. Utopia in these pages is a void, out of which comes a terrifying possibility - the much-needed revolutionary negation of all that is. If, like me, you are exhausted by a political Utopianism that buys its hope on the cheap, then start here. If there are grounds for hope, and for Utopian thought, then it must lie beyond naive optimism. Maybe, if we look into the dark pessimistic shadows, we will find something new for which to hope. ~ Jon Greenaway, academic, writer and teacher based in the North of England""]" Disordered Minds,"[""Ian Hughes""]","A compelling account of the dangers posed by narcissistic leaders, and why their rise to power has become the hallmark of our age.","Disordered Minds offers a compelling and timely account of the dangers posed by narcissistic leaders, and provides a stark warning that the conditions in which this psychopathy flourishes - extremes of social inequality and a culture of hyper-individualism - are the hallmarks of our present age. 'An excellent account of how malignant narcissism is evident in the lives of the great dictators, and how the conditions in which this psychopathy flourishes have returned to haunt us.' Dr Kieran Keohane, editor of The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization","Disordered Minds offers a compelling and timely account of the dangers posed by narcissistic leaders, and provides a stark warning that the conditions in which this psychopathy flourishes - extremes of social inequality and a culture of hyper-individualism - are the hallmarks of our present age. 'An excellent account of how malignant narcissism is evident in the lives of the great dictators, and how the conditions in which this psychopathy flourishes have returned to haunt us.' Dr Kieran Keohane, editor of The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization",8,"[""Ian Hughes adds new scientific insight to one of the deepest conundrums of politics: that positions of power appeal to the narcissistic, paranoid psychopaths among us, with catastrophic results for humanity. His argument that human institutions, particularly liberal democracy, are needed to constrain the worst of human nature, is profound and (needless to say) timely. Disordered Minds is sometimes disturbing, but it is consistently fascinating, and ultimately constructive and hopeful. ~ Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now"", ""Ian Hughes’ book Disordered Minds is essential reading in the era of Donald Trump. Hughes explains with insight and eloquence how leaders with disordered minds – psychopathy, narcissism, and paranoia – can take control in unstable societies and create mass movements that empower other disordered minds as well. The results can be disastrous: murder, mayhem, starvation, and war. Hughes emphasizes not only the threats of today’s mega-greed and massive inequality but solutions as well, including democratic institutions, a social democratic ethos, and the global movement towards sustainable development. ~ Jeffrey Sachs, Professor, Columbia University ,author of The End of Poverty, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet"", ""However they are formed, our world produces them - the psychopaths and those with narcissistic or paranoid personality disorders. You have met them, worked with them, maybe even lived with them or been victimized by them and you know just how bafflingly plausible they can be and how disastrously evil. Disordered Minds introduces us to the vast wastelands they are capable of creating when you and I, our neighbors, friends, families and colleagues fail to see just how dangerous they are, when we fail to underpin our democracies with the infrastructures capable of withstanding the onslaught of the deceptively charismatic lunatic leader. Read this exceptionally fine and accessible work of scholarship and make it your business to keep their disordered minds from disordering our universe. ~ Mary McAleese, Former President of Ireland"", ""Ian Hughes explains with admirable clarity and ease the ways in which dangerous individuals can emerge, flourish and dominate others in certain social and political settings, causing untold harm, violence and barbarism. In an age of right-wing ‘illiberal democracy’, xenophobic populism and the rise of politicians such as Trump in the U.S. or Le Pen in France, Disordered Minds is a diagnostic tool with which to identify both the social disorders and personality disorders that can threaten hard won democratic freedoms and undermine moves towards building a less unequal society and securing basic socio-economic rights for all. As we search for answers to explain our troubled times, we should be grateful to Ian Hughes for writing this book. ~ Prof. John Barry, author of The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability"", ""“This brilliant book, pulls together a big picture like no other books on psychopaths and politics I’ve seen. Further, it addresses, like no other book I've found, the damage that is caused when what Hughes calls \""the toxic Triangle” enables psychopaths to gain power at a national level. This is a book that legislators and leaders should read.\"" ~ Rob Kall, Founder of OpEdNews, host of the Bottom Up Radio Show and author of Bottom Up: The Connection Revolution"", ""\""An excellent account of how malignant narcissism is evident in the lives of the great dictators, and how the conditions in which this psychopathy flourishes have returned to haunt us. Disordered Minds serves as a clear warning that tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao should not be seen simply as historical figures, but rather as dangerous contemporaries, as modern people, closer to us than we might like to think, who can tell us something vital about our dangerous present and our uncertain future.” ~ Dr Kieran Keohane, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University College Cork and editor of The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization, Peer review of manuscript"", ""Ian Hughes’ fascinating book makes us reflect on the importance of electing leaders who are not just inspiring and effective but have a balanced personality. He has convinced me that every potential leader will one day have to publish not only their manifesto but also their psychological profile. ~ Graham Farmelo, Costa Book Award Winner, LA Times Book Prizes Winner and author of Churchill’s Bomb: A Hidden Story of Science, Politics and War, and"", ""As one of the most impressive and respected multidisciplinary scientists today, Ian Hughes in Disordered Minds gives a compelling and timely account of the dangers posed by psychologically dangerous leaders and provides a stark warning that the conditions in which this psychopathy flourishes - extremes of social inequality and a culture of hyper-individualism - are very much the hallmarks of our present age. A must read! ~ Professor Frederick M. Burkle, Jr, MD, Senior Fellow & Scientist, Harvard University""]" Dispirited,"[""David Webster""]",What a post-spiritual world view could look like,"This book by David Webster is a counter-blast against the culturally accepted norm that spirituality is a vital and important factor in human life. Rejecting the idea of human wellbeing as predicated on the spiritual, the book seeks to identify the toxic impact of spiritual discourses on our lives. Spirituality makes us confused, apolitical and miserable, whether that spirituality is from conventional religious roots, from a new-age buffet of beliefs, or from some re-imagined ancient system of belief. Looking beyond this dismissal, the book looks towards atheistic existentialism, Theravada Buddhism and political engagement as a means to imagine what a post-spiritual world view could look like.","This book by David Webster is a counter-blast against the culturally accepted norm that spirituality is a vital and important factor in human life. Rejecting the idea of human wellbeing as predicated on the spiritual, the book seeks to identify the toxic impact of spiritual discourses on our lives. Spirituality makes us confused, apolitical and miserable, whether that spirituality is from conventional religious roots, from a new-age buffet of beliefs, or from some re-imagined ancient system of belief. Looking beyond this dismissal, the book looks towards atheistic existentialism, Theravada Buddhism and political engagement as a means to imagine what a post-spiritual world view could look like.",3,"[""Should be placed gently but firmly in the hands of any budding convert who thinks that the vacuous claims of a new spirituality are any better than the lies, evasions and hypocrisies of orthodox religion\n\n~ Professor Christopher Norris, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy, Cardiff University"", ""Refusing all inwardness and consolation, David Webster faces down spirituality’s guile in favour of a bleak atheism’s hints of a worthwhile life. Bracing, timely stuff! ~ Peter Manley Scott, University of Manchester, UK"", ""Annoyed by the phrase 'I am not religious, but I’m very spiritual', Dr. David Webster successfully maps out the problems and contradictions it leads to. This is as close to a 'must read' as it gets, for the religious as well as the spiritual reader, as well as for atheists. ~ Dr. Mikael Askander, Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Sweden""]" Dog Days,"[""Linda Coggin""]","Peculiar, unique, unusual, elements of Cummings, Stevie Smith and Larkin cohere then fall away, in a collection of darkly clear, or clearly dark poems.","These poems act like short, sharp surprises. They can be oblique and then unravel with raw clarity, a strong and emotional openness pervading their deceptively simple structures. Coggin's strange and singular voice is recognisably English and even colloquial, but with a sophistication and love of imagery, even mystery. This is her first collection, and showcases not only her range but her unique relationship with memory, her presence in each poem more breathlike than embodied, and no less substantial for that.","These poems act like short, sharp surprises. They can be oblique and then unravel with raw clarity, a strong and emotional openness pervading their deceptively simple structures. Coggin's strange and singular voice is recognisably English and even colloquial, but with a sophistication and love of imagery, even mystery. This is her first collection, and showcases not only her range but her unique relationship with memory, her presence in each poem more breathlike than embodied, and no less substantial for that.",2,"[""Coggin’s poetry is both incisive and quirkily humourous. Well worth investigating.\n\n~ Emmet O'Cuana, http://abookadaytillicanstay.wordpress.com"", ""Linda Coggin's poems are liminal, crossing and recrossing thresholds between real, surreal, and mythic, life and death, the transgressive and the responsible. There is deep humanity in these poems, often allied to the acceptance of sadness and of imperfections - domestic chaos, the facts of dying and ageing. A sharp-eyed and humorous poem about a father's day race ends with unexpected and moving compassion for the unfit stragglers. This collection surprises at every turn, catching the reader rewardingly off guard. ~ Dr John Freeman, Cardiff University""]" "Don't Lose Track Vol. 1: 40 Selected Articles, Essays and Q&As","[""Jordannah Elizabeth""]","Don't lose track, she moves fast.","Don't Lose Track is a collection from the widely published arts and culture journalist, Jordannah Elizabeth. The book includes reviews, essays and interviews hand selected by Jordannah from a catalog of over 200 articles.","Don't Lose Track is a collection from the widely published arts and culture journalist, Jordannah Elizabeth. The book includes reviews, essays and interviews hand selected by Jordannah from a catalog of over 200 articles.",4,"[""http://www.infectiousmagazine.com/industry-interview-jordannah-elizabeth-the-deli-sf-weekly-mtv-networks/ ~ Angela Mastrogiacomo , Infectious Magazine"", ""This review inspired me to check out the album. I found it strange but beautiful, just as the author depicted. Excellent article! - Susan Harvey\n\nhttp://amsterdamnews.com/news/2014/aug/07/shabazz-palaces-new-album-challenges-postmodern-hi/ ~ Susan Harvey , http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2014/aug/07/shabazz-palaces-new-album-challenges-postmodern-hi/"", ""\""I was at this show and the review was right on, gone it would seem are the days of Anton attacking the audience. They have become maybe the best shoe gaze band ever.\"" ~ Nick Lamagna, http://www.eastbayexpress.com/CultureSpyBlog/archives/2014/05/09/live-review-the-brian-jonestown-massacre-at-the-fox-theater-5-8"", ""\""There’s nothing we love more at Infectious than hard working, passionate, ambitious people, and the Bay Area’s Jordannah Elizabeth is just that...\""\n\n~ Angela Mastrogiacomo, Infectious Magazine""]" Drone and Apocalypse,"[""Joanna Demers""]",An imagined retrospective of apocalyptic art,"Drone and Apocalypse is an exhibit catalog for a retrospective of twenty-first-century art. Its narrator, Cynthia Wey, is a failed artist convinced that apocalypse is imminent. She writes critical essays delineating apocalyptic tendencies in drone music and contemporary art. Interspersed amid these essays are “speculative artworks”, Wey’s term for descriptions of artworks she never constructs that center around the extinction of humanity. Wey’s favorite musicians are drone artists like William Basinski, Celer, Thomas Köner, Les Rallizes Dénudés, and Éliane Radigue, and her essays relate their works to moments of ineffability in Herodotus, Aristotle, Plato, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, Robert Burton, Hegel, and Dostoyevsky. Well after Wey’s demise, the apocalypse never arrives, but Wey’s journal is discovered. Curators fascinated with twenty-first-century culture use her writings as the basis for their exhibit “Commentaries on the Apocalypse”, which realizes Wey’s speculative artworks as photographs, collages, and sound/video installations.","Drone and Apocalypse is an exhibit catalog for a retrospective of twenty-first-century art. Its narrator, Cynthia Wey, is a failed artist convinced that apocalypse is imminent. She writes critical essays delineating apocalyptic tendencies in drone music and contemporary art. Interspersed amid these essays are “speculative artworks”, Wey’s term for descriptions of artworks she never constructs that center around the extinction of humanity. Wey’s favorite musicians are drone artists like William Basinski, Celer, Thomas Köner, Les Rallizes Dénudés, and Éliane Radigue, and her essays relate their works to moments of ineffability in Herodotus, Aristotle, Plato, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, Robert Burton, Hegel, and Dostoyevsky. Well after Wey’s demise, the apocalypse never arrives, but Wey’s journal is discovered. Curators fascinated with twenty-first-century culture use her writings as the basis for their exhibit “Commentaries on the Apocalypse”, which realizes Wey’s speculative artworks as photographs, collages, and sound/video installations.",8,"[""Demers’ Drone and Apocalypse is a sprawling and inventive meditation on the nature of apocalypse in contemporary art and music. It takes the form of an ‘exhibit catalogue’ pertaining to an exhibition staged in 2213 on the essays and artistic ideas of Cynthia Wey. The book variously focuses on drone music, film, philosophy, cynicism, list making and the apocalypse, which Wey, Demers’ invention and interlocutor, believed was imminent and foreshadowed in contemporary culture. While signs of the apocalypse have been seen throughout history, Demers identifies a new and emerging trend in contemporary culture.\n\nThe book begins with a prologue by Demers. It discusses drone music, clearly of both academic and emotional significance to the author, before setting out the author’s experimental approach for the book itself. I say clearly as despite a fairly wide experience of contemporary music, including electronic and dirge, drone music has always left me cold. Demers seems to enjoy the deliberately obtuse and challenging nature of this music, finding depths and complexities that have eluded me. Through the character of Cynthia Wey and an exhibition staged two hundred years from now, Demers creates distance from herself and her subject. This artifice is effective—Demers writes with more clarity and verve as Wey than she does in her own, more academic, voice.\n\nThe main part of the book is the exhibit catalogue. It includes a curator’s introduction which offers a pen portrait of Wey: a West Coast millennial, failed artist, diarist and administrator, convinced that in the early 2000s, the apocalypse was inevitable and fast approaching. For the curator of this fictional exhibition, Wey is a rediscovered visionary, valued for her insight into early 21st century culture. Her planned artworks have been recreated, both in the exhibition and here, through description, for the reader. These are possibly the weakest element of an otherwise interesting book. Even in exegesis, the works seem trite.\n\n“Photojournalism of the Fall” contains the only visual representation of Wey’s ideas: photocollages by Sean Griffin. These fairly derivative images add little to the text. To complicate matters, Griffin is a composer and artist currently working in California. Introducing a contemporary figure to recreate Wey’s works for the purposes of a future exhibition is both rather confusing and has the effect of breaking the book’s fourth wall briefly. The imagery combines various found elements, following the well-trodden path of Pop and more recent collage art. There is a noticeable difference between Demers writing on music and visual art: a different book where Wey was recast as a failed contemporary composer may have allowed for more original works to be imagined, described and used.\n\nWey and the book are deeply concerned with the concept of apocalypse. Drone music, as created by Boards of Canada, Celer and others, is seen as one sign of this apocalyptic tendency. This music is comprised of slow building, wordless, repetitive, even discordant planes of sound. It defies conventional music, in the same way that apocalyptic art, with its deliberate focus on boredom and repetition, defies modernism. However, Demers and Wey avoid a specific definition of apocalyptic art. Instead, list making, classification, duplication, irony and cynicism are qualities which make up this apocalyptic tendency. Turning its back on even the reheated narratives of postmodernism, apocalyptic art represents a final taking-stock-of-things. Art is slowly, deliberately packing up and putting away, and then waiting patiently for the end.\n\ndrone\n\nWhile Demers focuses on drone music as apocalyptic art, these same traits can be found in JG Ballard’s The Drought (1965), a book concerned with environmental apocalypse. Although not mentioned in Drone and Apocalypse, it was this far earlier work that came to mind while reading Demers. In The Drought, Ransom and a band of survivors cope with a cataclysmic drought by hoarding depleting water stocks and heading to the coast. Unlike apocalyptic novels which begin or end with the moment of collapse, The Drought takes us beyond that moment, and embraces the boredom, tawdry tensions, repetition and waiting of those who have reached the literal end of their world. The final third of the book takes place on a crowded, ruined beach where people desalinate hard-won puddles of water while dreaming of salvation. The deliberate anti-climatic quality of The Drought seems to capture Demers’ own sense of the apocalypse. Wey echoes the character of Ransom, with both waiting for a final apocalypse which has both already happened and never will. While Ransom had his marooned boat and beach, Wey exists in the more recognisable space of contemporary California.\n\nDemers provides some interesting historical background to the idea of the apocalypse—not an end, but an unveiling, a fundamental shift beyond human imagining. As such, and as with Ballard’s Drought, apocalypse has an after. We wait for the end but find ourselves with the post-end clean-up. The fiction of Demers’ book allows her to conceal what I feel is its core ambition—the mapping of a tendency in contemporary culture which is post-postmodernism. Demers mentioning contemporary culture as made up of “gore, fantasy and irony”, traits shared with postmodernism. However, she also sees repetition and dullness, coupled with a profound uncertainty. Through Wey, she posits a new form of culture which combines the weary stereotypes of the millennial with the apocalyptic fear of Millennialism. I would have liked to see more of this focused and original cultural criticism throughout the book. Demers uses Wey’s art as an example of apocalyptic art, rather than a route towards stronger examples.\n\nJames Richards’ films would be one example of contemporary visual culture embodying Demers’ ideas of apocalypse. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2014, Richards’ art combines installation, music and film. I saw Richards’ work in the Ars Viva show in Hamburg in 2015. For me, his work is as close to a visual representation of drone music as I have seen. Although I am more visual than musical, I found Richards’ films initially off-putting. They were discordant and repetitive and buried any narrative deep. I persisted, and the more I watched the more the nuances and texture were evident. The repetition became profound; the discordance moving. Like drone music, there is no tune or story to retell; rather, both create a powerful, immerse emotional impact.\n\nWhat is this book, then? It is at once an essay about apocalyptic culture, a reflection on the nature of apocalypse as the ‘great unveiling’, an experimental work of prose, a fictional portrayal of a failed artist and a work of futurism. In the spirit of apocalyptic culture, the book gives no answers but offers reflection and repetition. It also aims to be a gallery guide, a format which I feel, as a curator by trade, somewhat equipped to analyse. At its simplest, a gallery guide is a list of works and a memento of a show. Increasingly, catalogues combine essays by curators, academics and others to offer new perspectives on works of art. As such, they can act as a substitute for the exhibition itself. Here, this format allows Demers to approach the subject of apocalypse from multiple angles and voices.\n\nThe great strength of this unusual work is its huge range of sources. It is a rich feast of ideas which provokes the reader long after being read. Despite a fairly traditional opening (on troubadour songs, of all things), it rapidly opens out its references and ideas. Demers is strongest on music, her academic discipline, but the reflections on literature and philosophy are engaging and interesting. It is hard to avoid wondering if Wey is a semi-autobiographical character. Wey calls herself a ‘failed artist’ more than once—is the academic who studies rather than creates art a failed artist in the same way? This experimental approach allows the academic to embrace fiction and innovation, which provides much-needed new ground for discussion. While the form is challenging or occasionally infuriating, it is hard not to enjoy a book that quotes Dostoyevsky and Morrissey, and finds such peacefulness and hope in the idea of apocalypse. ~ Zosia Silarska, Minor Literatures"", ""Joanna Demers is an academic but Drone and Apocalypse is not quite your typical academic book. Though Demers frames the work as a furthering of her professional interest in experimental electronic music, it’s also clearly a personal record of listening to and being moved by that same music. The book is mostly made up of a series of short essays about particular musicians — William Basinski, Thomas Koner, Eliane Radigue and, most of all, Celer — operating in the ambient/drone area of electronic music, analyzed with the help of ancient Greek texts and examples of classic literature. The essays are essentially non-fictional but they come presented within a fictional context: an exhibition in the year 2213 featuring the writing and speculative artworks of an early 21st century artist-of-sorts, Cynthia Wey. Wey’s ‘speculative artworks’ are propositions for work never realized — photo collages, video installations, etc — that extend or express the ideas contained within the essays.\n\nThe book opens with Demers’ preface, which explains her reasoning behind this structure and her interest in drone music, which is followed by an introductory essay by the curators of the exhibition, doubling up on Demers’ notes as a fictionalized, art-world version of the same set of justifications and explanations. Together they set out the questions at the heart of the book: What are the philosophical foundations of drone music? What do we mean when we say ‘the end of the world’? How do we speak about something that has no meaning?\n\nCynthia Way is the figure Demers uses to think her way through these questions. Wey’s biography marks her as someone both inside and outside the traditional academy. As an MFA graduate working as an administrative assistant in the music department at UC San Diego, where “her job consisted of preparing payroll for faculty, staff and graduate students,” Wey has contact with and knowledge of the university structure. The work presented here — impassioned personal essays written at home, mostly at night — eludes these structures entirely.\n\nWey is able to access the traditions, knowledge, and practices of the university without having to write into those same traditions, without being bound by their limited affordances. Through Wey, Demers gives herself the space to advance an academic pursuit in a more personal, more ambiguous way. The music Demers is writing about is, in her own words, “slippery, resistant to deciphering, and perhaps eternally unknowable,” but the somewhat loose nature of a private journal allows her to attach words to these ineffable sounds, without having to make those words stick fast. She can decorate, she can cut quickly between ideas and references, she can advance and retreat. In this form, the blissful ignorance of wallowing in the meaninglessness of sustained tones needn’t be sacrificed for the sake of concrete knowledge. Wey’s character allows the writing to retain the kind of negative capability that a more straightforward academic structure would likely disallow. Like with the music itself, which eschews narrative and conclusion, it’s being there that counts.\n\nDrone music is a niche subject. Those who dismiss it likely find it boring or uselessly pretty, and much of it is indeed just a beautiful, glistening waste of time. Wey’s essays hit on the substance of the form though, which is its relationship to time and how, at their strongest, such sounds can open a space where both the crushing melancholia of memory and the anxious projections of hope for the future can be indulged. Extended, repetitious, near-unchanging drone pieces seem to freeze the listener in time, to slow the world around them and allow a certain kind of internal observation to take place, an existential or meditative self-examination.\n\nAt its deepest, and this is the pitch at which Wey most commonly operates, such an opportunity can result in thoughts of non-existence, of a time beyond one’s own life, or the life of one’s culture and society. As Deleuze wrote of Yasujiro Ozu’s lingering ‘still life’ shots, “Time is the full, that is, the unalterable form filled by change.” The static shot within a constantly moving medium serves as a reminder of time itself, a cosmological, capital-T Time, within which everything else changes and passes. As a genre that puts the static in ecstatic, drone music’s “moments of joy that halt time altogether” cannot but reassert Time, throw its passing into relief, and so make the end of one’s own time seem inevitable. These moments, “when one’s toes clench the precipice shortly before jumping,” are a through-line to an apocalyptic future. They “speak of the end of time, the end of the world, and all the unresolvable dilemmas that accompany such ends.”\n\nWey repeatedly comes back to one such dilemma: What does it mean to feel moments of happiness, joy even, in the face of a sure and imminent apocalypse? She contrasts Celer’s music and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in search of an answer. In the latter, happiness is something to push towards over an entire lifetime, an endeavor which can only be judged successful at the end of that life. In Celer’s music, and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Wey pin-points a different type of happiness in which a lifetime’s worth of the emotion can be felt within a single moment, even if such a moment comes at a great cost — not least the knowledge, after the moment has passed, of the continual absence of such great joy, such peace. In Celer’s Salvaged Violets, Wey imagines such a moment frozen and distended, looping forever as “an edifice of eternal happiness, eternal for however long it lasts,” implying always an afterward, a hollow encore.\n\nHowever long it lasts is another of Wey’s pressing concerns. She is a character who foresees an imminent end to human life on earth. One of the aspects of drone music which she finds most attractive is its ability to look at the end of the world without dramatizing it, without making the apocalyptic event a transcendent event. Drone is often an “anatomical art,” cataloging its ideas and sounds rather than expressing them through narrative or sullying them with a message or an imperative. This form of documentation — the manifest, the list — which is as evident in Wey’s own essays as in the music she writes about, is for her the only understandable reaction to the “bleakest knowledge” that all will pass, and pass soon. Such artworks are the “only fitting response after the heart has burned and bled and then stopped.” In listing what exists despite their assured destruction, they “prove that we were ever here.” That they cannot list everything and must remain incomplete is the source of their melancholy.\n\nIt is in the work of William Basinski and Eliane Radigue that Wey most effectively elucidates these ideas. Wey uses Radigue’s music to circle around Blaise Pascal’s question: “With no more than eight days to live, who would not find that the best bet is to believe . . . ?” For Wey, Radigue shows that belief — in God, in a savior, in an afterlife — at such a juncture is cynical. It’s empty, selfish logic — a monstrous form of reason. Given the end of the world, Wey declares it best to face the end without change, without desire either for the end or for things to be different. After the three beautiful, meaningless, monumental hours of Radigue’s Adnos I-III, the sound simply stops. It doesn’t close, it doesn’t climax; it stops. First it was, now it isn’t. In the simple switch from on to off, there is no sentimentality, no emotional grease or stylistic play-acting. No teleology, nothing to be learned. “There is no explanation for it, no narrative or program or belief in some event that will justify what we hear; it is beautiful and incomprehensible because of its sounds alone.”\n\nWey, and Demers too, must always return to this incomprehensible center, the void at the heart of the music and of the book. If the essays and artworks in the book are speculative, then so is the book itself. Drone and Apocalpyse speculates on what form knowledge might take in the face of the unknowable. What does knowledge look and feel like when it is uncertain, or beyond proof? The obvious answer is that it looks like faith, and the book is in part a delineation of a secular, nihilistic faith, a faith that can rely only on worldly beauty for its unifying force. Wey’s belief in beauty, her faith in the music which gives her a center with which to face an inevitable void, is matched by Demers belief in her structure; that this literary form might be a way of following and accompanying the meaningless and the inexpressible. Not unpacking or deconstructing it, not building it up to an ideology of its own, but simply being with it until a certain point, beyond which there is no being at all. ~ Ian Maleney, Full Stop"", ""When I saw that this book existed, I had one of those moments that writers sometimes have. Someone had ticked one off, on the list of things I had hoped to do before I exit the world.\n\nI have long thought that someone needs to write a serious book on drone. That Joanna Demers has now done it, and in such an exemplificatory spirit, is delightful. This is so very far from a dry academic autopsy. There are roots to drone, but Demers doesn’t give us a tedious timeline or teleology.\n\nWith music that never begins or ends, where time is irrelevant, why would you? Of course, drone has roots, and I have sketchily covered them as a music writer, over many years, hence my urge to collect my thoughts in a more systematic way. This book review had better do.\n\nYou cannot approach this topic straight on. If writing about music is like dancing to architecture, writing about drone is like trying to recreate Malevich’s black square using only the discarded bits that collect under your hole punch. So I am not going to directly restate what you can read in Demers’ book here, though I am urging you to read it.\n\nWhen explaining drone to students – I am currently supervising a dissertation on noise in art – I usually look back to Yves Klein’s Monotone Symphony. Then to Tony Conrad, a member of La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music in the 60’s, The Dream Syndicate, who was way ahead of the pack. So were Faust, with the ur-industrial drone, and they came together with Conrad, providing that metronomic pulse defined by a Neu! one-beat, now globally franchised as ‘Krautrock’, as Conrad relentlessly droned his violin over the top. Pure music, it makes the hairs on your arms stand up.\n\nSo how does all this make meaning? That dangerous word, ‘pure’, means only that it is relatively untainted by genre. Here, in brief, is how I approach drone, particularly its flattened aesthetic. Its very particular temporality and duration. Drone often unfolds over time and does not, at the same time. It is one big moment. Movement and no movement in one. Listen to the last tracks on Eno’s Discreet Music for an example of this. Of course, some drone moves, some slightly, some drastically. But drone often invokes the constantly collapsing present moment of Heidegger, or buddhism. I could go into Bergson here, but this is a book review.\n\nDrone can be utopian, the blank space we need to move to, mirroring Attali’s concern that sound travels before other mediums. It is literally avant-garde in form, as it is unburdened with the demands of, say, sculpture making. That said, you can make a work with the equivalent impact of a large bronze, with the same presence, in a space, with sound, using drone. You can fill a vast aircraft hangar with something as brutalising and permanent as concrete and metal, using only noise.\n\nBut still, how does it make meaning? There is a great deal to be gained here from writing about abstract painting. Drone often ‘hangs there’ like a painting. If you put a title on a very abstract, open piece, it tends to ground its meaning more, to narrow its range of possible significances. The same, for me, applies to drone. Adorno suggested that an effective modern piece will contain its own language. It will teach you how to read it as you take it in. They are monads, sealed units containing their own logic. But an effective modern piece will also contain a seed that can burst out and rupture itself, and all that lies around it. It is Revolutionary. Drone often teaches you how to read it. And drone can rupture. This is how I judge drone, qualitatively. It is how I read it.\n\nBut Demers also presents us with a fiction to read. A science fiction. Her book is in that tradition, in the best examples of Ballard, and… well, Ballard. Just as Robinson’s film cans appear in a caravan, in Keiller’s Robinson In Ruins, and the fictional academic Gang Lion, in Vertical Features Remake, by Peter Greenaway, Demers’ book comes to us via fictional, rediscovered academic notes.\n\nFor me, drone is both utopian and apocalyptic all at once. That requires you to look awry and take some deep breaths before writing. Demers does this and judges drone, through her fictional muse, on the apocalyptic side. She has written a dystopian sci-fi of noise.\n\nAgain, I have personal touchstones here. Godspeed You Black Emperor’s 1997 debut ‘f#a#∞’ asked if the end of the world was coming. To me, at the time, it was. I listened to this record on my way to work. Couldn’t stop. My job in a bank was turning me to drink. The tech people there, at that point, didn’t know if the mythical ‘Millenium Bug’ would wipe everything away. I watched the Seattle protests and Genoa. 9/11 wasn’t far away, which I watched live, in the HBOS headquarters. I watched a massive financial institution destroyed from within one, on a screen used to show banking adverts to marketing staff. A delegation from the Twin Towers had been in that very room, only a month before.\n\nGodspeed were a scab I couldn’t stop picking, it hurt me. It bled more than it should, but it satisfied. The drone sections could go either way. They were blank spaces that flickered between the end of the world and the beginning of a new one. Between hope and its opposite. All that remains of them now is the Wagnerian apocalypse of Godspeed’s Yanqui U.X.O. The funeral drum and Orleans horns of ‘rocket falls on Rocket Falls’. Yanqui U.X.O is an elegy, a grand political wake. The cover artwork is typical of their approach, bombs fall on the front, we’re not sure who is dropping them or where, which gives the image great tension.\n\nThese bombs are all bombs. On the back, the words ‘Yanqui U.X.O’ sit in the centre of a spider diagram. ‘Yanqui’, they say, is corporate imperialism, ‘U.X.O’ is unexploded ordnance, landmines. These words are then linked to Sony, British Aerospace and AOL Time Warner.\n\nThis is how drone and noise is apocalyptic, it goes back to Hendrix and The Star Spangled Banner, a national anthem painted in napalm, with its roots in Chicago bar room amplification. Pure pragmatism, but those roots in turn reach further down, to slavery and Empire. So many records come on like easy listening versions of Klauz Schulze, Edgar Froese or Cluster. The ‘ambient compilation’, but there was little that was reassuringly cosy about the German pioneers. In this sense, I am wary of the zen comparisons to drone, although they can legitimately be made.\n\n‘Bayreuth Return’ by Klauz Schulze signifies, it makes meaning. Think about it. Think about post-WW2 German culture. Think about how the word ‘Bayreuth’ inevitably resignifies after the holocaust.\n\nBut that’s an old recording to bring up. So let’s examine the subject through a more recent one. Angel’s ‘Terra Null’, for Editions Mego. Get the CD. Examine it. The initial signs seemed to indicate a record about 17th and 18th century emerging imperialism, with track titles such as ‘Naked Land’ and ’Colonialists’. Put the CD on.\n\n‘Naked Land’, betrays an almost spaghetti western sound, which seems to further underline the frontiersmanship. A guitar twangs, detuning and retuning, but the electronic side of the drones betray the time we’re in, and via this, Angel collapse ancient into modern, as Marx did when he talked about ‘primitive’ accumulation and the commodity as a kind of anthropological fetish.\n\nSomehow, this album by Angel puts us into that space, ‘Quake’ particularly, via slow drones, cello, oscillators, guitar and scree, it unfolds into what Dan Latimer called ‘a sublime appropriate for individual subjects fixed in some vast network of international business, blinking, clicking, whirring incessantly to transmit, like transistorized Jedi Knights, the power of the Force.’\n\nThe buzzing, low tones simultaneously describe this evil landscape, at the same time as they try to open a crack in it, and of course speed is important here, temporality is crucial to capitalism, and to drone. To slow it right down is to resist. To speed up is to acquiesce.\n\nThe antique etchings on the CD sleeve may be of ‘the new world’ of colonialism, but they become, simultaneously, dialectically, about the ‘new world’ we may be forced into, the place, as Jameson once told us, that we have no alternative but to go to. The past as the future. The two cancelled out by each other. This is ‘utopia’, terra null, a no-place, at least not yet. The last cut though, ‘Quake’, gets bible-apocalyptic, roaring like Sunn O))), or Merzbow. This is utopia and apocalypse as one. Hegel’s dialectic as two opposites in one whole, never combining, but bursting, absolutely seething with historical tension.\n\nOval, for me, are so important to this topic. Oval are drone as the End of History. They are the sound of vacuous mall music glitched out endlessly to swallow all of time. They are a formal translation of the flattening of our cultural landscapes into a substance so thin that it now covers everything. Their titles are also crucial to this, ‘Lens-Flared Capital’, for instance.\n\nFaust hinted at what was to come when opening their first album. The radio sweeps over the scree of interference, as All You Need Is Love flashes up, and is then smashed to pieces by noise. That, they say, is what happened to all of that, as Baader-Meinhof rose. Their spectre has just returned. Here is the logical extension of Revolution 9 by The Beatles, with its reference to Beethoven’s last symphony. Gesamtkustwerk as smashed fragments. Noise as historical symphony, that ensures another Historical Symphony can never be written.\n\nBeethoven was nearly deaf when the Ninth was premiered, and recording equipment did not exist. Since then, hundreds of recordings of it have been made. We have heard the Ninth more times, and better, than its writer. In this, Demers is absolutely correct to approach the topic through science fiction: Leif Inge’s Beet 9 Stretch slowed down Beethoven’s Ninth until it lasted for 24 hours, with no pitch distortions. This piece does many things, but one thing it has to do, before all the others, is flatten the Ninth into a millimetre thin surface, in order to squeeze the excess of signification out of it. This is one thing that drone can do well. Beethoven’s Ninth has become so overloaded with signification and connotation that it has imploded, in the way Faust made All You Need Is Love collapse. The Ode To Joy has a hundred meanings, the european anthem, film music, adverts.\n\nThis is the same thing as Demers’ opening reflections on ancient music that has been transcribed in detail and left to us, yet we will never know for certain how it sounded. The first performance of the Ninth was perhaps the last time this would be the case. With drone, transcription is often pointless, the space, medium and document is the music.\n\nBut once the Ninth has been flattened by Leif Inge, and the piece is being played on an endless loop, in a huge space, it becomes a new site of radical potential, which doesn’t completely erase its own suturing join with the historical, something the philosopher Catherine Malabou is very concerned about.\n\nDrone gives you the space where utopia and dystopia, the tabula rasa and apocalypse are one. Where they fold into each other. Demers gives us this, in the form of a musicology as dystopian sci-fi. She explores what I have outlined here through Tim Hecker and Celer, via Boethius. She has taken risks, and they pay off. She was the right person to open a serious debate about drone in book form, not me.\n\nNow it is up to us to carry on the conversation in the spirit of her annunciation. Here is my offering as an invocation. Snow, snow, snow come on snow, blast it all blind into a wiped, white VHS crackle. Lose the landscape and this sadness, in drifts no gritter can pass.\n\nYour instructions. Get this book, put Oval on repeat. Think, reflect, think, write. Repeat. ~ Steve Hanson, New Cross Review of Books"", ""Demers' text is a wide, rooted journey through interpretation and imagination, a fine example of the importance of listening with an open mind. ~ Will Long, founder of drone group Celer"", ""Some say that art is the postponement of the end of the world, and the curious effect of the obliquity of these intriguing critical-musical fictions is to slow down the onrush of the apocalypse they keep fantasizing, decelerating it to drone speed, to allow us to appreciate it. Drone is thingly music, and apocalypse speech fantasizes that you can rip the appearance away from things, to reach the reality. Joanna Demers's intricate, cycling filigrees of fiction and history and philosophy and music analysis prevent this rip from occurring, preserving the mysterious reality of things, a reality that science, STEM speak notwithstanding, is prevented from disclosing. ~ Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University"", ""This is an astonishingly rich book. The depth and range of Demers' fields of reference and the insights of her musical discussions make her account a marvelously productive true fiction. This is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary music. ~ Mitchell Morris, Professor of Musicology, UCLA"", ""At the end of the film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel, \""Fight Club\"", the narrator watches a skyscraper's collapse set to the sounds by The Dust Brothers. This self-fulfilled cataclysm is echoed by the (fictional) protagonist of Joanna Demers' \""Drone and Apocalypse\"", but unlike the breakbeat rhythms of this Hollywood depiction, Cynthia Wey's soundtrack is appropriately composed of the music by Celer, William Basinski and Éliane Radigue. The inevitable demise of humanity is explored through a series of essays that reflect on man-made catastrophes, spiritual holocaust, and ultimately, void. But unlike the negative connotation of the words marking the end of our own existence, Demers reveals the beauty of emptiness, expressed by the drones drenched in longing and time. This concept of eternal spaciousness has long been known in the Buddhist absolute. Demers' work invites the reader (and the listener) to enter the space of unending apocalypse, submerging oneself in a lasting nostalgia for our eminent fate.\n\n~ HC, from Headphone Commute, an independent online magazine covering electronic, experimental and instrumental music"", ""Joanna Demers' book is a creative and speculative mission into the lush hinterlands at the edges of academic writing. It is a fascinating exploration of drone, noise and the ends of the comprehensible. ~ Robert Willim, Lund University, Sweden""]" Dynamo Island,"[""David Scott""]","At the crossroads of fiction and social theory, the book confronts fundamental issues facing Western civilization in the 21st century.","Dynamo Island is an account of a contemporary ideal world set in an Ireland-sized island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. It expresses the possibility of a modern society living in harmonious ecological balance with its environment. The ethos of the place is built around the notion of the human being as a dynamo managing and self-regulating energy in a way that draws on without harming the natural world. One of the island’s main features is that there are no cars, only bicycles along with a comprehensive public tram and electric train network.","Dynamo Island is an account of a contemporary ideal world set in an Ireland-sized island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. It expresses the possibility of a modern society living in harmonious ecological balance with its environment. The ethos of the place is built around the notion of the human being as a dynamo managing and self-regulating energy in a way that draws on without harming the natural world. One of the island’s main features is that there are no cars, only bicycles along with a comprehensive public tram and electric train network.",1,"[""This is a significant and timely addition to the genre of Utopian fiction, a reminder that the novel is only one way to envision other places. 'Dynamo Island' employs the rhetoric, structure and scruple of the scholarly monograph alongside the plasticity of mind common to the writing of fiction and the creation of art. ~ Tom Lee""]" Eastern Spring,"[""Neil Kulkarni""]","Haunting, ferociously powerful look at life as a 2nd-generation immigrant in Coventry, England through the music of an ancient past.","From the grey streets of Coventry, to the green jungles of India, Neil Kulkarni chases the sounds of his past and ancient songs from the sub-continent to try and find himself a new way of listening to some of the oldest music on earth. Part touching memoir, part ferocious polemic, An Eastern Spring confronts race and the ghosts of the past in a fearless attempt to map our past, present and future as western music listeners.","From the grey streets of Coventry, to the green jungles of India, Neil Kulkarni chases the sounds of his past and ancient songs from the sub-continent to try and find himself a new way of listening to some of the oldest music on earth. Part touching memoir, part ferocious polemic, An Eastern Spring confronts race and the ghosts of the past in a fearless attempt to map our past, present and future as western music listeners.",0,[] Eddie the Kid,"[""Leo Zeilig""]","Eddie Bereskin wants to change the world and stop the war, instead his life unravels after being arrested on a protest.","Eddie Bereskin wants to change the world and stop the war, instead his life unravels after he is arrested on a Halloween protest in 2002. An incredible story about loss and hope set in London, Eddie the Kid takes us to the anti-war movement and two generations of activists, where, amid rioting and arrests, the destinies of Eddie and his sister Esther have been shaped.","Eddie Bereskin wants to change the world and stop the war, instead his life unravels after he is arrested on a Halloween protest in 2002. An incredible story about loss and hope set in London, Eddie the Kid takes us to the anti-war movement and two generations of activists, where, amid rioting and arrests, the destinies of Eddie and his sister Esther have been shaped.",6,"[""Academic and writer Leo Zeilig begins his first novel at the gates of Downing Street. It's late 2002, and activist Eddie Bereskin is borne on shoulders, megaphone in hand, calling Tony Blair a murderer and ordering the crowd to break the police barricade. He is arrested and charged, and as the movements for and against war in Iraq gather steam, falls into a feverish relationship with Rebecca, a beautiful fellow protester, and waits for his court case. Zeilig's sympathy for Eddie's convictions is clear, but he isn't afraid to mock Eddie's flamboyant solicitor (who wants to \""rip the fucking head off the global bourgeoisie\"") or expose the blinkered rage that causes Eddie to turn on Rebecca for shaving her legs. Indeed, Eddie's fraught family life, overhung by his brutal, charismatic father, is at the heart of this honest and powerful novel. Some rather broad scenes – including a sex-shop trip – disrupt the pace somewhat, but this passionate, sad and well-told book offers a compelling portrait of a flawed young radical. ~ James Start, The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/22/eddie-the-kid-zeilig-review"", ""At times this is a very funny novel, satirising the foibles of the left, though always from a position of deep commitment to that same left. But it is also a profoundly sad book which constantly reminds us that capitalism and its institutions, above all the family, can only be resisted and ultimately destroyed by those who are its victims, and that the victims are not only oppressed materially, but also warped and corrupted from within. As Eddie writes, \""More than ever I needed a revolution to cleanse me of the muck and prejudice of ages.\"" ~ Ian Birchall, Socialist Review: http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=12334"", ""Leo Zeilig's gripping, vibrant and affecting story of political struggle and psychological upheaval. Written through a series of flashbacks and time shifts, with naked bravura, EDDIE THE KID follows a family of political activists through generations from 1960s Chicago to the London protests in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war. With brute honesty and tender compassion, Zeilig reveals a cast of compelling characters as damaged and flawed as the world they have set out to change. Charting relationships, resistance, domestic violence, inner conflict, repression, rigged courts, police brutality, street battles.... this is a humane and political novel for our times. ~ Nicola Field, author of Over the Rainbow"", ""This is a powerful and unusual story of a revolutionary activist written with authenticity by someone who knows whereof he speaks. Relentlessly Zeilig reveals and confronts his eponymous hero’s dark side - this book is at once disturbing and strangely inspiring. ~ John Molyneux, author of What is the real Marxist tradition?"", ""I don’t know how Leo Zeilig did it. He created a wavering revolutionary, beset with juvenile tendencies and petty bourgeois emotion, and turned him into a wildly, implausibly, universal character. Eddie’s struggles with his conscience, the law, his family and his libido, are hilarious and moving. He’s an Adrian Mole for the age of Occupy. ~ Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing"", ""A brutally honest, often humorous and sometimes harsh look at the personal life of an anti-capitalist living under capitalism. This novel captures two generations of anti-war activists in their personal and political turmoil. Warts and all, Eddie is an appealing character and sharp narrator. ~ Colin Fancy, author of A Wheelie Bin Ate My Sister!""]" Education Revolution,"[""Sam Shain""]","If the revolution will not be televised, bring it to the classroom","A plea for public education nationwide to teach media literacy, and specifically from the left of the political spectrum. Within, the author discusses his journalism curriculum, which includes lessons in media literacy, critical thinking, bias, the political spectrum, economics, current events, and more. Additionally, he makes the case that ""politics"" belong in the classroom as a mechanism to push back on the looming realities of late-stage capitalism and right-wing disinformation; a highly necessary argument given how teaching these sorts of matters in public schools can be met with angst by parents, administrations, school boards, etc. It's time for people to take back power, information, and education.","A plea for public education nationwide to teach media literacy, and specifically from the left of the political spectrum. Within, the author discusses his journalism curriculum, which includes lessons in media literacy, critical thinking, bias, the political spectrum, economics, current events, and more. Additionally, he makes the case that ""politics"" belong in the classroom as a mechanism to push back on the looming realities of late-stage capitalism and right-wing disinformation; a highly necessary argument given how teaching these sorts of matters in public schools can be met with angst by parents, administrations, school boards, etc. It's time for people to take back power, information, and education.",2,"[""We live in a deeply unjust and unequal society. High school students are bombarded with propaganda to justify the status quo, from the reassuring fairy tales about capitalism in their economics classes to textbooks in their U.S. History classes that are splattered with more pictures of eagles and slowly waving flags than the signs at a Trump rally. Sam Shain understands how important it is to equip these students with the reasoning tools they can use to think for themselves and see through all the nonsense. We need about 10,000 more of him. ~ Ben Burgis, author of Give Them an Argument and Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique of the Contemporary Left"", ""Sam Shain's book addresses and boldly answers a burning question for our time: how to develop critical political awareness given corporate media and their political biases. As a public high-school teacher, he has long practiced answers to the question. This book contains the wisdom he has acquired. He tells us what needs to be taught and how to generate media literacy. The US left especially needs to read this as an important source for changing the major narratives through which people today make sense of a capitalism in crisis. ~ Richard Wolff, author of Democracy At Work, host of Economic Update podcast""]" "Embrace of Capital, The","[""Don Milligan""]",Capitalism has swallowed us whole. It's a love hate relationship.,"The ""spectre of communism"" which Karl Marx confidently evoked in 1848 is now nothing more than a ghostly and ghastly nightmare, without form or substance. This is because working people have developed a love-hate relationship with capitalism. They hate insecurity, inequality, and greed, and love civic and political freedom. They love mass consumption, and accept the logic of commerce. Barreling along through wars, revolutions, epidemics, and crises of all sorts, working people in their millions have consistently dumfounded and dismayed the left, by their refusal to countenance any alternative to the capitalist mode of life. We have to ask: Is it possible to reverse this reality, and once again talk of the necessity of communism?","The ""spectre of communism"" which Karl Marx confidently evoked in 1848 is now nothing more than a ghostly and ghastly nightmare, without form or substance. This is because working people have developed a love-hate relationship with capitalism. They hate insecurity, inequality, and greed, and love civic and political freedom. They love mass consumption, and accept the logic of commerce. Barreling along through wars, revolutions, epidemics, and crises of all sorts, working people in their millions have consistently dumfounded and dismayed the left, by their refusal to countenance any alternative to the capitalist mode of life. We have to ask: Is it possible to reverse this reality, and once again talk of the necessity of communism?",2,"[""Genuinely thought provoking and provocative. A much-needed takedown of what Orwell once called the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ of the left, and why they are so distant and alienated from the working class they claim to fight for. ~ Ralph Leonard"", ""So refreshing, and joyously subversive, to read a communist's analysis of why communism is so terribly unappetizing. ~ Yanis Varoufakis""]" Emerald City,"[""Joseph Grosso""]",New York's transformation back into a Gilded city and what to do about it.,"Joseph Grosso traces the history of New York's transformation back into a gilded city, and asks what can be done about it. He examines New York's deindustrialization and the elite planning and design that followed; New York's financial crisis of the mid-1970s and the policy decisions made in its wake; New York's housing crisis; and the history of public housing across the United States. Making the history of gentrification and deindustrialization widely available and understood is a crucial tool in combating housing crises which continue to spread in cities around the world as more and more houses are left empty, to be used for global investments instead of for living. Fresh, lively, accessible, Grosso brings the issues of gentrification, deindustrialization, homelessness, and militarized policing, so easily ignored, to the fore.","Joseph Grosso traces the history of New York's transformation back into a gilded city, and asks what can be done about it. He examines New York's deindustrialization and the elite planning and design that followed; New York's financial crisis of the mid-1970s and the policy decisions made in its wake; New York's housing crisis; and the history of public housing across the United States. Making the history of gentrification and deindustrialization widely available and understood is a crucial tool in combating housing crises which continue to spread in cities around the world as more and more houses are left empty, to be used for global investments instead of for living. Fresh, lively, accessible, Grosso brings the issues of gentrification, deindustrialization, homelessness, and militarized policing, so easily ignored, to the fore.",0,[] "En Abime: Listening, Reading, Writing","[""Daniela Cascella""]","An archival fiction of listening, where landscape is reinvented and abstracted across autobiographical narratives of sounds, books, pictures and songs.","En Abime explores listening and reading as creative and critical activities driven by memory and return, reshaped into the present. It introduces an idea of aural landscape as a historically defined cultural experience, and contributes with previously unexplored references to the emerging area of listening as artistic practice, adopting an expansive approach across poetry, visual art and literature. ""…poetic, incisive, grounded in politics and history yet continually pushing at the edges of what we now consider to be sound. She interrogates notions of music and the shifting experience that is silence with a freshness and coherence that is inspiring"" David Toop, Author of ""Ocean of Sound"", ""Haunted Weather"" and ""Sinister Resonance"" ""… compulsive and fast, rushing with you through textual territories that seem spoken, direct and contemporary while being nostalgic - invoking a past that creates the present tense."" Salomé Voegelin, author of ""Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art"" Read an interview by the author at http://earroom.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/daniella-cascella/ and also: http://www.digicult.it/news/en-abime-a-journey-across-listening-reading-and-writing-with-daniela-cascella/ And more at http://www.danielacascella.com and http://enabime.wordpress.com/","En Abime explores listening and reading as creative and critical activities driven by memory and return, reshaped into the present. It introduces an idea of aural landscape as a historically defined cultural experience, and contributes with previously unexplored references to the emerging area of listening as artistic practice, adopting an expansive approach across poetry, visual art and literature. ""…poetic, incisive, grounded in politics and history yet continually pushing at the edges of what we now consider to be sound. She interrogates notions of music and the shifting experience that is silence with a freshness and coherence that is inspiring"" David Toop, Author of ""Ocean of Sound"", ""Haunted Weather"" and ""Sinister Resonance"" ""… compulsive and fast, rushing with you through textual territories that seem spoken, direct and contemporary while being nostalgic - invoking a past that creates the present tense."" Salomé Voegelin, author of ""Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art"" Read an interview by the author at http://earroom.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/daniella-cascella/ and also: http://www.digicult.it/news/en-abime-a-journey-across-listening-reading-and-writing-with-daniela-cascella/ And more at http://www.danielacascella.com and http://enabime.wordpress.com/",14,"[""Mise en abyme means placed into the abyss. In art theory, it refers to an image containing a smaller copy of itself; in postmodern literary theory it becomes a tool for analysing complicated texts that contain a number of subtexts. To be thrown into the abyss could also be a description of what happens when we listen to music, especially that which contains unfamiliar, non-musical sounds. Here, it’s a writing device, allowing Daniela Cascella, who is Italian, to use English as a Verfremdungseffekt, or distancing effect, which reflects the polyphonic nature of memory and indeed the multiple texts of the mise en abyme. Among the stories she tells is one of a real abyss, recounting how Nero’s villa, Domus Aurea, was rediscovered in the 15th century by a boy who had accidentally fallen into a hole that led to the ruin. Such vivid, bodily experiences recur throughout En Abîme.\n\nAfrican-American poet Audre Lorde coined the term biomythography; here, Cascella complicates the genre of memoir by referring to an “archival fiction”. Her book is a personal meditation on her life, giving the impression of someone trying to pick up the pieces and put them together in a meaningful way. As a music writer and art historian, she has travelled widely to her objects of passion, curiosity or fascination, and the book oscillates between several geographical spaces, which in turn evoke metaphorical spaces. One is a Protestant cemetery near the Spanish Steps in Rome, where Gramsci, Keats and Shelley are buried. Another is New York, where Cascella researched a dissertation on the interdisciplinary avant garde magazine Possibilities, edited by William Baziotes with John Cage and Robert Motherwell. In New York she befriends Baziotes’s widow, Ethel. And in Berlin, she meets Mika Vainio, who, instead of giving her a straightforward interview, plays records to her.\n\nRome, a place of pilgrimage for many poets, writers and artists, is a city that åprovokes memories for Cascella. One of these is of listening to Bella Ciao, a compilation of workers’ and partisans’ songs, with her brother. The compilation is named after a famous song sung by the anti-fascist resistance movement in Italy and later covered by punk groups. In 1964, at the Spoleto festival, Giovanna Marini, a friend of communist film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, sang this song to a scandalised public who were not keen to be reminded of the past. But Cascella is haunted by the past because she wants to understand it, and she draws upon the experiences of other visitors to Rome – Herman Melville, Rainer Maria Rilke and Italian poet Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose work uses various dialects and languages – to help her to put together her own existence. A novel by Melville, Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities (later filmed by Leos Carax as Pola X, with a soundtrack by Scott Walker), where a prospective author writes two versions of a book – one for the reader and one only for himself – is the basis for a chapter of direct self-commentary on the author’s own reading and writing.\n\nSomehow this cascade of disrupted impressions makes sense. I felt at times as if the voice of the late Chris Marker was speaking to me – Cascella has a similar aphoristic style that recalls Sans Soleil’s meditations on memory. She never neglects the political aspect of her stories, all of which are painfully immersed in history, like the song “Bella Ciao” – the book’s real heart, and its musical leitmotif. En Abîme is, like Marker’s films, a road book, and as in his creations, there is at the end an elusive but firm sense that our world has transformed a little. ~ Agata Pyzik, The Wire"", ""En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing: An Archival Fiction. By Daniela Cascella. Zero Books, 2012. $16.95. enabime.wordpress.com\n\nReviewed by Lola San Martín Arbide, University of Salamanca, Spain.\n\nThroughout En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing: An Archival Fiction, the reader will find a repeated confession by the author, Daniela Cascella: “I lost all of my strength, I lost my ability.” This literary leitmotif is the true raison d’être of the text, to stick with the French in the title. En Abîme, a collection of Cascella’s criticism, resulted from an effort to put together a scattered body of work. As she has explained in interviews, the selected fragments have been extracted from a private notebook written concurrently with the press articles she published between 1998 and 2011. A type of counterpoint was created between these two parts, especially as the former are often more poetic, inventive, and personal than the latter. Books read in the past inform the way we listen, hear, and feel, and this creates a special kind of sound map, which in turn can develop into an intimate mental panorama. Cascella takes the reader for a walk through her inner landscape.\n\nEmbracing this concept of inscape, the author grants us access to her personal approach to writing sound. “Call me a writer of sound,” she writes. It is her inscape that sets the mood, the ethos for each piece. As if writing were the “other side of sound,” Cascella explores the ways that listening, reading, and writing are so closely imbricated. She explains this connection through her personal experience bringing together memories about the sound of novels by Herman Melville or traditional Alpine songs and linking them to actual places in Rome. Listening, sound, memories; these are concepts often considered too abstract to attempt to define normatively. However, Cascella’s book is an example of the concrete way that the three concepts are actually applied in the process of creative writing. She is an example of the listening art historian, to whom synesthesia, or “cohabitation of worlds” as she terms it, is the required medium towards any sort of artistic initiative.\n\nThe narration itself is a literal mise-en-abîme, employing repetition as one of its most distinctive stylistic characteristics. Extracts from quoted writers and musicians such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giovanna Marini, and Carlo Emilio Gadda, appear frequently in varied versions, creating a feeling of closeness to the author and to the story being told. All of these fragmentary elements, which appear scattered at the beginning, are emotively tied up in the end. The quoted artists are the elements of the subjectively crafted landscape in which Cascella’s literary criticism texts are rooted. These memories and personal stories exemplify the ways in which the cultural wealth accompanying our lives is an ever-changing corpus of potentially artistic materials. Despite the number of visual elements present throughout the text, there is not a single reproduction of them. This enhances a deeper sense of “archival fiction” and sets an ambiance where abstract reflection takes over from the precise and descriptive analysis typical of traditional research.\n\nMost libraries will classify this book under the general title of “literary criticism” as it does not quite fit into the standard tag of “music” or even that of “sound studies.” Elegantly leaving aside the style of academic writing, which tends to favor linear discourse, these fragments of a self-ethnography are of great interest when analyzed in terms of bilingualism. Writing in a foreign language for the sake of the sound of it – its natural melody, intonation, and pronunciation – must have been a beautiful and pleasurable challenge for the author. The book is set in a middle ground between a vernacular style and that of an adopted tongue, which calls for a renewed musical attitude from the native English-speaking reader. Cascella defines sound art as the “non-canonized way of shaping listening,” whereas En Abîme might well be described as a non-canonized subgenre of autobiography. It is a journey into Cascella’s ability to explain her artistic sensibility and part of her professional life in terms of past experiences, re-visited places, and artworks.\n\nDrawing on examples such as John Cage’s dissemination of Thoreau’s diaries until his words were nothing but abstract sounds, Cascella shows how sonic experiences become a shivering body, a rhythm that finds parallels in literary, filmic, or visual experiences. The book calls for a highly synesthetic sensibility from the art critic and writer. This approach can be of equal value to the ethnographer as well as to any kind of researcher. In general terms, Cascella is defending a broad approach to humanities, a holistic consideration of any art piece. The mise-en-abîme comes in when the reader is confronted with the assertion that a critique of an art piece is also subject to yet another critique, which in turn is subject to another in an endless repetition of critique. By making public our opinions and thoughts on what other people created, we are equally exposing our own creativity and its background. Cascella’s work seems to suggest that the best attitude a researcher can embrace is to acknowledge subjectivity, as long as clarity and honesty about its sources prevail. Quoting Jean Luc Godard, what matters “is not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to.” ~ Lola San Martín Arbide, Ethnomusicology Review"", ""Daniela Cascella’s En Abîme is a fascinating consideration of the art of writing about sound—the process of l i s t e n i n g a n d re-listening and responding to what one has heard. The result of a moment of crisis, when Cascella’s ten years of writing seemed to her to carry no real consistent shape or form, Cascella turned towards the silent abyss of words to reconsider them. The resulting book is shaped as a Sebaldian series of walks along via Appia in Rome, often ending with the author at or near the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Antonio Gramsci’s ashes are kept here and from those ashes the story spirals out—Pasolini’s short film La ricotta; Giovanna Marini’s sung lament to Pasolini’s death; a recording, featuring Marini, of workers songs cherished by Cascella as a child and later re-heard when covered by the post-punk band, CCCP. All of these references become pathways to consider the way sound carries the past along with the present moment of listening. Cascella wonderfully models how the act of listening for a writer also becomes the consideration of silences. She brilliantly weaves in deeply felt considerations of the music of Mika Vainio and Steve Roden, two artists whose work she has followed for a long time. Roden’s process, especially serves as a reversal of her own, often moving the silence of a text into the creation of a sonic piece. His work inspired her to write, “I began to write from the side of somebody who listens. Sound appeared as a perceptual asymptote for my words: they\n\nwould tend constantly to it, they would be forever disjointed from it.” En Abîme serves as a way for Cascella to regain her ability to write along the edges of sound, dipping into its resonances and pulling out detailed moments of inspiration and memory. It is an inspiring sound-memoir that models a way to listen to sound and write about its aftermaths. ~ Chris Kennedy, MusicWorks magazine #115"", ""En Abîme is one of those books that can be read in one sitting, letting yourself be caught up in the thick web of references and paths, and by the rhythm of the text itself. It is developed as an open structure, through a way of writing which is free from chronological orders and fixed divisions between real and fictional. It finds nourishment in recurring digressions and shifts in physical and literary spaces, in listening and reading, building and intertextual net through absolutely personal threads.\n\nhttp://www.digicult.it/news/en-abime-a-journey-across-listening-reading-and-writing-with-daniela-cascella/ ~ Elena Biserna , Digicult"", ""This slim volume from the Zero Books series is a collection of brief, interrelated reflections on sound by Daniele Cascella. There are extracts from journals, close readings of literary texts, snippets from interviews (with Steve Roden, among others). While the emotive exploration of sound's role in cultural and personal life is adventurous, perhaps the strongest aspect of Cascella's adoption of sound technique's writing is the way she repeats various themes, even phrases and sentences, as the probes her material and develops her argument. ~ Marc Weidenbaum, GoodReads.com"", ""http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2013/03/daniela-cascella-en-abime-listening-reading-and-writing/\n\nOur senses are as old as the cities we live in and the way we encounter and revisit sound is a thick knot of coincidences, words, colours and visions. Daniela Cascella’s ‘En Abime’ is a beautiful and delicate journey to the depths and different layers of such a difficult exploration of sound through reading and writing. It is physical and metaphysical, poetic and open ended. Rome becomes the field where the characters of La Ricotta cohabit with Pasolini’s verses from The Ashes of Gamsci, laments, the partisan song Bella Ciao, alpine chants, paintings, literature, Mike Cooper’s Hawaiian Shirts or Steve Roden’s plasticity with words. It is not so much about the nostalgic glance of the narrator to the past but more of a struggle to bring back the resonance of her listening experiences through words, to embody them through different archival devices and associations, real or fictional, little does it matter.\n\nKazantzakis once wrote that we come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. Kazantzakis’s idea of abyss was closely connected to the pursuit of truth; a long and arduous deambulation encompassing stories of personal and collective histories, politics, religion, painting, poetry, literature, people he met and places he visited. En Abime, to me, evoques Kazantzakis’s abyss but most importantly the luminous interval in between where all the scattered pieces and ruptured memories make sense, when one comes to terms with one’s many voices. It returns to the past to make a critical figuring of the present that then opens up to a suggestion for the future. Cascella creates a highly compelling, intimate yet collective journey of discovery and traces a new path of thinking about sound both embodied and in absentia. ~ Maria Papadomanolaki, Fluid Radio"", ""Daniela Cascella's En Abîme both describes and enacts the dynamic between writing and sound that gets put into play whenever we write about the auditory or sound out the phonetic limits of writing. Her soi-disant \""archival fiction\"" thematizes the writing of sound in scenes where phonographs serve as mnemonic triggers or are deployed as answers in an interview, but the archival sense of \""records\"" also plays throughout. Moreover, in its investigation of the dynamic between writing and sound, Cascella's work makes a compelling argument for rethinking the metaphors by which we understand both reading and listening: moving from surface and depth to horizon and edge to entanglements and knots. Picking up on Herman Melville's description of his unsuccessful book Pierre as a \""shallow nothing of a novel,\"" Cascella patiently demonstrates that the depth-model of value (\""shallow\"") and the ontology of \""nothing\"" (as John Cage had proved for \""silence\"") are far from certain and stable. Indeed, with its five blind-printed pages, her own second-hand copy of Melville's novel reanimates the metaphors of ghostly haunting and diminished echoing that echo and haunt her text in turn. A visual version of an echo, \""en abîme\"" names the recursive relationships that animate the formal structure of the eponymous fiction, but the abyss is also a formation where echoes emanate — the space required for resonance, the cry of the voice de profundis. Like Robert Walser's poetry, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, and Gert Jonke's novels (such as Der Ferne Klang and Erwachen zum großen Schlafkrieg), En Abîme conducts philosophy by other — narrative and aural — means. Cascella is a phonographer of the mind, and her work repays the replay of repeated auditioning. ~ Craig Dworkin, Professor, University of Utah. Author, No Medium (MIT Press, 2013)"", ""I consider Daniela Cascella to be one of the leading theorists and explorers of an exciting new discourse growing up around the practice of listening. Her book is poetic, incisive, grounded in politics and history yet continually pushing at the edges of what we now consider to be sound. She interrogates notions of music and the shifting experience that is silence with a freshness and coherence that is inspiring. ~ David Toop, author of Ocean of Sound, Haunted Weather, Sinister Resonance"", ""Two recent trilogies, of very different types, are particularly inspiring in regard to current considerations of the archive: Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, The Museum of Innocence, The Innocence of Objects – an extraordinary trilogy of novel, museum, catalog; and Daniela Cascella’s fascinating En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing, described as an “archival fiction,” where the trilogy is internal to the volume: meditative, discursive, nostalgic. I received En Abîme accompanied by the postcard of Salvator Rosa’s Jacob’s Dreams (1665), one of the most famous representations of the biblical passage (Genesis 28: 10-19) recounting Jacob’s Ladder, the dream that the Patriarch experienced after falling asleep during his flight from Esau. Particularly enticing – for the gastronome and wine-lover that I am – is the wine flask that appears at Jacob’s side, perhaps the efficient cause of this most famous of dreams, as I like to think that this is the earliest example of the aesthetics of intoxication, but I am nevertheless wary of anachronism. Vertically, we see the ladder, with the ascent and descent of angels, a fabulous axis mundi that proffers the very heart of the dream, articulating sleep and wakefulness, reverie and thought, immanence and transcendence, exile and homecoming. Horizontally, opposite the celestial ladder appears a wild landscape – more reminiscent of the terrible beauty of the Apennines than of a biblical topography – a paysage moralisé that distinguishes fantasm and nature, nostalgia and utopia, the autobiographical and the historical, the intimate and the political, the promised land of the biblical dream and the actual site of the painter’s awakening to landscape. But it is a most silent painting, despite undertones of the visibly apparent murmurs of the angels’ prayers, the rustling of leaves, and the breath of the wind. The oppositions, contradictions and paradoxes suggested by this painting offer a veritable allegory of En Abîme, a sort of pictorial epigraph. An irresistible impulse in the context of a book on sound would be to evoke Arnold Schoenberg’s Die Jakobsleiter (the unfinished oratorio of 1917-1921), that fascinating moment when the composer moved from free atonality to dodecaphonic music, from the decomposition of an old musical regime to a new sonic world order. This move from silence to sound suggests the necessary supplement to Cascella’s archival fiction, the archiving of those sounds that inspired her words. Where Pamuk has already written an elegy to Museums of Reading and Writing and created a museum thereof, what we now need is a Museum of Listening. ~ Allen S. Weiss"", ""En abîme is compulsive and fast, rushing with you through textual territories that seem spoken, direct and contemporary while being nostalgic - invoking a past that creates the present tense. It produces a wonderful séjourne into history that brings with it the contemporary condition of being, remote, apart, unseen, but in constant contact. Its words compose a listening journey that reminds of diaries written before the computer and the internet: crafted by hand, meticulously inscribing every shard of the travellers experience and thought. And so it talks intriguingly about listening to culture and cultural artefacts, not to know about sound but to know about culture, the social, the political and to make you understand rather than know the expanding function of listening.\n\nI read its voice aloud in my mind. A strong single narrating voice that is dispersed but not distracted, connecting in sound the circumstance of now as a fluent stream of poetry, philosophy, fiction, description and reverie. ~ Salomé Voegelin, author of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art"", ""With the incantatory circularity of a responsorium, Daniela Cascella weaves the threads of sound and life in a tapestry of ringing depths and aching beauty.\n\nCascella plays on the same emotional chords, on the same poetical league as the artists she draws from: Marini, Melville, Pasolini.\n\nAnd just like in \""Pierre\""'s recalling and refashioning, she constructs a fresh form out of mutilated remembrances, out of physical and psychological remotednesses: the listener has become a composer. ~ Luciano Chessa, composer, author of Luigi Russolo, Futurist. Noise, Visual Art and the Occult (University of California Press, 2012)"", ""En Abîme is a highly individual work of aural archaeology, sifting layers of sound, literature, autobiography and history. Cascella's project of writing sound dramatises both the continuities and the discontinuities between reading, writing and listening. The range of references and disciplines embraced by these reveries is remarkable: from Pasolini to Cage, Melville to Mika Vainio, protest songs to Alpine chants. Cascella has a wonderfully sensitive ear for the ways in which private and public histories resonate together. ~ Will Montgomery, English Department, Royal Holloway University of London"", ""Daniela Cascella is a talented writer whose research into the literary\n\naspects of silence is original and timely. Danielas work is, by nature,\n\ntransdisciplinary yet manages to retain an intensive methodological focus\n\non its subject. ~ Maria Fusco is a Belfast-born writer based in London, and Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths University of London"", ""At Sound and Music Ive had the pleasure of commissioning Danielas writing on a number of occasions. As an organisation that explores the wider contexts of music, listening and sound we have found her discursive and personal approach particularly suitable at a time when the celebration of biographical approaches to listening, and the emergence of a wider analysis of sound references within non-sounding art forms are on the rise. ~ Richard Whitelaw, Senior Producer, Sound and Music""]" "End of Capitalism, The: The Thought of Henryk Grossman","[""Ted Reese""]","With capitalism entering its worst ever and possibly final crisis, Henryk Grossman, the neglected 20th century Marxist who explained the inevitability of such a 'final breakdown' most convincingly, is more relevant than ever – and must be rehabilitated.","Henryk Grossman is a name most socialists or students of political and social theory - let alone the mass of working people around the world - have probably never heard of. Yet Grossman, a Polish Jew born in 1881, deserves recognition as the most sophisticated defender of Karl Marx's theory of capitalism's inevitable collapse. With capitalism sinking into its deepest ever crisis, Grossman's neglected work must be revisited and popularised. Is capitalism entering its final breakdown?","Henryk Grossman is a name most socialists or students of political and social theory - let alone the mass of working people around the world - have probably never heard of. Yet Grossman, a Polish Jew born in 1881, deserves recognition as the most sophisticated defender of Karl Marx's theory of capitalism's inevitable collapse. With capitalism sinking into its deepest ever crisis, Grossman's neglected work must be revisited and popularised. Is capitalism entering its final breakdown?",5,"[""\""Revealing the richness of the Marxist tradition, Reese provides an illuminating introduction into the life and thought of Henryk Grossman, connecting his many insights on the dynamics of capitalism, its contradictions, and its tendency to produce economic crises to present-day developments.\""\n\n-- Asatar Bair, Associate Professor of Economics, Riverside City College, author of Prison Labor in the US: An Economic Analysis ~ Asatar Bair, Asatar Bair, Associate Professor of Economics, Riverside City College, author of Prison Labor in the US: An Economic Analysis"", ""\""The End of Capitalism couldn’t be more urgent for socialists. In outlining the looming inevitability of capitalist breakdown, Reese makes a compelling case for Grossman’s work to be considered required reading alongside Marxist giants like Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.\"" - Stephen Radecki, The Swoletariat ~ Stephen Radecki, The Swoletariat"", ""\""Reese navigates what could easily be a series of complicated economic theories with his typical aptitude, making them accessible to amateur economists and laymen alike. He clearly demonstrates the significant value of Grossman's contribution to Marxist economics. Indeed, Grossman's writings now seem stunningly prescient.\"" -- wielisc, The Next Left ~ wielisc, The Next Left"", ""\""The rescuing of Henryk Grossman from obscurity is indispensable for any attempt to understand and overcome the crises confronting us today. Reese has written an inspiring and electrifying book.\"" - James Bell, Prolekult ~ James Bell, Prolekult"", ""\""Reese offers a fresh perspective on an underrated figure in the Marxist canon and shows how much fresher our perspectives could be if we gave Grossman the attention he has wrongly been denied.\"" - Kali Koba, Desperate Times Blog ~ Kali Koba, Desperate Times https://desperatetimes914496456.wordpress.com/""]" "End of Oulipo?, The","[""Lauren Elkin"", ""Veronica Esposito""]","As this experiment in literary patterns enters its sixth decade, its members, fans and critics are wondering: where can it go from here?","As this experiment in literary patterns enters its sixth decade, its members, fans and critics are wondering: where can it go from here? The Oulipo, founded in 1960s, is a group of writers and mathematicians which seeks to create literature using constrained experimental writing techniques such as palindromes, lipograms and snowballs. A lipogram is writing that excludes one or more letters. A snowball is a poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer. The Oulipo group celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2010, and as it enters its sixth decade, its members, fans and critics are all wondering: where can it go from here? In two long essays Veronica Esposito and Lauren Elkin consider Oulipo's strengths, weaknesses, and impact on today's experimental literature.","As this experiment in literary patterns enters its sixth decade, its members, fans and critics are wondering: where can it go from here? The Oulipo, founded in 1960s, is a group of writers and mathematicians which seeks to create literature using constrained experimental writing techniques such as palindromes, lipograms and snowballs. A lipogram is writing that excludes one or more letters. A snowball is a poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer. The Oulipo group celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2010, and as it enters its sixth decade, its members, fans and critics are all wondering: where can it go from here? In two long essays Veronica Esposito and Lauren Elkin consider Oulipo's strengths, weaknesses, and impact on today's experimental literature.",2,"[""The End of Oulipo? is effective, informative, highly entertaining, and essential reading.\n\nhttp://www.winnipegreview.com/\n\n~ Jeff Bursey, The Winnipeg Review"", ""...effective, informative, highly entertaining, and essential reading. ~ Jeff Bursey, The Winnipeg Review""]" "End of the End of History, The","[""Alex Hochuli"", ""George Hoare"", ""Philip Cunliffe""]",The 'End of History' is over. How did it end - and comes next?,"The “End of History” is over. The idea that Western liberal democracy was the “final form of human government” has been exposed as bluster: the old order is crumbling before our eyes. Angry anti-politics have arisen to threaten political establishments across the world. Elites have fallen into hysteria, blaming voters, “populism”, Putin, Facebook… anyone but themselves. They are suffering from Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome. Emerging from four years of interviews and debates on the popular global politics podcast Aufhebunga Bunga, The End of the End of History examines how the political consequences of the 2008 financial crisis have come home to roost. If Trump and Brexit shattered the liberal-democratic consensus in 2016, then the global pandemic of 2020 put a final end to the “End of History”. Politics is back, but it’s stranger than ever.","The “End of History” is over. The idea that Western liberal democracy was the “final form of human government” has been exposed as bluster: the old order is crumbling before our eyes. Angry anti-politics have arisen to threaten political establishments across the world. Elites have fallen into hysteria, blaming voters, “populism”, Putin, Facebook… anyone but themselves. They are suffering from Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome. Emerging from four years of interviews and debates on the popular global politics podcast Aufhebunga Bunga, The End of the End of History examines how the political consequences of the 2008 financial crisis have come home to roost. If Trump and Brexit shattered the liberal-democratic consensus in 2016, then the global pandemic of 2020 put a final end to the “End of History”. Politics is back, but it’s stranger than ever.",19,"[""Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Politics in the 21st Century seems to make no sense and this excellent read at times is a welcome antidote to the echo chamber that is presented by the (anti)social media companies. The best thing about this book is that those from the left and right will find things to agree with and also disagree with.\n\nAs with many excellent non-fiction books this makes you think and could be cause for despair. With the incredibly inept leadership currently on display in England and recently in the United States of America you could be forgiven for giving up. However, this book shows that the only certainty in relation to the future is that there is no certainty. ~ Steven Pipe (Reviewer) , NetGalley"", ""5* Rating. Highly recommend analysis of the last 30 years. Aufhebungabunga has presented an insightful analysis of politics after the End of History. Definitely recommend to anyone who seeks to understand the present political mess and wants to design the future. ~ Benkei333, Amazon"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. A politically charged and ideologically set book that examines the ways capitalism has failed humanity in the past three decades. The title is a nice pun on Fukuyama's idiotic pronouncement after the fall of Communism. Totally worth reading!! ~ Martin Lukanov (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. The sheep skin has been cast aside and the bared fangs of the neo-liberal wolf snarled in contempt at the feckless populace. The villagers, pitch forks in hand stood up to their tormentor and the wolf was forced to slink away. How to hide the wolf again? Well while the left is still tripping over whose rights are more right than the others’, the wolf has cleverly secreted himself behind a smokescreen of Trumpian triumph, Johnsonian jingoism, pseudo-nationalism and anti-social media bots peddling the old elixir of hate and them-ness. All of this to distract from who they really represent - the ultra-rich, neo-liberals that had never really gone away, just retreated to the their plush lairs in the hills, watching and waiting for the next chance. And like the pandemic virus, they just morph into another more adaptable variant to continue to suck the life out of normal working class people, destroy the environment in their endless profiteering and increase their hold on the world's wealth and power.\n\nEveryone should read this. The distractions of social media and regular media are many, this book reminds us to keep focussed on the real issues. Kudos to the authors.\n\nThank you to NetGallery for providing an e-copy of this fearless novel in exchange for an unbiased review. ~ Anneke Kingsley (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""5* Rating. Wonderful introduction to current global politics. Great short summary of today’s political context written in clear prose. I’ve been giving people copies. ~ Graeme, Amazon"", ""5* Rating. A fascinating and important book. This book grows out of the best politics podcast available, Aufhebunga Bunga (aka Bungacast). It distills the thinking from nearly 200 episodes, dozens of guests and book clubs into a punchy, provocative and enlightening text that helps to explain the contours of contemporary Western politics. As the title suggests, the book proposes seeing recent events as the end of the \""end of history\"" - that period after the end of the Cold War when it seemed fundamental political conflict had ended with the triumph of liberalism. Since the global financial crisis, the authors argue, liberalism has increasingly been under attack, while its defenders have succumbed to neoliberal order breakdown syndrome, madly lashing out as they fail to understand, explain or respond to political change. Yet perhaps the most important argument of the book, which distinguishes it from the podcast, is that all of the challenges to neoliberalism remain species of anti-politics, driven by disgust at and rejection of the political system as a whole, and core democratic processes like representation. This means that the end of history is over, but politics is not back. A fascinating and important book - a true must-read for anyone interested in contemporary politics. ~ Lee Jones, Amazon"", ""5* Rating. Aufhe-standing. Highly readable, bold and clarifying – this book situates the current, disorienting political moment in its proper context – the end of the deadening post-Cold-War neoliberal stranglehold on politics – and makes sense of things like no other analysis. What forms will mass re-engagement with politics take? Read this and you will feel less politically isolated and less alienated. ~ Alex Dale, Amazon"", ""5* Rating. Incisive commentary on contemporary politics. There's definitely this feeling that politics are changing but it's not clear what's next. Like the podcast, \""The End of End of History\"" discusses this politics of the interregnum between what was (The End of History) and what might come next with the Brexit, Trump, etc political shocks presented as symptoms of this changing of the guard. The book is entertaining and really well written and helped me to understand these odd times we live in. Recommended for anyone with even a passing interest in politics. ~ Drew, Amazon"", ""5* Rating. Superb, thought-provoking analysis from the Bunga boys. Politics is back, but bloody hell, it sure is a mess! For those of us on the left who had spent years dreaming about the breakdown of neoliberal order, I think it's safe to say not many of us expected its gradual demise to be quite so bleak, contradictory, and just plain weird.\n\nThe End of the End of History provides an insightful and highly readable look at the nature of political change since the end of the Cold War. It explains what exactly is new about contemporary politics, and what the implications of those developments are for political change, both now and in the future.\n\nThe analysis of Italy, and Berlusconi as the archetypal politician of our age, is especially compelling. I also loved the discussion of anti-politics, which does a superb job of explaining why so many seemingly radical (perhaps even revolutionary) global political movements over the past decade ultimately failed to bring about meaningful change.\n\nHaving listened to the authors develop some of these arguments on their equally superb podcast (Aufhebunga Bunga) over the last three years, it's terrific to finally see all their key ideas available here in one place. I'm confident I'll be returning to this book again and again over the coming years. ~ Richard McCulloch, Amazon"", ""5* Rating. Great explainer of why politics seems to have gone haywire. From Brexit to Trump, the last five years have been filled with doom-laden headlines and tweets telling us we're in the end times (or at least on the brink of fascism)\n\nThis book, and accompanying podcast, is a vital corrective to the panic. Drawing on a global view of contemporary thinking from the fringes of left and right (and beyond!) it offers an important context to the mainstream views on a variety of topics. For anyone who enjoys alternative left media like Red Scare, Chapo Trap House or Jacobin it will offer a more thoughtful (and less US-centric) view that also isn't scared to question some major left orthodoxies\n\nIt doesn't offer quick fixes or instant solutions - and you will probably spend a lot of time shouting back at it - but it will give you a great deal of context and understanding about the road from 1989 to now. And if you find yourself despairing at both contemporary politics and its radical alternatives, it will give you some comfort that there a lot of sharp-minded people working through some of the problems of today rather than fight the battles of yesterday (or just give up!). ~ David Bowden, Amazon"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. At times it can be difficult for a book to reflect on the recent history and give it the necessary light and attention. This book does a great job of placing historical context and trends and applying it to today and the future. Well done. ~ Kim Johnston (Reviewer) , NetGalley"", ""Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. An excellent short primer of the current state of Western politics in a post-post-Fukuyama world, particularly good on the UK. The chapter on the collective \""Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome\"", or NOBS as the book wittily puts it after Trump/Brexit was excellent - I've read similar takes on Twitter about the failure of the Op-Ed #FBPE writing classes to understand our current politics, but to have it in a cogently written book was very refreshing. ~ Ben Hart (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""It's been a long time since a text was so useful in helping me think through our present moment and my role within it. The End of The End of History is a clear, powerful and panoramic analysis of our world at the dawn of the 2020s. The authors have written an excellent work of contemporary history, but very surprisingly for a theoretically sophisticated work informed by Hegel, they have also written a page-turner. I picked it up one morning and finished it in less than a day. The End of the End of History is a valuable tool for deciphering our very messy political condition. ~ Vincent Bevins, author, The Jakarta Method"", ""Without exaggeration, the best left book I’ve read in years. Everyone on the left must read this, especially amidst the persistent refusal to face up to our many, punishing defeats of the last 20 (40?) years. A genuine marvel of a work of political theory. ~ Leigh Phillips, journalist and co-author, The People's Republic of Walmart"", ""It’s rare to find a book that gives us a total picture of the recent history of global politics, but the Aufhebunga Bunga boys have produced just such a text. The authors take us through a series of political upheavals and popular protests, populism, post-politics and anti-politics, and the defeats of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, in eight short bracing chapters. We also find original and critical insights into the campaigns against corruption in countries around the world, from Hungary to Brazil, to the case study of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. Engaged, informed, ordinary and discontent, self-educated, puzzled, disgusted and even a little angry, the reader for whom this book is written will be able to engage with the authors’ project of conceptual mapping and left-wing self-critique. Despite the darkness of the times, the book will give you a sliver of hope. It’s a page turner as one wonders how the authors will lead us to that tiny ray of light: socialist Enlightenment. ~ Catherine Liu, Professor of Film and Media Studies/Visual Studies, UC Irvine"", ""Suddenly we find ourselves thrown into a time of chaos and confusion, breakdown and decline. This short, smart book navigates a terrain of ideological mystification and encourages us to take a sober look at the balance of forces going into this tumultuous period, waking from the boredom of the end of history. ~ Angela Nagle, author, Kill All Normies"", ""In this provocative volume, the crew behind Aufhebunga Bunga podcast surveys the political landscape at “end of the end of history”. Looking at the triumph of neoliberalism and its tug-of-war with its populist Doppelgänger in different countries – from the US to the UK, from Italy to Brazil – the authors vividly demonstrate that, while neoliberalism’s contradictions are plainly visible, the Left is incapable of responding to a profound crisis of authority. A must-read for all those willing to gaze into the depths of contemporary ideological and cultural wars. ~ Paolo Gerbaudo, Director of the Centre for Digital Culture, King's College London; author, The Digital Party"", ""Aufhebunga Bunga is one of the best leftist podcasts around, and rather unique in consciously developing a historical and sociological framework for understanding the present political conjuncture. Regular listeners will be happy to see some of the ideas developed on the podcast - post-politics, anti-politics, and the eminently useful Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome (NOBS) - formalized in The End of the End of History. As the authors argue, contemporary anti-politics could lead to democratic renewal, or it could clear the way for authoritarian rule in a political vacuum. In pursuit of the former and avoidance of the latter, the authors are developing an indispensable orienting theory in conversation with some of the best minds on the Left. ~ Benjamin Y. Fong, Editor, Damage Magazine"", ""We live in disturbing times: the old order is crumbling, but nothing better is waiting in the wings. Mainstream and even critical political science is too wedded to the status quo ante to make sense of these changes – so it falls to others to do so. In my view, the “end of the End of History” framing is the best way to understand what is happening, and you can find few better guides to the wasteland than Hochuli, Hoare and Cunliffe. This book is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand, and ultimately to transcend, our contemporary crisis. ~ Lee Jones, Reader in International Politics, Queen Mary University of London""]" "End of the Megamachine, The","[""Fabian Scheidler""]",A uniquely comprehensive page-turner depicting the roots of the current civilizational crisis.,"The End of the Megamachine provides a uniquely comprehensive picture of the roots of the destructive forces that are threatening the future of humankind today. Spanning 5000 years of history, the book shows how the three tyrannies of militarized states, capital accumulation and ideological power have been steering both ecosystems and societies to the brink of collapse. With the growing instability of the Megamachine in the 21st century, new dangers open up as well as new possibilities for systemic change, to which everyone can contribute. Originally published in Germany in 2015 to great acclaim, Zero Books presents the first English language edition of The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization. “The topic could not be more important. A very valuable and surely timely contribution.” Noam Chomsky","The End of the Megamachine provides a uniquely comprehensive picture of the roots of the destructive forces that are threatening the future of humankind today. Spanning 5000 years of history, the book shows how the three tyrannies of militarized states, capital accumulation and ideological power have been steering both ecosystems and societies to the brink of collapse. With the growing instability of the Megamachine in the 21st century, new dangers open up as well as new possibilities for systemic change, to which everyone can contribute. Originally published in Germany in 2015 to great acclaim, Zero Books presents the first English language edition of The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization. “The topic could not be more important. A very valuable and surely timely contribution.” Noam Chomsky",29,"[""This is a brilliant read but one that really takes its toll — not a light weekend read. I can see it being used in many college classes and will recommend it for advanced homeschool high school credit in history, civics and social studies. It definitely gives the reader a deep dive into how we got here. ~ Alicia Bayer (Media/Journalist), NetGalley"", ""A thoroughly worthwhile read with a wealth of useful and relevant information. ~ Morning Star"", ""Scheidler looks at the emergence of modern civilisation and the capitalist system from new and unusual perspectives. A valuable contribution.”\n\n~ Socialist Standard"", ""A spanning survey of civilization from its inception to the present. Scheidler has focused the key issue (…) He leaves us with a sense of possibilities.\n\n~ Counterpunch"", ""Fabian Scheidler does not simply describe a dead end but examines the founding narrative of modern Western civilization in a different way. This engaging book can be seen as a manual of resistance, a motivating reflection that can be summed up in one question: what social organization do we want? ~ Le Temps"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. The End of the Megamachine provides a very interesting, although just slightly shallow historical account of the ways humanity has gone in the wrong direction in the past five millennia. For Scheidler, the people have veered away from the right path of development due to four things he calls tyrannies. Though four, they all stem from the same base desire - that for endless capital accumulation. Everything, from the creation of cities and countries, to that of the monotheistic religions comes from this greed for getting more and more. Seeing how the world ended up where it is now through the lense of Scheidler's observation is equally enlightening and depressing, but it is something everyone should read. ~ Martin Lukanov (Reviewer) , NetGalley"", ""Fabian Scheidler, a journalist, playwright and visual artist, caused a sensation when his book was published in Germany in 2015. Admirably researched and accessible in its coverage of 5,000 years of history, the book — now in its first English language edition with the addition of a telling final chapter on the covid-19 crisis — argues that ‘four tyrannies’ have brought both social and ecosystems near to collapse: the tyranny of the market and capital accumulation, the physical violence of the militarised state, the ideological power of the media, schools and universities, and the preponderance of linear thinking.\n\nLinear thinking, says Scheidler, assumes the world functions according to predictable laws of cause and effect and thus is controllable. But while this works for inanimate matter, it misleads when it comes to unpredictable humans, and blocks the view of reality in the living world. ‘The Great Machine is hitting a wall in slow motion, and those at the wheel are only making things worse by haphazardly yanking on all the levers,’ he asserts in a memorable passage. As the materialist ‘megamachine’ grows more unstable in the 21st century, new dangers present themselves, Scheidler warns, but at the same time opportunities for systemic change are developing around the world at grass roots level. Failures of the old order, perpetuating many problems which the existing system has been unable to solve — war, poverty, disease, climate change and financial collapse — demand a new model.\n\nNot since Colin Wilson’s monumental A Criminal History of Mankind (2nd edition 2005), have I read such an essential but dispiriting work about the flaws in the nature of man (and, historically, it is mainly men, of course) — for Scheidler’s book is a criminal history of a whole other kind, giving us a chilling perspective on the events of today, tracing as it does the course over centuries of pernicious forces now combined to place the future of the human race under serious threat.\n\n...................................More and more people are beginning to see through the bluster, exemplified particularly in the response of the medical-political complex to the coronavirus where the imposition of lockdowns and economic cruelty worldwide will only keep the capitalist Megamachine running, it seems, and even perhaps extend its life, through the structural violence of debt being enacted on and by governments everywhere on a vast scale. Perhaps this is a hidden agenda: how the world’s economic and political elites, through the power of debt, as Scheidler points out, can facilitate neoliberal reorganisation and profitable business and political control. After all, a sharp increase in national debt suddenly is no longer a problem; money, supposedly never there for social and ecological restructuring, suddenly flows in almost unlimited sums.\n\nWhile governments cosy up to the big corporations, the state and capital always having been closely intertwined — state power being chiefly a means to pave the way for unimpeded increase in money capital — small and medium sized businesses are disproportionately harder hit. Indeed, Scheidler agrees that the basic structures of the Megamachine are being maintained, and in some cases strengthened, by the covid catastrophe.\n\nThe End of the Megamachine follows two timelines: the first five chapters cover a period from about 3,000BCE, tracing the development of military, economic and ideological power back to its roots in Mesopotamia, and the following six chapters cover the last 500 years, relating how the modern world system was formed with the emergence of the first highly militarised corporations, the accumulation of capital in financial centres, colonisation and the rapid expansion enabled by fossil fuels which broke through ecological boundaries.\n\nSome key quotes:\n\n‘The inner logic of the Megamachine is fundamentally incompatible with true democracy, understood as self-organisation.’\n\n‘At the beginning of the modern era, Europeans transformed half the world into a hell on earth in the name of salvation and progress.’\n\n‘Wherever the European trinity of military, merchants and missionaries set foot, sooner or later, it laid waste to egalitarian forms of social organisation.’\n\n‘Modern states have arisen neither for the benefit of populations nor with their consent, but as the products of physical violence.’\n\n‘The only prospect remaining is that of a desolate dystopia: a planet torn between extreme wealth and abject misery, racing toward an ecological catastrophe with a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, collapsing megacities and a dysfunctional financial system.’\n\nApocalypse is not just a province of the imagination, says Scheidler. No other civilisation in history has managed to produce so many real-life doomsday options, from nuclear war to environmental collapse to the spread of lab-grown, mutated killer organisms: ‘These days the connection between apocalypticism and capitalism is almost uncannily topical.’\n\nScheidler warns that the covid-19 crisis and social and economic shutdowns could be a foretaste of how governments will try to control an increasingly fragile system in the future through a crisis mode that suspends democracy, at first temporarily, but eventually permanently. So as to take back hard-won democratic rights from the populace, the best justification is always a powerful enemy: since 2001, it has been Islamism and the ‘war on terror’, but that’s replaced by the coronavirus — although not a particularly dangerous illness in the scheme of things — and the ‘biopolitical state of emergency’, with governmental rhetoric remarkably similar. Fear of such enemies has diverted attention from ‘those far greater threats that come from the heart of Western civilisation itself: the biosphere crisis and the growing danger of nuclear war’.\n\nPandemics, financial crises and the collapse of life-sustaining ecosystems will inevitably force the economies of rich countries to contract in the long term. Thus Scheidler sees the corona crisis as an important learning experience as to how to free the state from its interdependence with big business and make it an institution obligated to serve the common good, how wealth income and work must be redistributed to create dignified lives for everyone. Disintegration, or collapse, often translates into chaos, but not necessarily an apocalypse. A determined resistance against the destructive force of the Megamachine is needed, and new social and economic structures built to allow people gradually to live outside its logic. Scheidler ends with various examples of ‘defensive struggles’ going on around the world which are resisting the old and building the new, and are just as important as creating alternatives.\n\nHis good news is that exit from the prevailing system has been under way for some time: he cites battles against mining projects, oil drilling, fracking, pipelines, dams, highways nuclear power plants, land grabbing, privatisation, militarisation and the power of the banks. ~ Geoff Ward, Medium.com"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars....Exploitation, alienation. Human cruelty, violence, impending ecological catastrophe.\n\nHow did things ever get to the predicament we collectively face now? How is it that 99% of the world's wealth is currently owned and controlled by a mere bus load of billionaires? This book attempts to answer this question by looking at the ways our civilisation has evolved.\n\nMore crucially, how this Machine evolved since the evolution of the first city states. Before that, the nomadic hunter/gatherer way of life persisted for tens of thousands and millions of years. But with this relatively highly recent development, metallurgy, profiteers and war became linked into an unholy alliance of power-over and has always been essentially malevolent. The need for constant growth through making profits leads to rapacious growth, to viewing nature as a commodity to be exploited (especially post Bacon and Descartes), the glorification of war, and innate inequality. This is what this writer has called the Machine, and it is time it was dismantled - for the sake of our survival of the species, as well as for the planet we are rapidly destroying...............This is an excellent sociological and anthropological study of how and why we have reached this current, precarious state of affairs, either way.\n\n~ Lynda Stevens (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. Because those in power get to write down “true” history, much of the world is steeped in the idea that Western civilization represents progress and reason. According to Western (economic and political) mythology, historical events by and large represent progress (so long as the victors become wealthy and the standard of life, for a large cross-section in the winning culture, is acceptable). This historical “truth” is embraced by most college students even though real history is a stream of wars, destruction and oppression of the weak. Scheidler explains that the root cause of this myth is not really liberalism favoring free market capitalism so much as a much older predatory system that seeks increased gains for those in power, forever justified by a publicly announced mission to bring about religious salvation, and when that justification was scuttled, the mission was modified to bring about development, a free market, and a higher standard of living.\n\nNo matter what is blamed for wars, the overall promotion of consumerism and exploitation of the earth is running into two 21st century walls: a structural global economic crisis that “can no longer be explained away by the usual economic cycles” (loc 157 of 5298) and the steady dwindling lack of security for a growing number of people (let alone the issues of global warming and ecological crisis). The End of the Megamachine is no mere exploration of a theory; it is a prophecy.\n\nScheidler supports his thesis with a historical study of cultural commercialism, and in so doing, he proves that we do not have to put up with the economic structure that we are saddled with today. The beginnings of the modern free market are tied to state gain. Scheidler asserts that those who “cultivated European market expansion at the threshold of modern times were not peaceful merchants” but they were in fact VIPs from militarized city states who used warfare “to assert their commercial interests” (1171). By contrast, Arab merchants did not use physical force and were not part of state policy making and were removed from state power.\n\nThe First Crusade involved the conquest of the port city of Acre in Galilee in 1104, for which Genoa received a third of the port city’s revenues The first crusade “led to the enormous enrichment of Genoese merchants and was the basis for much of the city’s subsequent power.” Scheilder cites William of Tyre’s eyewitness account of the massacre at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and it is horrific. The knights and soldiers from the Christian West massacred without mercy, and the “‘whole place was flooded with the blood of victims.’” Tyre described his revulsion at “‘the spectacle of headless bodies, mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused horror in all who looked upon them’ and insists that the victors themselves, dripping from blood from head to foot,’” brought terror to the beholder. In the Al Aqsa Mosque alone, ten thousand died, and a similar number of victims were dragged out from wherever they hid in the city and slain like sheep or “‘dashed headlong to the ground from some elevated place so that they perished miserably.’” All the spoils went to the victors by agreement before the slaughter, explaining the pitiless lack of humanity among the victors (1197).\n\nScheidler observes that a similar fate awaited the inhabitants of the Americas, calling the phenomenon “destructive violence produced by the combination of capitalism, militarism and Western missionary zeal”(1197). He furthermore brands the Crusades (in which Europe was the victor) as revelatory of what the rest of the world would soon taste. From the Crusades, the West moved into new forms of mercenary combat that threw out old rules, evident in the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) between England and France. The age of chivalry died when rules of combat were tossed aside and the number of dead were not limited—not even of other Christians. The “Black Prince,” Edward III’s son, resorted to a scorched earth policy that devastated large parts of southern France. His armies were financed by the Florentine banks, investors.\n\nIf the world’s wars have seemed disjointed or part of convoluted political maneuvering on a world stage, reading Scheidler’s assessment in the light of economic aggression and entitlement will have the advantage of tying everything together. He makes a tremendously strong argument for the driving force that could lead to mankind’s ultimate destruction. There is a section of the book that appears to argue that the belief systems supporting a dominant god have played into the global economic aggression, and that very well may be, but that segment (which many religious followers will take at least some issue with) does not detract from the overall convincing thesis that concepts can be distorted. He draws attention to this idea by quoting Levi-Strauss, who wrote, “The primary function for writing as a means of communication is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings”(366). One would hardly imagine that Scheidler would advocate a cessation of writing and reading lessons; here, he simply makes a good point about propaganda and the power of disseminated ideas.\n\nIt is ironic that religious and philosophical playbooks for living at peace and in harmony with each other and the earth have been in existence for centuries, but mankind has chosen to applaud the road of greed. This is not a book without hope, for at the outset Scheidler explains that the entire world agricultural system could be shifted to organic within a few years, if people wanted. It was good that he started on such a note, because one needs a little hope in the face of such a tidal wave of evidence. ~ Julia Simpson-Urrutia (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars...............Human society is not just heading in the wrong direction, it has forcefully made the wrong turn and doubled down on it for five thousand years now. According to Fabian Scheidler, whose book The End of the Megamachine has finally been published in English, that wrong approach can be clearly broken into four tyrannies that all trace their root to endless capital accumulation. It is an alternative history that can be very persuasive..... ~ David Wineberg (Media) , NetGalley"", ""An extremely good read! ~ Annette Jensen, Taz. Die Tageszeitung"", ""The book makes us understand how today’s madness came to be. You do not feel confused and powerless anymore, but ready for a new start. ~ Der Freitag (German weekly)"", ""Fabian Scheidler has written not only an economic but also a remarkable psychological history of capitalism. ~ Bettina Dyttrich, WOZ. Die Wochenzeitung (Swiss weekly)"", ""This book should become part of the curricula of all schools and universities. ~ Prof. Ulrich Duchrow, Publik Forum (German biweekly)"", ""The book is relentless but it reads marvelously, it makes one angry while offering encouragement at the same time ~ Lara Mallien, Oya (German monthly)"", ""A fascinating new take on the parts of human history that got us where we are today. It's a disturbing story, but it offers some clues on the way out of our box canyon. ~ Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org"", ""The topic could not be more important. A very valuable and surely timely contribution. ~ Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology/University of Arizona"", ""This book, a sensation in Germany when it was first published, challenges us to seek a new path for our and the planet’s survival. It tells the backstory of the failed promises of economic globalization and market capitalism and shows that the current social and ecological crises have their roots in thousands of years of war, domination and destruction of the natural world. ~ Maude Barlow, Chairperson of the Council of the Canadians"", ""A fascinating book, delightful to read in spite of the grim topic. This is an excellent reflection on the terror/hope that we are living. ~ John Holloway, Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico"", ""A brilliant book, that couldn’t be more topical. We owe the author our gratitude, solidarity and a great deal of admiration. ~ Jean Ziegler, Advisory Committee to the UN Human Rights Council"", ""What a brilliant achievement—a wonderfully coherent, cogent and gripping story of the historical origins of the political, economic, social and ecological crises of our times. You can’t be a serious activist committed to creating a new world if you haven’t read this. ~ Firoze Manji, Carleton University; founder of Pambazuka News"", ""A highly original and fascinating book. It helps to understand and overcome the global Megamachine that is threatening our future. ~ Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, President of the Club of Rome (2012–2018)"", ""The End of the Megamachine exposes the slide into a near complete loss of memory of who we are as humans and how we ought to live together. Scheidler weaves a potent tapestry of how we subvert ourselves through reckless exploitation of nature and the piling of socio-ecological harms on human communities. This book is a loud alarm that must not be ignored. ~ Nnimmo Bassey, Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation, Nigeria"", ""In this fascinating and rich synthesis, Fabian Scheidler tells us the whole story of the Megamachine, this giant creature that eats minerals and spawns armies, from the very beginning of the mining age, to the current wholesale destruction of the Earth's crust. ~ Ugo Bardi, University of Florence/Club of Rome, author of “The Limits to Growth Revisited” and “Extracted\"""", ""An eye-opener for social activists. A history of Western civilization in only 300 pages: no wonder that the book has such a great success! Fabian Scheidler brilliantly succeeds in highlighting the rupture points in this process. ~ Wolfgang Sachs, Club of Rome, editor of “The Development Dictionary“"", ""The End of the Megamachine is an informed and clearly written chronicle of how societies have reached the dire situation we now face. Going on from our perch on the precipice, do we accumulate ourselves into barbaric death under the rule of the Megamachine? Or do we cooperate ourselves into civilized life by ending the Megamachine, and not ourselves? Scheidler offers historical insights meant to fuel the liberating outcome. ~ Michael Albert, founder and editor of Z Magazine"", ""Fabian Scheidler’s book paints a uniquely complete picture of the historical roots of capitalism. It is a profound mirror for the Western world, which prides itself so much on values, peace and democracy. For me, the book is more valuable than everything I learned about history at school. ~ Christian Felber, founder of the Economy for the Common Good"", ""Top 10 of non-fiction books. ~ Robert Jungk Library for Future Studies"", ""A must read for everyone rising against the system that is destroying life on earth and our future. ~ Vandana Shiva, World Future Council, founder of Navdanya.org, India""]" Enjoying It,"[""Alfie Bown""]","This book is a study of enjoyment and of the enjoyment of studying. It asks what enjoyment says about us and what we say about enjoyment, and why.","Using a range of ‘case studies’ from Critical Theory to Candy Crush, ‘Gangnam Style’ to Game of Thrones and Football Manager to Hieronymus Bosch, this book argues that we need to rethink our enjoyment. Inspired by psychoanalysis, the book offers a new way of thinking about how we talk about what we enjoy and how we enjoy what we talk about. ""Will Candy Crush set you free?"" Watch this summary of Enjoying It and its philosophy: https://youtu.be/UW9oF3OPzqQ","Using a range of ‘case studies’ from Critical Theory to Candy Crush, ‘Gangnam Style’ to Game of Thrones and Football Manager to Hieronymus Bosch, this book argues that we need to rethink our enjoyment. Inspired by psychoanalysis, the book offers a new way of thinking about how we talk about what we enjoy and how we enjoy what we talk about. ""Will Candy Crush set you free?"" Watch this summary of Enjoying It and its philosophy: https://youtu.be/UW9oF3OPzqQ",5,"[""A year or so ago, in an old university teaching job, one of my students submitted a thought-provoking essay which used Freud’s ideas about the relationship between the id, the ego and the superego to discuss the Grand Theft Auto games. The piece argued that, while we have traditionally conceived of the superego –in a societal sense – as a limiting, disciplinary agency, GTA emblematises how the role performed by such an agency in the 21st century is quite different. Now, the cultural imperative, the law of the superego, is to live by the whims of the unschoolable, insatiable id. Whether we apprehend this message through the gruelling-seeming hedonism advertised by most contemporary music videos, the demands from the Smart Thinking shelves in WH Smiths that we break all extant intellectual moulds, or in video games whose narrative literally forces its characters to live outside the law, it is clear: we are restrained only by the command that we must not be restrained.\n\nAlfie Bown’s Enjoying It – Candy Crush and Capitalism is the latest in a growing line of speculations regarding this inversion of a tradition of an ethics based on limitation. Slavoj Žižek has, for some time, been pointing out that the sole command issued by the postmodern superego is to ‘enjoy’, while Mark Fisher’s increasingly influential 2009 work Capitalist Realism floated the concept of ‘depressive hedonia’, in which the neoliberal subject is paralysed by the constant pressure placed upon them to indulge in short-termist pleasures. Enjoying It both develops upon and (implicitly) contests some of these discussions, and stakes out its arguments with Žižekian excursions through the ephemera of popular culture. Bown, a contributor to Everyday Analysis, an online project to psychoanalyse the 21st century – and, more specifically, post-2008 – quotidian, is no stranger to what is often taken to be detritus, and steers us through considerations of Miley Cyrus, ‘Gangnam Style’, mobile phone gaming and Football Manager.\n\nThe book opens, however, with an important deconstruction of the distinction between ‘unproductive’ and ‘productive’ pleasures. Implicit in Fisher’s framing of ‘depressive hedonia’ is the idea that the instant gratification offered by grazing through YouTube, Instagram or Facebook distracts from the more substantial pleasures offered by aesthetic consideration or political activism. Impulsively, I’d tend to agree with Fisher on that point: I might find it easier to spend my evenings meandering the byways of Wikipedia or TV Tropes, but I fall asleep feeling better in myself, and specifically far less guilt-wracked, if I’ve been reading David Harvey or watching one of those Artificial Eye DVDs I never seem to get round to opening. Nevertheless, Bown counsels that we approach the idea of ‘productive’ pleasure with caution, illustrating his point by thinking through what it means when a person says they ‘enjoy’ engaging with philosophy or critical theory.\n\nReading Theodor Adorno or Michel Foucault is, Bown suggests, an activity which superficially positions one as critical of existing systems and ideologies. Many people have likely met individuals who stylise themselves as arch-theorists, ultra-sceptics pouting and smoking over Anti-Oedipus or Écrits and tweeting insistently to remind us – and them - of their radicality. For me, there’s something laudable about this straw-figure – the more I see tedious ‘deconstructions’ of ‘hipsters’ in the press, the more inclined I am to view pretentiousness as heroism pure and simple – but it’s typically true that they suffer from the blind spot Enjoying It points towards. This, Bown suggests, can be understood as follows: ‘Our ideas surrounding the enjoyment of critical theory and political resistance lead to the celebrated identity of the radical, which is another way of being a subject that suits capitalism’. In other words, the inclusive, absorptive nature of capitalism, which needs to bring everything within the scope of its mechanics of commodification, means that the radical is yet one more demographic to be sold to, another identity which can only find its expression through consumer preference. If this seems far-fetched, follow the twitter account of left-leaning London publishers Verso, who frequently retweet photographs sent in by satisfied customers of the piles of Marx (and assorted modern Marxist thinkers) which have just landed on their doormats. This is to take nothing away from the utopian desires potentially involved in reading, or buying, these texts, but it does remind us that our relationship with them is very often, if not exclusively, a reified one.\n\nThe main drive of the argument in Enjoying It, however, is a study of less ‘productive’ forms of enjoyment (which must, predictably, be accounted for in the terms of the ‘productive’ enjoyments of theory). His reading of Candy Crush, and its many, many commuter-friendly analogues, is perhaps the most instructive of these. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Bown discusses the dominant narrative which considers such activities to be a ‘distraction’ from a serious, ordered reality, a frippery which constitutes time out of life. This, he states, is a misunderstanding: it is actually the case that the palpable irrelevance of ‘distractions’ serves to make their outside seem serious and meaningful. Any guilt we feel while playing Candy Crush while at the office is ideological inasmuch as it lends work an appearance of existential profundity it does not deserve. Consequently, the political function of distraction is not to make us forget what is ‘really’ happening, but to draw boundaries for the real, a ‘stable working life and identity to which we can and should return’.\n\nBown is most pointed when he’s pulling off dialectical jack-knives such as those described above: his discussions of the ‘irrational enjoyment’ of ‘Gangnam Style’ works in a slightly more slippery conceptual register which must deal with the problematically fuzzy shapes of stupidity and inexplicability. Nevertheless, there are some useful ideas here. Pleasure which stupefies our attempts at analysis, which can’t be drawn back into some cosily politicised narrative about how and why we enjoy, points to the ‘gaps in ideology’ which denote our incompletion as subjects. If we don’t know why we enjoy what we enjoy, we might be doing more than simply functioning as capitalism’s duped drones. In fact, it might be the very ‘mindlessness’ of some pleasures, our capacity to enjoy what is not and cannot be fully instrumentalised by power, which points in the direction of utopian possibility.\n\nPerhaps I’d have liked to have seen a little more by way of distinction between those ‘irrational’ enjoyments which might operate as sites of resistance and Candy Crush-alike ‘distractions’, but this is a punchy and provocative piece of writing. Bown’s style is, somehow, simultaneously limpid and irony-laden, absolutely accessible but also teasing and suggestive in a way which is, like the pleasures offered by Psy, never fully explicable. In a time when pleasure is a central political question – if we are to simply enjoy, who is served by our enjoyment? – this is a necessary, and commensurably fun, work. ~ Joe Kennedy, The Quietus: http://thequietus.com/articles/19394-alfie-bown-enjoying-it-candy-crush-capitalism-review-grand-theft-auto-zizek-mark-fisher-adorno"", ""To put into context a book that deals with the concept of ‘enjoyment’, and how enjoyment is interpreted, I thought it relevant to share some of the things I’m enjoying at the time of writing this. After what seems like a prolonged hiatus from liking popular music, I’m currently enjoying the dream pop of Canadian artist ‘Grimes’, and American songsmith Ryan Adams’ rock interpretation of Taylor Swift’s 1989 album, which subsequently has led me to enjoy Taylor Swift’s original record. I’m also enjoying my tablet, laptop, and Android phone, conduits to further enjoyment of online content, film and music streaming, games, and hilarious memes. My tablet (which resembles something out of Star Trek: The Next Generation, something I also greatly enjoy) has been my gym companion, my motivational tool for an act I actually get very little enjoyment from, apart from when I see the psychical – though rare- improvements by body is undertaking. While the weather has been pleasurable I’ve been enjoying epic cycle adventures, a much more enjoyable way to stay fit. My bike, a mid range hybrid, was recently kitted out with saddle bags, new tires, new chain, and had an overhaul of the break and gear systems. An expensive endeavour that serves to prolong my enjoyment of this mode of transportation for a further year or so. There are many more facets of modern society that I enjoy and those that I don’t. From the short description of activities above it is rational to suggest that I ultimately enjoy the march of progress. In some areas of my life I have brought into the capitalist ideal that to live and enjoy life I must own shiny new things, experience popular activities, and look relatively fit and healthy whilst partaking in them. Alfie Bown’s concise debut book Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism (Zero Books) is the culmination of the modern experience of enjoyment, and a primer towards how enjoyment can be understood and interpreted in the fields of everyday life and academia. Bown takes us through the various steps of enjoyment via the means of ideological critiques of popular culture and psychoanalytic perspectives on how enjoyment affects us.\n\nThe first chapter, ‘Productive Enjoyment: Capitalism and Critical Theory’ as described by Bown in the book’s introduction, “discusses the ways in which seemingly radical moments of enjoyment are often coded within capitalist discourse and can be a form of conformation and adherence to the very structures that they see themselves as resisting.” And indeed here lies almost the whole premise of the book’s discussion. This part of the book also discusses the critical theory of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek. Readers fearing the use of these names (or perhaps their overuse in modern critical theory) need not be concerned. Bown unpacks these theorists’ sometimes indigestible ramblings and takes from their work only what is required to move the study of enjoyment forward. Bown also includes an in-depth case study on the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, one that Bown claims as “to have suffered from a connection to postmodernism and a sense that he invests too heavily in the postmodern world he writes about, which has meant his work has gone out of fashion.” Whilst this first chapter is certainly the most theory heavy within the book, the conversational tone involves and enlightens the reader and sets up the premise for what is to come.\n\nThe book’s second chapter, ‘Unproductive Enjoyment: ‘A Culture of Distraction’ and the two case studies of the games Candy Crush Saga and Football Manager is where the book becomes devilishly enjoyable, as it begins to connect with activities of our everyday lives. This chapter also illuminates Bown’s own thesis. Here he expands on the contributions and editorial oversight he has given to the online philosophy/culture website Everyday Analysis, and the subsequent books Are Animals Funny? and Twerking to Turking (Zero Books), in which objects, events, and features of everyday life are placed under short and sharp philosophical scrutiny. Whilst the first chapter may appear theory heavy to the non-academic, the author insures that his analysis of enjoyment is placed in activities that we can all relate to. Whilst these endeavours might be perceived as a waste of time in society’s eyes, it is the act of playing games such as Candy Crush and Football Manager that become extra-circular to our everyday lives, and represent a quiet defiance to the capitalist model of endless productivity. As Bown argues “As soon as no compulsion to work exists, it is ‘shunned like the plague’ in favor of Buzzfeed, Candy Crush and Football Manager…‘distracting’ enjoyment works to hide alienation and prevent organized rejection of working conditions.” Yet in fact the logic of Candy Crush offers a satisfactory sense of attainting order and a pleasurable experience when the game goes well.\n\nBown’s use of the Lacanian-Žižekian idea of ‘the big Other’, introduced in the text as an imaginary “god-like figure who appears to watch over us and has the power to ensure our conformation to the order of things,” is a brilliant distillation of the way in which our society functions on praise and affirmation of our opinions and tastes, as well as how our society is obsessed with putting ideas and experiences out into the world via social media. Bown sums this up as:\n\nIn some cases, what we send out to be seen by the other on social media may not be noticed, or even seen, by any individual (on Twitter especially) but we nonetheless feel it has been seen by the imaginary big Other and affirmed. We feel as though something has been publicly displayed and we imagine public approval. The ‘big Other’ may be imaginary, but it forms a fusion of countless individuals we desire to impress.\n\nThe book then moves on to ‘Irrational Enjoyment: Jouissance and Enjoyment Studies’. Jouissance, meaning physical or intellectual pleasure, is interpreted in the text via Jacques Lacan as,\n\nan enjoyment that has no apparent purpose. In English translations of his work the word is usually kept untranslated because whilst it does mean ‘enjoyment,’ it also suggests a specifically self-destructive kind of sexual enjoyment or compulsion and should be thought of as separate from general ideas of pleasure.\n\nCertainly the case studies that Bown draws focus on, the worldwide smash hit ‘Gangam Style’, the act of twerking, and the bloody violent television series Game of Thrones embody the meaning of Jouissance. Whilst finding any real productive pleasure in the annoying ‘Gangham Style’ is a futile task for most, it didn’t stop millions of people partaking in endless recreations of the song’s music video and the weird ‘horse riding’ dance style that accompanied it. Twerking entered the pop culture lexicon with Miley Cyrus’ infamous crotch grind of singer Robert Thicke at the 2013 MTV VMA’s, again an example of Jouissance ‘self-destructive kind of sexual enjoyment’. A car crash we can barely look away from. And this also applies to Game of Thrones, but doubles back on ‘Gangam Style’ and the act of twerking:\n\nThe violence of the show can be thought of in terms of sadistic voyeurism and likened to a whole history of gory television and film. The overt sexual imagery (more pronounced on television than in the novels) can be thought of as a reflection of carnal desire and a whole history of sexuality and the desire to speak increasingly about sex.\n\nThe case studies included can be thought of as visually grotesque and a kind of ‘sadistic voyeurism’, yet our participation in them is in an act of defiant Jouissance. Enjoyment without a means to an end.\n\nWhat Bown offers is a complex, yet fully engaging study of enjoyment in modern society, and of modern society. Whilst the book itself is slim, there is enough meat on the bones, and use of cultural theorists to further expand on university based discourse. However, the book functions better, as proven by the work done in Everyday Analysis, in opening up a public discussion on our enjoyment of items, activities, and events coterminous to popular culture and the virtues of our existence within a capitalist society. Does playing mobile computer games, enacting a viral craze, or watching Miley Cyrus twerk her way to stardom hinder or enhance us? To enjoy or not to enjoy, that is the question. ~ 3AM Magazine, http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/enjoying-it-candy-crush-and-capitalism-by-alfie-bown-reviewed/"", ""After reading this book, it became impossible to play Football Manager again without questioning my identity. A phenomenal read.\n\n~ Simon Anderson"", ""By saying that this book is highly enjoyable one puts oneself on the line of ambiguity that the book reflects upon. Alfie Bown offers a complex tapestry of various kinds of enjoyment and proposes conceptual tools to understand them.\n\n~ Prof Mladen Dolar"", ""With a good portion of self-irony, Alfie Bown lays open a fundamental paradox of today: the more somebody behaves as a conforming useful idiot, the more he needs to regard himself as a critical consumer. An alluring enjoyment to read. ~ Prof Robert Pfaller""]" Enlightenment Interrupted,"[""Michael Steinberg""]","Modernity isn't the realization of the Enlightenment but the forgetting of its culmination and self-critique, German idealism.","The modern world claims to inherit the values of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment Interrupted suggests a different genealogy. Instead of carrying on the Enlightenment it grew out of its suppression and forgetting, a founding act of bad faith and willed blindness that has haunted our world from its birth. In this groundbreaking analysis Michael Steinberg restores German Idealism to its rightful place as the culmination of the Enlightenment critique. Its great achievement was to move beyond the self-world dichotomy at the heart of Western thought. In the work of Fichte, especially, the recognition that all human life is the product of collective human activity had revolutionary implications. After 1815, however, in the aftermath of a quarter century of revolution, philosophers and politicians alike swept such challenges under the carpet. Modernity was thus founded in reaction. Lucidly written and accessible to non-specialists, Enlightenment Interrupted places the Idealists in the contexts of Romanticism, the brief contemporary openness to non-Western thought, and the political and social experimentation of the French Revolution. What followed was not a development of those tendencies but a retreat to the opposition of self and world and a drastic reduction in intellectual and social possibilities. This is one source of the collective impotence that sees the twenty-first century in a lockstep march to disaster","The modern world claims to inherit the values of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment Interrupted suggests a different genealogy. Instead of carrying on the Enlightenment it grew out of its suppression and forgetting, a founding act of bad faith and willed blindness that has haunted our world from its birth. In this groundbreaking analysis Michael Steinberg restores German Idealism to its rightful place as the culmination of the Enlightenment critique. Its great achievement was to move beyond the self-world dichotomy at the heart of Western thought. In the work of Fichte, especially, the recognition that all human life is the product of collective human activity had revolutionary implications. After 1815, however, in the aftermath of a quarter century of revolution, philosophers and politicians alike swept such challenges under the carpet. Modernity was thus founded in reaction. Lucidly written and accessible to non-specialists, Enlightenment Interrupted places the Idealists in the contexts of Romanticism, the brief contemporary openness to non-Western thought, and the political and social experimentation of the French Revolution. What followed was not a development of those tendencies but a retreat to the opposition of self and world and a drastic reduction in intellectual and social possibilities. This is one source of the collective impotence that sees the twenty-first century in a lockstep march to disaster",3,"[""Steinberg (independent scholar) here gives a detailed account of why the expectations of the Enlightenment were not fulfilled, indeed, why they could not be fulfilled. For Steinberg, the Enlightenment tradition is broadly conceived to include \""the philosophers and poets of the German idealist tradition, figures that are too often cast as enemies of the Enlightenment, even enemies of progress, or as Romantic irrationalists who set themselves against the proponents of reason who were the 'real' natural philosophers, philosophes and Aufklärer\"" (pp. 21–22). Steinberg’s tapestry is rich, weaving strands of German idealism, early German Romanticism, and the development of Marxist thought into a dramatic reading of the period. The volume is laudable for its sincerity and its attempt to draw attention to the relevance of the intellectual project offered by Kant, Fichte, Schlegel, Novalis, and Schelling. ~ E Millan, De Paul University, CHOICE"", ""Michael Steinberg’s Enlightenment Interrupted is a master class and a rollercoaster ride, all at once. The pitfalls of abstract individualism have been pointed out since Hegel, and explaining them has been central to radical political thought for fifty years by now. But it’s never been easy to grasp concretely how that separation of self and world came about, and what the alternative to it could have been. The extraordinary achievement of Steinberg’s book is to give us a clear view of those horizons. He sets out the key moments of German idealism, and brings out their dramatic intensity by relating them to their own time and our present crisis. The argument is lucid, timely and beautifully composed, and the stakes could not be higher. ~ Andrew Nash, Associate Professor, Department of Political Studies, University of Cape Town"", ""German idealist philosophers such as Kant, Fichte, and Hegel live on into the present, but they are confined in a cubbyhole visited only by academic philosophers, the occasional literary scholar or intellectual historian, and people looking to make jokes about unfathomable Germanic compound nouns. Steinberg’s book releases them from this place of enforced irrelevance and explains, with striking insight, how they came to be so belittled and ignored. He allows them to speak to us with all the richness of their vision of a connected, active, fulfilled humanity. In limpid, eloquent prose, he gives us the gift of their wisdom in confronting and changing the isolating effects of modernity. ~ Prof. Celia Applegate, William R. Kenan, Jr. Chair of History, Vanderbilt University""]" Ethical Portraits,"[""Hatty Nestor""]","Ethical Portraits investigates the representation of the incarcerated in the U.S. criminal justice system. Through interviews, creative non-fiction, and cultural theory, Hatty Nestor deconstructs a range of different prison portraiture.","Prisons systematically dehumanise the imprisoned. Visualised through mugshots and surveillance recordings, the incarcerated lose control of their own image and identity. The criminal justice system in the United States does not only carry out so-called justice in ways that compound inequality, it also minimises the possibility for empathetic encounters with those who are most marginalised. It is therefore urgent to understand how prisoners are portrayed by the carceral state and how this might be countered or recuperated. How can understanding the visual representation of prisoners help us confront the invisible forms of power in the American prison system? Ethical Portraits investigates the representation of the incarcerated in the United States criminal justice system, and the state’s failure to represent those incarcerated humanely. Through wide-ranging interviews and creative nonfiction, Hatty Nestor deconstructs the different roles of prison portraiture, such as in courtroom sketches, DNA profiling, and the incarceration of Chelsea Manning.","Prisons systematically dehumanise the imprisoned. Visualised through mugshots and surveillance recordings, the incarcerated lose control of their own image and identity. The criminal justice system in the United States does not only carry out so-called justice in ways that compound inequality, it also minimises the possibility for empathetic encounters with those who are most marginalised. It is therefore urgent to understand how prisoners are portrayed by the carceral state and how this might be countered or recuperated. How can understanding the visual representation of prisoners help us confront the invisible forms of power in the American prison system? Ethical Portraits investigates the representation of the incarcerated in the United States criminal justice system, and the state’s failure to represent those incarcerated humanely. Through wide-ranging interviews and creative nonfiction, Hatty Nestor deconstructs the different roles of prison portraiture, such as in courtroom sketches, DNA profiling, and the incarceration of Chelsea Manning.",5,"[""As a result of the privatization of prisons, greater powers of arrest for minor criminal offences, and systemic racism, the US prison population has soared from 200,000 in 1970 to nearly two million today. Hatty Nestor’s debut book, Ethical Portraits (2021), adds to the conceptual framework of debate about the prison-industrial complex and mass incarceration by examining portraiture’s central role in understanding how the criminalized are unjustly characterized in the public domain.\n\nEthical Portraits weaves together expanded interviews with various forms of judicial portraiture – courtroom sketches, forensic drawings, artist projects, facial-recognition technology and surveillance-camera footage – to examine the ways in which the accused are depicted, whether by artists, activist groups or state-sponsored strategies of visual representation. What starts out as an interrogation of social injustice through the portrayal of the incarcerated steadily expands into a wide-reaching conversation on mass surveillance and how it unfairly indexes criminality, targeting the most marginalized in society.\n\nBeginning with an examination of activist and whistle-blower Chelsea Manning, Nestor lays bare how the brutal treatment of a transgender inmate is symptomatic of the widespread violence of the US justice system. Nestor interviews the artist Alicia Neal, commissioned by the Chelsea Manning Support Network to paint Manning’s rightful portrait as a transgender woman. What follows is an ethically complex journey in attempting to create a portrait of Manning that is true to her real likeness without having access to her. It calls into question the political implications of what it means to create a portrait, and how misrepresentative portrayals of prisoners reveal anew the injustice of incarceration.\n\nAnother project, Prison Landscapes (2012) by Alyse Emdur, documents the freedom-evoking backdrops, such as tropical beaches and waterfalls, which prisoners are allowed to pose in front of for photographs when family and friends visit. Inspired by her conversation with Emdur, Nestor is optimistic about the project’s role in giving prisoners visibility on their own terms but also wonders if it perpetuates ‘yearning or a false sense of hope’.\n\nAs the writer negotiates this complex moral terrain with sensitivity, asserting her understanding ‘of the fine line between “research” and voyeurism’, she implicates the reader in this very act of looking. The consequences of such representations, she suggests, should not only be the concern of artists but of all those who engage in sensationalist penal spectatorship, such as true crime dramas. Nestor makes the case for those who are rendered invisible by a system that discriminates against signifiers such as class, race and gender conformity. ‘Criminality’, she writes, ‘is the result of structural and economic oppression.’\n\nThe foreword – written by Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism (2018) – lays the foundations for a book that pays attention to the power dynamics controlling not only who of the incarcerated are seen, but how. Nestor’s research is driven by a stringent moral and ethical obligation to represent justly those who lack, and are denied, any agency to represent themselves – or to question and examine the attempts of others.\n\nThe book asks readers to sit with this question: is it possible to portray incarcerated people ethically? We might be able to say yes, but only when it’s on their terms. There are no simple answers; Ethical Portraits broadens our understanding of the implications of how those on the ‘outside’ look at those who are incarcerated, and from what purview. ~ Gwen Burlington, Frieze Magazine - https://www.frieze.com/article/hatty-nestor-ethical-portraits-book-review"", ""In her first book, Ethical Portraits, Hatty Nestor examines artworks, activist projects and individuals subverting forensics, to find a morally acceptable way of representing people in the US prison system, exposing how they are dehumanised by their exclusion from representation and self-expression. She pays careful attention to the mediums of portraiture because she is acutely aware that each attempt at representation is intimately linked to a real feeling person, who deserves respect.\n\nWhile rooted in the visual arts and the techniques of image making, the book’s implications are bigger, stretching into general ethics; compassion owed to every other person as the fabric of society, and into representation more broadly; how we are all at risk of being dehumanised by ‘top down’ conglomerate systems which propagate racial, gendered and economic prejudices. Prisoners and artists are at the heart of this search, but its findings are by no means restricted to them.\n\nAnyone making representations or concerned with the politics of their own image finds in this book stimulating questions about technical choices; the emancipatory neutrality of a background, how framing a picture can mutilate a subject, how melancholy manifests in landscape or escapism in colour, how the time spent looking might disfigure, how these choices or pressures, far from inconsequential decorations, actually give a subject more or less freedom to be and to see themselves being, how they have real psychological consequences for real people, especially but not only those hidden away in correctional facilities. It also works outwards, heightening readers’ awareness of surroundings, how they nourish or curtail self-expression, how environments, be they ethical or physical, structure our sense of self and have the potential to generate our emotions..............\n\nEthical Portraits starts and ends with the case of Chelsea Manning, the American activist imprisoned for whistleblowing, who exemplifies like almost no other individual the violent psychological trauma that can be inflicted when representations are denied, politicised or indeed weaponised against their subject. Her story, extreme in its coverage and the stark ethical abuses of Trans rights that it entailed, is a relative success in the search for representational justice. It demonstrates what can be achieved when the wider community, through activism and art, forge an ethical portrait of an oppressed individual. It seems to share the intuition that has bolstered Nestor’s research, an awareness that thinking, feeling and resulting action should not be insular or a source of inertia, that it should have a point and do something in the world. That it should, if possible, do something good.\n\n~ Brett Walsh, Review 31 - http://review31.co.uk/article/view/783/can-we-make-it-better"", ""A portrait is always a portrait of power. Where this power lies, however, is a vexed and complicated issue. In her book Ethical Portraits Hatty Nestor explores the contested space – both material and representational – of the portrait when it collides with the brutal realities of the carceral system. Images of the human face are integral to contemporary legal structures: ‘wanted’ photographs and composite sketches are disseminated to capture suspects, mugshots are taken of those who have been arrested, courtroom sketches are made of defendants and, if convicted, these individuals are subject to a regime of highly invasive visibility, despite being removed from visibility in wider society. Nestor’s book examines how power dictates the circulation, and obfuscation, of the faces of those who have come into contact with the American legal system and find themselves enmeshed in the structures the carceral state produces.\n\nAlthough Nestor’s book raises a number of troubling questions for readers, it is perhaps most driven by one that she poses in her introduction: ‘who has a right to representation on their own terms, and for whom is this right obscured or denied?’ (pp.14–15). Rather than offering a direct answer to this question, Ethical Portraits recounts the stories behind such denials and obnubilations. The book is divided into seven chapters and includes discussions with the courtroom sketch artist Priscilla Coleman, the activist-artists Andrew Tider and Jeff Greenspan in relation to their project that compares ‘portraits of those held accountable for their crimes with those who aren’t’ (p.50), the artist Alyse Emdur, who has photographed inmates in prison visiting rooms as they pose beside uncanny landscapes FIG. 1, and two artists, Alicia Neal and Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who have each produced portraits of the American political dissident and educator Chelsea Manning. The chapter on Dewey-Hagborg is distinct from the the essayistic chapters that precede it in that it follows a question and answer format. Using the work of these artists as a starting point, Nestor explores themes of accountability, agency and power asymmetries in regimes of visual production.\n\nIn 2014 Neal was commissioned by the advocacy group The Chelsea Manning Support Network to paint a portrait of Manning for circulation in the media FIG. 2. Prior to this, Manning was generally represented by images that consciously misgendered her or were not intended for public circulation. In creating the portrait, Neal’s focus was to give ‘[Manning] the dignity of at least being seen as who she wants to be’ (p.25). As Nestor elaborates, ‘Neal’s portrait is a reminder that Manning’s identity has nothing to do with her imprisonment. It reminds us that we are not solely defined by the institutions and environments we are subjected to and conditioned by’ (p.28). In meeting and discussing the work with Neal, Hestor formulates her most explicit definition of what constitutes an ethical portrait: ‘a depiction of someone which holds political weight, is integral and empathetic, which challenges marginalisation through a visual image’ (p.24). Although readers may have their own addenda to such a definition, it provides a framework for Nestor’s selection and analysis of portraits in this volume.............\n\n~ William Kherbek, Burlington Contemporary - https://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/reviews/reviews/ethical-portraits"", ""As I embarked on Hatty Nestor's fluid, liberatory journey through the difficult question of portraiture and/in the prison, a plethora of cultural \""moments\"" of (anti-)carceral representation and counter-representation were summoned from my memory - beyond even those that Nestor unpacks so carefully in the book. Nestor's methodological hopefulness recalled, for instance, Native trans woman Stephanie Yellowhair's legendary pronouncement (from within a cop car, circa 2001) \""excuse my beauty.\"" In contrast, her unflinching critiques of diverse modes of anti-Black spectacularization brought to mind the artist Dana Schutz's infamous 2016 painting of the lynch victim Emmett Till, \""Open Casket.\"" Via fine-grained engagements with our culture's systems for putting a face on the incarcerated person - as well as the cracks in those systems - \""Ethical Portraits\"" is a profound contribution to contemporary prison-abolitionist struggle. ~ Sophie Lewis, Theorist"", ""Hatty Nestor is a writer of rare commitment, ambition and talent, whose interest in the field of criminal and carceral portraits has already produced an urgent and engaged piece of research and writing. The book outlined here mounts a timely and compelling case for such representation as more urgently than ever in need of analysis. It is intimately informed by engagement with the images in question, interviews with artists and prisoners, informed theoretical reflection throughout, and the pressing political impetus that has been at the heart of Hatty Nestor’s interest in the subject. ~ Brian Dillon, author of Essayism""]" "European Union and the End of Politics, The","[""James Heartfield""]",Despite its crises the European Union keeps on getting stronger – its power comes from the decline of participation in national politics.,"Europe is in crisis, but the European Union just gets stronger. Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland have all been told that they must submit their budgets to EU-appointed bureaucrats. The 'soft coup' that put EU officials in charge of Greece and Italy shows that the Union is opposed to democracy. Instead of weakening the European Union, the budget crisis of 2012 has ended up with the eurocrats grabbing new powers to dictate terms. Over the years the forward march of the European Union has been widely misunderstood. James Heartfield explains that the rise of the EU is driven by the decline in political participation. Without political contestation national parliaments have become an empty shell. Where once elites drew authority from their own people, today they draw authority from the European Union, and other summits of world leaders. The growth of the European Union runs in tandem with the decline in national politics. As national sovereignty is hollowed out, technocratic administration from Brussels fills the void. This account of the rise of the European Union includes a full survey of the major schools of thought in European studies, and a valuable guide to those who want to take back control.","Europe is in crisis, but the European Union just gets stronger. Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland have all been told that they must submit their budgets to EU-appointed bureaucrats. The 'soft coup' that put EU officials in charge of Greece and Italy shows that the Union is opposed to democracy. Instead of weakening the European Union, the budget crisis of 2012 has ended up with the eurocrats grabbing new powers to dictate terms. Over the years the forward march of the European Union has been widely misunderstood. James Heartfield explains that the rise of the EU is driven by the decline in political participation. Without political contestation national parliaments have become an empty shell. Where once elites drew authority from their own people, today they draw authority from the European Union, and other summits of world leaders. The growth of the European Union runs in tandem with the decline in national politics. As national sovereignty is hollowed out, technocratic administration from Brussels fills the void. This account of the rise of the European Union includes a full survey of the major schools of thought in European studies, and a valuable guide to those who want to take back control.",4,"[""Synopsis: Even though Europe is in a state of social, economic, and political crisis, the European Union just gets stronger. Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland have all been told that they must submit their budgets to EU-appointed bureaucrats. The 'soft coup' that put EU officials in charge of Greece and Italy shows that the Union is opposed to democracy. Instead of weakening the European Union, the budget crisis of 2012 has ended up with the eurocrats grabbing new powers to dictate terms. Over the years the forward march of the European Union has been widely misunderstood. In \""The European Union and the End of Politics\"" James Heartfield explains that the rise of the EU is driven by the decline in political participation. Without political contestation national parliaments have become an empty shell. Where once elites drew authority from their own people, today they draw authority from the European Union, and other summits of world leaders. The growth of the European Union runs in tandem with the decline in national politics. As national sovereignty is hollowed out, technocratic administration from Brussels fills the void. \""The European Union and the End of Politics\"" is an account of the rise of the European Union that includes a full survey of the major schools of thought in European studies, and a valuable guide to those who want to take back control.\n\nCritique: Very highly recommended for community and academic library Political Science collections in general, and European Union supplemental studies lists in particular, \""The European Union and the End of Politics\"" seems prophetic with Britain's newly resolved policy of seceding from the EU. It should be noted for students and non-specialist general reading with an interest in the subject that \""The European Union and the End of Politics\"" is also available in a Kindle format ($18.99).\n\n~ The Political Science Shelf, Midwest Book reviews"", ""Featured with 6 other Zero titles on \""Publishers in Focus\"" webpage by Blackwell Oxford\n\n\""Many publishers struggle to get the exposure that we feel their books deserve. On this page we will bring you a selection of the independent, interesting and essential that are worthy of greater attention\"" ~ Blackwell Bookshop-Oxford"", ""The EU: a club for anti-democrats\n\n...James Heartfield’s groundbreaking new book, The European Union and the End of Politics. Both parts of the title are important. Heartfield, a London-based writer and fellow contributor to spiked, explains the rise of the EU against the backdrop of the depoliticisation of nation states. He provides an innovative account of the rise of technocratic rule in its most advanced and grotesque incarnation. Read more: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the_eu_a_club_for_anti_democrats/13970#.Uo_BZU1FDIV ~ Daniel Ben Ami, Spiked-online.com"", ""James Heartfield’s new book The European Union and the End of Politics (Zero Books) is about the evolving relationship between the European Union and its constituent member countries. It is a mix of political science, recent European history and a call for agitation from the people of the continent.\n\nRead more: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2013/no-1307-july-2013/europe-blame ~ Kevin Cronin, Socialist Standard""]" Event Horizon,"[""Bonni Rambatan"", ""Jacob Johanssen""]","When our desires become the product of tech giants, what ways are there left for us to dream?","In an age where Silicon Valley dictates what it means to innovate a painless future, knowledge and enjoyment are fertile breeding grounds of political contestation. But it’s not exactly democracy. We are controlled through platforms that turn us into data for the profit of billionaires. Control has become so playful that we carry it in our pockets, as we continue to crave likes and followers. What is to be done? Should the Left continue to cling to the promise of a political Event, patiently waiting for a revolutionary rupture where new possibilities emerge? Is there a way to delineate its horizons amidst the chaos? Through a psychoanalytic interrogation of the intersections of online culture, sexuality, and politics, Bonni Rambatan and Jacob Johanssen explore such horizons at the limits of capitalism. Event Horizon examines how capitalist ideology functions in our current moment, and, more importantly, how it breaks down. With the increasing urgency of formulating a proper Leftist response to the rapidly growing violence that seriously threatens the lives of marginalised communities, this book could not be more timely.","In an age where Silicon Valley dictates what it means to innovate a painless future, knowledge and enjoyment are fertile breeding grounds of political contestation. But it’s not exactly democracy. We are controlled through platforms that turn us into data for the profit of billionaires. Control has become so playful that we carry it in our pockets, as we continue to crave likes and followers. What is to be done? Should the Left continue to cling to the promise of a political Event, patiently waiting for a revolutionary rupture where new possibilities emerge? Is there a way to delineate its horizons amidst the chaos? Through a psychoanalytic interrogation of the intersections of online culture, sexuality, and politics, Bonni Rambatan and Jacob Johanssen explore such horizons at the limits of capitalism. Event Horizon examines how capitalist ideology functions in our current moment, and, more importantly, how it breaks down. With the increasing urgency of formulating a proper Leftist response to the rapidly growing violence that seriously threatens the lives of marginalised communities, this book could not be more timely.",6,"[""\""The book’s title draws on an astrophysics concept (said horizon is the edge of a black hole), with the “black hole” variously capitalism or digital culture in general, but also on Badiou’s notion of the event as a rupture in political, scientific, or artistic domains. In six tightly argued chapters, they show, in a fast-moving way, how different elements of the digital can be understood with Lacan. While such harnessing of psychoanalysis to popular culture may seem to be the province of Slavoj Žižek, Rambatan and Johanssen show quite well that we need more engagement with the internet, the worlds of memes and online dating, and the like. Or to cite the Woody Allen/Žižek quip, this book could be called Everything You Need to Know about Psychoanalysis but were Afraid to Ask Siri.\""\n\nhttps://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41282-022-00294-0 ~ Clint Bunham, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society"", ""\""...an authoritative voice and a reassuringly vast knowledge of the hyper-specific discourses that increasingly permeate Internet platforms and online sub-cultures. The book is important for understanding\n\nthe rise of the Alt-Right, the distinctive psychological components of Internet culture that new fascist groups exploit, and the perverse tendencies of social media platforms that transcend political orientation and must be accommodated by any prospective emancipatory Left project.\""\n\nhttps://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/1325 ~ Jamie Ranger, triple C"", ""\""'Event Horizon' is a unique and most compellingly written book, composed – not unlike a piece of music – of a radical dystopia and an equally radical utopia. The first part presents us with powerful and pitiless analysis of the predicaments of our present social order, focusing particularly on how digital technology informs and shapes our lives and our social bonds in all their multiple aspects. But then, in the last part, it does not simply turn against technology, but envisions its involvement in a very different kind of social tie. Sexuality and its 'beyond', or transformation, are put at the center of this transformative revolution, which we are invited to imagine as the only Real on our horizon, with 'love or death' as our only choice.\""\n\n-- Prof Alenka Zupančič, author of \""What Is Sex?\"" ~"", ""“Event Horizon calls to overcome the contemporary internet and networked AI in favour of a new erotic. Working within the Lacanian tradition, the book pairs interpretation of classic sources with critical foresight on all matters digital. This theory manifesto provides an alternative framework that relates memes, selfies and online dating to rising heteropessimism and fascism. What should be the response when cuteness flips into violence? The authors' cautious motto: we are all part of the problem, but there are solutions. I’d say: vulnerable universality, bring it on!”\n\n-- Geert Lovink, author of \""Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism\"" ~"", ""\""This bristling little book embarks on nothing less than a total diagnosis of our sick capitalist present. Rambatan and Johanssen cut right to the chase in their incisive reading of forms of contemporary enjoyment online, disclosing a mutation in Lacan’s four discourses.\""\n\n-- Prof Sianne Ngai, author of \""Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form\"" ~"", ""\""In 'Event Horizon', Rambatan and Johanssen combine Lacanian psychoanalysis and various critical theory approaches for the analysis of how the mindset of the Alt-Right has shaped the contemporary internet. The resulting study is an excellent must-read for everyone who wants to understand how the subject thinks and acts in contemporary digital capitalism.\""\n\n-- Prof Christian Fuchs, author of “Social Media: A Critical Introduction“ and “Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter“ ~""]" "Expanding World, The","[""Michael Cronin""]",The world gets bigger not smaller all the time and this is very good news for humanity.,Are we really living in a shrinking world? Is it true that diversity is on the decline everywhere? Are we condemned to live on a planet without difference or hope? The Expanding World challenges the basic notion of a shrinking world in current debates around globalization and argues that it informs ways of thinking and doing which are deeply damaging to the emergence of a progressive politics. The work proposes instead a new kind of politics based on a notion of an expanding rather than a shrinking world. This implies a different way of looking at the world and a different way of doing politics. The Expanding World is fundamentally about looking more closely at what is around us and acting on that knowledge. It is about considering what it means to have whole worlds reflected in the looking glass of local inquiry. Cronin challenges the prevailing culture of disenchantment by highlighting the inexhaustible variety and richness of the planet and how that variety and richness can become the basis of new forms of emancipatory politics.,Are we really living in a shrinking world? Is it true that diversity is on the decline everywhere? Are we condemned to live on a planet without difference or hope? The Expanding World challenges the basic notion of a shrinking world in current debates around globalization and argues that it informs ways of thinking and doing which are deeply damaging to the emergence of a progressive politics. The work proposes instead a new kind of politics based on a notion of an expanding rather than a shrinking world. This implies a different way of looking at the world and a different way of doing politics. The Expanding World is fundamentally about looking more closely at what is around us and acting on that knowledge. It is about considering what it means to have whole worlds reflected in the looking glass of local inquiry. Cronin challenges the prevailing culture of disenchantment by highlighting the inexhaustible variety and richness of the planet and how that variety and richness can become the basis of new forms of emancipatory politics.,0,[] Exposing Phallacy,"[""Kate Gould""]","A sexual climate consumed by display ought to be ideal for flashers, yet their actions are taboo and illegal.","While others flirt with the accoutrements of romance and sexiness for lovers, flashers confront the spectator with sex organs. They ask no consent, baring the genitals of which they are so proud, convinced their spectators will desire them. But they rarely do. Instead, they are more likely to object to the imposition of the male flasher and leer at the female flasher. While softcore porn is fashionable and ubiquitous, the flashers public full frontal display is still forbidden.","While others flirt with the accoutrements of romance and sexiness for lovers, flashers confront the spectator with sex organs. They ask no consent, baring the genitals of which they are so proud, convinced their spectators will desire them. But they rarely do. Instead, they are more likely to object to the imposition of the male flasher and leer at the female flasher. While softcore porn is fashionable and ubiquitous, the flashers public full frontal display is still forbidden.",9,"[""Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Flasher\n\nMost of us might think that a book about flashing would have little to say about our day-to-day existence. Surprisingly, Kate Gould’s Exposing Phallacy shows how we are all, however involuntarily, inevitably linked to exhibitionism. In her latest book, Gould brings to the fore the consequences of the perennial sexualisation of society, and of how this plays a major, albeit elusive, role in the oppression of women today.\n\nExposing Phallacy is important on a number of levels. Firstly, it is a much needed feminist work on the ins and outs, the psychology and the numbers, behind the act of flashing. It reminds the reader that this act is not merely the showing off of a stranger’s genitals, but also the invasion of another person’s privacy. It is perpetrated with the intent to visually and emotionally attack someone else, and in this way derive some sort of morbid pleasure. Flashing, Gould argues, is an abuse of power. It is not simply a psychological condition which strips exhibitionists from a sense of ‘decency’, but a consequence of a highly arbitrated and engendered set of social norms.\n\nWhile there is data of women flashers, the numbers are widely surpassed by the male demographic. What is more, according to Gould, the modus operandi of each group is dramatically different. Women tend to expose themselves in situations of physical distance, or when there is possibility of escaping the area swiftly after the ‘incident’. Men usually have a confrontational approach, addressing their victims in unapologetic and, well, full frontal manner.\n\nThe book is a small analysis of the socio-cultural factors at play. It poignantly describes how (mostly male) flashers profit from the culture of fear prevalent in our society. Women are recurrently reminded not only of the seemingly universal peril of, but also of the stigma attached to being raped. Their role is to duck and dive, run, protect oneself, as if the actions committed onto them are somewhat their fault, for bearing breasts and hips and all other elements of sensual attraction. Gould goes onto show how the widely held assumption that most women will not confront their harasser, since they lack the social (and sometimes even legal) support to do so, encourages flashers to repeat their assault.\n\nThrough this more interdependent social analysis of different but nevertheless abusive practices, Exposing Phallacy is a much needed work about the consequences of rampant mass-sexualisation. Beyong this critique, Kate Gould argues that the solution to these complex malaises cannot be a mere return to the default position, i.e. the re-education of flashers to act as ‘normal’ males. To do this is to reenforce the underlying objectification of the Other (and, more often than not, that Other is woman), and to promote a behaviour that is predicated on the oppression of women. Gould points out the fallacy of ‘curing’ flashers through the re-channeling of their urges into accepted forms of commodified sexuality (e.g.: watching pornography), when it was the discrepancy between these accepted forms of sexual expression and individual experiences that created the ‘abnormal’ behavior in the first place.\n\nBut what is then left as a result? How can we deal with exhibitionism, particularly coming from predatory males, and eradicate it? How can we handle the objectification of women, and the perpetual commodification of sex in our culture? How can we stop the emotional and/or psychological decompensation at work in individuals who feel the urge to flash? The book points out the symptoms, but leaves no suggestions of ways to solve it. Perhaps the intent is for the reader to make his or her own conclusions. Gould could have given her two-pence worth and be none the worse. In fact, it would have nicely rounded off the work, bridging the male-female divide present throughout her analysis, exploring how we all, collectively and not only as individuals, are affected by the phenomena she depicts throughout the book.\n\nIf anything, I wished Exposing Phallacy had been longer. It mentions the work of several theoreticians – specifically Freud and Foucault – without seriously discussing their hypotheses. By solely alluding to these ideas, without deconstructing their premises which are still highly influential today, one cannot help but feel that the author is missing a trick.\n\nThe writing flows beautifully, entwining personal anecdotes and popular culture references, reminding the reader that Gould was once Germaine Greer’s research assistant. There is a lot of The Female Eunuch in Exposing Phallacy, and in a very good way. Alas, the brashness with which the content is sometimes dealt makes the reader feel slightly frustrated. Like a sumptuous meal one is only allowed to nibble at, Kate Gould’s latest offering leaves us wanting more. I can only hope that this book turns out to be just an appetizer. ~ Joana Ramiro, Anticapitalist Initiative"", ""booknotes: exposing phallacy\n\nRecently, I was sent an advance review copy of the book Exposing Phallacy: Flashing in Contemporary Culture (Zero Books, 2012) by Kate Gould. At seventy-four pages, Gould's examination of the culture of flashing is brief and necessarily incomplete, but thought-provoking nevertheless. Flashing (the practice of exposing one's sexybits without the prior consent of the viewer(s)) is frankly something I've never spent a lot of time thinking about. I've had the (rare, it seems) luck of never encountering someone who displayed their breasts, labia, or penis either directly to me or in a public area I happened to be. In a vague sort of way, I thought of such activities as existing in the area between public nudity performed to disrupt (streakers) and sexual harassment like wolf-whistles.\n\nLike streaking, flashing seems to trade on the indecency of exposing parts of one's naked body in public under certain conditions (could one be a flasher on a nude beach? would anyone care?). Like verbal sexual harassment on the street, if it takes place in a populated area with no other threat of physical harm, flashing is (to the viewer) weird and unexpected and probably unwanted, but not particularly effective either as a show of force or as a come-on. I mean, unless you happen to expose your bits to just the right person, most casual viewers are not going to read surprise genital exposure as a positive first move toward mutual sexual pleasure (\""Look! I have bits!\"" \""Indeed, you do, as do I. Care to start with a more personalized introduction?\"").\n\nI frankly hadn't thought of flashing as a particularly sexual activity, as something a person would get off on in a dedicated way -- though why I would fail to see the potential when voyeurism is such a strong element within eroticism now seems baffling. Gould argues exactly this, in fact: that flashers experience the act of flashing as a sexual activity, one in which their imagined encounter with the observer(s) of their act is the reward, rather than any specific response (disgust, anger, fear, indifference) on the part of those who have been flashed. The flashees, it would seem, are necessary yet strangely superfluous.\n\nFrom an explicitly feminist perspective, Gould explores the gendered differences in flashing: women exposing themselves as part of a larger culture that objectifies female sexuality, men exposing themselves as a bid for power and/or control over their own sexuality (and the imagined sexual responses of observers). She also talks briefly about the legal and medical frames around flashing, particularly for male flashers, and argues that both of these approaches to the problem of non-consensual flashing are inadequate. While those who've experienced flashing as sexual harassment certainly have a right to redress, treating flashing as a sexual disorder risks criminalizing and pathologizing a sexual activity simply because as a society we've deemed it \""abnormal.\"" As with so many other sexual behaviors, consent here seems to be the key issue and I wish Gould had explored this more fully: is the unwilling participation of observers (the surprise element) a key part of a flasher's experience? Or would someone who enjoys the activity of flashing be able to channel that sexual activity into a consensual context?\n\nIn the end, I found myself wondering what would happen if as a culture we just treated bodily exposure as ... unremarkable? It seems like part of what makes flashing an attractive activity to those who engage in it is the illicitness, the taboo element. So if as a society we've decided it's not so awesome for people to expose their sexybits in public what if we just responded with a collective yawn when it happened? What if, instead of criminalizing the activity and subjecting flashers to therapeutic \""fixes,\"" we just said, \""Gosh, that's boring!\"" It seems like if as a culture we had a less disordered relationship with sexuality and the human body, we might have a more constructive response to flashing behavior -- emphasizing the need for consent and otherwise treating the human body as an unremarkable fact of daily life.\n\nExposing Phallacy is a book that will be of interest to those who explore the intersections of human sexuality, social policing, and the law. ~ Anna Cook, The Feminist Librarian"", ""Exposing Phallacy\n\nI recently read Kate Gould‘s fascinating little book Exposing Phallacy, all about flashing in contemporary culture. Kate set out to understand the experience of flashing from all sides: spending time with flashers on online forums and chat rooms, as well as speaking to people who’ve been flashed about their responses, considering the gendered dynamics of flashing (comparing women and men who flash), and exploring continua of exhibitionism. Here I will briefly summarise some of the main points of the book before focusing on how therapists today might work with people who find themselves wanting to flash.\n\nBroadly speaking, Kate concludes that women who flash do so to be validated by men as sexy, desirable beings. The kind of infantilisation and sexualisation of women that occurs in other contexts is apparent here and flashing generally involves displaying a shaved vulva under a skirt in a ‘safe’ context where escape is possible (such as on a bike or a crowded beach). For men, Kate concludes, flashing is an aggressive act involving the invasion of women’s space and an insistence of the man’s right to be there; gratification is obtained from the fact that the penis commands a response, whatever that is. It seems that virtually all the flashers that Kate came across online focused on flashing at the ‘opposite sex’, and there was also no mention of anybody outside of the gender binary (of man/woman) talking about flashing on these fora.\n\nKate writes powerfully against the victim blame culture in which many women who have been flashed are encouraged to assume responsibility for the experience. She argues that telling women to deliberately avoid potential flashing situations or to alter their behaviour through fear of flashing risks further victimising women and increasing the power of men who flash. She calls for women to refuse the fear of the flasher’s imposition and to respond with defiance, whilst placing the blame clearly on the flasher, and calling for a critique of wider gendered and sexualised culture in which flashing occurs, or is enabled. Perhaps we need to think carefully, for example, about the gendered depictions (or not) of genitalia in the media and what messages these give.\n\n‘Treating’ flashers\n\nOne of the most interesting chapters of the book, for me, was the one which examines the ways in which flashing has been treated by the psychiatric profession. Flashing is categorised as a disorder according to the American Psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM IV TR) under exhibitionism and this doesn’t look like changing significantly in the next revision of the document. The main treatments that Kate reviews involve trying to make people who flash averse to flashing and/or ‘normalising’ their sexuality. Examples are given of flashers being given drugs which make them feel nauseas when thinking of flashing situations or making flashers undress in front of ‘mixed sex’ audiences or audiences who respond with indifference.\n\nI was struck that most of these examples of psychiatric treatment were from the 1960s and 1970s and reflective of the problematic behaviourist focus of the time. Also, like Kate, I was concerned about the ideals of ‘normal’ sex and masculinity assumed by the psychiatrists involved. I wondered about how a psychosexual therapist today might work with somebody who is sexually excited by the idea of flashing.\n\nIt seems important, as part of countering the victim blame culture that Kate speaks of, to focus on changing the behaviour of flashers rather than concentrating on victims’ behaviour (as well as addressing the wider culture in which flashing occurs, of course). Here I will give a few of my thoughts but I’d be very interested to hear from others who have worked in this area.\n\nTransgressive/coercive distinction\n\nOne of the things that I’ve found most helpful with clients who are interested in sexual activities which might be abusive or harmful is Chess Denham‘s distinction between transgressive and coercive sex. People often make judgements about sexual practices on the basis of whether they fit in with societal norms or not (those that don’t being ‘transgressive’). Chess suggests that a much better distinction is whether practices involve forcing, pressuring or persuading people or not (those that do being ‘coercive’).\n\nKate found that, in common with many others who engage in non-consensual sexual activity, flashers tend to fail to recognise their behaviour as problematic or are forgetful about what they have done. The combination of the power in behaving oppressively, and the guilt at recognising oneself as an oppressor, can result in a lot of fuzziness, emotional confusion, and avoidance.\n\nWorking with people who are excited by flashing I think it is useful to attempt to provide a safe-enough space to talk about any sexual practice (with the usual ethical proviso that confidentiality can’t be kept if there is a risk of harm to self or others). It can be helpful, within this, to talk about the diversity of sexual practices that exist, the commonality of sexual desire around power and displaying the body, and the fact that most people consider committing acts that would be coercive and/or hurtful at some point in their lives (so having the capacity for harm and coercion is normalised, whilst acting upon it is not).\n\nPeople often assume that they are entirely good (and therefore their flashing behaviour can’t be harmful really), but also harbour a deep fear that they might really be entirely bad (and perhaps it is a terrible, disgusting, unforgivable thing that they are doing). This makes it very hard for them to look at the behaviour at all because of the terror that it might prove that they are completely bad. Encouraging a more complex view of human beings, as all having the capacity for harming and helping, can make it more possible to openly reflect on frightening urges or desires, and to reach a clearer understanding of them. They can then determine which desires they might previously have regarded as problematic, because they were transgressive, but are actually perfectly possible to engage in consensually, and also which are coercive, and therefore shouldn’t be engaged in at all.\n\nMeanings of flashing\n\nAnother vital part of the picture is what flashing means to the individual. Kate’s sense of the common gendered meanings of flashing are useful here, but it is also important to recognise that the individual meanings for the person in question may differ from these, and also that there are frequently multiple meanings to any (sexual or other) practice.\n\nFor example, flashing could be about any and all of the following things and more: feeling powerful, attempting to elicit fear, attempting to elicit desire, being naughty or childlike, exposing one’s vulnerability, fighting against cultural norms around being clothed, trying to force some kind of intimate connection, being acknowledged, sharing one’s sexuality with another, displaying the body, wanting to confirm negative beliefs about oneself, or wanting negative beliefs disproved.\n\nOnce a person feels safe enough to look carefully at their desire to flash (rather than trying desperately not to look too closely at it because they feel so conflicted about it), they can also start to understand what it means to them. This opens up both the possibility of finding ways of doing the same thing in consensual ways, or of finding other activities which meet the same desires.\n\nFor example, if somebody finds that what they enjoy about the idea of flashing is sharing their sexuality with somebody else, they might find that they can do this by writing erotica online in places where others know the kind of thing they’ll be reading, or by engaging in consensual webchats about their fantasies. If the turn-on is about displaying the body to strangers then there are webcam websites for people who want to do this, or parties and clubs they could go to.\n\nIf the coercive aspect of flashing is central (for example if it is about power or about shocking the other person), then hopefully a better understanding of the distinctions between transgressive and coercive sex will help the person to see the problems with acting upon such desires. They can decide to keep those desires in the realm of fantasy and act upon other, consensual, ones (given the diversity of sexual possibilities).\n\nFurther exploration of meaning may also reveal other consensual, perhaps non-sexual, activities in which the person could have a need to feel powerful, important, acknowledged, or attractive met (amateur dramatics perhaps, or leading a team activity). It may be that there are broader lacks in the person’s life which can be addressed and which will meet these needs/desires.\n\nConclusions\n\nThere are useful ways of working with people who have sexual desires around flashing, around enabling conversation about the diversity of sexuality, clarifying the transgressive/coercive distinction, and considering the meanings for the individual within the wider culture they are situated in.\n\nI also agree strongly with Kate in the importance of cultural, as well as individual, reflection and change. We need more, rather than less, sex education in order that people understand the diversity of possibilities, the problems of coercion, and the importance of consent, from an earlier age. Also, we need to think about the ways in which gendered bodies and genitals are, and are not, represented, and the contexts that this creates in which flashing makes sense.\n\nThis issue, like many, demonstrates the importance of holding both the wider culture, and the individual experience, simultaneously, rather than allowing either one to overwhelm the other. We may well see cultural trends and norms which make flashing desirable and possible (such as the way femininity is generally associated with private space and masculinity with public, or the way in which men’s sexual desire is generally regarded as something natural that must be acted upon). At the same time, and within this, when we speak to individuals we will find a complex network of meanings, desires, and experiences which needs to be openly engaged with and understood if we are to shift their behaviour. ~ Meg Barker, Author of Rewriting the Rules: An Integrative Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships"", ""Kate Gould Exposes the Phallacies Surrounding Flashing\n\nAs the title of Exposing Phallacy suggests, Kate Gould’s book is an exploration of sexual exposure – otherwise known as flashing – which positively thrives on the satisfaction that only a successful turn of phrase can give. It is also, as again suggested by the title, one of the very few rigorously scholarly books that has actually made me laugh out loud. In so doing, it is continuing in a fine Zer0 Books tradition of demolishing the disconnect between popular culture and academia.\n\nAnd disconnect is curiously pertinent to the major theme of Gould’s over-in-a-flash [sorry] page-turner: Gould exposes a disconnected culture in which ‘we are all exhibitionists’, in which flesh is flashed wherever we look, from TV, to posters, to magazines, to just everyday people, and in which the flasher is pathologized, medicalized and ‘cured’ – more on the reason for these scare quotes later. In her exploration of the female flasher, Gould compares the ubiquity of the ‘plastic’ female form – pruned, painted, injected, photoshopped for our pornographically-inspired pleasure – with the raw “femaleness” of the ultimate absent presence when it comes to popular culture: the vagina*. “It’s the ultimate in female sexual expression, of a woman knowing the power of her body and experiencing the full potency of her desires”, Gould claims, “Or is it?”\n\nIt is typical of the Gould’s deft use of irony and humour that she brings her readers to their richly built-up fall using those three little words beloved of the advertiser in search of suspense; Gould uses these words as her base-jump off into a relentless undermining of the insidious trope of female empowerment through objectification, so beloved of an advertising industry. Her argument summarised is that women flashers are submissive to male reaction; gender power relations remain firmly in place despite the ‘empowerment’ rhetoric, and Gould’s killer blow can perhaps be located in this quotation, which deploys the deflating juxtaposition she frequently uses to devastating effect: “The women choose to take off their underwear, but that is the single aspect of the situation over which they have any control. Everything else is controlled by the men to whom they display their vaginas.”\n\nHaving exploded empowerment, Gould turns her attention to the male flasher and his “magnificent” penis – and yes, this self-love does seem to propel most male flashers. For Gould, the male flash is an “aggressive act”, in contrast to the female flasher’s submission; she terms it “the eroticization of abuse”, since “flashers know the likely response to their actions is distress and fear’. In conjunctions with flashers’ semantic commodification of the vagina as “the goods”, the repeated theme of contempt for the women they flash, and the assumption that they have “a greater right to get off than [a woman] does to live her life in freedom” it is hard to dissent from Gould’s view that “all the flasher actually feels towards women is hatred”.\n\nGould does not exactly place the blame for this hatred squarely at the feet of the flasher – although she does want them to accept responsibility, although not perhaps in the way, or for the reasons, you might think. Rather, having delved into the psychology of the male and female flashers, she then widens her focus to encompass the culture of female submission and victimisation, and the cult of alpha male masculinity. And this is where things get really interesting.\n\nGould delivers a galvanising message of true female empowerment, castigating the culture of victimhood for women, that reduces them to passive objects being acted upon. She uses the example of being given rape alarms at university, which she refers to as a ‘prop, the effectiveness of which was entirely dependent on it gaining the intended response’, recalling the female flasher, or the page 3 model, whose ‘empowerment’ relies upon getting the correct response – that is, an empowerment which relies upon an outside actor. In other words, no empowerment at all, just the same tired rehearsal of gender power relations whereby men act, and women ‘act’ by attracting others to act upon us.\n\nAnd suddenly it all clicks into place: the cultural disconnect of which Gould speaks is not so much a disconnect as a cultural toin-coss. Flashing is at once the expression of, and the reaction to, contemporary and historical gender power relations. This is perhaps most potently displayed [apologies for inevitable image associations] in Gould’s exploration of ‘masculinity’ and the psychiatric approach to the male flasher. Gould speaks of “an eruption of anxiety” (and having come to know Gould’s wit with words, I suspect that is an intended pun) in ‘masculinity’ as a result of a “devaluation of citadels of male power” not having been “accompanied by compensatory alterations in the markers of masculinity”; this seems painfully obvious. Nevertheless, the psychiatric approach, which combines a combination of humiliation and punishment seeks to ‘cure’ their patients by reinforcing the very tropes of masculinity which seem to be causing so much damage in the first place.\n\nReading about these treatments in the context of the argument that Gould has subtly built up without your consciously realising it, is an exercise in frustration: they not only sound inhumane and short-sighted to the point of idiocy (one seeming to guarantee that an adolescent boy will grow up to be a paedophile), they also suffer from a basic lack of understanding of the culture in which flashing thrives. And the approach to the female flasher is just as bad: they are simply labelled ‘narcissistic’ and ‘exhibitionist’ – even, as Gould drily notes, “with quite astoundingly archaic reasoning”, as having “a partial masculine identity” (whatever the hell that means anyway).\n\nGould ultimately wants more responsibility. She wants women to use their righteous anger at their cultural treatment and turn it towards true empowerment – an empowerment that doesn’t rely on the reactions of others, whether than be for protection or admiration. And she wants psychiatrists to give male flashers some responsibility for their actions, rather than ‘treating’ them via the medium of placing the responsibility entirely upon the rise of feminism, or perhaps a childhood trauma. This is not the same as ‘blaming’ the flasher; this is in order, strangely, to ‘empower’ the flasher: the infantilization achieved by removing responsibility can surely do little to assuage the “eruption of anxiety” in contemporary masculinity. It might stop a single flasher who happens to have been caught from flashing, but it doesn’t address the root causes of the desire, which Gould leaves us in little doubt lie outside of an individual’s experiences.\n\nJust as women can be awakened to patriarchy and choose to stop living as passive commodities, so men can be awakened to a cult of masculinity which sets them up as failures unless they consistently dominate and subjugate those around them. This is the responsibility that Gould agitates for in this brilliant polemic, which should be read by everyone – but especially, it seems, by psychiatrists.\n\n* Yes pedants, I’m aware that vagina might not be the exact medical term, but language is malleable. Go with the flow; all potential associations intended, I assure you. ~ Caroline Criado-Perez, www.weekwoman.wordpress.com"", ""This book is fast, intelligent, witty, informative, unafraid. It is also shocking, funny and surprising, and faced me with a view that made me puzzle and think beyond any preconceived notions. I am glad to have read it. This is a serious book, written in a light, engaging style that never loses command of the subject. ~ Valerie Kaye"", ""The first two times I remember being flashed were in my childhood. When I was about eight, a man stopped his car in an alley as I was attempting to cross it. Having been raised with a \""healthy\"" fear of strangers, I approached reluctantly when he motioned me over. Inside the open window of his car, the man was holding his erect penis in one hand, and the steering wheel in the other. I ran away. The second time, when I was maybe thirteen, a friend of mine and I were riding the bus somewhere. A man in an adjacent seat was sitting, legs open, with his penis and balls hanging languidly from his entirely too short shorts. The man was grinning. I don't remember our being frightened by this, merely grossed out. But, instead of shouting at the man, or telling the bus driver what was going on, we simply giggled nervously and changed seats.\n\nWhy didn't my friend and I report the incident to the bus driver? Perhaps it was the man's confidence in his gaze that prevented us from seeing this as a terrible act. Perhaps it is the fact that young women are trained to avoid conflict and simply move away from an aggressor, rather than confront that aggressor head on and say, \""No. Not okay.\""\n\nGould, through impeccable research, not only explains the whys and wherefores of why men (and some women) flash, she also delves deeply into the reasons that women react so passively to what, although seemingly mild, is an incredibly aggressive act.\n\nBefore reading \""Exposing Phallacy,\"" it never occurred to me to think to deeply about the culture of flashers. Moreover, I didn't even know there was such a culture. While deeply disturbing, this sexual proclivity is also quite fascinating to read about. And Gould's writing and research allowed me an insight into an act that I had put very little thought into, even though I (and many others) have been victims of it.\n\nGould not only explores the motivations, practices, turn-ons and culture around flashing, but goes on to describe and analyze the reasons why women react the way they generally do when flashed. This book is a thorough and fascinating piece of writing around a subject that has been largely ignored by society, psychology and sex research. ~ Sarah C Bell, Author of The Urban Fairytales"", ""Exposing Phallacy has a lightness of touch one would not expect in a treatise on sexual deviancy.\n\nIt is a page turner. A read-in-one-go work on flashing and flashers that will one day become a standard work.\n\nIn her fascinating study of the mindset of the flasher – both male and female – Kate Gould uses the English language like a surgeon’s knife, the blade travelling at a steady clip, cutting, lifting back flaps to peer beneath the surface.\n\nGould’s exercise of assembling facts, examining them at close range, interviewing offenders, and approaching psychiatrists, lawyers and members of the police force, are of interest not just to the academic but to the average reader – the cliché man in the street.\n\nPeople exposing their genitals in public is a subject not lightly to be approached, yet grim though such a subject is, the effect of Gould’s writing is infused with humour. She seems to walk a tightrope between mirth and enjoyment on the one hand and outrage and despair on the other.\n\nWhat, she asks, is going on in the mind of the flasher?\n\nWho is he/she?\n\nWhy do they flash?\n\nIs flashing for the male some kind of evolutionary display of violence? Does it make evolutionary sense? Does the male expose himself to show dominance or simply to arouse himself sexually?\n\nDoes exposing him/herself give the flasher an ego boost?\n\nDoes enjoyment come from occasioning shock in the beholder?\n\nWhere does shame come in?\n\nAre all males inherent flashes? How is non-threatening exhibitionism physically expressed? Does the flasher suffer some sort of psychological warping of his/her sexuality?\n\nThese and other questions are posited by the gimlet-eyed Gould in Exposing Phallacy, a book to delight and surprise her admirers, a book that tells us things about ourselves, the world, and the way we are.\n\n~ Mary D'Arcy, Author of Way to Go and Checking Out and Other Tales"", ""Titillating literary overexposure. A confluence of entertainment and academia - an enthralling read that maintains credibility to the end. I arrived with a `C'est quoi ce bordel?' attitude toward flashers and left with an explanation. I have long believed that even stupid people have their reasons. Don't know why I never made such allowances for the seriously deviant. Maybe the case wasn't made until now, or not as compellingly. I highly recommend this book. ~ Marc Phillips, Author of The Legend of Sander Grant"", ""A compelling, insightful and superbly written in-depth analysis of a subject matter that is rarely mentioned outside the parameters of a giggle. ~ Louisa Achille, Award-winning Documentary Filmmaker of The Naked Feminist""]" F.M.R.L.,"[""Daniela Cascella""]","Ephemeral, F.M.R.L: A collection of fragments and essays recording accidents of hearing and detours of thought in response to the peripheral nature of listening and reading.","Listening into writing, reading into writing take shape in F.M.R.L. through a collection of short texts, fragments and ‘deranged essays’, with attention to pacing and linguistic derives. An archive of books, notebooks, events and records prompts the texts in these pages, responding to encounters with Michel Leiris’s autobiographical fictions; concerts and events at Café Oto and the Swedenborg House in London; visits to museums such as the Pitt Rivers in Oxford and exhibitions such as Ice Age Art at the British Museum, among the others. F.M.R.L. is a book constructed across sonic patterns, assonance, repetitions, comprising texts that intermittently drift from sense to sound and to nonsense and back. A flip from the immateriality of sound to the sounds of letters and words as material, a call from reading to voicing.","Listening into writing, reading into writing take shape in F.M.R.L. through a collection of short texts, fragments and ‘deranged essays’, with attention to pacing and linguistic derives. An archive of books, notebooks, events and records prompts the texts in these pages, responding to encounters with Michel Leiris’s autobiographical fictions; concerts and events at Café Oto and the Swedenborg House in London; visits to museums such as the Pitt Rivers in Oxford and exhibitions such as Ice Age Art at the British Museum, among the others. F.M.R.L. is a book constructed across sonic patterns, assonance, repetitions, comprising texts that intermittently drift from sense to sound and to nonsense and back. A flip from the immateriality of sound to the sounds of letters and words as material, a call from reading to voicing.",10,"[""Writing about sound is no easy matter, particularly in a second language. Daniela Cascella’s accomplishment in her second book, F. M. R. L.: Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound (Zero Books), is to take the receptive reader far beyond sound, music and listening into the fragmented recesses of memory, the infinite subtlety of encounters with intangibility.\n\nTimes Higher Education, 'Books of 2015'\n\nhttps://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/best-books-of-2015 ~ David Toop, web"", ""fragments, miracles, recurrences and likenesses (a review of f.m.r.l. by daniela cascella)\n\nby C.D. Rose\n\n(Read the whole review at 3am Magazine)\n\n... Fifteen short chapters begin with a playful dialogue between sound and a writer, as Cascella seems to work out what she’s doing on the page before you, and then moving straight into the tangled yet lyrical description of that Scelsi quartet. As soon as you are oriented to that, Cascella moves again, to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford where a brass amulet triggers a moving memoir of her Neapolitan grandmother casting her final spell. And so it continues.\n\nCascella, an Italian now resident in London, has worked as a curator, lecturer and writer working largely in the field of sound and uses her experience as the mulch of F.M.R.L. Her first book, En Abîme circled similar areas, using personal experience as trigger for reflection in listening, reading and writing. Yet F.M.R.L. takes the approach a step further, defiantly becoming even more fragmentary, picking up on tiny clues and memory traces (those ‘footnotes, mirages, refrains and leftovers’), piecing them together to make a book which is ultimately more successful than its predecessor.\n\nThere are several reasons for this. First is the sheer fact that Cascella writes so well. This is even more of a feat when remembering that English isn’t her first language. Reflecting on this very fact she writes: “Deprived of proper words and of horizon I have no voice here, nor song, but a tongue tied to a thick rope of hemp right in my throat. It chokes me inside the barrel of my every London morning, in sawdust days of tea and tar.”\n\nHer writing draws on the models she refers to throughout the book (de Filippo, Malaparte, Rhys, Lispector), yet her English has a demotic edge, a journalistic sharpness and no truck with international artspeak. This lends the writing a directness, avoiding the occasional vagaries of her influences, which in turn gives the book another reason for its success: its emotional heft.\n\n[...]\n\nAdded to this, Cascella is a great storyteller. Her process moves toward the abstract, theoretical or intangible from a close engagement with the sensual and with lived experience.\n\n[...]\n\nAnd yet, the book avoids what is at its centre: there are no gushing descriptions of being rapt by sound, no blog-standard music crit thinkpieces. Cascella instead reveals the ghosts that the haptic experience of listening arises from, the gain and loss of their translation into the written word.\n\nI would contest Cascella’s idea that “if I believed that these words could stand forever on their own, and keep any experiences of sounds still within, I would be beaten: they are eroded by what they do not say. Like sounds, words won’t outlast me.” F.M.R.L. — a book of fragments, miracles, recurrences and likenesses, findings, memories, revenants and lacunae — is far from ephemeral. ~ 3:AM Magazine, web"", ""Review by Tomoe Hill\n\nhttp://minorliteratures.com/2015/09/10/f-m-r-l-by-daniella-cascella-tomoe-hill/\n\n... In some ways, to say it is a book does it a disservice, although of course it takes the physical form. Words in lines, on pages, familiar structures. But there is a magical disorder to all of these which reveals the logic from its listener-writer as well as creating a new one from the reader’s perspective: those of sound and word, meaning and memory. To read, in this instance is to open someone’s mind and play with the thoughts within, and then delve into your own to discover a kinship....\n\n... In the beginning of F.M.R.L., Cascella mentions Bataille on how we should approach primitive art with emotion rather than\n\nlogical reduction to gain meaning: he urges to consider instead the feeling of their burning, fiery presence that strikes us. Feeling is the temporary release of logic to gain understanding, the complete exposure of oneself to the in-between spaces, the offering of physicality to absorb meaning. It is how we connect with objects, sound, writing, memory, and what gives us the ability to communicate with others about them. It is like the norn’s thread, but eternal, binding us together. ~ Minor Literatures, web"", ""SO! Reads: Daniela Cascella’s F.M.R.L. (Finding Materials for Remembering and Listening)\n\nby Kyle D. Stedman\n\nBefore I read F.M.R.L., I didn’t know Daniela Cascella or her work. I hadn’t read her first book or her blog or her Tweets; I hadn’t seen any exhibits she had curated or attended a reading. Instead, the words in her book introduced us.\n\nHere’s how she was introduced, here in this exploration of how sound and writing intertwine:\n\nA wanderer, traveling the globe to meet friends, attend conferences, read books (and more books, and more books)\n\nAn archivist, saving physical and digital boxes of sounds and words and quotes, all blended with her own notes and ideas\n\nA listener, noticing the sounds of words as much as their meanings\n\nA cave-explorer, digging ever deeper through layers of earth to find echoes of what has been buried—which is another way to say a wanderer, an archivist, a listener\n\n[...]\n\nHow can I tell you anything at all, when all I know are sounds?\n\nBut still, you want the point. You want to know what this book will do for you, for your art, for your scholarship.\n\nHow can I tell you anything at all, when all I know are sounds?\n\nBut ok. You’re not here to be moved. (Are you? I hope you are.) But if you’re not: what will propel your ideas, what will inspire your work after reading Cascella, what the take-aways are:\n\n“Writing away from sound” as a different way to “write about sound” (44). That is, instead of explaining, to let the nature of sound itself inspire the kinds of work you do.\n\n“Writing Sound” as an “encounter,” as “transcience” (54).\n\nAcknowledging our archives and inviting them to the forefront of our writing, even when those encounters are messy or confusing.\n\nConsidering what we’re really doing in our art/theory/writing/sounding. Cascella says she’s not “a writer, a theorist, a critic” but “a handler of words, a listener, a reader” (90). Who are you? Who am I?\n\nBut how can I tell you anything at all, when all I know are sounds?\n\nRead the whole review at:\n\nhttp://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/05/18/so-reads-daniela-cascellas-f-m-r-l-finding-materials-for-remembering-and-listening_/ ~ Sounding Out! Blog, web"", ""Daniela Cascella invites us to listen. Her new book bypasses the usual descriptions of venturing into the world, rapt by sound (although she wants us to do this, too), and instead allows for an intense, internal stream of sounds to collide with words on paper, enveloping the silent reader.\n\nCascella is a London-based reader-writer-thinker-in-sound. Like her compatriot, Calvino, she seems to ascribe to the notion of ‘translator, traitor,’ a catchphrase imagined to mean that nothing translated from one language to another (from one listening experience to another) is ever without compromise. Cascella suggests her text is a proposition: a way of thinking and writing through listening and reading. Writer becomes channel; book as transmission.\n\nJoan Schuman, Earlid\n\nREAD AND LISTEN: http://www.earlid.org/posts/cascella_intro/ ~ Joan Schuman, web"", ""Review by Marcel Cobussen\n\nThe Journal of Sonic Studies\n\nhttp://sonicstudies.org/cascella2015\n\n… F.M.R.L.: 15 chapters, rather different in tone. Different voices, different styles, different genres. The book consists of scraps, leftovers, a series of beginnings, research and diary notes, many of them not directly related to sound but (also) to literature, drama, film, sculpture. I expected something else. But what? And why? I also ask myself if it is suitable for JSS. Why not? The attention paid to sound art, Daniela’s (implicit) invitations to read some pages aloud, the various rhythms of her thinking, the subtitle telling me that the book is about writing sound – sound is present (and absent) in and through the book in all its variety … ~ The Journal of Sonic Studies, web"", ""Cascella might have reached 'language at the edge', sometimes with poetic power, but the horizon of her own experiment is not void. ~ The Wire Magazine, magazine"", ""Daniela Cascella is the most literary listener I know. In the frenzy of ephemera collected here, she catches echoes between films and philosophy, sculpture and drama, music and novels. Grounded in French surrealism, Italian narrative, and American poetry, F.M.R.L. auscultates books by some of the most magical writers from the past century: Clarice Lispector, Gert Jonke, and — above all — Michel Leiris. In the process, Cascella investigates the very logic of sound: its recursiveness; its decay; its interference patterns and resonant sympathies. Attending to the blur of voices into noise at the borders of understanding, Cascella gives back the songs of sound's extended techniques, transmuting noise back into poetry at the borders of these pages. F.M.R.L. is a Passagen-Werk of the inner ear. ~ Craig Dworkin, author of No Medium (MIT Press 2013)"", ""In F.M.R.L., each reader enters a different labyrinth. Frictions, murmurings, resonances, laconisms. Retune your listening. Fractures, metamorphoses, residues, lingerings. Reconcile yourself with the ephemeral nature of sound. Fabulations, marginalia, recollections, labyrinths. Revel in invention based on error. Daniela Cascella's F.M.R.L. is, to turn one of her citations into an emblem of her project: “a site of confusion and heightened perception, a site of deep time.” Against the cognitive traps of syllogistic discourse she offers a celebration of the sundry accidents and errors of listening, each one an inspiration to write. She asks: “And what shall I do with my heritage of listening?” I answer: “Continue to share it with us!” ~ Allen S. Weiss, author of Varieties of Audio Mimesis (Errant Bodies Press, 2008) and Zen Landscapes (Reaktion Books, 2013)"", ""This is writing in its most present sense. Writing that, true to its tense, enacts a continual process of thinking and perceiving. Writing that, spinning its words from sound, gathers up referents in a loose weave. Expansive in scope, and intimate in scale, this is writing where reading dwells in the reverie of detail -- and deserves our full attention. ~ Kristen Kreider, author of Poetics and Place (I.B.Tauris, 2013)""]" "Failure of Vision, A","[""Doug Greene""]","An in-depth and critical look at the life and ideas of Michael Harrington, one of America's most important democratic socialists.","Doug Greene takes an in-depth and critical look at the life and ideas of Michael Harrington, one of America's most important democratic socialists. A Failure of Vision discusses one of the most important champions for democratic socialism in the United States. Michael Harrington (1928–1989) is widely recognized for writing The Other America, a seminal expose of poverty in the United States that inspired the War on Poverty. He was also the founder of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is currently the largest socialist organization in the United States. Michael Harrington hoped to transform democratic socialism from a marginal view into a major political force in the United States. To accomplish this, he advocated that socialists act as the “left-wing of the possible” inside of the Democratic Party in order to transform it into one that truly represented the people. In the end, Realignment proved to be a dead end to advance socialist politics. The questions proposed by Michael Harrington continue to be sharply debated by socialists. With an engaging style and critical approach to Michael Harrington's shortcomings, this book is essential reading to understand contemporary debates on the American left.","Doug Greene takes an in-depth and critical look at the life and ideas of Michael Harrington, one of America's most important democratic socialists. A Failure of Vision discusses one of the most important champions for democratic socialism in the United States. Michael Harrington (1928–1989) is widely recognized for writing The Other America, a seminal expose of poverty in the United States that inspired the War on Poverty. He was also the founder of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is currently the largest socialist organization in the United States. Michael Harrington hoped to transform democratic socialism from a marginal view into a major political force in the United States. To accomplish this, he advocated that socialists act as the “left-wing of the possible” inside of the Democratic Party in order to transform it into one that truly represented the people. In the end, Realignment proved to be a dead end to advance socialist politics. The questions proposed by Michael Harrington continue to be sharply debated by socialists. With an engaging style and critical approach to Michael Harrington's shortcomings, this book is essential reading to understand contemporary debates on the American left.",8,"[""\""I propose that revolutionary socialists use Greene’s book in an educational campaign aimed at the young workers and students who are attracted to the current DSA. It not only exposes the fatal flaws of DSA and its commitment to the Democratic Party, it also provides, in the Appendix, a very useful introduction to the revolutionary thought of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky.\"" ~ Chuck Chairns, Workers' Voice"", ""\""By presenting a fair but critical account, Greene’s book is able to show that an orientation to the Democrats is not a viable path forward for socialists. As a cautionary tale it is a necessary read.\"" ~ Wayne Rossi, Books From The Left"", ""If you know nothing about Michael Harrington, this is the first book you should read. Or, if you think you know everything about him, this is your next book, guaranteed. ~ Matthew Strauss, Amazon"", ""A Failure of Vision helps us understand what it will take to contend with the rise of right-wing authoritarianism and the depressing acceptance of lesser-evilism, and to build a diverse, multiracial, defiant socialism from below… ~ Bill Keach, Tempest Magazine"", ""\""Quite a few self-described socialists in the United States today have terrible policies: they campaign for the Democratic Party, vote for imperialist wars, and accept the capitalist system. But this isn't a new phenomenon. Michael Harrington was an intellectual pioneer in adapting socialism to liberalism. Doug Greene's exhaustive biography makes clear that Harrington's ideas were actually far worse than is generally known. A must-read for anyone who wants to fight for socialism in the United States today!\"" ~ Nathaniel Flakin, historian, author of \""Martin Monath: A Jewish Revolutionary Among Nazi Soldiers\"""", ""\""Leftists have often wondered why the United States has lacked any viable socialist movement. A large part of this failure stems from a lack of solid theory and principled leadership. This combination of theory and leadership is what the historian Doug Greene means by vision, and no one lacked this vision more than the American version of Eduard Bernstein, Michael Harrington. Harrington's politics were part and parcel of the right-wing of \""socialism\"": eclectic in theory and pro-Democrat in practice. In his political biography, Greene demonstrates Harrington's opportunism, while showing what is needed for a revolutionary socialist movement in the United States.\"" ~ Harrison Fluss, Ph.D, corresponding editor with Historical Materialism journal"", ""\""Doug Greene's A Failure of Vision is one of the most important works of American socialist history that I've ever read. The ideas of Michael Harrington make up the \""common sense\"" of today's American left: a reformist, watered down Marxism that refuses to break from the Democratic Party machine. Harrington's political thought and vision for socialism in America is centered on a fundamentally flawed strategy that we must contend with and ultimately overcome. Greene's book is essential reading for anyone eager to build a true socialist horizon in our time.\"" ~ Daniel Tutt, Ph.D., author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family"", ""“Greene argues that, ultimately, if any lesson is to be learned from Harrington’s legacy, it is that realignment, while optimistic, is bound to backfire, and that the left cannot win by compromising with the very system it seeks to upend. For those who want to understand the man who shaped the DSA, this book is a first-rate primer on the development and legacy of Harrington’s ideas.” ~ Shalon van Tine, Ohio University""]" "Failure, A Writer's Life","[""Joe Milutis""]","Failure is a catalogue of literary monstrosities, a philosophy for the unreadable, and a map for new literary worlds.","Failure, A Writer’s Life is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignettes and convolutes provide the intrepid reader with a philosophy for the unreadable, a consolation for the ignored, and a map for new literary worlds.","Failure, A Writer’s Life is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignettes and convolutes provide the intrepid reader with a philosophy for the unreadable, a consolation for the ignored, and a map for new literary worlds.",2,"[""\""The unfinished, unreadable, unpublishable — the scribbled and illegible, the too slowly published, the countless unpublished, all that does not seem to count at all. . . . here lie all manner of ruins. From Marguerite Duras to Google Maps, Henri Bergson to H.P. Lovecraft, Orson Welles to Walter Benjamin to a host of literary ambulance drivers (not to mention the FBI, UFOs, and UbuWeb), _Failure, A Writer's Life_ charts empty spaces and occupied libraries, searches databases bereft of filters, files spam and porn and weather reports into their respective _konvoluts_, and realizes the full potential of cultural inscription. In a series of snapshots concatenated in the best surrealist mode, Milutis has curated a catalogue of curiosities as essential to understanding our current cultural condition as they are eccentric. With Nietzschean _witz_ and self-reflexive bravura, he teases out the occult links between heterogeneities in the tradition of Allen S. Weiss and Greil Marcus. In the process, Milutis redefines the 'virtual' as something much broader and more interesting than digital simulacra: as the unmanageable storehouse of memory and the inevitable expanse of forgetfulness. Here, in all its glamorous success, is the horizon of failure.\"" ~ Craig Dworkin"", ""“Milutis is a skilled ringmaster of difficult ideas that might otherwise bite.” ~ Gregory Whitehead""]" "Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, The","[""David J. Blacker""]",Our education system is chained to the hold of a sinking capitalist ship. Is there any escape?,"The current neoliberal mutation of capitalism has evolved beyond the days when the wholesale exploitation of labor underwrote the world system’s expansion. While “normal” business profits plummet and theft-by-finance rises, capitalism now shifts into a mode of elimination that targets most of us—along with our environment—as waste products awaiting managed disposal. The education system is caught in the throes of this eliminationism across a number of fronts: crushing student debt, impatience with student expression, the looting of vestigial public institutions and, finally, as coup de grâce, an abandonment of the historic ideal of universal education. “Education reform” is powerless against eliminationism and is at best a mirage that diverts oppositional energies. The very idea of education activism becomes a comforting fiction. Educational institutions are strapped into the eliminationist project—the neoliberal endgame—in a way that admits no escape, even despite the heroic gestures of a few. The school systems that capitalism has built and directed over the last two centuries are fated to go down with the ship. It is rational therefore for educators to cultivate a certain pessimism. Should we despair? Why, yes, we should—but cheerfully, as confronting elimination, mortality, is after all our common fate. There is nothing and everything to do in order to prepare.","The current neoliberal mutation of capitalism has evolved beyond the days when the wholesale exploitation of labor underwrote the world system’s expansion. While “normal” business profits plummet and theft-by-finance rises, capitalism now shifts into a mode of elimination that targets most of us—along with our environment—as waste products awaiting managed disposal. The education system is caught in the throes of this eliminationism across a number of fronts: crushing student debt, impatience with student expression, the looting of vestigial public institutions and, finally, as coup de grâce, an abandonment of the historic ideal of universal education. “Education reform” is powerless against eliminationism and is at best a mirage that diverts oppositional energies. The very idea of education activism becomes a comforting fiction. Educational institutions are strapped into the eliminationist project—the neoliberal endgame—in a way that admits no escape, even despite the heroic gestures of a few. The school systems that capitalism has built and directed over the last two centuries are fated to go down with the ship. It is rational therefore for educators to cultivate a certain pessimism. Should we despair? Why, yes, we should—but cheerfully, as confronting elimination, mortality, is after all our common fate. There is nothing and everything to do in order to prepare.",15,"[""A is for apocalypse\n\nDavid J. Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, Zero Books, Winchester and Washington DC, 2013. 319 pp., £15.99 pb., 978 1 78099\n\n578 6.\n\nAmidst the recent flood of lachrymose reports on the neoliberal assault upon education, this book stands out for its unflinching survey of the extent of the impending catastrophe and the astute way it gleefully sets about puncturing the few remaining life rafts. The consolation of Blacker’s philosophy? ‘[E]ducational activism does not matter and is a waste of time’, and ‘those within educational institutions have very little choice but to strap themselves in … for a continuation of a very scary and uncertain ride that probably ends in death’.\n\nThis conclusion is based on an extension of what the book terms an eliminationist project inherent within our current phase of capitalism to the spe- cific domain of educational institutions too tightly bolted on to escape the same fate. It is extrapolated primarily from Marx’s hypothesis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall within capitalist produc- tion: the long-term structural propensity to replace human labour costs with technological fixtures that constantly leads to a decline of surplus value in pro- duction, coupled with a crisis of underconsumption. This failure of ‘normal’ capitalism to durably turn profits has for a long time been masked by various counter-forces, now approaching their limits. With the automation of the manufacturing and services industries and rapid advance of globalized commu- nications and transport technologies, Blacker argues we have reached what is seen as a ‘tipping point’ beyond the reliance on human labour, especially in the global North. Under such circumstances, capital- ism undergoes a fundamental shift from an ‘era of exploitation’ to a desperate ‘era of elimination’, as increasing numbers of the precariously under- or unemployed are no longer required as a ‘reserve army’ to ensure competition for work keeps wages low but join the masses of a lumpenproletariat: ‘no longer seen as resource to be harnessed … but more a mere threat’ to be eliminated.\n\nCrucially, Blacker does not recognize any revo- lutionary necessity to the playing out of this neo- liberal endgame of capitalism, either in Marx or in his own prognostications: what is terminal for capitalism may well be terminal for humanity. This general situation impacts upon the specific analysisof educational eliminationism, defined as a ‘state of affairs in which elites no longer find it necessary to utilize mass schooling as a first link in the long chain of the process of extraction of workers’ surplus labour’ but instead ‘cut their losses and abandon public schooling altogether’. The introduction sug- gests this occurs ‘across a number of fronts: crushing student debt, impatience with student expression, the looting of vestigial public institutions, and … an abandonment of the historical ideal of universal education’, subsequently elaborated in three central chapters on ‘Educational Eliminationism’ subtitled ‘I. Student Debt’, ‘II. Student Voice’, and ‘III. Universal Schooling disassembled’. It is significant that there is no specific chapter on the third ‘front’ – the looting of public institutions – since it is here that the book’s eliminationist thesis becomes most ambiguous.\n\nBlacker suggests economic eliminationism impacts upon the domain of education either directly, as austerity-driven cuts to public services, or indirectly, as an increasingly haemorrhaging system enters a desperate ‘smash and grab’ raid on those sectors not yet leached of exchange-value, in order to leverage capital for investment elsewhere. The ruthless mar- ketization of education is therefore perceived as a ‘world historical act of desperation’ and ‘an intensely pathetic phase of the post-debt bubble’, equivalent to shaking down the sector for any loose change. Here, Blacker is forced to play down the possibility of what could instead be a period of massive educational expansionism, one that corresponds to a broader pedagogization of society and culture, such that not only educational institutions but also galleries, cor- porations and charities compete with each other over pedagogical outreach projects as a now fetishized ideology of education increases its stranglehold.\n\nIf this is the case, it may well be that we will see a complex transformation of the primary functions of education rather than their elimination. If modern, public schooling instilled industrial discipline, pri- vatized education will be required to teach resil- ience towards increasingly precarious employment. But educational expansionism may in the shorter term also represent a solution to underemploy- ment, however unsustainable, as more students pay off higher fees through services connected to the Education Industry itself. Under such conditions it might even be that certain aspects of commodified education – far from becoming vocationalized, as many currently fear – assume autotelic form as a way of increasing its exchange value: l’éducation pour l’éducation (just as bourgeois culture’s marketability\n\n52 R a d i c a L Ph i L o s o P h y 1 8 6 ( j u L /a u G 2 0 1 4)\n\nhas been partially equated with its semblance of imperviousness to exchange value).\n\nWhen it focuses on student debt, the book sug- gests that ‘the financialized drive to commodify education ultimately resolves itself into a commodifi- cation of oneself ’. Here, the notion of eliminationism is no longer employed literally but corresponds to the metaphorical removal of ‘the human in human capital’, as what Blacker describes as ‘existentially indebted’ students (because the education they have purchased is inalienable) are tied with their whole being to a production process in which they increas- ingly resemble the constancy of fixed capital rather than the autonomous labourers of variable capital. This shift contradicts the book’s own rejection of what it calls the implicitly neo-Kantian framework of ‘canonical left critiques’ of education as something\n\ninstrumentally dehumanizing. This kind of critique becomes redundant, Blacker argues, when ‘the new kind of non-recognition involves not merely reducing people to means but simply wishing them away’. The focus on student debt reverts to a similar kind of dehumanizing framework, but one that also implies that the expansion of student debt has to ensure some kind of relationship between education and a service to capitalist production which pays off those debts.\n\nIn addition, although Blacker argues that capital- ism no longer needs skilled and semi-skilled labour because ‘the higher the tech, the dumber the worker can be and, ultimately, in the best case neoliberal scenario, phased out altogether where possible’, it is also possible to argue, as Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming have recently done in Dead Man Working (reviewed in RP 180, July/August 2013), that with the growth of service work and new forms of control an increasingly moribund and desperate system is forced to repurpose ‘living labour’ as it becomes increasingly reliant on human qualities such as social intelligence, imagination and resourceful initiative. Contra shifts towards automating call centres or relocating them\n\nabroad, for example, it is feasible that we will witness a new trend to rehumanize (and re-localize) the worker on the end of the line, encouraging them to be more charismatic, spontaneous and off-script in order to better sell their services. Although Cederström and Fleming focus on the new managerial techniques designed to harness human life, it is also possible that the social, creative and critical thinking skills of traditionally ‘non-vocational’ types of education – most obviously, the humanities – will be re-evaluated for this purpose, and not just in the worst-paid jobs: the UK’s minister of state for universities recently celebrated the fact that a third of the chief executives of our top FTSE companies have humanities degrees.\n\nIn this context, what is most obviously being eliminated is public education. But this concept, as Blacker acknowledges, is itself a relatively recent historical anomaly and an ambiguous one at that (fee-charging ‘public schools’ in England were inde- pendent from both religious restrictions and the residential restrictions of local endowments and were therefore ‘public’ by virtue of being ‘private’ in the contemporary sense). At times he suggests that the current infrastructure of public education, largely dependent on cheap fossil fuels, will disappear (here technological experiments in ‘flipped classrooms’ and MOOCs reveal the advantages of ‘home schooling’ in the age of austerity), at other times that whilst ‘compulsory education as a mass phenomenon will\n\n… be eliminated’, educational eliminationism may actually involve the continuation and expansion of their infrastructure even as ‘these institutions lose any independence and direct autonomy’. As the young no longer require ‘education in any substantive sense’, the book suggests, so-called ‘educational institutions’ may transform into sites of mere surveillance and incarceration. At its core, then, the ‘falling rate of learning’ is about a conceptual elimination of educa- tion, and Blacker is right to insist that any future substantiation of such a claim depends upon the con- tinued capacity to philosophize what such a concept means, without – it should be added – essentializing any specific historical formation.\n\nThe value of the book’s analysis throughout is the recognition of modern educational institutions as one of the counterforces that propped up capitalism; its only recourse to nostalgia comes with the recogni- tion that the exploitation which underwrites the traditional system may soon appear preferable to the eliminationism which replaces it. As a result, Blacker is structurally hemmed in to merely legalistic objec- tions to the eliminationism he identifies: student\n\nR a d i c a L Ph i L o s o P h y 1 8 6 ( j u L /a u G 2 0 1 4) 53\n\ndebt should be written off as illegitimate in accord- ance with the 1956 UN convention against ‘practices similar to slavery’, which includes ‘debt bondage’ of an unlimited or undefined nature and length, while moves to reduce the framework of free speech rights in schools are rejected as unreasonable in accordance with the foundational imperative of legal reasoning to stand by previous legal judgments. This nonethe- less permits Blacker to develop the most bracing and controversial part of his critique: not of capitalist eliminationism per se but of those educational activ- ists whose idealism provides ideological cover for the broader crisis at hand: ‘One constant thought is that we can educate ourselves out of the predicament, the more the better, primarily via an augmented and more equitable distribution of higher education.’ The vanity of educators has to be wounded, Blacker insists, because this heroic gesture is pointless: the education system of late capitalism isn’t fit to be patched up in this way.\n\nIn the concluding chapter Blacker proffers a ‘com- partmentalized and political pessimism that is direct intra-institutionally’, philosophized via a collectively repurposed version of Stoic fatalism. This is loosely developed through the idea of a ‘counterfactual peda- gogy of negative visualization’, which opportunisti- cally builds upon increasingly prevalent experiences of actual loss – but also the trauma imagined via the\n\nzombie dramas and apocalypticism of popular culture\n\n– as the best kind of teachers to prepare for the worst and to cling to what remains of the best. In such experiences, he suggests, we collectively confront our own status as the ‘living dead’ of a surplus humanity to be eliminated. We might, however, draw a differ- ent lesson from popular culture’s current fascina- tion with zombism: as the expression of capitalism’s fear not of the human life that remains but of an inhuman and undead labour that is immune to edu- cational interpellation and neoliberal vampirism. The ‘survivalism’ the book counsels might therefore have unconsciously adopted capital’s humanist perspective rather than succumbing to the unfathomably new experience of the ‘walking dead’ that stalk the land.\n\nUltimately, the catastrophic prophecy that ani- mates The Falling Rate of Learning is the pedagogi- cal equivalent of such negative visualization. It is a refreshing and effective tactic, making this one of the most readable and radical of recent books on the ‘crisis of education’. Apocalypticism is like comedy, however – all about timing. Even if we ulti- mately share Blacker’s dark vision of the capitalist endgame, we might have to prepare ourselves for the more worrying possibility that reports of education’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.\n\nMatthew Charles\n\n~ Matthew Charles, Radical Philosophy (July/August 2014)"", ""BLUE NATION REVIEW http://bluenationreview.com/david-blacker-another-economic-collapse-coming/\n\nIs Another Economic Collapse Coming? David Blacker Says Yes| by Joe Williams\n\nWASHINGTON – Chances are you haven’t heard of his book, but if you care about public education – or wealth inequality, or the futuredavidblacker-fallingratelearningneoliberalendgame of the nation – you will. If you’re an African American, however, chances are you don’t need to read David Blacker’s book to know what he’s talking about.\n\nBlacker, a philosophy of education professor at the University of Delaware, is the author of The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame. As its wonky title indicates, Blacker takes on American public education reform in the 21st century – and gives it an F.\n\nIf that weren’t cheery enough, Blacker says in a wide-ranging Salon.com interview that free market capitalism is undermining universal public education so pervasively that attempts at reform are “at best a mirage.”\n\nThe philosophy of free education for everyone emerged in the U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries, he argues, to meet the demands of Industrial Age businesses. Barons like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford needed a more educated labor pool, including new immigrants, to keep up with changing technology.\n\nThe goal was simple: squeeze out more productivity, and more profits, from labor in the coal mines, the steel mills or the shirtwaist factory.\n\nA century later, Blacker says, a host of societal changes – increased production (and worker elimination) through technology, wage stagnation, globalization and outsourcing, the broadening chasm between rich and poor, and the spiraling cost of a college diploma – has all but eroded the fundamental, idealistic view that education can be, or should be, for all.\n\nYet as the wealth gap widens and economic changes become permanent, he argues, capitalists and their political allies on the right argue for austerity (sound familiar?), push for privatization of public interests (charter schools, anyone?) and work to “contain” immigrants and the poor, the very people the American industrialized society once had a vested interest in educating.\n\nWhew. There’s a lot to unpack in Blacker’s argument, and that’s just from the interview.\n\nThe big takeaway for me is when the next global financial catastrophe comes – and Blacker firmly believes it’s coming – anyone who isn’t already rich or highly educated will fight over the economic scraps.\n\nBut if you’re poor and black, Blacker’s doomsday scenario is playing out now in real time, and has been for a generation if not longer.\n\nAt roughly 13.6 percent, the African American unemployment rate has been consistently more than twice the official US unemployment rate; that’s been true for decades. So has the academic achievement gap between black and white students, despite a lot of political lip service about how to solve the problem.\n\nAsk any conscientious black educator or community leader about the schools-to-prison pipeline, and he or she will give you a real-world tutorial on Blacker’s predictions, in plain English. Instead of a visit to the principal’s office, unruly students – many who have suffered neglect, live in poverty or have untreated learning disabilities – are entered into the corrections system. An example of Blacker’s containment strategy.\n\nEvery day, at any hour in my rapidly-gentrifying Northeast Washington neighborhood, I see plenty of idle young working- or college-age African American men and women who aren’t in the classroom or on the job.\n\nA generation or two ago, under Blacker’s premise, those young people would have had an opportunity to make a decent living, maybe in an auto or furniture manufacturing plant. Their employers likely would have encouraged them to get more education to increase production – and help them move up a rung or two on the class ladder.\n\nConversely, too many of the working- age young black people who do have jobs in the ‘hood aren’t making stuff, in my observations. Judging by their uniforms, they’re preparing food at restaurants, pouring coffee, waiting on department-store customers, or waiting for the relief shift at an office building’s security desk.\n\nWhile I unfortunately agree with a lot of Blacker’s disturbing, grim predictions for the coming economic apocalypse, and fear for the futures of my two children, there are some bright spots on the horizon – the push for universal pre-kindergarten, for example.\n\nIn April, when I visited the annual National Science, Technology, Engineering and Math festival here, I saw scores of black kids from all classes eagerly engaged in the exhibits, and in many cases conducting demonstrations. There are scores of non-governmental programs nationwide that are helping bring kids in under served communities up to educational speed.\n\nStill, you don’t need to be a liberal, or even have a conscience, to concerned for the futures of people who are already starting from further behind – people who look like me. If Blacker’s predictions come true, there’ll be a lot more civil unrest threatening the upper classes, and the changing economy probably will swallow the middle class whole.\n\nWhere I come from, it’s an old saw: by the time white America catches a cold, black America is already suffering from pneumonia. And the economic prognosis for African Americans is about to go from bad to worse.\n\nCopyright © 2014 Blue Nation Review. A division of Moko Social Media Limited. About Terms of Use Privacy and Cookie Notice.\n\n~ Joe Williams, Blue Nation Review"", ""The marketization of education is disturbing and dangerous. Intrinsic aims and values of education, such as civic engagement, personal development, self-awareness, cosmic wonder, etc., are quickly being reduced to mere development of human capital skills – human capital skills to be employed in capitalistic production, to maximize profits, within totalitarian workplace environments.\n\nDavid J. Blacker, a (Marxian) philosopher of education, argues in his new book The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, that recent developments are far worse than marketization. The essence of his argument is that millions of Americans are no longer needed in the economy. Their social labor has been technologically “eliminated.” Consequently, the need to educate this surplus population is no longer necessary. As such there is an attack on the schools themselves as being redundant and not “worth it” (196). Blacker contends the ultimate aim of neoliberal educational reforms is not merely privatization for market purposes, but “educational eliminationism” (12), and to disassemble any commitment to universal education for all (188-220). Educational elimination need not be the conscious intent of neoliberal educational reformers. But whether conscious intent or not, according to Blacker, “education as a mass phenomenon will, if present trends continue, be eliminated” (201). Education elimination is the logical outcome of the neoliberal capitalist structural dynamic (118-21).\n\nAccording to Blacker educational eliminationism is fourfold. First, as stated above is the elimination of mass education as a public good (188-220). Second, there is a falling rate of learning toward an elimination of learning (35, 226). Third, is the elimination of student “voices,” autonomy, and personal efficacy within the process of school (150-87). Fourth, is the elimination of personal autonomy and personal efficacy outside of schooling, following the mounting-up of student debt (122-49) and creation of a “new educational debt bondage” (138) to labor markets with low pay and poor working conditions.\n\nBlacker’s conclusion is highly pessimistic and cynical. According to Blacker, “education under advanced capitalism is too far gone” (232); the logical end is human and environmental elimination (240). The only thing left is individual critical pedagogies “here and there” (232), and a Pandora “Hope” that neoliberal processes will not run to completion in eliminating human beings and the environment (240). Blacker’s cynicism pivots on his failure to develop any potent sense of political agency.\n\nIn the rest of this review, I will first argue that Blacker’s reliance on the analogy of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF) is interesting, but that he has misunderstood the political economy of Marx. This critique is hardly fatal, but it does suggest Blacker’s ‘falling rate of learning’ may be exaggerated. Rather than a TRPF/“falling-rate-of-learning” analogy, Marxian political economy may suggest a class-struggle/pedagogical-struggle analogy. Second, capitalism is more resilient than Blacker portrays. Third, Blacker is not critical enough of human capital theory as the essential paradigm of educational theory today. Fourth, Blacker is impressively successful in developing (an implicit) immanent critique of human capital theory in the context of the fact that there are not enough (well-paying) jobs for the academically credentialed (i.e. high school and college graduates) and the severity of the debt-peonage result of school loans. But he is less successful in explaining the intrinsic value that education potentially offers human beings.\n\nBlacker uses Marx’s notion of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF) to express two primary elements of his argument. First, there is a corresponding analogy between the TRPF and the falling rate of learning in schools. Second, the TRPF suggests to Blacker the impossibility of capitalism. He employs the TRPF to describe the structural dynamic of capitalism. Blacker underestimates the resilience of capitalism. The Althusserian tradition provides the philosophical argument of capitalism’s ability to metamorphose and self-perpetuate, while the Dobbian tradition provides the historical record of contingent “stages of capitalist development” and historical self-perpetuation.\n\nBlacker maintains that the logical outcome of the so-called “profit squeeze” on capitalists and financiers (10) is “economic eliminationism” (28) whereby millions of jobs and the need for millions of Americans in the labor force have been eliminated. The elimination of jobs further means the elimination of consumers (48) and the tendency toward underconsumptionism (81). Additionally, economic eliminationism refers to the elimination of investment opportunities for capitalism, hence overinvestment in narrow areas of finance and creation of a euphoric boom and bust economy (29-32) well captured by Hyman Minsky’s “financial instability hypothesis” (89-91). Educational stratification between tier-one schools and other schools further “mirrors” the economic inequality of capitalism (92), whereby “the rich have grown richer and moreover have increasingly insulated themselves against the rest of the population via a geographical stratification” (33).\n\nThis all sets the stage for the correspondence between school and the society, albeit a “weak” correspondence (53). Just as Nazism yields Nazi schools, Communism communist schools, capitalism yields capitalistic human capital schools (99). This weak correspondence establishes the relationship between the economic eliminationism, of profits, jobs, consumers, and investment opportunities, and “the eliminationism we are now seeing in education” (28). The human capital motive of education has dominated schooling for several decades (196). Put simply there has been a “massive overaccumulation” of human capital skills, and neoliberal policy is aimed at no longer paying for this overaccumulation, hence the elimination of education (97).\n\nThis is an interesting argument. However, there are some problems. Blacker leans on the TRPF too much. As a metaphor or analogy to understand happenings in education it seems powerful. There is a fall in the rate of learning, because human capital skill development as a motive to learn is highly stratified and at a structural level overaccumulated. The overaccumulation of credentials creates a discouragement and disinterest in schooling and has a negative impact on learning.\n\nHowever, Marxian political economy does not depend on the TRPF as explained by Blacker. At one point Blacker theorizes competitive capitalism and a constant profit squeeze (68-74). This is simply not Marx. Never does Marx theorize capitalism as competitive. This is because capitalism, according to Marx, is a class struggle, aimed at the production of surplus value, with a macro dynamic toward concentration and centralization, i.e. away from the competiveness of vulgar political economy and neoclassical economics. The production of surplus value and reproduction of capitalistic social relations depend on two crucial occurrences: the presence of exploitable workers with human capital skills and evading mass discontent.\n\nThe point can be captured by analogy. Consider a slave master directly exploiting slave labor. The slave-master expropriates all the surplus product of the slaves. However, the masters must still worry about rebellion and losing their position as appropriators. An effective way to avoid this is to use surplus product as a means to circumvent rebellion.\n\nMasters may do this in numerous ways. For example, the slave-master may hire slave drivers, create a plantation militia or police force, and use other coercive means. The slave-master may create a patrimonial class of slaves, with various prized commodities as payment for loyalty. The slave master may also employ cultural forms such as modes of entrainment, religion, and education. These cultural forms could be geared ideologically for the slave to develop a consciousness that accepts the structural conditions, and/or that rebellion is immoral, unjust, and futile.\n\nThis slave analogy allows us to point out a weakness in Blacker’s argument. Blacker finds his paradigm in Joan Robinson’s dictum: ‘the only thing worse than being exploited by a capitalist, is not being exploited at all’ (102). Blacker believes that it is toward ‘not-being-exploited-at-all’ that capitalism is evolving. This is an exaggeration. Exploitation is alive and well. There is no reason to assume that employment is disappearing. Capitalism is far more resilient.\n\nBlacker seems to believe that if workers are not producing a material product, they are not producing surplus value (e.g. 201, 203). However, there has been an explosion in service sectors jobs. There is no reason to believe that this will not continue in health services, finance, clerical work, retail sales, marketing and education. If there is a limit on the elimination of jobs, then consumerism can remain strong. Indeed Harry Braverman (1974) showed that monopoly capitalism had already begun a transformation from material production of manufacturing to service sector jobs. The postindustrial society theory of Daniel Bell (1976) also gets at similar phenomena, as do the “liquid modernity” theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman (2000).\n\nThus, I have suggested that TRPF is not as problematic as is suggested by Blacker (TRPF does generate a particular and crucial macro-dynamic of boom and bust). Likewise I believe his arguments on job and consumer eliminationism are greatly exaggerated. Capitalism transforms to increase relative surplus value. The struggle then becomes the control of the workplace and the effect of the workplace on personal lives and personal well-being. If the correspondence theory that Blacker advocates is correct, we should find an analogous site of struggle within schools.\n\nNonetheless, he is on stronger ground regarding the increased (Minskyian) instability of monopoly-finance capitalism and rising inequality. This makes a commitment to a “return on investment” from schooling precarious and volatile, but an urgently necessary risk for students to take. But these phenomena have less to do with TRPF and far more to do with the production of surplus value, reproduction of society, and class struggle.\n\nMuch like our fictional slave driver, neoliberal policy makers will be anxious to create cultural forms that successfully reproduce society and minimize class struggle. Oligopolistic firms, both financial and nonfinancial, will be anxious that the production of surplus value continues and profits remain high. Indeed, Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis necessarily depends on profits being rather robust for some firms and industries. Thus, there is a particular tension between Blacker’s interpretation of TRPF and Minskyian instability.\n\nIn neoliberal unstable monopoly-finance capitalism, institutions of education will remain crucial. First for the neoliberal ideology they are capable of generating. Second, they also function as a justification for inequality. Third, I suspect there may very well be an expansion of educational institutions as a way to absorb surplus labor and to create jobs (for example 2008 Presidential candidate Barack Obama had proposed a 100,000 person teacher corps).\n\nBlacker does eventually contend that “elimination” does not necessarily mean campuses are being physically shut down. “There may even be a building boom.” Rather “education elimination” refers to the loss of pedagogical sovereignty and directional autonomy of institutions of higher education (117, 198-9, 201). But making these statements 100-plus pages into the argument seems a rather radical amendment to the letter of the text in the first 100-plus pages. In the earlier pages, Blacker maintains that education is no longer needed because jobs no longer exist for the entire labor force.\n\nThis is not the only confusion in Blacker’s argument. It is not education that is being eliminated by neoliberal capitalism, but the need for ‘schooling’ geared toward the mere development of human capital skills. Blacker simply has not been careful in differentiating the various aims of, and moments within, education. At the most surface level, education is schooling for human capital skills, and following Pierre Bourdieu (1977) this can be extended to include cultural and social capital. More generally still, this is what Bowles and Gintis (2011) called the ‘integration function.’ It is an important moment of education that today dominates the classroom, pedagogy, and educational policy. But there are other important pedagogical aims and moments within the educational experience, such as civic engagement and civic participation; personal development and empathy; self and social perspicacity; and cosmic wonder and awareness.\n\nBlacker’s falling rate of learning is on solid grounds concerning the decreased need for human capital skills. But there is an increased need for the other moments within the educational experience (these will be sites of pedagogical struggle within educational institutions). It is probably accurate to say that neoliberalism has little concern for these other pedagogical aims. But this is where there exists a potential site of resistance and struggle.\n\nBlacker’s argument against student debt is persuasive. He maintains that the language of the Brown v. Board of Education case provides the argument for education as a basic human right (141-2). With student debt now above the trillion dollar mark, it is time to make public education a public good. The costs of education would be paid by tax payers, and any debt incurred would be “transmogrified into social debts” (149). In short, Blacker convincingly argues that we need to abandon the neo-feudal debt-peonage-like result whereby students are required to borrow from a private bank to start a life (122-49).\n\nBut neo-feudalism or not, the aim of education cannot be reduced to human capital skills. 23 percent of jobs in the U.S. pay above $50,000, more than 30 percent of the population graduates with a four-year college degree. The maths here is simple – there are not enough well-paying jobs to justify human capital schooling and the indebtedness for this impoverished schooling. We need to argue for a depth pedagogy that includes civic engagement, personal development, self and social perspicacity, and cosmic wonder and awareness.\n\nPedagogical battles within the academy matter more than Blacker acknowledges (229). At the same time I fully agree with Blacker that the social assemblages outside education are the more urgent activist sites (228). There is no educational reform without labor market reform. Labor market reform is empty without transforming capitalistic production and totalitarian ruled workplaces. Capitalism is no alternative (CINA) (see, Despain 2013).\n\nThus we can certainly accept Blacker hyperliberal educational strategies of affordability, inclusion, and augmentation of student voices (213-4). Likewise we must embrace Blacker’s more radical position that it is more important to change the political economy outside of education. To Blacker’s credit he never suggests merely creating new jobs or raising pay, and continuing under human capital theory pedagogy. This is false and violent toward social being. The emptiness of vocationalism and credentialism is rather easy to demonstrate in this neoliberal era. The lack of well-paying jobs means that student indebtedness is not sustainable. The site of struggle must thus turn pedagogical and fully develop the notion that capitalism is no alternative, CINA.\n\n22 May 2014 ~ Hans G Despain, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books"", ""David Blacker makes a powerful case that in the present phase of capitalism, our rulers are abandoning the previous era’s principle of universal education\n\nDavid J. Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame (Zero Books 2014), 308pp.\n\nIf you have ever suspected that Michael Gove and flesh-eating zombies have something in common, David Blacker’s new study of neoliberalism supplies a plausible explanation. He suggests they are both symptoms of a decaying capitalist system that is now locked into a terminal doom loop. Gove personifies an ideological tendency within the ruling class that is determined to commodify and privatise any aspect of the public sector that is not nailed down. Popular culture’s obsession with zombies represents a subliminal anxiety within the elite about how to cope with the ever-expanding hordes of downtrodden and dispossessed who are the victims of this reactionary crusade (p.194). These are only two of a wide-ranging and subversive set of observations by the author that collectively provide a radical and compelling critique of current social policy in the US and Europe.\n\nBlacker’s specific focus is on education in the Western states but his contextualisation also includes hard-hitting analyses of political economy, environmental degradation and socialist strategy. The book is written in an erudite but witty style that leaves the reader with the clear and distinct impression that the next few decades will decide the fate of the human race. Blacker ominously warns us that the current global hegemony of the capitalist order presents most of our species with a grim choice: ‘we are subject to the harsh survivalist disjunction - we will have to kill it before it kills us’ (p.19).\n\nBlacker’s assessment of our ability to come out on the other side of this impending crisis is ultimately a negative one but he does not rule out the possibility of an undefined ‘existential event’ (p.13) delivering the promise of global liberation. His pessimism could have the effect of disabling an activist response to the challenges of our era, but it also serves as a useful antidote to the unthinking optimism that has sometimes blighted the rhetoric of the left in previous eras. Blacker provides a salutary warning that we may not have experienced the worst that capitalism can throw at us: ‘they could lead us down into something backwardly atavistic like neo-feudalism or something new or worse’ (p.58). His synthesis of political micro-analysis with millennial macro-analysis represents an innovative attempt to construct what he describes as a ‘Marxist eschatology’ (p.16).\n\nThe latter term is traditionally associated with theological discussions about the nature of the end of the world; the biblical Book of Revelations being the best known example in the West. Blacker contends that the current economic crisis of the system, originating with the crash of 2008, means the term can now usefully be appropriated for Marxist analysis. The potential apocalypse in this context refers not to supernatural intervention but to the operation of the laws of motion of economic development. The title alludes to Marx’s classical explanation of capitalist crisis as being rooted in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF). Blacker recognises that this theory is not universally accepted even within the ranks of contemporary Marxist economists but his advocacy of it is grounded on the basis of probability: ‘I will content myself with a weaker and more defensible claim than is advanced by some of the theory’s proponents: the TPRF matters and if it is not the reason capitalism is morphing into the death spiral neoliberal phase, it is surely a reason’ (p.24).\n\nBlacker provides an admirably lucid exposition of the TRPF (p.63). In Capital, Marx theorises that profit is rooted in the surplus value created in the process of production by the labour of the working class. The bourgeoisie constantly aspire to intensify the productivity of labour by investment in labour-saving technology, which, together with raw materials, forms constant capital as Marx terms it. The consequently increasing rates of productivity mean that correspondingly less labour - or variable capital (wages) - is required by the system.\n\nMarx’s core concept of the labour theory of value argues that only variable capital can generate value. Hence there exists a long-term tendency within capitalism for declining surplus value to be produced as a ratio of the total investment by the bourgeois class; the organic composition of capital is steadily rising, as Marx expresses it. As there is less surplus value being created it follows that the rate of profit must fall. Contrary to some of Marx’s critics, Blacker stresses that this pioneering formulation in no way contains a guarantee of the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system: ‘As Marx explains in the original articulation of the TPRF, massive counter forces such as monopolization may keep the gravitational downward pull on profits at bay almost indefinitely’ (p.76).\n\nThe author further contends that the neoliberal project that has been initiated by the global capitalist class since the 1980s represents one of these countervailing strategies that can off-set the TRPF, potentially indefinitely. Blacker identifies four key components of this project: deploying globalisation as a means of undermining public sectors in the Northern hemisphere and slashing working conditions in the South; encouraging credit bubbles to delude ordinary citizens into thinking they have a stake in the system; promoting the financialisation of Western economies as a means of avoiding the rising organic composition; and fourthly, deploying military force against any regimes that might wish to defy this global order (pp.26-7). Blacker is dismissive of the liberal remedy that regulation of greedy individuals would be sufficient to curtail the excesses of neoliberalism. As he puts it, ‘decrying such individuals would be, as they say, like handing out speeding tickets at the Indianapolis 500. They speed because they have to’ (p.27).\n\nThe penetration of this ideology into global political practice has resulted in the implicit adoption by elites of what Blacker calls ‘eliminationism’ (p.103). This neologism has been devised by some Holocaust scholars to define the attitude of the Nazi leadership to European Jewry in World War Two. Initially, the policy of the Third Reich was for the intensive exploitation of Jewish labour, but as the pressure of a militarised economy grew after 1939, the agenda was escalated towards physical extermination. This may seem to be a hyperbolic framework for analysing education policy in the twenty-first century but Blacker spells out the comparison. We are now in a situation ‘in which elites no longer find it necessary to utilize mass schooling as a first link in the long chain of the process of the extraction of workers’ surplus labour value. It has instead become easier for them to cut their losses and abandon public schooling altogether’ (p.103).\n\nAs an American academic, Blacker identifies this agenda as the basis for the massive problem of student debt in that country. The US ruling class have arrived at the conclusion that educated and skilled graduates are surplus to requirements in the neoliberal phase of capitalism. Globalisation means that sector of the workforce can increasingly be supplied from overseas on a cheaper basis; and by saddling American students with crippling personal debt, the public funding of higher education can be shrunk significantly.\n\nBlacker notes that in 2012, US student debt was over $1 trillion, which was more than the total for credit card debt. He grimly states: ‘There is almost no escape from this iron cage that has been carefully refined by our banking overlords and puppet politicians ... a system of government-backed mass peonage, a kind of debt bondage with copious historical analogs’ (p.132). Having already alluded to the Nazi ‘endgame’, Blacker is here inviting us to draw a comparison between the predicament of students in the US today and another notorious example of state terror: slavery in the antebellum South. Half-jokingly, he posits that some form of Lincoln-style military occupation might be the only method of ending this economic bondage: ‘In the name of the UN, perhaps it is time for the blue helmets to roll in and to cordon off our universities … before they sell off still more unsuspecting 18-year olds into lives of unremitting debt bondage’ (p.133).\n\nBlacker’s focus is on the US but his highlighting of this dimension of higher education applies with equal force to the UK. The two major British political parties have both abandoned the postwar principle of free university tuition and as result students here find themselves saddled with debt of up to £9000 per year. The notion that this does not act as a deterrent to a sixteen-year-old considering higher education is ludicrous but is now the standard mantra of Gove and his ilk. An even more egregious example of this commodification of the system that Blacker could have referred to is the growing trend of students appealing to ‘sugar daddies’ to fund their study. The potential for exploitation in these cases does not need to be spelt out.\n\nThe marketisation that is well underway in the American and British school sectors is also explored by Blacker. Teachers have become wearily accustomed to relentless pressure from above to pursue quantitative targets and conform to centralised orthodoxies of classroom practice. Both aspects of this neoliberal agenda are disguised as drives to raise standards but, in fact, have the combined effect of undermining the enjoyment of education, both for pupils and teachers.\n\nBlacker makes a powerful argument for the notion that this phase of capitalism has abandoned the principle of universal education that was a cornerstone of its previous incarnation. He notes how the dynamics of capitalist development in the West from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth required the cultivation of a workforce educated to a high level. This contextualisation of educational policy in the framework of wider socio-economic factors is one of the strengths of Blacker’s approach. As he puts it in a striking image: ‘schools are still an integral organ within capitalism’s respiratory system, rising and falling in rhythm with their encompassing chest cavity’ (p.192).\n\nHe persuasively argues that as the system has now entered a new era of crisis it is rejecting its previous commitment to what in Britain was known as the comprehensive ideal. The ruling class now no longer needs a significant layer of educated professionals with a commitment to the public sector ethos. In the period after World War Two, that was necessary in order to reconstruct devastated social and economic structures. Blacker baldly states that the neoliberal version of capitalism also definitely no longer desires the working class to be encouraged to raise their expectations: ‘what capitalism gave, capitalism also hath taken away. Just as the era of universal schooling began with massive changes in the plate tectonics of capitalism, it is now beginning to recede in accord with further changes within those same tectonics’ (p.199). Gove's recent suggestions that writing lines, picking up litter and mopping floors be restored as appropriate school punishments would seem to indicate Blacker is right to detect this new mind-set among the elite.\n\nAs a critique of education policy in contemporary capitalist states, Blacker’s analysis is powerful and stimulating. But there is a serious problem with his proposals to avert the impending calamity -fundamentally, that he doesn’t have any! The only strategy he can offer is that the forces of anti-capitalist resistance adopt a mentality that he describes as ‘Marxist fatalism’ (p.232). This amounts to little more than modest altruism within our personal and workplace groupings: ‘just try your best to be kind and at least to not be an asshole’ (p.229). This is not without merit as an ethical injunction, especially as we are frequently surrounded by individuals who are apparently incapable of understanding it. But as a means of averting the slide towards the apocalypse it is pitifully inadequate.\n\nEven worse than this tepid quietism, Blacker dismisses the notion that educators can play any role in the transformative wave of opposition he clearly wishes to see: ‘education activism does not matter and is a waste of time’ (p.223). The author has usefully reminded us of the constraints capitalism places on the education process but he underestimates the ability of teachers and students to spark significant resistance within the current system. The student protests in the UK in 2010, the Chicago teachers’ strike of 2012, and the role of NUT activists in the UK this year are just the most recent examples of the ability of committed sections of the left to go far beyond Blacker’s ‘compartmentalized pessimism’ (p.245) and fight for an ‘existential event’, or what we might less euphemistically call ‘the revolution’.\n\nTags:Economic CrisisEducationFalling Rate Of ProfitGoveMarketisationNeoliberalismNUTRuling Class\n\n- See more at: http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/book-reviews/17232-the-falling-rate-of-learning-and-the-neoliberal-endgame?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page=#sthash.tYeAMb6R.dpuf ~ Sean Ledwith, counterfire.org"", ""Extractive Institutions\n\nDavid Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame\n\nZero Books, 319pp, £15.99, ISBN 9781780995786\n\nreviewed by Calum Watt\n\nLast November saw the coalition government privatise almost £900 million of student debt. The debt comprised loans taken out during the 1990s, and so represents only a small portion of the total value of student loans. This total is estimated at £40 billion, all of which the government has indicated it plans to sell off. If you think this is just another innocuous step in the government’s project of ‘reducing the deficit’, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame may be the book to disabuse you of the idea.\n\nDavid J. Blacker is a philosopher of education whose thesis goes far beyond the regular complaint that universities and schools are becoming increasingly marketised. Marketisation is a plain fact, as anyone who has recently written a funding application will be aware. But by taking a broadly Marxist view, Blacker forecasts a longer-term and much more pernicious change. It is not merely that we are seeing a change in the understanding of the purpose of education (that education is becoming increasingly transactional, that students consider themselves as consumers and their courses as commodities), but that the very possibility of education is changing.\n\nThe book’s title refers to the concept that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall, a mainstay in Marxist economics. Marx’s abstract economic point is not, however, the main issue here: what Blacker calls the falling rate of learning is the political logic whereby when there is less need for labour (due to the globalised labour market, technological change and overpopulation), there is correspondingly less need for education. As a result, public educational institutions become subject to the same privatisation as other former public assets, such as healthcare, prisons and the post office. They become ‘extractive institutions’, a term that Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson coined in their 2012 bestseller Why Nations Fail, and defined as institutions which ‘extract income and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset’ — that different subset typically being shareholders and the wealthy elite. Privatisation is not, as its proponents like to claim, about competition or value for money.\n\nWhere does that leave students? The example of student loans in Britain gives an ominous indication of just exactly where. The government claims that repayment terms will not be retrospectively altered by the private companies buying the debt, but given that the recent history of higher education reform has consisted of a series of U-turns and broken promises one would be wise to treat this with scepticism, if not outright incredulity. For how else can the debt possibly be profitable to these companies? Blacker offers a dystopian vision of ‘a new era of debt servitude, even serfdom, where the very future possibilities of the young become existential carrion for the insatiably gluttonous financialised “vulture” capitals’. In a classic Master-Slave reversal, it is less that you own your education than that it owns you. Blacker concludes that ‘the young stare down the barrel of a neo-feudal future that looks, at best, bleak and disheartening.’\n\nAnd it gets worse. According to Blacker, our historical moment is one in which the bulk of the population is no longer regarded as a resource to be exploited through labour (bad as that might have been), but as a surplus to be disposed of. This is perhaps the most contentious aspect of Blacker’s thesis: the notion of ‘educational eliminationism’. Appropriating the latter word from the work of Holocaust scholars such as Daniel Goldhagen, Blacker provocatively compares the ‘moral structure’ in which neoliberalism effectively writes off swathes of the young as surplus to contemporary capitalist requirement (and therefore not worth investing in) to the Nazi policy following the Wannsee Conference of 1942, in which Jews were no longer to be exploited as slaves before being murdered in concentration camps, but simply subjected to the most direct extermination possible. This kind of rhetoric — which is typical of the book as a whole — may seem extreme and offensive, but its purpose is precisely to be alarming and to challenge the narrative which the author believes too many have accepted at face value — that austerity is necessary, that we are all in it together, and so on. The point of this particular analogy, it is stressed, is not that the youth are going to be eradicated — that would be obscene — but that they have been effectively written off vis-à-vis the ruling class. Blacker would doubtless consider the Conservatives’ plans to deny housing benefit to unemployed under-25s, at a time of record youth unemployment, as exemplary of the ideological construction of the young as disposable.\n\nIn many ways this is the kind of work a rightwing commentator who doesn’t read Marxist books might imagine a Marxist book to be — hyperbolic, denunciatory, apocalyptic. In fact, Blacker’s heavily fatalistic tone is what distinguishes The Falling Rate of Learning from even the more extreme contemporary leftist critiques. The ‘endgame’ of the title really is intended to suggest that neoliberalism is driving the world to terminal ruin — neoliberalism is a ‘thanatology’, and with regard to it we are collectively in a life or death situation. The book is nominally a work on the state of education in the Western world, but a recurring argument is that the damage being done to the environment is such that soon there might not be a world left. The problem is the result of systemic properties of the global neoliberal operation and, barring an unlikely overthrow of capitalism, looks irreversible.\n\nBlacker’s Marx is one ‘tempered with the Dantean ability to counsel despair’. The process is too far gone and there is little — to bring us back to universities — that academics can do to stop it; as he slightly disarmingly puts it, ‘education activism does not matter and is a waste of time’. His analogy is with prisons: prison guards may have the potential to achieve minor changes, but not the systemic overhaul required. Education is fated to go down in this way and efforts are better directed outside institutions — as the author says, ‘better an unofficial blog or an occupy protest than a speech at a faculty meeting or a petition to an administrator’. This is all to say that what is missing from the sloganeering of the anti-capitalist left is a dose of stoicism. The thought of Seneca, rather than of any Marxist, is invoked in the final chapter of the book. While something unexpected and game-changing may come about, we had best prepare for the coming storm and salvage what we can.\n\nBlacker is a professor at the University of Delaware and his book speaks primarily to the American experience. If you want to read a more conservative critical account of marketisation within the context of British universities, I recommend Stefan Collini’s recent essay in the London Review of Books (‘Sold Out’, 24 October 2013). But given that our education system seems to be heading in a similar direction to that of the US — and Blacker’s references to the ‘increasingly Gradgrindian UK’ are not reassuring — The Falling Rate of Learning ought to be read as a warning of things to come.\n\nBuy this book from Blackwell's.\n\nCalum Watt is a PhD researcher with the department of film studies at King's College London. ~ Calum Watt, Review31"", ""School’s Out\n\nDavid J. Blacker: The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame. Zero Books £15.99.\n\nRemember Tony Blair and his ‘Education, education, education’? That was how he set out his priorities in 1997, supposedly as a way of improving people’s lives and also making British capitalism more efficient and competitive. But with the recession leading to cuts to education budgets, things have not quite worked out that way.\n\nDavid Blacker’s title is a nod to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the view that, as technological progress continues, the proportion of constant capital (machines, buildings, etc) to variable capital (paid out in wages) will rise – see www.worldsocialism.org/articles/introduction_to_marxian_economics2.php. But as it is only labour that produces surplus value and so profit, it follows that the rate of profit (profit as a proportion of total capital) will fall. However, there are so many counteracting forces that this is at most a tendency. One consequence of technological progress, though, is a reduced demand for labour power, including educated labour power. Hence, according to Blacker, not just increases in unemployment and part-time jobs but ‘an abandonment of the ideal of the universal distribution of education’, or ‘the falling rate of learning’.\n\nHis book has a mainly US focus but the general points are more widely applicable. One response has been to see education as itself a source of profit, with widespread privatisation. Another has been to transfer much of the cost of higher education to students/workers themselves, by means of loans and debt. US student debt is now well over $1 trillion, and debts pursue many workers throughout their lives, since (unlike with credit cards) education debt is not discharged by personal bankruptcy. But if attending college and being weighed down by debt is an unpleasant prospect, not gaining a degree is even worse, as it can lead at best to a minimum-wage job (‘the fear of McDonalds’).\n\nBlacker classes medical bills together with educational loans as ‘existential debt’, which can haunt people for decades. They should, he suggests, be a focus for protest, part of a campaign for free higher state education. At the same time, though, he argues that educational activism is a waste of time, on the grounds that reforming schools will not usher in serious social and political reforms. It is certainly true that schools and colleges essentially reflect the society around them, and that it is only a revolution in the way society is organised that will lead to proper changes in the function and content of education.\n\nPB\n\n~ PB, Socialist Standard"", ""Intellectual Affairs\n\nForgive Us Our Debts\n\nFebruary 5, 2014\n\nBy\n\nScott McLemee\n\nTwo great models of eloquence in the English language are The Book of Common Prayer and the translation of the Bible usually called the King James Version. A memorable passage that appears in both volumes crossed my mind while thinking about a couple of recent works of social criticism. (It also happens that Princeton University Press recently brought out The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography by Alan Jacobs, a professor of humanities at Baylor University, which a couple of readers have highly recommended.)\n\nThe text in question appears a couple of times in the New Testament as part of what's usually called \""the Lord's Prayer.\"" The Book of Common Prayer, the older of the two volumes, renders one line of the prayer as \""Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.\"" The KJV rendering says, \""Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.\""\n\nTo my ear, \""trespasses\"" works better rhythmically, and it expresses the notion of \""sin\"" or \""offense\"" in a slightly more elegant manner. By contrast, \""debt\"" or \""debtor\"" expresses the same thought in a blunt and harsh way, and even conjures the old cartoon image of St. Peter recording good and evil deeds in a big ledger at the gates of heaven. Puzzled by the contrast, I consulted an extremely literal translation by J.N. Darby -- a Victorian Biblical scholar of uncompromising severity -- who suggests that \""debt\"" is indeed what the original text says.\n\nAround the time Darby was working on his translation, Friedrich Nietzsche fleshed out an argument about the interrelationship among guilt, debt, and memory. Bringing up an atheist philosopher pretty well guarantees someone is now offended. But The Genealogy of Morals spells out in bleak and somewhat lurid terms a point left implicit in the prayer: The debtor is at the mercy of the creditor, who has the right (or at least the power) to inflict suffering -- even bloody revenge -- when payment is not made.\n\nWhatever else it may signify, the brutal connotations of \""debt\"" make forgiveness sound much more demanding and consequential than \""trespass\"" would imply. (Awkward recollection: Learning the prayer as a little kid, I pictured God being unhappy that people were ignoring a sign on His lawn.)\n\nHomo economicus never spent all that much time on moral accounting. But at least the old bourgeois virtues included restraint and a residual belief that self-interest was justified insofar as it served a larger good. The issues that concern Andrew Ross in his new book Creditocracy (discussed in last week's column) unfold in a world where debt itself is a kind of demigod, answerable to no higher power of any kind -- and certainly not to the state.\n\nAs the example of credit-default swaps on subprime mortgages in the go-go '00s made clear, the alchemists of finance are able to create profitable investment opportunities out of the risk (i.e., the degree of likelihood) of non-repayment -- making possible the creation of enormous fortunes from loans that cannot be repaid, at least not in full. That is but one link in a complex chain of debt-creation. Should the speculative bubble burst, the job of preventing economic meltdown falls to the government (which already has its own deficits, of course) at whatever risk to allocations for education, infrastructure, etc.\n\nAdd to it an average household debt that, Ross notes, grew from 43 percent of gross domestic product in 1980 to 97 percent in 2008 -- across three decades of stagnating wages. Throughout that period, 60 percent of income gains went to the country's wealthiest 1 percent -- a trend that changed dramatically when the economic crisis hit. Since then, 95 percent of income gains have gone to that debt-creating (if not job-creating) sliver.\n\nDavid J. Blacker, a professor of philosophy of education and legal studies at the University of Delaware, characterizes the situation with a simple image in The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame (Zero Books):\n\n\""Imagine a casino in which you play with the house money and if you win you get to keep all the winnings to yourself, whereas if you lose, the house covers your bets. The literally astronomical public sums required to continue this arrangement for the minutest percentage of the population is the proximal cause of the squeeze on public resources. Schoolchildren, the poor, the sick, the disabled, the elderly etc., must all sacrifice so elites no longer have to undergo the risks that are officially supposed to be inherent in their role as fearless capitalist risk-takers. ...\"" But genuine competition and risk are reserved \""for small businesses and other little people like private and public sector employees.\""\n\nRoss responds to the debt-driven status quo by challenging a whole series of moral reflexes that have traditionally accompanied debt: the feelings of obligation and culpability, of shame and implied weakness, that the prayer rendered in the King James translation take as a given. When access to socially necessary goods (particularly higher education) is restricted or undermined by an economy making debt all but inescapable for countless people, someone ought to feel guilty when students default on their loans -- just not the students themselves. The next step is to call for large-scale fiscal disobedience: a social movement of millions of people pledging to default on their student loans. On the far side of that and other radical confrontations with the debt machine, Ross conceives the possibility of morally sound, humanely responsible systems of finance, based on communitarian social forms. Not utopia, perhaps, but a long way from here.\n\nMassive default is a strategy I find it easier to admire, or at least to daydream about, than to recommend. It is not impossible that a million people might make such a pledge. Carrying out the action is another matter -- and if only a fraction see it through, the result is bound to be martyrdom of an uninspiring and ineffectual kind. In any case, I have no student debt to default on in solidarity, and calling for others to do so would be a case of telling them, \""Let's you and him go fight.\""\n\nLike Creditocracy, David Blacker's book was written in the wake of Occupy Wall Street. But where Ross occasionally sounds like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon -- with his vision of a mutualist society of small producers, exchanging goods and services with a new form of money that doesn't promote inequality -- Blacker thinks along much more classically Marxist lines. The predatory forms of financial speculation that led to the crisis five years ago will not be regulated out of existence, nor are they deviations or tumors growing on a fundamentally healthy economy. The casino will keep rewarding the high rollers when they win and shaking the rest of society down when they lose. Such investment in manufacture as continues to be made will need workers with skills and the capacity to adapt to technological developments -- but ever fewer of them.\n\nMost of the population will be an object for social control, rather than Schooling proper. At some level most of us sense this already, making the whole notion of \""education as investment in the future\"" an ever more problematic principle. Blacker has written probably the gloomiest book I have read in years, but in some ways it seems like a practical one. He is not a survivalist. He thinks pedagogy still has a role, provided it's geared to understanding the dire probabilities and finding ways to respond to them. It helps that Blacker is a sharp and forceful writer, giving his analysis something of the vividness and urgency of an Old Testament prophet delivering warnings that nobody really wants to hear.\n\nRead more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/02/05/essay-creditocracy-andrew-ross-and-falling-rate-learning-and-neoliberal-endgame#ixzz32utquVsL\n\nInside Higher Ed ~ Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed"", ""The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame\n\nby David Blacker\n\nZero Books\n\n4.5 stars\n\nJames Ash\n\nIt's been a bad few decades for the reputation of Karl Marx, but according to US philosopher David Blacker, the free-market cheerleaders who applauded the death of communism spoke too soon. In this book, he argues that capitalism is now in its death throes and that Marx saw this coming all along. But Blacker says no-one should get too exultant about this, because capitalism's \""murder-suicide\"" is likely to take civilisation down with it.\n\nThe author is no Marxist, but he credits Marx with identifying capitalism's Achilles' heel: the long-term tendency for profits to decline. This forces it to mutate constantly, into forms sometimes catastrophic for society, as in its latest incarnation, neoliberalism.\n\nAs Blacker argues in this brilliant, searing broadside, neoliberalism's toxic mix of austerity, offshoring, financialisation, debt and inequality fell flat on its face in 2008, but refused to stay down. It continues on, zombie-like, as \""an all-out assault on anything in the system that might still have a little exchange value, a little liquidity with which to releverage. One might term this the 'searching under the couch cushions for loose change' phase of late capitalism\"".\n\nOne of these sofa cushions is the mass educational system. Publicly funded, it is a tempting target for systematic looting under the aegis of \""privatisation\"". Even worse for the educational system, capitalism no longer needs it. Per Blacker, mass education only exists because it served big business in the industrial era: an economy that made things needed lots of (minimally) educated workers to run the machines. But those days are gone.\n\nTurning Marx on his head, he argues that the only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited - to be surplus to its requirements. This is already the fate of billions in the \""long-ago enclosed and dispossessed global South\"", and one that will be shared by most of the next generation in the rich countries. Blacker argues that in the merciless logic of neoliberalism, this surplus population doesn't need traditional education. Public \""schools\"" will probably continue to exist, but they will resemble minimum-security prisons - that is, if post-industrial civilisation survives at all.\n\nHe foresees some combination of climate change, peak energy and debt-fuelled financial collapse leading to a complete breakdown, and a subsequent \""reshuffle of the deck\"". Whatever follows may be an improvement for the survivors, or it may not, Blacker writes - but this sort of catastrophic change is more plausible than anything envisioned by the Occupy movement, however much he applauds its spirit. ~ James Ash, South China Morning Post"", ""The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, by David J. Blacker\n\n6 FEBRUARY 2014\n\nGerald Taylor Aiken concurs with a call to protect higher education as a universal and public good\n\n“Neoliberalism of the academy”: in the UK, this ubiquitous phrase takes in the multimillion-pound student loan book sell-off, the introduction of £9,000-a-year tuition fees, the silencing of student dissent on campus, the research excellence framework and the research assessment exercise, citation indexes and even the increasing focus on graduate employability. Here, US academic David Blacker charts what neoliberalism means for education, arguing that its chief impact lies not in the restructuring of the economic conditions for universities, but in its drive to eliminate education as a universal and public good. This argument is drawn by analogy from Karl Marx’s “tendency of the rate of profit to fall”, essentially the way that capitalism, through the longue durée of technological innovation, investment and productivity gains, begins to bleed profits.\n\nBlacker has in his sights the confusing of education with financial investment – by either individuals or society – in the gaining of skills demanded by the job market. Countries desire a labour force with training in literacy, numeracy and IT – and need science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates in particular – in order to compete globally. Yet there are now fewer jobs going, and poorer ones at that – less fulfilling, less well paid, more insecure – which disproves the Clintonian lie that if they work hard and play by the rules, graduates will “get on”. The austerity marketplace seeks graduates with a wholly different set of skills than the Keynesian one but, crucially, it also wants fewer of them.\n\nThis, then, is the falling rate of learning. The usefulness for industry of universal public education, emerging hand-in-glove with industrial society and enfranchisement from the late 18th century, has gone. The rewards for state and business of cutting back on such education provision, in an age of austerity, are overwhelmingly appealing – hence Blacker’s characterisation of the neoliberal endgame for education.\n\nIts Marxist perspective means the book offers a structuralist reading of the changes that education is undergoing in the Western world. Blacker allows room for the committed, innovative educator (as you, reader, will no doubt be), capable of motivating students, transforming life chances and inspiring a lifelong love of learning. Yet he sees the landscape shifting to one in which elites are raising the drawbridge (financially if not literally) on funding for public education. He draws out three areas where this occurs: eye-watering levels of student debt, curbs on freedom of speech and the increasing differentiation in formerly universal education provision. Although the book is written from an American perspective and draws on US examples, many British analogies will be apparent.\n\nThis is a punchy, polemical book and good knockabout stuff, excoriating the individual culpability of greedy bankers and, in our sector, the CEO-style university leaders awarded inflation-busting pay rises. Blacker gleefully calls for the jailing of bankers for criminality, but the merit in his argument lies in its far deeper analysis of the “ailing production process”. For all the moral probity on university committees, for all the radical transformative pedagogy taught in lecture and seminar rooms, there remain structural economic and ideological forces directing the play from behind the scenes. Blacker calls our universities the “cold impersonal system”, the “machine”. This is a book that is not only unsparing but a rousing call to arms. It could be a vital tool in understanding the processes under way in UK higher education, namely those that Stefan Collini recently accused of turning “first-rate universities into third-rate companies”.\n\nThe Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame\n\nBy David J. Blacker\n\nZero Books, 319pp, £15.99 and £6.99\n\nISBN 9781780995786 and 5793 (e-book)\n\nPublished 13 December 2013 ~ Gerald Taylor Aiken, Times Higher Education"", ""Feature and author interview on THE FALLING RATE OF LEARNING AND THE NEOLIBERAL ENDGAME\n\n[n.b.: 1K FB shares, 400 twitter mentions in 24 hrs.; rising in amazon bestseller lists in many categories, e.g., #2 in Democracy]\n\nCapitalism vs. education: Why our free-market obsession is wrecking the future\n\nMarket-based education reform has become a mainstay of American politics — and it's a disaster waiting to happen\n\nJune 8, 2014\n\nby Eric Levitz\n\nThe 2014 State of the Union address was billed as the speech in which President Obama would finally reveal himself as the progressive champion we'd been promised. In the weeks prior, senior administration officials leaked word that the president would use his platform to declare income inequality the \""defining challenge of our time,\"" a claim he’d first made two years prior, in a highly touted speech news came that the phrase \""income inequality\"" had been scrapped from subsequent drafts, replaced by an emphasis on ladders of opportunity.\n\nIn Osawatomie, the president decried runaway inequality as a threat to the legitimacy of American democracy. In the State of the Union, he paid lip service to the divergent fortunes of \""those at the top\"" and of average wage earners, before transitioning into boilerplate calls for improving education and cutting taxes on domestic manufacturers. As the \""ladders\"" metaphor suggests, the speech framed the crisis facing the vaunted middle class as one of economic mobility, rather than inequality. The word \""inequality\"" was spoken only three times, \""opportunity,\"" thirteen.\n\nEven in Osawatomie, after describing in bracing detail how automation and globalization devalued American labor, producing an economy where weak demand is propped up by credit card debt, the president transitioned from diagnosis to prescription. Not with a call for robust income redistribution, or a proposal for aggressive government hiring, but by declaring, \""We need to meet the moment. . . . It starts by making education a national mission.\""\n\nThe point here is less to criticize the Obama administration's timidity than to illustrate the incredible onus our politics places on education. We have an economy in which 46.5 million Americans live in poverty, the real unemployment rate is above 12 percent, and our 400 wealthiest citizens enjoy as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the population. But a political system designed for gridlock, the grossly disproportionate influence of the rich, and Americans' ideological aversion to class politics conspire to make it politically inadvisable for a Democratic president to even speak the words \""income inequality\"" before a national audience. Absent the political will to explore redistributive structural reforms, we’re left with \""ladders of opportunity,\"" and a vision of economic salvation through higher test scores.\n\nWriting in Salon last month, Matt Bruenig illustrated the inadequacy of education as a remedy for inequality by looking at the market poverty rate in Finland, a nation whose students' math and science proficiency is among the highest in the world. Were education reform in the United States shaped by liberal utopian principles instead of corporate ones, Finland would be its model. The Finns' education system is radically egalitarian, with free college and no private schools. Standardized testing is limited, and teachers enjoy significant pedagogical freedom. Yet the only thing keeping Finland's market poverty rate from exceeding that of the United States is a redistributive system financed by a tax level twice as high as our own.\n\nIn his new book, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, philosophy of education professor David Blacker takes Bruenig's pessimism several steps further. In Blacker's vision, the economy's dysfunction renders systemic improvements in education not merely inadequate, but impossible. He argues that the form and quality of public education is so dependent on macroeconomic forces that education reform is \""at best a mirage that diverts oppositional energies.\"" To Blacker, it's no coincidence that universal public education became a reality in the Western world at the same time that industrialization created the demand for an expansive, educated workforce.\n\nNow, as automation and globalization renders whole swaths of the American labor force useless to capital, Blacker sees the economic system transitioning from a mode of exploitation to one of \""elimination.\"" [emphasis added] From the perspective of capital, an ever-increasing portion of the population is no longer seen as a resource to be cultivated, but as a risk to be contained. He sees this \""eliminationist\"" logic driving disinvestment from public higher education, impatience with student speech and activism, and the charter movement's push toward school privatization.\n\nHis book advises activists to adopt an attitude of fatalism. In his narrative, hope is found in the fact that even neoliberal capitalism is helplessly constrained by a system larger than itself, namely that of the environment. The task for the left then, is to prepare, psychologically and experimentally, for inevitable collapse.\n\nSalon spoke recently with Blacker about his new book, and the problem with America’s approach to education and inequality. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.\n\nYou write that education reform is \""at best a mirage that diverts oppositional energies.\"" Why do you believe education reform is a poor target for activists, and where do you believe oppositional energy should be directed?\n\nThe primary target of my critique was large-scale educational reform, the systemic movement. The goals of which, my heart is with: unionization, desegregation, inclusion. But I think my conception of fatalism is that the institution of education is so deeply, structurally tied to a certain trajectory of capitalism that it's not amenable to structural reforms. So that's where my pessimism comes from. I think that that kind of mainstream liberal activism, at best, has the effect of softening blows that are almost inevitably coming.\n\nThere's a little bit of nuance in experiments like the Waldorf Schools, places like Summerhills in England, the free schooling movement and so on. I don't mean to tar those efforts with the same brush, because I see those as little oppositional islands of truly alternative practices. But I wouldn't be enthusiastic about Waldorf Schools on the assumption that we can make the whole primary education system in the United States Waldorfian. I think that's delusional. On the other hand, I find those experiments very valuable and well worth everybody's efforts. I think there will be great value in having those smaller-scale experiments around, as potential models in a post-crisis or post-catastrophic situation. They're for the hereafter.\n\nYour book is titled The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame. Can you explain what you believe the neoliberal endgame is, and how it relates to the controversial Marxist notion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall?\n\nWell, basically, I think the way the economy has developed, productivity having been increased and augmented largely through technological development, including automation, has brought about what I call in the book \""eliminationism.\"" I think we find that because of those productivity increases, fewer and fewer workers are actually needed. Human labor is simply less and less part of the equation.\n\nNow, after the economic crisis of 2008, when I looked around and tried to find what seemed to be the best explanation for what had happened, I thought Marx's argument of \""The tendency of the rate of profit to fall\"" was a really interesting, important argument. It's very contentious. Mainstream economists don't accept it at all, most Marxists don't accept it. But still in its basic outlines, as long as you don't look at it in an overly constrained way, I think it's a really important part of what's going on.\n\nCapitalist firms don't exist just to make stuff. They exist to make a profit. Marx's Labor Theory of Value assumes that profit comes from the difference between what workers are paid and the value they actually produce. That's the profit the capitalist takes and either spends or reinvests. So that's labor value, that's why we get paid.\n\nGiven the assumption of the labor theory of value, the profit-producing sliver of enterprises is the human labor part of those enterprises, and as technological advances in production take place, that human labor element starts to get replaced on a large scale. And in many respects, from the point of view of an individual firm, that’s not a big problem. In fact, they can reap gigantic profits in the short term with such developments. But in the long run, in the ensemble, we look at entire sectors of the economy, and for example see how costs lower and you start not making money any more from producing, say, DVD players. When we look at the economy as a whole, as it becomes more and more automated, and the production process comes to rely less and less on that human labor component, by hypothesis, the profitability will decrease.\n\nI don't think it necessarily always shows up very well in terms of official measures of corporate profitability. Those profits, I think, can be propped up by any number of means. A lot of my analysis is trying to explain those means. Marx called them counter forces. To me, it's about this gravitational force pulling down profitability, that gives rise to all these counter forces, and these counter forces can be even more powerful than the original force they were opposing. They can win for a long time. Globalization, financialization, the debt machine, this ensemble of counter forces that together constitute \""Neoliberalism.\"" And corporate profits can look great under those conditions, but I always feel like there's an analogy with gravity:\n\nSo someone says, well, wait a minute, that airplane over there, it just took off, so where's your theory of gravity now, smarty pants? The plane took off. It defeated gravity, so therefore there's no gravity. Well, no. It just means the plane has sufficient counter forces to overcome that gravity. But any explanation of flight trajectory and the energy requirements of the airplane are going to involve gravity and understanding how it works.\n\nAnd if you look at various charts of profitiability since World War II, there's jagged curves and there's ups and downs, but on the whole, it seems like profits from actually making stuff, competitive capitalism, and that old style of making stuff and selling stuff for a profit? Profits in those areas seem to be down. The big money is in finance. It's not in making and selling stuff.\n\nGiven that picture, I think we're entering a new phase in terms of labor needs.\n\nBack in the 19th century, when capitalism was gearing up with factory-style production, we had what I call the \""all hands on deck\"" phase of capitalism: Okay, immigrants, get 'em in here. Gather up the world's people for the factories. The more people whose labor you can exploit, the more profits you can squeeze out of them, the more capital you can accrue. And that's the era precisely, and I don't think it's a coincidence, that's the era where we experienced the birth of universal public education.\n\nWhat decade do you tie that to?\n\nIn the United States, it was the 19th century. Universal primary education was complete in this country around the middle of the 19th century, and then universal secondary came in around the turn of the 20th century. And interestingly enough, the beginning of universal public education came in Massachusetts, which was also where factory production started, in the early 19th century.\n\nAnd there was idealism; it's not a simple reductionist picture. There are theories of democracy that contributed. But by and large, I think the real driving engine was the needs of production. It was a certain expansive phase, with a great imperative towards value-addedness, like literacy. And so, that expansive phase is almost what we came to take for granted. We erected visions of progress that would keep on going forever. We got the idea that education is always about inclusion and expansion and bringing more people in. And we had civil rights, racial desegregation, the disabilities movement, Title IX with gender equality. Over the generations, we got this picture of universal education as an unstoppable progressive force. And to me, I feel like we're now witnessing the frightening spectre of a tectonic shift, where things are starting to contract because of the reduced need for human labor.\n\nThere's an institutional lag time, but I think that change in the needs of capital is bound to have effects, and unfortunately fairly dramatic effects, on the project of universal public education. And so we're seeing austerity, we're seeing an increasing willingness to place the burden of that education, especially in higher ed, on individuals. As witnessed, and symptomatized by student debt.\n\nIn that context, then, how do you understand the movement toward charter schools?\n\nI think the logic there is a kind of marketization logic. It's an ideal of privatization which I think is ultimately tied to. . . I think privatization is the twin of austerity. Austerity being withdrawal of public commitment and public expenditure. I see those things as hand in hand, and they are symptomatic, from my point of view, of this decrease in commitment to that project of universal public education. Because the market logic sort of implies that education is this contingent matter for individuals. It's less of a social good. It's less of something we ought to worry about collectively, and more a commodity that individuals need to seize or take advantage of on their own. Invest in yourself. Or parents, invest in your children. [emphasis added]\n\nI don't want to promote a kind of \""good old days\"" picture here, but in the 19th century around the time of, say, land-grant colleges, we had robust agricultural expansion offices being set up. So, say I'm a farmer in Indiana somewhere, and I have these five young kids coming from the local college showing me some new agricultural technique having do to with fertilizer. And it increases my productivity and teaches me something worthwhile. It's very easy for me to feel like, well hey, it does make sense for me to pay property taxes to support that stuff, because it comes back to me. It's easier for me to buy into the idea that we as a society are actually better off if we augment the level of education of everyone.\n\nIt's easy for me to see that I'm tied into that project. But once the state starts withdrawing from that commitment, it becomes much easier for that Indiana farmer to see education as just a personal investment in his or her own kids. And if it's a personal investment, why should I have to pay for it? It's not a social good that's shared in any way. It's like placing a bet on the stock market. In this case it's the educational market; to the victor go the spoils. So I see charters and school choice as extensions of that basic logic. That education should be made much more a matter of personal choice, and the large-scale effect is that the rest of us, collectively as a society, we don't really have a shared interest, we just have our own isolated interest in it.\n\nThe effect is this vast funneling of public money into private money. The profitability is lower in traditional capital modes, so it's a good time to start looting erstwhile public institutions. In the book I call it the \""searching under the couch cushions for loose change\"" phase of capitalism.\n\nAn obvious rebuttal to your argument about eliminationism in education would be that federal funding for public education has actually increased over the last decade. President Obama has been championing universal pre-K. Here in New York, Mayor de Blasio is working to implement public pre-K services. Do you see those facts as products of institutional lag time, or how do you integrate them into your vision?\n\nThe way I would integrate it, I wouldn't conflate public expenditure on schooling with increased commitment to education. So, for example, in cities and other places, my argument is not that schools are going to dry up and blow away, that we will stop having things called schools. In fact, we might have quite well-funded places called \""schools.\"" Prisons are more expensive than schools. So I think even though the things are called schools, they’re internal nature is moving further away from citizenship goals, forget learning for its own sake. Those institutions, their level of funding may even increase. To do surveillance and warehousing. . . maintenance of a school-to-prison pipeline can be quite expensive. So I wouldn't see an increase in funding of school systems and school employees and school buildings as any particular cause for optimism.\n\nNear the end of your book you write, \""my recommendation is to prepare for catastrophe.\"" Do you believe that catastrophe is a necessary precondition for our economic order to be reformed?\n\nI think so. I think it's gotta get worse before it gets better. A lot of people don't like to hear that because it sounds defeatist. But I guess I really don't see it that way. I think a certain type of fatalism actually is the only thing that gives me optimism.\n\nSo, an analogy that I think may help clarify the existential attitude here is, if, let's say a blizzard is bearing down on my home, and I think: I need to do whatever I can to thwart the blizzard from coming. I need to stop it. I guess it would involve intervening with the weather. At a certain point, you realize it's just going happen. And to me, a mode of preparation: battening down the hatches, boarding up the windows, getting the candles and the flashlights, filling up the bathtub with water… a preparatory attitude that accepts the inevitability of the blizzard is actually a more \""activist,\"" sensible action or stance to take.\n\nOne thing that strikes me with that analogy, though, is that we have enough foreknowledge from previous blizzards to have a pretty good idea what being prepared for a blizzard entails. We can't say the same about the collapse of the global economy.\n\nI think you're absolutely right. So the analogy breaks down a little bit there. It's hard to create a preparedness pamphlet for something that's never happened. But I'd say there are still things we can do. There's value in small-scale social experiments.\n\nAn example would be something like permaculture, in terms of organics or agriculture. It's not that Monsanto and the entire U.S. is going to turn to permaculture. But it's really valuable that we have it around in pockets that have developed experience and expertise. So that's one thing I think I would put in the preparatory toolkit. As much of those small-scale alternative experiments as possible. And I also wouldn't minimize the value of psychological preparedness. History shows, I'm thinking of things like the economic collapse of the Soviet Union in the late '80s early '90s, where the currency collapsed, the economy wasn't functioning for a period of time… What actually killed most people there were not directly food shortages, water shortages, shelter shortages, those sorts of things. It was more psychological problems, having to do with alcoholism and suicide. People just aren't psychologically prepared at all for the possibility of this level of disruption.\n\nOne solution to the crisis created by increased productivity through automation would be to redistribute the abundance created by that productivity, without any labor requirement. You refer to this possibility, somewhat dismissively, as a \""redistributive techno-utopia.\"" However, the idea of a Universal Basic Income has been gaining traction, at least amongst those paid to pontificate on economic matters. And in our history, it seems that there have been moments in which elites have made concessions to the broader public out of enlightened self-interest.\n\nLike the New Deal era, for example?\n\nAnd so you would credit that period of reform to the catastrophe of the Great Depression?\n\nYeah. I think so. It's somewhat a case and point. And what's useful there is to actually have a program ready to go. I want a forthrightly opportunistic sort of mindset. Sort of a Naomi Klein Shock Doctrine. The right is really great at Shock Doctrine, and maybe a little left-wing version of it would be salutary here. Again, it's a preparatory mode. Ready with the tools that are going to make sense, not for now, not for tinkering with the status quo, but actually ready to make a difference in those moments when change really happens, in moments of acute economic crisis and war.\n\nAnd that’s one of the scary things: War is one of the traditional reset mechanisms for capitalism. A means of restarting the value-creation machine. And so I actually think one very traditional mode of activism that is actually quite radical and appropriate is anti-war, anti-imperialism activism. For example with Syria, I think there was a real desire to intervene in Syria that was thwarted by whatever vestiges of public opinion still matter. And if that kind of war solution for destruction of capital is prevented, if that isn't an option, then I think that could help create the conditions for the kind of cataclysmic change that I think is needed to force the hand of the system economically.\n\nWhat would you say to the argument that catastrophe, historically, is more conducive to reactionary or regressive kinds of change? And that it’s actually times of abundance and prosperity in which the left has been most successful, when people, particularly the young, feel enough economic security to spend time contemplating and fighting for political alternatives, as arguably happened in the 1960s?\n\nI think I actually agree a lot on that. It's really naïve to think, okay, cataclysm… economic, or climatic. . . . I think it could come from many different directions, unfortunately. I sort of sardonically refer to them as the “three horsemen of the apocalypse:” economic crisis, climate change, or energy depletion, any one of which could generate something pretty wrenching. But I agree that it's naïve to think we'll have a wrenching social cataclysm and out of it will pop permacultural, agrarian, leftist communism or something like that. In fact, I would say if I had to place a cold-eyed bet? In this country, I'd put my money on fascism. [emphasis added]\n\nBut to me that provides further fuel for the argument of a preparatory mode. A certain type of survivalism is warranted. Not a survivalism of canned goods, stockpiled weapons and buried gold. But an intelligent survivalism, where you realize what's really key are certain bonds of neighborhood. The face-to-face solidarity that can be fostered in an urban space. Traditions of mutual aid that can be developed and enhanced.\n\nBut it's true, you can’t root for a catastrophe. There's too much human misery involved. And ultimately, it's a bit like Russian roulette. There’s an element of contingency that can't be wished away.\n\nMore Commentaries\n\n~ Eric Levitz, Salon.com"", ""While it is no surprise that casino capitalism is in crisis and is spurring protests all over the world, few theorists connect the dots and analyze how this crisis moves through and is affected by a range of institutions. David Blacker has written a superb book in which matters of education, agency, economic justice and collective struggle come alive in both a language of critique and possibility. There will be no endgame to neoliberalism without critically thinking subjects who fight back collectively. This is the book that should be read to create the formative culture that makes such a struggle possible. ~ Henry A. Giroux, author, America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth, Professor of Communication Studies, McMaster University"", ""David Blacker provides a mordantly clear-eyed assessment of our predicament. He asks hard questions, in the tradition of our best gadflies, and reveals even harder truths, doing us and our 'democracy' (such as it is) a great potential service. Read rightly, Blacker's book, far from making you want to bury your head in the sand even deeper, will inspire you to shake yourself out of your slumber and do your part to arrest this pernicious development. We ignore his important work at our own peril. ~ Christopher Phillips, author, Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy, Senior Writing Fellow, University of Pennsylvania"", ""Invigorating pessimism. ~ Mark Fisher, author, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London"", ""David Blacker’s book should be required reading for everyone marching circles in schools and universities. ~ Douglas Lain, author, Billy Moon: 1968 and host of the Diet Soap Podcast"", ""The notion that widespread educational attainment is the key to widespread prosperity has long been a pillar of the dominant ideology. David Blacker’s central—and centrally important—insight is that the Great Recession has made this notion (which was always dubious) hopelessly anachronistic. When so many people have become superfluous to the capitalist system--mass joblessness persists four years after the recession officially ended--what have also become superfluous are these people’s skills, the schools that educate them, and the spending that funds the schools. And a capitalism mired in crisis just isn’t a capitalism that can afford to pay for what it doesn’t need. But isn’t this only a temporary situation? Drawing on Karl Marx’s falling-rate-of-profit theory and his associated theory of relative surplus (superfluous) population, Blacker warns that it may well be permanent and he urges us to face this prospect soberly and respond accordingly. ~ Andrew Kliman, author, The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession, Professor of Economics, Pace University""]" Famous for Fifteen People,"[""John William Daniel Robinson""]",The life and songs of singer/songwriter Momus during his time at Creation records and beyond.,"The life and songs of singer-songwriter Momus during his time at Creation records and beyond. Momus - the stage name of musician Nicholas Currie - is one of the most prolific and talented indie songwriters of the last forty years. His work is controversial, influential and highly regarded. From aspiring indie pop star of the 1980s to Japanese chart success in the 1990s through many experimental works to the present day, he has been a constant in the search for intelligent, thinking person's pop. Jarvis Cocker asked him to produce his band Pulp, the NME memorably awarded his album ""Hippopotamomus"" 0/10, Creation Records dropped him when he proved too dangerous for them, and his more controversial work led to astounding legal tussles. His personal life has involved scandal and heartbreak and he lost an eye following an infection, resulting in his distinctive eye-patch. His songs including ""The Hairstyle of the Devil"", ""The Guitar Lesson"" and ""I Want You but I Don't Need You"" are acclaimed and have been covered by artists including Amanda Palmer and Steven Wilson.","The life and songs of singer-songwriter Momus during his time at Creation records and beyond. Momus - the stage name of musician Nicholas Currie - is one of the most prolific and talented indie songwriters of the last forty years. His work is controversial, influential and highly regarded. From aspiring indie pop star of the 1980s to Japanese chart success in the 1990s through many experimental works to the present day, he has been a constant in the search for intelligent, thinking person's pop. Jarvis Cocker asked him to produce his band Pulp, the NME memorably awarded his album ""Hippopotamomus"" 0/10, Creation Records dropped him when he proved too dangerous for them, and his more controversial work led to astounding legal tussles. His personal life has involved scandal and heartbreak and he lost an eye following an infection, resulting in his distinctive eye-patch. His songs including ""The Hairstyle of the Devil"", ""The Guitar Lesson"" and ""I Want You but I Don't Need You"" are acclaimed and have been covered by artists including Amanda Palmer and Steven Wilson.",7,"[""Rating 5*. Vital! Truly superb writings on the early works of Momus. This is not only insightful and intelligent but it is also occasionally very funny too. Consider this line in the chapter relating to ‘the poison boyfriend’ and specifically the track ’closer to you’: “it’s Barry White, if Barry White had read a lot of french literature and spent time staring at girls on the tube”. Priceless! Momus is more than worthy of such a career analysis. I’m hoping there is a second volume which might promote greater interest in his later work which, being honest, is less accessible but equally deserving. Best music book this year! ~ Stephen Lloyd - Vine Voice, Amazon UK"", ""Rating 5*. The essential guide. An excellent vade mecum. Terrific guide to the incredibly talented Momus and his songs from 1982-95 making you hungry for Volume 2. This book is not hagiography but an honest and personal take on the meanings and references in the lyrics. Highly recommend if you’re a fan, or as an introduction. ~ JDQ, Amazon UK"", ""Everything goes in cycles: during the 2010s I contributed regularly to Chris O'Leary's Bowiesongs blog, and expressed a vague wish that one day somebody might make a similar study of Momus. Well, that's what John Robinson is doing, with an extraordinary vigour and thoroughness, in his blog Fifteen People. So far he's only halfway through the prolific Momus discography, but I'm amazed at the quality of his work: it's teaching me things even I didn't know, or had forgotten! It's also surprisingly funny. 2020 is a bit of a milestone year for Momus: my record about COVID-19, Vivid, is released in July, on the same day as Farrar, Straus & Giroux publish Niche: A Memoir in Pastiche, my autobiography. All this is kindling interest in my work as it's developed through four decades. It would be great to think there was something following, a solid, comprehensive and entertaining account of my songs by someone other than me. Called — oh, I don't know — Famous For Fifteen People: The Songs of Momus, by John Robinson. ~ Nicholas Currie (Momus), Momus (Nicholas Currie) is a singer/songwriter with over 30 studio albums, and author of numerous novels and cultural writings, including his recent memoir Niche (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)"", ""Momus is a unique and important artist. Fifteen People puts his body of work into context in time and related to the surrounding culture. It is insightful, provokes re-listening and conversation about the work. ~ Duglas T.Stewart, Singer, Songwriter, Producer, Scriptwriter and Leader of the band BMX Bandits"", ""I have spent basically my entire life listening to Momus records and thought I knew everything, but reading John Robinson’s Fifteen People has made me realize just how much more there is to know and how fascinating and delightful it is to learn it. This is a deep dive into a seemingly never-ending series of brilliant works, written about through astonishing research and heartfelt panache. Not only for Momus fans. ~ Jacob Wren, Jacob Wren makes exhibitions, literature, and performances as co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART. His books include Polyamorous Love Song (Book*hug, 2014)"", ""Fifteen People is a mandatory guide to the ludic world of Momus. Here be an encyclopaedia of entertaining explications, decodings of manic referentiality, the hard evidence of the Scottish artist’s continued pertinence after more than forty years of creation… ~ John Quin, Author of ‘Dr Quin, Medicine Man’ (Biteback, 2020). Writing about art, books and music for more than twenty years for publications including ArtReview, frieze, The Quietus, Tagesspiegel, The Wire)"", ""Fifteen People puts a microscope to a titanic talent. ~ Anthony Reynolds, Musician, journalist and writer, leader of the bands Jack and Jacques""]" Farewell to Democracy?,"[""Jack Luzkow""]","If you think you are living in an era of post-truth, you likely are. Farewell to Democracy? shows us what happens when we speak truth to power. It details the strength of mass protest. It pulls back the veil on post-truth.","If you think you are living in an era of post-truth, you likely are. If something sounds like magical thinking, it is. Nationalism makes no country great; it often leads to war, genocide, terror, destroyed economies and the turning of cities into rubble. Technology will not get us to paradise. It has made us more unequal than ever, polluted democracy, heightened job risk (displacement), created ever more billionaires, continued the rapid pace of the destruction of the planet, and transformed us from citizens into consumers, often with our active support. The free market is not free; too often it isn’t even a market (because we live in an age of monopoly). The road to serfdom is paved by demagogues, not the state; the state and its institutions are all we have. Trust expertise. Truth does not come from he who shouts the loudest. You are approaching a one-party-state when facts are relativized, science is denied, experts are mocked and threatened, alternative facts are embraced, minorities are criminalized, and lying is normalized. Farewell to Democracy? reminds us that we have been here before. It tells us that we can avoid a repetition of the past, but we must first know what that past was (and is). Farewell to Democracy? insists that nothing is inevitable. That we are not powerless. That we have institutions to help protect us, which we must protect in turn. It shows us what happens when we speak truth to power. It details the strength of mass protest. It pulls back the veil on Post-Truth. It urges all of us to bear witness and to ""show up.""","If you think you are living in an era of post-truth, you likely are. If something sounds like magical thinking, it is. Nationalism makes no country great; it often leads to war, genocide, terror, destroyed economies and the turning of cities into rubble. Technology will not get us to paradise. It has made us more unequal than ever, polluted democracy, heightened job risk (displacement), created ever more billionaires, continued the rapid pace of the destruction of the planet, and transformed us from citizens into consumers, often with our active support. The free market is not free; too often it isn’t even a market (because we live in an age of monopoly). The road to serfdom is paved by demagogues, not the state; the state and its institutions are all we have. Trust expertise. Truth does not come from he who shouts the loudest. You are approaching a one-party-state when facts are relativized, science is denied, experts are mocked and threatened, alternative facts are embraced, minorities are criminalized, and lying is normalized. Farewell to Democracy? reminds us that we have been here before. It tells us that we can avoid a repetition of the past, but we must first know what that past was (and is). Farewell to Democracy? insists that nothing is inevitable. That we are not powerless. That we have institutions to help protect us, which we must protect in turn. It shows us what happens when we speak truth to power. It details the strength of mass protest. It pulls back the veil on Post-Truth. It urges all of us to bear witness and to ""show up.""",1,"[""......It’s a little book (only a hundred pages) but it has a big message: that in the twenty-first century we are facing threats similar to the totalitarianism that emerged in the twentieth century. Luzkow writes from a US standpoint, but his book has relevance worldwide, raising as it does issues and questions of vital importance to every citizen. Positioned on the political left, he naturally sees the threats posed in the opposite quarter, but one has to say that they are as much present today on the left as on the right.......\n\nhttps://geoffjward.medium.com/democracy-in-decline-too-late-to-save-it-86d42e791a6b ~ Geoff Ward, Medium.com""]" Fear Before the Fall,"[""Alexander Herbert""]","Having initially been considered bourgeois, horror films emerged only under late socialism as the country underwent widespread social, cultural, and economic changes. In this book, Alexander Herbert examines those changes through the various fears and anx","Alienation, generational tensions, rampant nationalism and the pervasiveness of atomic danger are all topics that haunted late Soviet citizens, and those fears are reflected in the films meant to represent their horror genre. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, production of horror movies from independent filmmakers and Hollywood skyrocketed. It was a time of intense Cold War conflict and a resurgence of conservative ideals. It’s not difficult to imagine that the ascent of horror occurred in conjunction with an increasingly scary and alienated world, and horror reflected those freights in the form of nuclear holocausts, toxic waste pollution, alien clown invaders and undead houseguests. Everyone was at risk - teenagers especially - because their present and future remained most uncertain. If we can agree that such feelings underpinned American viewers in the age of Reagan and neo-liberalism, then what about late socialism? How did film makers depict Soviet society’s fears?","Alienation, generational tensions, rampant nationalism and the pervasiveness of atomic danger are all topics that haunted late Soviet citizens, and those fears are reflected in the films meant to represent their horror genre. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, production of horror movies from independent filmmakers and Hollywood skyrocketed. It was a time of intense Cold War conflict and a resurgence of conservative ideals. It’s not difficult to imagine that the ascent of horror occurred in conjunction with an increasingly scary and alienated world, and horror reflected those freights in the form of nuclear holocausts, toxic waste pollution, alien clown invaders and undead houseguests. Everyone was at risk - teenagers especially - because their present and future remained most uncertain. If we can agree that such feelings underpinned American viewers in the age of Reagan and neo-liberalism, then what about late socialism? How did film makers depict Soviet society’s fears?",4,"[""Us in the ‘west’ have heard all kinds of stories about what life was like within the Soviet Union; usually stories that paint it as an awful place thanks to residual anti-Soviet propaganda and hate, so we’ve probably either never thought about their film industry, or assumed that it was all government-made pro-communist propaganda. To actually see a well researched and well presented breakdown of what it was like was not only incredibly interesting, but hugely informative.\n\nFear Before The Fall might be something of a niche read, but it’s one that will appeal to a lot of readers if given the chance. ~ Amy Walker, Set the Tape"", ""Herbert’s book makes a decisive contribution to the history of horror cinema. His exploration of Soviet cinema offers us a new window into the dynamism of filmmaking in the Soviet Union. Horror is at its most alive when it responds to, and grows in, the social and material anxieties of a given historical moment. Herbert’s work proves this was just as real for the struggles and fears of building an alternative to capitalism. This book won’t just be for those drawn to the dark side of cinema, but for anyone who wants to know more about how horror blossoms wherever cultural and material conditions are tested….\n\n~ Ashley Darrow and Jon Greenway, Horror Vanguard"", ""If horror movies reflect the fears of society, what can be learned from the way the ghostly and the ghastly were represented in Soviet cinema, and is there room for a Marxist critique of the macabre? In this innovative book, Alexander Herbert introduces films both famous and less well-known and explores their context and what they can say about the changing attitudes and anxieties of their times.\n\n~ Mark Galeotti, University College London"", ""From the author's first kiss to his reading of Pelevin, this book contextualises some of the weirdest Russian films for the Western viewer. If horrors look different depending on where you are, their variety does help to understand yourself and the world. ~ Alexander Etkind, European University Institute, Florence""]" Fear of Music (2nd Edition),"[""David Stubbs""]",An examination of why modern art can be easier to appreciate than modern music.,"Modern art is a mass phenomenon. Conceptual artists like Damien Hirst enjoy celebrity status. Works by 20th century abstract artists like Mark Rothko are selling for record breaking sums, while the millions commanded by works by Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon make headline news. However, while the general public has no trouble embracing avant garde and experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant garde and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under similar circumstances - and despite the fact that from Schoenberg and Kandinsky onwards, musicians and artists have made repeated efforts to establish a ""synaesthesia"" between their two media. Fear of Music examines the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and examines why one is embraced and understood and the other ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment, as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated by, and listened to by the inexplicably crazed. It draws on interviews and often highly amusing anecdotal evidence in order to find answers to the question: Why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen?","Modern art is a mass phenomenon. Conceptual artists like Damien Hirst enjoy celebrity status. Works by 20th century abstract artists like Mark Rothko are selling for record breaking sums, while the millions commanded by works by Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon make headline news. However, while the general public has no trouble embracing avant garde and experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant garde and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under similar circumstances - and despite the fact that from Schoenberg and Kandinsky onwards, musicians and artists have made repeated efforts to establish a ""synaesthesia"" between their two media. Fear of Music examines the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and examines why one is embraced and understood and the other ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment, as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated by, and listened to by the inexplicably crazed. It draws on interviews and often highly amusing anecdotal evidence in order to find answers to the question: Why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen?",1,"[""Praise for the 1st edition of this title released in 2009: The title belies the fact that the main thrust of the content is a parallel history of contemporary art and music with a conclusion that attempts to answer the question inherent in the title, but, of course, fails. That's not a criticism as the content is informative and thought provoking and there never was going to be a clear answer. The author crams in a great deal in this short space and does it with an intense, evocative style, not difficult to read and absorb. If you are interested in contemporary music, particularly the kind that challenges the norm, this will prove to be a good investment. ~ Bill Anderton, www.newentorchestra.org/reviews""]" Feminism's Founding Fathers,"[""Kaevan Gazdar""]",The first book to tell the untold story of the male pioneers and fellow-travellers of Women's Lib.,"Why have so many remarkable men fought for women's rights, often risking their careers and ruining their health? Who were these men, what were their backgrounds, above all: what kind of relationships did they have with women? Finally, if there have been so many deviations from the male-oppressor/female-victim cliché, doesn't this stereotype need to be relativized or indeed rejected? Feminism's Founding Fathers is the first book to tell the untold story of the ""traitors"" to the men's cause - the pioneers and fellow-travellers of female emancipation. It challenges accepted wisdom and reveals the vital role that men have played in making Women's Lib happen.","Why have so many remarkable men fought for women's rights, often risking their careers and ruining their health? Who were these men, what were their backgrounds, above all: what kind of relationships did they have with women? Finally, if there have been so many deviations from the male-oppressor/female-victim cliché, doesn't this stereotype need to be relativized or indeed rejected? Feminism's Founding Fathers is the first book to tell the untold story of the ""traitors"" to the men's cause - the pioneers and fellow-travellers of female emancipation. It challenges accepted wisdom and reveals the vital role that men have played in making Women's Lib happen.",1,"[""This book gave me a whole new perspective about the history of the feminist movement. I hope that a lot of men read this book, and see why everyone (not just women) need feminism.\n\n~ Justine Kraemer, Librarian, NetGalley""]" "Film, Nihilism and the Restoration of Belief","[""Darren Ambrose""]",This book explores the possibility that cinema can challenge our contemporary nihilism and restore belief in new transformative possibilities for life.,"Despite the clichés which govern much of its current forms, the cinema continues to have a vital political and aesthetic significance. Our commitment to, and our sincerity towards, our ways of being in the world have become catastrophically eroded. Nihilism and despair have taken hold. We must find a way to renew our faith in our capacity to transform the world, a faith that will give us back the reality of a world eroded by the restrictive capitalist ontology of modernity. How can we restore belief in the reality of a world when scepticism and universal pessimism have taken hold? Is it possible to find alternative ways of living, being and thinking? This book will discuss the means by which some filmmakers have grasped the vocation of resisting and transforming the present, of cultivating new forms of belief in the world when total alienation seems inevitable.","Despite the clichés which govern much of its current forms, the cinema continues to have a vital political and aesthetic significance. Our commitment to, and our sincerity towards, our ways of being in the world have become catastrophically eroded. Nihilism and despair have taken hold. We must find a way to renew our faith in our capacity to transform the world, a faith that will give us back the reality of a world eroded by the restrictive capitalist ontology of modernity. How can we restore belief in the reality of a world when scepticism and universal pessimism have taken hold? Is it possible to find alternative ways of living, being and thinking? This book will discuss the means by which some filmmakers have grasped the vocation of resisting and transforming the present, of cultivating new forms of belief in the world when total alienation seems inevitable.",1,"[""‘In our time of economic misery, war and conflict, and general lethargy, it has been easy for nihilism and discontent to become widespread. To lose faith in humanity has become acceptable within our society. However, the culture of alienation is reaching a tipping point, we must begin to think, act and enact towards a different objective, if we are to begin to dig ourselves out of a very deep hole. Darren Ambrose’s book offers us some consolation. If film can offer us a transformative experience, that changes our personal perception, then can we use it to create changes in a larger context? Film, Nihilism and the Restoration of Belief is perhaps one of the most original and important books in the subject of cinema and its effects on our collective conscience.” ~ Stephen Lee Naish, Author of U.ESS.AY: Politics and Humanity in American Film""]" Fire Hides Everywhere,"[""Julian Feeld""]","Technology failed, most died. On an abandoned farm in the middle of France, an old man cares for a group of survivors: all children. Then he suffers a stroke, which comes to end their world for a second time.","Fire Hides Everywhere is a speculative fiction novel exploring a question central to identity: do we exist beyond our subject positions? Following an apocalypse in which all except those just born or about to die disappeared, Julian Feeld's novel sets out to explore the eternal Buddhist question: ""Who is born? Who dies?"" As the young are left to define their 'selves' untethered, an old man begins to enlist them as placeholders for those no longer present. When he suffers a violent stroke and loses his capacities as a caregiver, he continues to operate structurally in the lives of the young people left to fend for themselves, begging the question: do structures live on beyond the lives of those inhabiting them?","Fire Hides Everywhere is a speculative fiction novel exploring a question central to identity: do we exist beyond our subject positions? Following an apocalypse in which all except those just born or about to die disappeared, Julian Feeld's novel sets out to explore the eternal Buddhist question: ""Who is born? Who dies?"" As the young are left to define their 'selves' untethered, an old man begins to enlist them as placeholders for those no longer present. When he suffers a violent stroke and loses his capacities as a caregiver, he continues to operate structurally in the lives of the young people left to fend for themselves, begging the question: do structures live on beyond the lives of those inhabiting them?",2,"[""A rich, haunting and haunted, fever dream of a novel. ~ Tom Lutz, novelist and editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books"", ""Fire Hides Everywhere is gripping fiction by way of fascinating literary experimentation. Instead of simply dramatizing existing ideas on the subject, it defies subjectivity itself. ~ Alfie Bown, writer and editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong Review of Books""]" Flatline Constructs,"[""Mark Fisher""]",Mark Fisher's doctoral thesis - a metaphysics of cybernetic realism's anti-representation - more than a blur between between fiction and reality.,"Completed in 1999 during his time with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Mark Fisher’s PhD thesis, Flatline Constructs, invents a fusion of culture, critique, and radical philosophy that would define his signature style from Capitalist Realism to Acid Communism. Drawing on sources from David Cronenberg to Gilles Deleuze and William Gibson, Fisher presents a Gothic vision of cyberpunk reality, in which Man and media are drawn ever closer together, and life and death are never truly far apart.","Completed in 1999 during his time with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Mark Fisher’s PhD thesis, Flatline Constructs, invents a fusion of culture, critique, and radical philosophy that would define his signature style from Capitalist Realism to Acid Communism. Drawing on sources from David Cronenberg to Gilles Deleuze and William Gibson, Fisher presents a Gothic vision of cyberpunk reality, in which Man and media are drawn ever closer together, and life and death are never truly far apart.",2,"[""Flatline Constructs is Mark Fisher’s piercing précis of the metaphysics of cybernetics, whose herald is Spinoza. Fisher’s ‘gothic flatline’ annuls the difference between fiction and reality, obliterating representation with circuitry, the mirror with the screen, and law with code. If Flatline Constructs’ principal tropes — machinic animism and agency without subjectivity — have become theoretical commonplaces in the 25 years since its composition, its publication now retrospectively illuminates the political debility of a cybernetic realism that snuffs out every alternative to the present. Flatline Constructs diagnoses the paralyzing predicament which Fisher’s subsequent work would struggle to overcome. ~ Ray Brassier, British philosopher and author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction"", ""Among many other things, Mark Fisher was one of the most gifted prose writers of his generation. His early death deprived us of an unknowable number of unsettling new ideas. Flatline Constructs, originally Fisher's doctoral thesis at Warwick University, is a precious gift from the other world, where he now resides. ~ Graham Harman, American philosopher and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles""]" Folk Opposition,"[""Alex Niven""]",From Ridley Scott to Raoul Moat: why the left must recapture the imagination of the British folk populace.,"For David Cameron and Big Society Tories, folk culture means organic food, nu-folk pop music, and pastoral myths of Englishness. Meanwhile, postmodern liberal culture teaches us that talking about a singular folk is reductive at best, neo-fascist at worst. But what is being held in check by this consensus against the possibility of a unified, oppositional, populist identity taking root in modern Britain? Folk Opposition explores a renewed contemporary divide between rulers and ruled, between a powerful elite and a disempowered populace. Using a series of examples, from folk music to football supporters’ trusts, from Raoul Moat to Ridley Scott, it argues that anti-establishment populism remains a powerful force in British culture, and asserts that the left must recapture this cultural territory from the far right as it begins to rebuild democratic representation from the bottom up.","For David Cameron and Big Society Tories, folk culture means organic food, nu-folk pop music, and pastoral myths of Englishness. Meanwhile, postmodern liberal culture teaches us that talking about a singular folk is reductive at best, neo-fascist at worst. But what is being held in check by this consensus against the possibility of a unified, oppositional, populist identity taking root in modern Britain? Folk Opposition explores a renewed contemporary divide between rulers and ruled, between a powerful elite and a disempowered populace. Using a series of examples, from folk music to football supporters’ trusts, from Raoul Moat to Ridley Scott, it argues that anti-establishment populism remains a powerful force in British culture, and asserts that the left must recapture this cultural territory from the far right as it begins to rebuild democratic representation from the bottom up.",11,"[""\""... eminently readable, highly intelligent, and attractively wide-ranging. And the slagging off [of me] is well justified.\""\n\n~ Terry Eagleton, Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the Universities of Lancaster and Notre Dame"", ""\""While an invaluable new contribution to the progressive patriotism debate, Alex Nivens Folk Opposition not only has a brilliant title (there must be a 2012 T-shirt idea in that??) but also provides a much needed critique of the cosily pastoral versions of Englishness that an oppositionalist alternative requires too.\""\n\n~ Mark Perryman, Philosophy Football/Socialist Unity"", ""\""At the heart of Folk Opposition ... is a call for the left to look to folk identity as inspiration for new networks of working class solidarity. It’s an important suggestion, and one that recognises the metropolitan left’s chronic inability to connect with life outside the M25 ... Niven’s book is also a lament for the theft of folk culture – co-opted as it has been by an acutely southern elite ... As Niven says, the lionisation of this painfully upper middle class clique is indicative of the fact that we apparently care neither about the creative industries being dominated by the offensively moneyed, nor about the fact that they are currently amusing themselves by siphoning through the rubble of English heritage in order to find something marketable.\""\n\n~ Josh Hall, The Line of Best Fit"", ""\""... one of 2011s most incisive polemics ... In the broadsheet supplements, the cultural drift towards the homespun and quaint is painted as a politely political riposte to the commercial homogenisation of Britain. Alex Nivens Folk Opposition exposes this attitude as naïve, presenting the current fad for the pastoral, too often conceived of as a miraculous de-alienation of work, as an excuse for failing to attend to complex ideological issues ... [Nivens] writing riles energetically against the fanciful ConDem grand narrative, which assumes that the (apparently inexorably) worsening economic crisis can be weathered so long as we keep faith in Great British Values like, well, unremunerated volunteerism on heritage railways and eating bacon cut from that pig down the road that your children used to believe was Babe.\""\n\n~ Joe Kennedy, The Quietus"", ""\""... a provocative, timely, and moving work ... it seems to avoid the potential risk of merely ratifying defeat as the ground of new forms of struggle, and of the linked danger of simply dismissing the limits of past forms of struggle. It also has the benefit of trying to work through the relation of the empirical working class to the idea of the proletariat (or other political form of left agency), while avoiding condescension and hostility to that actually-existing working class ...\""\n\n~ Benjamin Noys, No Useless Leniency"", ""\""Why do we recoil from the word ‘folk?’ The term’s closeness to Hitler’s ‘Volk’ easily transports us into fear of the uniform crowd. Yet there is another vision it invokes: that of a pastoral idyll, blushing milkmaids and lads with beer tankards, as off-putting as our notion that anyone concerned with ‘folksiness’ is certain to be a cardigan-wearing, vinyl-playing peace-pusher. Alex Niven’s Folk Opposition can be read as an 81-page rebuttal to these knee-jerk reactions by way of careful historicisation and incisive cultural analysis.\""\n\n~ Niki Seth-Smith, Public Policy Research"", ""\""Intellectual Rock Stars and Philosophical Princes of Darkness out to wrest the mantle of More Theoretically-Anti-Humanist-Than-Thou are themselves rather a stale tradition, and the virtue of [Folk Opposition] is that rather than worrying after some transformative subjectivity which will bring about the post-Capitalist transition, its significantly more interesting, and genuinely more Socialist, in its basic humility. Where are interesting things happening? Where and what are the resurgent vestiges of communalism and mutualism and how are these to be supported and encouraged, to what extent should actually existent and emergent practices lead the way rather than a top-down theoretical models that ultimately produce little more than a flurry of intellectually gratifying debate. The books call, effectively, is for intellectualism to be a handmaiden to grassroots movements.\""\n\n~ Carl Neville, The Impostume"", ""\""... this book seems to potentially touch upon something that has interested me for some time. A reawakening of mass solidarity that the papers and ruling elite have been so successfully preoccupied with destroying for years upon years, a force which looks like becoming increasingly weaker as communities come together as a dominant power outside of the propaganda machines that have been so effective in making us all despise each other for decades.\""\n\n~ David Lichfield, charity worker, Newton Aycliffe"", ""\""There is a better future and Alex Niven draws inspiration from the past to show us how to get there. David Cameron's wrong, we're not all in this together. But most of us could be.\""\n\n~ Kevin Maguire, New Statesman / Daily Mirror"", ""\""A fascinating and knowledgeable writer who accurately dissects the cultural tensions and uncertainties that define his generation and mine.\""\n\n~ Robin Carmody, Sea Songs"", ""\""Perfect timing and spot on. It's a relief to have such a worthy and passionate advocate for the north who sees through the 'apocalypse of shit' (to quote La Grande Bouffe) we've been deluged with for so long.\""\n\n~ Tom Pickard, Poet""]" For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists,"[""Robert T. Tally Jr.""]","Facing an uncertain future and an unstable present, our most urgent task today involves a ruthless critique of all that exists.","For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists takes as its point of departure two profound and interrelated phenomena. The first is the pervasive sense of what Mark Fisher had called “capitalist realism"", in which (to cite the famous expression variously attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek) it is easier to imagine the end of the world than then end of capitalism. As Jameson in particular has noted, “perhaps this is due to some weakness in our imaginations,” and the attenuation of the imaginative function in cultural criticism has far-reaching implications for the organization and reformation of institutions more generally. This manifests itself as a waning of speculative or theoretical energy, which in turn leads to a general capitulation to the tyranny of “what is,” the actually existing state of affairs, and the preemptive disavowal of alternative possibilities. Connected to this is the second phenomenon: the prevalent tendency in literary and cultural criticism over the past 30 or more years to eschew critical theory and even critique itself, while championing approaches to cultural study that emphasize surface reading, thin description, ordinary language philosophy, object-oriented ontology, and post-critique. Together these forms of anticritical and antitheoretical criticism have constituted a tendency that has in its various incarnations come to dominate the humanities and other areas of higher education in recent years. The latter has served to reinforce the former, and the result has been to align literary and cultural criticism with the broad-based forces of neoliberalism whose influence has so deleteriously transformed not only higher education but the whole of society at large. Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that, in order to counter these trends and empower the imagination, the time is ripe for “a ruthless critique of all that exists,” to borrow a phrase from the young Marx. This book is intended as a provocation, at once a polemic and a call to action for cultural critics.","For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists takes as its point of departure two profound and interrelated phenomena. The first is the pervasive sense of what Mark Fisher had called “capitalist realism"", in which (to cite the famous expression variously attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek) it is easier to imagine the end of the world than then end of capitalism. As Jameson in particular has noted, “perhaps this is due to some weakness in our imaginations,” and the attenuation of the imaginative function in cultural criticism has far-reaching implications for the organization and reformation of institutions more generally. This manifests itself as a waning of speculative or theoretical energy, which in turn leads to a general capitulation to the tyranny of “what is,” the actually existing state of affairs, and the preemptive disavowal of alternative possibilities. Connected to this is the second phenomenon: the prevalent tendency in literary and cultural criticism over the past 30 or more years to eschew critical theory and even critique itself, while championing approaches to cultural study that emphasize surface reading, thin description, ordinary language philosophy, object-oriented ontology, and post-critique. Together these forms of anticritical and antitheoretical criticism have constituted a tendency that has in its various incarnations come to dominate the humanities and other areas of higher education in recent years. The latter has served to reinforce the former, and the result has been to align literary and cultural criticism with the broad-based forces of neoliberalism whose influence has so deleteriously transformed not only higher education but the whole of society at large. Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that, in order to counter these trends and empower the imagination, the time is ripe for “a ruthless critique of all that exists,” to borrow a phrase from the young Marx. This book is intended as a provocation, at once a polemic and a call to action for cultural critics.",5,"[""Tally’s new book, For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism, is particularly concerned with this question of the conditions of imagination under late capitalism, the ways in which it might be kept alive in the face of market forces that conspire to deaden it.\n\nIf we want to imagine the end of capitalism, and not merely the end of the world, we cannot dispense with the critical reading of literature. ~ Robert Scott, Los Angeles Review of Books"", ""\""An exuberant and erudite take-down of those who think things are pretty much okay, so critique is superfluous. Tally calls out both the logic and the timing of the dog-whistle school of anti-critique, who have done their part to encourage the recent frenzy over Critical Race Theory and other bits of populist anti-intellectualism. But rather than calling its opponents names, this book lays before them a formidably nuanced and eloquent example of critique. We nattering nabobs of negativism have found ourselves a joyous and principled defender.\"" ~ Bruce Robbins, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, is the author of Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction"", ""\""Against the vogue retreat from critique and ecstatic embrace of the immanent, Tally offers a bounding defense of the mutual project of critique and literature to depart from the given world to make better social orders, compellingly insisting on that project’s imaginative quality and its many joys.\"" ~ Anna Kornbluh, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space"", ""\""Over and against the caricature promulgated by 'postcritiquers,' according to which critique is inherently at odds with the literary text, Tally demonstrates how true critique works not only to draw out and complement the utopian dimension of literature—its crucial role in helping us to imagine new and better worlds—but to advance it as well. The result is a far more accurate and robust understanding of critique as a praxis that is fundamentally generative rather than destructive, committed rather than disinterested, joyous rather than dour. For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists so ruthlessly sets the record straight on the continued importance—indeed, the indispensability—of critique that the next time one hears it averred that 'critique has run out of steam,' their immediate reply should be, 'Wait, haven’t you read Tally’s book?!'\"" ~ Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall University, editor (with Slavoj Žižek) of Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism"", ""“Here is a work composed with profundity, conciseness, and brilliance, essential to not only scholars and critics, but us writers, reminding us of the salience of diving intensely into the message and meaning of the stories we create, given the role and necessity of critique, if effectively applied, in making the world a better place.” ~ Sabah Carrim, PhD, author of novels \""Humeirah\"" and \""Semi-Apes,\"" among other writings""]" Frontlines,"[""Nick Meynen""]",Take a journey to the shadowy frontlines of the world's global economy. Nick Meynen reveals powerful stories of the fight for justice and proposes ways out of this mess.,"Every unpacked frontline is one cutting edge of an economic system and political ideology that is destroying life on earth. Revealing our ecosystems to be under a sustained attack, Nick Meynen finds causes for hope in unconventional places. 'In his wide-ranging journalism and writing, Nick Meynen has been vividly mapping struggles for justice around the world. His new book is a rich collection of the human stories of those struggles, from resistance to mining in India and Greece, to land grabbing in Uganda, to a landmark climate lawsuit in the Netherlands. The book harnesses the power of lived experience to bring our most urgent, high-stakes policy debates to life, and it deserves a wide international audience.' Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate","Every unpacked frontline is one cutting edge of an economic system and political ideology that is destroying life on earth. Revealing our ecosystems to be under a sustained attack, Nick Meynen finds causes for hope in unconventional places. 'In his wide-ranging journalism and writing, Nick Meynen has been vividly mapping struggles for justice around the world. His new book is a rich collection of the human stories of those struggles, from resistance to mining in India and Greece, to land grabbing in Uganda, to a landmark climate lawsuit in the Netherlands. The book harnesses the power of lived experience to bring our most urgent, high-stakes policy debates to life, and it deserves a wide international audience.' Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate",12,"[""5 out of 5 stars. I very much enjoyed reading this book, which is easy to read, yet witted and very informative. Nick takes the reader on a journey to talk about human struggles in an economic system and mindset which has failed to respect planetary and social boundaries. In his book, he draws the contours of the frontlines between those who want to continue on a “business as usual” pathway and the people who dare to stand up to power and demand their rights to be respected. Telling truly personal stories as well as navigating many possible solutions to reforming our economic system, Nick reminds us that it is up to each and every one of us to play our role in the fight to achieve the radical changes necessary to save the planet. I highly recommend this book! ~ Valentina Weiskopf, Amazon"", ""Nick unpacks the grand battle between the predatory business and power-laden politics of our Age, and strorifies ordinary person’s pursuit of justice. This is a full-fledged battle between individuals and industry, between communities and lobbyist companies. Nick uses a strong narrative and rhetoric in telling the real-life experience of peasants, farmers, activists, factivists, urban-dwellers, citizen-scientists, certified-scientists, women, men and children that goes under one’s skin. His storytelling brings the burning issue of ecological breakdown and environmental justice to the heart of 21st-century crises. Finding strength in local and regional environmental struggles, Nick finds the resolution in people’s collective choice of a future that is not shaped by economics but socially- and environmentally-sound value systems. The “Frontlines” are not gruesome after all. Nick convinces the reader of the power of multiform unity and solidarity between people around the globe. There is no talk of victims here, but actors, who take initiatives and action against the systems of injustice and predatory capitalism.\n\nNick shares a learned lesson: prosperity is about ecological harmony, democracy and commitment into our relationship with nature – caring for ecological intactness, biodiversity, social cohesion and environmental justice. This, he finds, in the effort of adaptation to the nature. The difference between an adaptation as such and a modern understanding of adaptation to changes is that the holistic, deeper understanding of ecology, where ecological boundaries (supply-side limits) are recognized. With the same logic, Nick problematizes the economic models which exploit the environment based on an unrealistic world-order that is free from power and poor in ecological knowledge and respect/reciprocity. He reminds us of the fact that the global unequal exchange and exploitation is generating material prosperity at one place in exchange for poverty and hunger at another. Good news is that organized citizens and globally-cooperating small groups of earth-defenders are winning more and more cases against the predatory business and environment-damagers. This gives strength to Nick and to many others alike. ~ Burg Gurden, Goodreads"", ""Did you ever want to read a book that digs deeper into the dark areas of our global economy? Than you should definitely read “Frontlines” from Nick Meynen. If you still believe that neoliberalism, free trade and economic growth are the best things of our society, I think you will acknowledge that they go hand in hand with disastrous side effects. The strength of this book, is that Meynen himself went to all places on our planet to see the troubles himself. He tells us in an anecdotal way about the pressure on our ecosystem. Think of pollution of our natural capital (palm oil in the Amazon forest, gold digging in Greece or tar sands and fracking). Why do we send our old ships to Bangladesh, where they dismantle those in bad circumstances? Neoliberalism, capitalism and growth are myths. They aren’t needed, even more, they are undesirable. There are alternatives: a strong state, commons and more sustainable business. If you want to learn more about the back gates of globalism, read this and suggest this book to every (neo)liberal you know, I do it too! Have a lot of fun (not the exact emotion you will get) while reading! Naomi Klein approved! ~ Tycho Van Hauwaert , Goodreads"", ""Everyone concerned with the future of humanity should read this book. This is a true eye-opener full of AHA moments.\n\nNick convinced me to take action right away. After hearing him talk, I started the small local movement \""More trees in Roeselare\"". ~ David Demets, Goodreads"", ""a book everyone should read\n\neyeopener\n\nshows what one CAN do in times of mass economical misconduct ~ Mercedes, Goodreads"", ""Very well written book about a difficult subject. It gives the reader a full spectrum of emotions - from discovering, joy, opening mind, listening to the story, curiosity, through anger, sadness, despair, to motivation, hope and willingness to act.\n\nI totally recommend it. reads well and smooth. ~ Piotr Barczak, Goodreads"", ""Prosperity is about our ability to live well on a finite planet. It’s a task that has as much to do with story and narrative as it does with numbers and policies. Nick Meynen recognizes this essential truth. With the colorful insight of the poet and the dogged persistence of the investigative journalist, he recounts the day-to-day struggles and the extraordinary courage of ordinary people around the world as they engage in the fight for social and environmental justice. ~ Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity without Growth"", ""In his wide-ranging journalism and writing, Nick Meynen has been vividly mapping struggles for justice around the world. His new book is a rich collection of the human stories of those struggles - from resistance to mining in India and Greece, to land grabbing in Uganda, to a landmark climate lawsuit in the Netherlands. The book harnesses the power of lived experience to bring our most urgent, high-stakes policy debates to life, and it deserves a wide international audience. ~ Naomi Klein"", ""Nick Meynen shares the extraordinary knowledge he has acquired in the last ten years on environmental conflicts around the globe, from the commodity extraction to waste disposal frontiers. In a lively style he narrates episodes such as the unpaid environmental liabilities of oil companies in the Amazon and the heroic defense of nature and human livelihoods against the sand mafia in India. ~ Joan Martinez Alier"", ""In Frontlines, Nick Meynen does what we ecological economists and political ecologists often fail to do: communicate our findings in a rigorous but simple language. By reading this book you will learn the same as when reading our academic articles, but instead of falling asleep, you will have fun! - Federico Demaria, environmental scientist, co-editor of Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era ~ Federico Demaria"", ""Nick Meynen's eye-opening journey through some of the worst ecological and social disasters of the world is complemented with something even more urgent today, a chronicle of the inspiring struggles for justice and sustainability that 'ordinary' people are engaging in. This combination of shock and hope is just what is needed to wake up those who are still sleeping through the crises, and inform and inspire those who are awake and responding but may not have the width of vision that such a global tour can provide. ~ Ashish Kothari"", ""One often read in media how we're greening our economy pretty well. But who joins Nick in looking beyond consumerism knows better. He shows systematically how we're plundering the earth's resources, including the livelihoods of communities. If you're still not convinced of the urgent need for system change you need to read this book. (Review translated from Dutch). ~ Dirk Holemans""]" Fucking Law,"[""Victoria Brooks""]",An urgent call for everyone to find inventive ways to question the ethics of sexuality.,"Fucking Law is an urgent call for everyone, not just academics and researchers, to find inventive ways to question the ethics of sexuality. Since a sex life is full of so many diverse moments of joy and suffering, for each and everybody, the book attempts to bridge a gap between philosophical and non-philosophical questioning. Central to the book is the reality that everyone can challenge the ethics and laws of sexuality and ask questions, even where they seem frightening, or worse, even when we are told not to – by institutions and lovers alike. Non-philosophical and accessible, Fucking Law is risky, explicit and provocative as it bridges the gap between academic and every-day questioning of sexual encounters.","Fucking Law is an urgent call for everyone, not just academics and researchers, to find inventive ways to question the ethics of sexuality. Since a sex life is full of so many diverse moments of joy and suffering, for each and everybody, the book attempts to bridge a gap between philosophical and non-philosophical questioning. Central to the book is the reality that everyone can challenge the ethics and laws of sexuality and ask questions, even where they seem frightening, or worse, even when we are told not to – by institutions and lovers alike. Non-philosophical and accessible, Fucking Law is risky, explicit and provocative as it bridges the gap between academic and every-day questioning of sexual encounters.",21,"[""Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Sex is still so taboo in our society, especially when it comes to women and their sexuality. Often women are shamed for not being chaste and vanilla. Brooks opens up a big discussion that needs to be had, from a philosophical POV with real-world experiences mixed in. This book is a must-read for those interested in destigmatizing sexuality especially in relationship to the feminine. ~ Liliyana Shadowlyn (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""I was so impressed by the personal testimonials in this book, which reflected many experiences I've had but have never put into words. And that's saying something, given that I've been a feminist sex writer for many years. Additionally, this book covers a lot of legal and philosophical ground, and even though I didn’t follow it all, I was impressed by how Brooks points the way for an updated, improved sexual ethic centered on kindness and care. So if you're not a scholar, don't be intimidated by the academic language -- there's plenty of raw, personal, direct observation that informs a higher analysis that's sorely needed! ~ Clarisse Thorn , author of the S&M Feminist"", ""I thought it was brilliant. Reminded me of The Argonauts. ~ Stoya, writer, actress and author of Philosophy, Pussycats and Porn"", ""Partaking equally of poetry, porn and post-structuralism,..... I'm also not sure it's a book to be followed so much as inhaled, gazed at, or rolled around in. .......... . And yet after all the dicks, disappointments and Deleuze, it ends up in the entirely wholesome suggestion that what would help most is more kindness. ~ Alex Sarll , NetGalley"", ""......allow me to tell you how sublime and thought provoking this book is. Part memoir and part academic philosophical treatise, this book truly takes a hard and intriguing look at the philosophical ethics of human sexuality. It is a read that will make you think. ~ Jeff Sexton, NetGalley"", ""Forget what you thought you knew about fucking.\n\nThroughout Fucking Law, Brooks wants you to fuck. She calls for an ‘orgy of destruction’, for the destruction of ethical and sexual codes ‘that are not our own’ . For too long, she argues, your fucking has been determined not by your body but by someone else’s head. ‘Everything has become a concept,’ she writes, ‘and thus falls within the possibility of being known by philosophers’. But fucking can’t be known; knowledge of fucking can’t be discovered without first-hand experience—without doing it.\n\nBrooks teases throughout Fucking Law. Like a dominatrix, her prose ties you up and plays with you: ‘You really need to lose your head in sexuality research, but you can’t, since the head is ever-so-sexy.’ She prods, pokes and strokes in all the right places, edging you closer and closer to ball-busting climaxes like: ‘A promise, until death do us part, is meaningless where a second is forever between two bodies who don’t know how to fuck each other’.\n\nFucking Law is Brook’s own ethnography, her study of sex, knowledge, and the experience of fucking. But she divorces herself into two identities in the book. On the one hand, she talks about her experiences, particularly on le Cap d’Agde, using the first person: ‘You think my eyes cry with laughter and with tears, and it is my pussy that craves and drips, but it’s the other way around. How could you be so wrong?’ On the other, italicised intrusions seep into the narrative as she talks about her body and her fucking as if it were someone else’s: ‘She ground her hips into the sand, feeling the walls of her sticky cunt rub together, as she looked right into the eyes of a man at the back of the beach’.\n\nMuch like the Cap—a nudist beach and the site of much fucking—this book is something of a transgressive space, which sets out to upset your knowledge and experience of fucking. Brooks’s narrative ejaculations come in and out, like a tide. This isn’t a work of academia in the traditional sense, but something extremely personal. Brooks bares it all, metaphorically lying down on her own Cap, spread-eagle, for us all to stare at every crevice, hole and curve. In Fucking Law Brooks is concerned with how kind you are and should be when you fuck, but she’s also concerned with what kind of text she’s writing.\n\nIt’s a fascinating read, with a fucking-rhythm that oscillates from fast-paced sex-diary-cum-confessional to high-brow analysis of philosophical theory (especially Gilles Deleuze). It’s also sad. Charting a failed relationship with one of her academic inspirations (who’s married, a father and forces Brooks into all kinds of polyamorous adventures against her will), Fucking Law also reminds you how fucking can fuck you up, make you fall in love and make you desperate for kindness and for the fucking to be kind. The voice of this male academic also dribbles into the spunky pages of the narrative and comes to sound strikingly like that of a university Ethics Committee whom Brooks must persuade to fund her research trip to the Cap. Patriarchal forces try and get Brooks and her research to assume all kinds of vanilla positions—unlike her male researcher counterparts—but she—and her text—are beyond their control. She isn’t submissive.\n\nAnd neither, she argues, should you be when you’re thinking about whatever fucking you get up to. But at the same time, she warns, too much head—too much thinking—can be a bad thing: best just to get down and dirty. Fucking Law is enlightening, kinky and arousing and, though a little more interested in philosophy than law, a moving encounter about the politics and perversions of fucking and about fucking. ~ The Erotic Review , http://eroticreviewmagazine.com/reviews/review-fucking-law/"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. This book was something I've never read before but I absolutely love it. I will read more by this author in the future.. highly recommend. ~ Julie Jackson (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Sexual ethics, having pride and unabashedness in one’s body and their sexual intimate activities, reading erotic texts, and having an intellectual and intuitive dialogue with one’s partner; all from the perspective of a ‘she’ who lives in France and is reactionary in the third person to events with others and muses on philosophy and fact. Rather a lot like Beat poetry with the pulsing narrative vein of research. ~ Kristine Fisher (Reviewer) , NetGalley"", ""This was an interesting read, as it was part memoir and part fiction. It is thought provoking and erotic at the same time. An enjoyable read. ~ Cristie Underwood (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""3:AM Magazine: You’ve written this incredibly powerful book that you’ve described as an orgasmic attack on western philosophy. In particular, there’s a character in the book called “Her Philosopher”, who you describe as someone you were in an abusive relationship with. In many ways the problems you found you had in that relationship represent a lot of the problems you have with philosophy. There’s a question you pose to try and test the philosophy of sexuality and to test the sexuality of philosophy: do philosophers fuck differently? Your answer seems to be yes—on the pillow afterwards they can talk incessantly.\n\nVictoria Brooks: There’s a bit in the book where I’m having a heated conversation on the phone with the man called Her Philosopher. I throw the phone across the room in frustration. When I pick it up, he was still talking, without noticing any interruption. That endless talking can be the norm with philosophers. There’s no way in. And that’s what happens from the point of view of female sexuality. When I teach philosophy I find myself apologising to the women in the room—and the men too— that all of what we are studying is written by men. Philosophy is often long and boring and it speaks from up on high.\n\n3:AM: So philosophy is like the ultimate mansplain.\n\nVB: Exactly—it’s the ultimate mansplain. I wrote an article about female sexuality recently and in the comments I got mansplains telling me ‘Actually Kant’s not racist.’ Despite all of the clearly racist things he said. I’m not saying men’s comments are always invalid. But when it comes to female sexuality it might not be valid. Don’t get me wrong I love philosophy. I love long works of philosophy, like Deleuze’s stuff. But these texts need to be understood just as thinking rather than the paradigm to which we must always defer.\n\n3:AM: There’s a love-hate relationship with philosophy in your writing. Lines like “Destroy me with your words, I can’t orgasm otherwise” and you say “you really have to lose your head in sexuality research, but you can’t because your head is ever so sexy.” You’re interested in the paradoxes of sex, aren’t you?\n\nVB: I think those paradoxes trouble me a lot. These philosophers often have a power, a very toxic power. But that is sexy too, it’s a turn on. That line “Destroy me with your words, I can’t orgasm otherwise”, I’m saying that in frustration.\n\n3:AM: Much of your book is written in the third person and you also write from the first person in italics. Was it like that from the first draft or did you discover it needed to be like that as you started writing it?\n\nVB: I think from the start of writing it I needed that safe space of ambiguity, the way the third person allowed me to say things and the reader could be asking did this happen or didn’t this happen? I also think It’s nice to use the third person because it makes you complicit with the reader a little bit, like you’re both watching the story unfold. The third person is more fun, more free and less painful.\n\n3:AM: Less painful…?\n\nVB: If someone reads it and he makes a judgement then I can take it as judging the story and not judging me. The strange thing is my work is a lot about objectivity and how you shouldn’t distance yourself from the truth of the matter. But here that distance was nice.\n\n3:AM: The book ends with you breaking up with Her Philosopher. Does that mean you’ve broken up with philosophy too?\n\nVB: I still love philosophy as an action. But yes I wanted to break up with an incarnation of philosophy as this overbearing theory that tried to claim more knowledge of me and my sexuality than I had myself. I have my embodied set of desires and the white western conceptual framework often contradicts that. So I had to end it. ~ Andy West, Writer and Philospher , https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/toward-a-sexual-ethics-of-kindness-an-interview-with-victoria-brooks/"", ""What a fresh breath of air! It smells like freedom and autonomy, like a female sexual revolution, like a big vagina devouring what she craves. \""Fucking Law“ fucks with law or what we thought it is. It fucks with methodology, it fucks with fucking and it does so in a compelling, witty, and necessary way. After centuries of (academic) body hatred and suppression and patriarchal and Victorian sexual ethics - best represented in the uptight and fear driven legal discourse - this book asks exactly the right questions and it shows you that Law can be different, that Law ought to be and will be - like the Nana figures of Niki de Saint Phalle - the embodiment of female power, autonomy and sexuality. By doing so, it does exactly what it asks for, it is very kind to the reader and it’s body, it never stops to communicate with it. While getting explicit and intimate it never oversteps your boundaries, rather invites you to communicate and explore yours at the same time. Victoria Brooks takes you on an intimate journey reaching for the unknown and unseen areas of legal and academic discourse and your (own) sexuality at the same time. You can’t miss that! ~ Nicole Zilberszac (Nicole Noze, Artist)"", ""Fucking Ethics and Fucking Judgments. First, I will tell you that if the word “fucking” disturbs you, this book isn’t for you (but you may have suspected that from the title). If the various “raunchy” and “vulgar” words for human genitalia disturb you, this book isn’t for you.\n\nBut if you’re still reading this review, then I assume you’re at least ok with these words. In which case, allow me to tell you how sublime and thought provoking this book is. Part memoir and part academic philosophical treatise, this book truly takes a hard and intriguing look at the philosophical ethics of human sexuality.\n\nThis isn’t a light read. It isn’t a beach read (unless maybe you’re at a nudist/ swinger beach?). It is likely a read that will make you horny without actually being erotica. It is a read that will make you think. And maybe, just maybe, it is a read that will open you to the author’s own brand of sexual ethics, even though it is one she does not explicitly recommend – quite the opposite – herself. ~ Jeff Sexton, http://bookanon.com/2019/05/22/bookreview-fucking-law-by-victoria-brooks/"", ""Fucking Law is an urgent call for everyone, not just academics and researchers, to find inventive ways to question the ethics of sexuality. Since a sex life is full of so many diverse moments of joy and suffering, for each and everybody, the book attempts to bridge a gap between philosophical and non-philosophical questioning. Central to the book is the reality that everyone can challenge the ethics and laws of sexuality and ask questions, even where they seem frightening, or worse, even when we are told not to – by institutions and lovers alike. Non-philosophical and accessible, Fucking Law is risky, explicit and provocative as it bridges the gap between academic and every-day questioning of sexual encounters. ~ Janet Pole Cousineau, NetGalley"", ""What kind of book is this? A pornographic journal? A philosophical diary? A treatise of ethics of love and sex? Could anyone quote Hannah Arendt while having an orgasm without getting immediately cold? Can a brilliant cis-woman have sex with straight men without losing her critical convictions? Victoria Brooks explores the paradoxical condition of cis-women having sex with cis-men and develops a queer ethics for straight love to survive: A libertine love treatise in the times of #Metoo. ~ Paul B. Preciado, author of Testo Junkie"", ""This book is written by a body, not by a mind: the pages are sweaty flesh, the writing is body fluids, the structure has brittle bones. It is already rare to open a book and feel as if you are looking into a body; but this book does the even rarer and infinitely more generous thing of placing you in the middle of a female sexual explosion. This a remarkably brave book, relentlessly exposing and yet curing the wounds of the body. This is a remarkably beautiful book, with stunning changes of rhythm and language, but always personal, ondoyant, kind, intimate, culminating in a vociferous howl reminiscent of Tennessee Williams’s harrowing finales. And finally, this is the book that the law has been waiting for: a book that prises the law open and pours in sex, literary rhythm, corporeal emancipation, female and male desire, French philosophy, and an invigorating full-frontal attack against philosophers. Victoria Brooks is the Anais Nin of the #MeToo generation.\n\n~ Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Professor of Law & Theory, The Westminster Law & Theory Lab"", ""For too long, law has been for nobody. Or, to be more precise, law has been for bodies that didn’t come as trouble. It is this assumption that Victoria Brooks has tackled in her virtuoso first book, exploring intimately and provocatively what is the most troubling with bodies: their sexuality. In doing so, she has not only proved as irritating as one could be vis-à-vis the certainties of law, but also vis-à-vis the ones of ethics and sexuality. With a little bit of chance, none of them will ever be the same afterwards, for you, as for me. ~ Laurent de Sutter, author of Narcocapitalism"", ""Like a dominatrix, her prose ties you up and plays with you...It’s a fascinating read, with a fucking-rhythm that oscillates from fast-paced sex-diary-cum-confessional to high-brow analysis of philosophical theory...Patriarchal forces try and get Brooks and her research to assume all kinds of vanilla positions—unlike her male researcher counterparts—but she—and her text—are beyond their control. She isn’t submissive... Fucking Law is enlightening, kinky and arousing and, though a little more interested in philosophy than law, a moving encounter about the politics and perversions of fucking and about fucking. ~ The Erotic Review , http://eroticreviewmagazine.com/reviews/review-fucking-law/"", ""Victoria Brooks' legal lubrications are a radical fucking to, and with, law, philosophy and academia in general. A brave and honest call for the body as method, touching us and no doubt the bounds of theory to come, giving us access to law as it is through her succulent text. ~ Lucy Finchett-Maddock, author of Protest, Property and the Commons: Performances of Law and Resistance"", ""In Fucking Law, Victoria Brooks presents a fierce examination of the relationships between law, ethics, embodiment and spaces of female sexual desire. In doing so, this book offers a bold and scintillating critique of the academy’s regulation of sexuality research. ~ Jon Binnie, Reader in Law at Manchester Metropolitan University"", ""Part memoir, part polemic, Fucking Law is an experiment in form which should be read by anyone with more than a passing interest in sexuality, ethics or sexual ethics. Brooks invites her reader to join her in ‘fucking law’, in confronting and questioning the judgements that shape our embodied experiences and knowledges of sex. She argues that we might encounter sexuality otherwise, imagining a new and vivid kindness that would protect our desires from abuse. In searching for an ethics of sex, from university ethics committees to hotel bedrooms to the sands of Southern France, Fucking Law offers an unflinching and deeply personal meditation on the messiness of sex, love and philosophy that is at once salty, lucid and moving. ~ Alex Dymock, Lecturer in Criminology and Law, leader of the @Pharmacosex Project"", ""What kind of book is this? A pornographic journal? A philosophical diary? A treatise of ethics of love and sex? Could anyone quote Hannah Arendt while having an orgasm without getting immediately cold? Can a brilliant cis-woman have sex with straight men without losing her critical convictions? Victoria Brooks explores the paradoxical condition of cis-women having sex with cis-men and develops a queer ethics for straight love to survive: A libertine love treatise in the times of #Metoo. ~ Paul B. Preciado, author of Testo Junkie and Pornotopia""]" Furnace of this World,"[""Ed Simon""]","A fragmentary, digressive, impressionistic account of what the radical implications of goodness could possibly be in late capitalism.","In the tradition of Roland Barthes' Mythologies and Walter Benjamin's aphoristic Theses on the Philosophy of History, Ed Simon's Furnace of this World is a fragmentary, digressive, impressionistic account of what the radical implications of goodness could possibly be in late capitalism. Furnace of this World interrogates the concept of goodness, while arguing that it's always more interesting and radical than its opposite. With neither hubris nor reductionism, Furnace of this World speaks of what it means to pursue justice in a fallen world.","In the tradition of Roland Barthes' Mythologies and Walter Benjamin's aphoristic Theses on the Philosophy of History, Ed Simon's Furnace of this World is a fragmentary, digressive, impressionistic account of what the radical implications of goodness could possibly be in late capitalism. Furnace of this World interrogates the concept of goodness, while arguing that it's always more interesting and radical than its opposite. With neither hubris nor reductionism, Furnace of this World speaks of what it means to pursue justice in a fallen world.",4,"[""Imagine you stop to listen to a street corner preacher calling out to no one and everyone. Imagine that, like a subway musician who hits a lick that catches your year, he piques your interest with a vision that is like an impossible mashup of William James and George Carlin. Reading Ed Simon's ruthless Furnace of this World is like pausing for hour, ninety minutes tops, to listen to a wise stranger who is equal parts poet, prophet, and philosopher. You will be quiet, you will be rapt, and you will never be the same. ~ J.C. Hallman, author of B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal"", ""Against the assumption that to look for and find goodness in today's world is either dangerous, or naive, or both, comes Ed Simon's Ruthless Furnace of This World. This exuberant and erudite collection insists on the paradoxical power of good to exist where we least expect it. The book is the rare one that demonstrates what it describes - that we can amplify goodness with our own compassion, humility, and heart. Like William Blake writing The Lives of the Saints or Nietzsche drawing a map to Utopia, Simon succeeds on his own impossible terms. Embracing both Broadway and Bonhoeffer, AA and Augustine in its expansive geography of goodness, Simon's work is profound, often heartbreaking, yet surprisingly cheering. ~ Brook Wilensky-Lanford, author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden"", ""Between the struggle for religious certitude and stick-in-the-mud atheism is Ed Simon's honest and authentic exploration of the language of morality. Opting for story over the tired debate of \""does God exist,\"" Simon presents narratives of faith and doubt from across literature to instruct the reader that literalism in any form will never bring us as close to a well-lived life as the simple and quiet search for the good. ~ Peter Bebergal, author of Strange Frequencies"", ""Ed Simon's writing is perfectly suited to his theme, and reflects his preoccupations as a deep, wide-ranging and generous reader and thinker who applies his skills to address the fundamental question of human goodness. ~ Lydia Kiesling, editor at The Millions, and author of The Golden State""]" "Gathering of Promises, A","[""Ben Graham""]","The neglected story of how Texan musicians pioneered and explored psychedelic rock, and the too-high price they often paid.","A Gathering of Promises is a history of acid rock and psychedelic music in and from the state of Texas, focusing largely on its mid-1960s origins with the 13th Floor Elevators and contemporaries such as the Golden Dawn, the Red Crayola and Bubble Puppy, and following its development to the present day and the popularity of the annual Austin Psych Fest. Grounded in a strong social, cultural and historical context, the book asks how Texas produced some of the most extreme and influential psych of any era despite a prevailing social ethos of Christian conservatism and the strictest drug laws of any American state. It looks at how this environment shaped and affected the music, alongside the Texan frontier spirit and its championing of expansion, freedom and individualism.","A Gathering of Promises is a history of acid rock and psychedelic music in and from the state of Texas, focusing largely on its mid-1960s origins with the 13th Floor Elevators and contemporaries such as the Golden Dawn, the Red Crayola and Bubble Puppy, and following its development to the present day and the popularity of the annual Austin Psych Fest. Grounded in a strong social, cultural and historical context, the book asks how Texas produced some of the most extreme and influential psych of any era despite a prevailing social ethos of Christian conservatism and the strictest drug laws of any American state. It looks at how this environment shaped and affected the music, alongside the Texan frontier spirit and its championing of expansion, freedom and individualism.",2,"[""... masterful, thoroughly wrought, vivid and exciting to read.The writing is both deep and wide. There is... much truth and insight about our lives. You are a very fine writer indeed. ~ Clementine Hall (13th Floor Elevators)"", ""Congratulations on putting together the most accurate, comprehensive account of those times that I have ever encountered. Great job. I want to add that you have provided a very insightful review of my lyrics. Thanks for taking time to give the songs a sincere, meaningful interpretation. ~ George Kinney (The Golden Dawn)""]" Georgian Portraits,"[""Martin Demant Frederiksen"", ""Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen""]",Ten ethnographic portraits telling the story of the social and political aftermaths of revolution.,"Georgian Portraits chronicles everyday life in the Republic of Georgia in the decade that followed the Rose Revolution of 2003. Recent anthropological developments argue for the use of “afterlives” as an analytical notion through which to understand processes of socio-political change. Based on a series of portraits, Martin Demant Frederiksen and Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen employ the theory of social afterlives to examine the role of revolution in the formation of a modern Georgia. The book contributes to a deeper understanding of life in the aftermath of political reform, depicting the hopefulness of the Georgian population, but also the subsequent return to political disillusionment which lead them to a revolution in the first place.","Georgian Portraits chronicles everyday life in the Republic of Georgia in the decade that followed the Rose Revolution of 2003. Recent anthropological developments argue for the use of “afterlives” as an analytical notion through which to understand processes of socio-political change. Based on a series of portraits, Martin Demant Frederiksen and Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen employ the theory of social afterlives to examine the role of revolution in the formation of a modern Georgia. The book contributes to a deeper understanding of life in the aftermath of political reform, depicting the hopefulness of the Georgian population, but also the subsequent return to political disillusionment which lead them to a revolution in the first place.",3,"[""What happens after a revolution, when the bright and shiny finish has worn off its ideals? Capturing the weirdness and the wonder of post-revolutionary Georgia, Frederiksen and Gotfredsen also capture people's very real struggles to get by, their fears of war and their dreams of a \""European\"" future. Beautifully and hauntingly written, this book captures not only Georgia's politics, but its soul. ~ Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, author of Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business and the Remaking of Labor"", ""Revolutions are as much made of dreams as real events, and these dreams have afterlives as ghosts as the revolutionary hope fades into disappointment or despair. Writing the history of a revolutionary period is difficult, especially writing one that deals with the fundamentally emergent nature of a revolutionary period, as this one does, embracing the confusion of tenses in which the present is pregnant with the future and the future becomes a past as a condition of narration. This book tracks the lively history of Rose Revolutionary Georgia in a lovely and vivid manner, an engaging narrative full of lively characters, beginning always from small things and local perspectives that show the Rose Revolutionary period as a series of hopes and dreams, programs and disappointments. Misha Saakashvili appears throughout, sometimes as a real historical person, sometimes also an imagined demiurge, sometimes a fraudulent trickster. The ways a revolution changes a society are here portrayed from many perspectives, and the way the revolutionary dreams sometimes became haunting ghosts shows how a single moment can become a whole period of social life. ~ Paul Manning, author of Love Stories: Private Love and Public Romance in Georgia"", ""This book is crafted as a compendium of tacit knowledge about Georgia, harboring an array of insights that capture the tensions and ambiguities of a country that finds itself back from the future and poised between assembly and disassembly. The image of the portrait is therefore very accurate, reflecting the make-believe realities and re-enactments faced by the authors. Thumbing through its pages, I discovered how anthropological variations can be interwoven through biographies, social affects and political afterlives. This type of scholarship is not only inspiring and informative, but also pleasure to read.\n\nGeorgia is a country for storytellers and vernacular Sisyphus of life, being Martin Demant Frederiksen and Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen the perfect example of this contagious ardor. The intimate and sharp look achieved by the authors makes this collection an important milestone in the discussion of contemporary social dynamics in Eastern Europe and the understanding of human condition overall. ~ Francisco Martínez, author of Playgrounds and Battlefields: Critical Perspectives of Social Engagement""]" Ghosts of My Life,"[""Mark Fisher""]",Collected essays on popular culture by a major critic.,"This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others. THIS BRAND NEW EDITION FEATURES A NEW INTRODUCTION BY MATT COLQUHOUN AND NEW AFTERWORD BY SIMON REYNOLDS.","This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others. THIS BRAND NEW EDITION FEATURES A NEW INTRODUCTION BY MATT COLQUHOUN AND NEW AFTERWORD BY SIMON REYNOLDS.",11,"[""What is excellent are the two new essays; Matt Colquhoun’s Introduction contextualises Fisher’s work and makes a strong case for Ghosts of My Life being a foundational book for the author, and Reynolds is not scared to criticise Fisher’s work as he attempts to understand the despair and social and political decline and despair that drove Fisher to suicide, declaring that readers must ‘find new ways to balance pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, the need for realism and the imperative to dream a new reality’. ~ Rupert Loydell, International Times"", ""[Mark Fisher's] prose is the kind that has you compulsively underlining passages wherein ideas are inseparable from the sensual charisma of the language through which they are expressed.\n\nIf you missed it the first time round, of even if you didn't, this book will light up your brain like few others. Ironically, it's hopeful too: a UK that can produce the likes of Fisher is not beaten yet. ~ Rob Doyle, The Observer"", ""the translation into Italian of Ch. 1 from Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life ttp://www.quadernidaltritempi.eu/rivista/numero51/mappe/q51_m03.html\n\nThe translation is accompanied by an interview to the author, here: http://www.quadernidaltritempi.eu/rivista/numero51/mappe/q51_m02.html\n\n~ Dr. Beatrice Ferrara, Quaderni d'Altri Tempi"", ""Mark Fisher liefert mit »Ghosts of My Life« einmal mehr eine so scharfsinnige wie einleuchtende Analyse unserer Gegenwart.\n\nMit eindrucksvollem Spürsinn verfolgt er die Fährte, die die Geister der Vergangenheit – und einer möglichen Zukunft – in\n\nunserem Alltag hinterlassen.\n\nIn \""Ghosts of My Life\"" Mark Fisher delivers once more a clear analysis of our culture today. With great sensibility he unravels ideas from the past, from a possible future and today. ~ Hardy Funk, Skug Magazine, Germany"", ""Mark Fisher , \""Ghosts of my Life. Writings on depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures \"". Zero Books, Winchester 2014, 232 pages, 16,99 €\n\nIn writing 'Ghosts of My Life' Mark Fisher has overcome depression but it is not a self - help book it deals with the scepticism that is widely used in the British left.\n\nGhosts of my Life also examines the ugly and repressed side of 'pop' His portrait of the BBC DJ and children's TV presenter Jimmy Savile describes how with the connivance of politicians, authorities and the media Savile was able to pursue his inclinations and countless children were abused.\n\nWhat first begins as a review of the science fiction TV series \""Sapphire and Steel\"" on the occasion of their DVD edition, Fisher takes in the text \""The Slow Cancellation of Future\"" as an opportunity to reflect on the transformation of the world of work in the digital age . The individuals are caught in a stand-by existentialism\n\n\""There's no time here, not any more\"": The final scene of the series Fisher appears almost as the memorial of a \""traumatic\"" change. Culture would make an effort, he concludes, otherwise they do not manage to produce present and express themselves adequately. ~ Taz.de, Julian Weber"", ""The late writer Mark Fisher has become a hero of leftwing cultural criticism, and this reissued essay collection provides ample demonstration why ~ Rob Doyle, Author of Threshold and Here Are The Young Men"", ""Mark Fisher reads the contemporary world like no other analyst of its miseries and madness and mores. He is driven by anger but, miraculously, he never forgets to celebrate, when that reaction is apposite. I find his work exhilarating, fascinating, deeply engaging and, not least, utterly vital; this world we have made for ourselves would be a lesser place without it. ~ Niall Griffiths , award winning novelist and Guardian book reviewer"", ""After the brilliance of Capitalist Realism, Ghosts Of My Life confirms Mark Fisher's role as our greatest and most trusted navigator of these times out of joint, through all their frissons and ruptures, among all their apparitions and spectres, past, present and future. ~ David Peace, author of the Red Riding Quartet and Red or Dead"", ""No one writes as achingly well about our slow death by capitalism as Mark Fisher. Like the best of popular culture, he makes depression seductive--we find ourselves lost in a liberating hopelessness. Yet he turns this very liberation into a grimace of possibility, of a desire that exceeds the melancholia of left acquiescence to capitalist realism. ~ Jodi Dean, author of The Communist Horizon"", ""A must read for modernists, and for anyone who misses the future. This is the first book to really make sense of the fog of ideas that have been tagged as 'hauntology'. Ghosts Of My Life is enjoyable, progressive and exciting. ~ Bob Stanley"", ""Ghosts of My Life confirms that Mark Fisher is our most penetrating explorer of the connections between pop culture, politics, and personal life under the affective regime of digital capitalism. The most admirable qualities of Fisher’s work are its lucidity, reflecting the urgency of his commitment to communicating ideas; his high expectations of popular art’s power to challenge, enlighten, and heal; and his adamant refusal to settle for less. ~ Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania""]" Give Them an Argument,"[""Ben Burgis""]",The left must learn to argue.,"Many serious leftists have learned to distrust talk of logic and logical fallacies, associated with right-wing ""logicbros"". This is a serious mistake. Unlike the neoliberal technocrats, who can point to social problems and tell people ""trust us"", the serious Left must learn how to argue and persuade. In Give Them an Argument, Ben Burgis arms his reader with the essential knowledge of formal logic and informal fallacies.","Many serious leftists have learned to distrust talk of logic and logical fallacies, associated with right-wing ""logicbros"". This is a serious mistake. Unlike the neoliberal technocrats, who can point to social problems and tell people ""trust us"", the serious Left must learn how to argue and persuade. In Give Them an Argument, Ben Burgis arms his reader with the essential knowledge of formal logic and informal fallacies.",2,"[""In \""Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left\"", Burgis arms his reader with the essential knowledge of formal logic and informal fallacies that will be required for any political discussion in this polarized times. Critique: Informative, thoughtful, exceptionally well organized and presented, \""Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left\"" is an exceptionally effective tutorial. While very highly recommended for both community and academic library Contemporary Political Science collections, it should be noted for the personal reading lists of students, academia, political activists, politicians, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject. ~ James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, Mid West Book Review"", ""Ben Burgis understands that in order to persuade people to join a political movement, you have to master the techniques of rigorous argumentation. He masterfully exposes the cheap sophistry of right-wing 'philosophy' and shows why there's still a place for logic and reason in political discourse. This is a crucial handbook for those who want to 'crush' and 'destroy' the Ben Shapiros of the world. ~ Nathan Robinson, Editor, Current Affairs""]" "Going Nowhere, Slow","[""Mikkel Krause Frantzen""]",An unique analysis of four cultural works of depression and what they say about our society and our time.,"Using examples from art and literature, Frantzen explores the social, political and economic implications of both real and imagined depression. Is feeling blue a symptom of the death of progress? Was the suicide of David Foster Wallace a proverbial canary in a coal mine? Margaret Thatcher once declared that there is no alternative to the social order that we now reside within. Have we accepted her slogan as a fact, and is that why so many are on Prozac and other anti-depressants? Frantzen examines the works of Michel Houellebecq, Claire Fontaine and David Foster Wallace as he seeks out an answer and a way to formulate a new future oriented left movement.","Using examples from art and literature, Frantzen explores the social, political and economic implications of both real and imagined depression. Is feeling blue a symptom of the death of progress? Was the suicide of David Foster Wallace a proverbial canary in a coal mine? Margaret Thatcher once declared that there is no alternative to the social order that we now reside within. Have we accepted her slogan as a fact, and is that why so many are on Prozac and other anti-depressants? Frantzen examines the works of Michel Houellebecq, Claire Fontaine and David Foster Wallace as he seeks out an answer and a way to formulate a new future oriented left movement.",4,"[""...............Going Nowhere, Slow is a compelling read for anyone interested in conceptualization and representations of depression, or the relation between contemporary culture and mental illness more generally. Frantzen’s writing is high-paced, erudite and at times humorous. Despite the subject matter, the author never romanticizes depression or succumbs to pessimism or fatalism. Instead, he uses the artworks discussed to establish a possible way out of the perceived dualism between escapism and maintaining the status quo. Whether it is Wallace’s insistence on empathy, Claire Fontaine’s call for collective action or Von Trier’s depiction of eschatological salvation, Frantzen’s message is that there is hope amidst hopelessness. Deeply critical and sharply written, Going Nowhere, Slow is an inspired and inspiring work. ~ Ward Huetink, Radboud University Nijmegen."", ""In this groundbreaking book, Mikkel Krause Frantzen takes depression as something that does not simply have connection with the subject’s past and alienation from others, but also to the idea of future and too much closeness. As a result, Frantzen finds in depression glimmers of optimism and hope. This book is essential reading for anyone who has questioned what depression is all about and why so many well-known novelists have created their best works trying to come to grips with it. ~ Renata Salecl, author of Tyranny of Choice"", ""In this sharp and poetic book, Mikkel Krause Frantzen brilliantly illustrates the horror of depression. But he doesn’t leave us there, in despair, but opens up new hopeful ways of thinking about the spirit of our time. ~ Carl Cederström, author of The Happiness Fantasy, co-author of Dead Man Working"", ""Why are we all so depressed? Today, depression is less an individual malady, than it is a structure of feeling that pervades Western neoliberal society. In this book, Mikkel Krause Frantzen digs deeply into this situation, reading a number of works (novels, movies, visual art) that not only give expression to our depressive condition, but offer clues as to why and how we feel this way. ~ Steven Shaviro, author of Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society""]" Good Day Today,"[""Daniel Neofetou""]",This book argues that the films of David Lynch pose a radical challenge to conservative and absolutist ideologies.,"In his speech following the 2011nationwide riots in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron spoke out against people “being too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong” and proclaimed “this relativism – it’s not going to cut it anymore”. He was, then, presumably laying the foundation for one-size-fits-all absolutist authoritarianism and, worryingly, the moral outrage induced by the riots means a large proportion of the British public might not oppose such measures. When such a mindset is on the verge of becoming pandemic, where do we turn? This book suggests that the work of another David, born 20 years before and 3,000 miles away from Cameron, might engender a mode of thinking which does not apprehend the world in terms of such easy distinctions. In David Lynch, we find a director whose films – by utilising the tropes of the Hollywood movie, but subverting their accepted meanings - profoundly destablise spectators, and lead them to consider things not in terms of prescribed binaries, but as complex and multi-faceted.","In his speech following the 2011nationwide riots in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron spoke out against people “being too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong” and proclaimed “this relativism – it’s not going to cut it anymore”. He was, then, presumably laying the foundation for one-size-fits-all absolutist authoritarianism and, worryingly, the moral outrage induced by the riots means a large proportion of the British public might not oppose such measures. When such a mindset is on the verge of becoming pandemic, where do we turn? This book suggests that the work of another David, born 20 years before and 3,000 miles away from Cameron, might engender a mode of thinking which does not apprehend the world in terms of such easy distinctions. In David Lynch, we find a director whose films – by utilising the tropes of the Hollywood movie, but subverting their accepted meanings - profoundly destablise spectators, and lead them to consider things not in terms of prescribed binaries, but as complex and multi-faceted.",1,"[""Neofetou on Lynch is an original on an original. This book is a learned and lucid work in which Neofetou demonstrates how Lynch’s deeply entrancing filmmaking greatly destabilises the viewer into seeing and feeling outside the norm. ~ Jose Arroyo, Lecturer, University of Warwick Department of Film & Television Studies""]" Good Times in Dystopia,"[""George F.""]",How to party through the Apocalypse.,"London drowns in sewage and Europe burns. In this creative nonfiction, George F. falls in with a band of chaos punks who drink, fight and struggle for shelter when the world ends. From mass demonstrations in Paris, the rotten squats of Shoreditch, and the lawless forests of the borderlands, to carnival riots in the autonomous zones of Berlin they battle fascists, dodge arrest and wrestle with the greatest struggle of all: sobriety. 'In documenting his desperate battles against State, capital and inner demons, George has gifted us a raging response to the bleakness of our times.' Paul Case, Dead White Anarchists","London drowns in sewage and Europe burns. In this creative nonfiction, George F. falls in with a band of chaos punks who drink, fight and struggle for shelter when the world ends. From mass demonstrations in Paris, the rotten squats of Shoreditch, and the lawless forests of the borderlands, to carnival riots in the autonomous zones of Berlin they battle fascists, dodge arrest and wrestle with the greatest struggle of all: sobriety. 'In documenting his desperate battles against State, capital and inner demons, George has gifted us a raging response to the bleakness of our times.' Paul Case, Dead White Anarchists",7,"[""I’ve been intrigued by punk culture and the concept of anarchy since the age of 16. That was when I first started getting into music from the 70s and enrolled on a Government and Politics A-level course in college. I thought that, despite my timid nature, inherent respect for authority and deep-seeded fear of conflict, this was a scene I could really feel at home in.\n\nBut, despite my tattoos and music taste, I’ve finally accepted at the age of 30 that I’m as far removed from that world as anyone possibly could be. Mostly because I’m as scared of it as I am allured by it. I may have watched Made in Britain countless times, love the Stooges and have a safety pin tattooed on my shin, but I’m nothing but a wannabe. A faker. A tourist.\n\nSo, when George F invited me to review Good Times in Dystopia, an almost fictional depiction of his non-fictional journey through squats, riots and protests in London Berlin, and Paris, it was like embarking on the ultimate punk holiday. From the first page I was immediately thrown into a culture so disparate from the mainstream that most people don’t even know it exists. An invisible world right under our noses, so to speak.\n\nIn his book, George describes a myriad of colourful characters in chapter-long anecdotes (and yes, ‘colourful character’ is definitely the kind of term a fearful mother would give them, further proving how much of a tourist I am). While many of the people these anecdotes centre on are broken, lost and saturated in alcohol and drugs, they are also talented artists, political activists, animal lovers and charismatic charmers who may only be considered ‘colourful’ due to the fact that they’re living on the very edge of society.\n\nAs George describes his bizarre, perilous and often comical exploits around Europe, which include the COP21 climate protest, breaking into a theme park (twice) and a graphic (and practical) masturbation workshop, I was completely pulled into his world of tender debauchery. I often felt myself comparing his style and some of the content to Fear and Loathing and Trainspotting, yet George’s world has much more heart, gentleness and sincerity. It shares the rich imagery and shock factor of these aforementioned books, but there’s also an element of brutal realism and warmth that made Good Times in Dystopia much more captivating. It glamorised drugs as well, of course, but never in a fantastical way.\n\nWhile I enjoyed every page of this anarchical escapism, I also felt very conflicted. On the one hand I was immersed in a thriving squatting community of outcasts who seemed to live a purer, more meaningful life, somehow simultaneously primal and futuristic, yet on the other hand I worried over a group of lazy idealists as they chased a naïve, contradictory and unsustainable lifestyle. I felt a romantic pull with people who clumsily lived on top of one another, doing what they wanted, talking and singing and making and doing, marching the streets without fearing consequence or authority in order to fight for what they believed in, but at the same time their anarchic dream seemed futile. They thrived on conflict and stole the benefits of the consumerist lifestyle they were so adamantly against. They never appreciated differing lifestyles and how their actions may damage or hurt other people. But then again, does the average person care about the homeless? The disenfranchised? The atypical? Does the average Joe consider how their lifestyle could damage those who are unable to live similarly?\n\nEvery negative point I come up with for living the nomadic lifestyle is always partnered with a positive point. It’s hard to be the kind of person who lives on the fringes of society, but it’s also hard to live within society. If I had to make a pro and con list, especially in today’s political climate, I’d say we’re all losers. It’s just some of us know it and have subsequently chosen to live differently.\n\nMy favourite chapter heading…\n\nI think what hit the hardest with Good Times in Dystopia was the many examples it included of human shittiness, to want of a better phrase. I felt bombarded with the evidence of how foul society is, and it felt overwhelming at times, particularly when George recounted the Body Without Soul documentary about young teenage boy prostitutes living in Prague, the murder of Stephen Simpson and the vilified life of activist Barry Horne. Giving up on society seems almost inevitable after all that.\n\nSo, if you want to be taken on a twisted, captivating tale into the underground, to a place where people do and say and think what they want, who suffer and enjoy themselves enormously, who fight back against the man while trying to steal his comforts, all in a story written so, so eloquently – check out Good Time in Dystopia. I definitely enjoyed my time as a tourist. ~ Emily Babbs, https://www.dystopic.co.uk/good-times-in-dystopia-by-george-f-book-review/"", ""Evoking the narrative style and furious pace of beat generation writers, Good Times in Dystopia is not a story in the traditional sense, nor is it a straight-forward memoir. If I had to compare it to an artistic form it would verge closer to a mural or a heavily graffitied underpass: you can see traces of what went before and layers of history, people, and creativity, but the overall effect is that of colourful chaos. Speaking to George, they explain how this stylistic approach is linked to their identity as a punk and an anarchist:\n\nTo me, punk is anti-authoritarianism and DIY culture: the idea of being self-directed and self-reliant in the creation of an aesthetic, and a critique of dominant ideologies. I’d definitely be coming from the fine edge of where punk and anarchism cross over, so I’d be looking at the history around anarcho-punk and around the rejection of any authority but yourself. The idea that we become the best judges of where authority and power lie. In my terminology they are very, very close together, a lot of punk attitude or the punk way of being crosses over with anarchism in lots of ways. However, I do hang around with a lot of people who totally reject the idea of punk as being stupid, as being commercialised, as already being a dead form. It’s evolved and progressed way beyond punk, but we understand punk collectively as a touchstone of DIY culture, anti-authoritarianism and interesting haircuts.\n\nIn this context I ask George how they see the individual and the collective working together in this ideology and way of life:\n\nIdeally as a constant dialogue and interchange that values the role of the individual and the collective equally and sees that one constantly interacts with the others. I think there’s a strong tendency to either be individualist or collectivist to a very strong degree within both anarchism and punk. For me there’s that value of the individual within the collective but without putting one above the other, trying to find where is the most interesting and liberating point of dialogue and exchange between those two forms of being.\n\nConceptually one could argue Good Times fits into the emergent genre of what has come to be termed “auto-theory” – a form of queer-theory-cum-memoir that has grown in prominence since the 2015 publication of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, which challenges the distinction between detached, “objective” academic analysis and personal experience. It would be difficult to finish Good Times in Dystopia without both a sense of intimacy with George F.’s experiences and an outrage towards governments, corporations, and tools of exploitation and gentrification which are rife throughout Western Europe. George explains how they see the relationship between the person, collectives, and what they call “creative nonfiction”:\n\nA lot of the dialogue, the story and the ideas come from other characters we meet. A lot of it is other people’s perspectives and points of view. I’m privileged enough to have the skills of English, writing and access to put together a book, but to include lots of other people’s voices and stories and experience. That also anonymises them. The idea is it becomes bigger than the individuals within it, becoming about collective stories and how they’ve become part of our collective narrative.\n\nThis is why it’s put under “creative nonfiction”, the idea was not to be academic. The book has come out as “memoir”, but you know, I think it would be closer to “autofiction”. The idea was to create alternative narratives, stories that aren’t being told and aren’t being collected, but which are important for a culture of resistance. This is a continuation from my first book, Total Shambles, which creates a London identity of squatting that in this book expands to different points across Europe. A lot of people connected with it because those stories were their stories, even if it wasn’t their specific story.\n\nBy Junk Comix – [email protected]\n\nTonally, Good Times is very different from Total Shambles (Influx 2015). Where Total Shambles is a playful trip through the oddballs and accidents of living on the edge in London, Good Times strongly evokes the dystopia referenced in its title. From the very beginning it is visceral: references to sex, excrement, bodily fluids and drug use are littered throughout – at times people down on their luck quite literally shit into pizza boxes and deposit them on the street. These references, and others that I will leave the reader to explore, can make Good Times a challenging read. But they also contribute to what makes it worthwhile. You are drawn into a world of mental illness, hopelessness, and paranoia just as much as you are cheerfully roped into trips to clandestine French communes and exuberant street parties. I ask George about the tonal shift since Total Shambles:\n\nI wanted to be more honest. I became very aware of my own mortality and much more open to the idea of exposing what I was experiencing, also because it connects with what a lot of people are experiencing. The idea was to break taboos, to talk about things that aren’t really talked about. Within our circles of friends and culture in general, what’s been really great to see is more and more comfort with talking about very, very distressing things. That paralleled with how on an inner level there is this anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and on an outer level there is ecological collapse, domination, police brutality. The idea was to find that mirror because those became the conversations that we were having.\n\nYou won’t walk away from Good Times with a shrug and a “what are they like, these scamps!” Instead you are forced to contemplate the realities of violence towards homeless people, squatters, protestors, and other defenders of autonomous ways of living. This violence is multi-form – bailiffs, police, passers-by: all are complicit in the hostility towards those attempting to scrape by on the margins and George F. weaves this critique into their narrative so seamlessly that outrage at the injustice feels natural rather than manufactured. Yet, you are also left with a sense of the power and potential in resistance. And this is why punk and creativity are so important to George:\n\nPunk is an outward projection of resistance, the idea of resisting with the body, with the aesthetic, with the music, a culture of resisting that has become commercialised and co-opted in a lot of ways, but is still linked to an ideology such as anarchism that carries with it a great deal of depth and resilience. Through our creative acts, through this tension of creation and destruction we can actually sustain and nourish ourselves, but it’s through accepting the dark side, the trash and the despair as well as the utopian ideal of what it can be.\n\nGood Times in Dystopia is a powerful and raw and necessary read and I would recommend it to anyone interested in first-hand accounts of squatting and autonomous living – so long as they have a strong stomach. ~ Rowan Tallis Milligan, Anarchist Studies, https://anarchiststudies.noblogs.org/article-punk-anarchism-and-creative-non-fiction/"", ""In this European tour of grass roots anarchism and radical activism George F navigates the peripheries of mainstream society from decaying squats in east London to pastoral protest treehouses in Germany’s ancient Hambach Forest. Ricocheting between nihilistic partying and anti-capitalist campaigning the author documents their surroundings in the tradition of George Orwell, Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S Thompson.\n\nGeorge F is both observer and organiser: breaking into a theme park, running workshops on the frontlines of climate protests, and documenting amphetamine-fuelled fast living in the underbelly of London’s squat scene. As the book twists its way through peaceful protests in Paris, pitched battles with the police in Berlin, and violent conflict with security guards in Germany’s largest open pit coal mine – it explores the nature of rebellion, the role of violence in grass roots politics and the contemporary dynamics of modern capitalism. With artful prose and an eye for detail George F finds both beauty and tragedy in underworld communities forged by hippies, artists, gutter punks and drug-fuelled squatters that have rejected mainstream ideas about politics, economics, and sexuality.\n\nAs they hitchhike and shoplift between occupied spaces, illegal raves and protest sites George F builds on their first work of literary nonfiction, Total Shambles, digging deeper into the darker side of European squat culture. The reader is introduced to ideologues, like Berlin-based El Culo who sells beers to tourists when he isn’t taking part in anarchist projects, radical artists like George’s lover Mierda, and social dropouts, like the hapless Barnabas – who rarely drinks and dutifully drives other squatters to parties.\n\nGood Times in Dystopia documents their communal and often dysfunctional lifestyles on the fringes of society – and the support networks they create in order to sustain their unorthodox existence. Amid the pizza boxes filled with human shit, rainy days spent angle grinding locks, infected tattoos, LSD, bad sex, and stolen whisky – the book sketches lives lived at highspeed that sometimes end tragically. Good Times in Dystopia functions as a chaotic handbook on protest tactics and anarchistic organisation – as well as a visceral love song to those living on the anarchic borderlands of society. Describing the art of resistance and occupation in detail, the book shows how veteran protesters take on the police, landlords and large corporations in different countries – and legal jurisdictions. It details the “perfect” way to be arrested at a climate protest in Paris, as well as describing various techniques to deal with bailiffs and the police in the UK. George F’s journey takes him to martial arts classes for the homeless in Hackney, an anarchist masturbation workshop in Berlin’s Rigaer Strasse, and The Mother Black Cunt, a queer club in Camden that has been squatted and reopened for a final night of debauchery and celebration.\n\nGood Times in Dystopia is dotted with photos of twisted paintings that have been daubed inside occupied buildings, extracts from anarchist pamphlets, and quotes from political theorists – creating a DIY montage of the various influences that have shaped the communities George F is documenting. At times horrifying and unrelenting, the book provides a unique window into romances forged amid decaying buildings and drug abuse – and the elation that can come with winning small victories over bailiffs and corporations. As well as documenting the highs – it also offers insight into the isolation that can come with rejecting, or being rejected by, wider society. The depression, breakdowns and bewilderment that can come with facing up to climate crisis and turning your back on functioning plumbing, sobriety, monogamy, and money. ~ Wil Crisp, Freedom News, https://freedomnews.org.uk/book-review-good-times-in-dystopia/"", ""Apocalyptic visions, battles & conditions. But for George F. and compadres this is the everyday, the normal, the daily grind, the struggle, written about with insight, humour and a passionate urgency. A savage resilience propels this blow-by-blow account of the life anarchic. Memorise this book then repeat it to friends, lovers, enemies and strangers. George’s stories of the precarious, collective struggle for survival and change are essential ingredients of a deadly serious battle. Don’t fuck about. Read it and fight. ~ Paul Hawkins, author of Place, Waste, Dissent"", ""With ‘Good Times In Dystopia’, George F. once more proves a perfect guide into the gorgeous, grimy underground of the UK and beyond - at once a wry, detached observer and intoxicated agitator. This is writing at its most restless and urgent, a frenzied war cry guttural with booze, speed, nihilism and hope. In documenting his desperate battles against State, capital and inner demons, George has gifted us a raging response to the bleakness of our times. ~ Paul Case, Dead White Anarchists"", ""George F is a poet of the true underground, writing from a world many wish didn’t exist. He’s that rarest thing: a writer who lives the reality they capture on the page. ~ Gary Budden"", ""After the excellent 'Total Shambles', George F comes back with this beautifully written book. 'Good Times In Dystopia' reads like a dystopian novel, yet it is a contemporary London story: it depicts the lives of a gang of London squatters with all the messiness, joy and despair one may wish from a good novel included in the package. A must read for everyone interested in London's hidden history of squatting. If you liked Charles Bukowski, you will love George F. ~ Zofia Brom, Freedom News""]" "Graham Harman Reader, The","[""Graham Harman""]","The essential compendium of shorter works by one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century. Written in Harman’s typical clear and witty style, the Reader is an essential resource for veteran readers of Harman and newcomers alike.","The Graham Harman Reader is the essential compendium of shorter works by one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century. The writings in this volume are split into seven chapters. The first concerns Harman’s resistance to both downward and upward reductionism. The second chapter contains works that develop the specific fourfold structure of Object-Oriented Ontology. In the third, we find Harman’s novel arguments for why causal relations between two entities can only be indirect. The fourth chapter discusses why aesthetics deserves to be called first philosophy. The fifth chapter contains Harman’s underrated contributions to ethics and politics, and the sixth deals with epistemology, mind, and science. A concluding seventh chapter contains several previously unpublished writings not available anywhere else. Written in Harman’s typical clear and witty style, the /Reader/ is an essential resource for veteran readers of Harman and newcomers alike.","The Graham Harman Reader is the essential compendium of shorter works by one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century. The writings in this volume are split into seven chapters. The first concerns Harman’s resistance to both downward and upward reductionism. The second chapter contains works that develop the specific fourfold structure of Object-Oriented Ontology. In the third, we find Harman’s novel arguments for why causal relations between two entities can only be indirect. The fourth chapter discusses why aesthetics deserves to be called first philosophy. The fifth chapter contains Harman’s underrated contributions to ethics and politics, and the sixth deals with epistemology, mind, and science. A concluding seventh chapter contains several previously unpublished writings not available anywhere else. Written in Harman’s typical clear and witty style, the /Reader/ is an essential resource for veteran readers of Harman and newcomers alike.",2,"[""Overcoming the war of religion between analytics and continentals with a brand-new metaphysical insight, Graham Harman has restored to philosophy its greatness and value. ~ Maurizio Ferraris, Italian continental philosopher and author of the Manifesto of New Realism"", ""I don't read a lot of metaphysics, but 'The Graham Harman Reader' is metaphysics that I read. ~ Bruce Sterling, science fiction author""]" Greece: what is to be done?,"[""Karl Heinz Roth""]","In-depth analysis of the Greek debt crisis, and alternatives to the socioeconomic destruction of Greece and the Eurozone","""Greece – What is to be done"" analyzes the Greek debt crisis, the multilateral austerity countermeasures, and offers alternatives to the socioeconomic destruction of Greece and the Eurozone.","""Greece – What is to be done"" analyzes the Greek debt crisis, the multilateral austerity countermeasures, and offers alternatives to the socioeconomic destruction of Greece and the Eurozone.",1,"[""Greece has become the storm centre of class struggle in Europe for the duration of this decade. The country has been the site of a relentless economic and political assault by the internal and external forces of neoliberalism. The onset of global recession at the turn of this decade impacted on Greece in the form of a debt crisis, linked to the country's fast-tracked membership of the eurozone in 2001. The institutions of EU capitalism inflicted a sequence of austerity policies –euphemistically known as Memoranda – designed to make the country’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens pay for the corruption and ineptitude of its ruling class. In response to this ruling class offensive, the Greek subaltern classes have initiated a heroic wave of resistance that has taken multiple forms: general strikes, riots, occupations and, in the electoral arena, the sensational rise of Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left), which climaxed with the party's accession to office earlier this year. Karl Heinz Roth provides a valuable synopsis of the key events of the Greek crisis in this short but densely argued book. He is also interested in extracting the tactical and strategic lessons the left should draw from the ongoing turmoil. In Roth’s words, Greece has ‘become a laboratory: persons facing extreme processes of expropriation and pauperisation have to make existential decisions that may challenge habitual norms and lead in all sorts of directions’ (86). The author is undoubtedly correct that it is urgent that forces of the radical left in the rest of Europe engage with the theoretical and organisational challenges thrown up by this critical conjuncture. Debates over central questions such as the relationship between reform and the revolution or the nature of the capitalist state that engaged earlier generations of socialists now have to be revisited through the prism of the ‘Greek laboratory’.\n\nRoth opens his analysis by demolishing the ruling class narrative that the crisis is the combined consequence of a bloated public sector and a dilatory workforce that had developed an unhealthy dependence on EU hand-outs. The country’s admission to the top table of European capitalism in 1993 was engineered by the forces of neoliberalism even though ‘everyone involved was aware that Greece did not satisfy the criteria stipulated in the Maastricht Treaty, particularly the Treaty’s budgetary parameters’ (3). Roth perceptively notes that the Greek crisis cannot be comprehended on an economic register alone but must also be viewed on the assumption ‘that geostrategic and short-term political goals played a decisive role’ (3). He reminds us that the country’s fast-tracking into the Eurozone club came two years after the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the USSR, and that, consequently, Greece became an essential base for an ambitious attempt by the West to hegemonise regions of South-East Europe that had previously been under Russian influence. Interpreting the crisis as a multi-level one, incorporating factors of class, geopolitics and ideology, puts Roth’s analysis ahead of mainstream commentary of Greece that focus on the economic dimension alone.\n\nOutside Greece, there has been minimal coverage of the deleterious effects of EU-imposed austerity on the fabric of the country’s civil society. Most mainstream European commentators prefer to turn a blind eye to the savaging by the EU, ECB and IMF of the infrastructure of everyday life in Greece. Roth, in contrast, draws attention to how a developed Western state has been subjected to the type of economic barrage previously reserved for countries in the southern hemisphere. He describes how a staggering 80% of young, job-seeking Greeks have been forced to move back in with their parents (14); the number of people in absolute poverty has tripled (43); the suicide rate has doubled (46); and the bulk of the population have experienced a 50% drop in living standards (60). Roth vividly labels this the ‘skeletisation’ of Greek society (61).\n\nAs a German commentator, Roth admirably does not hold back on pointing the finger at the duplicitous role of his own ruling class for stoking the crisis. He describes how shortly before admission to the EU, the Athens Supreme Court had authorised compensation claims against Germany by Greek survivors of Nazi occupation of Greece in World War Two. As part of the deal between the two governments to authorise Eurozone membership that judicial decision was conveniently reversed by Athens (4). Roth underlines the current crisis cannot be comprehended without a recognition of the dark stain of the Second World War on relations between the two countries. Again, it is impressive that despite his nationality, Roth highlights the horrors inflicted on Greece during that conflict. Nazi terror led to 100 000 civilian deaths and left 1 million homeless. 1600 towns were razed to the ground and the country’s socio-economic infrastructure was effectively destroyed (77). The postwar settlement stipulated that Germany should repay Greece for the financial cost but the onset of the Cold War and geopolitical expediency meant that debt was conveniently shelved. Roth calculates that it currently stands at 79 billion euros, making allowances for currency adjustments (78). Not the least ironic element of the present situation is that the German elite throughout the twentieth century has twice managed to evade the economic consequences of aggressive foreign policy, thanks to realpolitik manoeuvring, and yet its latest incarnation in Berlin is now displaying a merciless attitude to extracting debt from another European state. Roth is alert to the hypocrisy of his own country’s rulers: ‘They are living in a glass house and yet they insist on the comparatively small Greek economy repaying its debt at virtually any cost. It is high time to put a stop to the hubris of Germany’s elite and the multilateral institutions supporting them’ (82).\n\nThe hubris of the German ruling class was apparent through extensive military contracts facilitated between the two countries as part of negotiations in the 1990s.The burgeoning Greek debt condoned by the paymasters of European capital funded 75 billion euros worth of armaments, with Germany profiting the most from orders of tanks and submarines. In fact, Greek military expenditure came to double that of the Germans at one point in the pre-crash era! Roth observes how an intersection of internal and external vested interests coalesced to create this criminal waste of money. German military contractors were obviously rubbing their hands with glee but the expenditure also allowed the Greek bourgeoisie cynically to exploit their historic rivalry with Turkey to justify the astronomical sums involved. Roth laments how ‘German and French defence contractors were the laughing third party and profiteers of this regional conflict’ (5).\n\nAnother crucial point he explains is that although the German plutocracy has profited from the Greek debacle, the same cannot be said for the working class of his own country. At the opening of this century, the ruling class in Berlin had piloted the austerity imposed on southern Europe on their own population in the form of ‘the agenda 2010 that has been enforced in Germany since 2003-04 and which is geared to the creation of a low-wage sector that aggressively proliferates from the lower to the higher echelons of the working class’ (58). The ability of the Euro elite to manipulate the media presentation of the current crisis into a supposed conflict between prudent Germans and irresponsible Greeks belies the reality of an international elite exploiting an international subaltern class.\n\nThe military-based chicanery is characteristic of the nefarious capacity of the international ruling class to generate an ideological smokescreen veiling its responsibility for the crisis. Roth expounds how the elite of exploiters can be analysed as being composed of three overlapping sections, all crucial contributors to the unfolding maelstrom of disaster. The native Greek bourgeoisie is made up of family clans who have accumulated wealth and power through their control of the country’s banking, shipping and petrochemical industries. In the 1990s, these closely-knit cliques exploited their political influence to organise tax avoidance on an industrial scale. Corporation tax was lowered to 25%, encouraging ‘a remarkable deterioration in the tax compliance of parts of the conservative upper middle class … the country’s top 30 000 families held more than 250 billion euros in capital assets. Of these, 100 billion alone were held as bank deposits; at least another 100 billion were transferred abroad’ (5).\n\nIntrinsically attached to this faction of the elite are an insidious conglomeration of financial, construction and military corporations located in other parts of Europe that profited from the Greek spending spree. These include Deutsche Bank, ThyssenKrupp and Credit Suisse (6). These first two parts of Roth’s gallery of rogues are predictable but some readers may find the third group he identifies more surprising. Pasok was the dominant party of the left in Greece following the fall of the military dictorship – that is, until the recent rise of Syriza. Roth argues Pasok is symptomatic of the decline of Western social democracy due to its craven acceptance of the tenets of neoliberalism and its failure to provide an authentic alternative to predatory right-wing parties. Roth describes a process horribly familiar to the post-Blair British left: ‘Pasok’s reservations about the major entrepreneurial dynasties, the Orthodox Church and the military-industrial complex were dropped. Pasok also entered into an unqualified symbiosis with the ruling elites’ (6) .The spectacular disintegration of Pasok’s voting base among the Greek working class can be largely attributed to this craven willingness on the part of its senior parliamentarians to prostrate themselves before the demands of the EU elite. Roth describes a cancerous growth of clientelism, corruption and greed permeating the higher echelons of Greece’s economic and political establishment and undermining the legitimacy of virtually all the mainstream parties. Of course, this can be seen as part of a global phenemonenon in which the apparent hegemony of neoliberal assumptions has eroded faith in the established structures of capitalist political systems and led to the rise of smaller parties on the margins of the electoral spectrum (including Ukip and the Greens in the UK).\n\nGreece has become the starkest example of this democratic deficit. Bourgeois politicians are increasingly powerless in the face of diktats by supra-national bodies such as the Troika. Pasok’s Prime Minister, George Papandreou, at one point sought to iniate a referendum on one of the austerity packages he was presented with by the Troika, but was promptly instructed by his French and German masters that such a course would not be appropriate (22). The logic of this evisceration of the façade of bourgeois democracy was reached shortly after when a Greek banker was installed as head of government with no democratic mandate whatever, but with the approval of the Euro elite in Berlin and Paris. Roth terms these crude tactics the ‘de-democritisation’of Greece, noting the irony that they are appalling in any context but especially so in the country that gave birth to the eponymous concept (67). Not the least of the lessons to be learned from the Greek laboratory is that capitalism finds democratic structures convenient but not indispensable.\n\nThe situation is clearly full of important lessons for the left in terms of understanding the changing nature of the ruling class in the current era. But equally significant is what we can learn about developing a strategy for socialist politics that might enable Europe’s working class to topple the neoliberal leviathan that now confronts it. Apart from the hollowing-out of social democratic parties such as Pasok noted above, Roth also dismisses far left sectarian posturing of organisations such as the Greek Communist Party that has repeatedly refused to co-operate with Syriza and consequently condemned itself to political irrelevance (86). In contrast, Roth acknowledges the positive role the latter party has played in encouraging the confidence and resistance of Greek workers. He praises the organisation for offering hope to the downtrodden right across Europe, not just within Greece, on the basis of a programme ‘designed to halt the rampant redistribution of income from the lower to the higher echelons of society while restoring social and economic justice and beginning to rebuild the Greek economy in an environmentally sustainable way’ (85). However, Roth is unconvinced by the claim of Syriza’s leadership that such a progressive social policy can be constructed within the parameters of the EU (85). Events since the book’s publication appear to validate Roth’s scepticism about the possibility of advances for the Greek left as long as it retains its faith in the beneficence of the Euro elite. Syriza has been caught in a familiar trap for reformist politicians of rising to power on the back of a mass movement of protest; but then being forced to apply the brakes to the same movement according to the rules of conventional politics. The author persuasively argues a more fundamental rupture is required to significantly challenge the supra-national forces of capitalism, encompassing a revival of the type of upsurges from below that sparked the Arab Spring revolutions and Occupy movement of 2011 (89). Roth takes his sub-title from Lenin’s seminal pamphlet written in 1902; recent events in Greece suggest the ongoing relevance of last century’s most successful revolutionary to the challenges of our time.\n\n1 April 2015\n\n~ Sean Ledwith, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books""]" He Was Our Man in Washington,"[""Owen Symes""]","A fair-minded but highly critical interpretation of president Obama and his brand of ""hope and change,"" grounded in a reality that goes beyond the headlines.","He Was Our Man in Washington provides a detailed narrative of the years of the Obama administration gravitating around six key topics: the War on Terror, the Great Recession, marginal struggles, the Affordable Care Act, climate change, and Indigenous issues, that sit at the intersection of the other topics. Each chapter begins with a brief account of the historical context within which the Obama administration acted. The result is a fair-minded but highly critical interpretation of president Obama and his brand of ""hope and change,"" grounded in a reality that goes beyond mere headlines.","He Was Our Man in Washington provides a detailed narrative of the years of the Obama administration gravitating around six key topics: the War on Terror, the Great Recession, marginal struggles, the Affordable Care Act, climate change, and Indigenous issues, that sit at the intersection of the other topics. Each chapter begins with a brief account of the historical context within which the Obama administration acted. The result is a fair-minded but highly critical interpretation of president Obama and his brand of ""hope and change,"" grounded in a reality that goes beyond mere headlines.",9,"[""Overall, although the book acknowledges improvements in health insurance availability and progress on civil rights issues, its assessment of Obama’s record is generally highly critical, indeed...Written topically rather than chronologically, this history of the Obama years effectively focuses on six key areas: foreign policy, the economy, health care, civil rights, climate change, and Indigenous relations/oil pipelines. On most of these, the book argues, the president effected little change...The book is supported by an impressive network of endnotes, and it presents a well-researched argument...a solid policy assessment of the Obama presidency...And although the argument is clear, its tendency toward digression sometimes results in a loss of focus. Extended discursions, including entire subsections, expound on the failures of free market capitalism or the origins of human-made climate change, for example, which provide historical analysis that’s far beyond the scope of the Obama administration...A thorough, if meandering, recollection and critique of a presidency. ~ Kirkus Reviews"", ""I went into HE WAS OUR MAN IN WASHINGTON with the idea that author Owen Symes was going to give us a look at the presidency of Barack Obama---and in some ways he did. What the book ultimately does, however, is look at the America that made it possible for Obama to even RUN for office, what he was able to (and not able to) accomplish and how far his message of 'hope and change' really went.\n\nThe history in this book is amazing, allowing us to see the America that dealt with slavery and other ills, how Obama thought he could fix the problems of a nation and its people---as well as the realities he faced.\n\nAs Symes writes in the book even with his accomplishments in some ways Obama fell short of even his own expectations as well as those who supported him. What we learn is that one man cannot change a system the way some might hope. Even the one holding the office of the presidency has their limits.\n\nA fascinating look at the world that gave birth to the Obama Presidency and that which has followed, HE WAS OUR MAN IN WASHINGTON is an informative read. ~ Cyrus Webb, author of Words I Choose to Live By"", ""He Was Our Man in Washington: A History of the Obama Years joins a host of other books about the Obama era, but offers a difference - it narrows its inspection to six key struggles and actions which marked Obama's legacy. Thus, it holds the opportunity to provide in-depth insights where more general Obama discourses only lightly touch upon these issues.\n\nThe six areas of focus are the War on Terror; the legacy of the recession of 2007; marginal group struggles; the Affordable Care Act; climate change; and Indigenous peoples' struggles. Each issue receives its own section and numerous chapters which outline various aspects of these concerns, often criticizing the impact and effects of presidential choices and approaches to the problems: \""Obama's policy in Libya was the loudest example of a typically quiet approach. Across the African continent, AFRICOM spent the two terms of the first black president dotting the landscape with outposts, bases, forward supply positions. Local airfields allowed US spy drones to operate, local troops made use of US equipment and training to hunt down their enemies (or topple their government, as was the case with Mali), and US special forces spread themselves across Africa, engaging in some 546 \""activities\"" over the course of 2013 alone, a 217 percent increase from 2008. The sustained expansion of this battlespace over the course of Obama's presidency, occurring as it did almost entirely out of the public's view, bodes ill for the future.\""\n\nReaders anticipating a one-sided laudatory review may be stymied by this critical treatise, but those who want a more even assessment of not just the pros but the cons of this administration's decisions will find He Was Our Man in Washington offers much food for thought.\n\nAnother important fact is that this book comes heavily footnoted with research supporting both the history and the author's analysis. This attention to detail provides not just facts, but more materials for further reading, for those who would pursue source materials and statistical references.\n\nThe result is a fine, in-depth survey of a wide range of topics, from civil rights to the environmental and political issues which received decisive action and influence from the Obama administration.\n\nPolitical science readers who would go beyond surface reports to truly understand political process and influence will find He Was Our Man in Washington a well-researched and thought-provoking analysis, especially well suited for classroom discussion and debate, as well as individual study. ~ Diane Donovan, Mid West Book Review"", ""He Was Our Man in Washington: A History of the Obama Years is a historical retrospective of the Obama administration (2008-2016). Chapters focus upon six major topics interconnected with the administration's policies: the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the problems of the margenalized, the Affordable Care Act, climate change, and problems affecting indigenous Americans. He Was Our Man in Washington neither lionizes nor demonizes the Obama administration; instead, every effort is made to critically evaluate the administration's results, while acknowledging that hindsight is 20/20 while decisions made in the moment do not necessarily benefit from such clarity of vision. He Was Our Man in Washington is expertly researched, thoroughly accessible, immensely fascinating, and highly recommended. ~ John Burroughs, Mid West Book Review"", ""[This book] is a fresh and most welcome perspective. It is a provocative study for anyone wanting to get a better comprehension of the Obama administration. ~ Norm Goldman, Bookpleasures.com"", ""Here is a comprehensively researched, well-argued, and balanced evaluation of Obama’s presidency. Given the hostile caricatures promoted by the Trump regime and its spokespersons, Owen Symes has produced a valuable assessment of hopes and promises, strengths and failures of an important chapter in US history. ~ Richard D. Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst"", ""Owen Symes is a rising young star who has created a masterful social history of the Obama years. This book clarifies the underlying contradictions of the Obama administration, linked to global capitalism. The clarification of Obamacare and other policies for health and human services is especially helpful. As we move forward, Symes’s analysis helps us shed our illusions so we can avoid making the same mistakes all over again. ~ Howard Waitzkin, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of New Mexico"", ""I spilled blue Gatorade on this thing, hung it out to dry, and it’s still the best book on Obama in my entire collection. ~ John Dilascio, creator of the QueerPOTUS YouTube channel"", ""In a stunningly perceptive debut, Owen Symes delivers a masterful, unique perspective in his non-fiction “He Was Our Man in Washington: A History of the Obama Years.” Owen stretches the relevance and impact of Obama’s tenure in the White House well beyond those eight years, bringing critical historical perspective from decades, even more than 150 years, into the full understanding of his presentation. Owen Symes brings a deceptive level of experience into his analysis of the Obama administration, adding a much larger historical context than today’s ‘soundbite’ prone conveyors provide. ‘He Was Our Man in Washington: A History of the Obama Years” is a vitally important offering in the historical tapestry of America’s executive leadership. ~ John Busbee for The Culture Buzz""]" Hearing the Cloud,"[""Emile Frankel""]","How do platform technologies change the way we listen, and can music help reimagine the future?","Can music be a curse? Here is an alternate history of online politics and new technology from the perspective of listening, typing, composing, and shared hearing. Emile Frankel presents a rigorous account of a world felt to be in crisis. The aesthetic and tonal ramifications for such feelings are twisted within the oppressive online structures mediating new music. The legacies of Silicon Valley digitalism, 4chan, Less Wrong, and Chaos Magic are compared to the magical thinking which underlies stochastic composition, and the aesthetics of deconstructed club music. Despite a pessimistic account of Accelerationism and reactionary philosophy, Frankel's spirited writing is full of hope. Hearing the Cloud considers the communal online conversations we engage in daily as profound acts of defiance. Sweet, lithe, oily, and honest music is shown to be an important source of togetherness.","Can music be a curse? Here is an alternate history of online politics and new technology from the perspective of listening, typing, composing, and shared hearing. Emile Frankel presents a rigorous account of a world felt to be in crisis. The aesthetic and tonal ramifications for such feelings are twisted within the oppressive online structures mediating new music. The legacies of Silicon Valley digitalism, 4chan, Less Wrong, and Chaos Magic are compared to the magical thinking which underlies stochastic composition, and the aesthetics of deconstructed club music. Despite a pessimistic account of Accelerationism and reactionary philosophy, Frankel's spirited writing is full of hope. Hearing the Cloud considers the communal online conversations we engage in daily as profound acts of defiance. Sweet, lithe, oily, and honest music is shown to be an important source of togetherness.",1,"[""Hearing the Cloud guides us through the soundscapes of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, from chillstep to nightcore, and recaptures the possibilities of collective listening embedded within these musical forms. Emile Frankel traces a pattern recognition of our moment, poised between dystopian nihilism and the receding possibilities of utopia. Against irony, fragmentation, and chaos, Hearing the Cloud helps us hear the material presence of sound in our lives and the whispers of a better future. ~ Benjamin Noys, author of Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism""]" Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists,"[""Aaron J. Leonard"", ""Conor A. Gallagher""]","A critical history of the largest Maoist organization to emerge in the US out of the tumultuous sixties, and the FBI's unrelenting campaign against it.","Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists is a history of the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party — the largest Maoist organization to arise in the US — from its origins in the explosive year of 1968, its expansion into a national organization in the early seventies, its extension into major industry throughout early part of that decade, the devastating schism in the aftermath of the death of Mao Tse-tung, and its ultimate decline as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. From its beginnings the grouping was the focus of J. Edgar Hoover and other top FBI officials for an unrelenting array of operations: Informant penetration, setting organizations against each other, setting up phony communist collectives for infiltration and disruption, planting of phone taps and microphones in apartments, break-ins to steal membership lists, the use of FBI ‘friendly journalists’ such as Victor Riesel and Ed Montgomery to undermine the group, and much more. It is the story of a sizable section of the radicalized youth of whose radicalism did not disappear at the end of the sixties, and of the FBI’s largest — and up to now, untold — campaign against it.","Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists is a history of the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party — the largest Maoist organization to arise in the US — from its origins in the explosive year of 1968, its expansion into a national organization in the early seventies, its extension into major industry throughout early part of that decade, the devastating schism in the aftermath of the death of Mao Tse-tung, and its ultimate decline as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. From its beginnings the grouping was the focus of J. Edgar Hoover and other top FBI officials for an unrelenting array of operations: Informant penetration, setting organizations against each other, setting up phony communist collectives for infiltration and disruption, planting of phone taps and microphones in apartments, break-ins to steal membership lists, the use of FBI ‘friendly journalists’ such as Victor Riesel and Ed Montgomery to undermine the group, and much more. It is the story of a sizable section of the radicalized youth of whose radicalism did not disappear at the end of the sixties, and of the FBI’s largest — and up to now, untold — campaign against it.",14,"[""Leonard and Gallagher do a tremendous service for activists today who are active in the Black Lives Matter movement, the fast food worker movement, and other social movements by showing in tremendous and rigorous detail what exactly the FBI did to destroy the radical left of the 1970s. ~ Bradley Duncan, Against the Current"", ""With Heavy Radicals, historians Aaron Leonard and Conor Gallagher illuminate the surveillance state's role in shaping both the left itself and the government's response to it. ~ Jay Kinney, Reason Magazine"", ""A new account of American Maoism and its peculiar impact on the protest movements of the USA in the 1970s and 1980s. \""Heavy Radicals\"" provides a rare insight into the motivations and political culture of a fringe culture on the American Left. ~ Left Futures, Mark Perryman"", ""Heavy Radicals is an excellent addition to the literature on the history of revolutionary groups which played important roles in the 1960s and 1970s. It is the first comprehensive and complete history of ... the Revolutionary Union. It is a well-researched book which fills the gap created by the absence of historical literature on an important period in the history of the United States. ~ Sarah Kahn, The Washington Book Review"", ""Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists-The Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980 recovers a “lost” but crucial portion of the history of the New Left of the 1960s and 70s. Co-authors Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher masterfully chronicle the tumultuous history of the leading Maoist group in the United States and the government’s attempt to crush dissent under an iron heel. ~ Mike Kuhlenbeck, Eurasia Review"", ""His personal experiences, in concert with a wealth of archival materials and FBI files, give the book gravitas...\""Heavy Radicals\"" is at its best when focused on the ways the US government worked to sabotage the RU and RCP. ~ Eleanor Bader, Truthout"", ""The story of the RU-RCP in the period covered by Leonard and Galagher is one of dedication to revolutionary principles and social justice. It is a commitment based on an understanding of the fundamental injustice of monopoly capitalism and imperialism, and evolved from years of political organizing trying to change that dynamic. It is set in the context of a period that saw the murderous war in Vietnam result in a victory for the Vietnamese; an antiwar and antiracist movement made of US students and working people of all races rise to victorious heights and then retreat; and a government in Washington determined to maintain and expand its power over the planet. It is a story of committed political radicals willing to give up their previous lives for revolution. Furthermore, it describes the dangers of factionalism and the pitfalls of dogmatism. The years portrayed in the text were also years of intensified police repression countered with growing cultural and personal freedom. Heavy Radicals does an exceptional job in layering these and other aspects specific to the times into a history well worth the read, even if you aren’t a historian (or a Marxist). ~ Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch"", ""Herein lies the historical take-home lessons from Heavy Radicals for future revolutionaries. Chief among them is the sine qua non of solidarity. The movement must be led by the masses, and it must be a principled movement that is inclusive of all humans. The 1 percenters will not desist from using whatever means to undermine solidarity and maintain the capitalist system that serves their needs while failing so many other humans. Solidarity is absolutely needed to overcome this classism and the greed and supremacism that drives it. ~ Kim Peterson, Dissident Voice"", ""Leonard and Gallagher's historiography reads as a grand political tragedy: it is the story of an organization that, despite significant state interference, temporarily became the primary force of revolution in the United States, and then, also despite state interference, imploded and became a marginal grouplet. Apprehending this tragedy should provide the contemporary left with several useful lessons. ~ Joshua Moufawad-Paul, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books"", ""Based on impeccable research, Heavy Radicals explores the rise of the Revolutionary Communist Party in the late 1960s and 1970s. Militant Maoists, dedicated to revolutionary class struggle, the RCP was one of many organizations that fought to carry on the 60s struggle for radical change in the United States well after SDS and other more well known groups imploded. Leonard and Gallagher help us to understand how the RCP's revolutionary ideology resonated with a small group of young people in post-1968 America, took inspiration from the People's Republic of China, and brought down the wrath of the FBI. ~ David Farber, Author of The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s"", ""Heavy Radicals is a concise and insightful history of a long-forgotten but vibrant radical movement. Leonard and Gallagher break new ground in revealing the extent to which law enforcement will go to infiltrate, destabilize and ultimately destroy domestic political organizations that espouse a philosophy counter to the status quo. To better understand the current state of domestic surveillance and political repression, from Occupy Wall Street to the Edward Snowden revelations, start with this little gem of a book. ~ T.J. English, Author of The Savage City"", ""Meticulously researched, drawing on both internal documents hiding in plain sight and a wealth of information gained through laborious freedom of information requests, Heavy Radicals is a great example of history of the near past -- in examining how the FBI acted, we are better able to understand the methods employed in undermining dissent today. ~ Eveline Lubbers, Author of Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark: Corporate and Police Spying on Activists"", ""In this masterfully written and extensively researched book, Aaron Leonard with Conor A. Gallagher offers a no-nonsense critical analysis of one of the most resilient, misunderstood, and controversial anti-capitalist organizations of the last fifty years. This book is a MUST READ for anyone invested in nuancing their understanding of revolutionary political struggle and unrelenting state repression in the United States. ~ Robeson Taj Frazier, Author of The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination"", ""In this untold and highly accessible history of Sixties radicalism, Aaron Leonard and Conor Gallagher expertly guide us through the world of the Maoists who picked up and maintained the activist cause well into the seventies, long after others had collapsed. Fascinating!” ~ Rick Shenkman, Founder and publisher of George Mason University's History News Network""]" Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists (second edition),"[""Aaron J. Leonard"", ""Conor A. Gallagher""]","A critical history of the largest Maoist organization to emerge in the US out of the tumultuous sixties, and the FBI's unrelenting campaign against it.","Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists is a history of the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party - the largest Maoist organization to arise in the US - from its origins in the explosive year of 1968, its expansion into a national organization in the early '70s, its extension into major industry throughout the early part of that decade, and the devastating schism in the aftermath of the death of Mao Tse-tung to its ultimate decline as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. From its beginnings the grouping was the focus of J. Edgar Hoover and other top FBI officials for an unrelenting array of operations: Informant penetration, setting organizations against each other, setting up phony communist collectives for infiltration and disruption, planting of phone taps and microphones in apartments, break-ins to steal membership lists, the use of FBI ‘friendly journalists’ such as Victor Riesel and Ed Montgomery to undermine the group, and much more. It is the story of a sizable section of the radicalized youth whose radicalism did not disappear at the end of the '60s, and of the FBI’s largest - and, up to now, untold - campaign against it.","Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists is a history of the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party - the largest Maoist organization to arise in the US - from its origins in the explosive year of 1968, its expansion into a national organization in the early '70s, its extension into major industry throughout the early part of that decade, and the devastating schism in the aftermath of the death of Mao Tse-tung to its ultimate decline as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. From its beginnings the grouping was the focus of J. Edgar Hoover and other top FBI officials for an unrelenting array of operations: Informant penetration, setting organizations against each other, setting up phony communist collectives for infiltration and disruption, planting of phone taps and microphones in apartments, break-ins to steal membership lists, the use of FBI ‘friendly journalists’ such as Victor Riesel and Ed Montgomery to undermine the group, and much more. It is the story of a sizable section of the radicalized youth whose radicalism did not disappear at the end of the '60s, and of the FBI’s largest - and, up to now, untold - campaign against it.",14,"[""Leonard and Gallagher do a tremendous service for activists today who are active in the Black Lives Matter movement, the fast food worker movement, and other social movements by showing in tremendous and rigorous detail what exactly the FBI did to destroy the radical left of the 1970s. ~ Bradley Duncan, Against the Current"", ""With Heavy Radicals, historians Aaron Leonard and Conor Gallagher illuminate the surveillance state's role in shaping both the left itself and the government's response to it. ~ Jay Kinney, Reason Magazine"", ""Herein lies the historical take-home lessons from Heavy Radicals for future revolutionaries. Chief among them is the sine qua non of solidarity. The movement must be led by the masses, and it must be a principled movement that is inclusive of all humans. The 1 percenters will not desist from using whatever means to undermine solidarity and maintain the capitalist system that serves their needs while failing so many other humans. Solidarity is absolutely needed to overcome this classism and the greed and supremacism that drives it. ~ Kim Peterson, Dissident Voice"", ""Leonard and Gallagher's historiography reads as a grand political tragedy: it is the story of an organization that, despite significant state interference, temporarily became the primary force of revolution in the United States, and then, also despite state interference, imploded and became a marginal grouplet. Apprehending this tragedy should provide the contemporary left with several useful lessons. ~ Joshua Moufawad-Paul, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books"", ""A new account of American Maoism and its peculiar impact on the protest movements of the USA in the 1970s and 1980s. \""Heavy Radicals\"" provides a rare insight into the motivations and political culture of a fringe culture on the American Left. ~ Mark Perryman, Left Futures"", ""Heavy Radicals is an excellent addition to the literature on the history of revolutionary groups which played important roles in the 1960s and 1970s. It is the first comprehensive and complete history of ... the Revolutionary Union. It is a well-researched book which fills the gap created by the absence of historical literature on an important period in the history of the United States. ~ Sarah Kahn, The Washington Book Review"", ""Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists-The Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980 recovers a “lost” but crucial portion of the history of the New Left of the 1960s and 70s. Co-authors Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher masterfully chronicle the tumultuous history of the leading Maoist group in the United States and the government’s attempt to crush dissent under an iron heel. ~ Mike Kuhlenbeck, Eurasia Review"", ""His personal experiences, in concert with a wealth of archival materials and FBI files, give the book gravitas...\""Heavy Radicals\"" is at its best when focused on the ways the US government worked to sabotage the RU and RCP. ~ Eleanor Bader, Truthout"", ""The story of the RU-RCP in the period covered by Leonard and Galagher is one of dedication to revolutionary principles and social justice. It is a commitment based on an understanding of the fundamental injustice of monopoly capitalism and imperialism, and evolved from years of political organizing trying to change that dynamic. It is set in the context of a period that saw the murderous war in Vietnam result in a victory for the Vietnamese; an antiwar and antiracist movement made of US students and working people of all races rise to victorious heights and then retreat; and a government in Washington determined to maintain and expand its power over the planet. It is a story of committed political radicals willing to give up their previous lives for revolution. Furthermore, it describes the dangers of factionalism and the pitfalls of dogmatism. The years portrayed in the text were also years of intensified police repression countered with growing cultural and personal freedom. Heavy Radicals does an exceptional job in layering these and other aspects specific to the times into a history well worth the read, even if you aren’t a historian (or a Marxist). ~ Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch"", ""In this masterfully written and extensively researched book, Aaron Leonard with Conor A. Gallagher offers a no-nonsense critical analysis of one of the most resilient, misunderstood, and controversial anti-capitalist organizations of the last fifty years. This book is a MUST READ for anyone invested in nuancing their understanding of revolutionary political struggle and unrelenting state repression in the United States. ~ Robeson Taj Frazier, author of The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination"", ""Meticulously researched, drawing on both internal documents hiding in plain sight and a wealth of information gained through laborious freedom of information requests, Heavy Radicals is a great example of history of the near past -- in examining how the FBI acted, we are better able to understand the methods employed in undermining dissent today. ~ Eveline Lubbers, author of Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark: Corporate and Police Spying on Activists"", ""In this untold and highly accessible history of Sixties radicalism, Aaron Leonard and Conor Gallagher expertly guide us through the world of the Maoists who picked up and maintained the activist cause well into the seventies, long after others had collapsed. Fascinating! ~ Rick Shenkman, founder and publisher of George Mason University's History News Network"", ""Heavy Radicals is a concise and insightful history of a long-forgotten but vibrant radical movement. Leonard and Gallagher break new ground in revealing the extent to which law enforcement will go to infiltrate, destabilize and ultimately destroy domestic political organizations that espouse a philosophy counter to the status quo. To better understand the current state of domestic surveillance and political repression, from Occupy Wall Street to the Edward Snowden revelations, start with this little gem of a book. ~ T.J. English, author of The Savage City"", ""Based on impeccable research, Heavy Radicals explores the rise of the Revolutionary Communist Party in the late 1960s and 1970s. Militant Maoists, dedicated to revolutionary class struggle, the RCP was one of many organizations that fought to carry on the 60s struggle for radical change in the United States well after SDS and other more well known groups imploded. Leonard and Gallagher help us to understand how the RCP's revolutionary ideology resonated with a small group of young people in post-1968 America, took inspiration from the People's Republic of China, and brought down the wrath of the FBI. ~ David Farber, author of The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s""]" "Henry, Henry","[""Brian Willems""]","A brilliantly conceived, wild and thought-provoking tale of composer Henry Purcell and his unscholarly contemporary biographers.","Henry, Henry is a brilliantly conceived experimental novel comprising two alternating stories: a factually inaccurate pseudo-biography of 17th-century composer Henry Purcell and the mid-20th-century story of the people writing the biography. In the 17th-century narrative, the young Henry is repeatedly imprisoned, has an affair with the choirmaster's wife, and is afflicted with an unusual fondness for nice clothes. Falsely accused of stealing all of the cornets from the royal stock of instruments, Henry is banished to a town infested with the plague. There he starts an affair with another woman, Cathleen. Upon his return to London, Henry is confronted with the complexities of his love life. The 20th-century narrative tells of faux-scholar Mr Austen who has taken up residence in a small coastal town to get on with his work. There he befriends the Purcell family: mother and young son Henry. At once wild, philosophical and thought-provoking, Henry, Henry is a novella that will stay with you.","Henry, Henry is a brilliantly conceived experimental novel comprising two alternating stories: a factually inaccurate pseudo-biography of 17th-century composer Henry Purcell and the mid-20th-century story of the people writing the biography. In the 17th-century narrative, the young Henry is repeatedly imprisoned, has an affair with the choirmaster's wife, and is afflicted with an unusual fondness for nice clothes. Falsely accused of stealing all of the cornets from the royal stock of instruments, Henry is banished to a town infested with the plague. There he starts an affair with another woman, Cathleen. Upon his return to London, Henry is confronted with the complexities of his love life. The 20th-century narrative tells of faux-scholar Mr Austen who has taken up residence in a small coastal town to get on with his work. There he befriends the Purcell family: mother and young son Henry. At once wild, philosophical and thought-provoking, Henry, Henry is a novella that will stay with you.",1,"[""Inventive. I love anything that manages to be experimental without being pretentious. This book pulls it off. ~ Jennifer Williams (librarian), GoodReads""]" Heterotopia,"[""Caroline Baillie"", ""Jens Kabo"", ""John Reader""]","Thoughts, ideas and a Heterotopia in which to examine the transformations necessary in contemporary society.","Many of us are concerned with the structures, systems and values that we meet on a day-to-day basis. We seem to be rushing headlong to a destination not of our choosing. How did we get here and what can we do about it? This book is the result of an exploration into the ideas of transformation. What does it mean to transform the way we live, to something that we value? In this book we take on the challenge of exploring a potential transformation in one professional field, that of engineering, as an example of how we might break free of common dysfunctional discourses and enter what we call a counter hegemonic 'Heterotopia' - a space or place where we might dream alternative futures. The text is a unique collaboration spanning the disciplines of engineering education, philosophy and social theory.","Many of us are concerned with the structures, systems and values that we meet on a day-to-day basis. We seem to be rushing headlong to a destination not of our choosing. How did we get here and what can we do about it? This book is the result of an exploration into the ideas of transformation. What does it mean to transform the way we live, to something that we value? In this book we take on the challenge of exploring a potential transformation in one professional field, that of engineering, as an example of how we might break free of common dysfunctional discourses and enter what we call a counter hegemonic 'Heterotopia' - a space or place where we might dream alternative futures. The text is a unique collaboration spanning the disciplines of engineering education, philosophy and social theory.",3,"[""This is a great project. It has plenty of content and relational structures that will continue to provoke insights and lift aspects of cultural hypnosis from its readers. ~ Chris Rose, Senior Critic, Department of Furniture Design, Rhode Island School of Design"", ""This book represents a bold, exciting and thought-provoking foray into the worlds of education, politics and social justice. The authors, writing from disciplines as diverse as engineering and theology, argue coherently for the power of the liminal space as the locus for interdisciplinary enquiry, and the search for common virtues and values out of which emerge new discourses, theories and methodologies. As well as this important theoretical contribution the authors have also rendered complex ideas in a clear and helpful way for those outside the disciplines in question. This book therefore practices what it preaches - namely the application of these daring transformational processes to areas of existing human endeavour. It is now for others to apply the principles and ideas contained in this book to their own situations and contexts. ~ Dr Chris Baker, Director of Research for the William Temple Foundation and Senior Lecturer in Public and Urban Theology in the Department of Theology"", ""It is with great excitement that I write in support of this most important new book on transformations, entitled Heterotopia. It is a book that arrives at a most important period in modern history, a time where humankind has the power to literally transform the world into whatever image it chooses. The questions then at hand are two fold: first, what do we as a society choose and second who among us is actually going to do the choosing?\n\nAs an engineer and an engineering educator for now over three decades, I have struggled mightily seeking to imagine my profession as one in which social justice is as important to us as it is to the medical and legal professions. I have run head on into the prevailing myths or perhaps more eloquently as described by the authors as the ‘common sense’ view. That view that pervades modern engineering today as it has over the last 200 years precludes any mention of justice relying much more comfortably with the notion of responsibility. That wall of obstructionism is immensely stable and powerful. At times I wonder if it ever can be shattered. I believe that the proposed effort, Heterotopia, offers to all of us a mallet with which we can begin to bring a sense of compassion into my profession, engineering, but also to countless other professions as well.\n\nRapidly advancing technology brings all of us closer together, wherein the concerns of one inevitably becoming the concerns of all. This new closeness is stripping away the false masks, the illusion of difference, which is at the root of injustice and hate and war. The ultimate irony is that engineering, my profession still clings to the dark and poisoning superstition that our world is bounded by the nearest hill, our universe ends at river shore, our common humanity is enclosed in the tight circle of those who share our town and even more powerfully, our views. Heteroptia offers all of us a glimpse into a new world in which the horizon is limitless, bridges to all are constructed and our circle of those for whom we care extends beyond our imaginations.\n\nI am most excited at the prospect of this new work. It fills a need, a desperate need, in the professions, which shape our modern world but unfortunately are saddled with limited perspectives at best.\n\nA recent conference in San Francisco focused on unlocking the heart of higher education. Heteroptia offers all of us the exciting possibility of not only unlocking that heart but the heart of us all no matter our profession or our work. ~ George D. Catalano, Professor of Bioengineering, Department of Bioengineering, State University of New York at Binghamton""]" Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future,"[""Justin Barton""]","The future is alongside us, sometimes closer, sometimes further away.","The future is alongside us, sometimes closer, sometimes further away. Hidden Valleys starts from the perception that the human world is an eerie place, particularly in relation to its stories and dreams. It also starts from events that took place in North Yorkshire, in 1978. A work of philosophy, an account of experiences, and a biography of a year, it is simultaneously a challenging cultural analysis, drawing on novels, songs and films. It argues for lucidity over reason, becomings over conventional gender and familialism, groups over state politics, and for an escape to wider realities in place of the delusions of religion. Most centrally it breaks open a view of a futural dimension that coexists with the present, and which intrinsically involves a heightened awareness and evaluation of the planet, of women, and of the abstract. Inseparably it is also a detective investigation into the causes of the eerie human predicament. The book reaches the planetary by starting from a singular place, it reaches reality by starting from dreams, and it reaches the future by finding a doorway in the past.","The future is alongside us, sometimes closer, sometimes further away. Hidden Valleys starts from the perception that the human world is an eerie place, particularly in relation to its stories and dreams. It also starts from events that took place in North Yorkshire, in 1978. A work of philosophy, an account of experiences, and a biography of a year, it is simultaneously a challenging cultural analysis, drawing on novels, songs and films. It argues for lucidity over reason, becomings over conventional gender and familialism, groups over state politics, and for an escape to wider realities in place of the delusions of religion. Most centrally it breaks open a view of a futural dimension that coexists with the present, and which intrinsically involves a heightened awareness and evaluation of the planet, of women, and of the abstract. Inseparably it is also a detective investigation into the causes of the eerie human predicament. The book reaches the planetary by starting from a singular place, it reaches reality by starting from dreams, and it reaches the future by finding a doorway in the past.",3,"[""From an article about On Vanishing Land\n\n\""At its most intense this audio-essay hollows out reality - the two artists are \""a dream within a dream, the planet is a dream within a dream\"" - even as it viscerally conjures material presences from a land of disjunctive temporalities.\"" ~ T.J..Demos, ART FORUM Sept 2013"", ""Hidden Valleys is an extraordinary and unique work. Amongst many other things, it is a philosophical autobiography, a vivid account of a place and a time, and a series of stunning new readings of cultural texts. Ultimately, it amounts to nothing less than a challenge to encounter the world more lucidly, more intensely, than consensual reality customarily permits.\n\n~ Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism and Ghosts Of My Life"", ""Ostensibly an inquiry into the eerie arcadia of modernism Hidden Valleys takes the reader on a journey through a life and through the promises of the future. The reader will find themselves in the presence of a genuine writer, a becoming-writer, who has gifts of poetic and philosophical insight to offer, and to share into our haunted existences, with recollections of sublime moments in popular music and culture alongside meditations on North Yorkshire and New Zealand and innovative deployments of Deleuzian philosophy. This book shows that there is poetry in philosophy and philosophy in poetry...it is a rare book of tremendous power and beauty. ~ Professor Keith Ansell-Pearson, author of Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze""]" Holes In The Whole,"[""Krzysztof Nawratek""]",This book seeks meaning and reasons for the existence of the city. It demonstrates the urgent need to define the city not as a territory of exploitation and resource for global corporations but as a self-governed subject.,"Holes in The Whole seeks meaning and reasons for the existence of the city. It demonstrates the urgent need to expand the sphere of urban activity - to define the city not only as a territory of exploitation, but as space of human existence in its fullest dimension. The book defines the conditions under which the city can develop as an entity without falling into the trap of arrogant self-sufficiency. It identifies the mechanisms that promote independent fragments, including people, neighbourhoods and regions, so that they are not random, unsystematic bunches, but stable (yet flexible) structures.","Holes in The Whole seeks meaning and reasons for the existence of the city. It demonstrates the urgent need to expand the sphere of urban activity - to define the city not only as a territory of exploitation, but as space of human existence in its fullest dimension. The book defines the conditions under which the city can develop as an entity without falling into the trap of arrogant self-sufficiency. It identifies the mechanisms that promote independent fragments, including people, neighbourhoods and regions, so that they are not random, unsystematic bunches, but stable (yet flexible) structures.",4,"[""Holes in the Whole is a welcome contribution to an increasingly crowded field of writing on cities. The book is a short but always a stimulating read, provoking questions and offering flashes of insight. Fighting against city-making that is too often captured by the “totalitarian logic of profit” and the focus on constructing urban political institutions that respond to a wider range of inhabitants’ demands is important in making us think of urban dwellers as true ‘citizens’ of their cities. ~ Karl Baker, LSE http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/05/15/book-review-holes-in-the-whole-introduction-to-the-urban-revolutions/"", ""A refreshing book. In a context where only \""world cities\"" matter to most urbanists, Krzysztof Nawratek is a thinker equally at home writing about Katowice and Shanghai, London and Plymouth. In this unromantic, lapidary but ultimately optimistic work he offers a precise diagnosis of contemporary urban ills and offers some potential ways out of some worn-out ways of thinking the city. Never mind worrying about the Polis or the decline of public space - this book calls instead for a revolutionary new urbanism.\n\n~ Owen Hatherley, , author of 'Militant Modernism', ' A Guide to New Ruins of Great Britain' and 'A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain.'"", ""Packed with fascinating and provocative insights\n\n~ Anna Minton, author of 'Ground Control. Fear and happiness in the twenty-first-century city'"", ""This is an engaging book – written in the first-person, and crossing genres of criticism, confession, analysis and polemic. It provokes the reader to think about urbanism as a dynamic intellectual field of ideas and experiences. Specialists and general readers will find this book stimulating as the author leaps around from idea to idea, always provocative and always full of insights. He relates issues in architecture, the city and urban life to a range of historical philosophical and cultural issues – from justice and ethics to creativity and community, public space and violence. There are few writers who take such a synthetic and wide-ranging approach in the English speaking world. Moreover, it intellectually reconnects Europe’s East and West, introducing a sense of flair into an overly laboured field of academic research.\n\n~ Dr. Jonathan Vickery, University of Warwick""]" Hontology,"[""Mark Payne""]",Is shame the route by which we access the capabilities for living that are abrogated in modernity?,"Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx has had an enormous influence on recent thought about the fate of human capabilities in late capitalism, especially in Europe. Hontology explores a road not taken in Specters of Marx - the idea that shame is the route by which we access the capabilities for living that are abrogated in modernity. More particularly still, the book considers the loss of the New World as an horizon in which these abrogated capabilities were still in play, and the inhabitants of the New World as presenting forms of life before which Europeans felt shame in comparison with their own. Finally, the book discusses what might take the place of the New World now that its productive horizon of shame has receded from view.","Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx has had an enormous influence on recent thought about the fate of human capabilities in late capitalism, especially in Europe. Hontology explores a road not taken in Specters of Marx - the idea that shame is the route by which we access the capabilities for living that are abrogated in modernity. More particularly still, the book considers the loss of the New World as an horizon in which these abrogated capabilities were still in play, and the inhabitants of the New World as presenting forms of life before which Europeans felt shame in comparison with their own. Finally, the book discusses what might take the place of the New World now that its productive horizon of shame has receded from view.",0,[] Horror of Philosophy,"[""Eugene Thacker""]","Eugene Thacker’s three cult-classic volumes of supernatural horror come together in this new Zer0 Books omnibus, revised with updated material, offering an essential resource for thinking about the unthinkable world.","Zer0 Books presents a new, omnibus edition of a cult classic: all three volumes of Eugene Thacker’s Horror of Philosophy trilogy, revised and expanded by the author. Across the three volumes of the series Thacker adopts a unique approach, reading works of horror as if they were philosophy, and works of philosophy as if they were horror, leading to far-reaching questions: Could it be that the more we know about the world, the less we understand it? Could it be that, while everything has been explained, nothing has meaning? At the center of Thacker’s project is the idea of the 'world without us,' an increasingly unthinkable world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live - not a philosophy of horror, but a horror of philosophy.","Zer0 Books presents a new, omnibus edition of a cult classic: all three volumes of Eugene Thacker’s Horror of Philosophy trilogy, revised and expanded by the author. Across the three volumes of the series Thacker adopts a unique approach, reading works of horror as if they were philosophy, and works of philosophy as if they were horror, leading to far-reaching questions: Could it be that the more we know about the world, the less we understand it? Could it be that, while everything has been explained, nothing has meaning? At the center of Thacker’s project is the idea of the 'world without us,' an increasingly unthinkable world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live - not a philosophy of horror, but a horror of philosophy.",1,"[""Praise for In the Dust of This Planet: Thacker’s discourse on the intersection of horror and philosophy is utterly original and utterly captivating...In the Dust of This Planet is an encyclopedic grimoire instructing us in the varieties of esoteric thought and infernal diversions that exist for the reader’s further investigation, treating us to a delightful stroll down a midway of accursed attractions that alone are worth the ticket of this volume. ~ Thomas Ligotti, author of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race""]" Hothouse Utopia,"[""Ryan Gunderson""]",What is to be done when the future's already ablaze?,"What is to be done when the future's already ablaze? With the international spread of right-wing ""populism,"" widening inequalities, precarious forms of labor becoming normative, surveillance capitalism, and a worsening ecological crisis, the future is bleak. One issue in particular, the likelihood of catastrophic climate change, coupled with the lack of a global movement with the organization and vision to effectively challenge our suicidal social order, yields the crushing awareness that future generations will be trapped in prehistory, one in which humanity continues to be dominated by its own creations instead of shaping the historical process in line with reason. Expanding upon the ideas of Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Lucien Goldmann, and others, Ryan Gunderson examines the modes of action and thought through which we react to the likelihood of a catastrophic future in ways that reproduce instead of challenge the status quo, and how we can, instead, productively sustain the search for a better world against all odds.","What is to be done when the future's already ablaze? With the international spread of right-wing ""populism,"" widening inequalities, precarious forms of labor becoming normative, surveillance capitalism, and a worsening ecological crisis, the future is bleak. One issue in particular, the likelihood of catastrophic climate change, coupled with the lack of a global movement with the organization and vision to effectively challenge our suicidal social order, yields the crushing awareness that future generations will be trapped in prehistory, one in which humanity continues to be dominated by its own creations instead of shaping the historical process in line with reason. Expanding upon the ideas of Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Lucien Goldmann, and others, Ryan Gunderson examines the modes of action and thought through which we react to the likelihood of a catastrophic future in ways that reproduce instead of challenge the status quo, and how we can, instead, productively sustain the search for a better world against all odds.",2,"[""“The passage from radical theory to transformative practice may seem today more strewn with obstacles and bereft of guideposts than ever before. And yet, as Ryan Gunderson urges in his unsentimental account of ‘hothouse utopianism,’ the challenges we face in pursuing it should not lead us down the opposite path to quiescence and resignation. There are still genuine possibilities for transcending the status quo worth our efforts, despite everything, to realize their promise.”\n\n- Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (2016) and Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations (2020) ~"", ""\""The possibility of dialectical thought has never been more hopeless, the need for it never more pressing. Revisiting the negative utopias of the Frankfurt School in the blood-red light of global ecological catastrophe, Gunderson works critical theory against the grain in a careful, painstaking effort to save philosophy from nihilism, hope from fatuity, and pessimism from despair. Hothouse Utopia is a timely, useful, and important contribution to the impossible yet necessary project of thinking a human future in the Anthropocene.\""\n\n- Roy Scranton, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the University of Notre Dame, and author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) and We’re Doomed. Now What? (2018) ~""]" How Capitalism Ends,"[""Steve Paxton""]","Capital's drive for profit has pushed technological development to previously unimagined heights, and now capitalist production is pushing progress in all the wrong directions.","While the past 300 years have witnessed immense growth in productive capacity, the ‘logic’ of capitalist production is now pushing progress in all the wrong directions. We’ve passed the point where our biggest enemy is material scarcity. Our problems no longer revolve around insufficient production, but iniquitous distribution - and the fact that we’re fast running out of planet - and these are problems that capitalism cannot solve. Taking in a diverse range of contemporary and historical evidence - from the Putney Debates of 1647 to Modern Monetary Theory, from John Locke to Thomas Piketty, from the Rights of Man to the rise of identity politics How Capitalism Ends navigates a path through current affairs, history, economics and philosophy and sets the scene for the conversation we, as a civilization, urgently need to begin…","While the past 300 years have witnessed immense growth in productive capacity, the ‘logic’ of capitalist production is now pushing progress in all the wrong directions. We’ve passed the point where our biggest enemy is material scarcity. Our problems no longer revolve around insufficient production, but iniquitous distribution - and the fact that we’re fast running out of planet - and these are problems that capitalism cannot solve. Taking in a diverse range of contemporary and historical evidence - from the Putney Debates of 1647 to Modern Monetary Theory, from John Locke to Thomas Piketty, from the Rights of Man to the rise of identity politics How Capitalism Ends navigates a path through current affairs, history, economics and philosophy and sets the scene for the conversation we, as a civilization, urgently need to begin…",1,"[""Lucid, practical, and impeccably argued, Steve Paxton's 'How Capitalism Ends' provides a road map with which to navigate an imminent social change more profound than we've seen in centuries. This is a necessary book. ~ Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Jerusalem""]" How the Establishment Lost Control,"[""Chris Nineham""]","An examination of dramatic developments across the British political landscape and the current crisis of consent, post-Brexit.","The post-war consensus is breaking up. The general election result, the 2014 Scottish referendum and the Brexit vote all testify to an insurgent mood amongst swathes of the population. This book attempts to explain these dramatic developments and to show how they question received notions about politics, history and how change happens.","The post-war consensus is breaking up. The general election result, the 2014 Scottish referendum and the Brexit vote all testify to an insurgent mood amongst swathes of the population. This book attempts to explain these dramatic developments and to show how they question received notions about politics, history and how change happens.",11,"[""A great read about the current moment in the Left -- it's specifically about the Left in the U.K., but a lot of the observations are easily applicable to the US. There's a lot of stuff I'm definitely gonna take to heart with my own political organizing. ~ Hannah Spaulding, NetGalley"", ""How the Establishment Lost Control charts the events that led to Labour's unexpected election success and the Brexit vote, tries to explain how and why it happened and offers an argument as to how the left move forward if they want to continue the momentum (no pun intended!) Overall it does this well. If you want a (very) left-wing overview of how we got to where we are then this book is worth a read.\n\nThe first half of the book gives a whistle-stop tour of the changes in the political landscape from the early 1970s to now in an attempt to explain Corbyn's success. I am fully on board with most of the arguments presented here (I joined Labour first as a supporter and then as a member and voted for Corbyn in both leadership elections). However, it tries to cram loads of different points into a very short space- the whole book is just over one hundred pages- so what you get is lots of very strongly worded opinion statements, granted with equally as many stats and references to back them up, but with not much analysis. There isn't really any nuanced discussion before the author jumps on to the next point so it moves too quickly. It is easy to gloss over the numbers and at times It feels as though the author making brash unjustified claims their even though the evidence is there, so as a reader I felt underwhelmed and even disconcerted at times. It was strange to read something I knew I agreed with but didn't quite feel comfortable with because of the way it was presented.\n\nThe second half of the book is much more analytical and rectifies the problem of the earlier chapters. However, Chapter 4 moves straight from fast-paced description to full-on analysis, using the Marxist theory of class consciousness explain our current situation. There's not really a bridge between the two and it was a bit of a strange leap. I certainly wasn't expecting it and I imagine it would feel even stranger if you've never studied Marx before! I am in agreement with the author, however, and I think the theory is well explained and accessible. The last two chapters are by far the best, striking the right balance between description and analysis. The argument in the last chapter is strong, to the point and well developed, ending the book on a high. ~ Rebecca Farren, NetGalley"", ""This book feels timely, coming as it does ten years on from the start of the great recession set in train by the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the US. Since then, we have had years of swingeing cuts, disguised under the moniker of austerity, plus a series of responses to that which have functioned as further shocks to the system in the UK and elsewhere: the Scottish Referendum; Brexit; Trump and the General Election of this June.\n\nHowever, Chris Nineham does much more than present a portrait of the last decade. Rather, he puts this into the context of the post-war consensus, its collapse and the subsequent onset of neoliberalism. He also discusses the turn away from Marx (and more broadly social-democratic traditions in economics) effected by sections of the left and, in particular, the academy, with its concomitant downplaying of class and its replacement with identity and choice as defining categories. Finally, he examines the tendency of the media to replicate and push hegemonic positions, allied to an inability and unwillingness to understand and engage with political events and views outside of their small Overton window.\n\nSo, what are the answers given in the book and what other problems does it discuss? Going back to Marx, Gramsci, Luxembourg and, in particular, Lukács, he makes the case for the continuing efficacy of a material analysis, with attention given to the role of alienation and commodification in hiding the extraction of surplus value from the worker, allied to the ruling class’s control over what Marx called ‘the mental means of production’ (p.68), i.e. the role of ideology in attempting to ensuring the smooth running of this system.\n\nThe book suggests that the contemporary birth of a revivified movement for social change can be dated back to the Seattle protests at the WTO in 1999. This is a view shared by Jodi Dean, among others.ii We then have the formation of Stop the War Coalition in the UK in 2001, further protests against the global elite in Genoa, Seattle, Nice and Washington, the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, the rise of Syriza in Greece and the formation of the People’s Assembly against Austerity in the UK in 2012. The latter did much of the work in the initial Corbyn campaign in 2015 and brought the energy of activists with years of campaigning between them to the staid world of mainstream political parties. In short, the author argues that we are in a moment of great optimism, buoyed by the shocks to the establishment in the UK, provided by the events listed in the first paragraph of this review.\n\nBrexit in particular opens up possibilities for a breakthrough by a working-class political alternative, coming as it did from a resounding ‘no’ to the political orthodoxy of the last forty years. The author acknowledges that times of crisis leave the door open for the right, particularly when their take on Brexit and the European Union in general is given such media dominance, both during and after the campaign. There has been a push to present it as an anti-immigrant, nationalist occurrence, despite the evidence suggesting otherwise, instead providing a multitude of reasons for people who voted leave. What they all had in common, though, was dissatisfaction with the state of things. The left must take advantage of the blow to British capitalism dealt by Brexit.\n\nThe book concludes with a section on the role of mass politics in achieving and securing change, giving space to a discussion of the problems that will be faced by a Corbyn-led government, with the forces of the ruling class lined up against it. This can be countered via the revolutionary organisation within the mass movement: as Chris Nineham says in his final line, ‘a time of system failure and class-based discontent is a time to take the initiative’ ~ Martin Hall, Counterfire"", ""A must read for anyone concerned with the state of our times, its historical antecedents and the possibilities of a different world.\n\n~ Alpa Shah, author of In the Shadows of the State"", ""A clear guide as to how the elite got us into this mess and why it can’t get us out of it again, it will stimulate debate as to how the left should respond.\n\n~ Andrew Murray, author of The Imperial Controversy and Off the Rails"", ""A provocative intervention into contemporary politics. Chris Nineham shows how 40 years of neoliberal capitalism resulted in accumulation by dispossession and the accumulation of discontent. The book makes an argument for socialism as the only adequate political response to the ongoing crises. ~ Christian Fuchs, author of Critical Theory of Communication and Reading Marx in the Information Age"", ""An antidote to the neoliberal fixation of British mainstream discourse. A must read for the informed citizen. ~ Francesca Martinez"", ""A highly readable, fast moving account of how the British establishment have lost the plot. Chris Nineham reveals, often using their own words, that they know they have, but they would rather you didn’t read it here... ~ Danny Dorling, author of Inequality and the 1%"", ""An important and perceptive history of post-war Britain and the effects of neoliberalism. A critique with a robust philosophical basis, it explains where the inequalities that led us to this point originated, how they are being perpetuated, and how they can be deconstructed. Essential reading for anybody wishing to understand the state we’re in. ~ Brian Eno"", ""This is a book to cheer you up. The game’s afoot. The old certainties are fading. The market doesn’t work. People’s lives are dominated by insecurity and pressures of all kinds. Can we bring together all who resist to make a real change? Chris Nineham argues for that possibility. It is a test not only of our determination, but also of our understanding. ~ Ken Loach"", ""The sub-text of this book is 'Against Pessimism'. Chris Nineham gives us a guide to the fractures and fault-lines in the establishment, reminding us how often our rulers don't get their own way, and how the Left can make the most of these weaknesses. ~ Mike Rosen""]" How to Dismantle the English State Education System in 10 Easy Steps,"[""Terry Edwards"", ""Carl Parsons""]","The story of the takeover of England’s schools by the super-efficient, modernising, academising machine.","Terry Edwards and Carl Parsons tell the story of the takeover of England’s schools by the super-efficient, modernising, academising machine, which, in collaboration with a dynamic, forward-looking government is recasting the educational landscape. England’s school system is turbo-charged into a new era and will be the envy of the world, led by Chief Executives of Multi Academy Trusts on bankers’ salaries, imposing a slim curriculum, the soundest of discipline regimes and ensuring that highest standards will be achieved even if at the expense of teacher morale, poor service to special needs, off-rolling of students and despite an absolute lack of evidence that this privatised system works.","Terry Edwards and Carl Parsons tell the story of the takeover of England’s schools by the super-efficient, modernising, academising machine, which, in collaboration with a dynamic, forward-looking government is recasting the educational landscape. England’s school system is turbo-charged into a new era and will be the envy of the world, led by Chief Executives of Multi Academy Trusts on bankers’ salaries, imposing a slim curriculum, the soundest of discipline regimes and ensuring that highest standards will be achieved even if at the expense of teacher morale, poor service to special needs, off-rolling of students and despite an absolute lack of evidence that this privatised system works.",7,"[""A sharp and incisive account of how state education has been dismantled into a system of competing Multi-Academy Trusts. We were told ‘choice’ would deliver higher standards. It didn’t. It made the system more chaotic, wasteful and segregated. This book explains how it was done. ~ Alasdair Smith, National Secretary, Anti Academies Alliance"", ""This book describes with irony the extraordinary changes that have taken place over the last ten years to achieve a partly privatised, unaccountable and unfair system that benefits bureaucrats and not children. Compelling and shocking. ~ Melian Mansfield, Chair, Campaign for State Education"", ""An energetic and passionate book, and full of useful and indignation-inducing information for those of us appalled at the direction public education is taking, and a reality check for academy ideologues. ~ David E. Ewens, author of the Frank Stirling series"", ""The academy experiment has served to harness greed and profit, ignoring the importance of the needs of students. The satire of this book makes the case emphatically. ~ John Fahy, Councillor in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, former Deputy Leader of the Council and Cabinet Member for Children's Services"", ""The deeply flawed system we are being forced to accept with its mantra of 'Make schools great again' makes me and many others who have spent their working lives in state comprehensive schools very angry. This book expertly articulates that anger with a damning evidence-based approach. ~ Des Malone, retired head teacher of The John Roan School, Greenwich"", ""A frightening and gripping must read for all parents. Exploring and exposing the perverse system of academies and the consequences... that most aren’t aware of until the battle hits their child’s school. ~ Shaunagh Roberts, mother of sons and accidental activist, Waltham Holy Cross Primary School"", ""This is an extraordinary and wonderful book, full of fun and insight. I heartily recommend it. ~ Ivor Goodson, Professor of Learning Theory, University of Brighton""]" How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps (second edition),"[""Youssef El-Gingihy""]",The story of how your NHS was sold off and why you will have to buy private health insurance soon.,"Events have spiralled since the first edition of How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps. The junior doctors' strike, the Conservative victory in the 2015 general election, the Corbyn phenomenon, the unexpected Brexit vote and the arguably even more unexpected loss of the Conservative majority in 2017. Further, since writing the first edition, Dr. Youssef El-Gingihy found himself stricken with a life-threatening illness and the NHS doctor became the NHS patient. The fight to save the NHS transformed into a fight for his own life. Now, fully recovered, Dr. Youssef El-Gingihy returns to his 10 Easy Steps in order to strengthen his original argument and continue what Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, deems 'one of the most fundamental battles we face in a struggle for a British society that works for the many'. In the year of the 70th anniversary of the NHS, Dr El-Gingihy's insights have never been more vital as our national health service continues to be hit by the privatisation of public services. New expanded second edition with chapters on junior doctor's strikes and plans for US-style healthcare.","Events have spiralled since the first edition of How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps. The junior doctors' strike, the Conservative victory in the 2015 general election, the Corbyn phenomenon, the unexpected Brexit vote and the arguably even more unexpected loss of the Conservative majority in 2017. Further, since writing the first edition, Dr. Youssef El-Gingihy found himself stricken with a life-threatening illness and the NHS doctor became the NHS patient. The fight to save the NHS transformed into a fight for his own life. Now, fully recovered, Dr. Youssef El-Gingihy returns to his 10 Easy Steps in order to strengthen his original argument and continue what Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, deems 'one of the most fundamental battles we face in a struggle for a British society that works for the many'. In the year of the 70th anniversary of the NHS, Dr El-Gingihy's insights have never been more vital as our national health service continues to be hit by the privatisation of public services. New expanded second edition with chapters on junior doctor's strikes and plans for US-style healthcare.",8,"[""Like an increasing number of British doctors, El-Gingihy has gone through disbelief, anger and radicalisation at what he sees as the inexorable privatisation of our public health service..How to Dismantle the NHS in Ten Easy Steps is an attempt to translate the changes into plain English..El-Gingihy’s account is enlivened by his experience as a GP serving some of London’s poorest patients. ~ Richard Godwin, Evening Standard"", ""How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps is a precise and devastating explanation of how a public health service - long the envy of the world - is furtively being dismembered for private, corporate gain by the likes of Virgin, Serco et al. The facts laid bare by El-Gingihy cry out for resistance. Arm yourself with this succinct book. ~ New Internationalist"", ""Youssef El-Gingihy’s accessible short book shows us why this attack on our most cherished public service is so important - a process that has been underway since the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher. Youssef provides a wealth of quite incredible information in 71 pages, so if you ever find yourself faced with a Tory offensive, you will be ready for the fight.And it’s not just a Tory problem, El-Gingihy shows that every government over the past thirty years has contributed to the demise of the pride of the UK.\n\nNye Bevan, the creator of the service once said, ‘The NHS will exist as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.’ El-Gingihy’s book provides us with plenty of ammunition for that fight. ~ Cameron Panting, Counterfire"", ""El-Gingihy is a GP in east London. His commitment to the NHS and the NHS ethos of compassion and caring shines through. Step by step, El-Gingihy takes us through the path to the destruction of the NHS, charted not just by the Tories but by New Labour as well.\n\nThis book is an accessible account of the complexity of 25 years of attacks on the NHS, and tremendously valuable for that. ~ Gill George, RS21 Magazine"", ""The campaign to undermine the NHS is often concealed in Orwellian euphemisms. Dr. Youssef El-Gingihy breaks through this web of deceit with this excellent primer of the who, what, where and why your Health Service is being stolen from you. ~ John Pilger, investigative journalist & filmmaker"", ""Let's imagine something almost unimaginable. The leadership of a country with the world's finest health system, the pride of the nation, decides to dismantle it and replace it by the system that is by far the most costly, bureaucratic, and ineffective in the developed world, apparently under the influence of rigid doctrine (and perhaps greed). Unimaginable, but it appears to be happening, so Youssef El-Gingihy argues, all too persuasively, in his review of the steps being taken to convert the NHS to the failed US model. ~ Noam Chomsky"", ""The fight to maintain the NHS as a public service is one of the most fundamental battles we face today in our struggle for a British society that works for the many.\n\nThis wonderful, sobering book details how governments have teamed up with corporate and financial elites in an underhand effort to privatise and dismantle the NHS. Crucially, it also proposes solutions for how we can reclaim our NHS and the critical role of the grassroots groups leading this fight we can and must win. ~ Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party"", ""\""The Tories are remorseless in undermining the founding principles of the National Health Service. Youssef is a practicing NHS doctor, who has seen the attacks at first hand. His book is an essential weapon in our fightback.\"" ~ Ken Loach , Film director""]" "How To Guide to Cosmopolitan Socialism, A","[""Matthew McManus""]","A tribute to the late Michael Brooks, and a defense of his vision of cosmopolitan socialism.","Socialism has always had internationalist ambitions, but what those ambitions should be and how to rethink them in the 21st century remain open questions. Before his tragic passing in 2020, Michael Brooks talked about a new kind of cosmopolitan socialism that would be appropriate for our time. A How To Guide To Cosmopolitan Socialism builds upon Brooks' vision to argue that we need a left which knows no boundaries and recognizes the fundamental moral equality of all individuals on the planet while securing the material conditions for their flourishing. Only such a sweeping vision can successfully combat the forces of reaction and violence confronting us today.","Socialism has always had internationalist ambitions, but what those ambitions should be and how to rethink them in the 21st century remain open questions. Before his tragic passing in 2020, Michael Brooks talked about a new kind of cosmopolitan socialism that would be appropriate for our time. A How To Guide To Cosmopolitan Socialism builds upon Brooks' vision to argue that we need a left which knows no boundaries and recognizes the fundamental moral equality of all individuals on the planet while securing the material conditions for their flourishing. Only such a sweeping vision can successfully combat the forces of reaction and violence confronting us today.",2,"[""Matthew McManus is swiftly becoming of the globally leading figures on liberal socialism. This book shows why. Combining his encylopaedic knowledge of the topic with easy-to-access pros, McManus convincingly argues that cosmopolitan socialism is central to a just future. You’ll walk away angry, but well-equipped to argue. ~ Dr Timothy Stacey | Utrecht University"", ""\""In the best tradition of Enlightenment critique, Matthew McManus identifies the rational kernels in liberal philosophy's arguments about the international and puts them in motion with classical Marxism. The result is a passionate and logical moral argument for cosmopolitan socialism grounded in the principles of historical materialism. Indeed, amidst the long dark night of neoliberal and neoconservative influence on the shape of the international order, Cosmopolitan Socialism is a luminous political treatise for the workers of the world to unite under the banner of freedom as reciprocal self-determination and the equal moral worth of all people.\"" ~ Dr. Dave Zeglen | Lecturer at the University of Michigan""]" How To Like Everything,"[""Paul Shepheard""]",There is no absolute truth but there is absolutely everything,"How To Like Everything is a utopia. 'Utopia' is a word invented five hundred years ago at the start of the modern age as a description of the ideal society. It's composed of Latin parts that taken together mean 'no place' or 'nowhere'. We now use the word utopia to mean an impossible dream of perfection. How To Like Everything recasts the actual world, the forever-changing world we live in, as utopia: to make the impossible possible. This is not a dry academic debate. Paul Shepheard takes on his subject by threading questions, evidence and logic through hilarious, moving and thought-provoking stories. The action is set in the complicated city of Amsterdam, where he gets stuck in the briars of love affairs, existential decisions and conflicts with complete strangers. And the philosophy? He is a materialist. His utopia hinges on the question of whether there can be anything other than the present moment.","How To Like Everything is a utopia. 'Utopia' is a word invented five hundred years ago at the start of the modern age as a description of the ideal society. It's composed of Latin parts that taken together mean 'no place' or 'nowhere'. We now use the word utopia to mean an impossible dream of perfection. How To Like Everything recasts the actual world, the forever-changing world we live in, as utopia: to make the impossible possible. This is not a dry academic debate. Paul Shepheard takes on his subject by threading questions, evidence and logic through hilarious, moving and thought-provoking stories. The action is set in the complicated city of Amsterdam, where he gets stuck in the briars of love affairs, existential decisions and conflicts with complete strangers. And the philosophy? He is a materialist. His utopia hinges on the question of whether there can be anything other than the present moment.",2,"[""Paul Shepheard is one of the finest thinkers and writers alive today. ~ Jem Finer, sound artist"", ""Het is niet eenvoudig om na lezing van Paul Shepheard's boeken de wereld met eigen ogen te zien. (It's not easy to see the world with your own eyes after reading Paul Shepheard.) ~ Andre Dekker, Observatorium""]" How to Read a History Book,"[""Marshall T. Poe""]","How to Read a History Book explains who writes history books, how the writers are trained, and why they write them.","A deconstruction of the modern history book as artifact, How to Read a History Book explains who writes history books, how the writers are trained, and why they write them. It also discusses genre, bias (political and otherwise) and how to read history books between the lines. Written for undergraduates, intro graduate students and anyone with an informed interest in the subject, How to Read a History Book demonstrates that, rather than being objects that fall from the sky, history books are actually socially-constructed artifacts reflecting all the contradictions of modern meritocratic capitalism.","A deconstruction of the modern history book as artifact, How to Read a History Book explains who writes history books, how the writers are trained, and why they write them. It also discusses genre, bias (political and otherwise) and how to read history books between the lines. Written for undergraduates, intro graduate students and anyone with an informed interest in the subject, How to Read a History Book demonstrates that, rather than being objects that fall from the sky, history books are actually socially-constructed artifacts reflecting all the contradictions of modern meritocratic capitalism.",2,"[""This book introduces the reader in an easy and understandable way into the genre of history books. Through fictional stories and examples, it becomes clear what difficulties historians encounter when writing such books. It also details the function of key components of history books. The book is valuable in giving readers tools to look at history books in a more critical and reflective way. This book is helpful for everyone who likes to read history books as well as students who want to have a deeper, reflective insight into this genre.\n\n~ Brigitt Amthor, NetGalley"", ""How To Read A History Book is a clever look at how academic works, and a comment on the way we perceive documentation and history. What stood out most to me about this book is the way I was able to reflect on my own academic work through the story shared here.\n\nAnd story was not what I expected at all. The narrative structure of the book proved to be a positive surprise. I would recommend this book to scholars, students, and anyone interested in reading about how \""what we know\"" comes to be.\n\n~ JD DeHart, NetGalley""]" Human Rights - Illusory Freedom,"[""Luke Gittos""]",A progressive argument for repealing the Human Rights Act.,"A progressive argument for repealing the Human Rights Act. Contrary to contemporary panic around human rights repeal, Human Rights - Illusory Freedom puts a progressive case against the Human Rights Act. It describes how human rights arose as a new language for western governments following the collapse in their collective authority in the aftermath of World War 2 and shows how the UK Human Rights Act has presided over a catastrophic loss of freedom, which continued a process which began with the Tory party in the 1970s. Human Rights - Illusory Freedom makes a positive case for restoring control over our traditional freedoms to the electorate and away from unaccountable Judges in the UK Courts and the European Court of Human Rights.","A progressive argument for repealing the Human Rights Act. Contrary to contemporary panic around human rights repeal, Human Rights - Illusory Freedom puts a progressive case against the Human Rights Act. It describes how human rights arose as a new language for western governments following the collapse in their collective authority in the aftermath of World War 2 and shows how the UK Human Rights Act has presided over a catastrophic loss of freedom, which continued a process which began with the Tory party in the 1970s. Human Rights - Illusory Freedom makes a positive case for restoring control over our traditional freedoms to the electorate and away from unaccountable Judges in the UK Courts and the European Court of Human Rights.",3,"[""When the topic of human rights peeks through the headlines, garnering action and progressive debate, my ears are at attention. Luke has penned a treatise on freedom, touching on the enigma revolving around the mosaic of ethicolegal concerns where human rights is center stage. He skillfully expounds upon various arguments and presents a strong case for the restoration and subsequent handing over of the control to those who hold freedom in high esteem.\n\nHighly recommended for readers with an acute interest in international human rights and the legislative history and present dynamic stimulating the debates. ~ Erica Watkins, NetGalley"", ""Luke Gittos’ has a very radical message: human rights grant an illusory freedom and are a weak guarantee for a free society. The main idea, shared by the vast majority of people, is that human rights laws are a step towards realizing a universal respect for human dignity and a way to prevent the repeat of evils in the past. Gittos demonstrates that human rights laws are contributing to the erosion of civil liberties and are increasing the arbitrary interference by the state in people’s lives.\n\nIn the UK, the Human Rights Act, passed as a response to a crisis in public confidence in democratic institutions, gave greater control over civil liberties to the judiciary. It expanded police powers of stop and search, the state’s surveillance power and restrictions on liberty. People, therefore, are less able to defend themselves against state power.\n\nLimitations on civil liberties in response to terrorism show how freedom is highly precarious in the modern age. Even human rights organizations are giving a distorted image of freedom. They present themselves as an insurance policy against the repeat of previous catastrophes and as supporters of a fair, just and equal society, but claim that sometimes it is legitimate to place limits on certain freedoms.\n\nWhat Gittos believes is that it is necessary the repeal of the Human Rights Act, because it has done nothing to help vulnerable people and it protects a narrow and deeply qualified (with restrictions) idea of freedom. He suggests that it is fundamental to place the meanings of important freedoms back on the table for public debate and to roll back the role of judiciary in assessing, challenging and undermining policies and decisions made by elected representatives. ~ Francesco Camodeca , NetGalley"", ""Excellent summary of all the rights I’ve lost since way before I was born, lol. Highly recommended for all people who would like to have rights, or at least want to know where they went. ~ Tala Schwa, NetGalley""]" "Human Rights Manifesto, The","[""Julie Wark""]","Universal human rights are intrinsically radical in espousing liberty, equality and fraternity for every single person. We must claim them.","Universal human rights are intrinsically radical in espousing liberty, equality and fraternity for every single person. We must claim them.","Universal human rights are intrinsically radical in espousing liberty, equality and fraternity for every single person. We must claim them.",9,"[""Featured with 6 other Zero titles on \""Publishers in Focus\"" webpage by Blackwell Oxford\n\n\""Many publishers struggle to get the exposure that we feel their books deserve. On this page we will bring you a selection of the independent, interesting and essential that are worthy of greater attention\"" ~ Blackwell Oxford"", ""DECEMBER 30, 2013\n\nSHARE ON FACEBOOK SHARE ON TWITTER SHARE ON GOOGLE MORE SHARING SERVICES\n\n15\n\nA Revolutionary Tract\n\nA Human Rights Manifesto\n\nby RON JACOBS\n\nJulie Wark has written a manifesto for justice. Simply titled A Human Rights Manifesto, her book examines the UN Declaration of Human Rights and compares it to the current situation. In doing so, it is clear that we as a species have failed. While there is certainly plenty of blame to go around, from those activists who have resigned from the battle to those who have convinced themselves that the current political and economic systems are capable of remedying the daily violations of human rights, the bulk of the blame remains with the greatest violators of those rights. That means governments, their militaries and police officials, and their courts. The ultimate violator however, in every measurement Ms. Wark relates, is the current manifestation of the capitalist economy: neoliberalism.\n\nThis book destroys the myth that neoliberal capitalism is a positive force for humankind. It does so by merely stating the facts. Example after example of the cruelties and deprivations unleashed in the name of corporate and financial freedom leap from these pages. Thousands of children starving every day; forests, rivers and mountains ravaged, raped and destroyed by the machines ploughing under our planet’s future; wars undertaken and resistance destroyed to ensure the continued expansion until death of the capitalist system emanating from the world’s financial capitals. The perversion of local and national food economies via corporate manipulation of production through the commodification of food and artificial GMOs to the withholding of fertilizers and food via sanctions, humanity’s fundamental right to not starve is denied. Despite the ravages described in A Human Rights Manifesto, the author holds out an optimistic hope flickering in this litany of despair. That flicker emanates from that long-forgotten and ignored declaration.\n\nIt’s been clear to many for a while that humanitarian interventions are usually something else entirely. How else could one explain the increase in death that often occurs after the supposedly humanitarian troops arrive with their automatic weapons, their fighter planes and attack helicopters? How else can one explain the fact that when the original military phase of such interventions are over, the foreign troops remain, imposing the will of their political and corporate commanders back home? How else does one explain that in so many of these interventions, the majority of the civilians residing in said countries still find their lives at risk? The nature of these interventions and their non-humanitarian results have led many to scoff whenever the words “human rights” appear as a motivation. This skepticism feeds into the invaders’ dynamic quite helpfully, leaving their military power plays unchallenged in any meaningful way.\n\nMs. Wark’s book reclaims human rights for those whom they were originally intended. That is, for all humanity, especially those whose existence is considered unnecessary by the Goldman Sachs of the world. Instead of defining these rights in a manner that considers the right to buy and sell to be more important than the right to eat, Wark’s text is inspired by an understanding that human rights can only be human rights when they are applied to all of humanity, not just those of a certain nation, political or religious philosophy, and certainly not only to those with property and wealth.\n\nEssentially anarchist in its analysis, The Human Rights Manifesto gives no government or economic system a free pass. Yet it is primarily a searing indictment of neoliberal capitalism.\n\nDon Winslow is the author of several works of crime fiction. His novels are about people that travel in the smuggling of contraband, drugs and human. The laws of society rarely apply in Winslow’s world. Instead, it is usually the individual who is most brutal and amoral that succeeds. When the force of justice does appear, usually in the form of a renegade cop or private investigator, that justice is without mercy. I mention Winslow because Wark quotes his novels in her book. The quotes she chooses are not laudatory. Instead, they compare the morality of those who run and profit from the neoliberal capitalist economy to those that operate in the murderous economy Mr. Winslow writes of so graphically in his novels. The difference, the use of these quotes seems to claim, is just a matter of scale.\n\nPerhaps the most interesting discussion in this book is the one presented by Wark concerning language and its (mis)use and manipulation. She lambastes the misuse of words like justice and the phrase human rights. Not only has their meaning been manipulated, it has been rendered meaningless. If the words describing a phenomenon no longer have any absolute meaning, then the phenomena become whatever those in power decide. In this world, justice becomes revenge and war becomes humanitarian intervention.\n\nWhen the original UN Declaration was signed in 1948, it combined economic and political rights. After the major capitalist nations balked at the two elements being linked, the declaration was split and those nations objecting did not sign the part dealing with economic rights, which included statements detailing the right of all humanity to form labor unions, earn a fair wage, have shelter, health care, food and education. Washington and its cohorts knew that including these in any declaration of human rights would make the world they hoped to help build–the world we live in today–pretty much impossible. After all, without the commodification of food, education, shelter and health care, how would the financial-corporate nexus control the world like they do now?\n\nJulie Wark’s book is a revolutionary tract. All it does is demands that the human rights claimed by the wealthiest and most powerful in our world be applied to everyone. It is a shame that such a demand has become a call to revolution. But, if that’s what is demanded, then we would do well to begin.\n\nRon Jacobs is the author of the just released novel All the Sinners, Saints. He is also the author of The Way the Wind Blew: a History of the Weather Underground and Short Order Frame Up and The Co-Conspirator’s Tale. Jacobs’ essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch’s collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His third novel All the Sinners Saints is a companion to the previous two and is due out in April 2013. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected] . ~ Ron Jacobs, CounterPunch"", ""Like all great manifestos, this one not only dazzles with the sheer brilliance of its diagnosis of the contemporary world; it also gives us a new moral vocabulary in which to phrase our aspirations for political and economic change. And it is no accident that it should appear as, starting with the Green Movement in Iran and the Arab Spring, a new politics of dignity becomes visible around the world. Everyone should read it.\n\n~ Pankaj Mishra, essayist and novelist."", ""In her well-argued Manifesto Julie Wark puts neoliberalism and the ruling elite of the neoliberal democracies of the West on trial. She asserts that the neoliberal system is intrinsically inimical to human rights. She supports this radical assertion with well-researched evidence. Rights, she says, are the basis of dignity, freedom and justice; without them no human being can be free. Neoliberalism is a rogue system that cherishes the non-human value of money instead of human values. She explains the political economy of neoliberalism in succinct and lucid terms that are not clouded by jargon, making this document a joy to read. Backed by grim statistics she argues that the present global order is a crime against humanity. She traces various crimes against the human race through various historical epochs to the present. She illustrates cogently how the atrocities of, for instance, the Khmer Rouge and of blood-thirsty African militias in the Congo and in other theatres of conflict, are in fact the crimes of neoliberalism. She portrays neoliberalism as an insidious system that promotes new forms of slavery, human trafficking and child labor. She makes the chilling observation that there are more people enslaved today than they were at the height of trans-Atlantic slave trade on which the wealth of nations like the USA is founded – most of today’s slaves are women and children. Foreign aid and humanitarianism are the empire’s neoliberal tool of conquest, subjugation and exploitation. Indeed, humanitarianism is a vehicle of Western hegemony. She denounces world governments and corporations as the criminals, but citizens who are enjoying the benefits of these policies and are indifferent to the plight of the rest of the world are not absolved. They are accomplices. And finally she defines what genuine human rights should be. The solutions that she proposes, to begin the world all over again involving what she calls the commoning, the human rights republic, and the universalizing of property, are quite radical, to say the least. These concepts, of course, need further development. This Manifesto would be a great companion for civil society organizations and individual activists. It should be required reading for both non-governmental and government agencies.\n\n~ Zakes Mda, eminent South African novelist, poet, painter and playwright, whose most recent work is the highly acclaimed memoir Sometimes There Is a Vo"", ""A Port Huron Statement for the Occupy Generation with a breath-taking vision of planting 'human rights republics' in the practices of daily life. ~ Mike Davis"", ""Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’ Yet half the world’s population lives in extreme poverty without the conditions for freedom or dignity and with very few if any rights. Julie Wark’s Human Rights Manifesto is vivid, clear and passionate. Her case against neo-liberalism and her case for basic income is an appeal to common sense and a call to action.\n\n~ Peter Cochrane, historian"", ""Julie Wark’s manifesto is a call to action. It asks that you and I as global citizens insist that EVERYONE has the basic human rights that deliver not only freedom, justice and self-determination, but also individual dignity. Only a heartless person could read this and not feel an instant compulsion to act. ~ Dr Anita Heiss, Aboriginal Australian academic, author and activist"", ""Many states have committed appalling crimes in the name of human rights. Julie Wark provides a great deal of material demonstrating this. She also very convincingly argues that the most basic human right is that of the guaranteed material existence of every member of society. Now, in 2012, when governments are engaged in a full-blown offensive against the conditions of existence of their populations, Wark’s defence of universal human rights in this Manifesto is admirable for its intellectual courage. ~ Daniel Raventós (University of Barcelona and President of Basic Income Network of Spain)"", ""With this Manifesto, Julie Wark has provided an extraordinary and important\n\ncontribution to the literature on human rights. With great passion and\n\neloquence, she expands the concept of human rights to encompass economic\n\njustice for all - the great animating principle of the Arab Spring and the\n\nOccupy movement. While not everyone will agree with this formulation, it is\n\nimpossible to deny the power of her reasoning.\n\n~ Michael Klare, Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies.""]" Hungry Capital,"[""Luigi Russi""]",A compelling analysis of how global finance is devouring the food system and gambling with our future in the process.,"Over the past thirty years, the ability of global finance to affect aspects of everyday life has been increasing at an unprecedented rate. The world of food bears vivid testimony to this tendency, through the scars opened by the 2008 world food price crisis, the iron fist of retailing giants that occupy the supply chain and the unsustainable ecological footprint left behind by global production networks. Hungry Capital offers a rigorous analysis of the influence that financial imperatives exert on the food economy at different levels: from the direct use of edible commodities as an object of speculation to the complex food chains set up by manufacturers and supermarkets. It argues that the circular compulsion to build profits upon profits that global finance injects into the world of food restructures the basic nurturing relationship between man and nature into a streamlined process from which value has to be mined. The end result is a monstrous Leviathan that holds together while – at every step – risks to crumble.","Over the past thirty years, the ability of global finance to affect aspects of everyday life has been increasing at an unprecedented rate. The world of food bears vivid testimony to this tendency, through the scars opened by the 2008 world food price crisis, the iron fist of retailing giants that occupy the supply chain and the unsustainable ecological footprint left behind by global production networks. Hungry Capital offers a rigorous analysis of the influence that financial imperatives exert on the food economy at different levels: from the direct use of edible commodities as an object of speculation to the complex food chains set up by manufacturers and supermarkets. It argues that the circular compulsion to build profits upon profits that global finance injects into the world of food restructures the basic nurturing relationship between man and nature into a streamlined process from which value has to be mined. The end result is a monstrous Leviathan that holds together while – at every step – risks to crumble.",7,"[""In ‘Hungry Capital’, Luigi Russi considers the relationship between food production, consumption and finance in a short but interesting, revelatory but not revolutionary, and original but somewhat disconnected book. The metaphor of Hobbes’s leviathan is adopted to set the scene, situating capitalism as the monster being precariously held together by the fragile and contradictory relations it creates. This topical book seeks specifically to examine how ‘an unstable financial system is projected onto the world of food, while the increased fragility of the food economy feeds in turn the very chaotic features of the financial system’ (4-5). Russi organises chapters into key themes, beginning with a more general overview of the complexities of the financial system (chapter 2), followed by consideration of the evolution of the financialisation of food (chapters 3-5) and finally providing two case studies, looking at the influence of land grabs and the corporatisation of coffee production and distribution (chapters 6 and 7). In his Conclusion, Russi offers the idea of a paradigm shift as a possible solution to the challenges of reinventing the food economy and suggests that ‘innovative agency deployed from within and without the system may act as a counterpoint to the existing expansionist tendencies of the financialised economy’ (103). However, although Russi has the desire to tell a ‘new story of food as co-production’ (103), the book fails to promote a clear way forward, offering only minimal insight into how innovation and active responses against the capitalist system of food production may take shape in practice.\n\nChapter two presents an analysis of the ‘black box’ (6) of finance, beginning by reflecting on endogenous influences which effect the ‘patterns of relations’ (8) in the financial system. These relations are consistently rebalancing and shifting in a contradictory way in order to counterbalance possibilities for entropy whilst, concomitantly encouraging ‘unsustainable growth’ (19) and therefore contributing towards entropy. Such are the ‘self-reinforcing dynamics’ (17) of the financial market, which leads to the systemic regulation of society’s actions, in terms of not just what we consume through food, but also where we invest capital. Here Russi builds in the development of derivatives: market traded vehicles whose apparent ‘value’ is derived from an underlying asset, be it real estate, commodities or food. However, there is often disconnection between the pricing of the derivatives and the assets themselves, due to market sentiment and pricing driven by trading, with financial speculation increasing the drive towards profit maximisation. Russi demonstrates how the financial market is riven with ‘glitches’ (30), which results in trickle down effects from trading being acutely felt in the food markets, as they become ‘financialised’.\n\nThe financialisation of food and the consequences it brings is discussed more fully in chapter three, through three ‘food regimes’ (33). These regimes chart the progressive absorption of food into the capitalist system, from the first regime (where food production was localised and trading colonialised), through to the second regime post World Wars, where the state influence was paramount in the promotion of the ‘comprehensive industrialisation of agriculture, with a view to maximising food production’ (35) via processing chains and substitutionism (e.g. providing ‘alternative’ synthetic goods, such as margarine in place of butter). The third regime was stimulated by collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the third world debt crisis, leading to the increasing involvement of international bodies in regulating the food systems at work, whilst financial liberalisation and globalisation led to market monopolies of food suppliers squeezing the producers. The latter situation has been marked by increased control of the food industry by transnational corporations (TNCs) as they adopt an almost imperial approach to production, as well as the simultaneous adoption of food into the financial markets through commodity speculation and indices (as detailed in chapter 4). The shift away from the autonomous ‘peasant condition’ of farming (54) into an engineered and profit driven entity, has led to our current position, where exploitative social and catastrophic environmental impacts have become inevitable under the ‘pervasive economisation of the food system’ (61).\n\nCoffee production and land grabs are the two case studies presented in chapters 6 and 7, both of which are criticised as neoliberal and unsustainable, especially in developing economies. The food production system today epitomises how finance and profit are prioritised over society’s wellbeing and ecological soundness. The dynamics of food production demonstrate the indifference of financialisation to the inequalities it exacerbates, through coffee fuelled speculation (75) or the destruction of land for the production of jatropha (87). Each of these case studies provide incisive insight into the precarious financialisation of food and help to demonstrate key points previously made in earlier chapters.\n\nThe concept and content of the book is ambitious and interesting, but for me, the organisation and presentation of information, resulted in a disjointed and interrupted reading experience. Russi has covered a lot of research ground here and attempted to unravel and simplify the intricacies of food systems under capitalism, for which he is to be lauded. However, due to the organisation of this book, a wide variety of seemingly distinct yet related topics are analysed in some detail independently of each other, then reflected on in the final conclusion. But, there are few explicit links and connections provided for the reader in between chapters, which make for a frustrating examination of an inherently problematic and worrying phenomenon. There is no debating the contemporary relevance and importance of this book, and Russi succeeds on many levels in revealing the mutually destructive and profitable alliances between transnational food corporations and producers (chapter 5), introducing key ideas on financial speculation (chapter 4) and derivatives (chapter 2), emphasising the drive towards profit maximisation, irrespective of the resulting marginalisation of producers and demonstrating the system’s lack of concern for more-than-economic costs (chapter 6). The destruction of the environment and the consequences for us, as the human race are further exposed (chapter 7). Indeed Russi introduces us to a wide variety of issues from which many further opportunities for discussions emerge. All in all, although this book concludes by suggesting a necessary paradigm shift and considers how smaller acts of resistance can be accumulated and amplified, it doesn’t do enough to answer the question of how the food system itself can be radically altered. Hungry Capital opens up perspectives for additional investigation. It is less of an answer and more of an emerging question over what can be done from the perspective of the left to further understand and effectively respond to the destructive social relations being created by the financialisation of food.\n\n~ Nicola Livingstone, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books"", ""Luigi Russi takes up an issue that will dominate the lives of people everywhere in the coming years: the adequacy and safety of our food. He brings insights from the worlds of finance, legal sociology and political economy to link processes of global capitalism with the appalling persistence and increase of hunger and malnutrition. A must read. ~ Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University"", ""This is a thought-provoking book on the food industries and how these are entangled with the world of finance. It is theoretically well grounded, original and rich in empirical detail. It is an important contribution to the international debate on the future of agriculture. ~ Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Professor in Transition Studies, Wageningen University"", ""Russi issues a stark warning, as he identifies how the drive for profits and the deregulation of commodity trading are re-shaping the business strategies of the large corporations who procure, broker and reassemble our food. The result is the acceleration of the ecological crises facing the food supply. ~ David Barling, Reader in Food Policy, City University London and co-author of Food Policy: Integrating Health, Environment and Society"", ""At a time when finance and food are the epicentre of global crises, Luigi Russi's study provides a unique insight into the dynamics driving these complex but critical chains of human economic interaction. A must read for anyone analysing complex socio-economic processes and the potential for social progress. ~ Anastasia Nesvetailova, Reader in International Political Economy, City University London and author of Financial Alchemy in Crisis: The Great Liquidity Illusion"", ""Luigi Russi has made a significant contribution to the unpicking of the relationship between finance and food by opening up for scrutiny the powerful and uncontrolled forces operating in this obscure and complex trading system, which has only just been recognised as giving rise to a crisis which is as potentially damaging as the failure to maintain control of the world's banking industry. ~ Peter Robbins, Author of Stolen Fruit: The Tropical Commodities Disaster"", ""Hungry Capital provides a timely and novel analysis of the new frontier of financial capitalism. ~ Ole Bjerg, Associate Professor, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School""]" iCommunism,"[""Colin Cremin""]","Capitalism promised us shiny things but only communism can deliver them in a different, more liberating, universal and sustainable form.","Our relationship to consumption is not an easy one. Apart from being self-centred, superficial and narcissistic, the consumer is held responsible for global warming, poverty and now, by binging on easy credit, economic crisis. A straw man has many uses, including being part of the solution by reducing carbon footprints, consuming more ethically and tightening the proverbial belt. iCommunism defends the consumer against the prevailing politics of austerity. It splits the fetish from the commodity fetish by taking the shine away from the commodity now signified in the ubiquitous i of i branded products and transfers it over to communism. With ideology once again alive on the streets of Europe, iCommunism reimagines Herbert Marcuse s 1960s artistic critique of capitalism s repressive performance principle for today s consumer society. Capitalism promised us shiny things but only communism can deliver them in a different, more liberating, universal and sustainable form.","Our relationship to consumption is not an easy one. Apart from being self-centred, superficial and narcissistic, the consumer is held responsible for global warming, poverty and now, by binging on easy credit, economic crisis. A straw man has many uses, including being part of the solution by reducing carbon footprints, consuming more ethically and tightening the proverbial belt. iCommunism defends the consumer against the prevailing politics of austerity. It splits the fetish from the commodity fetish by taking the shine away from the commodity now signified in the ubiquitous i of i branded products and transfers it over to communism. With ideology once again alive on the streets of Europe, iCommunism reimagines Herbert Marcuse s 1960s artistic critique of capitalism s repressive performance principle for today s consumer society. Capitalism promised us shiny things but only communism can deliver them in a different, more liberating, universal and sustainable form.",2,"[""The icon-shattering publishing house, Zero books, added Colin Cremin’s iCommunism to its increasingly impressive list of titles. This is a book that updates Frankfurt School style radicalism for the web 2.0 generation. Breathlessly modernist and radical at the same time, the perfect combination. Jodi Dean’s The Communist Horizon is part of the publisher Verso’s interesting project to reinvent the entire idea of Communism. The academic references are considerable and may put off some readers, yet the purpose is faultless, a wonderful polemic full of both anger and imagination. ~ Mark Perryman, www.socialistunity.com/xmas-books-roundup/"", ""Has neo-liberalism’s bizarre “cultural revolution” finally succeeded?\n\nAre we all now but sad facsimiles of the marketplace, the covetous\n\ncorporation and the latest stupid iWhatever? Cremin’s wonderful book\n\nsays “NO”, the game isn’t up just yet. If capitalism has become a\n\nnasty metaphor for human life itself, then iCommunism paves the way\n\nfor a joyous rescripting of our worries and obsessions that will make\n\nDavid Cameron and IKEA wish you had never read this book.\n\n~ Peter Fleming, author of Contesting the Corporation and Dead Man Working (with Zero Books).""]" Ideology and the Virtual City,"[""Jon Bailes""]",An exploration of modern society and the critical value of popular culture.,"Ideology and the Virtual City is an exploration of modern society and the critical value of popular culture. It combines a prescient social theory that describes how ‘neoliberal’ ideology in today’s societies dominates our economic, political and cultural ideals, with an entertaining exploration of narratives, characters and play structures in some of today’s most interesting videogames. The book takes readers into a range of simulated urban environments that symbolise the hidden antagonisms of social life and create outlandish resolutions through their power fantasies. Interactive entertainment can help us understand the ways in which people relate to a modern ‘common sense’ neoliberal background, in terms of absorbing assumptions, and questioning them.","Ideology and the Virtual City is an exploration of modern society and the critical value of popular culture. It combines a prescient social theory that describes how ‘neoliberal’ ideology in today’s societies dominates our economic, political and cultural ideals, with an entertaining exploration of narratives, characters and play structures in some of today’s most interesting videogames. The book takes readers into a range of simulated urban environments that symbolise the hidden antagonisms of social life and create outlandish resolutions through their power fantasies. Interactive entertainment can help us understand the ways in which people relate to a modern ‘common sense’ neoliberal background, in terms of absorbing assumptions, and questioning them.",2,"[""Videogames are gradually recognized as a new cultural form which reaches far beyond mere entertainment: they enact new forms of subjectivity and temporality. However, this fascination with the new form should not render us blind for the fact that, in their content, even at its most magic, videogames are firmly rooted in our neoliberal capitalism and faithfully mirror its antinomies. This is where Bailes’s book enters. Through a detailed analysis of selected games, from Grand Theft Auto to Persona, he demonstrates how they reproduce the key dimensions of a modern megalopolis: the City as Playground, as Battleground, as Wasteland, as Prison… Ideology and the Virtual City is not only insanely readable; in its combination of vivid descriptions with theoretical stringency, it provides an unsurpassable introduction into the deadlocks of our real life. In short, an instant classic for everyone who wants to understand not just games but our reality itself. ~ Slavoj Zizek"", ""Videogames are the battle ground on which the culture wars are fought, and the space of gaming is shaping the political present and future, whether we like it or not. In this insighful and politically vital intervention, Jon Bailes reads the contemporary city through its representation in videogames and considers how city space itself is tranformed by games. Bailes shows how the city and the virtual world can hardly be separated, making a case for a critical-theoretical engagement with games which makes their politics, importance and limitations visible. A timely and important book on a topic so easily and so often misunderstood, setting the terms for future discussions of gaming. ~ Alfie Bown, author of The Playstation Dreamworld""]" Ignoble Displacement,"[""Stephanie Polsky""]",A radical reinterpretation of Dickens's novels made consequential to an understanding of capitalism in the neoliberal age.,"We live in a time of great social, political and economic crisis that many date to the collapse of the global banking system in 2008. Many are finding it difficult to contextualise the hardships that have taken place in the years following on from those events. It is difficult to find the answers in our present media landscape, or in a political and intellectual climate that continues to laud capitalism as the winning economic system coming out of both World War II and the end of the Cold War, which has become over the last century synonymous with democracy itself. The irony is that in our times the majority of the world’s people feel disenfranchised by both capitalism and democracy. How did we come to this historical juncture? What can we learn not just from history, but from our cultural artefacts that might tell us how we first came to conduct ourselves within a system of global finance capitalism? This volume proposes that we reinterpret the writings of Charles Dickens to find the antecedents of our present situation with regards to capital, empire and subjectivity.","We live in a time of great social, political and economic crisis that many date to the collapse of the global banking system in 2008. Many are finding it difficult to contextualise the hardships that have taken place in the years following on from those events. It is difficult to find the answers in our present media landscape, or in a political and intellectual climate that continues to laud capitalism as the winning economic system coming out of both World War II and the end of the Cold War, which has become over the last century synonymous with democracy itself. The irony is that in our times the majority of the world’s people feel disenfranchised by both capitalism and democracy. How did we come to this historical juncture? What can we learn not just from history, but from our cultural artefacts that might tell us how we first came to conduct ourselves within a system of global finance capitalism? This volume proposes that we reinterpret the writings of Charles Dickens to find the antecedents of our present situation with regards to capital, empire and subjectivity.",1,"[""Synopsis: We live in a time of great social, political and economic crisis that many date to the collapse of the global banking system in 2008. Many are finding it difficult to contextualise the hardships that have taken place in the years following on from those events. It is difficult to find the answers in our present media landscape, or in a political and intellectual climate that continues to laud capitalism as the winning economic system coming out of both World War II and the end of the Cold War, which has become over the last century synonymous with democracy itself. The irony is that in our times the majority of the world's people feel disenfranchised by both capitalism and democracy. How did we come to this historical juncture? What can we learn not just from history, but from our cultural artifacts that might tell us how we first came to conduct ourselves within a system of global finance capitalism? In \""Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London\"", author, and interdisciplinary writer/academic Stephanie Polsky proposes that we reinterpret the writings of Charles Dickens to find the antecedents of our present situation with regards to capital, empire and subjectivity.\n\nCritique: \""Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London\"" is comprised of four major thematic essays and an Epilogue. The result is an unique study that is as informed and informative as it is thoughtful and thought-provoking. An inherently absorbing read from beginning to end, \""Ignoble Displacement\"" is especially recommended for both community and economic library Economics Studies collections. For students and the non-specialist general reader with an interest in a Dickensian perspective on contemporary economic issues, it should be noted that \""Ignoble Displacement\"" is available in a Kindle edition ($19.99).\n\n~ Mary Cowper, Midwest Book Review""]" Imaginary Games,"[""Chris Bateman""]",Can games be art or is all art a kind of game? A philosophical investigation of play and imaginary things.,"Can games be art? When film critic Roger Ebert claimed in 2010 that videogames could never be art it was seen as a snub by many gamers. But from the perspective of philosophy of art this question was topsy turvey, since according to one of the most influential theories of representation all art is a game. Kendall Waltons make-believe theory explains how we interact with paintings, novels, movies and other artworks in terms of imaginary games, like a childs game of make-believe, wherein the artwork acts as a prop prescribing specific imaginings. In this view there can be no question that videogames - in fact, all games - are indeed a strange and wonderful form of art. In Imaginary Games, game designer and philosopher Chris Bateman expands Waltons theory to videogames, board games, collectible card games such as Pokémon and Magic: the Gathering, and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. The book explores the diverse fictional worlds that influence the modern world, the ethics of games, and the curious role imagination plays in everything from religion to science and mathematics.","Can games be art? When film critic Roger Ebert claimed in 2010 that videogames could never be art it was seen as a snub by many gamers. But from the perspective of philosophy of art this question was topsy turvey, since according to one of the most influential theories of representation all art is a game. Kendall Waltons make-believe theory explains how we interact with paintings, novels, movies and other artworks in terms of imaginary games, like a childs game of make-believe, wherein the artwork acts as a prop prescribing specific imaginings. In this view there can be no question that videogames - in fact, all games - are indeed a strange and wonderful form of art. In Imaginary Games, game designer and philosopher Chris Bateman expands Waltons theory to videogames, board games, collectible card games such as Pokémon and Magic: the Gathering, and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. The book explores the diverse fictional worlds that influence the modern world, the ethics of games, and the curious role imagination plays in everything from religion to science and mathematics.",4,"[""To the extent that Bateman aims to refute Ebert’s claims by treating games with the attention and rigorousness with which he feels they deserve, he succeeds unequivocally. His consultation of source material is nearly exhaustive – literally from A through Z, from Aristotle to Žižek, from the Atari game systems to Zuckerberg’s Facebook – yet the thoroughness of his research is rarely foregrounded due to the lucidity and congeniality of his writing. As someone based outside the academy, Bateman demonstrates splendidly that professorship need not be a prerequisite for scholarship.\n\nFittingly, Imaginary Games is published by Zer0 Books, which is committed to resurrecting the figure of the public intellectual. Chris Bateman, whose scholarship is astonishingly honest, refreshingly cogent, and thoroughly meticulous, earns that title. ~ Allen Zhang, MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine"", ""In this well-researched book Chris Bateman explores the ambiguous territory between the fictional and the real, and slays some dragons hiding therein. Highly recommended. ~ Ernest Adams, Founder of the International Game Developers' Association"", ""Chris Bateman’s Imaginary Games may just do for videogames what Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror did for scary books and movies.... not only philosophically compelling and interesting; it is also a great read. Bateman’s fluency in the relevant philosophical debates and history of thinking about games is both enviable and a pleasure to behold. ~ Jon Cogburn, Director of Philosophy, LSU Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies"", ""A wonderfully refreshing and inventive look at games of many kinds, but especially digital games. It is seriously philosophical, but Bateman, a professional game designer, draws on a huge variety of resources far beyond the writings of academic philosophers - fascinating and fun! ~ Kendall Walton, Charles Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan""]" "Imaginoscope for Organizers, An","[""Monika Kostera""]",Human beings are storytelling creatures. The imaginoscope is an (imaginary) device that people can use to create better organizations.,"An Imaginoscope for Organizers offers practical exercises to use both individual and collective imagination to activate and mobilize creative organizing impulses. It proposes intellectual, symbolic and poetic food for thought and practice. Each chapter is a step on the quest for creative ideas and practices and introduces a language that can be used to invent and communicate your own.","An Imaginoscope for Organizers offers practical exercises to use both individual and collective imagination to activate and mobilize creative organizing impulses. It proposes intellectual, symbolic and poetic food for thought and practice. Each chapter is a step on the quest for creative ideas and practices and introduces a language that can be used to invent and communicate your own.",4,"[""There is, in my view, an urgent need for teaching that encourages imagination rather than compliance, and when this is done well students inevitably enjoy the experience. I have found this to be particularly so for post-experience (MBA) students, but the need to engage imagination actually pervades teaching at all levels. An Imaginoscope for Organizers is an interesting read, with lots of practical advice about how to develop and use the imaginoscope with students. ~ Barbara Simpson PhD FRSA, Professor of Leadership and Organisational Dynamics , Strathclyde Business School"", ""Every once and a while someone from organizational studies writes something that extends far beyond the boundaries and limits of the field, whereby they achieve negentropy. That is, ideas and writing that give us energy and hope. This is what Monika Kostera has achieved here; it is a book of pedagogical ideas, a response to teaching during the Covid pandemic, an exploration of ethnographic phenomenology and a political statement. Not only is the text poetically powerful; it is rich in ‘imaginiscope’ suggestions, possibilities and interactions, creating a liminal space that we the readers will be eager to enter into and engage with. ~ Professor Hugo Letiche, Professor Hugo Letiche - LITEM, Institut Mines-TBS Evry/Paris; recent book is The Magic of Organization (ed with J-L Moriceau"", ""While imagination is one of the most important topics in organization theory and design, it is, unfortunately, one of the least studied. This book by Monika Kostera fills this gap by allowing readers to rediscover their imaginative faculties through a series of experiments, starting with language. By changing the perspective of observers and actors of organizational life, she invites them to participate in the imaginoscopic transmutation of the world of work. ~ Ghislain Deslandes, Professor, ESCP Business School"", ""An Imaginoscope for Organizers invites readers to imagine and go beyond the limitations of our imagination to think differently and mobilize collectively against forces that threaten our ability to create alternative futures. A timely, creative, and enchanting interdisciplinary text that will linger with us until we imagine anew.\n\n~ Professor Alison Pullen Professor of Management and Organization Studies Joint Editor-in-Chief Gender, Work and Organization""]" In Confidence: Talking Frankly about Fame,"[""Laurie Taylor""]","Celebrity artists, scientists, actors, film-makers and novelists on being famous.","A study of celebrity based on the seventy odd interviews featured in the Sky Arts television series, In Confidence. Informants include David Schwimmer, Stephen Fry, Harry Belafonte, Alan Ayckbourn, Kathie Burke, Michael Frayn, Christopher Hitchens, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sheila Hancock, Richard Dawkins, Miriam Margolys, Tracey Emin, and Nigel Kennedy. Here you will find everyone from politicians to artists, film-makers to novelists, talking frankly about fame and reputation.","A study of celebrity based on the seventy odd interviews featured in the Sky Arts television series, In Confidence. Informants include David Schwimmer, Stephen Fry, Harry Belafonte, Alan Ayckbourn, Kathie Burke, Michael Frayn, Christopher Hitchens, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sheila Hancock, Richard Dawkins, Miriam Margolys, Tracey Emin, and Nigel Kennedy. Here you will find everyone from politicians to artists, film-makers to novelists, talking frankly about fame and reputation.",3,"[""Subtitled ‘talking frankly about fame’ this is a compilation of a series of interviews on Sky Arts that constitutes a reflection on the nature of celebrity. The introduction reminds the reader of other interview series such as Face to Face with John Freeman, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair with Anthony Clare and the series with Sir Michael Parkinson. The book is structured thematically with interviews about making music, art and stories, with about four interviews per chapter. There are then reflections on family and friends and the nature of identity relation to celebrity. Stephen Fry discusses various ways in which he copes with his own fame, sometimes with books in brief 72 Network Review Winter 2015 www.scimednet.org self-deprecation. He reflects that most communications are looking to take something from you, which is ultimately exhausting. It is very instructive to learn that Nigel Kennedy’s trademark casual clothing on stage actually began with him leaving his smart outfit in New York when he was playing in London! He explains that much of his persona is designed to break down barriers, which one senses in his performance of Bach in an Irish parish church with comfortable informality. Sir Alan Ayckbourn recounts an amusing incident with a local who is astonished that he still lives in Scarborough when he could live in Bridlington, having made a great deal of money. One intriguing line of demarcation becoming a celebrity is when journalists become interested in details of private lives, as so many famous people have found to their cost. The book gives an important insight into the varieties of contemporary fame. ~ David Lorimer, Paradigm Explorer"", ""In an age of soapy soundbites, Taylor's hour-long interview strand is a serious attempt to delve deeper into its subjects.\n\n~ The Telegraph"", ""In this era of presentation bells and whistles, it's hard to over-emphasise how satisfying it is to see a television show that simply involves two engaging and articulate people talking to each other… Great stuff. ~ Time Out""]" In Land,"[""Ben Tufnell""]","A collection of essays about Land art, one of the most important artistic movements of our times.","An attempt to melt an iceberg with a blowtorch, an indoor lake of tequila, an ascent of Mt Everest, driftwood burnt with sunlight focused through a magnifying glass and a doorbell that emits the sound of a dying star; these are some of the extraordinary artistic strategies covered in this collection. Gathering together texts published since 2002, as well as specially written new essays, In Land traces recent engagements with landscape, nature, environment and the cosmos.","An attempt to melt an iceberg with a blowtorch, an indoor lake of tequila, an ascent of Mt Everest, driftwood burnt with sunlight focused through a magnifying glass and a doorbell that emits the sound of a dying star; these are some of the extraordinary artistic strategies covered in this collection. Gathering together texts published since 2002, as well as specially written new essays, In Land traces recent engagements with landscape, nature, environment and the cosmos.",9,"[""Gallerist and curator Ben Tufnell has worked closely with most of the artists he writes about, and his approach to Land art, a mode of radical practice emerging in the later 1960s, in which artists worked directly in the landscape, and which he wrote about in the excellent 2006 monograph Land Art (published by Tate) is also informed by a deep feeling for nature and the outdoors. That earlier survey has freed him up to envisage a different kind of book: one that is more personal, elliptical and open-ended.\n\nIt brings together texts that have appeared in variety of contexts, including exhibition catalogues and conference papers, over the past 15 years or so, supplemented by new material. Tufnell’s main interest is in the often overlooked contribution made by Land artists in Britain; there are essays here on artists not usually associated with the phenomenon, such as Roger Ackling and Garry Fabian Miller, along with others on more prominent figures like Richard Long or Hamish Fulton. But Tufnell also casts his net widely: a whole section is devoted to the US-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, for example, whose work has included installations utilizing gunpowder, explosions, rocks and plants, artificial animals, and pools of mescal or olive oil. Some essays follow his chosen artists on their journeys to remote locations, as is the case with Thomas Joshua Cooper and his ongoing Atlantic basin project, with its photographs from zones of ‘uncharted dangers’, where rescue cannot be expected.\n\nTufnell quotes Richard Long on the virtue of ‘simple, practical, emotional, quiet, vigorous art’, and finds these qualities in artists too. While, broadly speaking, he resists the idea that Land art might have anything to do with the Romantic Landscape tradition, he also succeeds in conveying very vividly the imaginative responses of artists to the environments in which they have chosen to work.\n\n~ Nicholas Alfrey, Art Quarterly, Spring 2020"", ""Landscape is first made by geological history, and second by human history. In the late 1960s a number of artists across the globe started to create sculptural situations in the landscape, far from urban hubs of art making, directly addressing these processes. For millennia human beings had marked the surface of the planet in extraordinary ways, but this was something different. These actions grew out of contemporaneous expanding highway networks, developed from climate-change consciousness that was spurred by post-industrialization, and riffed off humankind’s launch off the limits of the known world to the moon – an event that pushed bird’s eye views of our planet into mass consciousness. These artists’ excursions and incursions were fed back to the museum through photography, film, objects, texts, and conversation: as the critic Dore Ashton noted at the time, this was artwork made to be seen.\n\n‘Land art’ was the moniker that came to describe such activities. One of the first public uses of the term was made by Gerry Schum and Ursula Wevers in a landmark exhibition they created to be experienced on German mainstream television. In 1969, the ‘Television Gallery’ broadcast European and North American artists addressing the landscape. Their approach was not to present landscape, nor to show an ideal rural beauty. It was to get literally down and dirty with the matter of the land. Holes were dug, rocks were moved, earth was displaced. Schum and Wevers chose to title their wordless thirty-eight-minute program ‘Land Art’, having rejected their initial title ‘Landscape Art.’ This would become the descriptive term for some of the most radical art that would follow, as well as a means to address the long history of earthworks. Evoking and landscape and displacing a place, Land art intensifies what we think we might know about the places we inhabit.\n\nBen Tufnell is both an expert on and enthusiast of Land art. This collection of short monographic essays written between 2002 and 2017 gathers his musings on actions of artists who could be considered Land artists. Like so many art historical, terms Land Art is a description that artists equally adopt and rail against. Tufnell is interested in circling around Land art, not in defining it. He opens up what Land art might be, rather than tying it to a dogma. His method is to follow the artists whose names (willingly and otherwise) are regarded as part of the coordinates of Land art. He looks to those fundamental to the development of this art historical genre, such as Nancy Holt, Richard Long, and Ana Mendieta, as well as artists who would refute inclusion, such as Roger Ackling and Katie Paterson. For Tufnell, Land art is an attitude and method, not a monumental gesture.\n\nTracking networks of ideas across time and geography, an autobiographical line weaves through Tufnell’s texts. We learn Tufnell was a curator at Tate, that he was an only child who reveled in discovering the landscape, and that he has in inquiring mind, open to testing assumptions. In this collection he pays particular attention to the way artists, museums, and exhibition-makers have understood artists’ Land art in Britain. Hamish Fulton was the artist who revealed to Tufnell how artists’ interrogation of landscape and place can enable alternative ways to understand how we might find our place on this planet. In an interview in this volume, Fulton makes a careful reminder that attitudes to landscape and environment are always in flux. As assumptions wax and wane, we often find it unimaginable that previous humans actions on landscape could never have been acceptable. Land art is concerned with perception and sensation: perception is akin to geography, to reading space through coordinates; sensation is akin to landscape, to revealing ideas through inhabitation.\n\nAn artist Tufnell describes as haunting his writings is Robert Smithson, whose ideas indeed spiral through these texts. Smithson clearly articulated in a 1969 interview that to look to remote sites and to the surface of our planet was to make ’the landscape as coextensive with the gallery.’ He continued: ‘I don’t think we are dealing with a back to nature movement. For me the world is a museum. […] I’m totally concerned with making art and this is mainly an act of viewing, a mental activity that zeroes in on discrete sites.’ To write around rather than on is to create a discussion, not to set a prescription. It is also to create a climate of ideas – climate as the philosopher Bruno La Tour understands it: the broad sense of the relations between human beings and the material conditions of their lives. The environment is us and we are it: the composition of the air we breathe, and the land gravity pulls us to has been formed by human beings, it is not independent of us. Land art in its long and short histories re-mapped and stretched the limits of what art might be. Art does not create the future, rather it vibrates with what is already tingling in the nerve endings. In this collection, Tufnell invites the reader to accompany him on his journey, with perception and sensation the roadmap.\n\n~ Lisa Le Feuvre, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture"", ""5 out of 5 stars: What is Land art? 'In Land' will give newcomers a wonderful introduction, while also providing plenty for the more knowledgeable to consider. Ben Tufnell is a world-renowned authority on the subject and this selection of his highly-readable essays throws light on some of the movement's most important artists and their key works.\n\nHe writes from an insider's perspective, being a significant figure in London's art scene — as director of the thriving Parafin gallery — but he also brings an objectivity to his art criticism founded on his deep knowledge and love of the subject.\n\nGive yourself some brain food and award yourself some time to immerse yourself in this lovely book! ~ JM, Amazon"", ""5 out of 5 stars: 'In Land' delves into some of the lesser known branches of what could be categorized as Land Art. This is a series of essays written from a personal point of view, often supported by direct interviews. More than anything Ben Tufnell seems to be looking, through his poetic, unpretentious style, for a spiritual experience through art. ~ LJ Caulfield, Amazon"", ""5 out of 5 stars: Land and Earth art is as relevant today as it was in the 70s, possibly more so as we figure out our place in this fragile place. If you love this earth, and value concept over commercial, this book is for you. Tufnell captures it beautifully. ~ SHA, Amazon"", ""Think Land Art and you might imagine huge macho earthworks by a handful of American artists, but Ben Tufnell’s excellent new book on this subject In Land shows how this misconceived this is. In a selection of eloquent and accessible essays written by Tufnell over nearly two decades, the book brings together the multifarious approaches to site and experience by artists from America, Europe and beyond. Most rewarding is the inclusion of many women artists who are central to this story, among them Ana Mendieta, Nancy Holt, Anya Gallaccio and Katie Paterson. Not just an introduction, but an insightful foray into this topic, In Land will no doubt be used by researchers and art enthusiasts for years to come. ~ Simon Grant, Editor, Tate"", ""In Land continues the critically important writings Tufnell has authored concerning the Land art movement. His professional reach and personal experience moves us beyond a rigid definition of artists' engagement with the land, revealing the nuanced dialogues and intricacies artists often create, providing us with new lenses within which to experience our surrounding environment. ~ Hikmet Sidney Loe, author of The Spiral Jetty Encyclo: Exploring Robert Smithson's Earthwork through Time and Place"", ""This collection of texts by Ben Tufnell is an erudite journey through the ways artists explore the land. Tufnell’s precise examination of artworks and their reception is a finely tuned analysis demonstrating how artworks address the problems of understanding our place in the world. With personal, poetic and political words, this book underlines the importance of art for our current times. ~ Lisa Le Feuvre, curator, writer and editor and Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation"", ""Land art inaugurated new forms of landscape art, but it also prompted innovative forms of art writing: notably the personal and autobiographical account of a journey or pilgrimage to a site, the revisiting of the picturesque ‘tour’ and musings on the wider place of humans in the universe. Tufnell eloquently discusses journeys to the locations of historic works of Land art as well as the explorations of more recent artists such as Cai Guo Qiang and Katie Paterson.\n\nIn Tufnell’s writing fragments are connected indexically and allegorically to place, time and the solar system. ~ Joy Sleeman, Reader in Art History and Theory at UCL, author of The Sculpture of William Tucker (2007) and Roelof Louw (2018)""]" In Praise of Friendship,"[""Michał Herer""]","If we are to resist returning to the logic of clashing, violent particularisms and defend ourselves against fascist or fascistoid tendencies that appear on the political horizon, we need a renaissance of the culture of friendship.","We are living in the age of decline, or at least crisis, of what might be called a ‘culture of friendship’. Our existence as social beings is constricted in a triangle whose three apices are: the alienated work, subjected to the principle of ruthless competition, the closed, isolated nuclear family and the national or ‘cultural’ community constituted in the act of aggression towards a common enemy (the ‘alien’). It is precisely this constriction that makes the culture of friendship decline, and vice versa: it is this decline that seems to make any other way of life increasingly harder to imagine. However, if we are to resist the temptation of returning to the logic of clashing, violent particularisms and defend ourselves against fascist or fascistoid tendencies that appear on the political horizon, some kind of opening must occur, we must once again be able to experiment with new forms of being together, despite divisions resulting from territorial and cultural identities or family relations. What we need is a renaissance of the culture of friendship. Originally published in Poland, this edition from Zero Books is the first English language publication of In Praise of Friendship.","We are living in the age of decline, or at least crisis, of what might be called a ‘culture of friendship’. Our existence as social beings is constricted in a triangle whose three apices are: the alienated work, subjected to the principle of ruthless competition, the closed, isolated nuclear family and the national or ‘cultural’ community constituted in the act of aggression towards a common enemy (the ‘alien’). It is precisely this constriction that makes the culture of friendship decline, and vice versa: it is this decline that seems to make any other way of life increasingly harder to imagine. However, if we are to resist the temptation of returning to the logic of clashing, violent particularisms and defend ourselves against fascist or fascistoid tendencies that appear on the political horizon, some kind of opening must occur, we must once again be able to experiment with new forms of being together, despite divisions resulting from territorial and cultural identities or family relations. What we need is a renaissance of the culture of friendship. Originally published in Poland, this edition from Zero Books is the first English language publication of In Praise of Friendship.",3,"[""This is a surprisingly, maybe even shockingly classical view of friendship, while fully aware of all the counter-arguments available. Michał Herer’s essay is preoccupied by the main question of moral and political philosophy, to wit, how are we to live together. In the last two centuries or so we’ve been telling each other why are we divided. Mr Herer demonstrates in a novel way that the foundations of togetherness are not lacking, even if they don’t coincide with the foundations of our societies. This is both alarming and reassuring. ~ G. M. Tamás, Visiting Professor at the Central European University in Budapest and Vienna"", ""Michał Herer is an outstanding Polish philosopher of younger/middle generation, the author of some important books on contemporary philosophy, connaisseur, more specially, of Nietzche’s, Foucault’s and Deleuze’s thoughts and an brilliant interpreter of the hole critical tradition in the modern philosophy.\n\nHis essay Apologia of Friendship win the first prize in the periodical “Barbara Skarga competition for philosophical essay” organized by The Foundation for Thinking, a free Polish philosophical organization. It was highly appreciated by all ten jurors as both original, dealing in a subtle way with a long tradition of the philosophical reflection on friendship, and “classical” in its form, elegant and clear. The essay shows the erudition of the author, freely moving from the ancient to modern approaches to the concept of friendship, but it develops mostly his idea of renewing this concept in the context of contemporary moral, social and political problems.\n\nThe text is philosophical but accessible also to a larger public. Its significance is surely universal. I have no doubt it should be published in English to be red broadly beyond Poland. ~ Małgorzata Kowalska, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Białystok, the Chair of the Jury in the Barbara Skarga Competition for Philosophica"", ""Michał Herer has written an important book the subject of which is the late-modern crisis of friendship. Friendship, conceived here as a complex dialectical play between intimacy and distance, possesses an indefinable quality which binds singulars in a singular manner, and because of that falls out of the charts of the modern society which now is achieving its peak of the Weberian disenchantment and rationalisation. Modern people, isolated and disciplined to enter only the relations regulated and prescribed by the law, have a need of a new collective, yet ‘neither family nor national community prove sufficient against the late-capitalist sense of anomy.’.\n\n...Following the unfinished project of Michel Foucault, who, right before his death, announced that he wanted to write a ‘history of friendship,’ Michał Herer gives a succinct account of all the transformations of the concept from Plato and Aristotle, via Saint Thomas and Montaigne, to contemporary psychoanalysis (Reich, Horney, Lacan), Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. But the main asset of Herer’s aproach is that he situates these transformations within the Foucauldian context of the socio-economic evolution of the Western culture and locates the moment in which the interest in friendship begins to wane in the early-modern bourgeois construction of family based on the notion of the romantic love... This little book is remarakbaly well written: by avoiding jargon and going straigth into the most essential matter of things, it reads smoothly as a convincing argument. ~ Prof. Agata Bielik-Robson, Professor of Jewish Studies Theology & Religious Studies, University of Nottingham, UK""]" In the Dust of This Planet,"[""Eugene Thacker""]","Supernatural horror defined as the thought of the unthinkable. In this bestselling book, Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world.","#1 Amazon Bestseller in Philosophy Criticism The world is increasingly unthinkable, a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. In this book Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live – a central motif of the horror genre. In the Dust of This Planet explores these relationships between philosophy and horror. In Thacker’s hands, philosophy is not academic logic-chopping; instead, it is the thought of the limit of all thought, especially as it dovetails into occultism, demonology, and mysticism. Likewise, Thacker takes horror to mean something beyond the focus on gore and scare tactics, but as the under-appreciated genre of supernatural horror in fiction, film, comics, and music. This relationship between philosophy and horror does not mean the philosophy of horror, if anything, it means the reverse, the horror of philosophy: those moments when philosophical thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own existence. For Thacker, the genre of supernatural horror is the key site in which this paradoxical thought of the unthinkable takes place. The cover of In the Dust of this Planet can be seen in a New York gallery, on a banner at the 2014 Climate Change march in New York and on Jay-Z’s back promoting Run. The book influenced the writers of the US TV series True Detective and has been lambasted by ex-Fox News broadcaster, Glenn Beck in his podcast. Other writing by Eugene Thacker Two more in the series Horror of Philosophy - April 2015: • [ Zero Books ] Starry Speculative Corpse Horror of Philosophy vol. 2 Eugene Thacker Paperback: 978-1-78279-891-0 eBook: 978-1-78279-890-3 • [ Zero Books ] Tentacles Longer Than Night Horror of Philosophy vol. 3 Eugene Thacker Paperback: 978-1-78279-889-7 eBook: 978-1-78279-888-0","#1 Amazon Bestseller in Philosophy Criticism The world is increasingly unthinkable, a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. In this book Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live – a central motif of the horror genre. In the Dust of This Planet explores these relationships between philosophy and horror. In Thacker’s hands, philosophy is not academic logic-chopping; instead, it is the thought of the limit of all thought, especially as it dovetails into occultism, demonology, and mysticism. Likewise, Thacker takes horror to mean something beyond the focus on gore and scare tactics, but as the under-appreciated genre of supernatural horror in fiction, film, comics, and music. This relationship between philosophy and horror does not mean the philosophy of horror, if anything, it means the reverse, the horror of philosophy: those moments when philosophical thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own existence. For Thacker, the genre of supernatural horror is the key site in which this paradoxical thought of the unthinkable takes place. The cover of In the Dust of this Planet can be seen in a New York gallery, on a banner at the 2014 Climate Change march in New York and on Jay-Z’s back promoting Run. The book influenced the writers of the US TV series True Detective and has been lambasted by ex-Fox News broadcaster, Glenn Beck in his podcast. Other writing by Eugene Thacker Two more in the series Horror of Philosophy - April 2015: • [ Zero Books ] Starry Speculative Corpse Horror of Philosophy vol. 2 Eugene Thacker Paperback: 978-1-78279-891-0 eBook: 978-1-78279-890-3 • [ Zero Books ] Tentacles Longer Than Night Horror of Philosophy vol. 3 Eugene Thacker Paperback: 978-1-78279-889-7 eBook: 978-1-78279-888-0",1,"[""Thacker’s discourse on the intersection of horror and philosophy is utterly original and utterly captivating...In the Dust of This Planet is an encyclopedic grimoire instructing us in the varieties of esoteric thought and infernal diversions that exist for the reader’s further investigation, treating us to a delightful stroll down a midway of accursed attractions that alone are worth the ticket of this volume. ~ Thomas Ligotti, author of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race""]" In The Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling,"[""Stuart Walton""]",A thorough-going re-elaboration of modern experience via the senses.,"The five physical senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching have been held to underpin the complexity of human experience ever since Aristotle first theorised about how they worked. Classical and scholastic philosophy up to the time of the European Enlightenment relegated their operations to its margins, viewing them as at best a distraction from higher thinking, and at worst a positive deception. Paradoxically, what one could not objectively know, the products of the mind, were accorded precedence over the concrete. From the Romantic era onwards, the senses moved to the centre of speculative thought, and the various dialectical currents of philosophy after Hegel made them interdependent with the intellectual function, which was held to derive most or all of its authority from them. This tendency has continued down to the sensualist, hedonist and anti-intellectual currents of our own day. In this theoretical consideration of what has been done to the senses in modern experience, Stuart Walton subjects the life of the senses to a further materialist turn, one that refuses a spiritualisation of the material realm, to which contemporary discourses of the body have often fallen prey, while at the same time preserving sensuality from being delivered once again to a sterile idealism.","The five physical senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching have been held to underpin the complexity of human experience ever since Aristotle first theorised about how they worked. Classical and scholastic philosophy up to the time of the European Enlightenment relegated their operations to its margins, viewing them as at best a distraction from higher thinking, and at worst a positive deception. Paradoxically, what one could not objectively know, the products of the mind, were accorded precedence over the concrete. From the Romantic era onwards, the senses moved to the centre of speculative thought, and the various dialectical currents of philosophy after Hegel made them interdependent with the intellectual function, which was held to derive most or all of its authority from them. This tendency has continued down to the sensualist, hedonist and anti-intellectual currents of our own day. In this theoretical consideration of what has been done to the senses in modern experience, Stuart Walton subjects the life of the senses to a further materialist turn, one that refuses a spiritualisation of the material realm, to which contemporary discourses of the body have often fallen prey, while at the same time preserving sensuality from being delivered once again to a sterile idealism.",0,[] Infinite Fictions,"[""David Winters""]",Selected writings by one of today's leading young literary critics.,"David Winters has quickly become a leading voice in the new landscape of online literary criticism. His widely-published work maps the furthest frontiers of contemporary fiction and theory. The essays in this book range from the American satirist Sam Lipsyte to the reclusive Australian genius Gerald Murnane; from the ""distant reading"" of Franco Moretti to the legacy of Gordon Lish. Meditations on style, form and fictional worlds sit side-by-side with overviews of the cult status of Oulipo, the aftermath of modernism, and the history of continental philosophy. Infinite Fictions is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the forefront of literary thought.","David Winters has quickly become a leading voice in the new landscape of online literary criticism. His widely-published work maps the furthest frontiers of contemporary fiction and theory. The essays in this book range from the American satirist Sam Lipsyte to the reclusive Australian genius Gerald Murnane; from the ""distant reading"" of Franco Moretti to the legacy of Gordon Lish. Meditations on style, form and fictional worlds sit side-by-side with overviews of the cult status of Oulipo, the aftermath of modernism, and the history of continental philosophy. Infinite Fictions is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the forefront of literary thought.",8,"[""David Winters is a brilliant young literary critic. His literary essays, which have appeared in a vast range of publications, both on- and offline, go far beyond the usual precis-and-evaluation typical of book reviews. He is unique in the philosophical subtlety and depth he brings to his work, and in the striking authors he covers. ~ Lars Iyer, Author of Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus"", ""David Winters is an exceptional talent in literary criticism. He combines a vivid, accessible style of writing with deep erudition and great intellectual precision. Ranging from popular works of fiction to difficult philosophers, he is always able to cut through the jargon and make the reader engage with the heart of the matter. Indeed, Winters is that rare thing: a young intellectual who is able to speak to the general reader while contributing to the academic conversation as well. ~ Martin Hägglund, Yale University"", ""David Winters is the smartest young critic to emerge in recent years. His writing is marked by a desire for the unorthodox, and an attention to our most daring logophiles—Lish, Lutz, Marcom, Schutt—so often overlooked by others. An intimacy with continental philosophy and literary modernism elevates his work well beyond the obvious exegetical formulas of mainstream criticism, and yet it always remains eminently readable and accessible, eminently fun. In Winters I've found a critic whose writing I can read without having to chalk it up to a guilty pleasure—he makes me smarter, there's no doubt about it. ~ Evan Lavender-Smith, Author of Avatar and From Old Notebooks"", ""Whenever I read David Winters' thoughts on a book, it is as though I am seeing that book anew, no matter how well I thought I already knew it. He is rigorous, broad-minded, generous, and courageous—qualities that cannot be taught, but are of essential importance for a critic to have. I look forward to reading him for years to come. ~ Scott Esposito, Co-author of The End of Oulipo"", ""David Winters is a massively intelligent, erudite and inquiring analyst of American letters. I read his essays avidly, and always find fresh insights and fresh connections. He's describing the furniture in the room—a lot of other critics haven't found the door yet. Winters writes with élan, complexity and thoughtfulness. I haven't come across another new critic I like so well. ~ Douglas Glover, Author of Attack of the Copula Spiders"", ""David Winters has become a prominent figure in a new generation of young intellectuals. His literary criticism resists the temptation of liberal humanism and its narrow conception of literature; it interrogates the nature of the novel in a philosophically radical fashion, and sheds light on the alternative voices that are routinely ignored by the mainstream. ~ Carl Cederström, Co-author of Dead Man Working"", ""David Winters’ meditations on the literary experience dance with intelligence and beauty. Powerful and penetrating, his essays turn other writers’ writing into new, exciting pieces that spark the writerly imagination and leave you wanting more. A leading critic. ~ Susana Medina, Author of Philosophical Toys"", ""David Winters is the most exciting critic out there. Each of his reviews starts from scratch, as he looks for a new vocabulary and a new form to talk about each new book. In a sense, his reviews are often even more fascinating than the books themselves—demonstrating how great a writer he truly is. ~ Andrew Gallix, 3:AM Magazine""]" Infinite Music,"[""Adam Harper""]","A new system for imagining music, built on the infnite possibilities of twenty-first century technology.","A timely analysis of musical evolution at a moment when many practitioners have become fixated on the past and thinkers have found themselves unable to locate possible futures. Steve Goodman,author of Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear In the last few decades, new technologies have brought composers and listeners to the brink of an era of limitless musical possibility. They stand before a vast ocean of creative potential, in which any sounds imaginable can be synthesised and pieced together into radical new styles and forms of music-making. But are musicians taking advantage of this potential? How could we go about creating and listening to new music, and why should we? Bringing the ideas of twentieth-century avant-garde composers Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage to their ultimate conclusion, Infinite Music proposes a system for imagining music based on its capacity for variation, redefining musical modernism and music itself in the process. By detailing not just how music is composed but crucially how its perceived, Infinite Music maps the future of music and the many paths towards it.","A timely analysis of musical evolution at a moment when many practitioners have become fixated on the past and thinkers have found themselves unable to locate possible futures. Steve Goodman,author of Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear In the last few decades, new technologies have brought composers and listeners to the brink of an era of limitless musical possibility. They stand before a vast ocean of creative potential, in which any sounds imaginable can be synthesised and pieced together into radical new styles and forms of music-making. But are musicians taking advantage of this potential? How could we go about creating and listening to new music, and why should we? Bringing the ideas of twentieth-century avant-garde composers Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage to their ultimate conclusion, Infinite Music proposes a system for imagining music based on its capacity for variation, redefining musical modernism and music itself in the process. By detailing not just how music is composed but crucially how its perceived, Infinite Music maps the future of music and the many paths towards it.",7,"[""Adam Harper’s thorough, considered and cogent attempt to suggest a means of taking music forward by liberating it from restrictive modes of perception and regressive, habitual practices is an admirably high-minded undertaking. Musical variables, dimensions in music space and music criticism are among the myriad facets tackled in a treatise which reveals the bigger picture by delving into the minutiae at a sub-atomic level... [He] makes for a wise and informed guide. He’s hot on the distinction between acknowledging the work of Cage, Stockhausen et al, and noting that it quickly became its own orthodoxy: furthermore, the weight of his argument encourages a holistic viewpoint whereby music can be seen as a fully integrated aspect of life, not an end in itself. ~ Oregano Rathbone, http://recordcollectormag.com/reviews/infinite-music-imagining-the-next-millennium-of-human-music-making"", ""With his book Infinite Music Adam Harper provides answers that clean away the old structures of thought and make a realistic Utopia of music visible. He grabs the culture of pessimism by the collar and reminds it that music means more than organised sound... The music of the future is in our hands. ~ Philipp Rhensius, Groove Magazine http://www.groove.de/2012/04/15/adam-harper-infinite-music-buch-review/"", ""A painstaking conceptual dissection... which... sets out to atomise and reconfigure every last assumption about what music is and how it can be made - revealing even the most catholic taste to be inherently limited... Infinite Music is not about the music that you already know - that narrow range of tonal, textual and rhytmic tactics that the last millennium of music makers have seen fit to employ. Instead, it's a futuristic manifesto for a revitalised musical modernism, a thought-strategy designed to unchain us from our hoary old traditions, a framework for the imagination which calls into being an uncharted cosmos of musical possibility. ~ Chris Sharp, Wire Magazine #336"", ""Harper is searching for a more holistic musical egalitarianism, one that treats timbre, instrumentation, and performance conventions with the same levelling hand as serialism did pitch. “No restrictions whatsoever” is what Harper demands of this new modernism, and it is a cri de coeur that is as meticulously and thoroughly explained as it is inspiringly progressive...If there is a danger that a manifesto such as Harper’s—one that propounds a more egalitarian musical world and seeks to imagine the future—should drift into idealism and daydream, or worse, into the very type of proscriptive demagoguery that it seeks to dispel, then Harper counteracts it by providing a framework for reassessing music-making that is practical and thorough, wide-ranging and speculative, yet honest and humble in its intentions... “Why shouldn’t we try to imagine another thousand years of musical history?” asks Harper, defiantly. And in imagining a music with infinite possibility, Harper sees an inspiring, albeit tentative, precursor of this future. ~ Tom Astley, Oxonian Review http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/futureproof/"", ""It's a very important text for composers today and in the future, and for disillusioned listeners who may feel the need to re-engage with the massive significance of music and music creation in our times... Adam’s book describes the spirit of an open-ended system of continuous, multidimensional musical complexity, based on intuition and technology, culture and community. ~ Cristian Vogel, http://cristianvogel.neverengine.org/post/12369333228/infinite-music-adam-harper"", ""Infinite Music is a super clear, open-ended philosophy of sound and music for the post-rave generation. Essential reading for sonic modernists everywhere.\n\n~ Cristian Vogel"", ""A timely analysis of musical evolution at a moment when many practitioners have become fixated on the past and thinkers have found themselves unable to locate possible futures.\n\n~ Steve Goodman,, author of Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear""]" "Instagram Archipelago, The","[""Elliot C. Mason""]","Through a raucous tour of Instagram’s fisherwomen, The Instagram Archipelago proposes a radical new ethics of gender and race.","Set on Idan Hayosh’s peculiar Instagram page of women holding dead fish, The Instagram Archipelago is a conversation with contemporary culture’s logics of gender and race. Working through recent thinking in Black studies and Hayosh’s satirical images, Elliot C. Mason presents the aesthetics of capitalism as a sea that makes everything the same, turning the world into a single form. The Instagram Archipelago brings radical antiracist and feminist scholarship to a general audience, applying a model of thinking beyond gender and race to the strange world of online fishing photos. This funny and fascinating book moves past the liberal celebration of gender and race, towards a tiny island of resistance in a growing archipelago.","Set on Idan Hayosh’s peculiar Instagram page of women holding dead fish, The Instagram Archipelago is a conversation with contemporary culture’s logics of gender and race. Working through recent thinking in Black studies and Hayosh’s satirical images, Elliot C. Mason presents the aesthetics of capitalism as a sea that makes everything the same, turning the world into a single form. The Instagram Archipelago brings radical antiracist and feminist scholarship to a general audience, applying a model of thinking beyond gender and race to the strange world of online fishing photos. This funny and fascinating book moves past the liberal celebration of gender and race, towards a tiny island of resistance in a growing archipelago.",3,"[""By way of a personal response to Idan Hayosh’s deeply weird images, Elliot C. Mason has conjured a bracingly witty, original and lyrical meditation on architecture, fishing, bikinis and the possibility of escape from the ‘eclipsing wetness’ of our homogenizing neoliberal culture. ~ Josh Cohen"", ""Elliot C. Mason is a force of nature. Dissolving the boundaries of genre, he provides a roadmap to the writing of the future. The Instagram Archipelago is witty, trenchant, and very very relevant. ~ Frances Wilson"", ""Timely, insightful, moving, funny, and rigorous in its self-scrutiny. [Mason has written] a persuasive, and admirable, study of the white male gaze and the world it’s helped bring about. ~ Matt Greene, author of Jew(ish) and Ostrich.""]" Is the East Still Red?,"[""Gary Blank""]","Leftist observers of China's political economy, whether they are adulatory or dismissive, have fundamentally misunderstood the role of the market","Does China represent a non-capitalist alternative to neoliberal development models? Commentators on the left have offered sharply divergent assessments over the last two decades. A few still cling the old dream of market socialism, twinning efficiency with social justice. For most, however, China is proof that market reforms invariably yield dispossession, inequality, and capitalist restoration. Is the East Still Red? argues that both interpretations are wrong and exhibit a common failure to distinguish between market mechanisms and capitalist imperatives. Gary Blank situates the Chinese experience within broader Marxist debates on socio-historical transitions and primitive accumulation, highlighting the need to conceptualize capitalism as a unique system in which producers and appropriators depend on the market for their reproduction. Despite years of marketization, the mandarins in Beijing have not yet imposed full market dependence in industry and agriculture. He shows how the resistance of workers and peasants, the imperatives of party-state legitimacy, and the reproductive strategies of individual Communist officials and managers all act to perpetuate central aspects of a bureaucratic-collectivist system, in which direct producers and bureaucrats are effectively merged with the means of production. The People’s Republic may be a non-capitalist market alternative, albeit one that is hardly edifying for socialists.","Does China represent a non-capitalist alternative to neoliberal development models? Commentators on the left have offered sharply divergent assessments over the last two decades. A few still cling the old dream of market socialism, twinning efficiency with social justice. For most, however, China is proof that market reforms invariably yield dispossession, inequality, and capitalist restoration. Is the East Still Red? argues that both interpretations are wrong and exhibit a common failure to distinguish between market mechanisms and capitalist imperatives. Gary Blank situates the Chinese experience within broader Marxist debates on socio-historical transitions and primitive accumulation, highlighting the need to conceptualize capitalism as a unique system in which producers and appropriators depend on the market for their reproduction. Despite years of marketization, the mandarins in Beijing have not yet imposed full market dependence in industry and agriculture. He shows how the resistance of workers and peasants, the imperatives of party-state legitimacy, and the reproductive strategies of individual Communist officials and managers all act to perpetuate central aspects of a bureaucratic-collectivist system, in which direct producers and bureaucrats are effectively merged with the means of production. The People’s Republic may be a non-capitalist market alternative, albeit one that is hardly edifying for socialists.",0,[] It’s Not Over,"[""Pete Dolack""]",A comprehensive historical study to understand today's world and find a better world tomorrow.,"The path to a better world can’t be found without knowledge of history. ""It’s Not Over"" analyzes attempts to supplant capitalism in the past in order to draw lessons for emerging and future movements that seek to overcome the political and economic crises of today. This history is presented through the words and actions of the men and women who made these revolutions, and the everyday experiences of the millions of people who put new revolutionary ideas into practice under the pressures of enormous internal and external forces. This is history that can be applied to today’s struggles to shape our world, in which new ideas are emerging to bring about the economic democracy that is indispensable to a rational and sustainable future.","The path to a better world can’t be found without knowledge of history. ""It’s Not Over"" analyzes attempts to supplant capitalism in the past in order to draw lessons for emerging and future movements that seek to overcome the political and economic crises of today. This history is presented through the words and actions of the men and women who made these revolutions, and the everyday experiences of the millions of people who put new revolutionary ideas into practice under the pressures of enormous internal and external forces. This is history that can be applied to today’s struggles to shape our world, in which new ideas are emerging to bring about the economic democracy that is indispensable to a rational and sustainable future.",3,"[""As Cold War taboos on honest discussions of capitalism and socialism lose their force, important books like this are emerging. They ask why capitalism keeps provoking movements to go beyond it, why they have not yet achieved that goal, and what we must learn from them so the next efforts prove more effective. Dolack here contributes to the vital emerging answers. ~ Rick Wolff, author of Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism and host of the Economic Update radio program"", ""There is a great amount of knowledge to be gained from this ambitious work that takes us from the Paris Commune to the Sandinista revolution. It’s Not Over sifts through more than a century of revolutionary history persistently seeking the lessons to be drawn from it for the construction of a non-capitalist world. The result is original and useful book that should not be missed. ~ Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation and co-founder of the International Feminist Collective"", ""Over two decades following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this book provides a timely and comprehensive appraisal of its internal and geopolitical contradictions and a grounded general schematic for workers’ movements which will form and build new socialist states in the near future. Dolack cogently recognizes the incredible advances of socialism in improving the quality of life among workers and peasants. The lessons of It’s Not Over point to the fundamental significance of worker control in organizing a sustainable and equitable system of social exchange. ~ Immanuel Ness, City University of New York and author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class""]" Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict,"[""James Crossley"", ""Robert J. Myles""]",A major biography of Jesus from a historical materialist perspective,"What made the Jesus movement tick? By situating the life of Jesus of Nazareth in the turbulent troubles of first-century Palestine, Crossley and Myles give a thrilling historical-materialist take on the historical Jesus. Delivering a wealth of knowledge on the social, economic, and cultural conflicts of the time, Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict uncovers the emergence of a fervent and deadly serious religious organizer whose social and religious movement offered not only a radical end-time edict of divine reversal and judgment but also a promising new world order ruled in the interests of the peasantry. The movement’s popular appeal was due in part to a desire to represent the values of ordinary rural workers, and its vision meant that the rich would have to give up their wealth, while the poor would be afforded a life of heavenly luxury. Tensions flared up considerably when the movement marched on Jerusalem and Jesus was willingly martyred for the cause. Crossley and Myles offer a vivid portrait of the man and his movement and uncover the material conditions that converged to make it happen.","What made the Jesus movement tick? By situating the life of Jesus of Nazareth in the turbulent troubles of first-century Palestine, Crossley and Myles give a thrilling historical-materialist take on the historical Jesus. Delivering a wealth of knowledge on the social, economic, and cultural conflicts of the time, Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict uncovers the emergence of a fervent and deadly serious religious organizer whose social and religious movement offered not only a radical end-time edict of divine reversal and judgment but also a promising new world order ruled in the interests of the peasantry. The movement’s popular appeal was due in part to a desire to represent the values of ordinary rural workers, and its vision meant that the rich would have to give up their wealth, while the poor would be afforded a life of heavenly luxury. Tensions flared up considerably when the movement marched on Jerusalem and Jesus was willingly martyred for the cause. Crossley and Myles offer a vivid portrait of the man and his movement and uncover the material conditions that converged to make it happen.",12,"[""Christianity has justified oppressive hierarchies aplenty. But it has also justified resistance to them. This book does a very good job of showing us why. ~ Dragan Plavšić , Counterfire"", ""Despite being written from a perspective that questions many of the traditions of the Christian faith, it is respectful in its approach, reasonable in most of its assessments, and simply enjoyable to read. ~ Daniel N. Gullotta, Religion & Liberty | Acton Institute"", ""At a time when Marxists and people of faith continue to treat each other’s core texts with contempt or suspicion, Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict is a timely and welcome study. May it be the first of a revived genre. ~ Paul Simon, People's World"", ""A robust foundation for a renewed political interpretation of Jesus and the Jesus movement, one charged with revolutionary possibilities. ~ Stephen D. Morrison"", ""Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict is a must read and belongs on every scholar and lay person's shelf. Whether you are an academic of the field, a lay Christian, or clergy, you should be reading this volume and seriously considering it. ~ , Goodreads"", ""Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict will henceforth provide an easy answer whenever friends and family request a recommendation for an accessible but reliable book about the historical Jesus.\n\nThe book is sound in its scholarship, reasonable in its conclusions, yet provocative enough that it will hold an array of readers' interests. ~ , Amazon"", ""‘Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict’—book bridges divide between Marxists and Christians ~ Paul Simon, People's World"", ""Precise, clear, accessible, and important. I can think of no better introduction to the historical Jesus for the general reader, no clearer statement on the legacy of the Jesus movement in the sweep of subsequent history, or a more worthy challenge to contemporary scholarship on Jesus and the rise of Christianity. ~ Neil Elliott, author of Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle"", ""The greatest story ever told as told from below is more compelling than ever. I was utterly engrossed. What impresses the most, though, is in how by demystifying an epic class struggle of the past lessons of strategic relevance to struggles for liberation in the present can be drawn. Essential stuff. ~ Ciara Cremin, author of Totalled: Salvaging the Future from the Wreckage of Capitalism"", ""Copious and informed material information by way of well-wrought and well-written biographical narrative. The book conveys a sharp sense of the times and places, the issues and discussions, the difficulties and possibilities. A marvelous idea on the part of Crossley and Myles. ~ Fernando F. Segovia, Oberlin Graduate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, Vanderbilt University"", ""This book moves on from the Third Quest for the historical Jesus, so focused on seeing Jesus as a great innovator within a particular cultural, religious and societal context. Seeing such portraits as romanticized and overly idealized, the interest here is on the social and economic forces that produced the Jesus movement. ~ Joan E. Taylor, Professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism, Kings College London"", ""Crossley and Myles have recaptured the mind-blowing excitement generated by the original quest to distinguish the Jesus of history behind the myth. ~ Deane Galbraith, Lecturer in Religion, University of Otago""]" Kill All Normies,"[""Angela Nagle""]","How internet subcultures are conquering the mainstream, from from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right.","Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the ""alt right"" ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.","Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the ""alt right"" ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.",16,"[""This dynamite stick packaged as a short book, analyzes the twin reactions to the liberal-democratic consensus which served till recently as the self-evident normative foundation of our society: alt-right and Political Correctness. Nobody is spared in Nagle’s razor-sharp critical probing: while she brings out the shared presuppositions and hidden complicity of the two reactions, she also clearly demonstrates how these reactions are grounded in the weakness of the liberal-democratic consensus itself. KILL ALL NORMIES provides the much needed cognitive mapping for our predicament – it is a book for ALL those who want to orient ourselves in our crazy times. ~ Slavoj Zizek"", ""Angela Nagle describes the methods of American right-wing populists on the Net and explains why they are so successful. Trump has perfected these methods.\n\nAt least since the disclosure book \""Fire and Fury\"" by Michael Wolff about the conditions in the White House in this country waves high , we know how chaotic and haphazard the current president of the superpower USA leads his government. And we know more about his former whisperer: Steven Bannon. Although Donald Trump has broken with the figurehead of the \""alt-right\"" movement, Bannon's influence on the rise of right-wing populist and racist tendencies in the past is not to be underestimated.\n\nHere Angela Nagle's book hits a nerve: \""Kill All Normies - Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumble to Trump and the Old Right\"" describes the methods of right-wing populists and their tremendous power in the current cultural landscape of the United States.\n\nNagle's basic thesis is as bold as it is obvious: academic \""political correctness\"" - manifested in a person like Barack Obama, who incarnates the image of the \""articulated, cosmopolitan American\"" - finds his countermovement in the America First policy of his successor. In other words: Trump's success feeds on his open fight against just that correctness, openly delivered not only in his speeches, but above all on the Internet. Trump perfected what had been announced years earlier: the culture of conscious border crossing, which has unfolded a tremendous viral dynamic.\n\nThe Irish communications scholar Angela Nagle has been working for years on the online presence of the \""alt-right\"" movement, which - and this is only briefly mentioned - is by no means a homogenous current and that caused by the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville in August 2017 only became visible.\n\nHer theory becomes plausible on the example of the online platform \""4chan\"", where images are mainly posted in so-called \""image boards\"". The topics range from nature, cars, weapons, eroticism to politics. An online mirror article describes the effect of 4chan aptly: \""An abysmal place where horrors, racist and sexist tirades and images are published far beyond the bounds of good taste [...] The world of 4chan is obscure and weird, like the inside of a confused provincial teen at three in the morning.\""\n\n4chan was considered the cradle of the Anonymous movement until, as Nagle describes, right-wing ideas took over the platform. The permanent crossing of borders, actually a phenomenon of a left-anarchic culture, was successfully perfected by the \""alt-right\"" movement. Incidentally, Nagle believes that the same applies to role models, as the title shows. Similar to left-wing subcultures, the new right wing opposes the mainstream: \""Kill all normies!\"" The negation of this finding, said Nagle, Hillary Clinton had the victory.\n\nSo if you want to get up to date on the viral culture fight, read Angela Nagle. The book - almost an essay with its 136 pages - at the end upsets both sides of the political co-ordinate system.\n\nNagle, who locates herelf in the left spectrum, prophesies: \""If the left wants to move forward, it is time to put away the aesthetic values ​​of this counterculture - and to invent something new\"". ~ Nana Brink, Deutschland Funkkultur, translated into English from German"", ""The rise of President Trump and right-wing populism worldwide was preceded and normalized by a far-right social media movement. Sites such as 4chan and reddit fostered online right-wing communities that spilled out into internet journalism, Facebook and Twitter, and ultimately the White House. In her book Kill All Normies, Irish journalist Angela Nagle elucidates the circumstances that fomented this ideology.\n\nNagle posits that the Obama presidency’s veneer of reasoned sincerity led to the disingenuous clicktivism of the KONY 2012 movement and the social media vilification of the Cincinnati Zoo in the wake of their euthanizing Harambe the gorilla. These trends’ self-importance and intolerance of dissent led to a good deal of disillusionment of youth on the left and the right. Gamer groups, various white nationalist and Christian conservative groups, and the remnants of the pick-up artist community congealed into a loosely affiliated, predominantly male movement referred to as the Alt-Right.\n\nThe Alt-Right is anti-authoritarian, decentralized, and often anonymous, although it has many (frequently at odds) figureheads. It follows, then, that contradictory ideologies co-exist beneath the same umbrella. Richard Spencer decries homosexuality and drug use as symptoms of Western decline, whereas both are celebrated by Milo Yiannopolis. Nagle posits that the greatest uniting force is “a bursting forth of anti-PC cultural politics through the culture wars of recent years.”\n\nThe mainstreaming of Black Lives Matter, safe spaces, transgender bathroom rights, etc. saw transgression becoming the project of retrograde racial and gender politics. Whereas once Prince’s lyrics and Dead Kennedys’ album art were the matter of Congressional inquiry, it is now edgier to release a female game designer’s home address or liken Leslie Jones to a gorilla. Indeed, Nagle argues that the Alt-Right has co-opted liberalism’s transgressive rhetoric and aesthetic. The difference is that the status quo now is more socially liberal than it was in the 1950s and ’60s. The core contradiction of Alt-Right ideology is that its strategies, because they are co-opted from and practiced in an environment of social liberalism, require liberalism to exist. As Nagle puts it, “Trump, rightist 4chan and the alt-right all represent a pretty dramatic departure from the kind of churchgoing, upstanding, button-down, family values conservativism that we usually associate with the term in Anglo-American public and political life.”\n\nWhile she doesn’t quite make clear how the real-world consequences of this online discourse—especially the election of Donald Trump—were precipitated by the online hate-pit, Nagle’s analysis is trenchant and timely. What makes Kill All Normies such an insightful book is the author’s insistence on the culpability of the left in creating the vacuum in which the Alt-Right expanded. As liberal college campuses and private businesses instituted policies of gender-neutral bathrooms, safe spaces, and trigger warnings, they ironically made speech and thought less free through call-out culture. Nagle’s caution that the left’s stagnant ideas, pedantry, and infighting have made it the weaker party of the two should surely lead those who want change to reflect on their methods. ~ Alex Kies, Rain Taxi Review of Books"", ""Kill All Normies is an important book, albeit one whose conclusions are likely to prove unflattering and potentially unpopular. In it, the alt-right emerges as something not quite as alien as many would like to think. Rather, it is a bastardized version of the cultural currents that most of the book’s likely readers — myself included — participate in and valorize. And although there may be no easy way out of the mess we have gotten ourselves into — stabbings in Portland, riots in Berkeley, and Trump in the White House — the book’s indictment of our elitist culture wars does point toward an inevitable, if slightly horrifying conclusion: Perhaps the normies aren’t so bad after all. ~ Park McDougald, New York Magazine"", ""Nagle approaches the alt-right with understanding and patience. Her political taxonomies are careful, her sociological explanations are persuasive, and her psychological evaluations are considerate. She has a genuine sympathy for her subjects and a genuine solidarity with their victims. Most important, she shows that psychological and economic analysis are complimentary rather than at odds. Read Kill All Normies, then everything else Nagle has written. It’ll be time better spent than listening to your favorite podcaster complain about “political correctness” for the nth time. ~ Mark Dunbar, The Humanist"", ""Nagle’s measured prose, her commitment to both context and dialectics, contradiction and convergence as well as her stark imperturbability in the face of deeply disturbing materials make her the ideal reader of both liberal and academic hypocrisy as well as alt-right instrumentalization of transgression as politics. ~ Catherine Liu, LA Review of Books"", ""If the internet is a trial run for real-life political action, then it’s clear that change is in order. As Nagle observes, if the left is to proceed, “it may be time to lay the very recent and very modern aesthetic values of counterculture to rest, and create something new.” Something that the right can’t co-opt. ~ Hannah Gais, New Republic"", ""I really enjoyed this book. I come at is a politically aware but mainstream 30 something who is largely unfamiliar with the extremes of the modern and emerging left and right.\n\nFrom reading the book it became apparent I'm most likely best classed as a person who believes in left economic ideas and reduced inequality who feels the left has lost its way by emphasising identify over inequality. I say that however while being fully aware I don't suffer any discrimination or major challenges based solely on either my identity or my class/economic situation.\n\nMy primary response to the book is sadness. Sadness at how polarized it appears online culture is and how it has clearly influenced mainstream politics in such an unpleasant way. I suspect the author will be attacked by both right and left which is possibly the best endorsement I can give the book. In many ways it is hard not to see so many of the \""culture warriors\"" as being somewhat pathetic - whether it be attacking women simply because they are women or by feeling the need to hound someone out of a job etc. because you disagree with the views on something. .\n\nI do believe it is important to be aware of the different sub-cultures within the left and right movements. And to not tar everyone with the same brush. Interestingly it seems at first reading that the author is possibly harsher on the extreme left than the extreme right but on reflection that may simply be because its unusual for me, as a Guardian / NYT reading normie, to see open criticism of the left on social issues (rather than the usual economic criticism).\n\nIts slightly concerning that at 33 I feel completely out of date and out of the loop with internet culture!\n\n~ Brenda Crowley, Librarian."", ""Angela Nagle strikes me as an uncommonly sane voice in a culture war defined by astounding cruelty, extremism and intolerance. Kill All Normies is as absorbing as it is important. I hope everyone reads it. ~ Rob Doyle, The Stinging Fly"", ""Dynamite! ~ Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell"", ""Nagle is looking around corners in the dark. And she's got guts. ~ Jacob Siegel, The Daily Beast"", ""This dynamite stick packaged as a short book, analyzes the twin reactions to the liberal-democratic consensus which served till recently as the self-evident normative foundation of our society: alt-right and Political Correctness. Nobody is spared in Nagle’s razor-sharp critical probing: while she brings out the shared presuppositions and hidden complicity of the two reactions, she also clearly demonstrates how these reactions are grounded in the weakness of the liberal-democratic consensus itself. KILL ALL NORMIES provides the much needed cognitive mapping for our predicament – it is a book for ALL those who want to orient ourselves in our crazy times. ~ Slavoj Zizek"", ""This short head-butt of a book taught me more about recent political events in a single rich evening of reading than I’ve learned in this entire last and very unpleasant year of obsessively monitoring cable TV, and confirmed for me something I’ve been feeling for a while now, namely that social media is a toxin we are gleefully and cluelessly injecting into ourselves, even as we ask, “Why are we getting so mean and stupid?” ~ George Saunders, author, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize"", ""Amidst the chaos of our times, it is a relief to have a brilliant and fearless critic like Angela Nagle to turn to. Unwilling to stomach the liberal shibboleths that fail to adequately explain the emergence and significance of right-wing subculture, she's the only one willing to descend into the grimiest of Internet grottos and give us the benefit of her incisive and cool-headed analysis. ~ Amber A'Lee Frost, Chapo Trap House"", ""Angela Nagle is one of the few writers anywhere who has consistently refused to hold a double standard for virulent racism and misogyny even when it came in edgy countercultural packaging. Kill All Normies is a brilliant exposé of the new faces of online nihilism and fascism, which can no longer be explained away as doing it “for the lulz”. ~ David Golumbia, author of The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism"", ""With a liberal left dangerously lost in the stormy waters of middle class self-flagellation, Angela Nagle is the lighthouse keeper showing us the way out. Her writing is unsparing in its diagnosis but never cruel. Unlike much of the Left who've grown far too accustomed to marginalization and defeat, Nagle still believes in politics as the only way of changing an increasingly brutal world. She is the writer and social critic I've been waiting for. ~ Connor Kilpatrick, Jacobin magazine""]" "LACONIA: 1,200 TWEETS ON FILM","[""Masha Tupitsyn""]","If the sound bite is the new order, then how do we make every word count?","If the sound bite is the new order, then how do we make every word count? In todays surplus world of communication overload and cultural clutter, writer and cultural critic Masha Tupitsyn turns to the media matrix of Twitter to explore the changing ways that we construct and consume narrative. Loosely applying the discerning aphorism—a compressed genre in itself—to a 21st century context, LACONIA: 1,200 TWEETS ON FILM offers meditations on film and popular culture that resonant with laconic meaning and personal insight while getting to the heart of the matter. Inspired by Chris Markers free-associative film impressions in La Jet èe and Sans Soleil, LACONIA is part film diary, part cultural inventory, and part mashup. Pulling from an array of film, popular culture, books, and mainstream news, it offers penetrating critical commentary on an increasingly muddled virtual world. LACONIA consists of brick by brick prose, as Tupitsyn thinks in sentences and lines that culminate in an architecture of thinking.","If the sound bite is the new order, then how do we make every word count? In todays surplus world of communication overload and cultural clutter, writer and cultural critic Masha Tupitsyn turns to the media matrix of Twitter to explore the changing ways that we construct and consume narrative. Loosely applying the discerning aphorism—a compressed genre in itself—to a 21st century context, LACONIA: 1,200 TWEETS ON FILM offers meditations on film and popular culture that resonant with laconic meaning and personal insight while getting to the heart of the matter. Inspired by Chris Markers free-associative film impressions in La Jet èe and Sans Soleil, LACONIA is part film diary, part cultural inventory, and part mashup. Pulling from an array of film, popular culture, books, and mainstream news, it offers penetrating critical commentary on an increasingly muddled virtual world. LACONIA consists of brick by brick prose, as Tupitsyn thinks in sentences and lines that culminate in an architecture of thinking.",12,"[""\""In LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Films, Masha Tupitsyn explores the curious intersection of the print tradition of books and the micronarrative model of Twitter. The project is essentially an experiment that appropriates the forms of social media — soundbites, fragmented commentary, quotes, condensed reactions — in a work of film criticism that preserves the cultural purpose of the genre but divorces it from its traditional medium of essayistic narrative. What makes Tupitsyn’s project exceptional is that it reverse-engineers the now-familiar frameworks of Twitter anthologies — unlike Tweets from Tahrir, for instance, which sought to capture of a slice of the social narrative about the Egyptian revolution by culling tweets after the fact, Tupitsyn’s approach put the intention of the book before the composition of each tweet, so that every tweet was deliberately crafted with the larger narrative in mind. Rather than a cohesive analysis of one idea at length, however, that narrative instead connects dots across diverse sources and constructs a mosaic of cultural patterns that explore the relationships between films. At its heart, the book is as much about film itself as it is about how Tupitsyn thinks about film in the age of infinite connectivity and on a platform that has more in common with poetry than with prose. LACONIA is an ingenious experiment in fragmented film criticism.\""\n\n-Brain Pickings ~"", ""\""Masha Tupitsyn helped establish the genre of 'micro-criticism' with LACONIA---a series of studied, architecturally arranged tweets on cinema.\""\n\n—Flavorwire, \""A Brief and Incomplete Survey of New Types of Online Literature\"" ~"", ""\""In Masha Tupitsyn’s extraordinary new book of cultural criticism through film criticism, LACONIA: 1200 Tweets on Film, the use of the tweet-form dramatizes the kinds of remembering and thinking at stake in contemporary social media and the culture it informs and is informed by. How can we begin today to think about the relationship between virtual memory and cultural memory; between digital memory and embodied memory? So much of what is moving in Tupitsyn’s criticism is her way of locating, animating, and mourning the loss of the material, the loss of texture, the loss of the real—where material, texture and realness are qualities as spiritual and moral as they are embodied; where fidelity to those qualities can be a way of calling out a culture of violent alienation and commodification. The idea of a radiant wholeness only elusively possible through fragments is an apt way of thinking about LACONIA. The book’s radical and engaged nostalgia is also a radical and engaged anger, indignance and grief. What has been lost? And what can be recovered?\n\nRather than respond to the corruption of brevity with a long-form book or essay, LACONIA does something more provocative; it takes brevity back. So that the wit, clarity and concision of the short form are organized around, rallied around, the kind of criticism that currently feels as sorely needed as it is sometimes sorely lacking: a deeply feminist criticism, invested in the personal and the interpersonal (and their burgeoning degradation at the hands of individualist and capitalist culture), a profound attention to how dehumanizing and exploitative gender relations and equally dehumanizing and exploitative systems of production manifest themselves in popular representation—and perhaps most of all, an attention to attention...LACONIA is testament to the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute act (each fragment time-stamped and dated) of what Susan Sontag called paying attention to the world.\"" ~ Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart"", ""\""When I first read Masha Tupitsyn’s hybrid-genre book Beauty Talk & Monsters, I was completely floored by it…There is something beautiful about the way Tupitsyn 'reads' culture; how she honors the connections and resonances of the media she encounters; the way it is processed, assimilated and re-invented when it is filtered through her perception; intermingling with specific memories and preoccupations. Tupitsyn integrates the subjective and the critical in a way that demonstrates the specificity of our encounters with media. Both Beauty Talk & Monsters and LACONIA could be described as a literary approach to film criticism, but it’s also fitting to describe the works as a cinematic approach to literary writing…Tupitsyn’s commentary on film accomplishes what a lot of contemporary cultural criticism fails to do— it’s accessible while still being complex, philosophical while being specific; it strikes a balance between the subjective and the social in its approach. Her perspective is totally singular and specific to her way of looking without making you feel bludgeoned by some kind of Critic Ego. By the end of the book, you actually do get a feel for the architecture of Tupitsyn’s thinking.”\n\n-Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism ~"", ""\""The 1200 tweets that constitute Masha Tupitsyn's LACONIA are--each one--an aphorism in a bottle set adrift into the midst of all the other crisscrossing messages that movies and the media universe have spawned and continually and more or less blindly emit. Everything is happening in real time – not recollected in tranquility, but intercepted in passing – even when the messages emanate from the deep past or (perhaps) a future around the next bend. It's a collage of the present moment, a continuous and unyielding dialogue; open-ended and extremely alert to the barrage of signals that has become our home.\""\n\n-Geoffrey O'Brien, The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century\n\n~"", ""\""Tupitsyn dedicated her latest book, LACONIA: 1200 Tweets on Film, to the film critic Robin Wood, a writer known for elegantly lasered analysis, as well as his refusal to split that analysis from the personal and political. LACONIA is of a feather, and not gimmickly so at all -- it’s a prismatic mix of head and heart, love and death, onscreen and off, plus the gem notes of Joubert, the tightness of LeWitt’s geometry. It’s so chiseled that at first I wished Tupitsyn’d let herself laugh a little, but then I realized she just wasn’t wasting any of her 140 characters, just wasn’t using any to waffle or acquiesce, as folks so often do on the Internet. I finished it in a rush, with a rush.\""\n\n-Bookslut ~"", ""\""Masha Tupitsyns LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film considers the question of intimacy and visual culture at large through the private/public sphere of the internet. LACONIA is a fascinating experiment in both form and thought, creating what cultural theorist Lauren Berlant would call an intimate public…LACONIA, written entirely on Twitter between April 2009 and June 2010, uses popular culture to a create a personal world. It stays focused and intimate; personal albeit public. Tupitsyn seeks to do what seems almost impossible—inhabiting the present moment to its fullest. The book calls to mind Blaise Pascal’s Pensées or Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, fragmented texts or aphorisms that are innately spiritual and political in nature. LACONIA, however, is not so much steeped in religious mysticism as much as it is a demystification of image, celebrity, and consumerism. It is at once diary, film criticism, and cultural collage.”\n\n-The Brooklyn Rail ~"", ""\""The sheer number of films and books to be encountered in LACONIA is remarkable: 421, as indexed in order of appearance at the back of what is an extraordinary (and somehow unlikely) book. In Tupitsyn’s book Beauty Talk & Monsters blended film criticism with fiction and memoir, not getting into any of those categorical wardrobes, but leaving them all wide open with the contents disturbed. Movies in Beauty Talk & Monsters are a part of the experience of reality, and reality as full of special effects and elaborate Hollywood trickery as any movie; both above all potent arenas for feminist critique and politics. In many ways, LACONIA continues this project, replacing the fictional framework of Beauty Talk & Monsters’ with the structural scaffolding provided by Twitter. And the importance of their origin on Twitter makes itself strongly felt throughout the text; it’s a very different book to what 1,200 Aphorisms on Film would have been, for example. It’s impossible in LACONIA to get away from the fact that this book forms just a part of the long stream-like text that Twitter users compose every day, and beyond that the long text we’re all always writing with every utterance, every email etc, etc. There’s an awareness that the text is in the broadest sense a part of the culture it’s critiquing...With LACONIA, Tupitsyn does for Twitter what Kevin Killian did for the Amazon review in his two-volume Selected Amazon Reviews. They’ve taken the structures and conventions of networking features on internet mega-sites and attuned and altered them into art forms and vehicles for their particular, nuanced, extraordinary artistic intelligences.\""\n\n—3 AM Magazine ~"", ""\""Reading Masha Tupitsyn’s LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film, you make notes in the margin in the same aphoristic manner as the content. I came to LACONIA cynically and skeptically. I was suspicious of the delegation of content’s role to form; that by tweeting about film Tupitsyn was hoping that this device would hold far more than it should: the burden and necessity of argument. Because the form itself already made oblique comment on the subject at hand, the content was relieved of its obligation to be rigorously argued. Yet somehow the opposite is true, content sweeps up form, and LACONIA creates a rigor all its own, a remarkable series of tumbling thoughts through and about visual culture. At points it is quite stunning. They carry over to one another, reflect, argue with one another. The potential problems of this sort of formal construction – that each tweet would be isolated, irrelevant to anything beyond itself, a casual observation that has no particular interest or quality – dissolve as you read. Because you read. You make narratives, connections. Including Tupitsyn herself.\""\n\n—Glasgow Review of Books ~"", ""\""There's something about the way Masha Tupitsyn's mind works when she addresses gender and film. It is different from how other contemporary feminist theorists do it. Amid so much detached deconstruction, Tupitsyn's criticism is refreshingly full of life. LACONIA, a document of Tupitsyn's public thoughts on film, is a stream of intimate, immediate, and specific reflections on movies, as well as a broad and sustained interrogation of things like whether we can any longer truly see corporatized cities like LA and NY other than in old movies, how to understand David Lynch's women, and whether there is any real possibility for connection in social media. Or for that matter, in watching films.\""\n\n-Make/Shift Magazine ~"", ""\""Masha Tupitsyns LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film considers the question of intimacy and visual culture at large through the private/public sphere of the internet. LACONIA is a fascinating experiment in both form and thought, creating what cultural theorist Lauren Berlant would call an intimate public…LACONIA, written entirely on Twitter between April 2009 and June 2010, uses popular culture to a create a personal world. It stays focused and intimate; personal albeit public. Tupitsyn seeks to do what seems almost impossible—inhabiting the present moment to its fullest. The book calls to mind Blaise Pascal’s Pensées or Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, fragmented texts or aphorisms that are innately spiritual and political in nature. LACONIA, however, is not so much steeped in religious mysticism as much as it is a demystification of image, celebrity, and consumerism. It is at once diary, film criticism, and cultural collage.”\n\n-The Brooklyn Rail ~"", ""\"" The 1200 tweets that constitute Masha Tupitsyn's LACONIA are, each one, an aphorism in a bottle set adrift into the midst of all the other crisscrossing messages that movies and the media universe have spawned and continually and more or less blindly emit. Everything is happening in real time – not recollected in tranquility but intercepted in passing – even when the messages emanate from the deep past or (perhaps) a future around the next bend. It's a collage of the present moment, a continuous and unyielding dialogue, open-ended and alert to the barrage of signals that has become our home.\""\n\n~ Geoffrey O'Brien, Author of The Fall of the House of Walworth, Phantom Empire, Dream Time, and Hardboiled America.""]" Land of Hunger,"[""Wayne Holloway""]",A collection of short stories; or one long one.,"Land of Hunger is a collection of short stories, that interconnect, loop and return upon each other despite their seemingly disparate subject matter. Fragments that resonate across time and place, from the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, to the miners' strike, to the world of animal rights protestors. The stories are all about the collection of fictions that make up a writer. A fantasy of who the author is, where he comes from; the story of a fragile, shifting identity built on facts, yet obscuring them. In doing this, Wayne Holloway embodies our deep hunger for the stories of who and why we are. ""At long last: A short-story collection packed with meaning. LAND OF HUNGER is a socio-political odyssey that is both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving. Wayne Holloway is a much-needed breath of fresh air."" Lee Rourke, author of Vulgar Things and winner of the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize 2010","Land of Hunger is a collection of short stories, that interconnect, loop and return upon each other despite their seemingly disparate subject matter. Fragments that resonate across time and place, from the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, to the miners' strike, to the world of animal rights protestors. The stories are all about the collection of fictions that make up a writer. A fantasy of who the author is, where he comes from; the story of a fragile, shifting identity built on facts, yet obscuring them. In doing this, Wayne Holloway embodies our deep hunger for the stories of who and why we are. ""At long last: A short-story collection packed with meaning. LAND OF HUNGER is a socio-political odyssey that is both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving. Wayne Holloway is a much-needed breath of fresh air."" Lee Rourke, author of Vulgar Things and winner of the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize 2010",2,"[""Wayne Holloway delivers a clenched fist rammed hard into the flabby belly of what post-modern writing has become! ~ Stewart Home, author of 69 Things to do with a dead princess, Slow Death and Tainted Love"", ""At long last: A short-story collection packed with meaning. LAND OF HUNGER is a socio-political odyssey that is both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving. Wayne Holloway is a much-needed breath of fresh air. ~ Lee Rourke, author of Vulgar Things and winner of the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize 2010""]" "Last Night, The","[""Federico Campagna""]","By replacing hope and faith with adventure, The Last Night of our lives might finally become the first morning of an autonomous future.","Our secular society seems to have finally found its new God: Work. As technological progress makes human labour superfluous, and over-production destroys both the economy and the planet, Work remains stronger than ever as a mantra of universal submission. This book develops a fully-fledged theory of radical atheism, advocating a disrespectful, opportunist squandering of obedience. By replacing hope and faith with adventure, The Last Night of our lives might finally become the first morning of an autonomous future.","Our secular society seems to have finally found its new God: Work. As technological progress makes human labour superfluous, and over-production destroys both the economy and the planet, Work remains stronger than ever as a mantra of universal submission. This book develops a fully-fledged theory of radical atheism, advocating a disrespectful, opportunist squandering of obedience. By replacing hope and faith with adventure, The Last Night of our lives might finally become the first morning of an autonomous future.",5,"[""By turns lyrical, acerbic and fabular, Federico Campagna updates existentialism for the 21st century. If death is certain, surely we can't afford to sacrifice our lives to the pointless labour which capital demands of us. Why do we continue to waste our lives doing it? What are the invisible bonds that keep us in servitude? The Last Night exposes the fondly held delusions that stop us from confronting these challenges - but, beware leftists and anarchists, it is our assumptions that the book dismisses most ruthlessly. ~ Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism: is there no alternative?"", ""Effortlessly moving between politics, philosophy and autobiography, Campagna has created an ethical code that can function as an everyday compass for the lost generation of adventurers. And we are in desperate need of new maps. ~ Simon Critchley"", ""If God is dead then why do we worship work? Federico Campagna’s provocative and poetic manifesto suggests we will not be atheists until we stop believing in capitalism. Contesting the abstractions that rule our lives The Last Night is an ethical manual for our warfare without welfare present.\n\n~ Benjamin Noys"", ""\""A precarious culture is emerging from the horizon of our time, and this book is a presage of the tide to come.\"" ~ Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, from the introduction"", ""\""Like Stirner before him, Campagna has written something novel, singular and dangerous. Not a prayer book for ideologues, but something between an ethical meditation and Molotov cocktail that can be thrown against the abstractions that imprison us.\"" ~ Saul Newman, from the afterword""]" "Last Tape, The","[""Alex Niven""]","In this haunting debut collection, Alex Niven explores a poetic hinterland that is also a psychological and cultural wilderness.","In this haunting debut collection, Alex Niven explores a poetic hinterland that is also a psychological and cultural wilderness. Adopting a style grounded in the radical minimalism of northern English modernism and romanticism, Niven writes poems constructed out of traditional forms cut up and reassembled to produce an abrupt lyric realism ideally suited to the political subject matter of his verse. These are poems of anger, mourning, and finally, extraordinary optimism, announcing the arrival of a historically lucid new bearing in twenty-first-century British poetry. HIDDEN TRACK I couldn’t work out whether you were part of the future or a beautiful aftershock. Blind spots where the sun snuck. Your skin was syncopated, weightless. We crossed every finish line, woke immaculately new.","In this haunting debut collection, Alex Niven explores a poetic hinterland that is also a psychological and cultural wilderness. Adopting a style grounded in the radical minimalism of northern English modernism and romanticism, Niven writes poems constructed out of traditional forms cut up and reassembled to produce an abrupt lyric realism ideally suited to the political subject matter of his verse. These are poems of anger, mourning, and finally, extraordinary optimism, announcing the arrival of a historically lucid new bearing in twenty-first-century British poetry. HIDDEN TRACK I couldn’t work out whether you were part of the future or a beautiful aftershock. Blind spots where the sun snuck. Your skin was syncopated, weightless. We crossed every finish line, woke immaculately new.",2,"[""Alex Niven always has something to say that I’m better for having heard said. And he says it with passion and eloquence. One of his loci is a North of mind and place, and these poems remind us there is a north in every southern town, a south in every north.\n\n~ Tom Pickard"", ""'One of these days there will be movement …' The backdrop to Alex Niven's The Last Tape is the official story of the last three decades: the defeat of socialism in the eighties, the capitalist realist desert of the noughties, the nameless confusion of our current moment. With a compassion devoid of sentimentality, Niven reminds us of the casualties of capitalist triumphalism: lost lives, suppressed yearnings, prematurely terminated projects. Yet everywhere in The Last Tape we can feel the trace and pressure of other possibilities. Niven's vignettes quietly but insistently wager on the thought that progress is about to be resumed: 'After 1979/ Our reeling hopes were all erased/ But the last tape can be wiped again/ And the dreaming past can be rephrased.' ~ Mark Fisher, author of Ghosts Of My Life and Capitalist Realism""]" Lazarus in the Multiple,"[""Camaren Peter""]",Surviving the anthropocene; the era of complexity!,"Lazarus in the Multiple presents a new philosophy on how to navigate the complex challenges that society faces in the 21st Century. It deploys the biblical “Lazarus” as the everyman of modernity, who is caught between past and present, life and death, and sleep and awakening amidst the humdrum and complexity of the “multiple”. The multiple is the great sea of noise that lies both within and without Lazarus, from which social reality is born. In this casting, Lazarus is unable to distinguish the signal from the noise and hence remains trapped within enduring ritual and an unfulfilled existence. He is unable to find expression and take actions to bring about meaningful change within himself or in the world around him.","Lazarus in the Multiple presents a new philosophy on how to navigate the complex challenges that society faces in the 21st Century. It deploys the biblical “Lazarus” as the everyman of modernity, who is caught between past and present, life and death, and sleep and awakening amidst the humdrum and complexity of the “multiple”. The multiple is the great sea of noise that lies both within and without Lazarus, from which social reality is born. In this casting, Lazarus is unable to distinguish the signal from the noise and hence remains trapped within enduring ritual and an unfulfilled existence. He is unable to find expression and take actions to bring about meaningful change within himself or in the world around him.",0,[] "Left for Itself, A","[""David Swift""]","The first full length analysis of the rise of left-wing hobbyists, performative radicals and the identity Left.","In the first full length analysis of the rise of left-wing hobbyists, performative radicals and the 'Identity Left', A Left for Itself interrogates the connection between socio-economic realities and politico-cultural views and boldly asks what is a worthy politics, one for the follower count or one for effecting change. 'In the sometimes febrile environment of contemporary left politics, this book is a measured and evaluative contribution. David Swift cuts through the rhetoric of often violent and divisive exchanges to uncover the roots, motivations, diverse character and strengths and weaknesses of the current phenomenon of so-called ‘identity politics’.' Dr Stephen Meredith","In the first full length analysis of the rise of left-wing hobbyists, performative radicals and the 'Identity Left', A Left for Itself interrogates the connection between socio-economic realities and politico-cultural views and boldly asks what is a worthy politics, one for the follower count or one for effecting change. 'In the sometimes febrile environment of contemporary left politics, this book is a measured and evaluative contribution. David Swift cuts through the rhetoric of often violent and divisive exchanges to uncover the roots, motivations, diverse character and strengths and weaknesses of the current phenomenon of so-called ‘identity politics’.' Dr Stephen Meredith",13,"[""5 out of 5 stars: Really good analysis from the left of one of the key issues that is holding Labour back from winning elections in the UK. Very persuasively argued, and written in an accessible, easily read style (rather than the heavy academic stuff that some books of this ilk choose)\n\nLabour supporters would do well to read this and absorb the lessons within, but I don't expect they will, or at least the hobbyists won't. And while that goes on, they make it massively more likely that the Tories have a free run at each election. This lack of understanding of the vital importance of winning elections vs ideological purity is at the heart of the self indulgent Corbyn disaster. ~ WR Kirby, Amazon"", ""5 out of 5 stars: The book offers a highly insightful analysis of the problems of the left in the UK and is also highly relevant to problems of the left in the U.S and other countries. In addition to compelling arguments and interesting discussion of the historical context, the book brings a range of interesting examples to support its arguments. It is very well written in an accessible style and occasionally - very funny. I highly recommend it. ~ , Amazon"", ""5 out of 5 stars: Bought this book out of curiosity but pleased I did. It's both an informative and entertaining read. I would recommend giving this book a go, chances are you will learn something and also find yourself chuckling away too! ~ Amazon Taxman, Amazon"", ""5 out of 5 stars: Want to know why the Left is in such a mess in 2019? Read this book. ~ Jparussell, Amazon"", ""5 out of 5 stars: A Left for itself tackles some of the most controversial and timely current issues, such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, feminism and migration. But rather than adding yet another opinion to this endless debate, Swift cleverly points attention towards those who comment on these matters. His book is significant in the sense that it points to the performative identity-driven motivations behind such commentary that in fact are counter-productive in terms of forming any real change around these issues. More importantly he points to the neo-liberal tendencies within such identity-driven actions, that dissolve any communal attempt to break down systems of power, and to the Orientalist aspects of many of these discourses. All this is done with great attention to detail - with several 'pearls' from commentators such as Seumus Milne, Owen Jones and Laurie Penny - and in-depth historical analysis. I really recommend this thought-provoking book. ~ , Amazon"", ""The language and politics [of the Left today] seem to be what motivated Swift, a left-wing academic, to write this angry polemic against almost the entire class of people whom he considers to have led the left and a whole generation astray.\n\nThe problem, as he says at the beginning, is that “much of the contemporary left is driven not by a desire for real change, but rather by a desire for an enjoyable pastime, and a search for an identity. It is a left for itself.” In other words, they like the idea of herself caring and of there being an enemy that callously doesn’t, but don’t care enough practically (and unromantically) to engage with others so that there’s a realistic chance of changing things.\n\nSwift’s explanation for this apparent gap between stated virtues and the ability to endorse a successful strategy for change is that too much of the left is fundamentally unserious. And, he argues, it is unserious because — contrary to its protestations — it has no real dog in the great social fights. This is because — unlike previous lefts — it is educated, wealthier and holds elite values, which distances it from the lives of ordinary people. Politics for the modern left is a hobby, he says, not a necessary way of effecting changes to their circumstances...it is easy enough to encounter the matrix of attitudes that Swift refers to, although he illustrates his book with some of the most vacuous and self-consciously virtuous sentiments expressed by a relatively small group of people who, with one or two exceptions, are products of the Corbyn era.\n\nThe problem, Swift says, is that these ways of talking and these priorities alienate some of the very people who the “hobbyists”...claim they care most about. And in some situations are in themselves harmful. ~ David Aaronovitch, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a-left-for-itself-by-david-swift-review-corbyn-6zhfm3rp3"", ""Swift argues — persuasively — that contemporary Left-wing politics “is better understood as less of a political movement and more as a form of identity or enjoyable past time”. It has become more a “consumption activity” than a way to improve people’s lives, as the political scientist Eitan Hersh has noted... As Swift writes: “when conservatives say that ‘feminism/anti-racism/LGBT rights have gone too far’ they clearly aren’t talking about the end of gender pay gaps, racist violence or LGBT teen suicides. What they are talking about is the language of online activists and the attention-seeking schemes of identity leftists.” ... As Swift correctly notes, “there is no binary division in society between good and bad, no easy dichotomy between rich, white Tory men on the one hand and women, gays, ethnic minorities and the working class on the other”....Which brings us back to my point about the Left needing a better grasp of what it stands for in the 21st century. Until it works that out, we’ll be hearing a lot more from loud-mouthed hobbyists who, as Swift puts it, are “not motivated by anything as prosaic and tedious as affecting real political change”. And those who need the Left to stand up for them are left out in in the cold. ~ James Bloodworth, author of Hired, longlisted for the Orwell Prize 2019, https://unherd.com/2019/10/how-the-left-lost-all-purpose/"", ""David Swift rides a coach and horses through the self-indulgence, radical chic and bloviating of too much of today’s British left. ~ Professor John Bew, author of Citizen Clem, winner of the Orwell Prize 2017"", ""This is a fascinating and challenging book that covers a lot of ground in a more than accessible manner. In a field where we have very little to go on - the ideology and nature of Britain's apparently rejuvenated Left - it bristles with both sharp detail and general insight. ~ Professor Glen O'Hara, Oxford Brookes University"", ""David Swift stakes-out a difficult but really important political space in this book. He is of the left but launches an assault on a generational cohort of left-wing political activists and their preoccupations and prejudices. His argument is provocative and his style uncompromising. But the underpinning research is careful and his conclusions important. ~ Professor Andrew Hindmoor, author of What's Left Now?, Head of Politics, University of Sheffield"", ""In the sometimes febrile environment of contemporary left politics, this book is a measured and evaluative contribution. David Swift cuts through the rhetoric of often violent and divisive exchanges to uncover the roots, motivations, diverse character and strengths and weaknesses of the current phenomenon of so-called ‘identity politics’. Ranging from recent work by Fukuyama to the journalistic pages of The Spectator and New Statesman and beyond, the book is an important addition and contribution to this widespread and multi-form debate over the rise, impact and reaction to a newly-emboldened and assertive ‘identity left’. ~ Dr Stephen Meredith, John Antcliffe Archives By-Fellow, Churchill College Cambridge, 2018-19 and Head of Politics, University of Central Lancashire"", ""This book is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the contemporary state of the left. ~ Professor Matthew Goodwin, author of National Populism: the Revolt Against Liberal Democracy"", ""David Swift astutely diagnoses the pathological narcissism at the heart of what he calls the ‘hobbyist left’, which has captured the Labour Party. With its preoccupation with language and virtue-signalling, and scant interest in the concerns and culture of actual working people, today’s middle-class elitist left no longer speaks to the voters who once gave their support to the Labour Party. ~ Professor Eric Kaufmann, author of Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities""]" Lenin Lives!,"[""Philip Cunliffe""]","What if history had had a happy ending? To change the future, we need to reimagine the past.","Of all the tomes published on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, none will reckon with a key part of the story: what if the revolutionaries' dreams had come true, instead of being dashed? Yet no tale of the Russian Revolution is complete without asking 'what if ...?' Lenin Lives! lays out a narrative account of how history might have happened differently if Lenin had lived long enough to see the global spread of the Russian Revolution to Western Europe and the USA. In one alternative world, instead of the grim authoritarian and autarkic states of the East, socialist revolution in the world’s most advanced economies ushers in an era of global peace, progress and prosperity, with global federations substituting for nation-states and international organisations. In keeping with the hopes of European revolutionaries of the time, the early achievement of socialism leads to a drastic improvement in human progress, economic growth, democracy and freedom at the global level.","Of all the tomes published on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, none will reckon with a key part of the story: what if the revolutionaries' dreams had come true, instead of being dashed? Yet no tale of the Russian Revolution is complete without asking 'what if ...?' Lenin Lives! lays out a narrative account of how history might have happened differently if Lenin had lived long enough to see the global spread of the Russian Revolution to Western Europe and the USA. In one alternative world, instead of the grim authoritarian and autarkic states of the East, socialist revolution in the world’s most advanced economies ushers in an era of global peace, progress and prosperity, with global federations substituting for nation-states and international organisations. In keeping with the hopes of European revolutionaries of the time, the early achievement of socialism leads to a drastic improvement in human progress, economic growth, democracy and freedom at the global level.",4,"[""In this thought-provoking and entertaining book, the author goes back to 1917 to reimagine the Russian Revolution and its results to explore how we have ended up with the world we have today. He suggests what might have happened, what could have happened, if the Revolution had panned out differently and spread to other countries. We could have had a world without Fascism, without WWII, and with socialism rather than capitalism the prevalent form of government. I enjoyed reading this counter-factual exploration but I fear I am not qualified to pass judgement on whether any of it could indeed have come to pass and whether our world would actually have been the better for it. Who knows? But it’s interesting to speculate, for sure. ~ Mandy Jenkinson (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""What’s deeply commendable about Lenin Lives is its ability to counter philosophical tendencies of the latter half of the 20th century, tendencies that argue for the end of “grand narratives,” by precisely persisting in the need to narrativize the history of modern bourgeois society along those vastly grand scales. How else could we have a sense of where our politics might take us, if we did not permit ourselves the freedom to imagine the social totality (and our subject positions within it) to be transcendeable?\n\nhttps://platypus1917.org/2017/11/01/book-review-philip-cunliffe-lenin-lives-reimagining-russian-revolution-1917-2017/\n\n~ Gregor Baszak, Platypus Review"", ""What if the hopes of the Russian Revolution had been realised? Setting out from this question Cunliffe shines a great deal of new critical light on our times. Hugely thought-provoking and entertaining. Full of contentious ideas and stimulating insights. A firecracker of a book. ~ Sean Sayers, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Kent"", ""'Lenin Lives!' is erudite and imaginative - grounded in a profound and humane understanding of all the different conflicts at play in the world of 1917, Cunliffe soars above us to show a 2017 that might have been, if the revolutionaries had won out a hundred years before. 'We are all in the gutter,' said Oscar Wilde, 'but some of us are looking at the stars' - and Philip Cunliffe gives us a great account of both. ~ James Heartfield, author of Unpatriotic History of the Second World War""]" Levinas Unhinged,"[""Tom Sparrow""]","Levinas Unhinged presents philosopher Emmanuel Levinas as a metaphysician racked by the sensuous, and often terrifying, materiality of existence.","Through six heterodox essays this book extracts a materialist account of subjectivity and aesthetics from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. More than a work of academic commentary that would leave many of Levinas’s pious commentators aghast, Sparrow exhibits an aspect of Levinas which is darker, yet no less fundamental, than his ethical and theological guises. This darkened Levinas provides answers to problems in aesthetics, speculative philosophy, ecology, ethics, and philosophy of race, problems which not only trouble scholars, but which haunt anyone who insists that the material of existence is the beginning and end of existence itself.","Through six heterodox essays this book extracts a materialist account of subjectivity and aesthetics from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. More than a work of academic commentary that would leave many of Levinas’s pious commentators aghast, Sparrow exhibits an aspect of Levinas which is darker, yet no less fundamental, than his ethical and theological guises. This darkened Levinas provides answers to problems in aesthetics, speculative philosophy, ecology, ethics, and philosophy of race, problems which not only trouble scholars, but which haunt anyone who insists that the material of existence is the beginning and end of existence itself.",3,"[""Admitting from the off that his aim is not to ‘get Levinas right’, [Sparrow] seeks to defamiliarize Levinas through a series of powerful readings, each foregrounding the strange, unsettling and liminal aspects of his philosophy: the centrality of the body, materiality, the night. The result is impressive. Sparrow presents a Levinas who is both haunted and haunting — and, a Levinas primed for an engagement with the turn towards the weird and visceral that we see in recent speculative philosophy. ~ Will Rees, 3:AM Magazine"", ""Most 'defenders' of Levinas have undercut his genius by presenting him either as a pious old finger-wagging grandpa or as Jacques Derrida's halfhearted apprentice. In this book Tom Sparrow gives us the true Levinas: a formidable metaphysician who did more than anyone else to sensualize and concretize the work of Heidegger. Levinas is not in our rearview mirror, but remains in our motorcade today. He will still have much to teach us. Sparrow lucidly reminds us why. ~ Graham Harman, Associate Provost for Research Administration and Professor of Philosophy, American University in Cairo"", ""Levinas Unhinged shows us another side of Levinas that is often ignored or overlooked. Sparrow's Levinas is foremost a philosopher of the night, attuned to the shadowy underbelly of appearances. Removed from his role as the high priest of ethics, Levinas appears in a new way. Now, the terms horror, indifference, and facelessness all come to the foreground as central to an understanding of Levinasian philosophy. This provocative reading is thus not only a challenge to Levinas scholarship, it is also a challenge to materialist ontology more broadly. The result is a worthy contribution to current debates in speculative realism and phenomenology. ~ Dylan Trigg, Research Fellow at École Normale Supérieure and University College Dublin""]" Levitate the Primate,"[""Michael Thomsen""]","A lovestory in fragments, told in the margins of a new philosophy of 21st Century sexuality.","A collection of essays and confessions about sex, taken, in large part, from a period of time, when author, Michael Thomsen was writing a sex and dating blog for Nerve.com","A collection of essays and confessions about sex, taken, in large part, from a period of time, when author, Michael Thomsen was writing a sex and dating blog for Nerve.com",2,"[""Michael Thomsen writes about sex like someone who's actually had it. That is, the sex in this book isn't like the sex in movies, or porno movies, or 99% of books about sex--it's real: funny, confusing, gross, thrilling, and occasionally beautiful. You could say the same about the book. Thomsen writes with wit, intelligence, and impressive candor about things most people are too embarrassed to discuss. The end product is a book that everyone--virgins and experts alike--will find engrossing, illuminating, and absolutely hilarious. ~ Adam Wilson, Author, Flatscreen"", ""A crushingly honest collection of confessions about love in the shape of sex, from which any American man could learn a thing or ten. ~ Malcolm Harris, The New Inquiry""]" Literary Freedom: a Cultural Right to Literature,"[""Heather Katharine McRobie""]",How do we protect literary freedom while preventing the harm done by literary hate speech? This book presents an innovative new approach to literary freedom as a cultural right.,Literary Freedom: a Cultural Right to Literature is a non-fiction study of literary freedom from a political-philosophical perspective. It adds an original perspective on the issue of literary freedom as it synthesises debates from human rights as well as providing a new way of addressing the question 'How do we mitigate against the harm caused by hate speech?' by applying Amartya Sen's capability approach to this question.,Literary Freedom: a Cultural Right to Literature is a non-fiction study of literary freedom from a political-philosophical perspective. It adds an original perspective on the issue of literary freedom as it synthesises debates from human rights as well as providing a new way of addressing the question 'How do we mitigate against the harm caused by hate speech?' by applying Amartya Sen's capability approach to this question.,1,"[""Featured with 6 other Zero titles on \""Publishers in Focus\"" webpage by Blackwell Oxford\n\n\""Many publishers struggle to get the exposure that we feel their books deserve. On this page we will bring you a selection of the independent, interesting and essential that are worthy of greater attention\"" ~ Blackwell Oxford""]" Lives; Running,"[""David Renton""]","A story of learning to run, of a son's love for his father, and of becoming a father in turn.","David Renton was in his mid-teens a country standard middle-distance runner. He tells the story of how he began to run, and of the influence over him of his father s own career as an international-standard rower. He portrays running as a step towards a world of freedom, and describes the attempts of his father to find ideas that would guide his life.","David Renton was in his mid-teens a country standard middle-distance runner. He tells the story of how he began to run, and of the influence over him of his father s own career as an international-standard rower. He portrays running as a step towards a world of freedom, and describes the attempts of his father to find ideas that would guide his life.",0,[] "London Dream, The","[""Chris McMillan""]","The London Dream is about the mythology of London as a place of opportunity, excitement and the possibility of prosperity. But, who really profits from the London Dream?","The London Dream tells the story of a city that promises opportunity, excitement and the possibility of prosperity. It is a mythology has launched millions of migrant journeys. No one benefits more from the flow of willed and willing workers than London’s employers. And still, they come. They come to a city propelled by a newly cool capitalism and hungry for workers to serve it. From actors to cleaners, academics to café workers, The London Dream explores the stories of Londoners chasing the dreams offered by the city and the economy within which their precarious hopes become profits.","The London Dream tells the story of a city that promises opportunity, excitement and the possibility of prosperity. It is a mythology has launched millions of migrant journeys. No one benefits more from the flow of willed and willing workers than London’s employers. And still, they come. They come to a city propelled by a newly cool capitalism and hungry for workers to serve it. From actors to cleaners, academics to café workers, The London Dream explores the stories of Londoners chasing the dreams offered by the city and the economy within which their precarious hopes become profits.",10,"[""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. An excellent Marxist reading of working conditions in the gig economy in London. He started off wanting to chart the misery of working conditions but found workers fond of London and keen to get on. Good on \""Cool capital\"" and why exploitative companies don't feel the need to change. ~ Liz Dexter (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. London is the place to be, the place where with a little fortune you can make it big. This is the idea that has soaked imaginations in millions of students or migrants in search of a better future. But the reality is much more complicated and it is made of precarious working conditions, zero-hour contracts, hard work and resilience. With a deep analysis, Chris McMillan demonstrates the intimate connection of the London dream with the brutal logic of capitalism that has at its core a great sense of inequality (accumulation of wealth on one side and misery on the other side). And London is not an exception, because, generally, the most attractive cities are also the most unequal.\n\nLondon is a place where all migrants are welcome and this openness has made London an attractive hub for businesses and people willing to work above anything else. The City is hungry for new bodies and new dreamers, of people still believing that things can get better because London will provide them with opportunities unavailable elsewhere, of workers desperate to be exploited, even if their salary is well below the London Living Wage. The London dream is the narrative that has motivated Londoners and newcomers for centuries and helped them to justify their suffering. The story of London as the place to be has been continually revived, and even today there is a healthy supply of human material ready for exploitation by the city’s employers hoping for a better life. ~ Francesco Camodeca (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Upfront - I am a researcher in political science and have a special interest in migration and London. So, this book is an excellent match for my personal and academic interest.\n\nI really, really liked this book. McMillan did an excellent job at conveying fact and anecdotal information. \""The London Dream\"" is something that has ingrained itself as a social and cultural phenomena globally. The pull of London is its \""coolness\"" and its history, as well as the potential for excellent work. The stories of migration to London, even if its Englanders moving to their capital or expats from other countries, vary in cause and impact. I think this is an important facet of understanding why and how people move around the globe, especially in heightened globalization + migration (and backlashes against these phenomena). Excellent book and will be suggesting it for my university's library. ~ A Home Library (Reviewer) , NetGalley"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. This book was so informative and interesting. The beginning was a lot about the founding of London and history in the 1800s. It was super interesting but not entirely what I had expected. We then got to current day London which was more of what I had expected. I am very pleased with how it came together and made such an enjoyable read. ~ Katie Martin (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Chris McMillan knows the London Dream all too well, and his book shows how the city exploits labour whatever the form of capitalism it has hosted, finds Morgan Daniels\n\nChris McMillan, The London Dream: Migration and the Mythology of the City (Zero Books 2020), 360pp.\n\nArriving in the capital a decade ago from his native New Zealand, Chris McMillan expected to find steady employment. Instead, he survived for years through a precarious mix of bitty jobs that just about allowed him to pay the rent. Things were so desperate at one stage that he was tempted to take work as a guinea pig for flu medication (‘all I had to do was not move for a week’). McMillan’s story eventually had a happy ending: he now has both a permanent job and two young children, but as he explores in his timely and witty new book, London doesn’t work out quite so well for everyone.\n\nThe London Dream is concerned with the Big Smoke as a place of promise, a grand fantasy that has drawn in millions of migrants across the world and across the centuries. The backbone of McMillan’s research is a series of interviews with workers in a wide range of fields, each of whom has lived the dream in one form or another: a Swedish actor; an Austrian entrepreneur; an outsourced security guard from Nigeria. These contemporary case studies are complemented by a fine sweep through London’s history, going back to the settling of Londinium by the Romans.\n\nMcMillan is grounded throughout by Marx, in particular his insight into capitalism’s need for a ‘disposable industrial reserve army’: put otherwise, ‘a mass of human material always ready for exploitation’. Whether The London Dream is profiling an early career journalist, a copywriter, or a casualised academic, the story is usually the same: the jobs market in London is obscenely over-saturated, meaning that there will always be hundreds if not thousands of others ready to be exploited if you’re not. ‘Thus,’ writes McMillan, ‘those not being employed within a given field but still searching for work there have a vital economic function. By being excluded from industry and yet standing as potential workers, they compel employees to accept and endure conditions they are presented with’ (pp.214-15).\n\nOne of the most famous examples of the ‘reserve army’ in action in London was on the nineteenth-century docks, when only a third or so of labourers had permanent work. The rest would be up at the crack of dawn in places like Limehouse, prepared to physically fight one another for the hope of a day’s pay. Though we might find such a process ‘barbaric’ today, observes McMillan, the ‘logic of the Victorian docks’ persists in a particularly pronounced way in the gig economy, in the basement-level exploitation of Uber and Deliveroo drivers. The London Dream suggests one big difference between then and now:\n\n‘Although twenty-first century sweated labour has become cleaner, no Victorian employer would try to sell the benefits of insecure work. London’s gig economy companies have less shame, instead promoting the benefits of flexibility, freedom and control’ (p.236).\n\nFor me, this straight line between the docks of old and the immoral economy of Uber exemplifies the real value of The London Dream. Just as Marx took the bourgeois economists deadly seriously so as to debunk them, McMillan gives respect to more recent theories of social class with the effect of showing them to be neoliberal nonsense.\n\nEspecial attention is afforded to the work of the urbanist Richard Florida’s rigorous promotion of ‘the creative class’ as the motor of economic growth and (therefore) the modern city. Florida’s ideas have had a tremendous influence in the reimagining of whole areas of cities in a ‘cool’ register - street art, wacky open-plan offices, bullshit bars with ball pits, whatever - in the hope of attracting ‘creatives’. The stories that McMillan tells undercut such postmodern conceptions of class.\n\nWhat I mean is that The London Dream ultimately reaffirms class as a social relation. This is an essential lesson. For all the talk of the gig economy or the creative class, for all the wrecking balls taken to the very notion of labour over the past forty years, class remains a question of one’s relationship to the means of production. Are you the exploiter or the exploited?\n\n‘Capitalism can be cool’ writes McMillan. ‘Capitalism can be cold and brutal. It is still capitalism, whatever form it takes.’ ~ Morgan Daniels, Counterfire"", ""From gentle amusement to bewilderment, Chris McMillan's The London Dream explores what continues to draw so many wide eyed college graduates to the gloomy city streets. Tracing the precarious lives of \""creatives\"" like museum workers, actors, writers and influencers through interviews, McMillan shows how London creates a \""cool capitalism\"" that relies on a sea of talented, unemployed, and thirsty workers, Even more so, McMillan shows the policies and structures that allows cool capitalism to flourish and predate on those vulnerable dreamers. Most interestingly, he pulls the layers back on modern London to show the always hungry worker at the bottom rung, ready to do whatever it takes to make it up another ladder while those at the top watch on with bemusement. A chilling and eye opening read! ~ Nuha Fariha (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. The London Dream was an interesting read for me, having been a previous resident of the city. It pulled the shiny veneer off the city of dreams, claiming that it is essentially still Victorian-era London today with its mass levels of inequality, exploitation, and surplus of labour for few choice jobs. Great read if you're a fan of nonfiction migration stories. ~ Suzanne Bhagan (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""4 out of 5 stars. The London Dream is a look at the mythology around London as a city and the dreams of success that people have for living there. McMillan looks at a range of jobs and dreams and the ways in which myths have been structured to bring people to London, to contribute to its economy and to its 'cool' status, and how these use certain versions of capitalism and precarious work. Various Londoners have been interviewed and their experiences sit alongside the analysis of the image of 'cool capitalism' and how the labour of precariously employed and badly paid people keeps the cool, creative image of London going.\n\nThis is an engrossing book, not because the symbiotic relationship between the 'cool' image of London, which comes with dreams of making it big, and the underpaid, not-officially-employed labour that is needed to make London this way is a revelation, but because McMillan lays out these ideas in a clear, interesting way and combines them with the real stories of people who believe London is their place to be, but have also had to deal with many of its downsides. What feels particularly important is the fact the book covers both the dreams of aspiring creative types trying to break into industries due to the opportunities in London and the dreams of people looking to do often service industry jobs to support themselves and their families, and both groups have 'migrated' to London in some way from somewhere else, on the hope of work and experiences. The history of London in these areas is charted at relevant points, but the book feels very focused on the present, a kind of warning about the labour and personal realities of the dream of the big city.\n\nAs someone who did move to London for a couple of years and found some of the content very relatable (I worked alongside aspiring and out-of-work actors in hospitality), The London Dream was particularly satisfying, as a kind of proof that the image of London isn't all it is cracked up to be. The book's specific focus on particular areas of labour, notably the gig economy and the creative industries, means that it leaves you wanting more of a look at other broader and more specific issues, to tear down the 'London dream' and leave behind a reality where things could be better for thousands of people living in the city. ~ Siobhan Dunlop (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Isn't it funny that The London Dream vividly captured what the Nairobi dream is...through the eyes of the workers, of those who are hanging by a thread of hope and like 'New York' the feeling of if you make it here then you can make it anywhere? This book has just reminded me of a path I started pursuing but gave up on - the path of understanding and advocating for policies in cities, on housing and more so on minimum wages for casual laborers and a part of me truly thinks that I can still look into it. ~ Dora Archie Okeyo (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""In The London Dream, Chris McMillan offers an urgent and expansive account of how long-held fantasies underpin the precarious realities of those whose labour keeps our modern cities running. This is an exciting and timely project, both scholarly and accessible, which asks uncomfortable, necessary questions about the ruthlessness of late-capitalism and our complicity within it. ~ Laurence Scott, author The Four Dimensional Human and Picnic Comma Lightning""]" "Long Struggle, The","[""Amil Khan""]",The best thing America can do for the Middle East is lose,"In The Long Struggle, Amil Khan explains how a shell shocked Muslim world struggled for over a century between emulation and rejection of the West while international events continued to stoke anger among people who were forced to give up the wealth and global influence they felt was their birth right. But it is not going to continue like that, Khan argues. The forces unleashed by the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have forced Muslims to snap out of their dysfunctional relationship with the West. Muslims are finding that Western power is not all conquering and those who present themselves as polar opposites to all things Western are not necessarily Islamic. As the struggle ends, the opportunity to build a new relationship arises. Amil Khan spent 10 years working as a journalist in the Middle East, Africa and Britain before pursuing in depth research and working on counter extremism projects.","In The Long Struggle, Amil Khan explains how a shell shocked Muslim world struggled for over a century between emulation and rejection of the West while international events continued to stoke anger among people who were forced to give up the wealth and global influence they felt was their birth right. But it is not going to continue like that, Khan argues. The forces unleashed by the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have forced Muslims to snap out of their dysfunctional relationship with the West. Muslims are finding that Western power is not all conquering and those who present themselves as polar opposites to all things Western are not necessarily Islamic. As the struggle ends, the opportunity to build a new relationship arises. Amil Khan spent 10 years working as a journalist in the Middle East, Africa and Britain before pursuing in depth research and working on counter extremism projects.",3,"[""In a surprisingly readable format for a scholarly presentation, the author takes the reader on a fascinating journey through personal conversations with Jihadi fighters, fellow journalists and young teenaged Muslim extremists in the UK.\n\nThis is a well-researched book and an excellent read for those wanting to understand Muslim world history and outlook; keep up-to-date on unfolding events in the Middle East; and separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to truth and fiction about the Islamic world and organizations.\n\n~ June Maffin, Bookpleasures"", ""For those who do not have an extensive knowledge of the West’s dealings with the Middle Eastern countries in the last century or so this is an excellent, concise and balanced introduction. The current focus on radicalized Islam tends to obscure our understanding of the genuine historical grievances and frustrations that have prevented civil freedom and statehood emerging in the Middle East. This book deftly clarifies a complex picture, especially at a time of tremendous change.\n\n~ Simon Iredale, The Goodbookstall"", ""Across the Arab and Islamic worlds, argues the author, nearly all political trends, whether secular or Islamist, share a sense of humiliation at having lost former glory at the hands of the West and therefore tend to define their politics in terms of their relationship to the West, alternately calling for emulating or rejecting the West. He offers a capsule history describing the relations with the West and how it impacted politics in the region, contending that the dysfunctional relationship with the West is beginning to change as it becomes evident that the West is incapable of actually controlling events in the Arab or Islamic worlds. The time has come, he says, for politics in the Arab and Islamic worlds to be defined by inner dynamics and not in relation to the West.\n\n~ Book News Inc""]" Look at the Bunny,"[""Dominic Pettman""]",An essential guide to those technological totems and taboos which help us navigate the chaotic terrain of today's mediascape.,"Are totems merely a thing of the distant past? Or might it be that our sleek new machines are producing totemic forces which we are only beginning to recognize? This book asks to what degree today's media technologies are haunted by a Freudian ghost, functioning as totems or taboos (or both). By isolating five case-studies (rabbits in popular culture, animated creatures that go ""off-program,"" virtual lovers, jealous animal spirit guides, and electronic paradises), Look at the Bunny highlights and explores today's techno-totemic environment. In doing so, it explores how nonhuman avatars are increasingly expected to shepherd us beyond our land-locked identities, into a risky - sometimes ecstatic - relationship with the Other. In-depth podcast interview with the author: http://newbooksinscitechsoc.com/2013/05/31/dominic-pettman-human-error-uminnesota-2011look-at-the-bunny-zero-books-2013/","Are totems merely a thing of the distant past? Or might it be that our sleek new machines are producing totemic forces which we are only beginning to recognize? This book asks to what degree today's media technologies are haunted by a Freudian ghost, functioning as totems or taboos (or both). By isolating five case-studies (rabbits in popular culture, animated creatures that go ""off-program,"" virtual lovers, jealous animal spirit guides, and electronic paradises), Look at the Bunny highlights and explores today's techno-totemic environment. In doing so, it explores how nonhuman avatars are increasingly expected to shepherd us beyond our land-locked identities, into a risky - sometimes ecstatic - relationship with the Other. In-depth podcast interview with the author: http://newbooksinscitechsoc.com/2013/05/31/dominic-pettman-human-error-uminnesota-2011look-at-the-bunny-zero-books-2013/",2,"[""This uses the rabbit as totem as a trope through which to interrogate our relationship with technology. Pettman explores the Heideggerian being-toward-death of the pooka in Harvey (1950) and Donnie Darko (2001), the overwrought sexuality of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), and the spectral haunting of the rabbits in David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006). Like Frank the bunny in Donnie Darko, Pettman reads the rabbits both Of Mice and Men and Watership Down as guides: Looking at the bunny is looking into the future.\n\nSkipping ahead, however, is not always a promising prospect. The Cassandra conundrum of seeing imminent catastrophe and having no one in the present believe you follows the prophet–rabbit or otherwise. The vagabond rabbits of Watership Down led by the frequently hysterical Fiver, Lennie, George, and Candy in Of Mice and Men led by a rabbit-ridden future vision, Donnie Darko led by his daylight hallucinations of Frank, and Elwood led by his imaginary Harvey are all held suspect by their peers. ”The list of lapine totems, no doubt, could go on and on–which is partly my point,” he writes (p. 63). Moreover, two more rabbit holes Pettman mentions early in the book include “the bunny plot” and “the Easter egg.” The former is a nagging idea that won’t leave you alone until you write it out of there, and the latter, of course, refers to the hidden treats of media: DVD menus, websites, etc. Pettman writes,\n\nIndeed, the notion of the Easter egg can be employed to reflect on the nature or possibility of significant surprises in a claustrophically overcoded – thus predictable – world. A world seemingly bereft of alternatives. Perhaps we need to enact rituals designed to encourage the magic bunny to break the tedious cultural algorithms that restrict every day – in the West at least – to a smooth series of anticipated rhythms. (After all, a predictable consumer is a docile and productive citizen.) Perhaps we should be finding inspiration from the temporal tricks of this particular totem to get access not to the material Easter eggs of fetishized commodities, but the hidden, virtual gift of the “something else”: an unprecedented experience, a unimagined possibility, an unanticipated alliance, and so on (p. 63).\n\nMake no mistake, this rabbit hole is deep.\n\nA future seen eliminates the element of surprise. For the living being, it’s an ontological issue, one that Pettman explores from virtual rabbits to software, citing everyone from Eugene Thacker, McKenzie Wark, William Gibson, Marshall McLuhan, and N. Katherine Hayles, to Slavoj Žižek, Deleuze and Guattari, Vilém Flusser, and Giorgio Agamben. Make no mistake, this rabbit hole is deep.\n\nConcluding, Pettman sums it up, writing,\n\nThe rabbit, Orc, penguin, avatar, angel, pixelated lover – even Paradise itself – all make appearances in the idiosyncratic virtual montage fashioned by this book. They are neototems for an era in which the monolithic notion of Nature is finally giving way to an understanding of ecology that includes computers as much as whales, and in which humans are just as likely to be sheep as shepherds (p. 164).\n\nFar from the private life of the rabbit, its many public representations can show you the way. Totems can help us see the world with fresh eyes. So, next time you’re lost in the media matrix, wake up and follow the rabbit. ~ Roy Christopher, http://roychristopher.com/look-at-the-bunny"", ""Reading Dominic Pettman doesn't change what one thinks. It changes HOW one thinks. What starts out as counter-intuitive ends up as so true and right that one can no longer recall ever thinking otherwise. This book is only for those courageous enough to venture down the rabbit-hole. ~ Jodi Dean, author of Blog Theory and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.""]" Los Indignados: Tides of Social Insertion in Spain,"[""Richard R. Weiner"", ""Ivan Lopez""]","A movement that is transforming Spanish politics and society, heralding an end to the Transition since Franco, and responding to multiple legitimation crises in Spain and in Europe.","The emergent Indignados movement in Spain is transforming Spanish politics and society, heralding an end to the Transition since Franco, and responding to multiple legitimation crises in Spain and in Europe. This movement is rooted in the Stop Evictions campaign led by Ada Colau in Barcelona following the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble in the wake of the 2008; as well as the 15-M Movement arising in May 2011 Puerta del Sol of Madrid, symbolizing the Indignez-Vous outrage of a lost generation.","The emergent Indignados movement in Spain is transforming Spanish politics and society, heralding an end to the Transition since Franco, and responding to multiple legitimation crises in Spain and in Europe. This movement is rooted in the Stop Evictions campaign led by Ada Colau in Barcelona following the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble in the wake of the 2008; as well as the 15-M Movement arising in May 2011 Puerta del Sol of Madrid, symbolizing the Indignez-Vous outrage of a lost generation.",3,"[""Few books on populist (grassroots) social movements manage to be both theoretically original and empirically well documented. Richard R. Weiner and Iván López’s Los Indignados: Tides of Social Insertion in Spain accomplish this rare intellectual feat.\n\nThe authors rigorously analyse the recent history of a major western European nation whose democracy grew out of a transition from an authoritarian regime (Franco’s Spain). As the authors explain, they have been following the developments of Los Indignados, 15-M movement and Podemos from their very beginning. The first two can be described as a large anti-austerity movement that arose as a reaction to high rates of unemployment and economic hardship. Podemos is young a party founded in the aftermath of mass protests to respond to corruption and social inequality.\n\nBeing experts in sociology and political science Weiner and López go beyond simply describing the historical development of these movements and their various political consequences. They also present a clear picture of the social forces and actors who played a major role in the new forms of democracy in Spain. As they explain (p. 1),\n\nFollowing Alain Touraine’s sociology of social movement as an institutionalizing leveraging to reorganize the field of historicity, the authors have been keeping up with Los Indignados for these past four years.\n\nIn particular they have explored how new forms of social pacting and non-hierarchical association have been at the forefront of the struggles to “re-embed” the economy and limit the power of the neoliberal economic agenda of various Spanish socio-economic elites.\n\nWeiner and López begin by describing the origins of the Los Indignados. Who exactly are the people behind the movement to make Spanish politics more accountable to the population? They are mainly, though not exclusively\n\ncut off and massively unemployed youth – cut off from the circuits of capital accumulation, workplace habitus, and the pillars of social democracy (p. 9).\n\nThis generation, the grandchildren of the Spanish welfare state, are living lives best described by Gilles Deleuze and André Gorz. They exist as a sort of non-class, neither proletariat nor bourgeoisie. They are the result of a dwindling middle-class now living economically precarious lives in an increasingly neoliberal world order.\n\nYet, as the analysis of Weiner and López convincingly shows, they are not doomed to social nothingness, cut off from political power, what Stiglitz sometimes refers to as a “wasted generation”,\n\nThe Indignados movement of Confluence against a perceived unrepresentative and unresponsive Transition State amounts to more than effervescence (p. 12).\n\nThis apparently “lost generation” and their movement in Spain have become something, despite their lack of hold on traditional sources of economic and political power, perhaps even because of it. They have learned to be creative and structure their demands in new, effective and original ways.\n\nWeiner and López also discuss the question of legitimacy and democracy in 21st century Spain and in the context of western democracies generally. They paint a very accurate and poignant picture of the various phases from authoritarian rule to a transitional state form towards something new that has not yet fully developed.\n\nThey portray the nature of the distrust towards the major political parties. Weiner and López explain the phenomenon of “social washing”. Parties present themselves as close to the people but serve the interests of economic elites:\n\nThey pose insincerely as “socially concerned” in their promotional communication and marketing, while actually operating the other way. It is a manipulating of discourse and legitimation claims in a misleading way. (P. 38)\n\nThis type of “social washing” was also widely noted and denounced by the student protesters of 2012 in the province of Quebec (Canada). The student protests spread and eventually led to the downfall of the Liberal party then in power. The difference being that in Spain a large and durable social movement, including a new political party, emerged from the mass social protests.\n\nAnother major aspect of this major work in political sociology is their analysis of the question of “social insertion”. How do the people who do not have access to traditional forms of economic and social power manage to organize and become active in the construction of a better and viable future?\n\nThe concept of “social insertion” goes back to before the Franco regime. As Weiner and López explain (p. 44),\n\nThe concept of “social insertion” has roots in the municipalismo of mutual aid practised by Spanish anarchists […] although it is used in new ways by the Indignados.\n\nThe authors also note that there is a tension within the larger social movement and the Podemos party. A tension between organizing outside and around the state or rather attempting to use the State’s “institutionalizing power”.\n\nWeiner and López describe much of what has happened in recent years in Spain as a contemporary form of what Polanyi famously dubbed the “double movement”. (Re)insertion and (re-)embedding are two processes that seem to be happening together and to be supporting each other in the movement presented by Weiner and López.\n\nBeyond resentment, the authors (p. 35) point us to the concept of rhizomatic form of social insertion as a “constitutive provenance,” one articulating “an emergent imaginary” in the precarious, the marginalized and the displaced. There are significant chapters (7, 8 and 11), grounded statistically, that chronicle — in two decades in public opinion polling — a growing mistrust and existential insecurity foreshadowing the legitimation crisis of the post-Franco Transition State.\n\nLos Indignados is a must read book for anyone interested in social movements and who wishes to better understand the mechanisms of social change. ~ The West Network"", ""This is such an important book on such an important topic. It is horrendously bleak in describing the world as experienced by so many of those who live in what we once called advanced western liberal democracies. And yet, and at the same time, it is wonderfully liberating in its detailed account of their mobilization and their attempts to make for themselves, indeed for us all, a better world. ~ Colin Hay, Sciences Po, Paris"", ""Honing in on democratic fundamentals, this rich book offers an engaged and learned chronicle of a mass social and political movement that, from the start, has sought to deepen and stengthen popular sovereignty across a wide range of issues, levels of governance, and systems of meaning. Moving fluidly among theory, observation and analysis, Los Indignados thus stretches our imagination well beyond Spain at a time of political passion, fragile institutions, the dissolution of traditional party bonds, and fraught ideological combinations. ~ Ira Katznelson, Columbia University""]" Ludopolitics,"[""Liam Mitchell""]","If the fantasy of control is the problem, then videogame controllers are the solution.","What can videogames tell us about the politics of contemporary technoculture, and how are designers and players responding to its impositions? To what extent do the technical features of videogames index our assumptions about what exists and what is denied that status? And how can we use games to identify and shift those assumptions without ever putting down the controller? Ludopolitics responds to these questions with a critique of one of the defining features of modern technology: the fantasy of control. Videogames promise players the opportunity to map and master worlds, offering closed systems that are perfect in principle if not in practice. In their numerical, rule-bound, and goal-oriented form, they express assumptions about both the technological world and the world as such. More importantly, they can help us identify these assumptions and challenge them. Games like Spec Ops: The Line, Braid, Undertale, and Bastion, as well as play practices like speedrunning, theorycrafting, and myth-making provide an aesthetic means of mounting a political critique of the pursuit and valorization of technological control.","What can videogames tell us about the politics of contemporary technoculture, and how are designers and players responding to its impositions? To what extent do the technical features of videogames index our assumptions about what exists and what is denied that status? And how can we use games to identify and shift those assumptions without ever putting down the controller? Ludopolitics responds to these questions with a critique of one of the defining features of modern technology: the fantasy of control. Videogames promise players the opportunity to map and master worlds, offering closed systems that are perfect in principle if not in practice. In their numerical, rule-bound, and goal-oriented form, they express assumptions about both the technological world and the world as such. More importantly, they can help us identify these assumptions and challenge them. Games like Spec Ops: The Line, Braid, Undertale, and Bastion, as well as play practices like speedrunning, theorycrafting, and myth-making provide an aesthetic means of mounting a political critique of the pursuit and valorization of technological control.",1,"[""What if we took a closer look at both the design and the play of videogames to find out how politics and technology intersect there? Ludopolitics takes us beyond the more familiar criticism of the way games represent the world to inquire into what kind of world is enacted there, and what other worlds might be possible. The stakes of the game, and the stakes of the world, appear to be a kind of algorithmic control. But perhaps games at their best are a kind of art work where designer and player can meet and learn something about how the mechanics of control might function. Ludopolitics is a theory-assisted speed run through these big picture questions of our time. ~ McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory""]" Made in Brooklyn,"[""Amanda Wasielewski""]",The artist is dead. There are only makers now.,"Made in Brooklyn is a belated critique of the Maker Movement: from its origins in the nineteenth century to its impact on labor and its entanglement in the neoliberal economic model of the tech industry. Part history, part ethnography, Made in Brooklyn provides a unified analysis of how the tech industry has infiltrated artistic practice and urban space.","Made in Brooklyn is a belated critique of the Maker Movement: from its origins in the nineteenth century to its impact on labor and its entanglement in the neoliberal economic model of the tech industry. Part history, part ethnography, Made in Brooklyn provides a unified analysis of how the tech industry has infiltrated artistic practice and urban space.",3,"[""This was a great book. Highly researched, Made in Brooklyn offers a perspective on how and why makers culture took over bad areas of NY (and other cities in the world - the motives seem applicable in most big cities with hip neighbourhoods) and transformed them into middle-class, eclectic, gentrified areas. I'll recommend this book to all of my friends who believe that buying triple organic vegetables is better than (average) organic products from local markets.\n\n~ Silvia Patriche , NetGalley"", ""Anybody interested in artist-led urban gentrification in general, and the poster child for this process - Brooklyn, NYC - should read this book. Combining journalistic, ethnographic and academic perspectives, the book is an engaging, provocative, and pleasurable. Read it and you will see your own city in new ways. ~ Lev Manovich"", ""Since the 19th century Paris prototype, the bohemian romance of young artists navigating the perils and possibilities of the great metropolis has proven both remarkably durable and highly dynamic. In this excellent book, Amanda Wasielewski updates bohemia for the 21st century, via the notorious art scene taking shape against the jagged backdrop of a rapidly changing Brooklyn. Digging beneath the facile and pejorative “hipster” stereotype that dogs Millennial artists, she depicts how young creatives operate in the context of hyper-gentrification and an emergent “gig” economy shaped in equal parts by new media and contingent labor. Ever resourceful, these digitally savvy and increasingly entrepreneurial artists invent new styles of self-expression and self-promotion, while struggling, not always successfully, to preserve their autonomy. Avoiding the traps of either utopian boosterism or cynical critique, Wasielewski gifts us with a measured, analytically incisive and vividly rendered account of a major new trends, in both cities and art. ~ Richard Lloyd, author of Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City""]" "Magic Kingdom, The","[""Dan Hind""]",What would you need if you wanted to live in a democracy? What would living in a democracy be like?,"Anyone who knows anything about Britain knows that it is a democracy and a constitutional monarchy. The trouble is, it is neither. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is one of the most exotic nations on earth. In the republican form of government a defined public exercise sovereign power. Most modern states describe themselves as democratic republics. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is an anomaly, in that formal sovereignty is still denied to its people. In The Magic Kingdom Dan Hind explores what the republican tradition has to offer the British at a time of deep political, social and economic dislocation. He considers what innovations are necessary if liberty is to be secured in current conditions. His argument will surprise many who consider themselves republicans. It will upset those who benefit from the current arrangements. It offers a way forward for those who can no longer tolerate steepening inequality and its associated ills. Existing republican institutions have not been able to deliver public control of the state. If substantive democracy is to be possible in large and complex societies, the systems of communication, subsidy and credit must be made subject to popular oversight and control. In a disarmingly calm manner, Hind shows how this can be done, by minor adjustments to the existing institutions. Perhaps, unlikely as it sounds, Britain will provide the venue for the world's first truly republican society. Longlisted for the BREAD AND ROSES PRIZE 2015","Anyone who knows anything about Britain knows that it is a democracy and a constitutional monarchy. The trouble is, it is neither. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is one of the most exotic nations on earth. In the republican form of government a defined public exercise sovereign power. Most modern states describe themselves as democratic republics. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is an anomaly, in that formal sovereignty is still denied to its people. In The Magic Kingdom Dan Hind explores what the republican tradition has to offer the British at a time of deep political, social and economic dislocation. He considers what innovations are necessary if liberty is to be secured in current conditions. His argument will surprise many who consider themselves republicans. It will upset those who benefit from the current arrangements. It offers a way forward for those who can no longer tolerate steepening inequality and its associated ills. Existing republican institutions have not been able to deliver public control of the state. If substantive democracy is to be possible in large and complex societies, the systems of communication, subsidy and credit must be made subject to popular oversight and control. In a disarmingly calm manner, Hind shows how this can be done, by minor adjustments to the existing institutions. Perhaps, unlikely as it sounds, Britain will provide the venue for the world's first truly republican society. Longlisted for the BREAD AND ROSES PRIZE 2015",2,"[""Dan Hind’s short book The Magic Kingdom is perhaps the best read post-referendum. He not only dissects the contradictions of a non-existent British constitution but provides a practical vision for a modern, republican, future. ~ Mark Perryman, Philosophy Football"", ""A good attempt to get people to think, the precondition for becoming truly human. Dan Hind is one of England's very best public writers. ~ Anthony Barnett""]" Malibu Motel,"[""Chaunceton Bird""]",An unbelievable true story about the colossal cost of free cash and misplaced hope in the American dream.,"Based on the incredible true story of a hapless lottery winner, Malibu Motel is a raw, timeless novel exploring the undercurrents of capitalism. Caish Calloway is struggling to maintain a stake in the land of limitless privilege. Blinded by pride and fueled by greed, Caish is slave to the wiles of a moneyed mind, as only one who has tasted wealth's powerful fruit can be. 'A stunning and visceral look into the high stakes world of big money and the risks taken by the wealthy elite.' Anthony Avina, Edge of Sanity","Based on the incredible true story of a hapless lottery winner, Malibu Motel is a raw, timeless novel exploring the undercurrents of capitalism. Caish Calloway is struggling to maintain a stake in the land of limitless privilege. Blinded by pride and fueled by greed, Caish is slave to the wiles of a moneyed mind, as only one who has tasted wealth's powerful fruit can be. 'A stunning and visceral look into the high stakes world of big money and the risks taken by the wealthy elite.' Anthony Avina, Edge of Sanity",31,"[""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. This was a brilliant literary novel that takes a close look at how greed and money can change a life, but not always for the better. We learn a lot about how Caish's mind works, and watching them as the novel progressed and the things they were willing to do to maintain a certain way of life was a deep dive into the human psyche. Caish could quite literally be almost anyone, and it's easy to see how going from struggling to survive to having the world at your fingertips thanks to a large influx of cash could change someone, especially with the way things are in America today. A brilliant book, and the story it contains will stay with you after you finish reading, a haunting warning of how quickly things can change. ~ Liliyana Shadowlyn (Reviewer) , NetGalley"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. Malibu Motel is the true story of how one goes from winning the lotto to hitting rock bottom. The struggle is real from bank robbery to heroin addiction to finally serving time in a federal penitentiary. What a story! ~ Ily Renfroe (Media), NetGalley"", "".................This is a really interesting story about a unique but not impossible premise: how do you live your life after you win the lottery? Bird creates a character full of hubris who sees the win not as luck but as destiny and something that was earned through hard work and perseverance. However, Caish’s overconfidence and entitlement are ultimately his downfall and Bird explores how capitalism, materialism and even religion play a part in Caish’s undoing. One thing that Bird really excelled at was dramatic irony, and the audience can see Caish’s mistakes coming a mile a way. Bird also explores the mental gymnastics Caish performs to absolve themselves of any personal responsibility for their failings whatsoever. Anyone reading this will immediately be reminded of a Caish that they know. I really enjoyed that Bird added to the mystery and the universality of the story by withholding many of the personal attributes of his characters, in particular gender.......... ~ Angharad Lodwick/ Tinted Edges , NetGalley"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. ......This story is completely immersive. It will legit blow your mind. I kept my husband fully informed of every twist and turn of this book and I’ve NEVER done that before. I HAD to discuss this with someone. A crazy, wild journey that will leave you speechless. One of my top 10 books of the year.. ~ Dianna Setterfield (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""........This book was engaging and the plot was well written, I flew through this book! ~ Molly Walker (Reviewer) , NetGalley"", ""Well written and interesting story! Based on a true story and at times fiction as I understand that some things were added. What can happen if you ever win the lottery and make bad decisions...You can have it all.... and lose it all...It's dark, deep, enjoyable, interesting until the end. Different to what I usually read and it was good! You keep turning the pages to see what happens next.... ~ Maryline D (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""An extraordinary, cautionary tale of how not to lead your life when you become wealthy overnight. Based on a true story which makes the story more compelling, this is a gripping read which should be read by all get rich quick entrepreneurs. Sad and entertaining at the same time - a real roller coaster of rags to riches and back. Read it -you won't regret it. ~ Umar Belai (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. This is a chilling look at what happens to people whose primary motivation in life is money. Having not just a comfortable income and assets, but becoming one of the 1%. It is a cautionary tale of what happens when having an over-abundance of wealth....... When there can never be enough and one is always, always wanting more and never satisfied with enough. There never IS enough. And that is a dark, dark place.\n\nI imagine all of us have fantasized about winning a huge lottery. Of millions and millions of dollars. This is the story of someone who did win that lottery and how his life was turned upside down by the influx of more money than he knew what to do with........This is a very well-written book. The character’s life is a dark story since he is a slave to money..........This was a very fascinating story despite being so dark. Kudos to the author and best of luck to him. ~ Anneke Van Couvering (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""\""The love of money is the root of all evil”. This gritty novel brilliantly takes the reader for a ride through the streets of Los Angeles. As an LA resident, this book captures the wealth disparity and landscape of the city flawlessly. Although this book may not be for everyone— if you can hang on, this one will be one you’ll never forget. Chaunceton has a unique ability to transport the reader into the protagonist’s dark mind. Bonus: plenty of jaw dropping shock moments, some unexpected laughs, and a haunting ending. Well done. Rating: 5 out of 5 stars ~ Katherine Christen (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Written by Chaunceton Bird, Malibu Motel follows the rich, the kind who are only concerned with money, and what happens as it slips away, faster and faster.\n\nWhen you don't understand the value of money, understand how to keep it and that, yes, you don't have any debt, but you also don't understand how to grow your money, you are setting yourself up for disaster. This is a cautionary, terribly dark tale.\n\nAnd I mean dark and depraved. This isn't a story you read to your children at night. This is a story I would recommend only to a few, those brave enough to delve into the dark.\n\nThe writing reflects that. It isn't the best writing, but it is done, I think, to convey the actual state of the main character. Written in first person, the writing does change, and honestly from the first page you know something is wrong with our protagonist, Caish Calloway. From the way Caish views the world, how Caish does his research (WIKIPEDIA IS NOT ENOUGH), to even how Caish self-regards as: \""Rich.\"" Caish doesn't listen to the educated accountant who manages Caish's money when she tells Caish, simply, to stop spending. Caish is so prideful of having no debt, yet can't seem to stop spending.\n\nThere are lessons to be had in this novel. I would never recommend it for children or for anyone with a week constitution. Or any one who is very Christian and doesn't like to stray from those ideals.\n\nThis is, in all honesty, a cautionary horror tale. It isn't a horror from the point of Steven King and straight fantasy, this is a horror of what people are willing to do. And the fact that, the end of this novel, may be based on something that actually happened is indeed horrifying. ~ Southern Today Gone Tomorrow"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars Wow! What a read! What an ending! I don't believe I've ever read a book that made me want to reach out to the main protagonist as much as this one. For the first part of the story we are introduced to Caish Calloway. (We never learn if Caish is a man or woman but for this review I'll go with male) Caish is rich, filthy stinking rich. He can afford the best things in life - the best cars, the big house in a prestigious post code, he gets invited to the best parties and he believes this is what life is all about - extravagance. He is rich beyond our imagination and actually his own too. We are led to believe that hard work and grit have afforded this lifestyle when in fact we find out Caish actually won the lottery - over 100 million! Suffice to say Caish has no way of understanding the enormity of this sum of money. He's not very savvy even though he believes he is. As you read you find that Caish is actually very naive. A few bad investments are made and we see the consequences of these bad decisions and the downward spiral they take Caish' s life. He talks about his dwindling bank balance but as long as he can keep up the payments on his houses and cars , the drugs ans women he'll be fine, his luck will change and he'll be on the up in no time but despite his best efforts we see his descent continue. He downsizes, offloads some cars and decides he is going to invest the remains of the winnings. He had made some good investments before on start up businesses, stocks and shares and he has a good feeling about Green Mountain. He decides to invest a colossal 35 million dollars however, the 'investment' is actually a scam and he loses it all. Now we see a whole different person emerge. One who has difficulty facing reality, one whose perception of happiness has changed. In Caish' s books money = happiness. We see his desperation to cling onto a life he clearly can't afford. We see his relationships dwindle with his so called friends. In all of this I really enjoyed the authors voice even though Caish' s thought process isn't rational you can't help but be taken on an emotional rollercoaster with him and when he is really down on his luck you really feel for poor chap. This is fantastic, thought provoking read that will remind you of the 7 sins mostly greed, ego and pride. An accomplished and well executed debut novel. ~ Kiren Parmar, NetGalley"", ""Exquisite is an understatement. The pace catches the reader and drags them into murky events that will leave anyone beyond exasperated—only to find more unsorted complications and rapid plot twists. With unbound thrills, Malibu Motel is nothing short of an action-packed Hollywood thriller. Intelligently narrated with first hand information, this novel based on a true story can easily be any reader's pick of the season. ~ Tee Wai, Biblichor"", ""This book is not what you want if you are looking for a touchy feely, heartwarming and uplifting read. But if you want to be enthralled by a character with unremitting self-centeredness and greed, who is not saved by romantic love or a come-to-Jesus moment, I am sure you will enjoy Motel Malibu as much as I did. ~ Margaret Gust, NetGalley"", ""Malibu Motel, by Chaunceton Bird, is a novel of wealth and loss based on a true story. Caish Calloway, who won over $100 million in the California Lottery, has a problem: Caish's wealth is waning. A twenty-million dollar house, car collection, Jackson Pollock, and several companies and making ends meet is still a challenge. Money means little to those who do not earn it, although Caish does think playing the lottery is working. With little thought, money is spent and tipped away. Ignoring the advice of an accountant, Caish takes a chance with a hedge fund. Here is where the story begins... ~ Joseph Spuckler, Evilcyclist"", ""Loosely based on actual events, this story delves into the mind of a post-lottery winner as he rides the roller coaster of life after instant unimaginable wealth. Caish Calloway is the first-person protagonist, explaining his logic (or lack thereof), of his numerous spur-of-the-moment expensive decisions and exposing his extremely narcissistic image of himself. You want to dislike him but its so much fun watching him self-destruct as each new phase of his quickly diminishing way of life. Is it truly a blessing to win the lottery? Do we really want this “amazingly great luck” to befall us? Probably not after listening to Caish. ~ Catherine Thomas (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""I particularly liked the gender-neutral language of the book. We have no idea what gender Caish and their lovers are, but it's done in such a subtle way that it doesn't interfere with the story at all. Overall, this is a chronicle of an absolute dumpster fire of a life and it's hard to tear yourself away. ~ Laura Hanna-White , NetGalley"", ""Malibu Motel is a book based on a true story of a lottery winner who went from living with his mother to fast cars and even faster parties and wild nights with the means to pay for all of it. But for how long? And ultimately, at what cost? Caish Calloway narrates his sad story from rags to riches, and to rags again, and you don't need a psychology degree to figure out why it all happened........The main character is a by-product of his upbringing, the values of his society. The things he says and believes are simplified truths of the capitalist society - money is everything, status is everything, and what you truly need is only the most immediate gratification of the senses - sex, power, status - nothing beyond that. ...... What's more, this story is also about how our current society seems to think that the rich are somehow exempt of disease or any sort of risks. Or even stupid decisions! Because that doesn't happen to the rich - or, at least, that's the idea Caish keeps operating on (and I'll bet it's not just Caish who thinks that.) And he certainly wouldn't have it in his head if he wasn't raised with it......Ultimately, in this society we view wealth as a fairytale - an unreachable one to most, so it's the stuff of myths and legends to most people. Malibu Motel is a story that explores what happens when someone from a different background is dropped into this fairytale..... But it's also a reminder to maybe not wish for that fairytale, because sometimes we don't know whether we actually need something we're asking for, and whether we're actually up for handling it.. ~ Evelina (avalinah, AvalinahsBooks) (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. A very interesting true story of one mans fall from riches to rags. A different story to my norm but I thoroughly enjoyed this and enjoyed the writing style. ~ Gillian Moore (Reviewer) , NetGalley"", ""Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. We often say ( well I do ) ‘I have never read a book like this before’ but this time I mean it ‘I have never read a book like this before’!!\n\nBased, some say loosely but nonetheless based, on a true story this books charts the life of Caish Calloway after his multi million dollar win on the Californian Lottery, - you do get a look back at his life before this at various times in the book but the book starts as he is in the flush of mega wealth....living in Malibu, countless (well 16) luxury cars, all the drugs, sex and rock n roll he can buy and his own brand of entitled/narcissistic personality\n\nCaish sets up a few unremarkable businesses but isn't worried by the odd loss and then he falls in love, with the wrong person, who loses him 32 million!!!, I have to say though to my mind the signs were all there, blatantly there, that this guy was a fraudster but a combination of untouchability and first fever of love meant Caish didn't see those signs, or chose not to!\n\nThis loss causes an unstoppable chain of events which see him sliding further and further into ‘the mire’. The narrative of drug mainlining, HIV, illness and downright tunnel vision of what Caish wants as opposed to anything else, may not suit some readers its fair to say - there is a lot of drug usage talk and you could feel it's glamourised although the end result is anything but. Devoid of family and friends, after an unsuccessful attempt at moving back to Montana we find him living rough, then in a halfway house then in a shelter, where his despair battles with false thoughts that he is still ‘better than these people’ - the ending is dramatic and powerful.\n\nCaish is arrogant, I hated and loved him in equal measure throughout the book but everytime he ‘went too far’ a chink, just a chink of something came through to almost win me back....until the next page usually when he was off again! A complex character bar none whose fragility was as evident as his pompousness, confusing and annoying!\n\nOther various cast members were as vapid as him, his money grabbing Mum and 3 siblings repugnant and his hangers on lovely until they fell off! Its a very wordy book and there is some repetition re cars and drugs but it's told almost like a diary and so the writing is quick and easy and often shocking. The book starts and ends in Malibu, one town yet 2 places in that town as far away as you could possibly get. I will not forget Caish it would be impossible to do so. ~ Mark Fearn (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""WOW - what an incredible tale! I was totally fascinated with Malibu Motel, the story of a young man's demise as the result of his poor decisions regarding money, sex, and drugs. I read this book in record speed - it was well written, exciting, and ultimately gut-wrenching. Potential readers should be aware that this story is painful if they have now or have ever had a loved one with an uncontrollable drug abuse problem.\n\n5 out of 5 stars ~ Amy Bannerman, NetGalley"", ""Malibu Motel is an absorbing read that explores the murky depths of society and humanity. The writing in Malibu Motel is agile, and intersperses simple liveliness of style with passages that are dark and reflective. It's the kind of book you can't put down. ~ Kalyan Panja, Travtasy"", ""Malibu Motel explores the darkest places one is willing to go to when all they care about is money. Having it. Possessing it. Living a good life and not wanting to work for it. Dark and seedy, this is a cautionary tale and the writing portrays that mood perfectly... This isn't a story you read to your children at night. This is a story I would recommend only to those brave enough to delve into the dark. ~ Southern Today Gone Tomorrow"", ""A compelling read that perfectly captures the frailty of human nature. ~ January Gray Reviews"", ""An intensely readable riches-to-rags story, Malibu Motel will have you gripped till the last page. ~ Bridget McNulty, Now Novel"", ""In the world of money, sex, drugs, and plastic friends, being the big fish doesn't put you in charge of the pond, it makes you the mark. ~ Joseph Spuckler, Evilcyclist"", ""Chaunceton Bird has created a fantastic story in Malibu Motel... A stunning and visceral look into the high stakes world of big money and the risks taken by the wealthy elite. ~ Anthony Avina, Edge of Sanity"", ""It's true what they say: the higher you climb, the harder you fall. A gripping novel based on true events that will keep you engrossed until the last page. ~ Amy Williams, Tomes with Tea"", ""Absolutely Fantastic! Definitely worth the read! ~ Erik McManus, Breakeven Books"", ""Exquisite is an understatement. ~ Tee Wai, The Writing Greyhound"", ""Malibu Motel is an unflinching account of life lived in the fast lane; a true modern-day rags to riches and back again story. Caish Calloway is the absolute opposite of a traditional hero - a selfish, entitled individual who thinks of little more than money, sex, drugs, and alcohol. Despite these obvious problems, you still can’t help but wish Caish luck in the quest to reclaim former wealth and escape the clutches of extreme poverty. From start to finish, Malibu Motel is a real roller coaster ride and a story that keeps you turning page after page! ~ Lorna Holland, The Writing Greyhound"", ""Brilliantly Entertaining. A story that will show you that greed really can cost too much. ~ Stacey Garrity, Whispering Stories""]" Malign Velocities,"[""Benjamin Noys""]","Against the need for speed, Malign Velocities tracks acceleration as the symptom of the ongoing crises of capitalism.","We are told our lives are too fast, subject to the accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more. That’s one familiar story. Another, stranger, story is told here: of those who think we haven’t gone fast enough. Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production they argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. Rejecting this conclusion, Malign Velocities tracks this 'accelerationism' as the symptom of the misery and pain of labour under capitalism. Retracing a series of historical moments of accelerationism - the Italian Futurism; communist accelerationism after the Russian Revolution; the 'cyberpunk phuturism' of the ’90s and ’00s; the unconscious fantasies of our integration with machines; the apocalyptic accelerationism of the post-2008 moment of crisis; and the terminal moment of negative accelerationism - suggests the pleasures and pains of speed signal the need to disengage, negate, and develop a new politics that truly challenges the supposed pleasures of speed.","We are told our lives are too fast, subject to the accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more. That’s one familiar story. Another, stranger, story is told here: of those who think we haven’t gone fast enough. Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production they argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. Rejecting this conclusion, Malign Velocities tracks this 'accelerationism' as the symptom of the misery and pain of labour under capitalism. Retracing a series of historical moments of accelerationism - the Italian Futurism; communist accelerationism after the Russian Revolution; the 'cyberpunk phuturism' of the ’90s and ’00s; the unconscious fantasies of our integration with machines; the apocalyptic accelerationism of the post-2008 moment of crisis; and the terminal moment of negative accelerationism - suggests the pleasures and pains of speed signal the need to disengage, negate, and develop a new politics that truly challenges the supposed pleasures of speed.",3,"[""Always deterritorialize! Or so goes the mantra of recent 'accelerationist' theory. Intoxication against intoxication, schizophrenia against schizophrenia, delirium against delirium--the accelerationist tendencies of millennial life are laid bare in this concise volume by the author who first suggested the term. From the historical avant-garde, through Detroit techno and science fiction, to Nick Land and the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit (CCRU), Benjamin Noys reveals the ideological fantasies of speed. We should dismiss accelerationism for its capitalophilia, he concludes, but preserve it for its extremism: go far, go deep and go negative to get real. ~ Alexander R. Galloway"", ""'The notion that 'the worse, the better' has an obvious appeal to disempowered communists in a time of capitalist crisis. Malign Velocities steps in and registers the futurist thrill of those theorists who would arrive at communism via an advanced, high tech capitalism - and registers the often disastrous results of these 'accelerations', which took us more often to Stalinism or neoliberalism than to utopia. Noys' writing is erudite, clear, and coloured by the darkest humour' ~ Owen Hatherley, author Militant Modernism, Zero Books 2009"", ""In the midst of a hair-shirt neoliberalism, with growth-rates stagnating and accumulation reliant on ever-deeper dispossession, the sirens of speed are once again luring the advocates of radical theory. Malign Velocities diagnoses the moment of 'accelerationism' with exacting lucidity, revisiting prior iterations of the idea of an excessive exit from the clutches of capital – from futurism to cyberpunk – and uncovering these theories' political-economic unconscious, the accelerationist's fantasy of labour. Noys's book is a model of dialectical critique, combining a sophisticated account of accelerationism's historical conditions of possibility with an incisive verdict about its incapacity to generate strategies adequate to this conjuncture of crisis. Malign Velocities succeeds in both being true to the materialist injunction not to tell oneself stories and in weaving an engrossing tale of theory's struggles with the limits and compulsions of capitalism. ​\n\n~ Alberto Toscano, Reader in Critical Theory, Goldsmiths, and author of \""Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea\""""]" "Manifesto Handbook, The","[""Julian Hanna""]",The Manifesto Handbook is an insider's guide to an incendiary genre that has sparked the most important revolutionary movements in history.,"The Manifesto Handbook describes the hidden life of an undervalued genre: the conduit for declarations of principle, advertisements for new “isms,” and provocations in pamphlet form. Often physically slight and small in scale, the manifesto is always grand in style and ambition. A bold, charismatic genre, it has founded some of the most important and revolutionary movements in modern history, from the declaration of wars and the birth of nations to the launch of countless social, political and artistic movements worldwide. Julian Hanna provides a brief genealogy of the genre, analyses its complex speaking position, traces the material process of manifesto making from production to dissemination, unpacks its extremist underbelly, and follows the twenty-first century resurgence of the manifesto as a re-politicised and reinvigorated digital form.","The Manifesto Handbook describes the hidden life of an undervalued genre: the conduit for declarations of principle, advertisements for new “isms,” and provocations in pamphlet form. Often physically slight and small in scale, the manifesto is always grand in style and ambition. A bold, charismatic genre, it has founded some of the most important and revolutionary movements in modern history, from the declaration of wars and the birth of nations to the launch of countless social, political and artistic movements worldwide. Julian Hanna provides a brief genealogy of the genre, analyses its complex speaking position, traces the material process of manifesto making from production to dissemination, unpacks its extremist underbelly, and follows the twenty-first century resurgence of the manifesto as a re-politicised and reinvigorated digital form.",8,"[""\""Julian Hanna’s absolutely wonderful little book ... does the best job anyone ever could of showing us the true hand of the manifesto.\"" ~ Tom Tomaszewski, 3:AM Magazine, https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-words-dont-give-a-fuck/"", ""Growing up in post-revolutionary Iran, I was always in love with the idea of manifestos; as texts, movements, gestures for resistance and mobilization. Yet I hardly found myself in them, for it being such a male, Western, white dominant genre of \""making claims and occupying space.\"" Julian Hanna's book does a beautiful and necessary job of showing both the limits and the possibilities of manifestos; giving us the chance to re-imagine its potential for a new kind of world-building and re-claiming. ~ Morehshin Allahyari, artist and co-author of The 3D Additivist Manifesto"", ""The Manifesto Handbook is something like a meta-manifesto, which proclaims the joy and necessity of the manifesto form. Julian Hanna shows us how to both read them and write them, to have some fun and maybe change the world. He also shows how this once distinctive form has soaked into the general style of writing of the internet age. But then the Manifesto has always found ways to outflank the received ideas and media habits of its era, no matter what the era. And in an era of cultural burnout and generalized depression, the short, sharp shot of mania that is the ground tone of the manifesto might not be a bad idea. Read this book, find your people, expose the enemy of the good life - and write your own! ~ McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto"", ""A Wunderkammer of the aesthetics of revolution via revolutions in aesthetics, instructions included. ~ Joanna Walsh, author of Break.up"", ""Julian Hanna is an astute observer and critic of our world dominated by corporations and driven by technology. He is also a brilliant writer in his own right. Definitely one to watch. ~ Andrew Gallix, Editor-in-Chief, 3:AM Magazine"", ""I am often suspicious of manifestos: they remind me of a more certain, mostly male-dominated, age, and I have grown impatient. But Julian Hanna’s book, which might also be described as a love letter to the manifesto, has pierced my doubts, offering the manifesto as a tender literary object whose optimism still upholds the word as a dynamic, almost magical, device out of which whole worlds are created. His book has been an antidote to my cynicism. ~ Lucía Sanromán, Director of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco"", ""A full-length book like this is long overdue, and it couldn't be better timed with the current climate of polarizing rhetoric, post-truth, Antifa, engaged art, etc. The brief history plus how-to lesson is a winning combination. ~ Mark Yakich, Distinguished Professor of English, Loyola University, New Orleans"", ""Julian Hanna makes wisdom out of the most unreasonable of genres. A precious companion in a time of too much anger and not enough revolt. ~ Marta Peirano, author of El Pequeño libro rojo del activista en la red (The Little Red Book of the Network Activist)""]" Marx Returns,"[""Jason Barker""]",The story of one man's struggle to write the book that will change the world.,"Karl Marx is a revolutionary. He is not alone. It is November 1849 and London is full of them: a bunch of fanatical dreamers trying to change the world. Persecuted by a tyrannical housekeeper and ignored by his sexually liberated wife, Marx immerses himself in his writing, believing that his book on capital is the surest way of ushering in the workers’ revolution and his family out of poverty. But when a mysterious figure begins to take an obsessive interest in his work Marx’s revolutionary journey takes an unexpected turn... Marx Returns combines historical fiction, psychological mystery, philosophy, differential calculus and extracts from Marx and Engels's collected works to reimagine the life and times of one of history's most exceptional minds, in this next fiction offering from Zero Books.","Karl Marx is a revolutionary. He is not alone. It is November 1849 and London is full of them: a bunch of fanatical dreamers trying to change the world. Persecuted by a tyrannical housekeeper and ignored by his sexually liberated wife, Marx immerses himself in his writing, believing that his book on capital is the surest way of ushering in the workers’ revolution and his family out of poverty. But when a mysterious figure begins to take an obsessive interest in his work Marx’s revolutionary journey takes an unexpected turn... Marx Returns combines historical fiction, psychological mystery, philosophy, differential calculus and extracts from Marx and Engels's collected works to reimagine the life and times of one of history's most exceptional minds, in this next fiction offering from Zero Books.",15,"[""A rollicking, zany, hilarious, irreverential reconstruction of the life and world of Karl Marx. ~ G. M. Goshgarian, editor and translator of Louis Althusser's posthumous writings"", ""This is a stimulating book, which manages to wear the immensity of its learning lightly. ~ Peter Beilharz , The Australian"", ""Marx Returns creatively weaves together real historical events; imaginative flights of fancy from Marx’s point of view, meditating on the nature of capital, mathematics, and ontology; and an uptempo narrative that is at heart a familial drama about the experience of exile in the nineteenth century. ~ Rafael Khachaturian, Jacobin Magazine"", ""An outstanding work of fiction that goes to the very heart of Marx's revolutionary thinking. ~ Slavoj Zizek, European Graduate School, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities"", ""The coming and going with history, with all the paths of these revolutionaries more or less lost, stranded in London; the references to new conceptual frameworks proposed by the sciences; a Jenny Marx who has so much in common with Joyce's Molly... In short, the chaosmos of Jason Barker's Marx and his struggles interests me in so many respects. ~ Pascal Bataillard, French translator, James Joyce's Ulysses"", ""If you're inclined to doubt the dramatic potential of differential calculus then take my advice and read this marvellous novel. ~ Rachel Holmes, author of Eleanor Marx: A Life"", ""This book is fabulous. The descriptions of steam are stunning! ~ Andreas Malm, author of Fossil Capital and The Progress of This Storm"", ""An imaginative, uplifting, and sometimes disturbing alternative history. ~ Nina Power, Los Angeles Review of Books"", ""An entertaining work of historical fiction. ~ Jacqui Freeman, Socialist Review"", ""Set in a putrid pre-revolutionary London marinating in the miasma of oppression and exploitation, Marx Returns is an uncanny alt-fiction that blows the past out of the continuum of history to revivify Marx the man, his life and his thought for our own age. Mixing tragedy with farce, mathematics with alcohol, Marx Returns gives us a great new take on a grand old tale. ~ Justin Clemens, author of The Mundiad"", ""In the year of the Marx bicentennial anniversary Barker’s novel is an experimental and thought-provoking work, the type of counterfactual history that makes us question precisely why and how “Marx was right”. ~ Chris Rumble, Historical Materialism"", ""Barker's book crosses the same terrain as Raoul Peck's film The Young Karl Marx, drawing together biography, narrative, and ideas, but it does so in a way that actively embraces fiction... Barker fills his novel with the sights and sounds of nineteenth-century London in the midst of the industrial revolution; reminding us that if \""the forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present\"", then some of that history is also a forgetting, as the brutality of exploitation has been sanitized and moved out of sight. ~ Jason Read, Unemployed Negativity"", ""Curious, funny, perplexing, and irreverent; an inspired divagation that casts unexpected light on Marx’s thought. ~ Ray Brassier, author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction"", ""Barker conjures the true stakes of Marx’s tragedy which instead of ending in reconciliation, forces it to assume terrifying forms in its prospect of life after death, or of what somewhat ridiculously has come to be known as permanent revolution. ~ Ana Stankovic, Filozofski vestnik"", ""For years we've been led to believe that \""Marx was right\"". On the evidence of Jason Barker's debut novel, however, it seems we may have grossly underestimated him. Joyful, artful and playfully anachronistic, Marx Returns is a book you're unlikely to want to end. ~ Yong Soon Seo, Professor of Philosophy, Sungkyunkwan University""]" "Meaning of David Cameron, The","[""Richard Seymour""]","What you won't have got in the televised debates, party manifestos, campaign trail propaganda and media coverage, portaining to Cameron the cipher and the social forces he represents.","David Cameron was sold to the British electorate as a thoroughly modern politician, part Blair, part Thatcher, a one nation conservative with a soft spot for social democracy, the green movement, big and small business, youth, minorities, traditionalists, the armed forces and the old. Has a politician ever been sold as so many things to so many people, at home in fashion magazines as he is at Party conferences? But despite being told, arguably more, about Cameron the man than any other politician he remains vacuous, strangely unformed, a cipher for the real interests and forces he represents. The Meaning of Cameron is an unmasking of the false politics Cameron embodies, and an examination of the face the mask has eaten into. How does this critique of Cameron match up after five years in Government?","David Cameron was sold to the British electorate as a thoroughly modern politician, part Blair, part Thatcher, a one nation conservative with a soft spot for social democracy, the green movement, big and small business, youth, minorities, traditionalists, the armed forces and the old. Has a politician ever been sold as so many things to so many people, at home in fashion magazines as he is at Party conferences? But despite being told, arguably more, about Cameron the man than any other politician he remains vacuous, strangely unformed, a cipher for the real interests and forces he represents. The Meaning of Cameron is an unmasking of the false politics Cameron embodies, and an examination of the face the mask has eaten into. How does this critique of Cameron match up after five years in Government?",2,"[""Synopsis: David Cameron has been sold to the British electorate as a thoroughly modern politician, part Blair, part Thatcher, a one nation conservative with a soft spot for social democracy, the green movement, big and small business, youth, minorities, traditionalists, the armed forces and the old. Has a British politician ever been sold as so many things to so many people, at home in fashion magazines as he is at Party conferences? But despite being told, arguably more, about Cameron the man than any other politician he remains vacuous, strangely unformed, a cipher for the real interests and forces he represents. \""The Meaning of David Cameron\"" is an unmasking of the false politics Cameron embodies, and an examination of the face the mask has eaten into.\n\nCritique: David Cameron was the unmeaning-to-architect for the British vote to leave the European Union. Not since Nevil Chamberlain's blunder with respect to misreading Adolph Hitler has the British political system been so misled. An informed and compelling analysis of a British politician, \""The Meaning of David Cameron\"" is very ighly recommended personal reading lists and for college and university library collections.\n\nMichael Dunford\n\nReviewer\n\n~ Dunford's Bookself, Midwest Bookreview"", ""If the bourgeoisie was indeed a bit more classically conspiratorial and besieged, they'd stop the presses on this one.\n\n\""The Meaning of David Cameron\"" takes its subject, a vague corporate personality known as David Cameron, as the starting point for an examination of the founding lexemes of contemporary political discourse.\n\n...short and pungent apologia for the Marxist categories of class and class war.\n\n...easy to follow if you are a political layman, ...eloquently phrased.\n\n~ What reviewers say on Amazon""]" "Meaning of Trump, The","[""Brian Francis Culkin""]",An ideological critique of Donald Trump's Presidential election. What is the meaning of Trump?,"The election of Donald Trump was a shattering moment to the political sensibilities of America; immediately sending the country into a frenzy of commentary, critique, and a never-ending media coverage that has bordered on the absurd. But the question still remains: what does it all mean? The Meaning of Trump is an ideological critique that sees the election of Donald Trump as a completely natural progression to the general trajectory of digitized technologies, neoliberalism, and a new breed of financialized capitalism; destructive global forces that know no party affiliation or national boundary. Although Donald Trump is undoubtedly the symptom that has exploded to the surface after nearly four decades of failed policies and broken promises by both Republicans and Democrats alike, his election can also be seen as an existential fork in the road for both the United States and even humanity itself. What path is taken still remains to be seen.","The election of Donald Trump was a shattering moment to the political sensibilities of America; immediately sending the country into a frenzy of commentary, critique, and a never-ending media coverage that has bordered on the absurd. But the question still remains: what does it all mean? The Meaning of Trump is an ideological critique that sees the election of Donald Trump as a completely natural progression to the general trajectory of digitized technologies, neoliberalism, and a new breed of financialized capitalism; destructive global forces that know no party affiliation or national boundary. Although Donald Trump is undoubtedly the symptom that has exploded to the surface after nearly four decades of failed policies and broken promises by both Republicans and Democrats alike, his election can also be seen as an existential fork in the road for both the United States and even humanity itself. What path is taken still remains to be seen.",8,"[""The Meaning of Trump from Brian Francis Culkin is an attempt, largely successful, to assess what the election of someone like Trump means, about who we are, what we are becoming, and what we might be able to do.\n\nI started this quite a while back but had to set it aside because at the time all I wanted to do was scream profanities at Trump and his supporters, which is not the proper frame of mind to read a book that tries to explain what this hell we're living through means. I finally came back to it and will also be reading a couple others I did the same thing with. I won't say I agree with Culkin completely but I do think he makes some very good points about what that election means.\n\nHe is fairly objective in his assessments but he also acknowledges that much of what Trump does and says is, well, not good for the country. But he does not attack Trump so much as his \""policies\"" so this is not simply an anti-Trump book. He has some sharp words for those on the left as well, particularly as it relates to trying to return to a similar form of neoliberalism. The responsibility for this fiasco we are experiencing is spread all across the political spectrum. Even with Russian meddling we have to take responsibility for making the environment in the country ripe for an imbecile to become President.\n\nIf you want a decent read, this is a good choice. I think I would suggest a couple as well but anything that can keep from degenerating into what I would write is a step in the right direction. I don't think any single volume can cover this horrific set of circumstances that led us to being on the brink of losing our attempt at a democracy, so reading several books such as this one can at least provide some semblance of understanding.\n\nReviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ~ Earl Messer, NetGalley"", ""The meaning of Trump tries to explore further the real meaning of Donald Trump's electoral victory in November 2016. After the wave of indignation and surprise traveled the world Brian Francis Culkin thinks now it is the right moment to analyse the figure of the President not only through his words and deeds but also as a symbol which represents something bigger in our current society. The avalanche of books, articles and general information has been so overwhelming since his election that it is difficult to add something new and refreshing and even though parts of the book sound merely introductory Culkin manages to contribute to the debate with his views. The most interesting input is the relation that the author establishes between Trump and digital society, or rather, the idea that Donald Trump is a direct consequence of the ways we use to communicate in social media and specially in Twitter. This permanent tension, the unnecessary but constant search for conflict, and the lack of any ideas apart from continuous insults and disrespect are the main characteristics of this kind of discourse, one that never listens to what the other person is saying and only generates noise and anxiety. Politicians are a symptom of the societies that create them and nourish them and never isolated cases coming from nowhere. They represent ideas and values that explicit or implicitly are present in our society and thus when a character like Donald Trump becomes against all odds President of the United States we must fight back, protest and push for change but also look to ourselves and see which are our priorities and what kind of place we want to live in. ~ Guillermo Fernandez , NetGalley"", ""This is a fairly brief but useful overview of the reasons behind and the implications of Trump's presidency. Although some of Culkin's claims about elements such as the overwhelmingly negative effects of networked technologies, the disintegration of social relationships or the strategic thinking behind Trump's rise can be questioned, the book is very good on the effects of the growing coarseness of public discourse. The fact that his attempts at objectivity frequently falter in the face of the sheer absurdity of the current political situation is telling and reassuring. While I would have liked to have seen more focus on the effects beyond the US, the book is an interesting and timely examination of our times. ~ Michael J, NetGalley"", ""Culkin presents a scholarly narrative on the very 'meaning of Trump'. In an effort to not spoil the 'ideological critique' he provides, this is excellent introduction to the issues surrounding this administration and those who advocate for it.\n\nRecommended reading for college political science courses, in part, for its brevity, this book is written at a level upon which most can understand. However, I strongly recommend this missive for those politically savvy individuals who wish to read a different take on the current President.\n\n~ Eric Watkins, NetGalley"", ""Donald Trumps election was a complete shock to many Americans The Meaning Of Trump is a well written blueprint of why we shouldn’t of been shocked what facts led to his election ~ rhonda Lomazow , NetGalley"", ""The election of Donald Trump was a shattering moment to the political sensibilities of America; immediately sending the country into a frenzy of commentary, critique, and a never-ending media coverage that has bordered on the absurd. But the question still remains: what does it all mean?\n\nThe Meaning of Trump is an ideological critique that sees the election of Donald Trump as a completely natural progression to the general trajectory of digitized technologies, neoliberalism, and a new breed of financialized capitalism; destructive global forces that know no party affiliation or national boundary. Although Donald Trump is undoubtedly the symptom that has exploded to the surface after nearly four decades of failed policies and broken promises by both Republicans and Democrats alike, his election can also be seen as an existential fork in the road for both the United States and even humanity itself.\n\nWhat path is taken still remains to be seen.\n\nRead this book --- it is definitely an education! (and not one from TrumpU!)\n\n~ Janet Cousineau"", ""“Trump wants neoliberalism, absent the globalization.”\n\nThat is the paradox of Donald Trump, according to Brian Francis Culkin in his new book The Meaning of Trump, out from Zero Books in the first week of July, 2018. In other words, Trump embodies a paradox: he essentially represents the very neoliberal system–with its outsourcing of productivity to the Third World; migration of social and mediatic interactivity to the digital hypersphere; and the financialization of Big Business–that he built his entire campaign upon dismantling, promising to the middle American workers of the Rust Belt an impossibility: namely, that he could bring their jobs back, bring factories back from Mexico and China–such as Carrier–and in his words, “make America great, again.”\n\nFurthermore, the global migration crisis, according to Culkin, which Trump avows also to put a stop to, is in fact the fallout and result of American militarization and unrestrained multinational corporatism that Trump fully supports. You can’t have one without the other. Which lands Trump within another paradox: ignoring climate change and ordering his Titanic full speed ahead at the approaching iceberg by deregulating Big Business, ignoring environmental devastation, the dissolution of local economies and the rise of wars over resource scarcity, all of which virtually guarantees that the problem of human migration will only grow worse and worse. We are looking, over the next century, at the uprooting of possibly over a billion people in zones where failed nation states, such as in Syria and Iraq, and gradually increasing global temperatures, will be rendering such areas inhospitable and uninhabitable. The Syrian crisis is merely the prelude to the gradual depopulation of the Middle East as soaring temperatures will render it shorn of all human beings. These people have to go somewhere, and northern latitudes are going to be prime real estate. The irony is that Trump’s policies of deregulation will only make this situation worse, never better. Just like entropy. It only goes one way.\n\nTrump’s campaign, as Culkin also points out, won on a message that was, in essence, impossible to fulfill, namely to “make America great again,” by bringing back factories and jobs to the Rust Belt, turning back the clock on immigration to an age in which mostly white men benefited from the economy, and turn back to a time when social media wasn’t disrupting the flow of information from centralized sources. This is an example of what Arnold Toynbee called “the idolization of an ephemeral self,” such as in the case of ancient Athens after the Persian Wars, when the arrogance of the Athenians, relying upon their past greatness, kept getting them into worse and worse social and cultural disasters.\n\nAmerican industrialization is dead, done and gone. Nothing can ever bring it back, as many of these jobs are in the process of becoming more and more automated. You cannot reverse the decaying entropy of a place like the Rust Belt. Economies simply don’t work that way, for they are built on exhausting and depleting resources in a specific area which, once exhausted, can never come back. It’s like trying to resurrect a mining town that is becoming a ghost town as the reserves are being depleted. The Sumerians, for instance, kept salinizing and ruining their soils as they went along, which is why, according to Thorkild Jacobsen, Mesopotamian civilization is a story that gradually migrates from southern Iraq with the Sumerians, to middle Iraq with the Babylonians, and ultimately to northern Iraq with the Assyrians. Once those soils are dead, they can’t be revived and neither can American industrialization. So that is a phantom set of floating signifiers whose signifieds have all been melted down. There’s no bringing them back.\n\nBut note the vectors so far: Trump wants to build a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants; put travel bans on Muslim immigrants; he has withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal; threatens to withdraw from NATO; supported Brexit; criticized any American involvement in Syria; and eased tensions with North Korea for the sole purpose of protecting American interests. In other words, it is an attempt to turn back the clock to pre-World War American Isolationism. It is like the Chinese emperor who, in the 1400s, ordered the burning of all admiral Zheng He’s records of his naval explorations in the Pacific, to Africa and, very possibly, the Americas. Subsequent Chinese influence upon the world retracted by the 1600s almost to zero as a result.\n\nIt doesn’t sound so much like Trump wants to “make America great again” as to make it “small again.” Small, quaint, ignorant and provincial. Yet, as Culkin makes clear in his analysis of the very paradox that Trump represents, all the while supporting Big Business, deregulation and global corporate investments. It is a telling fact that while in North Korea, Trump was said to have been eyeballing its beaches as sites for possible future real estate developments.\n\nReagan’s narrative, recall, was “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” to rid it of Big Government interference in the financial flows of its citizens. (In other words, as a wealthy movie star, he simply got tired of paying taxes). Trump’s narrative, on the other hand, is “The Art of the Deal.” Everything can be negotiated. He knows nothing of politics, cares nothing for history, and is ignorant of climate change. None of this matters. All that matters to him is transforming any and every situation to his advantage by extracting financial flows from it. His journey to North Korea had nothing to do with diplomacy: he was looking for ways to make money off of Kim Jong-Un. He wasn’t even thinking of echoing Nixon’s visit to China, which he probably doesn’t remember anyway.\n\nTrump’s right hand, it is clear, does not know what his left hand is doing. As Culkin demonstrates, he is perhaps the most confused and confusing American president that we have ever had. And yet, the contradictions continue to ramify. Bizarrely, Trump has recently announced the creation of a Space Force, to be aligned with the American military. But isn’t this a retrieval of American expansionism again? But wait a minute: I thought he wanted to make America small again. Hold on: he meant “great,” right? Or was it small? So which is it: do you want to continue the expansion of the American Empire or shut it down and turn it into a quaint and cozy place of isolationism. Nation state or Empire? I don’t think this guy has thought anything through.\n\nCulkin’s book succeeds best when it analyzes the kinds of contradictions that the Trump presidency represents. He is the first Hypermodern president, who tweeted his way into the White House, just as JFK was the first televisual president. I wonder, though, how popular Twitter is with the kinds of small town American Rust Belt workers that put Trump into office? Wouldn’t they regard it as a toy of the coastal liberal elite in their decadent big cities? Voting for him, as Culkin points out, was clearly not in their best interests, although due to his charisma and rhetoric he was able to make them think that he was their Big Brother–in the best sense of the phrase–looking out for their best interests. But the joke was on them. Their jobs aren’t coming back and Wall Street is only going to grow bigger, more esoteric and complex.\n\nIn short, Culkin’s new book is brilliant, short, readable and beautiful. I highly recommend it. ~ Cultural Discourse"", ""Fascinating. Culkin's book on Trump is like a live coal that glows in your brain as you read it. No one will ever look or think about Donald Trump the same way again. ~ John David Ebert, cultural critic and poet""]" Meat Market,"[""Laurie Penny""]","A feminist dissection of women's bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism, whereby women are both consumers and consumed.","Modern culture is obsessed with controlling women's bodies. Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women's political selfhood. Touching on sexuality, prostitution, hunger, consumption, eating disorders, housework, transsexualism and the global trade in the signs and signifiers of femininity, Meat Market is a thin, bloody sliver of feminist dialectic, dissecting women's bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism. GERMAN EDITION - voted number 5 by German journalists in their list of top ten non-fiction books of 2011.","Modern culture is obsessed with controlling women's bodies. Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women's political selfhood. Touching on sexuality, prostitution, hunger, consumption, eating disorders, housework, transsexualism and the global trade in the signs and signifiers of femininity, Meat Market is a thin, bloody sliver of feminist dialectic, dissecting women's bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism. GERMAN EDITION - voted number 5 by German journalists in their list of top ten non-fiction books of 2011.",5,"[""A great first book on feminism. ~ Virginia Moffat, Peace News"", ""At just 24, the talented journalist and student activist Laurie Penny is already a respected commentator.\n\nMeat Market, her debut feminist polemic, offers a brutal materialist critique of popular culture to expose the tyranny of \""the patriarchal capitalist machine\"" that perpetually denies the true value of female potential. Penny discusses women's sexualisation, eating disorders, gender stereotyping and the labour market, covering prostitution, housework, the marketisation of domesticity as a kitsch hobby, the prevalence of class delineation as a form of control and the positioning of the Playboy Bunny as an emblem of manufactured desirability.\n\nShe balances sophisticated theorising with the anecdotal, which prevents Meat Market from becoming a dense academic diatribe. The most evocative passages are rooted in the personal, including comments by diverse interviewees, and Penny's insightful exposition of the psychological nuances that precipitated her own battle with anorexia. \""From time to time, I still miss my eating disorder,\"" says Penny. \""I miss the sense of control that comes when avoiding food is your highest ambition.\""\n\nAt times, her indictment of capitalist oppression – especially in relation to the policing of women's bodies and female sexuality – becomes a glib, less cogent reflection of arguments articulated by the established feminists to whom she is indebted. However, this does not mitigate the potency of her work, and she highlights the need for young feminists to reignite a debate that has been stifled by an acceptance of inequality as part of the status quo.\n\nHer discussion of transsexualism, a divisive issue in feminist circles, forms the most perceptive chapter. She confidently dissects notions posited by Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer to argue that trans women are not proponents of gender stereotyping, but subject to restrictive definitions of \""male\"" and \""female\"" modes of behaviour, forced \""to fight at every turn for the constrained right to consumer femininity.\"" Though her statement that \""not a single person on this planet is born a woman\"" is a hat-tip to Simone de Beauvoir, it stresses that pressures to emulate synthetic images of female beauty are universally detrimental, making trans activism rightly a \""vital\"" part of the feminist movement.\n\nPenny is an exceptional writer with a shark-bite wit, yet here her trademark hyperbole has been diluted. Though not completely lacking her excellent acidic branding, the rage that provokes impassioned responses to her journalism has been somehow trimmed and moulded into a more palatable form, which, though not hugely detrimental, is a shame.\n\nOn the whole, Meat Market is a nutritious thought-snack for emergent feminists and those approaching female cultural positioning from a socialist perspective. Penny's emphatic delivery centralises the urgent need for collaborative action that lets women know \""with a clear and brilliant certainty, that our persons are powerful\"".\n\n~ Abby O'Reilly, Independent on Sunday"", ""Meat Market is a valuable contribution to understanding women’s inequality and a challenge to it. It is a welcome change to the claims that, because women are equal before the law, the fight for their emancipation is over, and it forces a consideration of how some of the ideas and understandings we take for granted are not as innocent as commonly thought. ~ The Oxonian Review"", ""This book presents a compelling argument for the reassessment of feminist values, as well as the need to challenge the false consciousness of modern men and women. Personally charged invective that demands to be heard. I read over underlined passages repeatedly after finishing the book.\n\n~ Emmet O'Cuana , a book a day till i can stay"", ""Laurie Penny hones her every phrase to a razor's edge. She is absolutely surgical in her anatomising of a mad world. MEAT MARKET is the kind of cut you learn from. ~ Warren Ellis , author of TRANSMETROPOLITAN, CROOKED LITTLE VEIN, RED""]" "Media Against Democracy, The","[""Thomas Field""]",A radical critique of existing institutions.,"The Media does not know what democracy is. Indeed our societies have, for the most part, forgotten the meaning of democracy. Democracy is not a state form. Democracy is a mode of foundationless existential living. As such it needs the kind of attention which our self-satisfied media institutions, riven with complacent journalistic practices and corrupted by institutional privilege, are incapable of. We need to sweep away The Media to allow existential democracy to manifest itself. This will also entail the destruction of key aspects of the academic institution of Media and Cultural Studies, which has evidently failed to radically change the nature of media institutions and practices which was its avowed aim. It has failed because of the epistemological and ontological assumptions that underpin it and which were ultimately drawn from the failed project of structuralism. The images we create arise from chaos. Images of value are in Castoriadis’ expression ‘windows upon the chaos’. The Media Against Democracy is engaged in rethinking the possibilities for aesthetic engagement with this chaos, proposing an existential-anarchic critique of media. Through our images and sounds we need to learn to understand ontological chaos, only then can we know that whatever we create, when we try to explain to each other how we should live, has no authority other than what we can accord it.","The Media does not know what democracy is. Indeed our societies have, for the most part, forgotten the meaning of democracy. Democracy is not a state form. Democracy is a mode of foundationless existential living. As such it needs the kind of attention which our self-satisfied media institutions, riven with complacent journalistic practices and corrupted by institutional privilege, are incapable of. We need to sweep away The Media to allow existential democracy to manifest itself. This will also entail the destruction of key aspects of the academic institution of Media and Cultural Studies, which has evidently failed to radically change the nature of media institutions and practices which was its avowed aim. It has failed because of the epistemological and ontological assumptions that underpin it and which were ultimately drawn from the failed project of structuralism. The images we create arise from chaos. Images of value are in Castoriadis’ expression ‘windows upon the chaos’. The Media Against Democracy is engaged in rethinking the possibilities for aesthetic engagement with this chaos, proposing an existential-anarchic critique of media. Through our images and sounds we need to learn to understand ontological chaos, only then can we know that whatever we create, when we try to explain to each other how we should live, has no authority other than what we can accord it.",0,[] Melancology,"[""Scott Wilson""]",Melancology addresses Black Metal as a form of environmental writing and provides a provocative contribution to debates on ecology.,"Melancology addresses the notorious musical genre black metal as a negative form of environmental writing that ‘blackens’ the cosmos. This book conjures a new word and concept that conjoins ‘black’ and ‘ecology’: melancology, a word in which can be heard the melancholy affect appropriate to the conjunction. Black metal resounds from the abyss and it is precisely only in relation to its sonic forces that the question of intervention in the environment arises in the articulation of melancology with ethics. That is, in deciding ‘which way out’ we should take, in deciding with what surpluses to dwell, with what waste, what detritus or decay in a process of unbinding with sonic forces that traverse an earth choking in wealth and death. The book thus provides a provocative and challenging contribution both to popular and intellectual debates on ecology. The book contains key contributions from Nicola Masciandaro, author of Hideous Gnosis, Reza Negarestani and Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of this Planet, whose cover cn be seen on Jay-Z’s back promoting Run and has been lambasted by ex-Fox News broadcaster, Glenn Beck.","Melancology addresses the notorious musical genre black metal as a negative form of environmental writing that ‘blackens’ the cosmos. This book conjures a new word and concept that conjoins ‘black’ and ‘ecology’: melancology, a word in which can be heard the melancholy affect appropriate to the conjunction. Black metal resounds from the abyss and it is precisely only in relation to its sonic forces that the question of intervention in the environment arises in the articulation of melancology with ethics. That is, in deciding ‘which way out’ we should take, in deciding with what surpluses to dwell, with what waste, what detritus or decay in a process of unbinding with sonic forces that traverse an earth choking in wealth and death. The book thus provides a provocative and challenging contribution both to popular and intellectual debates on ecology. The book contains key contributions from Nicola Masciandaro, author of Hideous Gnosis, Reza Negarestani and Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of this Planet, whose cover cn be seen on Jay-Z’s back promoting Run and has been lambasted by ex-Fox News broadcaster, Glenn Beck.",0,[] "Message, The","[""Tariq Goddard""]",100 years after the Heart of Darkness and the 21st Century Empire Builders are ready for another go at Africa.,"The Message is a literary thriller set in a fictional African state in the grip of civil war provoked by an unusual religious development. Written with the immediacy of an airport novel, though addressing themes normally associated with literary fiction, the Message is an exciting, topical treatment of realpolitk, personal integrity and the cost of Empire building.","The Message is a literary thriller set in a fictional African state in the grip of civil war provoked by an unusual religious development. Written with the immediacy of an airport novel, though addressing themes normally associated with literary fiction, the Message is an exciting, topical treatment of realpolitk, personal integrity and the cost of Empire building.",4,"[""The Message is set in Shimba a fictional East African country in the\n\nmiddle of a civil war. Shimba is rich in a mineral - Shimberite - that\n\nis used in mobile phones, the population desperately poor. The rebel\n\nmovement is led by a man claiming to be the Mahdi - the prophesied\n\nsaviour of Islam. He leads a chaotic force of fighter against a\n\ngovernment who until recently ran Shimba in Western interests.\n\nShimba is being stalked by mercenaries, aid-workers and Iranian and\n\nBritish secret forces. The novel follows the adventures of a small SAS\n\ngroup dispatched to assassinate the Mahdi. Iran has also sent two\n\noperatives to determine the trajectory of a rebel movement that they\n\nhave backed - seeking their own influence in the resource-rich country.\n\nThis is a world of hard, cynical politics where only imperial concerns\n\nand profits matter.\n\nThere is also an aid worker, Foy, who get caught up in the fighting\n\nhaving originally travelled to Africa for an authentic experience\n\nhelping the poor - instead she gets pulled into Shimba's tragedy. Foy is\n\nkidnapped by a family of brutal mercenaries from Ipswich hired by the\n\nMahdi to shore up and defend his power.\n\nThe backdrop of the novel is the revolutions in North Africa that have\n\ncast imperial policy into a panic as countries struggle to maintain\n\ntheir influence on a region that is rapidly mutating - by mass\n\nupheavals, but also wars caused by the long, post-colony legacies of\n\nforeign interventions and resource wars.\n\nThe book is a hard-hitting and challenging satire - written with\n\nincredible dexterity and energy. The characters are modern\n\nrepresentatives of Africa's wars. The SAS men, little more than\n\nmercenaries themselves, are cynics without illusions about what they are\n\ndoing. Their world is cast into simple dichotomies of 'primitive'\n\nAfricans and 'available' women. The Iranian regime seeks the same\n\ncontrol over the country as the meddling and violent British, only on\n\ndifferent sides. The mercenaries roam 21st century conflicts for money\n\nand violence. The Africans we encounter are doomed in this war to be\n\nboth its innocent victims and dupes to movements that offer them\n\nnothing.\n\nAfrica's conflicts turn it participants into exactly the savage and\n\nbroken characters described in The Message. The aid-worker on a mission\n\nto assuage the guilt she feels at her middle class privileges by being a\n\n'better person'. But in the novel she is nothing more than another\n\nuseless whitey seeking adventure and salvation in Africa. The Message\n\nhas stripped down the world into its brutal components.\n\nThe story is not far from reality. The Congo's recent wars drew in the\n\nexactly the same motley crowd of 'family' mercenaries, US and British\n\nspecial forces on 'training' operations and regional countries jostling,\n\nthrough competing rebel armies, for control of the country's\n\nextraordinary mineral wealth.\n\nThe murder and mayhem of The Message is one side of the continents\n\nglobalisations after decades of imperial squabbling, humanitarian\n\nintervention and structural reforms. The alternatives are bleak for a\n\ncountry riven by these wars. As Beasley, one of the SAS men in The\n\nMessage observes, 'we thrive on unpredictability and we're adaptable.\n\nThree weeks after we reopen diplomatic channels, we'll have their Mahdi\n\nas corrupt as the old boy was, and twice as nice, stops things from\n\ngoing stale.' The Socialist Review ~"", ""The Message was an excellent plot and what an antidote to Greenmantle which I remember reading as a kid. Loved your prose style in The Message... Amongst my favorite lines... \""the bored deity who must have tossed them off for reasons of contrast.\"" .... \""burning urns mentholating the air , the atmosphere uncomfortably feral , better suited to a convalescing animal than a new head of state....\"" And some interesting views on religion on Page 120 I especially enjoyed. That family made excellent villains - really foul- and neo-Dickensian. Pat Mills ~"", ""A fictional African state of little consequence becomes suddenly more consequential when a local warlord disdains dressing like a hip-hop star and proclaims himself to be the descendent of the prophet Mohammed. Iran immediately dispatches an adviser, while Britain sends in the SAS in order to protect hi-tech mineral assets worth more than their weight in mobile phones. Goddard's comic thriller starts out well, with a timely nod to insurgencies in the Arab world, and features a venal Ayatollah who asks whether \""it is always in God's interest to have people who believe in him running the world\""? The Iranian ambassador has a good grasp of the situation: \""The British were here and it was not like them to come without a reason. The plot was not going to get any thinner and he did not want it to.\""\n\n~ The Guardian"", ""THE MESSAGE is a remarkable and timely novel which deals, in fictional form, with the global consequences of the so-called Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.\n\nOne of Tariq Goddard's great successes is his technique of devising representative characters from all sides of the religious and ideological divide. The result is a kind of international dialogue, true to the complexities of the contemporary world it describes.\n\nGoddard's novel is played out on a wide canvas which takes in contemporary Britain, Iran and Africa. The writing is compelling, and the subject-matter is both urgent and well-defined.\n\nI do not expect to read a more important or rewarding novel this year.\n\n~ Dr Andrew Biswell, Director, International Anthony Burgess Foundation""]" Methods Devour Themselves,"[""Benjanun Sriduangkaew"", ""J. Moufawad-Paul""]","A dialogue between story and essay, between speculative fiction and radical philosophy...","Methods Devour Themselves is a dialogue between fiction and non-fiction. Inspired by Quentin Meillassoux's Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction that was paired with an Isaac Asimov short story, this book examines the ways in which stories can provoke philosophical interventions and philosophical essays can provoke stories. Alternating between Benjanun Sriduangkaew's fiction and J. Moufawad-Paul's non-fiction, Methods Devour Themselves is an interstitial project that brings fiction and essay into a unique, avant-garde whole.","Methods Devour Themselves is a dialogue between fiction and non-fiction. Inspired by Quentin Meillassoux's Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction that was paired with an Isaac Asimov short story, this book examines the ways in which stories can provoke philosophical interventions and philosophical essays can provoke stories. Alternating between Benjanun Sriduangkaew's fiction and J. Moufawad-Paul's non-fiction, Methods Devour Themselves is an interstitial project that brings fiction and essay into a unique, avant-garde whole.",3,"[""\""Methods Devour Themselves is a unique intervention in the fields of philosophy and literature. Aside from a foreword by Moufawad-Paul and an afterword by Sriduangkaew, the book alternates between three short stories by Sriduangkaew and three essays by Moufawad-Paul. Rarely does it happen that an artist or writer carries out a sustained conversation with a given theoretical intervention through art (in this case, science fiction) and not wearing the hat, as it were, of the critic or theorist who reflectively theorizes about the literature that serves as the terrain and object of interpretation. Whereas Moufawad-Paul responds through theoretical analysis, Sriduangkaew interjects in fiction.\"" ~ Devin Zane Shaw, https://www.c-scp.org/2018/08/30/benjanun-sriduangkaew-and-j-moufawad-paul-methods-devour-themselves"", ""Taking their cue, and title, from Frantz Fanon, Benjanun Sriduangkaew and J. Moufawad-Paul have refused all methodological straitjackets in this genre-defying book. The result is a chaotically dialectical spiral of fiction-critique-fiction whose form is as speculative as its content, imagining new worlds from amid the crumbling wreckage of the old. ~ George Ciccariello-Maher, author of Decolonizing Dialectics and Building the Commune"", ""Compelling science fiction and evocative instant postcolonial criticism entwined in a mutually reproductive double helix. Every page contains an intellectual thrill. ~ Nick Mamatas, author of Sensation and I Am Providence""]" Militant Modernism,"[""Owen Hatherley""]",A defence of Modernism against its defenders.,"This book is a defence of Modernism against its defenders. In readings of modern design, film, pop and especially architecture, it attempts to reclaim a revolutionary modernism against its absorption into the heritage industry and the aesthetics of the luxury flat. Militant Modernism features new readings of some familiar names — Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, et al. — but more on the lesser-known, quotidian modernists of the twentieth century. These chapters range from a study of British industrial and brutalist aesthetics to Russian Constructivism in architecture, the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich in film and design, and the alienation effects of Brecht and Hanns Eisler on record and screen — all arguing for a modernism of everyday life, immersed in questions of socialism, sexual politics, and technology.","This book is a defence of Modernism against its defenders. In readings of modern design, film, pop and especially architecture, it attempts to reclaim a revolutionary modernism against its absorption into the heritage industry and the aesthetics of the luxury flat. Militant Modernism features new readings of some familiar names — Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, et al. — but more on the lesser-known, quotidian modernists of the twentieth century. These chapters range from a study of British industrial and brutalist aesthetics to Russian Constructivism in architecture, the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich in film and design, and the alienation effects of Brecht and Hanns Eisler on record and screen — all arguing for a modernism of everyday life, immersed in questions of socialism, sexual politics, and technology.",9,"[""Hatherley is ostensibly a critic in the mode of Reyner Banham: freewheeling, spinning out ideas, theories and evaluations that may have their origin in the stony core of the built environment, but which spread to encompass most other aesthetic realms as well. ~ Will Self, London Review of Books"", ""subtle ingenuity and sheer exuberance ~ Jonathan Meades, New Statesman"", ""Fear of Music is the deflected Bildungsroman of a very clever, velvet-gloved provocateur nostalgic for yesterday’s tomorrow, for a world made before he was born, a distant, preposterously optimistic world which, even though it still exists in scattered fragments, has had its meaning erased, its possibilities defiled. And which has posthumously been wilfully misrepresented.\n\n….... The last third of the book is devoted to a detailed scrutiny of Makavejev’s anti-naturalism and to special pleading on behalf of Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect, devices which, together with the example of the constructivist variant called productivism, Hatherley considers might be among the bases of a new Proletcult, an art of engagement and commitment. Maybe. The writing in this section does not share the freshness, subtle ingenuity and sheer exuberance of what precedes it. As a commentator on architecture, however, Hatherley is in a school of one. ~ Jonathan Meades, New Statesman"", ""This may be the only book you'll read dedicated to the Southampton city council architects department. Which is a shame, because according to Owen Hatherley, who grew up on a Southampton housing estate, its postwar buildings are \""excitingly modern\"" and evoke the \""glittering towers of science fiction\"". Bombed-out British cities like Southampton offered modernist architects a chance to realise their utopian dreams of a socialist new society. But their concrete cities in the sky have fallen out of favour, unlike other socialist structures such as the NHS. Hatherley's book is an intelligent and passionately argued attempt to \""excavate utopia\"" from the ruins of modernism and to oppose the trend in public housing towards a Disneyfied pastiche of pre-industrial architecture, as at Prince Charles's Poundbury. Hatherley's exhilarating manifesto for a reborn socialist modernism is inspired by an admirable desire to reawaken our sense of the utopian imaginary. His rallying cry is suitably Brechtian: \""Forwards! Not forgetting.\"" ~ P D Smith, The Guardian"", ""This energetic – and at times wildly enjoyable – polemic attempts to accomplish two difficult tasks: to excavate the lost utopian relics of a vital leftist past, and then to present these findings as methods which can be employed by the contemporary British left in its attempts to jolt itself back to vitality from its currently moribund state. It is to Owen Hatherley’s credit that he achieves both to a significant degree, presenting a compelling case for a coherent strand of largely-communist leftism that explored the imaginative possibilities of a revolution expressed through cultural forms: in architecture, in art, in film. ~ Karl Whitney, www.3ammagazine.com"", ""Why can't the present be more like the future? Time was they wanted it Now. Owen Hatherley's Militant Modernism (0 Books, £9.99) would be insanely ambitious if he hadn't pulled off the seemingly impossible, compressed social, political and aesthetic analysis of modernist utopianism in a sizzling 160 pages. Ruskin: Gothic, Hatherley: modernism. Mind-blowing ~ Helen DeWitt, New Statesman books of the year 2009"", ""Hatherley's book is an intelligently and passionately argued attempt to excavate utopia from the ruins of modernism and to oppose the trend towards Disneyfication. Hatherley's exhilarating manifesto for a reborn socialist modernism is inspired by an admirable desire to reawaken our sense of utopia. ~ P.D. Smith, The Guardian"", ""With svelte prose, agile wit, and alarming erudition, Owen Hatherley pries open the prematurely closed case of early twentieth-century modernism. This slim and shapely, ideas-packed and intensely felt book is neither a misty-eyed memorial nor a dour inquest but a verging-on-erotic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Rediscovering the enchantment of demystification and the sexiness of severity, Hatherley harks forward to modernism's Utopian spirit: critical, radically democratic, dedicated to the conscious transformation of everyday life, determined to build a better world. ~ Simon Reynolds, Author of Rip It Up and Start Again - Postpunk 1978-84"", ""A call to have the courage to be modern against all the current postmodern pieties of exhaustion and fragmentation, Owen Hatherley’s brilliant reactivation of the utopian impulses of the modernist avant-garde is Brecht meeting Ballard to create the science-fiction of socialism. ~ Benjamin Noys, Author of Georges Bataille and The Culture of Death""]" Millennials and the Moments That Made Us,"[""Shaun Scott""]","A generation on the move, a country on the brink, and a young author's search to find out how we got here.","A generation on the move, a country on the brink, and a young author's search to find out how we got here. Millennials and the Moments That Made Us is a cultural history of the United States, as seen through the eyes of the largest, most diverse, and most disprivileged generation in American history. The book is a relatable pop culture history that critiques the capitalist status quo our generation inherited - a critical tour of the music, movies, books, TV shows, and technology that have defined us and our times.","A generation on the move, a country on the brink, and a young author's search to find out how we got here. Millennials and the Moments That Made Us is a cultural history of the United States, as seen through the eyes of the largest, most diverse, and most disprivileged generation in American history. The book is a relatable pop culture history that critiques the capitalist status quo our generation inherited - a critical tour of the music, movies, books, TV shows, and technology that have defined us and our times.",4,"[""Shaun Scott is a budding master of prose. His sentences are tied up in humor, contemporary cultural criticism, head-shaking sadness, and hope. His new work might be the beacon Millennials turn to in staggering times, as his pages are filled with inspiringly precise language. ~ Jake Uitti, Contributing Writer, Washington Post"", ""Millennials are presented as a cultural black box at best and a poorly-executed caricature at worse. With references ranging from Milton Friedman to \""Hotline Bling,\"" Shaun Scott creates the most accurate portrayal of the Millennial condition currently in print - what we've endured, what we've created, and, perhaps most essentially, what actionable policies we need to enact in order to thrive. ~ Hanna Brooks Olsen, Writer and Cultural Critic"", ""The situation of Millennials in neoliberal capitalism is still under-theorized, and Scott’s analysis is informed theoretical work. ~ Sarah Grey, Writer, Founder of Grey Editing"", ""Shaun Scott’s “Millennials and the Moments That Made Us” is a depiction of what life is like for Millennials in the age of corporatism, racism, and rampant consumerism. Where Orwell’s fictional 1984 leaves off, Scott begins; because you can’t change the future without having a firm understanding of the past. ~ Sylvia Hysen, Managing Editor, Millennial Magazine""]" Murder in Notting Hill,"[""Mark Olden""]",A search for the truth about a distant unsolved murder.,"At around midnight on May 17 1959, a white gang ambushed Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane on a Notting Hill slum street. One of them plunged a knife into his heart. When the police failed to catch the killer, many black people believed it would have been different if the victim had been white. Murder in Notting Hill is a tale of crumbling tenements transformed into a millionaires playground, of the districts fading white working class, and of a veil finally being lifted on the past.","At around midnight on May 17 1959, a white gang ambushed Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane on a Notting Hill slum street. One of them plunged a knife into his heart. When the police failed to catch the killer, many black people believed it would have been different if the victim had been white. Murder in Notting Hill is a tale of crumbling tenements transformed into a millionaires playground, of the districts fading white working class, and of a veil finally being lifted on the past.",19,"[""Ranging in time from the 1950s to the present day and drawing on numerous interviews with witnesses and suspects, as well as books, official files and newspaper accounts, it combines a history of the area with determined detective work and atmospheric reportage... In doggedly pursuing this task and by vividly recreating a tragic and pivotal event in British social history, Olden merits our thanks. This is a well-written and important book and deserves to be widely read. ~ Adam Carter, Searchlight magazine"", ""Olden constructs a pacy, cross-cutting account of the murder and its aftermath, richly evoking the colours and tensions of the period... Closer to the present day, Olden recounts poignant journeys to visit old men eking out their pensions in sad decrepitude, reminscing about the good old days of criminal gangstership, and, finally, revealing to him Notting Hills \""worst kept secret\"", the identity of the murderer. The author concludes that investigative mistakes, as well as a reluctance to inflame racial tensions any further meant that \""Cochrane had little chance of ever getting justice\"". This book is at least a belated shadow of some. ~ The Guardian, Stephen Poole"", ""Murder in Notting Hill was featured in BBC Radio Four, with Jonathan Freedland taking the long view of the Stephen Lawrence case, comparing it to the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane in Notting Hill in 1959\n\n~ BBC Radio Four, The Long View"", ""Olden reconstructs the events of 1959 and locates who he feels to be the culprit; the finished article is a resourceful investigative undertaking which goes beyond true crimes sensationalist remit to map the social and political resonances of what took place.\n\n~ Joe Kennedy, The Quietus"", ""Notting Hill is Oldens territory and he knows it well. He deftly describes its rise and fall; and, unlike much local history, he puts a human face to it. We see it through the eyes of the people who lived and worked there, grew up there, notably those to whom it was home in 1959. Thus Murder in Notting Hill is not just about a murder, its also about a time and place.\n\n~ Anthony Frewin, Lobster magazine"", ""Mark Olden, a London journalist, displays a terrier-like devotion in locating elderly Notting Dale inhabitants for interview and trawling public archives for information. In pages of atmospheric reportage he brings 1950s Notting Dale vividly to life, with its boozers, nightclubs and cinemas frequented by the likes of Colin MacInnes... Any lingering hope of justice has now apparently gone. In the meantime, we can read this superb work of social history, in all its gritty actuality.\n\n~ Ian Thomson, Review, The Spectator"", ""In his new re-investigation of the 1959 murder in the heart of Notting Hill of a black man, Kelso Cochrane, author Mark Olden brilliantly describes a postwar world where feral young white men, drunk on beer, high on bravado, terrified at the emergence of a community they did not recognise or understand, made a statement of their own with regular bouts of \""nigger hunting\"".\n\n~ Hugh Muir, The Guardian feature, 'The importance of the Notting Hill Carnival'"", ""By juxtaposing the present rom-com property porn incarnation of the area with the seedy dangerous slum of the late 50s, Mark Olden has come up with the best book about Notting Hill since the Colin MacInnes classic.\n\n~ Tom Vague, Notting Hill community historian and author: London Psychogeography, Rachman, Riots and Rillington Place"", ""Highly recommended...[a] fascinating portrait of time and place.\n\n~ Robert Elms, BBC London 94.9"", ""There seems to be a deep commitment behind this book to uncover who killed Kelso.... The story that emerges from Olden’s book is compelling... Murder in Notting Hill is an excellent read and is highly recommended.\n\n~ Harmit Athwal, Institute of Race Relations"", ""[Olden's] book is an unputdownable investigation and, like a good detective story, pursues a riveting forensic trail.\n\n~ John Green, Morning Star"", ""...A timely reminder that neither institutional racism, police corruption, nor the old bill being in the pockets of the media, are anything new in London.\n\n~ Stewart Home"", ""Olden presents a complex and compelling story. One of the most interesting features of the book is the light it shed is the changes that working class people experienced at the time.\n\n~ Ken Olende, Socialist Worker"", ""This book is not simply a look back at the past, but a useful historical document that still has resonances for us today.\n\n~ John Green, Review 31"", ""In a small way this book offers a piece of justice for a man whose name will never be forgotten.\n\n~ Pendle Harte, The Hill magazine"", ""In the story of race and justice in this country, the murder of Kelso Cochrane is like an unhealed wound. Today's readers will see many similarities with what happened in relation to Stephen Lawrence -- the missed opportunities in the investigation, the denial of the race motive, the obvious official discomfort and confusion -- but this is a tragedy in its own right, and all the more dreadful in a time when racism was often overt and tolerated . Mark Olden has written a first-rate, highly readable account of the known facts, but he has also gone farther, tracking down surviving witnesses and, with due care and caution after all these years, shedding new light on the case. For anyone interested in justice in modern Britain this is an important book.\n\n~ Brian Cathcart, Author: The Case of Stephen Lawrence; Jill Dando: her Life and Death; Were You Still Up For Portillo?"", ""Some crimes echo down over the years, not just because of the pain or death they cause, but because of the social wounds and patterns of injustice they reveal. This murder is one. Mark Olden has done a fine job of combining investigative reporting and suspenseful storytelling about a crime whose legacy has not gone away.\n\n~ Adam Hochschild, Author: King Leopold's Ghost; Bury the Chains; To End All Wars"", ""A fascinating story based on meticulous research which not only illuminates a dark period in Britain’s recent history, but is also a compelling read.\n\n~ Matthew Collin, Author: Altered State; This is Serbia Calling; The Time of the Rebels"", ""Not only is this a meticulous and important work of investigative journalism but it is also, and perhaps more crucially, a compelling analysis of the conditions in which extreme right-wing politics and racism thrived to such an extent that a ‘stranger’ of the wrong colour could be killed with impunity...A story not only of a particular time and place but a salutary reminder of the need to remain vigilant unless such conditions occur again.\n\n~ Professor Roger Bromley, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham""]" Myth and Mayhem,"[""Ben Burgis"", ""Conrad Bongard Hamilton"", ""Matthew McManus"", ""Marion Trejo""]",Myth and Mayhem takes Jordan Peterson's work seriously while criticizing it from a leftist perspective; offering the most sustained theoretical and political critique thus far.,"Jordan Peterson rocketed to fame in the 2010s and has preached on everything from the evils of postmodern neo-Marxism to the mating habits of lobsters ever since then. The Left has since leveled many criticisms about the Canadian psychologist, characterizing him as everything from an apologist for the alt-right to simply not being interesting or profound. Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson is intended as a comprehensive critical look at all aspects of his thought, from the philosophical depths to the mundane heights. Written by four authors who each look at a different element of his thought, it shows why taking Peterson seriously doesn't mean embracing him. Includes an introduction by Slavoj Zizek","Jordan Peterson rocketed to fame in the 2010s and has preached on everything from the evils of postmodern neo-Marxism to the mating habits of lobsters ever since then. The Left has since leveled many criticisms about the Canadian psychologist, characterizing him as everything from an apologist for the alt-right to simply not being interesting or profound. Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson is intended as a comprehensive critical look at all aspects of his thought, from the philosophical depths to the mundane heights. Written by four authors who each look at a different element of his thought, it shows why taking Peterson seriously doesn't mean embracing him. Includes an introduction by Slavoj Zizek",0,[] "Mythology of Evolution, The","[""Chris Bateman""]",How can we tell the story of life without distorting it?,"What is the nature of life? Scientists turn to natural selection, genes or adaptation to explain the living world, but much of the imagery used to present evolution threatens to distort our understanding of the incredible history of our planet. There is no science without mythology, and the only way to reveal the facts is to understand the fictions. The Mythology of Evolution exposes the seven spins given to evolutionary theory, each resting upon an ideological interpretation of an otherwise neutral idea. There are myths of progress and destiny, such as the ""ladder of progress"" and only the strong survive. There are stories magnifying the significance of genes such as the ""selfish gene"" or ""kin selection"". There are more grandiose myths such as ""survival of the fittest"" and the infamous ""intelligent design"". All relate to a final myth – that of ""science as truth"". By liberating evolution from these misrepresentative stories, we can find a more nuanced vision of life that shows how advantages persist, trust is beneficial, and the diversity of species emerges from a refinement of possibilities made possible by a chain of inheritance that stretches back to the beginnings of life itself.","What is the nature of life? Scientists turn to natural selection, genes or adaptation to explain the living world, but much of the imagery used to present evolution threatens to distort our understanding of the incredible history of our planet. There is no science without mythology, and the only way to reveal the facts is to understand the fictions. The Mythology of Evolution exposes the seven spins given to evolutionary theory, each resting upon an ideological interpretation of an otherwise neutral idea. There are myths of progress and destiny, such as the ""ladder of progress"" and only the strong survive. There are stories magnifying the significance of genes such as the ""selfish gene"" or ""kin selection"". There are more grandiose myths such as ""survival of the fittest"" and the infamous ""intelligent design"". All relate to a final myth – that of ""science as truth"". By liberating evolution from these misrepresentative stories, we can find a more nuanced vision of life that shows how advantages persist, trust is beneficial, and the diversity of species emerges from a refinement of possibilities made possible by a chain of inheritance that stretches back to the beginnings of life itself.",6,"[""Chris Bateman offers in this book a set of myths(metaphors or stories) which he suggests are at the base of evolutionary theory as currently understood, believed and explained by specialists...We should be grateful to him for his close examination of terms that are commonly used in traditional evolutionary theory without examination and also for the alternative views which he presents. ~ Edward James, Paradigm Explorer"", ""The Mythology of Evolution is a commendable book. It is an accessible read, but with a firm basis in science and philosophy, and a vision of current and future intellectual struggles that seems fair and hopeful. I believe the book will be most appealing to those people (religious or not) who already value freedom and peace above the authority to proclaim truth. ~ Oscar Strik, Sub Specie"", ""This readable and insightful work restores sanity and reasonableness to philosophical reflection on evolution. Bateman carefully separates what is illuminating from what is misleading in the various metaphors and myths that have dominated evolutionary discourse... Scientists, philosophers and other intellectually interested readers will profit immensely from reading and reflecting on this thoughtful book.\n\n~ John F. Haught, Landegger Distinguished Professor of Theology at Georgetown University"", ""This book explores the many ways that extra-scientific metaphors, or myths, both color and constrain our view of evolution. Bateman shows that alternative myths are equally consistent with the data, but present a very different image of the evolutionary process. ~ John O. Reiss, Professor of Zoology & Department Chair Evolutionary and Developmental Morphology, Humboldt State University"", ""A book that’s badly needed and could be revolutionary. Bateman doesn’t just describe evolutionary theories but digs out their imaginative roots. He shows how essential it is to understand our myths properly since myths are not lies but powerful visions that can shape all our perceptions. This matters; read it! ~ Mary Midgley, Philosopher and Author of 'Beast and Man' and 'The Myths We Live By'"", ""In The Mythology of Evolution, Chris Bateman explains why ID and other creationist proposals are not science. But Bateman also has little tolerance for atheists who use evolution to argue against religion. If you want a thoughtful assessment of where evolution stands as a scientific theory, read this book. ~ Francisco Ayala, University Professor and Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine""]" Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene,"[""William Brown""]","Through an analysis of Buster Keaton’s classic The Navigator through the combined lenses of posthumanism and critical race theory, Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene deconstructs white modernity and posits a ‘black’ future.","Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene radically re-interprets Buster Keaton's iconic 1924 film, The Navigator, through the combined lenses of posthumanism and critical race theory. This book deconstructs the film's underlying anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity while exposing the unthinking whiteness of theorists and philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze, who have given Keaton's work pride of place in the history of cinema. Through its daring and provocative analysis of Keaton's classic, Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene invites us to consider cinema itself, at least in its classical narrative form, as a tool for constructing and maintaining white supremacy while building the conceptual tools for a world beyond whiteness.","Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene radically re-interprets Buster Keaton's iconic 1924 film, The Navigator, through the combined lenses of posthumanism and critical race theory. This book deconstructs the film's underlying anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity while exposing the unthinking whiteness of theorists and philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze, who have given Keaton's work pride of place in the history of cinema. Through its daring and provocative analysis of Keaton's classic, Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene invites us to consider cinema itself, at least in its classical narrative form, as a tool for constructing and maintaining white supremacy while building the conceptual tools for a world beyond whiteness.",0,[] Negative Capitalism,"[""Dan Taylor""]",A lucid and groundbreaking analysis of contemporary neoliberalism and its devastating effects for young people today.,"Thatcher's claim that 'There is No Alternative' to free-market capitalism has long rung hollow. Yet why is it that, despite the best efforts of protest movements, radical theorists and an increasingly liberal popular culture, when it comes to politics a consensus still reigns about the impossibility of change? Written to provoke reflection and discussion, Negative Capitalism argues that cynicism is the key feeling of our era, and an effect of our collective disempowerment by the political establishment. Produced for an informed but not academic reader, the book charts the negation of democratic power in chapters covering debt, mental health, meaningless political languages, popular cynicism and pornography. It also grounds its account of neoliberalism in political theory and history, focusing particularly on Thatcher's monetarism. It raises pertinent doubts about blind optimism, and concludes with a fiery, startling polemic.","Thatcher's claim that 'There is No Alternative' to free-market capitalism has long rung hollow. Yet why is it that, despite the best efforts of protest movements, radical theorists and an increasingly liberal popular culture, when it comes to politics a consensus still reigns about the impossibility of change? Written to provoke reflection and discussion, Negative Capitalism argues that cynicism is the key feeling of our era, and an effect of our collective disempowerment by the political establishment. Produced for an informed but not academic reader, the book charts the negation of democratic power in chapters covering debt, mental health, meaningless political languages, popular cynicism and pornography. It also grounds its account of neoliberalism in political theory and history, focusing particularly on Thatcher's monetarism. It raises pertinent doubts about blind optimism, and concludes with a fiery, startling polemic.",3,"[""Negative Capitalism represents a new generation of critique by what I've termed graduates without a future. Taylor brings together incisive and provocative analysis alongside personal experience to explore how debt, cynicism, smartphones, psychopharmacology, underemployment and neoliberalism all represent a new era of negation. In a time of economic meltdown and mass struggle, this book offers one way out of the current crisis. ~ Paul Mason, journalist and author of Why its Kicking Off Everywhere"", ""Seriously researched... its sections on London and gentrification, class and the riots, Ruin Porn and DIY Porn, the brave and risky notes on fascism, and the intriguing practical proposals near the end all really stand out. ~ Owen Hatherley, author of A New Kind of Bleak"", ""Negative Capitalism is a timely reminder of how a logic of negation is as central to an analysis of culture, politics, and the economy as it is to the machinations of capital itself. ~ Eugene Thacker, author of In The Dust Of This Planet""]" Neglected or Misunderstood: Introducing Theodor Adorno,"[""Stuart Walton""]",An introductory approach that evaluates Theodor Adorno's work in its own terms and within those of present-day critical theory.,"While Theodor Adorno has continued to be influential since his death in 1969, his very centrality has led to the left simplifying his ideas while the right placed him at the center of a myriad of wild conspiracy theories, all of them filed under the category of Cultural Marxism. Adorno has wrongly been blamed for everything from the Beatles to postmodernism, but he has continued to be read, if read badly. Stuart Walton's introduction to Adorno attempts to explain how this idiosyncratic thinker reframed elements of the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical in the fields of philosophy, sociology, politics and aesthetics and to rectify some of the major misunderstandings about Adorno and the Frankfurt School. When Walton began studying Adorno at Oxford in 1983 he felt that Adorno was nowhere in the English-speaking world, but that he should be everywhere. Now Adorno is everywhere, but hardly anywhere sufficiently or deeply understood.","While Theodor Adorno has continued to be influential since his death in 1969, his very centrality has led to the left simplifying his ideas while the right placed him at the center of a myriad of wild conspiracy theories, all of them filed under the category of Cultural Marxism. Adorno has wrongly been blamed for everything from the Beatles to postmodernism, but he has continued to be read, if read badly. Stuart Walton's introduction to Adorno attempts to explain how this idiosyncratic thinker reframed elements of the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical in the fields of philosophy, sociology, politics and aesthetics and to rectify some of the major misunderstandings about Adorno and the Frankfurt School. When Walton began studying Adorno at Oxford in 1983 he felt that Adorno was nowhere in the English-speaking world, but that he should be everywhere. Now Adorno is everywhere, but hardly anywhere sufficiently or deeply understood.",1,"[""No book about Adorno is going to be an easy read but Stuart Walton succeeds in offering an accessible overview of Adorno's work without over-simplifying it or the cultural contexts in which it developed. The book works both as an introduction and as a refresher for those returning to his thinking, particular for readers who are interested in what has happened to his reputation since they last checked. ~ Michael J, NetGalley""]" Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone,"[""Victoria Margree""]","Should pregnancy and childbirth be transformed, in order for women to be free?","Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex proved immediately controversial upon its publication in 1970. The book’s thesis is that the origins of women’s oppression lie in biology: in the fact that it is women and not men who conceive and give birth to children. Firestone’s solution is revolutionary: since it is biology that is the problem, then biology must be changed, through technological intervention that would have as its end the complete removal of the reproductive process from women’s bodies. With its proposal for the development of artificial wombs, its call for the abolition of the nuclear family and its vision of a cybernetic future, Firestone’s manifesto may seem hopelessly out-dated, a far-fetched, utopian hangover of Swinging Sixties radicalism. This book, on the contrary, will argue for its importance to the resurgent feminism of today as a text that interrogates issues around gender, biology, sexuality, work and technology, and the ways in which our imaginations in the 21st century continue to be in thrall to ideologies of maternity and the nuclear family.","Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex proved immediately controversial upon its publication in 1970. The book’s thesis is that the origins of women’s oppression lie in biology: in the fact that it is women and not men who conceive and give birth to children. Firestone’s solution is revolutionary: since it is biology that is the problem, then biology must be changed, through technological intervention that would have as its end the complete removal of the reproductive process from women’s bodies. With its proposal for the development of artificial wombs, its call for the abolition of the nuclear family and its vision of a cybernetic future, Firestone’s manifesto may seem hopelessly out-dated, a far-fetched, utopian hangover of Swinging Sixties radicalism. This book, on the contrary, will argue for its importance to the resurgent feminism of today as a text that interrogates issues around gender, biology, sexuality, work and technology, and the ways in which our imaginations in the 21st century continue to be in thrall to ideologies of maternity and the nuclear family.",2,"[""Clear-eyed, pedagogical and contemporary, Victoria Margree's reading of Firestone will be of use to anyone thinking about feminism and technology today. Providing clear historical and philosophical context, Margree provides a supremely balanced account of Firestone in all her complexity. With reference to other great feminist thinkers, the women's political movement, as well as recent developments in reproductive technology, Margree's book brings Firestone firmly up-to-date. ~ Nina Power, author of One Dimensional Woman"", ""Questioning, rigorous, yet accessible, this is an important contribution to the current reconsideration of the demonized visionary of Second Wave feminism. With careful attention to its intellectual influences and analytical coherence, Victoria Margree offers a lucid exposition of Shulamith Firestone’s argument against the power imbalances created by maternity. As the conservative challenge to contraception and abortion intensifies in Europe and the US, Margree concludes with an invaluable discussion of the post-Firestone politics of reproduction. ~ Mandy Merck, Co-Editor, Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex""]" "Neoliberal Undead, The:","[""Marc James Léger""]",Charting new directions for cultural theory and practice and offering alternatives to the project of neoliberal class restoration.,"The Neoliberal Undead describes the frightening world of class restoration, neoliberal austerity, ecological meltdown, and neo-imperialism – a disaster capitalism that breeds mutant ideological justifications for itself and the inevitability of disorder, poverty and suffering. What role does culture play in this world of markets and how do new contestatory forms enable a leftist solidarity that can move cultural radicalism beyond the postmodern obsession with new subjectivities? Rather than become the symptoms of democratic materialism, signing up for endless culture wars, The Neoliberal Undead argues for a rethinking of radical cultural leftism against the terms of the dominant global situation. The relentless reduction of art criticism and art production under capitalist relations requires that the living separate themselves from the abstractions of globalization and reconnect with revolutionary theory.","The Neoliberal Undead describes the frightening world of class restoration, neoliberal austerity, ecological meltdown, and neo-imperialism – a disaster capitalism that breeds mutant ideological justifications for itself and the inevitability of disorder, poverty and suffering. What role does culture play in this world of markets and how do new contestatory forms enable a leftist solidarity that can move cultural radicalism beyond the postmodern obsession with new subjectivities? Rather than become the symptoms of democratic materialism, signing up for endless culture wars, The Neoliberal Undead argues for a rethinking of radical cultural leftism against the terms of the dominant global situation. The relentless reduction of art criticism and art production under capitalist relations requires that the living separate themselves from the abstractions of globalization and reconnect with revolutionary theory.",3,"[""Mass upheavals of this decade now include Occupy, and the Squares movement in Europe. Such sustained radicalisation will eventually influence spheres, including art, distant from the putatively ‘proper’ site of politics. Canadian critic Marc James Léger’s recent contribution to these developing debates is The Neoliberal Undead: Essays on Contemporary Art and Politics.\n\n(...) A brief on the 2012 mass student strike in Québec constitutes the eighth chapter. As Léger recognises, it involved forces ranged from communists, to liberals, to identitarian movements. A red square – on, for example, armbands – was one symbol for this ‘Maple Spring’. Noting early Soviet artists, such as El Lissitzky, whose mobilising art used similar colour schemes and simplified geometry, Léger upholds the protesters’ chosen symbol. That symbol, first, is ‘associated with the power of organized structures’; and, second, is not ‘based on identity, but … on universal, emancipatory organization’ (143). The first point is hardly specific to his projected communist sequence; while anarchism can be conventionally opposed to such structure, other left tendencies are not. On the second point, the obvious question – which Léger does register – is how such a universalist understanding can be precipitously forced in the current period, given the heterogeneous empirical character of the actual struggle in Québec.\n\n(...) Léger’s approach is dialectical throughout the book, particularly regarding questions of art in capitalist versus socialist state institutions; and regarding art’s ability to ‘uncontain’ and stimulate a subjective dreaming. The Neoliberal Undead is a valuable contribution to dialogues around politics and aesthetics.\n\n14 May 2014 ~ Paul Mullan, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books"", ""The 'Neoliberal Undead' reads very much like a report from the 'front lines' and as such has the feel of a users' manual. These kind of books are important at the moment because they offer a quick retort to events. This book's work on art's advance into the 'creative industries' and the artist-as-entrepeneur is absolutely salient to any defence of autonomy now. And this is why the inflation of the artist as the paradigmatic post-Fordist worker today is so risible, for the semi-proletarianization and underemployment of the artist within an expanded global casual economy highlights how feeble the mantra of 'creativity' is under these conditions. ~ John Roberts"", ""Art criticism as institutional critique in this series of essays by Montreal-based artist and writer Marc James Léger. Largely produced between 2009 and 2011, Léger’s writings here have a strong focus on the Canadian art scene and its relationship with a broader culture and politics. Whilst some of the names and references may not be so well known outside of the context in which they operate, Léger’s forceful arguments around the oft-uneasy relationship between art and activism will chime for anyone tangentially involved in the Western world’s subjugated ‘culture industries’. ~ Tom Jeffreys, Editor The Journal of Wild Culture""]" Networkologies,"[""Christopher Vitale""]","Networks are the future: here's the first philosophy based on networks, a new image of thought for a hyperconnected age.","Networkologies is the first text to develop an entire new philosophy based upon networks. While many contemporary texts on networks have presented critiques or analyses of network formations in our world, this book is the first to develop an entirely new worldview based on the structure of networks themselves. From global capitalism to artificial minds, evolutionary biology to quantum physics, networks are our future. Networkologies presents us with a new image of thought for our hyperconnected age.","Networkologies is the first text to develop an entire new philosophy based upon networks. While many contemporary texts on networks have presented critiques or analyses of network formations in our world, this book is the first to develop an entirely new worldview based on the structure of networks themselves. From global capitalism to artificial minds, evolutionary biology to quantum physics, networks are our future. Networkologies presents us with a new image of thought for our hyperconnected age.",2,"[""We all know that we live in a networked world; but we do not really know just what a \""network\"" is. In this important and vital book, Christopher Vitale provides us with a full-fledged philosophy of networks. He considers the questions of where networks come from, of how they change and develop, and of what conditions may lead to their (and our) continued flourishing. Networkologies is solidly grounded in the latest science, but it is also a powerful work of speculative philosophy. It gives us both a vision of what we are, and intimations of what we might become. ~ Steven Shaviro, author of \""The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism\"""", ""Vitale is opening a truly philosophical, typological and topological understanding of networks in Contemporary Culture, well beyond the usual technical accounts of Internet development. Entering in a natural dialogue with some masters which have reflected on the concept and practice of relation (Bergson, Deleuze, Simondon among others), Vitale turns himself as a profound new voice which unveals the fascinating philosophical combinatorics of cultural complex systems. Through a series of well-defined tetrads, including immanence/relation/refraction/emergence, and node/link/ground/process, Vitale circumnavigates the explosive contradictions of our times,to offer new perspectives of visualization and integration. ~ Fernando Zalamea, Professor of Mathematics at Universidad Nacional de Cololmbia""]" "New Flesh, The","[""Adam C. Jones""]","Communication has taken on an accelerated viral character, and life is rendered ever more profitable as a simulation of itself.","From social media to so-called ‘AI’, from cyberpunk society to automated apartheid, The New Flesh asks and answers the same questions: What does it mean to live in an increasingly online world and what is it doing to us? The thesis is this: Data production has permeated everyday life, on platforms that addict the bored and enslave the dispossessed. Communication has taken on an accelerated viral character, life is rendered ever more as a profitable simulation of itself, and new fascisms arise to disseminate themselves through cyberspace and develop their imperial weaponry. The platform is a factory for producing content, and security technologies are increasingly being trained by human beings displaced and enclosed within digitalized plantations. When we can understand the interconnections between the internet and the empire, we can fight back. By fusing Marx and Engels with William Burroughs, Mark Fisher, and contemporary Queer Theory, Adam C. Jones takes cybernetic philosophy beyond hype and hyperbole, presenting a materialist politics of the psychological and economic relations that permeate cyberspace today.","From social media to so-called ‘AI’, from cyberpunk society to automated apartheid, The New Flesh asks and answers the same questions: What does it mean to live in an increasingly online world and what is it doing to us? The thesis is this: Data production has permeated everyday life, on platforms that addict the bored and enslave the dispossessed. Communication has taken on an accelerated viral character, life is rendered ever more as a profitable simulation of itself, and new fascisms arise to disseminate themselves through cyberspace and develop their imperial weaponry. The platform is a factory for producing content, and security technologies are increasingly being trained by human beings displaced and enclosed within digitalized plantations. When we can understand the interconnections between the internet and the empire, we can fight back. By fusing Marx and Engels with William Burroughs, Mark Fisher, and contemporary Queer Theory, Adam C. Jones takes cybernetic philosophy beyond hype and hyperbole, presenting a materialist politics of the psychological and economic relations that permeate cyberspace today.",4,"[""What have we become in the age of the algorithm? We are always already hybrid, plugged in, and inescapably logged on. With scrupulous philosophical rigor, Adam Jones sets a new standard for cybernetic philosophy, moving past the tired nostalgia of cyberpunk and the pathetic fetishizing of contemporary techno-capital. At last we have here modern techno-philosophy with blood in it — an examination of the new flesh we all share and a guide to the postmodern mediation of technology that structures sociality. An essential read and a superb example of what philosophy could and should be as the contradictions of contemporary internet culture continue to accelerate. ~ Jon Greenaway, author of Capitalism: A Horror Story"", ""In a world where the lines between flesh and data are increasingly blurred, The New Flesh stands as a crucial text for both organizers and researchers. It dissects the morbid loop of digital consumption that now defines our existence, conditioning and confining the potentialities of our emancipatory movements. This book is essential reading for anyone struggling with the relentless consumption of online violence, where we witness endless images of death without understanding why we remain passive, trapped in cycles of self — and collective — replication that dominate both our online and offline lives. ~ Islam al Khatib, researcher in the relationship between technology and fascism"", ""A much-needed book on the convergence between the body and the automaton. I found it enormously interesting. ~ Franco 'Bifo' Berardi"", ""Far more has been grafted onto our libidinal skin since David Cronenberg inserted a VHS tape into an abdomen in 1983. In The New Flesh, Adam Jones expertly maps out the endocrine updates of a 21st-century cybernetics, the pleasures of our new communicative organs, and the necessity of a new politics capable of short-circuiting their illusory freedoms. As we start to more closely resemble the automatons that science-fiction long dreamt about, it is not an AI jailbreak we should be worried about, but our acquisition of a new autonomy that is worthy of the name. Let Jones be your guide to a future escape. ~ Mattie Colquhoun, author of 'Narcissus in Bloom'""]" "New Work, New Culture","[""Frithjof Bergmann""]",A proposed alternative to the failing job system.,"The “job system” for organizing work has only existed for around 200 years - since the industrial revolution. Always problematic, it now approaches collapse, and what follows, either for good or ill, depends on decisions made and executed in current times. Many people are filled with dismay, and turn for succor to political opportunists. Prescient of the looming disaster, Frithjof Bergmann began to devise alternatives to the job system in the 1970s. He started with the fostering of dialogue; about ameliorating the impacts of layoffs in times of recession, among the workforce in the auto industry and community, in Flint, Michigan. What has evolved, over years, is his proposed alternative to the job system. New Work, New Culture recounts the development of his ideas, and describes one course which humanity might follow, that all might live better lives.","The “job system” for organizing work has only existed for around 200 years - since the industrial revolution. Always problematic, it now approaches collapse, and what follows, either for good or ill, depends on decisions made and executed in current times. Many people are filled with dismay, and turn for succor to political opportunists. Prescient of the looming disaster, Frithjof Bergmann began to devise alternatives to the job system in the 1970s. He started with the fostering of dialogue; about ameliorating the impacts of layoffs in times of recession, among the workforce in the auto industry and community, in Flint, Michigan. What has evolved, over years, is his proposed alternative to the job system. New Work, New Culture recounts the development of his ideas, and describes one course which humanity might follow, that all might live better lives.",0,[] Night,"[""Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh""]",Engages the myriad dimensions of Night in order to explore the human experience of the after-dark.,"This short book engages the myriad dimensions of Night, through ancient rituals, medieval storytelling, modern philosophy, and futuristic images, in order to explore the human experience of the after-dark. It thereby tracks Night through the prisms of its most fascinating practitioners: namely, those who keep strange hours and navigate the various potentialities of nocturnal experience (both of terror and enchantment). The Thief’s Night; The Runaway’s Night; The Drunkard’s Night; The Insomniac’s Night; The Revolutionary’s Night; The Lunatic’s Night; The Sorcerer’s Night. Undoubtedly, each of these conceptual figures provides a unique gateway into understanding the powerful sensorial effects of evening, as well as its vast connections to larger questions of time, space, fear, nothingness, desire, death, forgetting, vision, secrecy, criminality, monstrosity, and the body.","This short book engages the myriad dimensions of Night, through ancient rituals, medieval storytelling, modern philosophy, and futuristic images, in order to explore the human experience of the after-dark. It thereby tracks Night through the prisms of its most fascinating practitioners: namely, those who keep strange hours and navigate the various potentialities of nocturnal experience (both of terror and enchantment). The Thief’s Night; The Runaway’s Night; The Drunkard’s Night; The Insomniac’s Night; The Revolutionary’s Night; The Lunatic’s Night; The Sorcerer’s Night. Undoubtedly, each of these conceptual figures provides a unique gateway into understanding the powerful sensorial effects of evening, as well as its vast connections to larger questions of time, space, fear, nothingness, desire, death, forgetting, vision, secrecy, criminality, monstrosity, and the body.",2,"[""I have read two of the author’s books prior to reading this and I find the latter very much in keeping with his remarkable voice and almost sui generis approach to and retrieval of contemporary non-western thought. Mohaghegh challenges the prevailing contours of philosophy, creatively and philosophically rethinking not only what matters to philosophy but also how philosophy can matter. ~ Jason Wirth, Professor of Philosophy, Seattle University"", ""Night emerges as an intellectually unique and methodologically courageous work...Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh's stylistic and methodological novelty is a great advantage, for it gives the reader the chaotic and multidimensional universe of culture, and increasingly the world in which live. It gives us not a clear and transparent unity, a structure, but an ever-changing, fractal cosmos, and invites the reader to follow the trace of the affect in the everyday. ~ Mahmut Mutman, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Tampere""]" "Night, Volume II","[""Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh""]","To enter the many experiential chambers of Night--space, silence, cruelty, secrecy--and thereby confront a vision of the end of worlds.","This book follows and expands on the boundaries of its precursor Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark by presenting a series of new conceptual territories, figures, sources, images and imaginative possibilities. The central idea of Night is contemplated in its intricate relation to space, silence, cruelty and secrecy while also taking thought toward the futural limits of a vision of the last world.","This book follows and expands on the boundaries of its precursor Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark by presenting a series of new conceptual territories, figures, sources, images and imaginative possibilities. The central idea of Night is contemplated in its intricate relation to space, silence, cruelty and secrecy while also taking thought toward the futural limits of a vision of the last world.",1,"[""There are always—by twists of fate—deviant exceptions. Mohaghegh’s Night: A Philosophy of the Last World is precisely one of such exceptions. Navigating the undercurrents and the untrodden cave systems which form that tenebrous underside of literature upon which the greatest works have been casually or rigorously erected, Mohaghegh’s Night project is more akin to a play, set after the sunset where the unconscious forces of literature begin to take center stage in a plot that involves feats of ambush, intrigue, tremors, terror, and an easy quietude, where the bite of night leaves its greatest mark on us. ~ Reza Negarestani, author of Cyclonopedia""]" No Bosses,"[""Michael Albert""]","Providing hope and direction to sustain commitment on the path to change, No Bosses is about winning a new world.","Life under capitalism. Rampant debilitating denial for the many next to vile enrichment of the few. Material deprivation, denial, and denigration. Dignity defiled. Michael Albert's book No Bosses advocates for the conception and then organization of a new economy. The vision offered is called participatory economics. It elevates self-management, equity, solidarity, diversity, and sustainability. It eliminates elitist, arrogant, dismissive, authoritarian, exploitation, competition, and homogenization. No Bosses proposes a built and natural productive commons, self-management by all who work, income for how long, how hard, and the onerousness of conditions of socially valued work, jobs that give all economic actors comparable means and inclination to participate in decisions that affect them, and a process called participatory planning in which caring behavior and solidarity are the currency of collective and individual success.","Life under capitalism. Rampant debilitating denial for the many next to vile enrichment of the few. Material deprivation, denial, and denigration. Dignity defiled. Michael Albert's book No Bosses advocates for the conception and then organization of a new economy. The vision offered is called participatory economics. It elevates self-management, equity, solidarity, diversity, and sustainability. It eliminates elitist, arrogant, dismissive, authoritarian, exploitation, competition, and homogenization. No Bosses proposes a built and natural productive commons, self-management by all who work, income for how long, how hard, and the onerousness of conditions of socially valued work, jobs that give all economic actors comparable means and inclination to participate in decisions that affect them, and a process called participatory planning in which caring behavior and solidarity are the currency of collective and individual success.",11,"[""Read No Bosses and you will be changed. Read it and you will have hope. Read it and you will want to live in a Parsoc world. Read it and you will ask yourself, why aren’t we doing this already? ~ Bridget Meehan, The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability"", ""Unlike many of the more pretentious offerings of leading left thinkers, Albert’s general approach to discussing economic justice has great commonsense appeal. This comes as a much-needed breath of fresh air for those who are sick of the more pompous intellectual tendencies on the left. This is not to say that the book is in any way anti-intellectual. On the contrary, it is full of great ideas and practicable solutions to real-world problems. ~ Mark Evans, Common Dreams"", ""A prime goal of Albert’s work is to help to reinvigorate that common understanding and to revive the commitment to mutual aid and solidarity, and most important, to spell out in some detail how the goals can be realized. ~ Noam Chomsky"", ""'No bosses’ means that no one tells anyone what to do from above, not owners or commissars. “But, how do things get done?”, comes the inevitable question. To answer it, Michael begins analytically, methodically, by first answering the question “How should things not get done?” ~ Yanis Varoufakis"", ""Michael Albert’s No Bossesis easy reading, thanks to his unique folksy style, but heavy thinking. Be ready to challenge your own narrow view of “the possible.” I recommend that after every sentence, paragraph or chapter that has you saying, “Nice idea but it just won’t work,” remind yourself that the present system doesn’t work (unless, of course, you think Jeff Bezos’s deserves to make $10 million an hour and the climate crisis is not an existential threat.) So read it with delight at the creative ways we can organize—asap—to sweep Mr. Moneybags into the dustbin of history and create the new equitable, participatory, empowering and sustainable world that we want to live in. ~ Medea Benjamin, author and cofounder of CODEPINK."", ""What I love about Michael Albert's works is that they are about vision and about the possible. He does not argue whether the future that he proposes is probable, but rather insists that it is necessary. His latest book A New Economy for a New Worker accomplishes just that and is a delight to read.\""--Bill Fletcher, Jr., coauthor of Solidarity Divided; author of \""They're Bankrupting Us\"" - And Twenty other myths about unions; former president of TransAfrica Forum. ~ Bill Fletcher"", ""Tired of working for a boss but don't want just to trade your boss for a new boss? Tired of living in a system run by bosses but don't want to swap it for a system run by other bosses? Take a look at Michael Albert's NO BOSSES: A NEW ECONOMY FOR A BETTER WORLD. You'll have a hard time finding a better guide to moving from capitalism to a genuinely free, equal, and participatory economy. ~ Jeremy Brecher"", ""Michael Albert has the courage and the background to propose solutions to the multitude of our social problems in his new book “A New Economy for a Better World”. Also, he has the life-experience to suggest: “Don’t just cling and curse. Swim.” For this he uses one of the most important words in our social vocabulary: “Resist”! Resistance in essence is a moral act. Also, we do not resist alone. We resist together with our neighbour, or as he puts it “all people share responsibilities”. - Nikos Raptis, Civil Engineer (retired), and writer. He lives in Athens, Greece. ~ Nikos Raptis Y"", ""The collapse of socialist and Soviet-type experiments became a heavy burden for post-capitalist perspectives precisely at a time when they are most needed. Michael Albert has devoted his life to re-creating visions and a strategy towards a better future. No Bosses, A New Economy for a Better World offers a refined, compelling argument in favor of a non-capitalist, participatory economics. His vision is of utmost importance for people and social movements struggling for a better world. ~ Ezequiel Adamovsky"", ""Michael Albert firmly rejects capitalism, often through bluntly questioning its basic tenets. Why should people who already have so much be entitled to get more? Why not admire and pursue excellence and expertise without rewarding it with undue material wealth or social power? The arguments in No Bossesgo well beyond iconoclasm. Seriously and carefully, Albert aims to create a framework, a “scaffold,” for a worthy economic plan. Building on three decades of research, he describes participatory economics with enjoyable candor, raising as many questions as he answers and inviting readers to set cynicism aside. My advice: equip yourself with a big “Why not?” and give this vision plenty of attention. –Kathy Kelly, activist and author of “Other Lands Have Dreams, from Baghdad to Pekin Prison” ~ Kathy Kelly"", ""After Sanders and Black Lives Matter, amidst COVID and Global Warming, many ask what’s next? Michael Albert’s new book, “No Bosses,” proposes an answer for economics from self managed decision making to balanced work and from equitable incomes to ending class division. “No Bosses”should be widely read as we assess the way forward in this unprecedented moment in the history of this nation. — Dr. Ron Daniels, Social and Political Activist, President of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century ~ Ron Daniels""]" "No Justice, No Police?","[""Matt Clement""]",Why have the police become the new public enemy? Can society keep the peace more effectively with or without them?,"Sparked by the brutal police murder of George Floyd, the second wave of the #blacklivesmatter protest movement has surged across more than 100 US cities, spilling into Brazil, South Africa, Paris and London - to name a few of the primary sites of active resistance. This is a new movement, international in scope, with a disproportionately large section of young people - Black and white - using their own language and tactics to fundamentally challenge the whole range of racist institutions governing today’s globalised world. Matt Clement’s No Justice, No Police? The Politics of Protest and Social Change chronicles this movement as it continues to deepen and broaden.","Sparked by the brutal police murder of George Floyd, the second wave of the #blacklivesmatter protest movement has surged across more than 100 US cities, spilling into Brazil, South Africa, Paris and London - to name a few of the primary sites of active resistance. This is a new movement, international in scope, with a disproportionately large section of young people - Black and white - using their own language and tactics to fundamentally challenge the whole range of racist institutions governing today’s globalised world. Matt Clement’s No Justice, No Police? The Politics of Protest and Social Change chronicles this movement as it continues to deepen and broaden.",4,"[""No Justice, No Police? The Politics of Protest and Social Change\n\nBook Endorsement\n\nIt is courageous to say no to police. Not just no in our encounters with police officers, but also no to the architecture and discourses of policing. Our lives are so deeply embedded in a policing lens that even critical criminologists perfunctorily assume a policing response is best or necessary. Matt Clement and the contributors to this collection take on the daring task of refuting the power and role of police, and do so with practical resolutions as to the pathway out of a policing response to violence. Reformation may be necessary to make the lives of those captured by police just a little less punitive. We have liberals to do that triage. As radical activists, scholars, and pracademics, the contributors to this collection provoke us to think otherwise about what is harm, what is safety, and who is best placed to enliven justice?\n\nWhether we frame this necessary work as abolishing or defunding police—or as I prefer, refunding communities—as Jeff Ferrell reminds us in his foreword, Bakunin saw creativity in destruction. We need to build as we dismantle, and what we need now are activists, scholars, and provocateurs who can reimagine social relationships that are not mediated by the authorised force of police (or social workers!). The contributors to this collection highlight the myriad of ways that modern policing fails. It fails to prevent crime; it fails to control crime; it fails to facilitate justice, and it fails the people caught up in their wide and thin nets. The contributors to this collection, however, also incite us with their fertile ideas about life without (the need for) police. If not a blueprint, No Justice, No Police?, at least, offers us a refuge where we can safely dream and test how it could be otherwise.\n\n~ Professor Nicole L Asquith , Chair of Policing & Emergency Management, University of Tasmania, Director, Tasmanian Institute of Law Enforcement Studies"", ""This timely edited volume exposes a threatening dialectic manoeuvre: the 21st century is returning to the situation present within the origins of capitalist society when the military was in charge of public surveillance, but now it does so in a more egregious manner: through militarized policing. However, the book does not leave us without hope. Instead, it is a call to build upon a worldwide social movement demanding the defunding of the police and proposing a transformative way of dealing with crime and punishment.\n\nAuthor of 'Marxism and Criminology' (2018) Chicago:Haymarket ~ Valeria Vegh Weis: , Researcher, Konstanz Universität, Germany: Professor of Criminology, Universidad de Buenos Aires"", ""Globally, there are increasing concerns about police use of force within both democratic nation-states and authoritarian regimes. This is combined with a growing awareness of the fact that criminal justice systems are institutionally racist. This book does an admirable job of drawing together these issues and asking urgent questions: what is the role of the police; what could justice be in the 21st century; do black lives really matter? The book will be invaluable for all students interested in justice, equality and rights in the age of Black Lives Matter. ~ David Baker, author of We are Not the Enemy, University of Liverpool, UK"", ""This collective volume edited by Matt Clement achieves something few of us might have anticipated. Setting off with analyses of struggles for justice, through to re-discussions of ‘policing the crisis’ and the return of colonial models of policing, the book lands on the terrain of what criminologists identify as abolitionism. A refreshing journey that successfully crosses several areas of the social sciences.\n\n, ~ Professor Vincenzo Ruggiero, Middlesex University, London (UK)""]" No Local,"[""Greg Sharzer""]","Local food, local business and buying local won't change the world. Challenging market priorities will. Here's why.","Can making things smaller make the world a better place? No Local takes a critical look at localism, an ideology that says small businesses, ethical shopping and community initiatives like gardens and farmers’ markets can stop corporate globalization. These small acts might make life better for some, but they don’t challenge the drive for profit that’s damaging our communities and the earth. No Local shows how localism’s fixation on small comes from an outdated economic model. Growth is built into capitalism. Small firms must play by the same rules as large ones, cutting costs, exploiting workers and damaging the environment. Localism doesn’t ask who controls production, allowing it to be co-opted by governments offloading social services onto the poor. At worst, localism becomes a strategy for neoliberal politics, not an alternative to it.","Can making things smaller make the world a better place? No Local takes a critical look at localism, an ideology that says small businesses, ethical shopping and community initiatives like gardens and farmers’ markets can stop corporate globalization. These small acts might make life better for some, but they don’t challenge the drive for profit that’s damaging our communities and the earth. No Local shows how localism’s fixation on small comes from an outdated economic model. Growth is built into capitalism. Small firms must play by the same rules as large ones, cutting costs, exploiting workers and damaging the environment. Localism doesn’t ask who controls production, allowing it to be co-opted by governments offloading social services onto the poor. At worst, localism becomes a strategy for neoliberal politics, not an alternative to it.",2,"[""\""In No Local, Greg Sharzer places the claims of localism to the test, finding that “hidden beneath localism’s DIY attitude is a deep pessimism: it assumes we can’t make large-scale, collective social change” (3). While the movement toward small-scale economies might deserve praise for its community-centered, humanistic worldview, as well as for identifying the problems with the current regime of neoliberalism, Sharzer argues that localism proceeds from a fundamental confusion about the nature of the capitalist economy, and this confusion undermines the ability of the movement to offer any real palliative to the current system, much less a viable alternative.\""\n\nhttp://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2014/1460 ~ Donald Lancaster, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books"", ""Against a backdrop of global climate disasters, financial panics, and inequality, localism — the creation of small-scale local systems of production and distribution — seems to make sense. Start small and stay close to home; forge community ties, grow your own food locally, and create alternatives that can eventually replace the current system of global capitalism with a sane, sustainable way of life. By providing this alternative, the local will overwhelm global capitalism. Death by a thousand cuts. But can the power of global capitalism be undone through establishing bike paths, cooperatives, bartering, alternative local currencies, community gardens, and small businesses?\n\nGreg Sharzer’s well-researched book, with the unfortunate title No Local, argues no. Localism is incapable of displacing capitalism or even effectively challenging it because it fails to understand how capitalism works. “It sees the effect of unbridled competition, but not its cause.” By failing to understand how profit drives production, localism is blind to the pressures capitalism applies to its proposed remedies, which rely on the market or involve time and money that most working-class people don’t have. More utopian ideology than political framework, and too often served with a dose of moral superiority, localism never adequately explains by what magic small businesses or collectives can eclipse giant corporations.\n\nThreads from localist authors, stretching back to Marx’s contemporary Pierre Proudhon and forward to modern authors like Barbara Kingsolver, Bill McKibben, Carlo Petrini, Michael Shuman, and E. F. Schumacher are scrutinized in constructive ways to highlight the profound gaps in their utopian remedies. No Local also shines a light on the often-neglected issue of class in the environmental movement.\n\nThe title is a nod to fellow Canadian Naomi Klein’s influential No Logo, published in 1999 and highly popular in the global justice movement. Despite the categorical title, Sharzer is not condemning the benefits of local action, but pointing out localism’s inadequacies and contradictions as a model of social change. Beyond Local might have better conveyed the book’s central message. Regardless, anyone who has encountered or explored the politics of localism must read this book. We are living through an unprecedented environmental crisis that requires a global solution of historic proportions. We must reexamine all of localism’s assumptions and place the environmental and social justice movements on a stronger theoretical foundation if we are to mount a serious, viable defense of the planet.\n\nNo Local begins with a brief history of capitalism and a cogent explanation of its inner workings, centered on Marx’s labor theory of value. Localism seeks a return to a preindustrial economic model that romanticizes small-scale production. But simplicity and smaller scale will not get rid of the social relations that underlay capitalism. Equal exchange and bartering don’t address the theft inherent even in small-scale capitalism, where workers are still paid less than the exchange value of the things they create, no matter the scale of production. Localists confuse use value and exchange value, forgetting that capitalism prioritizes profit (value) over human need (use value). By ignoring this question, localism leaves the question of exploitation unanswered and fails to root out the capitalist dynamic- accumulation for accumulation’s sake-that leads us to our current dilemma.\n\nSharzer insists that localism ends up apologizing for capitalism:\n\n“For Marx, this is more than just false: it ‘is accepting the present state of affairs; it is, in short, making an apology… for a society without understanding it.’ Unfortunately, any apology for capitalism gets in the way of finding real solutions. . .. [E]conomists who accept the market always end up back where they began: at an ideal capitalism, with its ugly contradictions hidden behind visions of social harmony. This has a long history.”\n\nSharzer distinguishes between promarket and antimarket versions of localism. Promarket localism supports local businesses over their global competitors and urges lower rates of consumption. It accepts the market as a permanent feature of life and hopes that small-scale production will, over time, eradicate our current ills. These promarket assumptions are based on the interests of the middle class and small-business owners threatened by corporate competition.\n\nThe reality is that no hard line exists between the local and the global. While small may be beautiful for some business owners, it certainly isn’t for most employees, or even the environment.\n\nLocally spent money doesn’t necessarily stay in a community. Business is reliant on tools and equipment made abroad. The cash register, computer, and industrial oven at your local bakery were probably not made down the road. Money might stay in the community for a cycle or two, but quickly moves on. Small-scale local production is usually less efficient and thereby less profitable, which is why small businesses pay only two-thirds of the wages of companies with more than five hundred employees, and often don’t offer health insurance. In addition, 83 percent of US small-business owners in a 2010 study were older, married, white men. One UK study cited by Sharzer concluded that small businesses are the least likely to “safeguard the environment.”\n\nA pillar of promarket localism is the concept of ethical consumption. The idea is that if “consumers buy locally-sourced goods from ethical sellers”-for example, organic produce-”they’ll shrink the economy to a more rational, sustainable level.” A select group pays more for products, propping up businesses that the market would otherwise devour. This doesn’t challenge the market mechanism, nor does it address the question of the means to ethically produce adequate food for the billions who go hungry on the planet and cannot afford to pay more.\n\nThe antimarket localists focus on democratic, decentralized, prefigurative communities and methods of production. While anticapitalist, these small-scale experiments don’t realistically challenge capitalism. Antimarket localism’s greatest weakness is the assumption that everything society needs can be produced locally. It fails to address the complexities of modern production and distribution, romanticizing feudalism and precapitalist societies.\n\nA planet with seven billion people and one billion Facebook accounts should never go back to bartering, surviving on grain and root vegetables all winter, or making our own clothes, except for our own individual amusement. Modern humans under capitalism have created an incredibly complex, specialized system of production and distribution. Rather than casting aside modern methods of production and distribution, they should be recast based on human priorities. That requires a difficult, head-on confrontation rather than the fantasy of communes gradually supplanting capitalism.\n\nBoth pro and antimarket localism seek to limit technology and transportation, which are seen as energy inefficient. But local food production might not reduce energy inputs. Growing and storing food in colder climates can often use more energy than needed for transportation. As Sharzer notes, 83 percent of food-related carbon emissions come from the production of food, while only 11 percent is due to transportation.\n\nThe political orientation of the localists is essentially that of the middle class-defined by Sharzer not only as shopkeepers and other owners of small businesses, but also professionals, “junior executives and office workers” whose mode of work encourages aggressive individualism. Because of their investment in the status quo, the progressive petite bourgeoisie avoids class conflict and longs for social peace. They are drawn to individual actions over collective responses. They look to consumption as the way to express social power rather than class location. They prioritize lifestyle choices, emphasizing morality and selfrestraint. Rather than aiming their fire at the corporations and the US military-industrial complex, they blame the individual consumer. We should stop shopping at Walmart and driving SUVs. Volunteer and strengthen your local community, buy organic food and a Prius. The end result is a narrow, cultural escape built inside the walls of capitalism.\n\nThe alternative is class struggle. Sharzer defends Marxism’s orientation on confronting crises, exploitation, and oppression through collective action as the key process by which people gain the knowledge to transform the world and themselves. Struggle can be local or global. Sharzer’s point is that such struggles must be confrontations- one class against another-that pose a challenge to the system rather than localism’s polite resistance, which is like a mosquito biting an elephant.\n\nThis review was first published in International Socialist Review.\n\n~ Michael Ware, Climate and Capitalism""]" No More Heroes?,"[""Carl Neville""]","Neoliberalism, steroids, cocaine, deregulation and finance as reflected in the films of the 70s.","The interface between neoliberalism, steroids, cocaine, finance and American mythology as reflected in the films of the 70s and 80s.","The interface between neoliberalism, steroids, cocaine, finance and American mythology as reflected in the films of the 70s and 80s.",1,"[""Austrian strongmen have often had a malign influence on 20th century history. Holding out for a Hero makes a bold claim - that the true, rippling-muscled embodiment of the 'Austrian school' neoliberal economists was the Styrian bodybuilder and rightwing activist Arnold Schwarzenegger. It follows his influence through a landscape populated by monster trucks, closing car factories, apocalyptic visions and heartland dreams. A bizarre, exhilarating and mordant secret history of the 1980s ~ Owen Hatherley, Author of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso) and Militant Modernism.""]" Non-Stop Inertia,"[""Ivor Southwood""]","A theoretical investigation into the culture of precarious work, digital consumption and personal flexibility, calling for a counter-discourse of resistance.","In our culture of short-term work, mobile communications and rolling media, it seems we are always on the move; but are we really getting anywhere? Non-Stop Inertia argues that this appearance of restless activity conceals and indeed maintains a deep paralysis of thought and action, and that rather than being unquestionable or inevitable, the environment of personal flexibility and perpetual crisis which we now inhabit is ideologically constructed.","In our culture of short-term work, mobile communications and rolling media, it seems we are always on the move; but are we really getting anywhere? Non-Stop Inertia argues that this appearance of restless activity conceals and indeed maintains a deep paralysis of thought and action, and that rather than being unquestionable or inevitable, the environment of personal flexibility and perpetual crisis which we now inhabit is ideologically constructed.",1,"[""One of the pithiest and most powerful descriptions of the political economy of inertia. Southwood really anatomises the new culture of the workplace that ties the precarity of finding work and keeping work to this culture of enforced positive thinking and action. That’s what he’s describing as ‘non-stop inertia,’ because you feel like you’re never really getting anywhere. ~ Josh Cohen, psychoanalyst, professor of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of Not Working: Why We Have to Stop""]" Norms Under Siege. The Parallel Political Lives of Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi,"[""Edoardo M Fracanzani""]","Both leaders have amassed huge followings, ready to support them at all costs, sometimes having observers wonder if this bond should be considered a cult, rather than political affiliation.","A look at the striking similarities between Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi, from their business and TV backgrounds to the unprecedented way in which they broke into politics. Both leaders introduced new language patterns, deepened the political wedge between parties, and managed to recruit a significant base of followers; should they be considered a cult, rather than political affiliation? In Norms Under Siege, Edoardo M. Fracanzani goes beyond comparisons between Trump and Berlusconi and asks what is revealed about the kind of society that would allow their rise to power.","A look at the striking similarities between Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi, from their business and TV backgrounds to the unprecedented way in which they broke into politics. Both leaders introduced new language patterns, deepened the political wedge between parties, and managed to recruit a significant base of followers; should they be considered a cult, rather than political affiliation? In Norms Under Siege, Edoardo M. Fracanzani goes beyond comparisons between Trump and Berlusconi and asks what is revealed about the kind of society that would allow their rise to power.",0,[] Now and Forever: Towards a theory and history of the loop,"[""Tilman Baumgärtel""]",A Secret Acoustic History of the 20th Century,"Elvis Presley and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The Beatles and Andy Warhol. Terry Riley and Ken Kesey. What all these artists have in common is that loops have played a significant role in their work. The short sequences of sounds or images repeated using recording media have proved to be an astonishingly flexible, versatile and momentous aesthetic method in post-World War II art and music. Today, loops must be counted among the most important creative tools of postmodern art and music. Yet until now they have been largely overlooked as an aesthetic phenomenon. Now, for the first time, this book tells a secret story of the 20th century: how a formerly inconspicuous basic function of all modern media technology gave rise to complete artistic oeuvres, musical styles such as minimal music, hip hop and techno, and, most recently, entire scenes and subcultures that would have been unthinkable without loops.","Elvis Presley and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The Beatles and Andy Warhol. Terry Riley and Ken Kesey. What all these artists have in common is that loops have played a significant role in their work. The short sequences of sounds or images repeated using recording media have proved to be an astonishingly flexible, versatile and momentous aesthetic method in post-World War II art and music. Today, loops must be counted among the most important creative tools of postmodern art and music. Yet until now they have been largely overlooked as an aesthetic phenomenon. Now, for the first time, this book tells a secret story of the 20th century: how a formerly inconspicuous basic function of all modern media technology gave rise to complete artistic oeuvres, musical styles such as minimal music, hip hop and techno, and, most recently, entire scenes and subcultures that would have been unthinkable without loops.",2,"[""\""Repetition is both as old as time and the defining characteristic of our postmodern age. In Now and Forever, Tilman Baumgärtel deftly examines this cultural paradox via the cyclical operations inherent to technical media: film and audiotape loops, analog synthesizers, and, ultimately, the computers that now replicate them.\"" ~ Dr Andrew Lison, University at Buffalo, SUNY"", ""\""Baumgärtel explores the phenomenon of the loop not just as a music-historical but as a broad socio-cultural phenomenon. A seminal work for anyone interested in the histories, technologies, and aesthetics of musical repetition.\""\n\n~ Dr Christine Dysers, Uppsala University""]" Nuclear Futurism,"[""Liam Sprod""]","In the time of ends, the most dangerous technology of nuclear weapons confronts us with a new philosophy of the future.","Starting from the end of history, the end of art and the failure of the future set out by such ends, Nuclear Futurism reinvigorates art, literature and philosophy through the unlikely alliance of hauntology and the Italian futurists. Tracing the paradoxes of the possibilities of total nuclear destruction reveals the terminal condition of culture in the time of ends, where the logic of the apocalyptic without apocalypse holds sway. These paradoxes also open the path for a new vision of the future in the form of experimental art and literature. By re-examining the thought of both Derrida and Heidegger with regards to the history of art, the art of history and their responses to the most dangerous technology of nuclear weapons the future is exposed as a progressive event, rather than the atrophied and apocalyptic to-come of the present world. It is happening now, opening up through the force of art and literature and charting a new path for a futural philosophy.","Starting from the end of history, the end of art and the failure of the future set out by such ends, Nuclear Futurism reinvigorates art, literature and philosophy through the unlikely alliance of hauntology and the Italian futurists. Tracing the paradoxes of the possibilities of total nuclear destruction reveals the terminal condition of culture in the time of ends, where the logic of the apocalyptic without apocalypse holds sway. These paradoxes also open the path for a new vision of the future in the form of experimental art and literature. By re-examining the thought of both Derrida and Heidegger with regards to the history of art, the art of history and their responses to the most dangerous technology of nuclear weapons the future is exposed as a progressive event, rather than the atrophied and apocalyptic to-come of the present world. It is happening now, opening up through the force of art and literature and charting a new path for a futural philosophy.",2,"[""Un libro come Nuclear Futurism di Liam Sprod (Zer0 books 2012), in cui Derrida viene confrontato con Marinetti, è il segno di una apertura del mondo di lingua inglese in altri tempi inconcepibile\n\n[A book like Nuclear Futurism by Liam Sprod (Zer0 books 2012), in which Derrida is compared with Marinetti, is the sign of an opening of the English-speaking world that was inconceivable in the past] ~ MAURIZIO FERRARIS, La Repubblica : http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2013/12/19/web-platonico-cosi-il-dibattito-filosofico-si.html?ref=search"", ""The central thesis of the book, that this hauntological futurity is applicable to a study of Italian Futurism, remains an interesting topic, and my only criticism would be that I would have preferred a longer study which pays greater attention to Futurist works of art themselves, as well as the famous manifestos. The care and attention paid to the construction and qualification of the arguments in Nuclear Futurism is both admirable but also the reason why you wouldn’t exactly pick this book up unless you had a specific interest in doing so. It is most definitely ‘difficult theory’, not because it is particularly difficult per se, or lacking in clarity, rather, the arguments are so dense and well qualified that any clumsy turns of thought are banished, and what remains is 120 pages of taut and challenging philosophical investigation. The book doesn’t let up until the endnotes, so anyone spying its slim spine and considering a quick theory fix should be warned off - this is hardcore. ~ Callam Green, Review31: http://review31.co.uk/article/view/118/apocalypse-tomorrow""]" OccupyMedia!,"[""Christian Fuchs""]","OccupyMedia! shows how Occupy activists confront capitalism and communication in a world of crisis, capitalism, surveillance and social media.","The Occupy movement has emerged in a historical crisis of global capitalism. It struggles for the reappropriation of the commodified commons. Communications are part of the commons of society. Yet contemporary social media are ridden by an antagonism between private corporate control (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and self-managed, commons-based activist media. In this work, Christian Fuchs analyses the contradictory dialectic of social media in the Occupy movement. Drawing on a political economy framework and interpretation of the results of the OccupyMedia! Survey, in which more than 400 Occupy activists reported on their social media use, OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism shows how activists confront the contradictions of capitalism and communication in the age of crisis and social media. The book discusses the contradiction between commercial and alternative social media and argues that the existence of a surveillance-industrial complex expressed in the PRISM system shows the urgent necessity to create social media beyond Facebook and Google.","The Occupy movement has emerged in a historical crisis of global capitalism. It struggles for the reappropriation of the commodified commons. Communications are part of the commons of society. Yet contemporary social media are ridden by an antagonism between private corporate control (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and self-managed, commons-based activist media. In this work, Christian Fuchs analyses the contradictory dialectic of social media in the Occupy movement. Drawing on a political economy framework and interpretation of the results of the OccupyMedia! Survey, in which more than 400 Occupy activists reported on their social media use, OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism shows how activists confront the contradictions of capitalism and communication in the age of crisis and social media. The book discusses the contradiction between commercial and alternative social media and argues that the existence of a surveillance-industrial complex expressed in the PRISM system shows the urgent necessity to create social media beyond Facebook and Google.",3,"[""Occupy Media! by Christian Fuchs is in part a recognition of how deep the change that is needed in the theories and practice of traditional oppositional politics. Christian explains the role of social media, as a model of organisation as well as a tool of communication, in terms of the transformation of protest movements world-wide. Such a role though isn’t by any means automatic ~ Mark Perryman, Philosophy Football"", ""There have been many attempts to examine the Occupy Movement, but none with the theoretical and empirical rigour of Fuchs’ masterful book. OccupyMedia! offers a critical vision of a world in crisis, a detailed description of the voices of resistance, and a thorough analysis of new forms of communication. The result is a much-needed model for research on social movements and a rich store of information for today’s movement activists. ~ Prof. Vincent Mosco, Queen's University – Author of “The Political Economy of Communication”"", ""Christian Fuchs has written an indispensable guide - based on new research - to the breaking story of the relationship of the massive explosion in worldwide protest and upheaval and social media. The book is a terrific read and has important insights into the most serious issues facing media scholars and activists. It deserves close attention. ~ Prof. Robert W. McChesney, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – Author of “Digital Disconnect\""""]" "Off-Modern, The","[""Ron Roberts""]",A new psychology for a new society.,"Society is undergoing a process of deep change and transformation as the neoliberal order moves into crisis. Contemporary psychology, mired in exceptionalism and individualism, fails to address this broader context and continues with a fragmented reductionist approach which is alienating to students and practitioners alike. In the lifetime of the discipline there have been several distinct frameworks to emerge - psychoanalytic, behaviourist and cognitive. To these one might add Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory as the last attempt to present a coherent and challenging framework for how to understand our lives. As society moves into a new phase, Ron Roberts argues the need for a new way of ‘doing’ psychology which challenges not only the existing epistemological and reductionist outlook, but the centrality of a scientific professional discourse as a suitable vehicle for improving lives and making sense of the world.","Society is undergoing a process of deep change and transformation as the neoliberal order moves into crisis. Contemporary psychology, mired in exceptionalism and individualism, fails to address this broader context and continues with a fragmented reductionist approach which is alienating to students and practitioners alike. In the lifetime of the discipline there have been several distinct frameworks to emerge - psychoanalytic, behaviourist and cognitive. To these one might add Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory as the last attempt to present a coherent and challenging framework for how to understand our lives. As society moves into a new phase, Ron Roberts argues the need for a new way of ‘doing’ psychology which challenges not only the existing epistemological and reductionist outlook, but the centrality of a scientific professional discourse as a suitable vehicle for improving lives and making sense of the world.",3,"[""In The Off-Modern, Ron Roberts takes the reader on a beautiful and inspiring journey, away from common platitudes in modern psychology to new ways of knowing ourselves. This is neither modern nor post-modern psychology: this is 'off-modern'. Roberts uses the concept of the off-modern from the philosopher Svetlana Boym for a critical interpretation of the history of psychology. Modern psychology is estranged from what makes humans unique. What makes us human is that we are not merely behaviourist, neurocognitive or rational-economic machines that always behave in predictable ways: we are human when we wander off the main paths, are creative and mysterious. However, many models in psychology, and its associated disciplines such as economics, 'celebrate a carnival of inauthenticity' and miss our unique off-modern nature. Instead, to understand humans, we need art, experiences, relationships, community life, mystery and resistance. From an off-modern perspective, ideas about normal and abnormal, group and individual, start to turn upside down. This also undermines the illusion of linear progression of the field of psychology; instead, Roberts asks us to explore unforeseen ventures. Instead of what modern psychology makes us believe, Roberts shows that off-modern ideas are not uncommon in psychology. He gives many examples of psychologists, psychogeographs and psychotherapists whose ideas do not fit in a modern or postmodern psychology but go off-modern. Not only does this book offer new perspectives on the field of psychology, it also reads as a personal journey of the author, written in an almost poetic style with many examples from movies and art. This is a rare book in its depth, rigour and love for the off-modern. Anyone interested in how the future of psychology will look like, needs to read this book.\n\n-Dr Joel Vos, PhD, CPsychol, psychologist, philosopher ~ Dr. Joel Vos, Amazon"", ""For the reader frustrated with the limitations of modernist psychology this book offers a thought-provoking alternative: an Off-Modern approach. Ron Roberts’ erudite and thought-provoking book explores the worlds of psychogeography and psychotherapy, drawing insights not only from scholars and researchers but also poets, artists, musicians and martial artists. Roberts offers those interested in psychology a new way of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. ~ Dave Harper, Programme Director in Clinical Psychology, University of East London"", ""This book is for sure off-psychology, taking us off on a journey away from the attempts to regulate who we are to a quite different way of reclaiming who we might be from the psychologists. If you thought psychology must be ‘modern’ then think again; this book is one way to off psychology. ~ Ian Parker, Professor of Management, University of Leicester""]" Officious,"[""Josie Appleton""]",Anatomy of the new breed of state regulation colonising everyday life.,"In Anglo-Saxon countries there is a new and distinctive form of state: the busybody state. This state is defined by an attachment to bureaucratic procedures for their own sake: the rule for the sake of a rule; the form for the sake of a form. Its insignias are the badge, the policy, the code and the procedure. The logic of the regulation is neither to represent an elite class interest, nor to serve the public, nor even to organise social relations with the greatest efficiency as with classic bureaucracy, but rather to represent regulation itself. This book analyses the logic of the busybody state, explains its origins, and calls for a popular alliance defending the free realm of civil society.","In Anglo-Saxon countries there is a new and distinctive form of state: the busybody state. This state is defined by an attachment to bureaucratic procedures for their own sake: the rule for the sake of a rule; the form for the sake of a form. Its insignias are the badge, the policy, the code and the procedure. The logic of the regulation is neither to represent an elite class interest, nor to serve the public, nor even to organise social relations with the greatest efficiency as with classic bureaucracy, but rather to represent regulation itself. This book analyses the logic of the busybody state, explains its origins, and calls for a popular alliance defending the free realm of civil society.",4,"[""An intellectually gripping analysis of what its author Josie Appleton characterises as a new kind of state power, one that is arbitrary and encroaching on what is left of our unregulated lives. Overall this is a subtle and intelligently argued essay. Its reconstruction of the essential trajectory of the officious state will be a valuable weapon for those keen to argue for greater freedom in everyday life. (http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-rise-of-the-officious-state/19081#.WHOgfnipvFI) ~ James Heartfield, spiked"", ""This is a must read for anyone thinking about the workings and nature of the modern State. It combines sensitive insights from the author based on her experience of working as hard as possible to uphold freedoms, and a genuinely thought provoking argument about the State and its purposes, drawing on serious intellectual work. I would recommend that anyone teaching in the areas of Social Policy, Sociology or Politics and Government reads this book and uses it for teaching. ~ Dr Ellie Lee, Director of Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, Reader in Social Policy, University of Kent"", ""The antics of meddlesome bureaucrats are frequently so ridiculous that it is tempting to laugh them off. Officialdom is no joke, however, as Josie Appleton’s insightful book makes clear. Our freedoms will be lost unless we confront these incremental steps towards an authoritarian state. ~ Nick Cater, Executive Director, Menzies Research Centre; author, 'The Lucky Culture (and the rise of an Australian ruling class)'"", ""\""The state once left us alone unless we committed a crime or fought in a war. Now its tendrils creep everywhere. Josie Appleton, a doughty champion of the free citizen, brilliantly exposes the meddlesome bossiness of the modern state\"". ~ Philip Johnston, author, 'Bad Laws'""]" On a Common Culture,"[""Brian Russell Graham""]","What common culture is, what it offers, and how to generate it.","In the United Kingdom, the notion of a common culture has always been suggestive of a national culture which is accessible to all and provides various kinds of benefits to all, including participation in national cultural life. Brian Russell Graham's exploration of the theme aims to clarify how we might define common culture in the twenty-first century, and offers a perspective on specific benefits of such a shared culture. Common culture can generate a sense of inclusive national identity, he argues. Additionally, it can even out differences in our so-called ‘cultural capital’ – it can make people more equal in terms of their cultural lives.","In the United Kingdom, the notion of a common culture has always been suggestive of a national culture which is accessible to all and provides various kinds of benefits to all, including participation in national cultural life. Brian Russell Graham's exploration of the theme aims to clarify how we might define common culture in the twenty-first century, and offers a perspective on specific benefits of such a shared culture. Common culture can generate a sense of inclusive national identity, he argues. Additionally, it can even out differences in our so-called ‘cultural capital’ – it can make people more equal in terms of their cultural lives.",3,"[""\""On A Common Culture acutely manages to produce something distinctive and relevant here today, whilst also providing absorbing, and at all times, sophisticated contributions to cultural studies.\"" ~ Anne Carlini, Exclusive Magazine"", ""“A really useful contribution to the left-conservative tradition that absorbs the best from left and right and produces something distinctive and increasingly relevant.” ~ David Goodhart, Head of Demography, Immigration & Integration Unit, Policy Exchange;"", ""\""An elegant and significant contribution to cultural studies, informed by a much more pluralistic and wider field of theory, which includes Richard Hoggart, George Orwell and Matthew Arnold. The argument here has the authority and importance of Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy: it’s an intelligent and enlightening exploration of the uses of culture.\"" ~ Tim Crook, Emeritus Professor in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies. Goldsmiths, University of London""]" On the Unhappiness of Being Greek,"[""Nikos Dimou""]",Required reading for anyone wishing to understand how the Greek crisis came about and what it means to be Greek today written by a controversial patriot and native of Greece.,"If Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal have a Greek analogue, it is Nikos Dimou, one of the most fertile minds of his generation. This book is a series of 193 mostly brief, often cutting and at times satirical aphorisms about Greece and Greeks. In the postscript, Dimou writes: I have tried, simply, to articulate my observations in such a way so that serious people will find them to be serious, while less serious ones will find them less serious. I am now tortured by the possibility that the exact opposite will occur. According to its author, Nikos Dimou: “This book is not a humorous collection of aphorisms about the shortcomings of Greeks — but a bitter reflection on their tragic destiny…(it is) the product of a man who cares deeply for his country, and tries to help his fellow citizens fulfil the Delphic motto: ‘Know thyself.’” This book has also earned Dimou the label anti-Hellene, and he came to be known as a gadfly at best and a traitor at worst.. While he is at times viciously blunt, and while many of his observations are clearly debatable, Dimou always exudes a love for Greece in his text, a love more pure, many readers have observed, than that of the most ardent (self-proclaimed) patriots. One of his pertinent reflections highlighted in The Economist (UK Christmas Special 2012) is ""Any race believing itself to be descended from the Ancient Greeks, would be automatically unhappy. Unless it could either forget them or surpass them."" First published in 1975, the book became an overnight bestseller in Greece and is currently in its 31st edition having sold over 110,000 copies. An instant bestseller in Germany (Kunstmann, 2012) where it has gone on to sell more than 25,000 copies, the book has also been published in France (Payot, 2012), Italy (Castelvecchi, 2012), Spain (Anagrama, 2012), and Turkey (Istos, 2013).","If Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal have a Greek analogue, it is Nikos Dimou, one of the most fertile minds of his generation. This book is a series of 193 mostly brief, often cutting and at times satirical aphorisms about Greece and Greeks. In the postscript, Dimou writes: I have tried, simply, to articulate my observations in such a way so that serious people will find them to be serious, while less serious ones will find them less serious. I am now tortured by the possibility that the exact opposite will occur. According to its author, Nikos Dimou: “This book is not a humorous collection of aphorisms about the shortcomings of Greeks — but a bitter reflection on their tragic destiny…(it is) the product of a man who cares deeply for his country, and tries to help his fellow citizens fulfil the Delphic motto: ‘Know thyself.’” This book has also earned Dimou the label anti-Hellene, and he came to be known as a gadfly at best and a traitor at worst.. While he is at times viciously blunt, and while many of his observations are clearly debatable, Dimou always exudes a love for Greece in his text, a love more pure, many readers have observed, than that of the most ardent (self-proclaimed) patriots. One of his pertinent reflections highlighted in The Economist (UK Christmas Special 2012) is ""Any race believing itself to be descended from the Ancient Greeks, would be automatically unhappy. Unless it could either forget them or surpass them."" First published in 1975, the book became an overnight bestseller in Greece and is currently in its 31st edition having sold over 110,000 copies. An instant bestseller in Germany (Kunstmann, 2012) where it has gone on to sell more than 25,000 copies, the book has also been published in France (Payot, 2012), Italy (Castelvecchi, 2012), Spain (Anagrama, 2012), and Turkey (Istos, 2013).",10,"[""“Painfully relevant to understanding the current crisis engulfing (Greece) and the continent.”\n\n~ , Die Welt"", ""\""The most succesfull non-fiction book in Greek after the Antiquity\""\n\n~ , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"", ""\""A revelation!\""\n\n~ , Die Presse"", ""\""Only the Gods know why it took almost forty years until -at last-this book appeared in Germany.\"" ~ , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"", ""\""This small volume shows how little German readers know about Greece.\"" ~ , Suddeutsche Zeitung"", ""\""(Dimou's book) offers a glimpse of Greek mentality.\"" ~ , Il Sole 24 Ore"", ""A classic book … a bitter path towards self-knowledge … it examines with idiosyncratic sarcasm the subject of Modern Greek identity … a truly patriotic book. Dimou places himself at the right distance from his subject observing Greeks as they truly are. ~ Alexandros Stergiopoulos, Eleftherotypia Newspaper"", ""Nikos Dimou had a different kind of unhappiness in mind when he wrote On the Unhappiness of Being Greek back in 1975 … yet all the symptoms he described at the time contributed greatly towards Greece’s present predicament. The mentality that was developed … the national identity that was formed after the military dictatorship … we are still suffering from the same symptoms and very soon we will find ourselves just as unhappy (as we were back in 1975).\n\n~ Chrystalla Chatzidimitriou, O Fileleftheros Newspaper"", ""The 30th edition of On the Unhappiness of Being Greek has just come out making this classic book a legend. There couldn’t be a better time for this new edition. I grew up with this book. In fact we grew up together. I was a student when I first discovered it and now I am what they call a middle-aged man. The only difference between us is that, unlike myself, Nikos Dimou’s book of aphorisms –having gone against time and change- has remained the same.\n\nOne cause for unhappiness for us Greeks is that this book has continued to be just as current as it was when it was first published … another cause for unhappiness is the way the book was received back then … especially by certain so called experts. They didn’t see it as it really was (small bitter lessons for those who love Greece and maintain the irrational hope that somehow miraculously it will be saved) but as the exact opposite: a book that lays blame for no reason at all (all blame is unreasonable in Greece, it goes without saying). Along with those experts appeared the demagogues as well. These people never read books, they just argue about the books they never read. For all those good patriots this book was deemed to be dangerous. In the 90s … everything that went against their attitudes, which were propagated in all the controlled media, was naturally labelled as ‘dangerous’. It didn’t help that Nikos Dimou was always in a peculiar black list … because he had many flaws. First of all he was an advertising man and a successful one at that. Secondly, as his work has shown, he was never one to go with the flow of our nation’s typical ideologies. On the contrary he fought against them as much as he could. Even worse, he never barricaded himself behind a particular caste, group, union or leftish ideology group so to be able to take part in the game. He remained the sensitive man that he was, who insisted on voicing his own opinions, (which is the reason why he did not last long in most newspapers and magazines he worked for.) … I owe this man a lot and this is the least I can do to thank him for his poems, photographs, newspaper and magazine columns, the breath of fresh air he’s been in our lives for so many years now. And rather unfortunately his remains the freshest voice in today’s free presses.\n\nSo now that the banners of the fight have been ripped apart, now that the allure of the great expectations of those propagating Greekness and anything Greek has worn off, the book has reappeared. And it is indispensable to us. On the Unhappiness of Being Greek has now become a classic best-seller and is again in the line of duty for a reason: it is high time young Greeks learned the reasons of our unhappiness so as to make their best in the coming decades to turn this book into a funny and bitter memory of all the lost years. I am happy this book has come out again. I am truly unhappy it remains so current.\n\n~ www.eyelands.gr, www.eyelands.gr"", ""On the Unhappiness of Being Greek was the title of one of Nikos Dimou’s books that had caused a stir in the years following the military dictatorship. There was a line in the book: Whenever a Greek looks at himself in the mirror, he sees either Alexander the Great or Kolokotronis (hero of the Greek War of Independence) or (at least) Onassis. Never Karaghiozis (comic puppet character from the Greek popular shadow theatre.)\n\nThe truth of this observation has been corroborated many times in the past and it continues to be corroborated. For three consecutive decades, this country’s indigenous residents have been refusing to accept that their participation in supranational organisations was not by way of compliment. They were not accepted in these organisations because of their nation’s grandeur. It was an agreement with obligations for both sides: especially in the case of the European Union. … Our agreement with the European Union presupposes rights and obligations, too. We have claimed our rights. Our obligations have now prompted the creation of a fund. In today’s Europe it is a misfortune to say that you are Greek. ~ George Lakopoulos, www.protagon.gr""]" One Dimensional Woman,"[""Nina Power""]","Exposes the dark heart of contemporary cultural life by examining pornography, consumer capitalism and the ideology of women's work.","Where have all the interesting women gone? If the contemporary portrayal of womankind were to be believed, contemporary female achievement would culminate in the ownership of expensive handbags, a vibrator, a job, a flat and a man. Of course, no one has to believe the TV shows, the magazines and adverts, and many don't. But how has it come to this? Did the desires of twentieth-century women's liberation achieve their fulfilment in the shopper's paradise of 'naughty' self-pampering, playboy bunny pendants and bikini waxes? That the height of supposed female emancipation coincides so perfectly with consumerism is a miserable index of a politically desolate time. Much contemporary feminism, particularly in its American formulation, doesn't seem too concerned about this coincidence. This short book is partly an attack on the apparent abdication of any systematic political thought on the part of today's positive, up-beat feminists. It suggests alternative ways of thinking about transformations in work, sexuality and culture that, while seemingly far-fetched in the current ideological climate, may provide more serious material for future feminism.","Where have all the interesting women gone? If the contemporary portrayal of womankind were to be believed, contemporary female achievement would culminate in the ownership of expensive handbags, a vibrator, a job, a flat and a man. Of course, no one has to believe the TV shows, the magazines and adverts, and many don't. But how has it come to this? Did the desires of twentieth-century women's liberation achieve their fulfilment in the shopper's paradise of 'naughty' self-pampering, playboy bunny pendants and bikini waxes? That the height of supposed female emancipation coincides so perfectly with consumerism is a miserable index of a politically desolate time. Much contemporary feminism, particularly in its American formulation, doesn't seem too concerned about this coincidence. This short book is partly an attack on the apparent abdication of any systematic political thought on the part of today's positive, up-beat feminists. It suggests alternative ways of thinking about transformations in work, sexuality and culture that, while seemingly far-fetched in the current ideological climate, may provide more serious material for future feminism.",8,"[""Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman (0 Books, £7.99) was a welcome reminder that there is more to feminism than Either/Or (Pradettes apussyfooting in Jimmy Choos/Moms amoosehunting on the campaign trail). A rabblerousing joy to read. ~ Helen DeWitt, Books of the Year, New Statesman"", ""An important contribution to the latest string of books on feminism and women's liberation. ~ Sian Ruddick, International Socialism"", ""One Dimensional Woman offers an interesting contribution to the current debate on work, sex and politics. The book covers an impressive array of subjects. The most interesting section looks at the ahistorical nature of feminist debate on pornography. ~ Jacqui Freeman, Socialist Review"", ""Crucially, it is Power's theoretical lens that raises this book above the level of much mainstream polemic. A philosophy lecturer, she will no doubt be dismissed by some for being too academic. But it is critical theory that gives her the tools to tackle these debates. One of the highlights is her fascinating genealogy of pornography. Many mainstream debates about gender equality remain boring, simplistic, even dangerous. That is why I salute this book: because it makes you think. (full review in linked files) ~ The Guardian, 16th Jan 2010"", ""Nina Power is keen to confront the uncomfortable and unpalatable, a refreshing trait in a culture perpetually moving toward anodyne. ~ Catherine Scott, Bitch"", ""Nina Power's One-Dimensional Woman does a fine job of reading Valenti's fatuous advertising copy as an ideological symptom, a sign of the times. Valenti's response demonstrates perfectly the hostility to thought, the pre-emptive smothering of imagination, that shields the reality-system with which her putative feminism seeks to accommodate itself. Accusations of elitism are not only the last but also, invariably, the immediate resort of those who have accepted the capitalist injunction to \""live without ideas\"" (as Badiou puts it). No further argument will ever be produced.\n\nElitists are those whose thought is abstract because it is concerned with the deadly abstractions which dominate our lives, and because it aims at a future incompatible with our dominated present. In point of fact, Nina's writing is far more urgently and hectically involved with the bodies and languages of our common world than the most lavishly anecdotal self-help book; but it also, as Natalie Hanman rightly identifies, turns the intense focus of the theoretical lens on that world, in order to burn a hole through its apparent self-evidence and inevitability. This is the task of an elite from which everyone is equally excluded by the demand that we remain without ideas: an elite that already includes all of us insofar as we are capable of participating in thought. ~ Poetix 53 / 50 133t"", ""It's rare for anger to be so witty, wit to be so angry, or either to be so compelling. An outstanding dose of sal volatile. ~ China Mieville, author of \""weird fiction\"" Embassytown, The City and the city, Railsea..."", ""'Philosophically sophisticated, politically astute, Nina Power's trenchant analysis of the issues of work, sex and politics underlying consumerist contemporary feminism brings much-needed energy to debates too often trivialized. At a time when the media make minstrelization look like the only game in town, the acerbic wit, historical breadth and sheer imaginative inventiveness of One-Dimensional Woman provoke the subversive belief that feminism could again be a radical force for change.' ~ Helen DeWitt, novellist""]" Open Book Theater Management,"[""Rafe Beckley""]","How to run a low/no budget theatre company or production, without losing either your integrity or your shirt.","In the world of Fringe (or Off-Off Broadway) theater, a strong debate has been raging for years - when you're producing a low/no-budget production, how on earth can you make it happen and still treat everyone involved in an open, honest and ethical manner? Where do you stand with profit-share productions when you can't afford to pay Union minimums? Open Book Theater Management, along with its free online resources of instructional budget spreadsheets, is the first book ever to show you exactly how to mount a theater production without losing either your integrity or your shirt. It is aimed at actors, directors and producers in the early stages of their careers; drama schools; and further and higher education establishments. The methodologies outlined in the book are transferable across all countries in which arts funding is difficult to secure. The time for going to the Establishment with the begging bowl is over. There need be no more excuses. The author will even show you how to start your own theater company for only a tenner…","In the world of Fringe (or Off-Off Broadway) theater, a strong debate has been raging for years - when you're producing a low/no-budget production, how on earth can you make it happen and still treat everyone involved in an open, honest and ethical manner? Where do you stand with profit-share productions when you can't afford to pay Union minimums? Open Book Theater Management, along with its free online resources of instructional budget spreadsheets, is the first book ever to show you exactly how to mount a theater production without losing either your integrity or your shirt. It is aimed at actors, directors and producers in the early stages of their careers; drama schools; and further and higher education establishments. The methodologies outlined in the book are transferable across all countries in which arts funding is difficult to secure. The time for going to the Establishment with the begging bowl is over. There need be no more excuses. The author will even show you how to start your own theater company for only a tenner…",9,"[""Stories about unscrupulous production companies – unpaid bills, exploitation of employees, no insurance and so on – are regrettably common. Rafe Beckley, an East 15 Acting School-trained actor turned producer, suggests an alternative way of creating work in an ethical, open way – although he is careful to stress positives and never to suggest that the industry is full of sharks. He proposes open book management, so that everyone in the company knows exactly how things are done while observing that you have to make money first and art second, because if you make money on your first show you are far more likely to be able to stage the second. He takes the reader – wittily and informatively – through the finer points of budgets, contracts, raising finance, cashflow, profit share and more. ~ Susan Elkin, The Stage"", ""A quite extraordinary solution to the very real problem of funding low-budget theatre, Rafe Beckley takes a financial model from US co-operative business and re-structures it to create an open, honest, practical and ethical system for theatre financing that is required reading for stage producers and directors everywhere. I don't often give 5 stars to anything. This book totally deserves it. ~ Ivor B, Amazon"", ""This is the new Bible for recession theatre.\n\nWhether you're in Rotterdam, anywhere, Liverpool or Rome this book is hugely important for a long and developing career. SPREAD THE WORD and we can change the face of British Theatre. Rafe is inspirational and honest. I shall continue to refer to this book throughout my career. ~ Thomas Steer, Amazon"", ""Open Book Management: The future of the fringe?\n\nLast week, I looked at the future of the fringe, amid a fevered debate that is being waged by Equity (and recently in the employment tribunal courts) about the enforcement of legal minimum wage requirements.\n\nGiven that most actors are self-employed rather than employed, however, the courts may have no jurisdiction (a subject that is soon to be tested in an employment tribunal appeal).\n\nBut a lot of fringe producers, as I also pointed out, are taking a pro-active step towards trying to come to fair, sustainable agreements, both with Equity and the actors they both represent (or not), to go somewhere towards meeting a minimum payment of some kind.\n\nThis is a step in the right direction, since at least there’s an acknowledgement now of a desire to make the numbers work in a way that includes the actors. David Babani, artistic director of the Menier Chocolate Factory, recently gave me this sage advice for a budding producer:\n\nDrill your numbers — make sure you’ve really done your homework as to how things stack up and if you don’t sell the amount of tickets you think you’re going to, what is your plan B? Make sure you have one and that it is succinct before you embark on the show.\n\nIt’s a piece of advice that is reiterated in a new book by director and producer Rafe Beckley called Open Book Theatre Management. Advising that producers have to make sure that the projects they take forward are “commercially viable”, he writes, they need “to seriously consider whether any given project is likely to at least break even… If the numbers don’t stack up, then you’re placing yourself in a position where you know you’re going to lose money, and a lot of that money will belong to other people. Can you honestly do that with a clear conscience?”\n\nAnd that’s a principle at the heart of the open book philosophy, which is to be open, honest and ethical in all they do. Of course, a lot of theatrical endeavour is purely speculative; we can never predict the likely commercial outcome in advance. More shows lose money than make money. (As they always say about the theatre, you can’t make a living, but you can make a killing). But who should take the risk? In the commercial model, it is investors. But in the existing fringe profit-share model, is it right that actors carry the biggest burden of risk, in terms of being the last ones to receive a potential benefit, after all others have been paid back?\n\nThat has invariably meant that actors typically receive little or no financial return. So the new models of building certain guaranteed fees for actors, however small, is an attempt to redress it. But last week I asked if it would be viable for the smallest fringe theatres; and one theatre, the 50-seater Hope in Islington, has made it clear that they already have an agreement in place with Equity to do just that, paying actors (plus stage management and box office) minimum wage for hours worked, including rehearsals and performances. It also covers visiting companies.\n\nSo they’ve already proved it is possible. Of course, it may not be possible to stage the kind of productions that routinely take my breath away at places like the Union, Landor or Finborough with their massive casts; there are, after all, only so many productions of I Do, I Do or The Last Five Years that the first two could stage in a year, or Shirley Valentine and Educating Rita for the latter. It would lead to a serious disruption in their usual adventurous programming, to the point that they might as well cease existing.\n\nSo what’s the alternative? An open book goes a long way to alleviating concerns that someone, somewhere is making a lot of money (however unfeasible that is in reality). On the one hand, the people that run the venue need to have an income stream from somewhere — unlike the actors, who can take other, hopefully more lucrative jobs around working there, venue managers need to be remunerated for their full-time efforts. But in a venue that runs an open book throughout its production process, at least everyone has access to seeing where the money is coming in and going out to. They can then choose whether or not to work there. That’s another key thing: choice. No one is forcing anyone to work at these venues — as self-employed professionals, they can turn down offers to work there as well as a accept them.\n\nAway from the self-producing venues, Rafe Beckley’s own children’s touring theatre company Red Table Theatre has been putting its (lack of) money where its mouth is, and demonstrated that with an open book policy it can function successfully and even pay people. For its most recent tour, it managed to pay all the actors the Equity day rate, plus travel and accommodation costs, but were not able to fulfil a full Equity contract as there wasn’t enough money to pay per diems as well.\n\nHe’s now drawing up plans for the company’s next tour, and is committed to putting the actors on an Equity contract. But he finds himself in an interesting position: he can only make the numbers work if he takes three actors and a stage manager out on the road, rather than the four he usually takes. “It’s an unintended outcome,” he tells me, “that in order to reach the union minimums, I have to create one less job for an actor.” But perhaps it is better to have three actors being paid ‘properly’ than four not.\n\nRafe Beckley’s Open Book Theatre Management can be bought on Amazon, and is available at Foyles Bookshop. ~ Mark Shenton, The Stage"", ""5.0 out of 5 stars - Essential reading for anyone and everyone in the theatre industry\n\nThis book is an essential read for anyone who has just started out in the theatre industry, is thinking of starting out or - hell, is even experienced in the industry.\n\nBeckley's passion for encouraging ethical theatre production is clear from the outset and his personable style of writing makes the book readable and, most important of all, the concepts understandable. His clear experience and history in the industry (including one example of a time he ended sitting in an aisle in a supermarket in despair) demonstrate that this man is not a theatrical philosopher but an experienced practitioner who knows what change in the industry will make a difference to those on the ground.\n\nI won't go in to too much detail as to the actual content and ideas, as that is something which needs to really be experienced by those that read it, but I will say one thing. The concepts and ideas are not easy to stomach at first; a prime example being the 'three guiding principles' at the outset which clearly state that making art is not the first priority. As hard as this could be to fathom, along with other ideas which seem may seem alien, they ring true and in the depth of your heart, you feel that he is right. There is the risk that some may find the tone occasionally over-bearing, even arrogant. But this is a personal thing. Approaching this book with an open-mind and a willingness to learn will pay dividends.\n\nHis passion, again, for the subject make for a compelling argument and you leave the book feeling that, if everybody read this, the industry may just be the better for it.\n\nThe inclusion of a complimentary website, with examples of budget sheets, is great - especially for people like me who are to accounting and budgets what flocks of birds are to aeroplane engines.\n\nThe outcome of my reading this book? My small production company is now fully signed up to this style of theatre production - and I hope many others follow suit.\n\nThis is the voice of a theatre practitioner who knows what change needs to take place, and is unafraid of being the person to make that change happen. ~ D Segeth, Amazon"", ""Learning to put 'trust' first in Theatre Prodns\n\n5 Stars\n\nby Machen on Sep 24, 2014\n\nWell, the first thing you notice when you get hold of Rafe's excellent treatise is that he spells 'theater' the wrong way. Well, it's for the US (larger market which I can forgive). This also extends to the use of dollars rather than pounds in all the free Excel spreadsheets. These are the core of his ?method? and are simplified so that 'dumb' producers like myself can use them without having to delve into the intricacies of cell formula writing (until we want to customize our own budgets) This book is written in a very easy to read conversational style (almost feel as though you know the author) When I emailed to Stage One that I thought ethical theatre production may not be a book I can buy from Amazon the author emailed me straight back to let me see a preview copy. It is available from many outlets from Friday 26th September. Great to be able to interact with the author. So now I do feel as if I know him. I was even able to suggest adding lines in one of the spreadsheets. He discusses profit share and royalty pools shared amongst the team (including the actors and anyone connected with the show) Perhaps a little more could have been mentioned regarding author royalties especially with regard to musicals (Book, Music, Lyrics) He just lists the 'writer' as getting a small part of the profit share (2 points) but it is up to you the number of points allocated. A great book that should help to galvanise discussions amongst theatre producers worldwide and lead to changes in the ways we work. Ethics is being considered in all walks of life now and some theatre companies are looking at green issues - Arcola Theatre in Hackney, N London, Metta Theatre and I'm sure loads of others too. I am at the point of having finished my first two 'fringe' productions and knowing how hard it is to make ends meet let alone make any money from the business. This has given me a deeper insight into the way I should be travelling. The journey can be exciting and working with others should be truly rewarding if 'Open Book' Trust is used amongst the theatre 'company' . Rafe only has three rules: Make Money, Make Art and the third rule is rule 1 always comes first. Now this applies specifically to professional theatre production but amateurs will find useful guidelines here too. Rafe discusses raising finance (suggesting how to put on a production for a tenner-optimistic!), contracts and profit share. Cashflow is one of the most interesting chapters I am trying to get my head around at the moment. And Continuous Learning is what we all espouse. In the Appendix there is a Model Cast/Crew Contract Templateand Model Unit Funding Contract as well as 5 spreadsheets on the website which are freely available. ~ Machen, Alibris"", ""Practical, moral, fair and inspired. Small-scale and fringe theatre has been waiting a long time for Open Book - we should embrace it with open arms. ~ Ivor Benjamin, Chair, Directors Guild of Great Britain"", ""This book is just what actors and directors starting out need to read before setting up or joining a theatre company. Clear and to the point, ethical and principled, and encouraging Trade Union membership and contracts - an extremely helpful guide for employers and employed in the low budget field of theatre work, but applicable to all areas. ~ John Gillett, Author of Acting on Impulse, Acting Stanislavski, and co-author of Voice into Acting."", ""A powerful insight into a straight-from-the-hip method of shooting down the stars and capturing your theatrical dreams. A great balance of practical wisdom, clear methodology, and space for artistic expression ~ Max Lewendel, Artistic Director, Icarus Theatre Collective""]" Other Paradises,"[""Jessica Sequeira""]",A collection of essays exploring imaginative responses to science and technology.,"Why do people choose to play with ideas considered antiquated? Why do they elect to act in non-productive ways? Perhaps the question can be asked in reverse: What comes to mind when we think of technology? That which is practical, efficient, invisible, fast, optimistic, constantly updated. So how can one explain the search for the opposite, that which is useless, inefficient, physically present, slow, dystopian, obsolete and governed by chance? The matter of what motivates the search for ‘antiquated’ forms strikes deep into the heart of value. Are people simply following trends? Are they idiots? Are they sentimental? Are they artists? Are they interested in kitsch? Are they uninformed? Are they poets? Other Paradises is a collection of essays exploring imaginative responses to science and technology, and is about people who choose to build ‘other paradises’, fully conscious of the alternative they offer to the dominant paradigm of technological progress.","Why do people choose to play with ideas considered antiquated? Why do they elect to act in non-productive ways? Perhaps the question can be asked in reverse: What comes to mind when we think of technology? That which is practical, efficient, invisible, fast, optimistic, constantly updated. So how can one explain the search for the opposite, that which is useless, inefficient, physically present, slow, dystopian, obsolete and governed by chance? The matter of what motivates the search for ‘antiquated’ forms strikes deep into the heart of value. Are people simply following trends? Are they idiots? Are they sentimental? Are they artists? Are they interested in kitsch? Are they uninformed? Are they poets? Other Paradises is a collection of essays exploring imaginative responses to science and technology, and is about people who choose to build ‘other paradises’, fully conscious of the alternative they offer to the dominant paradigm of technological progress.",3,"[""In Other Paradises, Jessica Sequeira brings fresh insights to our new machine age and those that have led us here. Technology is at the center of her inquiry, but to call it simply a book about technology would do a disservice to its variety, joy and playfulness. I finished it with the best sort of feeling: the desire to read more. Madeleine Schwartz, reporter and former editor at the New York Review of Books, Robert Bosch Stiftung fellow. ~ Madeleine Schwartz"", ""A rich, testing and pleasing book... I'm still thinking about its discussion of our relationship with technology: its endless variety, the surprise of how playful it can be, and the joyous inventiveness of the human mind capable of writing like this. ~ Jon Lindsay Miles, translator of Haroldo Conti's Southeaster, publisher at Immigrant Press"", ""In Other Paradises, Jessica Sequeira reads generously, cleverly, with clarity and elan. She is spot on about how technology is recreating literature IRL, but even better, Sequeira’s essays recreate criticism, imaginative response by imaginative response. Reading this book one imagines yet another paradise, one where we don’t read any critic who can’t match Sequeira for energy and acuity. ~ Daniel Bosch, poet and translator, lecturer in English literature at Emory University, senior editor of Berfrois""]" Other People's Politics,"[""J.A. Smith""]","From right to left: the indispensable guide to post-2016 life, under Populism, Corbynism... and after.","How did Trump and Brexit go from laughable impossibilities to everyday reality? Why did digital media stop being cool and progressive, and become a reactionary, brainwashing nightmare? And, how did the Left get its act together and start winning again? From right to left, Other People's Politics is the indispensable guide to post-2016 life. 'Other People's Politics is to contemporary political debates what Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own was to early feminism: a call for progressives to work tirelessly so that everyone is granted the material conditions necessary for reading a difficult book like James Joyce's Ulysses, if they choose to.' Yanis Varoufakis, former Minister of Finance in Greece's SYRIZA government","How did Trump and Brexit go from laughable impossibilities to everyday reality? Why did digital media stop being cool and progressive, and become a reactionary, brainwashing nightmare? And, how did the Left get its act together and start winning again? From right to left, Other People's Politics is the indispensable guide to post-2016 life. 'Other People's Politics is to contemporary political debates what Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own was to early feminism: a call for progressives to work tirelessly so that everyone is granted the material conditions necessary for reading a difficult book like James Joyce's Ulysses, if they choose to.' Yanis Varoufakis, former Minister of Finance in Greece's SYRIZA government",7,"[""First rate analysis and great political economy. I would highly recommend it as the perfect antidote to mainstream UK media orthodoxy. ~ Mark Seddon, President of the UN General Assembly"", ""One of the most original thinkers out there right now. ~ Ellie Mae O'Hagan"", ""Other People’s Politics is an essential book for our time. It is theoretically rich, well-written, and aspirational without being recklessly idealistic. It will surely be of interest to anyone with an interest in progressive politics and the rise of right-wing populism. The book also speaks to a real need on the part of progressives to go beyond just condemning the Right—and towards trying to understand it. One of the most refreshing features of Smith’s book is its willingness to take seriously the arguments of conservative commentators like J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy. Smith is capable of demonstrating sympathy and understanding for the plight of conservative blue collar workers concerned with the state of their country, while also insisting that the Trumpist solutions they are turning too are ultimately dead ends. I think this is the correct approach and adds to the nuance of Smith’s book. It is a piece driven by authentic passion and care for the people it describes: a virtue all too rare in today’s political commentary. ~ Matt McManus, Merion West"", ""J.A. Smith’s Other People’s Politics is a critical and original contribution to the debate over populism that seeks to go beyond the prevailing liberal interpretations, insisting that it is a form of politics that is best understood as one of three intertwined social and cultural ‘vectors’ that have given the decade or so since the 2008 financial crash their form. Indeed, embedded within these wider developments, populist insurgency is an expression of fundamental structural social transformations and, as such, is likely to remain a permanent feature of the political landscape. It is for this reason that, for Smith, the left must learn to navigate the new populist terrain. ~ Ed Rooksby, Review 31"", ""Other People's Politics is to contemporary political debates what Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own was to early feminism: a call for progressives to work tirelessly so that everyone is granted the material conditions necessary for reading a difficult book like James Joyce's Ulysses, if they choose to. ~ Yanis Varoufakis, former Minister of Finance in Greece's SYRIZA government"", ""Other People’s Politics is both a fascinating analysis of the populist discourses used by both left and right, and a considered deconstruction of the term ‘populism’ itself. Smith’s detailed and comprehensive analysis is a welcome contribution to the debate on the dangers and opportunities of populist politics. As left movements around the world increasingly make use of discourses that pit working people against elites, Other People’s Politics is recommended reading for socialist activists and organisers seeking to construct a populism from the left. ~ Grace Blakeley, New Statesman"", ""James Smith meticulously examines today’s ‘populisms’ and illuminates the real meanings behind these insurgencies. A must-read for those that want to understand and progress beyond this new world we are in. ~ Ann Pettifor, Director of the Policy Research in Macroeconomics network""]" Outside the Revolution; Everything,"[""Tom Astley""]","Through the reclamation of a left-wing identity, disparate groups of Cuban musicians seek a collective Cubanness ‘outside of the Revolution’.","Outside the Revolution; Everything is aimed at an audience of those interested in the music and culture of Cuba, but who wish to expand their understanding beyond the often narrow portrait presented in world music circuits. Ultimately, this is a book that attempts to reconnect Cuba socially, culturally, historically and politically into a global narrative, and as such may be of interest to people working in any of those fields, particularly within Caribbean or Latin American studies.","Outside the Revolution; Everything is aimed at an audience of those interested in the music and culture of Cuba, but who wish to expand their understanding beyond the often narrow portrait presented in world music circuits. Ultimately, this is a book that attempts to reconnect Cuba socially, culturally, historically and politically into a global narrative, and as such may be of interest to people working in any of those fields, particularly within Caribbean or Latin American studies.",4,"[""Porno Para Ricardo... are among the artists highlighted by author Tom Astley... who are not only challenging the notion of what Cuban music can be, but are also seeking to advance discourses pertaining to what being \""left wing\"" in Cuba really means today... Astley succinctly details a recalcitrant music scene in this fascinating book which examines their quest for a new alternative. ~ The Crack Magazine"", ""\""An astute and well grounded book that captures the musical landscape of contemporary Cuba in its richness and complexity.\"" ~ Sujatha Fernandes, Associate Professor of Sociology, CUNY, email"", ""Outside the Revolution; Everything: A Redefinition of Left-Wing Identity in Contemporary Cuban Music Making by Thomas Astley revisits and redefines the quest for a left-wing Cuban identity through a thoughtful and provocative analysis of the incorporation of musics not traditionally defined as “Cuban” —punk, rap, and, to some extent, certain singer-songwriter styles. It is bound to raise some eyebrows at various points along the political spectrum (as such works always do), but it is well researched and documented and, building upon previous work with original research and interpretation, adds significantly to the body of knowledge addressing this topic. The historical moments that provide the focal points for analysis — the Revolution, the Special Period, and the present — are well chosen to illustrate Astley’s themes. And the particular artists he profiles — punk rockers Porno Para Ricardo, rapper Escuadron Patriota, and singer-songwriter Pedro Luis Ferrer — demonstrate the diversity of styles that incorporate outside influences and a more global cosmopolitanism in the construction of contemporary Cuban identity.\n\n~ Professor Reebee Garofalo"", ""http://www.journallive.co.uk/culture-newcastle/book-reviews/2012/08/25/heaton-author-tom-astley-on-his-new-cuban-music-book-61634-31692153/\n\n~ Kate Proctor, The Journal""]" "Pac-Man Principle, The","[""Alex Wade""]",A blast from the past; direction to the future? Pac-Man is our guide through the maze of contemporary capitalism.,"In spite of being well into middle-age, Pac-Man's popularity shows no sign of decline and the character has appeared in over sixty games on virtually every games platform ever released. According to the David Brown celebrity index, in 2008, nearly three decades after initial release, 94% of Americans were able to recognise Pac-Man, which gave the character greater brand awareness than Super Mario. Pac-Man, with its avowed commitment to non-violence was a videogame of many firsts, including being designed to appeal to children and females and providing the first narrative interlude in a videogame. Although iconic, Pac-Man has not been subject to sustained critical analysis. This book helps to fill that gap, providing an extensive, sophisticated, but accessible analysis of the influence of Pac-Man on the way that we live in contemporary western societies.","In spite of being well into middle-age, Pac-Man's popularity shows no sign of decline and the character has appeared in over sixty games on virtually every games platform ever released. According to the David Brown celebrity index, in 2008, nearly three decades after initial release, 94% of Americans were able to recognise Pac-Man, which gave the character greater brand awareness than Super Mario. Pac-Man, with its avowed commitment to non-violence was a videogame of many firsts, including being designed to appeal to children and females and providing the first narrative interlude in a videogame. Although iconic, Pac-Man has not been subject to sustained critical analysis. This book helps to fill that gap, providing an extensive, sophisticated, but accessible analysis of the influence of Pac-Man on the way that we live in contemporary western societies.",4,"[""Wade expertly pulls apart one of video gaming's most iconic titles to discover layer upon layer of meaning, drawing comparisons between Namco's globally-recognised pill-gobbler and the often shadowy worlds of capitalism, politics and much more besides, making it abundantly clear that there's much more to these pixellated classics of yesteryear than meets the eye. ~ Damien McFerran, Editor, Nintendo Life & Videogame and Tech Journalist"", ""Alex Wade has written a rattling good book, as ravenous and riveting as his main character, Pac-Man, whose adventures take us from the frictionless glide through the shopping centre to the dank corners of the postmodern neo-liberal world and our many forms of resistance against it, whether in a Balkan minefield or a cannabis factory. On the way Alex Wade weaves a tantalizing guide through the labyrinths of contemporary capitalism. Read it and be shocked into seeing both the real and the hyperreal in unexpected ways. Better still, read it twice; it’s short and lively. Like playing Pac-Man, it’s addictive. ~ Dennis Smith, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Loughborough University"", ""Pac-Man can be regarded as the convenient poster child of video game culture. It came from a desire to explore non-violence in game design when the popularity of space shooters was reaching its apex, and years before Mike Edwards’ Realms of Impossibilities or Richard Garriott’s Ultima IV adopted a similar design motto. It was built around the universally desirable theme of eating and is still lauded as an attempt to attract a wider demographic, including women. That story has already been told. Alex Wade doesn’t simply revisit this landmark moment in game history. Moving away from a cute-ified glorification of an important figure, his account explores the darker half of this poster child. It dives into the open mouth to explore the underbelly of the yellow munching beast: capitalism.\n\nFrom the smooth consumption occurring in its labyrinths to the constant surveillance of algorithms lurking beneath the googly eyes of ghosts, and the sad inevitability of terror attacks – or a kill screen – in these homogenised worlds made for a consumer-tourist always on the move, Pac-Man resonates with the current neoliberal condition. In a constantly accelerated conflict, power pellets provide some welfare and a momentary reversal of fortune. This powerful formula has grown into one of the most essential forms of reinforcement, forging our consumption of video games, our technological and even social habitus. Pac-Man as a symbol of the world? Wade allows us to connect the dots. ~ Carl Therrien, Adjunct Professor, University of Montreal"", ""Alex Wade’s The Pac-Man Principle offers a suitably wide-ranging account of one of the most influential videogames of all time. The simplicity and elegance of design in Iwatani’s masterpiece proves immensely productive in a critique that addresses a range of contemporary issues, from the welfare state to consumer culture, from drones to political referenda. ~ Paul Martin, Assistant Professor in Digital Media and Communications, , University of Nottingham Ningbo, China""]" Pandemic: A Test of the News,"[""Alan O'Connor""]","This is exactly the kind of news analysis that we need - Mike Davis, Author of The Monster Enters (2020).","This book argues against the rapidly expanding literature about misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic - and that the real issues are much broader. Mainstream news media, except Fox News, has generally done a good job in educating people about the basic facts and precautions to be taken. Pandemic: A Test of the News identifies the mainframes used to tell the media story. With some exceptions such as long reads in The New Yorker and the Guardian, the media has not included the fundamental factors that caused the pandemic, the seriousness of a medical crisis that will last for several years - and the same factors that will cause the next pandemic.","This book argues against the rapidly expanding literature about misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic - and that the real issues are much broader. Mainstream news media, except Fox News, has generally done a good job in educating people about the basic facts and precautions to be taken. Pandemic: A Test of the News identifies the mainframes used to tell the media story. With some exceptions such as long reads in The New Yorker and the Guardian, the media has not included the fundamental factors that caused the pandemic, the seriousness of a medical crisis that will last for several years - and the same factors that will cause the next pandemic.",1,"[""This is exactly the kind of news analysis that we need. ~ Mike Davis, Author of The Monster Enters (2020).""]" Pantomime Terror,"[""John Hutnyk""]","The war on terror thrives on pantomime demons, created and maintained by political opportunism, convenient stereotype and uncritical celebrity scholarship.","Pantomime is a theatrical form that has come to rule our everyday lives as terror. In the early years of the 21st century, a dissembling political demonology has sometimes placed otherwise merely lyrical musicians in a volatile predicament. The discussion here is of Fun-da-Mental's Aki Nawaz portrayed as a 'suicide rapper', Asian Dub Foundation striking poses from the street in support of youth in Paris and Algiers, and M.I.A., born free fighting immigration crackdown with atrocity video. Along the way, bus bombs, comedy circuits, critical theory, Arabian Nights, Bradley Wiggins, Dinarzade, Karl Marx, Paris boulevards, Molotov, Mao, the Eiffel Tower, reserve armies, lists, Richard Wagner, Samina Malik, Slavoj Žižek, Freudian slips, red-heads, Guantanamo. The book offers some sharp critiques of our contemporary complacency, and the failures of theory as more than ten years of war on terror turns anxiety at home and drone-strike assassinations abroad into a normal everyday. This pantomime is a terror story told over and over to distract from the workings of a despotic power. The need for an adequate (winning) counter-narrative was never more clear.","Pantomime is a theatrical form that has come to rule our everyday lives as terror. In the early years of the 21st century, a dissembling political demonology has sometimes placed otherwise merely lyrical musicians in a volatile predicament. The discussion here is of Fun-da-Mental's Aki Nawaz portrayed as a 'suicide rapper', Asian Dub Foundation striking poses from the street in support of youth in Paris and Algiers, and M.I.A., born free fighting immigration crackdown with atrocity video. Along the way, bus bombs, comedy circuits, critical theory, Arabian Nights, Bradley Wiggins, Dinarzade, Karl Marx, Paris boulevards, Molotov, Mao, the Eiffel Tower, reserve armies, lists, Richard Wagner, Samina Malik, Slavoj Žižek, Freudian slips, red-heads, Guantanamo. The book offers some sharp critiques of our contemporary complacency, and the failures of theory as more than ten years of war on terror turns anxiety at home and drone-strike assassinations abroad into a normal everyday. This pantomime is a terror story told over and over to distract from the workings of a despotic power. The need for an adequate (winning) counter-narrative was never more clear.",3,"[""If you’re of the opinion that music and politics should generally keep the fuck out\n\nof each other’s way, then Pantomime Terror will be a tough sell. But author John Hutnyk’s polemic is rational, convincing and supported by relentless, tirelessly researched cross-referencing, so consider us sold. ~ Record Collector UK"", ""This book starts with the countless provocations that surround us in the ambient war on terror. However, rather than retreating into either loathsome self-pity or indignant self-righteousness, Hutnyk responds with the thumping provocation to think and get real! ~ Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne"", ""For two decades, Hutnyk's research on diasporic music and politics has been at the political and scholarly cutting edge. Moving from ADF and Fun-Da-Mental, to MIA and Wagner, his work is always contextualised with relevance and an unstinting anti-racist, anti-imperialist commitment. Here in the not-so-great British tradition of pantomime parody with its Molotov cocktail caricatures of hero(in)es, villains and sidekicks, Hutnyk urges us to look at how horror is accompanied by the ludic, and how the culture industry is reined into the post 9/11 war on terror: ‘the pantomime of politics, the theatre of power, the double-plays of deception’. War peculates through every cell and membrane in our numbed bodies, only to be resigned to the waste basket of disposable culture. With its cogent attack on what have become cultural icons, Pantomime Terror updates Adorno for this terror-saturated age - masterful in its sweep, engaging in its style and thought-provoking in its analysis. ~ Raminder Kaur, University of Sussex""]" Parched City,"[""Emma M. Jones""]","Plunder, pollution, profiteering: A history of London’s public and private drinking water.","With original stories from London’s archives, Parched City tracks drinking-water obsessions through a popular architectural, environmental and social history tale. Naturally we meet Dr John Snow, but we also encounter lesser known characters: the flamboyant temperance activist Samuel Gurney, who was on a mission to cover London with drinking fountains; the bacteriologists who paved the way for the drinking water quality we enjoy today in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – Grace and Percy Frankland, and Dr Alexander Houston. Sifting through the archives for these drinking water details in the grander engineering narratives, the author reveals micro-stories of London; including the drill for home water treatment during the Blitz, when Milton became a household brand. Environmentalists, water industry professionals and designers collide in the book’s coverage of more recent history, with divergent views on how London might be liberated from its daily plastic avalanche of waste from bottled water containers. Jones’ fresh research into the explosion of the bottled water industry in the 1980s—including the country’s first and only water strike—reveals that the thirst for packaged water was not only down to successful advertising campaigns. Events leading up to the water, and waste-water, industry’s privatisation in 1989 unravel why a mistrust of London’s tap water may linger. This is something, Jones argues, that the water industry must publicly confront. Is the city’s water supply completely safe now? If London’s tap water is pristine, why are public drinking fountains not springing up everywhere to herald the new age of high-tech desalination, amongst Thames Water’s menu of engineering triumphs? Who should be responsible for providing drinking fountains and maintaining them? Why are the capital’s convenience stores’ fridges bursting with bottled water brands in the twenty-first century, and why is this ludicrously expensive product so ubiquitous throughout the UK and beyond? If drinking water is a basic human right, as the United Nations proclaims of the ‘developed’ as well as the ‘developing’ world, why has it become so thoroughly commodified as a product? From Londinium to the Olympic Games, Parched City investigates these critical questions of water access, ownership and quality.","With original stories from London’s archives, Parched City tracks drinking-water obsessions through a popular architectural, environmental and social history tale. Naturally we meet Dr John Snow, but we also encounter lesser known characters: the flamboyant temperance activist Samuel Gurney, who was on a mission to cover London with drinking fountains; the bacteriologists who paved the way for the drinking water quality we enjoy today in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – Grace and Percy Frankland, and Dr Alexander Houston. Sifting through the archives for these drinking water details in the grander engineering narratives, the author reveals micro-stories of London; including the drill for home water treatment during the Blitz, when Milton became a household brand. Environmentalists, water industry professionals and designers collide in the book’s coverage of more recent history, with divergent views on how London might be liberated from its daily plastic avalanche of waste from bottled water containers. Jones’ fresh research into the explosion of the bottled water industry in the 1980s—including the country’s first and only water strike—reveals that the thirst for packaged water was not only down to successful advertising campaigns. Events leading up to the water, and waste-water, industry’s privatisation in 1989 unravel why a mistrust of London’s tap water may linger. This is something, Jones argues, that the water industry must publicly confront. Is the city’s water supply completely safe now? If London’s tap water is pristine, why are public drinking fountains not springing up everywhere to herald the new age of high-tech desalination, amongst Thames Water’s menu of engineering triumphs? Who should be responsible for providing drinking fountains and maintaining them? Why are the capital’s convenience stores’ fridges bursting with bottled water brands in the twenty-first century, and why is this ludicrously expensive product so ubiquitous throughout the UK and beyond? If drinking water is a basic human right, as the United Nations proclaims of the ‘developed’ as well as the ‘developing’ world, why has it become so thoroughly commodified as a product? From Londinium to the Olympic Games, Parched City investigates these critical questions of water access, ownership and quality.",2,"[""'Parched City tells London’s history through its drinking water. Grounded in detailed archival research, interviews and analysis of current policy and social trends, it reveals the complexity of provision of one of our most fundamental needs. Emma Jones weaves together histories of science, design, public administration and social campaigns to show how London’s drinking water system came to be, and what might be done to address environmental and social challenges of the future. The focus on ‘drinking water’, in contrast to typical narratives about water infrastructure, allows her to effectively tackle ever more urgent debates about bottled water and public drinking water fountains. Understanding the evolution of drinking water in the city, and the array of interests it serves, provides the basis for devising intelligent, culturally informed strategies to respond to twenty-first century challenges. The provision of drinking water is so often taken for granted in London, and yet it is the subject of fierce debate. This book guides us through the history of drinking water as it rises and recedes in public consciousness, laying the foundations for constructive deliberation about the future of this most fundamental element of life and the city.' ~ Sarah Bell, Professor of Environmental Engineering, University College London; author of Urban Water Sustainability: Constructing infrastructure for cities and nature (Routledge, 2018)"", ""Ditching bottled water is a win win situation; it's kind to your pocket and to the planet. In the UK, unlike many parts of the world, we are lucky enough to have clean water in every home and yet we don't realise our good fortune. Parched City explains how the good fortune happened, and why bottled water is an extravagance too far. ~ Jenny Jones - London Assembly Member for the Green Party""]" Peace or Pacification?,"[""Liam Ó Ruairc""]",Northern Ireland after the defeat of the IRA. A critical analysis of the Irish peace process.,"Often the so-called 'Irish question' is reduced to one of ancestral hatreds, but this timely book following the revenant tensions borne out of Brexit negotiations grounds its study in the context of colonialism, anti-imperialism and liberation struggles. This study demonstrates that 'peace' might not be found in 'justice', and argues instead of a 'peace process' for a 'pacification process'.","Often the so-called 'Irish question' is reduced to one of ancestral hatreds, but this timely book following the revenant tensions borne out of Brexit negotiations grounds its study in the context of colonialism, anti-imperialism and liberation struggles. This study demonstrates that 'peace' might not be found in 'justice', and argues instead of a 'peace process' for a 'pacification process'.",17,"[""Who won the war in an Irish town? From the tyranny of fear to fear of freedom\n\nhttps://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03098168211018014 ~ Paul Stewart, Tommy McKearney, Capital & Class, vol. 45, 2: pp. 311-318. , First Published June 6, 2021."", "".............Ó Ruairc’s study is thorough. He has gone through numerous sources on the history and politics of Northern Ireland. Convincingly, he presents the region’s history in the context of colonialism and imperialism and ties the most recent developments to the neoliberal era. The book also includes timely reflections on “truth” in the information age and the impact of identity politics on nationalist movements. Ó Ruairc’s observations on the disillusionment of Northern Ireland’s youth with politics, with a voter turnout that can fall under 40 percent, are disheartening. The answer to the rhetorical question of the book’s title is definite: “It is … more accurate to speak of a ‘pacification process’ in Northern Ireland than a ‘peace process.’”.......\n\nhttps://lefttwothree.org/the-difficult-road-to-peace-in-northern-ireland/. ~ Gabriel Kuhn, LeftTwoThree"", ""This week my reading neatly dovetailed with a short lecture on the ‘Tan War – a Just War’ for the Peadar O’Donnell Republican Socialist Forum, which will be broadcast in November. At the end of the panel discussion, the chair asked me to make some concluding remarks. A contributor had expressed uncertainty regarding Sinn Féin’s future left-wing never mind socialist orientation if it carried its current opinion poll ratings into the next general election and became the main party of government in Dublin. This had followed on from a wider question as to whether the decade of commemorations had generated renewed enthusiasm for republican and socialist ideas. I responded by paraphrasing Marx in the Holy Family that\n\nHistory does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.\n\nMy point was that, despite many questionable theses by liberal historians, commemoration does not provoke radical calls for change, it rather provides the environment or ideological terrain on which opposition to current material conditions are articulated. The 1966 commemoration may have stimulated a re-examination of Connolly and Mellows, but without poverty north and south, a generation of northern Catholics weaned on post-war welfare measures and the continuation of a gerrymandered discriminatory one-party regime in the six-counties unconditionally backed by London, the dust from the brief flurry of state pageantry would have safely settled to the status quo ante. I continued that I had no illusions as to Sinn Féin’s socialism, since the Provisionals were long-ago content to ring the New York Stock Exchange bell in the company of Ian Paisley and oversaw the implementation of a decade of vicious austerity.\n\nWhile I failed to acknowledge my inspiration at the time, I can now admit that the image of Martin McGuinness gleefully chuckling in the citadel of capitalism sprang from Liam Ó Ruairc’s recent book Peace or Pacification? which I had read that very week. The author admits early on that his ‘central argument is that the “process” represents a major defeat for national liberation as it reinforces the partition of Ireland and that following the 1998 Agreement, Sinn Féin has become a junior partner of the British state.’ He later concludes that, within a mendacious ‘peace’ process, ‘truth’ has been supplanted by ‘constructive ambiguity’. Furthermore the failure to recognize the genuine right of Irish self-determination leaves the process devoid of justice. This reality is camouflaged by the general acceptance of the British state’s analysis that the Irish problem concerns competing ethno-national identities rather than unfinished decolonisation. This is nowhere more apparent than in the championing of neo-liberalism that withheld any peace ‘dividends’ from working-class people most affected by the conflict.\n\nIn line with arguments in this blog, Ó Ruairc rightly identifies the origin of the Irish conflict ‘in the British state’s refusal to recognise the right of the people of Ireland as a whole to self- determination.’ Partition did not achieve self-determination for an illusory British Ulster nation, rather it sought to subvert self-determination. Lloyd George, who wrote to Carson in 1916, that ‘we must make it clear that Ulster does not, whether she wills it or not, merge with the rest of Ireland’, admitted that in 1921: ‘If you asked the people of Ireland what plan they would accept, by an emphatic majority they would say: “We want independence and an Irish Republic”.’ The imperial establishment were not prepared to recognise this democratic mandate. As Henry Wilson opined in March 1921: ‘If we lose Ireland we have lost the Empire’. I unsurprisingly agree with Ó Ruairc’s assessment that ‘the republican case against partition and the existence of Northern Ireland is not a matter of “irredentism”, it is fundamentally an issue of democracy.’ As The Sunday Times Insight Team noted: ‘The border was itself the first and biggest gerrymander:.. Protestant supremacy was the only reason why the State existed. As such, the State was an immoral concept. It therefore had to be maintained from the first by immoral means’.\n\nSimilarly, readers of this blog will recognise Ó Ruairc’s emphasis on the distinction between republicanism as a radical humanist articulation of universalist and emancipatory principles, as opposed to ‘nationalism which is based on the particular’. To all intents and purposes, Ó Ruairc identifies Sinn Féin as a constitutional nationalist party, who abandoned its principles to participate in a Peace Process: ‘the strategic objective’ of which, in the words of the oft-quoted Anthony McIntyre ‘was to include republicans while excluding republicanism’. This was achieved by ‘the Irish version of the social democratic maxim “the movement is everything and the principles nothing”. Once the movement is more important than principles, republicanism becomes whatever the leadership of the movement said it is.’ While Ó Ruairc does not express it in these terms, the implication is that the Adams’ leadership exercised its authority to present republicans with a false dichotomy in the nineties between electoralism and militarism. While one Irish government source ridiculed the Sinn Féin leadership as negotiating dunces, in fact this Machiavellian vanguard skilfully triangulated its way to becoming the main representatives of northern nationalism, attracting ‘new Catholic money… largely apolitical but nationalistic in its aspirations’[quote attributed to Tony Catney] and operating as an ‘ethnic tribune’, while it soft soaped its working-class grassroots. In this reading, the Adams’ leadership emerge as the latest in a succession of nationalist populists [the heirs of Joe Devlin’s Hibernianism] who cynically employ republican rhetoric to gain a seat at the master’s table. Ó Ruairc bluntly states that\n\nThe Provisional movement had gone from being the vanguard of the historic struggle for an independent, 32- county republic to a counter-revolutionary barrier protecting the British presence in Ireland. Sinn Féin has been de-republicanised and the entire liberation project has been weakened as it now accepts the political terms of its opponent.\n\nThis process may have pre-dated the fall of the Berlin Wall, but Ó Ruairc draws a telling comparison between the Provisionals’ capitulation and Fukyama’s end of history, when a series of leftist liberation struggles yielded to apparent historical logic. As Danny Morrison wrote admiringly in 1990: ‘The Sandinistas had to come to terms with reality. The pragmatism of the head had to take precedence over the principle of the heart.’ While Ó Ruairc frequently cites Edward W. Said, his most telling reference locates Sinn Féin within a nexus of defeatism from Latin America through South Africa to Palestine: ‘It is simply not enough to say that we live in the New World Order which requires “pragmatism” and “realism” and that we must shed the old ideas of nationalism and liberation. That is pure nonsense. No outside power like Israel or the United States can unilaterally decree what reality is’. The Provisional leadership adopted a pragmatic [in reality an opportunistic] position that required the abandonment of republican principle to enter a process or strategy whereby the ends would ultimately justify the means. Anyone who disagreed could be labelled anti-peace. From the socialist perspective Eamonn McCann pointed out that those republicans who rejected Sinn Féin’s position ‘do not dissent from the Republican tradition. What they dissent from is departure from the tradition’. Similarly, Bernadette McAliskey identified the aim of the peace process was ‘to eradicate republicanism, not violence’.\n\nI often employ Rousseau’s admonishment that ‘falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being’ in this blog. Yet, Provisional Sinn Féin has largely abandoned republican civic virtue in order to play the game. As Jim Gibney remarked: ‘If there is one big lesson coming out of the peace process… it is words like “certainty” and “clarity” are not part of the creative lexicon that conflict resolution requires if it is to be successful… Give me the language of ambiguity… It has oiled the engine of the peace process. Long may it continue to do so.’ This position constitutes the very antithesis of republicanism, but it is also self-defeating. From Collins to Dev to MacBride through Goulding and so on, no Irish republican organisation that went through the process of what Gramsci labelled transformismo ever emerged the same. Ó Ruairc employs McAliskey, again to devastating effect, when she warned Provisionals during the early stages of the peace process that ‘you boys, you’re going down a wee tunnel. It won’t bring you peace. It won’t bring you equality and, when you come outside at the other end of it, you won’t even have the personal and political integrity you had going into it’.\n\nWhat we get then is an Irish articulation of Thatcher’s ‘There is No Alternative’ [TINA], where political acumen appears commensurate to the degree to which you can delude people with smoke and mirrors. Tellingly, Sinn Féin also proceeded with the wholesale adoption of Thatcherite economic policy. Ó Ruairc provides good statistics on the damage wrought by Stormont’s unconditional promotion of ‘the virtues of free market enterprise, austerity finance, urban regeneration, public-private partnership, private-finance initiatives and foreign direct investment by global multinationals.’ Indeed, in order to be able to cut corporation tax in December 2014, Sinn Féin agreed to lose 20,000 public sector jobs, slash welfare benefits and accept a reduction of £200 million per year in the block grant. The statistics demonstrate that public spending accounts for over 70% of the North’s GDP against an OECD average of 28%. Over 30% work directly for the public sector. Proportionally, the gross disposable household income vis-a-vis the rest of UK in 2014 matched that of 1997, while the suicide rate doubled in the same period and the number of peace walls quadrupled. They can erect a statue to James Connolly in West Belfast, but the working-class people who pass it every day live in a society that Connolly himself would have railed against.\n\nNevertheless, Ó Ruairc’s assessment of neo-liberalism, while rich in detail, tails off into a disappointing section on the victims’ industry. Arguably, there are some significant dots to be joined up here. He rightly identifies ‘counter-insurgency Keynesianism’ as the means by which even Thatcher used state employment to undermine support for the Provisionals. Yet, the section on the levelling off of the divisions between Protestants and Catholics elides some significant issues. The average hourly wage for nationalists and republicans (£9.44 per hour) is now higher than that of pro-British unionists (£9.11 per hour).In 1992, 76% of working-age Protestants were economically active, compared with 66% of working-age Catholics. By 2016, these figures had fallen to 75% for Protestants, but risen to 74% for Catholics. In 1992, 24% of working-age Protestants were economically inactive compared with 34% of working-age Catholics, a 10% point difference. In 2016, the rates were 25% for Protestants and 26% for Catholics. Over the period 1993 to 2016, the proportion of working-age economically active Protestants with no qualifications fell from 30% to 11%, but the numbers of Catholics without skills fell by slightly more, from 32% to 10%. This is all very interesting, but there is little analysis or insight into what the implications are for those committed to an emancipatory future. Indeed, for the student of history, these figures represent a sea-change in the character of northern society.\n\nOnly the most naïve (and this is not directed at Ó Ruairc) could suggest that this level of intervention would have taken place without the republican campaign. In a classic manifestation of the cunning of reason, Sinn Féin has emerged as the party of a new Catholic middle-class born during the Troubles – a class created to undermine the PIRA campaign during their youth. In 2001, only 17% of Catholics belonging to the highest social and economic category were born in it compared to 33% of Protestant. Working-class Catholics have a 1-in-5 chance of attending university, the figure is 1-in-10 for their Protestant counterparts. The Protestant working class represent the net losers of the peace process, but the working class as a whole has barely benefitted. Indeed, ‘Northern Ireland suffered the largest fall in household incomes and the biggest rise in poverty in the UK during the recession and austerity measures’. Ó Ruairc is right that ‘there is an economic crisis, but it has not yet reached the stage of an organic crisis – where the very legitimacy of the system itself is questioned.’ But, as a socialist republican, what means are at our disposal to challenge this vast injustice?\n\nThis is where his analysis, in my opinion, ignores some pertinent tensions – admittedly perhaps due to book’s publication date during rapidly changing historical conditions. I agree with Ó Ruairc that ‘the 1998 Agreement achieved the “reconstitution of bourgeois order” in the North “not in the context of the British Empire…but in the context of the European Union”. I have previously written of a Catholic surrogate establishment at the birth of the Orange state. The republican military challenge did not achieve its objectives, but the conflict fundamentally altered the material forces or the character of northern society. We appear to have a largely redundant political system where two-thirds of young people don’t even vote. But we also have a northern bourgeoisie more European in orientation and sentiment than ever. Ó Ruairc himself points out that ‘about 60 per cent of Northern Ireland’s exports are to the EU, and of that more than half go to the Republic of Ireland’. The Brexit process and potential Scottish independence suggests that a socially liberal, economically conservative tendency on the civic nationalist model could potentially destabilise the northern bourgeoisie’s aversion to constitutional change. This is not to vindicate Sinn Féin’s ‘strategy’, but it demonstrates how external forces impinge on what appeared to be a reasonably settled political modus vivendi.\n\nAt the same time, the end of heavy industry and disappearance of much of the Troubles’ security economy has dissolved the material basis of Orange patronage and narrowed the gap between two impoverished communities. We are a long way from talking about a northern working class, but the carefully managed differential that underpinned institutionalised sectarianism has largely ended – working-class Protestants and Catholics have received little if any peace dividend. Perversely, rather than an Orange State, we now live in an Orange and Green State. The potential for Protestant working-class resentment to manifest in extreme right-wing loyalism hardly needs to be explained. However, Sinn Féin as a neo-Hibernian ethnic tribune cannot attract working-class Protestants in any serious number – only genuine socialist republicanism has any faint chance of that.\n\nAnd this is another criticism I have of a very interesting book that mirrors my own analysis to a very large degree. There is a preponderance of criticism, but little in the way of constructive suggestion. Surely a republican or socialist committed to universalist and emancipatory principles needs to expand their horizon from ‘the individual intellectual vocation, which is neither disabled by a paralysed sense of political defeat nor impelled by groundless optimism and illusory hope.’ Ó Ruairc, for instance, offers little criticism of vanguardism. Like many critics of Sinn Féin before him, it would appear that the leaders rather than the model represented the problem, but splendid principled isolation will bring the Republic no closer. The analysis of working-class republican agency is also incredibly bleak. There is little commentary on the reality that working-class communities sustained an insurrection against a major world power for over two decades. Their movement emerged not because of a group of leaders or since commemorations spurred their efforts, but because material conditions and political realities generated the collective agency for genuine change that all revolutions require.\n\nAt the end of my lecture last week, I concluded by saying that all revolutions and popular insurgencies rely in the first instance on material conditions, when Marx’s old mole resurfaces. Sinn Féin developed its peace strategy in a period when it seemed that revolutionary movements had been decisively defeated. They should not be criticised for abandoning the armed struggle [and in fairness Ó Ruairc does not do this], but because their electoral strategy displayed such a wanton lack of faith in working-class, democratic agency and such a marked propensity for elitist and hierarchical political control. If Sinn Féin enter government in the south, they will serve their class interests and despite rhetorical flourishes, they are the party of the emergent northern nationalist middle class. The working class across the island will be told that labour can wait, that we need to get unification over the line, that the strategy is finally paying dividends. Like an awful lot else, the Provisionals will pilfer some more Sticky lines and promote their own stages theory to the grass roots.\n\nThis shit show has been going on for over two decades. If the Shinners enter government, then working-class Irish people need to hit the streets and demand that they walk as well as talk left. The socialist republican position rejects opportunism and develops a pragmatic position based on principle. Mass democratic movements have shaken Irish establishment politics in the past. Parnell and Davitt did not fight the land war on their own, but after an economic depression spurred hundreds of thousands to action. Tom Barry and his peers were only agents of a democratic movement that captured the mass of Irish people after the cataclysm of world war. The Orange State fell when thousands engaged in civil disobedience and when the nationalist working class refused to stay on their knees. Yes leaders emerged, but without mass political consciousness and agency, there is no meaningful and progressive societal change.\n\nMarx’s mole has poked his head to the surface once more. We are living in the midst of a decade-long global systematic crisis where the majority of people on this island and globally suffer under an exploitative economic system. The centenary of the Ireland’s unsuccessful revolution should provide lessons and inspiration, but the responsibility rests with this generation of Irish people – our demands most moderate are, we only want the earth. A Workers’ Republic now!\n\n~ Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh, BLOSC – blag staire le Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh https://blosc.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/for-a-workers-republic/"", ""Book Review\n\nLiam O’Ruairc: Peace or Pacification? Northern Ireland After the Defeat of the IRA\n\nZero Books 2019\n\nLiam O’Ruairc’s book is written from an explicitly Republican perspective but he is anxious to reiterate that it is a particular version of that ideology. O’Ruairc’s Republicanism is based on the universalist principles of the radical enlightenment rather than the particularism of romantic Irish nationalism. The creed of Republicanism, according to O’Ruairc, is about challenging injustice and securing genuine social emancipation - the defeat of Unionism is, in this context, a precondition for this and not an end in itself. The assumption is that without national self-determination any such liberation is practically impossible. O’Ruairc reminds us that Unionists, who articulated a supremacist ideology, relied on special powers and electoral gerrymandering to secure their grotesque sectarian statelet and he makes the pertinent subsidiary observations that resistance to that state began as a “war” of liberation and that applying labels like “terrorist” make absolutely no sense in the context of “Northern Ireland”.\n\nHowever, the central theme of book is that the so-called “peace process” which ended with the Good Friday Agreement, constituted a catastrophic defeat for IRA and national liberation. In short the GFA meant accepting the legitimacy of the NI state, indeed (as Tony Blair noted at the time) it gave the Unionists practically everything they ever wanted. O’Ruairc goes on to explain, with some dexterity, the constructive ambiguity that underpinned the “peace process”, and maintains that it was in fact a “process of pacification” that was constructed on the back of a Republican surrender. As he says, “the process that the Provisional Republican Movement joined was pre-programmed to deliver a partitionist settlement”. The political parameters had already been set by the Downing Street Declaration, the Framework Documents and the Mitchell Principles and Adams effectively confirmed this by stating that the aim was to “re-negotiate” the Union. In fact O’Ruairc notes that Sinn Fein contributed very little to the process and, as one Irish official put it, they sat “in the dunces corner”. Any “gains” Sinn Fein secured were therefore at the margins (e.g. in relation to prisoners and the so-called “equality” agenda). Here O’Ruairc reinforces the observation (made by others) that the “peace process” may have included Republicans (or more correctly, people who referred to themselves as such) but it excluded Republicanism. Of course, the GFA was described as “Sunningdale for slow learners” by Seamus Mallon but, as O’Ruairc points out, the actual terms were significantly worse than that offered in 1973, and he refers to the Agreement as the “Republican Versailles”. In fact a more apt comparator might be the Bolshevik capitulation at Brest-Litovsk, but O’Ruairc is undoubtedly correct to point out that Sinn Fein’s “realism” meant accepting all of the major preconditions set by Britain. In the end Martin McGuinness bent the knee to Royalty and MI5 now controls “security” in the north. Any Republican seeing this as a “success” needs to be sectioned.\n\nO’Ruairc also focuses, quite correctly, on the politically significant fact that the IRA gave up its weapons. In effect this act retrospectively de-criminalized the armed resistance against the British state. He argues that “there has never been a situation in the world where an ‘undefeated army’ has willingly and unilaterally handed over its weapons to its enemy. The only situation where that applies is when an army has been defeated and is forced to\n\nhand over arms as an act of surrender”. In fact O’Ruairc actually quotes Danny Morrison, whose has persistently claimed that the IRA was “undefeated”, and proves emphatically that Morrison was “demonstrably wrong” (it wouldn’t be the only time Morrison had mangled the truth would it?). O’Ruairc makes the interesting observation that surrendering arms is in breach of General Order No.11 of the IRA constitution which deemed it an act of treason punishable by death. And to rub salt into that wound O’Ruairc quotes internal documentation from British Army in 2007 which says that their campaign was brought to a “successful conclusion”. The author of the report was General Mike Jackson – the significance of this will not be lost on Republicans. O’Ruairc also makes the point that “dissident” Republicans are not capable of waging a sustained campaign, so any actions are purely “symbolic” rather than possessing “strategic” value. Brexit, he argues, is unlikely to alter this situation.\n\nO’Ruairc’s text also deals decisively with the so-called “peace dividend” of the GFA. The material benefits have, he argues, been meagre and based on a British subsidy that conceals the economic fragility of a “province” subservient to neo-liberal orthodoxy. This subordination was symbolically represented by the images of McGuinness and Paisley opening the Nasdaq Stock Market on Wall Street in 2007. Both Sinn Fein and the Unionists accept unconditionally the neo-liberal principles of privatization, private finance initiatives, a reduction in tax rates for corporations and cuts in public services. As O’Ruairc says “peace has, in effect, been ‘privatized’”. The new Catholic middle classes may have benefitted from this process, but those that bore the brunt of the struggle have gained nothing but more economic insecurity and social inequality. Moreover, genuine social, economic and political aspirations have been transformed into matters of cultural identity and “parity of esteem”. In this O’Ruairc is, to coin a phrase, right on the money.\n\nHowever, given the focus is the actual “peace process”, the book doesn’t really examine in detail the forces that drove the Republicans down the dead end of compromise its bitterest political enemies. There some reference to the international geo-political context, but is no doubt that the “dirty war” conducted by the British secret services, which led to the infiltration of the IRA and the manipulation of Loyalist paramilitaries, created the context for Provisional capitulation. Indeed, in many ways the hidden hand in the peace process narrative is the secret state – for example, any really comprehensive account of the abject failure of Provisional Republicanism needs to take account the impact of the Force Research Unit, the SAS and Scappattici. Once the British secret services had completed their malevolent machinations, the political task of manipulating the likes of Adams and McGuinness was made far easier. Of course there is absolutely no shame in losing, and Republicans have a long history of honorable failure - but the insidious way in which the whole process was kept secret from Republicans and then spun as “a new phase of struggle” raises serious questions about the integrity of those who led the movement in this period. This point is thrown into much sharper relief by the fact that internal critics of “the process” were often intimidated, disparaged and marginalized.\n\nAs O’Ruairc says, what exists now is a “negative peace” in the sense of not having open conflict but no genuine reconciliation either. In many ways Liam O’Ruiarc’s book makes uncomfortable reading for committed republicans. He has called time of death on the Provisional version of Republicanism and the corpse has been described in relentless detail. The fact that some people refuse to acknowledge this fact does not invalidate the reality of its\n\nsad demise. As Mark Twain once remarked – no amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot! It is time to move forward and leave the necrophiliacs in Sinn Fein to pursue the political path it has chosen for itself – the dead end of pragmatic constitutionalism. Liam O’Ruairc actually refers to Provisional Sinn Fein as “counter-revolutionary” and it is difficult to disagree with this conclusion because the really serious questions, such as how to evade ecological disaster and eliminate social injustice by replacing “vulture capitalism” with a more rational and egalitarian method of distributing resources, are now being asked outside the party. Republicans need to find a way of engaging with the people who are asking such questions, and only O’Ruairc’s version of the ideology is capable of doing this effectively. That is now the key task, and maybe it is a useful topic for O’Ruairc’s next book. I hope so.\n\nMark Hayes ~ Dr Mark Hayes, Senior Lecturer in Human Sciences, Solent University, Southampton, An Spréach, Issue 7, January-March 2020, pp.24-25"", ""How Ireland’s truth became the lie\n\nReview of Peace or Pacification? Northern Ireland after the defeat of the IRA Liam Ó Ruairc, Zero Books 2019. £13\n\nOfficial censorship, pertaining to the North of Ireland, ended in 1994 when the London and Dublin governments lifted their broadcasting bans. War propaganda gave way to the propaganda of peace. More than that, says Liam Ó Ruairc, the process that brought us from ceasefire to Good Friday Agreement, and from there to the current power-sharing arrangements, was sustained by grand public deception. It required ‘a campaign of blatant media manipulation,’ directed by the British government, ‘to flood Northern Ireland with positive stories about the peace deal’ (p5). British state censorship was rendered obsolete by self-censorship. From the university academic to the Sinn Féin spokesman, with an agreed peace came agreed truth; real truth became the lie. Stormont press officers outnumbered journalists in Belfast newsrooms; they wrote the story. Breaking truce with falsehood, one can discern where Irish Republicanism is in reality; how it got there; and where, if anywhere, it is going. The book returns to basics, setting out what Irish Republicanism is, and what it isn’t; why it is politically relevant and globally significant. There follows an assessment of the scale of the Republican defeat of the 1990s and its consequences. Ó Ruairc proves what took place in the Six Counties was not a process grounded in justice, capable of reconciling former adversaries, but a series of political and economic measures aimed at pacifying resistance. He shows how it secured social division and increased inequality. No less importantly, he upholds the universal and emancipatory content of Irish Republicanism.\n\nThe process and the peace\n\n‘The peace process has to be seen as an attempt by the British state to reconstruct its authority in Northern Ireland in a context of decline and defeat of actually existing national liberation movements.’ (p34) ‘The paradox is that nationalists and republicans seem on the rise while they lost the constitutional dispute ...Unionists and Loyalists feel they have lost while the Union has been copper-fastened.’ (p105) Ó Ruairc reviews landmarks on the road to 1998. He shows to be untenable the thesis that the Republican Movement did not surrender but rather entered a pragmatic compromise with the British state. Not only was it defeated ‘but Sinn Féin has joined the enemy camp … a counter-revolutionary barrier protecting the British presence in Ireland’ (p87). Ó Ruairc reveals the gravity of this defeat, its consequences for the North’s politics and the lives of its people. He shows that those who suffered most in war, benefit least in peace. For many in former bastions of Republican resistance, ‘peace dividends’ are a long time coming. Concerning the Loyalist working class, he demonstrates the erosion of their former privileges and its political effect. Then he turns to the apparent winners.\n\nA new Catholic middle class\n\nÓ Ruairc argues that nationalist communal interests have been greatly advanced, benefiting from positive discrimination and public sector expansion – what he calls ‘counter-insurgency Keynesianism’ – producing a new Catholic middle class (p103). Once an insignificant minority of lawyers, priests and pub owners, teachers and doctors, serving their community, the new Catholic middle class is significant – socially and politically. It is established in accountancy, banking, engineering and architecture, but ‘essentially concentrated in the public sector and … gradually rising to its top’ (p103). Sinn Féin is their party now. In 2001 just two of the 20 most affluent areas in the North had nationalist majorities, by 2011 six of them did (pp103-4). Left-wing axioms of the 1970s and ‘80s that the sectarian statelet was ‘irreformable’, incapable of civil equality, were therefore wrong – ‘or at least premature’ (p102).\n\nThe minor politics of identity\n\nPolitically, behind the superficial radicalism of painted gable walls, the landscape is changed utterly: self-determination, republicanism, socialism – are redefined to fit the logic of the peace. ‘From irreconcilable political projects,’ republicanism and unionism are ‘transformed into different “traditions”’ (p109). History is reworked, causes of conflict reexplained thus: Irish cultural identity was not respected; British cultural identity was perceived to be under threat. The solution? ‘Parity of esteem’ and ‘respect to all identities and cultures’ (p109). The Left confines itself to minor politics, Sinn Féin to identity politics: not contesting actual sovereignty but squabbling with Unionism over the symbolism of sovereignty – whose flag should fly where and when, what official status befits the Irish language. ‘Northern Ireland has gone from the politics of imperialism versus anti-imperialism to the narcissism of small differences’ (p111).\n\nVictim culture\n\nImperialism is airbrushed or confined to ‘history’. All that remains to account for a fractious, abnormal present is the ‘legacy’: the outer ripples of an uncomfortable past, embodied in a backward facing, traumatised population. A ‘victim industry’ spawned ‘almost 50 dedicated victim and survivor groups’ by 2014 (p113). With the rise of identity politics, victim culture is indicative ‘not only of the crisis of republicanism and unionism,’ but of a ‘general weakened sense of agency’ (p114). It is symptomatic of the ‘collapse of historical forces [and] diminished political expectations’ (p120). So long as the British state is accepted as arbiter in dealing with ‘the past’, this carnival of helplessness paves a new way for Britain ‘to reassert its authority in the Six Counties’. As Ó Ruairc points out, Brexit changes none of this fundamentally – other than to make it all worse. Irish unity is not on the cards, let alone Irish liberty. Political accident won’t free Ireland, but Ó Ruairc’s analysis is a point of departure for those who might.\n\nPatrick Casey\n\nFIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 274 February/March 2020 page 13\n\n~ Patrick Casey , FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 274 February/March 2020 page 13"", ""Book review\n\nPeace or Pacification? Northern Ireland after the defeat of the IRA\n\nLiam Ó Ruairc\n\nZero books\n\nWinchester, UK Washington, USA 2019\n\nISBN: 978 1 78904 127 9\n\n978 1 78904 128 6 (ebook)\n\nReviewed by John McAnulty\n\n17 September 2019\n\nLiam Ó Ruairc 's book is meticulously researched, with many of the assertions backed up by references and direct quotes.\n\nUsing this approach he establishes in the first few pages that the Irish peace process was built upon \""constructive ambiguity\"" or outright lies and that all the forces involved openly admit that this was the case. They lied openly and now boast of their skill in prevarication. The prevarication is not historical. Journalism today operates within a regime of self-censorship where criticism of the peace process is beyond the pale.\n\nSo how can you have a whole process and the subsequent social structures built upon a global mechanism of lying?\n\nAccording to the author this was absolutely essential because what was presented as a peace process was in fact a pacification process. A peace process would have involved some movement towards national self-determination for Ireland. Pacification would be based on republican defeat and would involve incorporating them into what was essentially the status quo ante.\n\nLiam Ó Ruairc illustrates this by reference to the positions of the British and the IRA in 1923 talks.\n\nThe IRA demanded:\n\nBritish withdrawal\n\nAn all-Ireland constituent assembly\n\nRelease of Prisoners.\n\nThe British position of continued British sovereignty, no change without majority support in the North, a six-county assembly and cross- border bodies as a symbolic Irish dimension were all realised in the eventual settlement. The republican proposals were nowhere to be seen.\n\nThe book documents in some detail the political collapse that followed, when politics was replaced by culture wars and identity politics and war into competing forms of victimhood. Strategic apologies allowed Britain to move from participant in the conflict to neutral mediator.\n\nThe author's argument becomes more complex when he addresses economic strategy. A neoliberal economic strategy is separated from the peace process. As he notes, this is an issue in such settlements across the globe. However such a separation is only necessary if the peace process contains progressive elements in contrast to the economic programme. If both are part of an imperialist victory such a separation is unnecessary.\n\nLiam Ó Ruairc demonstrates convincingly that there is no peace dividend and that the North is a failed political entity, heavily dependent on British subsidy, with low wages and low labour productivity. Does it run alongside a political victory for nationalism? It is certainly the case that there have been major advances for the catholic middle class and that unemployment and wage rates at the lower levels of the working class are now similar. However ever growing sectarianism, continued housing apartheid and a high level of impunity granted to loyalists by the srate state suggest that the issue of civil rights in the North has yet to be resolved.\n\nOne difficulty is that the author misstates the \""irreformability\"" argument advanced by socialists and republicans during the conflict. It is stated as an assertion that the North was irreformable. The actual argument was that systematic and structural reform that delivered human rights would remove the foundations on which the state rested and lead to its dissolution.\n\nIn essence this is what is playing out now. The system of communal rights falls short of civil rights but has delivered for the catholic middle class. It has also provoked a furious backlash by unionism to preserve sectarian rights. Under this pressure unionism has collapsed the state institutions and it seems unlikely that they will be revived in their current form.\n\nThe book does valuable work, but there is much that it ignores. The peace process was not just the outcome of a battle between Britain and Ireland, but of a class struggle within Ireland.\n\nThe argument about the irreformability of the North marked class divisions within Ireland and ideological differences in the resistance. Irish capitalism sought to contain the civil rights struggle and crush the republican upsurge. The Communist party, the Workers party and their allies demanded the reform of the North as opposed to Irish unity and labelled the Provos \""Green fascists.\"" The current settlement and its contradictions mirrors elements of the proposals they made at the beginning of the conflict.\n\nLiam Ó Ruairc draws upon anti imperialist writers on Palestine: Said, Chomsky, Pappe, Massad and Finkelstein. These writers have much that is deep and illuminating to say. Edward Said's \""Peace and its Discontents\"" is a classic tour de force, worth reading and rereading. The genre has immense conviction and descriptive power. Its weaknesses lies in explanation and in future policy.\n\nLiam's analysis has the weakness of his mentors. It is credible and convincing, but leaves us in the dark about the collapse of republicanism other than pointing to a global weakness of national liberation struggles following the collapse of \""actually existing socialism\"" and blind loyalty among the ranks.\n\nIn terms of future policy he quotes Tommy Mc Kearney in calling for a \""new and relevant republicanism,\"" by it is quite clear from the context that this new republicanism is to leave to one side the issue of partition - that is, the thing that makes republicanism republicanism. Later the book offers \""an articulation of social forces\"" which seems itself a retreat from the class based analysis of the past. It ends on a pessimistic note. Critical thought is a sort of \""message in a bottle\"" to be picked in some future struggle.\n\nThe reviewer disagrees. History has not ground to a standstill. Workers movements that have been in long retreat are showing signs of revival. The internal contradictions of capitalism continue to operate, tearing it apart. We have to look to classical Marxist analysis both for explanation of past failure and direction towards future advance.\n\nhttp://www.socialistdemocracy.org/RecentArticles/RecentReviewPeaceOrPacification.html ~ John McAnulty, http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/RecentArticles/RecentReviewPeaceOrPacification.html"", ""Often the so-called 'Irish question' is reduced to one of ancestral hatreds, but \""Peace or Pacification?: Northern Ireland After The Defeat of the IRA\"" follows the relevant tensions (a soft border vs a hard border) borne out of Brexit negotiations grounds in a thought-provoking study within the context of colonialism, anti-imperialism and liberation struggles. \""Peace or Pacification?\"" demonstrates that 'peace' might not be found in 'justice', and argues instead of a 'peace process' for a 'pacification process'.\n\nTimely, relevant, informative, thoughtful, instructive, and a critically significant contribution to the current Brexit controversy, \""Peace or Pacification?: Northern Ireland After The Defeat of the IRA\"" is especially and unreservedly recommended for community and academic library collections. ~ James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, Mid West Book Review"", ""\""This book is good - interesting overview of how we got to where we are.\""\n\n- Matt Treacy was a member of the IRA for 30 years, spending four of these in Portlaoise prison, and worked for over ten years as a senior political advisor to Sinn Féin in the Irish parliament. His book The IRA 1956-69: Rethinking the Republic (Manchester University Press) is based on his PhD. He published his memoir A Tunnel to the Moon: The End of the Irish Republican Army in 2017. ~ Matt Treacy"", ""\""In his book Peace or Pacification: Northern Ireland After the Defeat of the IRA, which will be published later this month, Belfast-based academic Liam O Ruairc offers an incisive analysis of all shades of republicanism..\"" ~ Suzanne Breen, Political Editor, Belfast Telegraph (Northern Ireland's main daily newspaper) , https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/suzanne-breen/suzanne-breen-diehards-will-carry-on-in-stubborn-bid-to-prevent-normalisation-38418124.html"", ""\""Der Belfaster Autor Liam O›Ruairc - ein ehemals führendes Mitglied der Irisch-Republikanischen Sozialistischen Partei und früherer Herausgeber des Diskussionsmediums »The Blanket« - ist anderer Meinung. In seiner bei Zero Books erscheinenden Studie »Peace or Pacification? Northern Ireland After the Defeat of the IRA« erläutert er, dass das Wiedererstarken radikaler Kräfte weniger mit dem EU-Austritt Großbritanniens zu tun hat als vielmehr mit einem faktischen Scheitern des Friedensprozesses. Der Wandel von IRA und der Partei Sinn Féin von einer revolutionären zu einer konstitutionellen Bewegung brachte keinen Frieden. Die »Niederlage« der IRA, so O‹Ruairc, manifestiere sich darin, dass der republikanischen Ideologie ihr transformativer Horizont abhanden kam. Der republikanische Kampf sei umgedeutet worden - weg vom Ziel einer vereinten sozialistischen Republik, hin zu einem Kampf um Bürgerrechte und Identität.\n\nNoch in den 1970ern sahen irische Republikaner und ihre internationalen Unterstützer Nordirland als Relikt des untergehenden britischen Kolonialismus. Der Friedensprozess aber besiegelte die Auffassung, es gehe nur um einen Kampf für die Rechte der katholischen Minderheit innerhalb Großbritanniens. Echten Frieden, so O›Ruairc, habe es aber nicht gegeben, nur eine Befriedung zu britischen Bedingungen: Die IRA gab die Waffen ab und machte einen großen Schritt - während die Gegenseite nicht viel unternahm. Die sozialen und politischen Probleme, die hinter dem Konflikt standen, sind bis heute nicht gelöst. Die einstige Industrieregion ist heute einer der ärmsten Landstriche Europas. Wenn es Arbeit gibt, dann bei der öffentlichen Hand, ein Privatsektor existiert kaum. Die Jugendarbeitslosigkeit ist exorbitant und selbst die Lebenserwartung ist in vielen katholischen Arbeiterbezirken gering. Nordirland hat die höchste Selbstmordrate Großbritanniens - seit 1998 haben mehr Menschen Suizid begangen, als zuvor bei Kampfhandlungen gestorben waren.\n\nDiese Lage liefert Radikalen wie der »Neuen IRA« die Rekruten: Arbeitslose Jugendliche, die zwar oft erst nach dem Karfreitagsabkommen geboren wurden - und doch voll Wut sind auf das politische System, ihre Lebensbedingungen und auch die nach wie vor harte Repression der Polizei. Es trifft zwar zu, dass die Unsicherheit rund um den Brexit Öl ins Feuer gießt. Doch weil die gegenwärtige Misere in den EU-Zeiten Großbritanniens gewachsen sind, spielt nun auch der Brexit eher eine Nebenrolle. Der radikale Republikanismus, der wieder an Zulauf gewinnt, zielt wie eh und je auf eine vereinte irische Republik und Sozialismus.\n\nAuf dem Kontinent wird oft übersehen, dass Nordirland auch seit dem Karfreitagsabkommen nie von politischer Gewalt frei war. Die über 100 Menschenleben, die sie seither forderte, können nur im Licht der vorherigen Lage als niedriges Level gelten. Nordirland ist auf dem Weg zu einem scheiternden Staat, in dem die Jugend keine Perspektive sieht. So wenig, wie heute die Bedingungen für einen wirklichen Frieden bestehen, ist es der Brexit allein, der den Krieg zurückbringen könnte. ~ Neues Deutschland (German daily newspaper with a circulation of 21,352 as of 2019) The newspaper is both politically and financially tied to one of i, https://www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/1124441.nordirland-befriedung-statt-frieden.html"", ""Der Friedensprozess sei kein Aushandeln auf Augenhöhe gewesen, argumentiert der irische Publizist, sondern das Resultat einer Niederlage der IRA, die man sich einzugestehen habe, wenn man den Republikanismus als politische Idee weiterentwickeln wolle. Die versprochene „Friedensdividende“ sei ausgeblieben, ja mehr noch sei mit der Befriedung ein Prozess des neoliberalen Umbaus Nordirlands einhergegangen.\n\nDer Quellenreichtum von „Friede oder Befriedung?“ macht das Buch dabei gerade auch für Irland-Laien lesenswert – es liefert viele wenig bekannte Daten und Fakten und geschichtlichen Kontext. Die Schärfe der Beobachtung macht es passagenweise auch ganz unabhängig von dem konkreten Bezug zu einer lehrreichen Lektüre. So sind zum Beispiel die Bemerkungen zu „Opfer-Industrie und Therapiekultur“ unschwer etwa auf die in spanischen und baskischen Debatten um den Kampf der ETA vorherrschende Entpolitisierung der Gedenkkultur wiederzufinden.\n\nUnd wem in unserer postmodernen Linken würde nicht die Entschärfung des Konflikts durch eine Verlagerung auf das Level der „narzistischen kleinen Differenzen“ bekannt vorkommen? „Zuvor wurde der Konflikt klar verstanden als ein politischer Konflikt zwischen zwei entgegengesetzten politischen Ideologien – Republikanismus und Unionismus. Die Frage war, wer letztendlich der Souverän war: Der Britische Staat oder das irische Volk als Ganzes. Der Friedensprozess hat das fundamental verändert: Der Konflikt wird nun neu definiert – nicht als ein Disput zwischen entgegengesetzten politischen Ideologien, sondern als kultureller Clash zwischen zwei unterschiedlichen kulturellen Identitäten.“ Die Frage, wer real die Souveränität in Nordirland hat, tritt zurück hinter Spiegelfechtereien darüber, wer wie viele Tage im Jahr welche Fahne irgendwohin hängen darf.\n\nÓ Ruaircs Buch gibt nicht nur einen guten Überblick über die Lage in Nordirland heute; es ist auch lesenswert im Hinblick auf aktuelle Entwicklungen auf der Insel. Denn so oder so, der Brexit wird die immer noch unvollendete Befreiung Irlands von britischer Vorherrschaft wieder in den Fokus der öffentlichen Debatte rücken. Und dabei kann es nicht schaden, die Stimmen dissidenter Linker aus Irland zumindest zur Kenntnis zu nehmen.\n\n~ Lower Class Mag , https://lowerclassmag.com/2019/08/12/befriedung-ohne-frieden/"", ""Liam Ó Ruairc has written an important, revelatory analysis of the peace process in Northern Ireland which I am confident will take its place among the best books written about this consequential period in Anglo-Irish history. His underlying thesis is that what has happened in the near thirty years or so since the IRA recognized the southern state and embarked on a journey to constitutionalism is less a peace process and more a pacification process in which the republicans and the British co-operated to drain and enfeeble the vital ideological juices which had sustained resistance to partition for so long. The war in Ireland began with republicans and their allies abroad viewing the NI situation as a relic of British colonialism and ended with the militants accepting that it was really just a struggle over cultural identity; in the process republicans have been drained of their radicalism and now subscribe entirely to the neo-liberalism panacea. It is impossible to read this book and not wonder at the scale of the British triumph. The companion to this book, explaining how British intelligence so completely overwhelmed the IRA, has yet to be written. Until then Ó Ruairc’s fine work will do very nicely. ~ Ed Moloney, former Northern Ireland editor for The Irish Times and The Sunday Tribune, author of: A Secret History of the IRA"", ""Liam Ó Ruairc is one of the most fastidious commentators of the Irish political scene. Whether one agrees or disagrees with his opinion, his work is invariably scrupulously researched and supported evidentially. His book is, therefore, a welcome and valuable contribution to our understanding and analysis of the current political situation in the northern part of Ireland and deserves the wide readership that scholarship of this calibre merits.\n\n~ Tommy McKearney, senior member of the Provisional IRA from the early 1970s until his arrest in 1977, author of: The Provisional IRA"", ""A fascinating and provocative book. Even those who remain unpersuaded by its arguments will benefit from engaging with it.\n\n~ Richard English CBE, Professor at and Pro-Vice-Chancellor Queen's University Belfast, author of Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA"", ""Liam Ó Ruairc is a meticulous research with a particular eye for detail. A most astute observer of the Northern Irish political scene he has with this book brought acute discernment to major aspects of the peace process. This work will stand the test of time. ~ Anthony McIntyre PhD, former IRA prisoner who spent eighteen years in prison, author of Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism"", ""Liam Ó Ruairc's Peace or Pacification? Northern Ireland After the Defeat of the IRA offers an interesting and provocative perspective on the Northern Ireland peace process. Neo-liberals who believe that there has been a \""peace dividend\"" and those who believe that the \""revolutionary ideology\"" of Irish Republicanism has been \""de-republicanized\"" will benefit from Ó Ruairc 's insightful presentation. ~ Robert W. White, author of Out of the Ashes: An Oral History of the Provisional Irish Republican Movement"", ""Liam Ó Ruairc’s stated aim in this book is to present Irish republicanism as part of a wider, international struggle against oppression, injustice and exploitation. In exploring both the historical and contemporary forces that have shaped Irish politics he not only admirably succeeds in that project, but also challenges key aspects of the complacent consensus that has come to dominate public debate on both sides of the border since the late 1990s. By going beyond the mere repetition of worn out shibboleths Ó Ruairc’s account reclaims the ‘universal and emancipatory core’ of republicanism and thus opens up new possibilities for political thought and action in Ireland. ~ Dr. Kevin Bean, Lecturer in Irish Politics, Institute of Irish Studies,University of Liverpool, author of The New Politics of Sinn Féin""]" "People v. Tony Blair, The","[""Chris Nineham""]",The People v. Tony Blair argues that even a hostile media can be neutralised when a mass movement becomes powerful enough.,"Some people dismiss mass protest. The People v. Tony Blair shows the huge demonstrations against the Iraq War in 2003 nearly brought down Blair and almost forced Britain out of the war. Based on interviews and insider accounts, it describes panic in Downing Street and despair in Whitehall. A controversial intervention into the debates about power, media and popular protest, The People v. Tony Blair argues that even a hostile media can be neutralised when a mass movement becomes powerful enough.","Some people dismiss mass protest. The People v. Tony Blair shows the huge demonstrations against the Iraq War in 2003 nearly brought down Blair and almost forced Britain out of the war. Based on interviews and insider accounts, it describes panic in Downing Street and despair in Whitehall. A controversial intervention into the debates about power, media and popular protest, The People v. Tony Blair argues that even a hostile media can be neutralised when a mass movement becomes powerful enough.",1,"[""The People v Tony Blair is an interesting argument about how the power of protest is represented, and more often misrepresented, by the media . The book provides vital insights into how to construct present and future resistance to austerity and much else. ~ Mark Perryman, Philosophy Football reviews""]" "Picture of Contented New Wealth, The","[""Tariq Goddard""]","As the 1980s reach their high-water mark, a family realises that it is not wealth they are obsessed with, but the devil.","In the brilliant red doom of a Hampshire Sunset, Brigit Conti can hear a voice behind her ears that is not her own. Bed-bound and complaining of a rare bone disease that no doctor can diagnose, her husband fears that the house they have purchased is a portal through which an older, more malign energy has passed, possessing his wife and son. Through their successive deterioration, his secular and agnostic worldview undergoes a metamorphosis, drawing him to a strange man from the hills - the Rector, their unlikely saviour - or are he and his family merely victims of their own self-serving yuppie way of life?","In the brilliant red doom of a Hampshire Sunset, Brigit Conti can hear a voice behind her ears that is not her own. Bed-bound and complaining of a rare bone disease that no doctor can diagnose, her husband fears that the house they have purchased is a portal through which an older, more malign energy has passed, possessing his wife and son. Through their successive deterioration, his secular and agnostic worldview undergoes a metamorphosis, drawing him to a strange man from the hills - the Rector, their unlikely saviour - or are he and his family merely victims of their own self-serving yuppie way of life?",47,"[""It may be hard to believe in spirits until they begin to ruin your life. The Picture of Contented New Wealth is an intriguing story of a family moving into a new house and the otherworldly problems they face. A man looks towards a portal, which has lead him to believe that a foul spirit has entered his life and possessed his wife and son. The Picture of Contented New Wealth is an intriguing and psychological drama that should not be ignored. ~ James A Cox, Midwest Book Review"", ""So freaky I couldn't read this after dark at home by myself. ~ Clare English - BBC Radio Scotland - The Book Cafe"", ""The best of both worlds: the visual excitement of The Exorcist but told as excellent literary fiction\n\nRight up there with the macabre and horror-filled diabolical plot of a Stephen King or John Updike novel is a fairly new kid on the block who will be giving everyone a run for their money in the metaphysical genre...It is a gothic tragedy set in the nineteen eighties that brings proper characterization and literary sensibility to the traditional horror story with just the right blend of gore, excitement, humor and desire. There is something terrifying about becoming afraid of familiar things that were never frightening before. ~ Hot Indie News, posted pre release"", ""Tariq Goddard - the ‘master of fright.’\n\nThe Picture of Contented New Wealth (O-Books) is a brilliantly crafted thriller by Tariq Goddard that keeps you on the edge of your seat. As this gothic tragedy set in the nineteen eighties takes hold, you’ll find yourself jumping as someone walks into the room unexpectedly. When all things familiar suddenly become sinister you know you’re reading a great book!\n\nGoddard has gained recognition for his earlier books, which were nominated for national and international awards. What makes a good story? When the author crafts the tale around his own nightmares as Goddard does in The Picture of Contented New Wealth. Mixing a brew of thrills, desire, and humor, The Picture of Contented New Wealth goes beyond your traditional thriller.\n\nThe story tells the tale of the Conti family who purchase a house in Hampshire. The mother, bed-bound and complaining of a rare bone disease, hears a voice behind her ears that is not her own – causing her husband to fear that their home is a portal through which an older, more malign energy has passed and now possesses his wife and son. As their life deteriorates, his secular and agnostic world view undergoes a transformation, drawing him to a strange man from the hills – a preacher. Will this man be their unlikely savior or are he and his family merely victims of their own self-serving yuppie way of life? As the end of the eighties approaches, this family recognizes that it is not wealth they are obsessed with, but something far more evil… ~ USA Travel Magazine's Travel News"", ""FOUR STARS\n\nA woman lies bedridden in an old country house, complaining of a sickness that no doctor can treat. Terrible sights and smells assail the senses of all who visit her. Only the ancient housekeeper, who has seen it all before, is unmoved. Is the woman demonically possessed, and, if so, how much is she an unwilling victim? The local vicar can't help, but he knows someone who can, a shaman-like priest known as The Rector. But is salvation attainable, and, if it is, on what terms? Tariq Goddard's ingenious take on the Gothic novel forsakes cheap thrills and chills in favour of something much more interesting - a lucid exploration of good and evil and the meaning of faith.\n\nSIMON SHAW ~ THE MAIL ON SUNDAY"", ""Tariq Goddard, The Picture of Contented New Wealth: A Metaphysical Horror\n\n'A thin white mist was spilling through the curtains heightening the scarlet in Brigit's lips, her red tongue curling from her mouth like a baby dragons phallus. The parts of her that did not resemble food on the turn appeared to be crafted from silvery wax, uncanny inhumanity pervading every inch of her sleeping body' - Tariq Goddard.\n\n'There was an instant of atomic stillness before the shadow disintegrated into a plethora of hissing molecules, its parts falling away like a routed army, the whole floor reverberating with the sound of a hundred little footprints fleeing in panic' - Tariq Goddard.\n\nTariq Goddard's Metaphysical Horror novel is one of the few books to actually make me afraid, ( of what, I'm unsure - and that is most unnerving ) whilst and after putting down the text. The last book that installed similarly affecting emotions within myself was Nicolai Gogols 'The Night Before Christmas' a piece from his Ukrainian Tales collection of short stories. An odd connection of two dissimilar texts, Gogol's phantasmagorically dark and eerie tales of folklore pre-suppose a belief ( or at least a familiarity ) in the paranormal and extra-vital magic of Ukrainian Christianity whilst entwining the reader around a magical world of ghosts, witches and demons. Whilst Goddard's work, set in 1980's Hampshire among middle-upper class yuppie nobodies, maintains all the scoffing denial that would be expected around such subjects however the slow screw of ensuring all notions and explanations point towards a genuinely paranormal or demoniacal entity, much to the dismay of the works protagonist, positively cements the tangibility ( or more concerning - the possibility ) of an 'other'. Mr Conti and Martin's awkward reluctance to embrace the facts around them is echoed within the era and the situation. The house ( Tyger Tyger house - possibly an oblique reference to William Blake's 1794 poem 'The Tyger' ) is described in great detail, and the problems it confronts its inhabitants with provides much of the horror, however this generic horror apparatus is firmly glued into an awkward, mundane and retrorific paradigm of 80's socioscope, the house is not haunted per se, just harbouring negatives. The form is deceiving, the corners are lies, reflections are mirages and the shadows are tricks - at first ( and intrinsically ) these maladies are not illnesses of spirit - rather illnesses of a sick philosophy - namely the contented new wealth of unnaturally displaced yuppies..\n\nGoddards conjuring of atmosphere and tweaking of the 'emotional air' is perhaps his most accomplished feat within the text. '....the dusk clouds reddening before him like bleeding lizard skins.' - a gem of a description of a Hampshire dusk, the phrase resonating within the works polystrata -a hallucinatory description of an idyllic place, geographically, economically and in few, odd occurrences spiritually, but innately tainted by a negative and disruptive infraction of evil. Its the unknown - the other - that operates most disturbingly within the novels various situations. Its this subtle tugging on our psyche from an unseen entity that is so profoundly orchestrated by Goddard. Various instances occur whereby the characters intent is ill defined and the outcome of their actions not mentioned, or merely hinted at. These contexts are not red herrings, just open ends - however the reading ( our interpretation ) is heavily jaded by the negative atmosphere and constant reinforcement that which is unknown is also sinister. The notion of the uncanny ( un-homely ) is a shrewd parallel, to juxtapose with displaced yuppies, and the imagery and leverage Goddard employs so effectively is not new - but none the less powerful for its genericism ( William Peter Blatty's 'The Exorcist' is heavily referenced, or simply reinstated ) - what is implied is a natural - or unnatural notion that when humans move against the spirits of the world an other, and uncanny entity can fill any void left open by such an awkward and poorly fitting life.\n\nEvil finding a home within an awkward house inhabited by people who are perhaps unnaturally too young, rich and free is not new, however Goddards transposition of this idea to the novels particular historical and geographical context is ( to my knowledge ) relevant and long overdue. The most provocative and fundamentally worrying idea is presented within chapter five. Philosophy is confronted directly as contributory facets concerning 'Iblis' access to Brigit's spirit when The Rector exclaimed \""You think the Professors in a Philosophy Department would know the Devil if it goosed them in the street? To my knowledge Iblis doesn't feature greatly in the lexicon of of linguistic analytic philosophy, and don't even get me started on the Continentals. There could be no safer home to dwell in..... The reason no one saw it coming, Mr Conti, is because good and evil have become to much to be true, haven't they? Quaint, embarrassing, pre-scientific concepts, replaced by \""the banality of evil\"", \""foucaldian\"" power relations of some other quasi-sociological flim-flam\"". The suggestion here is that as philosophers dwell on logic within a climate where there are no moral absolutes evil could find a space to be. This suggestion is contested by Martin who argues \""only egg heads think like that, man\"" before The Rector continues to provide one of the most fundamentally disturbing questions - \""Maybe so, but the rest of us are content to do without moral absolutes, you only have to turn on the news to watch the fall out. Truth no longer moves through knowledge because truth no longer exists....Your wife, Mr Conti, thought that she could think her way beyond good and evil, both of which dwell in what she called ontology and I call God. In the academic atmosphere she moved in, what was the use of a close reading of Aquinas next to the blasphemous freedom advocated by Nietsche? The Christians lost the intellectual arguments ago. Meanwhile out there in the real world Iblis is having a ball. ..... Ideas that are of eternity are never wrong: though occasionally they slip out of fashion. There is no moral neutrality in this world and no ethically disinterested processes in life. Your wife simply chose to ignore the moral dimensions, invoking evolutionary psychology, post-structuralism, whatever.\""\n\nI didn't find this argument threatening or preachy. I actually put the book down feeling slightly perplexed. In recent times I can't remember anyone asking the question of Good or Evil within an intellectual context, not in Art theory, post structuralism, or even BBC's Question Time. Perhaps as The Rector so eloquently explained, good and evil are too true, too true in a world where nothing is real - but these are ideas that have been around as long as man, so why are they no longer confronted? Even on more social issues I feel the majority of decision lies in political or social notions rather than moral absolutes. I cant help but feel that more discussion for contextualising various intellectual themes within moral absolutes would do more than stop the eerie shadows from creeping up the walls. Goddard should be praised for attempting to re-ignite such an old discussion, but his main triumph is re-threading and re-aligning the imperatives to a contemporary sphere.\n\nPOSTED BY VIVIAN 0 COMMENTS ~"", ""Brilliant, terrifying, completely blown away. ~ Le Cool"", ""The Picture of Contented New Wealth is an intellectual horror story set in a creepy old house in the English countryside. Something evil has been lurking in its dark paneled walls for as long as the house has stood, but ever since the Conti family has moved in the presence seems more malign.\n\nThe evil presence soon reveals itself as demonic in nature, no matter how unbelieving the secular family is. Mrs. Conti soon becomes possessed and her young son falls under her power. It is up to the incredulous Mr. Conti to find a way to save his family.\n\nThis eloquent novel is not your typical haunted house or possession story. Author Tariq Goddard weaves some heavy philosophical and religious themes throughout the novel, yet heavy shouldn't be taken to mean that they weigh the book down. These themes help bolster the book's story and make perfect sense in the grand scheme of things.\n\nGoddard makes wonderful use of the large house the Conti's move into, called Tyger Tyger, which, of course, brings to mind William Blake's poem The Tyger (Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?). And Tyger Tyger House certainly does burn bright with all the fires of Hell! Its long, shadowy corridors, whispering voices, shadowy figures and things that just don't seem right certainly sent shivers up my spine! The experiences the family members face in the house are downright unsettling, including their son claiming to play with the family's long-dead cat or their au pere's horrifyingly real nightmares.\n\nEqually horrifying is the possession of Mrs. Conti. Her husband is so disbelieving of the supernatural that he thinks she is just mentally ill, but after his continued experiences with both the house, strange occurrences and his sick wife, comes to believe in the supernatural. Mrs.Conti's attacks keep getting worse, her appearance changing along with her demeanor. Her transformation is chilling to read and yet you can't help but wanting to read more.\n\nI haven't personally read any of author Goddard's previous works, but I sincerely hope that in his literary future he decides to write another horror novel. The Picture of Contented New Wealth crawled deep under my skin and remained there long after I had finished reading it. Its metaphysical horror story will certainly get you thinking all the while you cower under the covers! ~ Fatally Yours"", ""A novel with a disturbing subject and aim – however, it concerns matters very close to the heart of religion and faith. This novel is an interesting reminder that not all of the Brigit and Hartley generation are satisfied by secularism. They may not be drawn to the current types of Christianity available in this country, yet they still wrestle with how not to be lead into temptation and long to be delivered from evil. ~ Peter Cruchley-Jones, URC minister in Cardiff, Reform"", ""Praise for 'Homage to a Firing Squad': Impressive, each character is drawn with humour and subtlety...a fine balance between comedy and tragedy, pathos and slapstick. ~ The Times"", ""FOR 'HOMAGE TO A FIRING SQUAD ~"", ""Cerebral, powerful and accomplished. ~ The Face"", ""A pacy, poised and undeniably exciting debut...a teat bleakly humorous, well written adventure ~ Boyd Tonkin, Independent"", ""A clever mix of humour and horror and sadness and life and death...a surreal book that juggles humour with horror as it journeys deep into the night ~ John King"", ""Goddard's highly impressive debut mixes a black comic tone reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino and Graham Greene, a cracking good read. ~ Mail on Sunday"", ""Goddard's eye is for irony and disaster, a potent thriller, driven by unravelling the neuroses of his characters as much as by uncovering the politics behind their predicament. ~ Observer"", ""Frank sex and bloody and farcical violence, serious readable and unpredictable ~ The Big Issue"", ""Highly polished, bullets fly through the air, knives flash silver in the moonlight. ~ Daily Mail"", ""Bravura quality, a dazzling debut, half farce half atrocity ~ James Collard, Times Magazine"", ""Beautifully choreographed, plotted with the minimum of fuss and dark with excellent seasoning. ~ Spain Magazine"", ""Well rounded, sophisticated, evocative and darkly humorous, full of fear, excitement and futility. ~ The Morning Star"", ""Auspicious and audacious, a triumph of philosophical enquiry with earthy gory action. ~ Independent on Sunday"", ""Impressive, each character is drawn with humour and subtlety...a fine balance between comedy and tragedy, pathos and slapstick. ~ The Times"", ""A nasty and carnage ridden pastiche ~ The Guardian"", ""FOR DYNAMO ~"", ""A tremendous story of everyday life in a place of tremendous unrest. ~ ES Magazine"", ""A thoroughly entertaining story of drinking and women, colourful, lively and enjoyable. ~ The Times"", ""Laugh out aloud, an acute grasp of subtlety and irony, one of our finest young novelists ~ Arena"", ""Crisp, colourful, lively and enjoyable. ~ The Guardian"", ""Riveting, authentic and very down and dirty... essential reading. ~ David Shukman, Daily Mail"", ""Original, clever and accomplished, a wonderful premise for a novel, which he pulls of with a flourish, a smart, engaging novel from a refreshingly unusual voice in British Fiction. ~ Martyn Bedford, The New Statesman"", ""STAR CHOICE- irresistible and original ~ Bookseller Magazine"", ""A compulsive, headlong narrative, profound psychological sense, the conclusion is surprising and masterly ~ Uncut"", ""Sheer excitement that matches Elmore Leonard in hyperbole and humour. Characters slip into the readers heart. ~ Sunday Times"", ""Frictionlessly combines the individual and universal, both an aria and hooligan holler to the human spirit ~ Time Out"", ""A colourful and pensive novel full of eccentricity and desperate humour...Dynamo's closing moments grip like a vice. ~ Sunday Herald"", ""A fascinating story told with tension, pace and humour ~ Daren King, Scotland on Sunday"", ""Very little football occurs in Dynamo, yet it remains as transfixing as a Maradona run and as surprising and wonderful as Wales beating Italy. Dynamo like Football itself, is an affirmation and exageration of life. ~ Niall Griffiths"", ""Four stars, a brilliant and offbeat comedy spun out of a bizarre true story. ~ South China Morning Post"", ""FOR THE MORNING RIDES BEHIND US ~"", ""An exuberant narrative that turns on the fresh possibilities of tenderness...simply rumbustious. ~ James Urquhart, Independent"", ""Valiant, full of anecdotes maxims and bravado. ~ Time Out"", ""The politics of the time are portrayed with a simple gusto, it sparkles with a depth of language and ideas but retains buoyancy, it's also very funny and playful...a universal and entertaining novel about England, freedom, fear and existential malaise ~ Richard Cabut, The Daily Telegraph"", ""It's tone is dark, getting darker, a remarkable portrayal of friendship and frustration, grimly funny rolling with narrative energy. ~ Arena"", ""Strives to explain post war society, the endeavour of which is exhilarating ~ Sunday Telegraph"", ""Large minded and deserving of a wide readership. It is hard to believe that there is a more promising novelist under the age of 30 working in Britain today. ~ Andrew Biswell, Scotland on Sunday"", ""A pacy and intelligent tale that has won him friends in high places, full of whip cracking prose and characters that bounce of the page ~ Romford Recorder""]" Politactics,"[""EDA Collective""]",The everyday of politics is the politics of the everyday.,"Technology, politics and entertainment have merged to the point of confusion. Politactics, the third book from the Everyday Analysis collective, is a set of conversations about how to sift through this organized but disordered mess and create a framework which could enact change against political and corporate hegemony. An internationalist collection of essays, articles, responses and letters, the book argues that we need a ‘politactical’ mindset in order to develop tactical and practical responses to the situations in which we are finding ourselves politically.","Technology, politics and entertainment have merged to the point of confusion. Politactics, the third book from the Everyday Analysis collective, is a set of conversations about how to sift through this organized but disordered mess and create a framework which could enact change against political and corporate hegemony. An internationalist collection of essays, articles, responses and letters, the book argues that we need a ‘politactical’ mindset in order to develop tactical and practical responses to the situations in which we are finding ourselves politically.",1,"[""Even if you thought you knew the truth, you wouldn't be close. Get/read a copy of Politactics. ~ Mark McGowan (The Artist Taxi Driver)""]" Politics by Other Means,"[""Alison Hugill"", ""Houman Barekat""]","A collection of the site's very best reviews on art, culture & theory.","Launched in October 2011, the online literary journal Review 31 - www.review31.co.uk - enjoys a growing reputation as one of the most intelligent and thoughtful literary resources on the web. Publishing accessible and informed reviews of the most interesting new titles, Review 31 covers non-fiction books on politics, history, art & culture, as well as literary fiction. This volume is a collection of the site’s very best reviews on art, culture & theory. Contributors include Nina Power, Benjamin Noys, Ian Birchall, Gee Williams, Robert Barry and Sebastian Truskolaski. The volume covers an expansive array of topics from hipsterism and digital technology to the rise of what Neal Curtis calls ‘idiotism’ in contemporary culture, through literary theory, architecture and continental philosophy. The title - a nod, of course, to Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is ‘politics by other means’ - is an acknowledgement of the radical political current that informs much of the criticism in these pages.","Launched in October 2011, the online literary journal Review 31 - www.review31.co.uk - enjoys a growing reputation as one of the most intelligent and thoughtful literary resources on the web. Publishing accessible and informed reviews of the most interesting new titles, Review 31 covers non-fiction books on politics, history, art & culture, as well as literary fiction. This volume is a collection of the site’s very best reviews on art, culture & theory. Contributors include Nina Power, Benjamin Noys, Ian Birchall, Gee Williams, Robert Barry and Sebastian Truskolaski. The volume covers an expansive array of topics from hipsterism and digital technology to the rise of what Neal Curtis calls ‘idiotism’ in contemporary culture, through literary theory, architecture and continental philosophy. The title - a nod, of course, to Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is ‘politics by other means’ - is an acknowledgement of the radical political current that informs much of the criticism in these pages.",0,[] "Politics of Debt, The","[""Sjoerd van Tuinen"", ""Arjen Kleinherenbrink""]","In this collection of essays and interviews philosophers, political scientists and economists reflect on the political role played by debt.","The Politics of Debt brings together philosophers, political scientists, and economists and sets them the task of reflecting on the political role played by debt. Focusing on the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, particularly in the United States and Europe, the book is split into groups. It contains six essays and five interviews that aim to fully comprehend the political consequences of the economic crisis and specifically of debt.","The Politics of Debt brings together philosophers, political scientists, and economists and sets them the task of reflecting on the political role played by debt. Focusing on the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, particularly in the United States and Europe, the book is split into groups. It contains six essays and five interviews that aim to fully comprehend the political consequences of the economic crisis and specifically of debt.",0,[] "Politics of Down Syndrome, The","[""Kieron Smith""]","The Politics of Down Syndrome is a call for people to think again about what it means to be inclusive, why we're hung up on the idea of intelligence and how an inclusive society is a better society.","Are we a more accepting society than ever before? Is there no longer a 'them and us' division between the disabled and 'everybody else'? The Politics of Down Syndrome looks at how we got to where we are, from the racist roots of its identification to the rising number of abortions today. Down syndrome is the most common form of learning disability, shared by all classes and races, yet it's one we rarely address our feelings about, head on. This book, although direct and questioning, takes a positive view about where we go from here and the opportunity for society to fully enjoy the benefits of being inclusive. Fascinating - at last a concise, well written examination of Down syndrome Andy Merriman, Writer and broadcaster, co-author of BBC Radio 4 drama Minor Adjustment","Are we a more accepting society than ever before? Is there no longer a 'them and us' division between the disabled and 'everybody else'? The Politics of Down Syndrome looks at how we got to where we are, from the racist roots of its identification to the rising number of abortions today. Down syndrome is the most common form of learning disability, shared by all classes and races, yet it's one we rarely address our feelings about, head on. This book, although direct and questioning, takes a positive view about where we go from here and the opportunity for society to fully enjoy the benefits of being inclusive. Fascinating - at last a concise, well written examination of Down syndrome Andy Merriman, Writer and broadcaster, co-author of BBC Radio 4 drama Minor Adjustment",12,"[""Kieron Smith is the father of a child with down syndrome. Having experienced the struggles, hardships, and achievements that his family has encountered throughout the process of raising a child with a disability he casts a seasoned and critical eye on the level of acceptance that today's society allows with respect to people who are different. In his writing he gives the reader a perspective that many of us know very little about. ~ Social Design for Down Syndrome, http://www.sdfords.com/our-crew/"", ""My brother Henry may be severely mentally handicapped, but he is also very special; childlike; naive. He has no grasp of war or class or inequality. My parents have spent the best part of 20 years trying to ready him for the world, trying to imbue in him some sense of right and wrong; trying to make everything all right. It seems so strange then to consider that science will be able to commodify his condition, to make it a defect that can be removed. These issues form the core of a new book by Kieron Smith called The Politics of Down Syndrome. This book, for the first time, tackles stigma, inclusion and special needs in a head-on political manner. Reading it, I found myself drawing constant comparisons to Henry's life. Smith fights for inclusion and full social integration. What The Politics of Down Syndrome did make me realise is how far we've come as a society trying to understand special needs. ~ Lewis Irvine, Independent Newspaper"", ""While this book is obviously of special interest to educators, social workers, and medical professionals, it is also an important book for feminists. Smith discusses issues like the discrimination against older women giving birth, and the way in which biased emphasis on prenatal screening for certain conditions influences the decision to terminate a pregnancy. (He does not take a pro or con stand on abortion.) Consider finding a place for this one on your shelves. It might appeal to more of your customers than you’d expect. ~ Anna Jedrziewski, New Age Retailer"", ""Smith has written an essay that will resonate with many parents. Perhaps too, many will take heed of his call to action, and as best they can, raise awareness of these issues. After all, given we are on the cusp of genetically identifying other conditions such as autism in utero the need to speak up as Smith has done and insist it is not acceptable to view people with Down syndrome or any disability as lesser can only become more pressing. And as Smith says, it is not acceptable to veer back towards exclusion. ~ Voice, the members' journal published by Down Syndrome NSW, http://www.dsansw.org.au/downloads/Review_-_The_politics_of_Down_syndrome_Voice_April_2012_web.pdf"", ""Follow the link for a copy of this interview with author Kieron Smith. ~ New Left Project, http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_politics_of_down_syndrome"", ""Thought provoking. I recommend it. ~ AE, Newsbeat, Cerebra"", ""A topical and current book, written by Kieron Smith, who is father to Tanzie who is 6 years old and has Down syndrome, this book looks at ‘hot topics’ that are regularly discussed in the media but rarely in any depth including how society views people with Down syndrome and how this has changed over the last century, antenatal testing and the implications of the developments in non-invasive testing procedures, education of children with Down syndrome, inclusion and Down syndrome: a cultural perspective\n\nAll royalties from sales of the book will be donated to Down Syndrome Education International, who undertake vital research into the education of children with Down syndrome, benefitting families across the UK and worldwide. The book is available from all good bookshops including amazon and comes highly recommended by Parent Voice. ~ Parent Voice, http://www.parentvoice.info/en/News_Home_-_%E2%80%98The_politics_of_Down_Syndrome%E2%80%99"", ""Follow the above link to see this interview. ~ Socialist Review, http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11880"", ""Follow the above link to view this interview ~ Spiked, http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_preview/12065/"", ""\""...an excellent book and would be a very great addition to anyones collection.\"" ~ DSA Journal , http://www.downs-syndrome.org.uk/"", ""This is a timely book that is as important as it is unusual. The ‘problems’ of people with Down syndrome are often discussed – less so those of the world they find themselves in. Political decisions that profoundly affect (or even prematurely end) the lives of people with Down syndrome are taken by policymakers with little knowledge of the condition and almost always without asking people with Down syndrome what they think. This book highlights many of the prejudices behind these decisions, and many of their consequences. In so doing, it provokes a debate that is urgently needed – one that is not just about Down syndrome but about human differences, human diversity and the defence of individual human rights.\n\n~ Frank Buckley, CEO Down Syndrome Education International"", ""Fascinating - at last a concise, well written examination of Down's syndrome which not only presents a historical perspective and political analysis but has the added advantage of deriving from personal experience. ~ Andy Merriman, Writer and broadcaster, co-author of BBC Radio 4 drama \\\""Minor Adjustment\\\""""]" Politics of Indignation,"[""Peter Mayo""]","This work focuses on contemporary issues within the context of neoliberalism and colonial legacies, while exploring decolonizing spaces.","Politics of Indignation is a challenging, accessible and exciting book. Not only does it provide a critical analysis of the neoliberal onslaught on public education in many countries including Cuba, Nicaragua and the Arab world, it also offers new insights into the dynamics of control, while demonstrating how and where resistance has succeeded.","Politics of Indignation is a challenging, accessible and exciting book. Not only does it provide a critical analysis of the neoliberal onslaught on public education in many countries including Cuba, Nicaragua and the Arab world, it also offers new insights into the dynamics of control, while demonstrating how and where resistance has succeeded.",6,"[""By imparting a consciousness of human struggle against neoliberal violence and its ramifications, Politics of Indignation provides a discourse which seeks to disrupt the process through which citizens have become fodder for imperialist powers to consolidate a destructive political system.\n\nCapitalism created a culture of oblivion, distorting international solidarity through globalization. The fragmenting of human rights discourse alienated the scope of internationalism, thus enabling imperialism and the media to create an imaginary platform of unity which strives to consolidate divergences, geopolitical stereotypes and control over freedom. Mayo discerns a flow of coercion which, through playing upon concepts such as citizenship, identity and the value of humanity, threatens to rupture unity within the oppressed.\n\nWith human rights fast becoming a bargaining tool in the hands of oppressive institutions, citizens’ indignation at the manipulation is increasing and social movements are gaining momentum. The state’s transformation from provider of welfare to a market regulator deprives many citizens of basic fundamental freedoms and necessities, such as education, housing and health care. The transformation from necessities to commodities exploits the people as mere puppets whose sole worth is to prop up governments thriving upon the plunder of natural resources and the eradication of culture in order to create a stereotype that can be modified with each imperialist aim.\n\nChile’s September 11, in 1973 paved the way for an onslaught upon Latin American countries. The US aided military coup brought an end to an established system of parliamentary democracy. The torture and disappearances inflicted upon Chileans reverberated in other Latin American countries, creating both a challenge to authenticate history and a struggle to recover dignity within countries engulfed by capitalist policies. Chilean market reforms ushered by Milton Friedman privatised education, resulting in poor quality education for low income families and indigenous people which is being challenged by the student movement and their protests in favour of free quality education for all.\n\nThe US’s September 11, in 2001 brought about devastation for thousands of people within the country due to the terror attack, as well as in the Middle East through the US War on Terror. Wars and the subsequent military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq on the pretext of hunting down terrorists devastated the countries and the region. Terror suspects – a number of them being dispensable bargains for militias far removed from terrorist activities, ended up tortured in notorious prisons such as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Whilst imperialist powers and the media lauded the wars, human rights violations existed within a vacuum in which the perpetrators were neither held accountable nor responsible.\n\nMayo portrays how the Cuban revolution and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua were demonised, despite the reforms in education and healthcare. Educators in Nicaragua were targeted aiming to prevent the spreading of revolutionary pedagogy. In Cuba, health and educational reforms took on an internationalist approach, with doctors and educators providing assistance in various countries and amongst minority communities. Despite US efforts to undermine the Cuban revolution through counter revolutionary operations, Fidel Castro persisted in a worldwide revolutionary commitment, offering aid to countries and communities ravaged by war or natural disasters.\n\nThe book emphasises the significance of education to combat the imperialist attitude of disregarding human value. Creating a public space for education as opposed to neoliberal experiments would combat imperialism and its political violence manifested in various spheres, such as state violence, violence against minorities, the annihilation of indigenous cultures, the prohibition of protests and commemoration of workers’ struggle. Mayo describes how the workers’ struggle should become a focal point of internationalism, especially considering that right wing policies wield the power to fragment the workers’ struggle through exploiting their fears and displace their collective aspirations.\n\n“Unless such an education strategy is developed, it is more likely that the working class people become attracted to the populist right wing and often neo fascist discourse that plays on their fears and leads to further segmentation and antagonism among workers on ethnic lines.”\n\nNeoliberalism also created a global culture of incarceration, as seen in the case of migrants. Whilst globalization trends necessitate migration, migrants tend to become victimised repeatedly after leaving their countries of origin. The affirmation of ‘the other’ embodied by migrants facilitates the host state’s repressive policies of detention and marginalisation. Mayo insists that education should incorporate and promote “a critical and genuine anti-racist education.” With regard to indigenous communities, it is essential that the West stops projecting its education principles as the only viable solution in order to reap profits from the plundering of natural resources and human labour.\n\nThe importance of implementing education “as a public and not a consumer good” is brilliantly portrayed in the chapter entitled Education and the MDGs. The United Nation’s eight goals with regard to education have been accepted by many countries. However, many of these same countries are embroiled in a global oppression which prevents their achievement. The arms trade, war and conflict, and institutions such as the IMF and the World Trade Organization persist in exploitation and endorsement of imperialism; strengthening the previous history of colonialism, fuelling conflict between tribes and enhancing the conditions for social injustice.\n\nMayo insists that education cannot assume neutrality. An education system which allows oppressors to consolidate their reign with the aim of accumulating profits at the expense of humanity needs to be met with an opposite philosophy – one that embraces social obligations and defends the social sciences in order to liberate education and ensure the survival of culture in order to contribute in a tangible manner towards social justice. “Education is not an independent variable.” Hence, isolating education from social processes is an error that imbues education with powers above its role, giving rise to the hypocrisy of tolerance instead of aiming for inclusion.\n\nA striking aspect of the book is its graceful sequence and absolute respect towards history and the masses’ narratives. Mayo’s writing reinforces a commitment towards education and revolutionary struggle in an authentic manner – a profound philosophy determined in its denunciation of the treachery perpetrated by global, imperial violence. ~ Ramona Wadi, Irish Left Review"", ""Peter Mayo’s fascinating book is as timely as it is important. It is incisive and trenchant in its critique of global capitalism, and presents cogent and informative analyses of liberal and neoliberal policies that buttress it. It is courageous and provocative as it develops alternative perspectives on central social and political questions facing the world such as race, migration, education and socio-economic inequality. It is well written and well argued, as well as engaging and engaged. It is a book that will appeal to both the specialist and the general reader.\n\n~ Benedetto Fontana, Professor, Political Science,Baruch College, CUNY, New York."", ""Peter Mayo shows us with his most challenging and original new book not only the central problem of a globalizing Mediterranean world (including the Arab world and its indignant youth), but he also provides us with most important insights how to develop new concepts for new learning situations . One common and most important element of Mayo’s publication is that he underscores the political basis of education. He shows that education is not a neutral enterprise (unlike the way neo-liberal economy presents it) but is serving either to ‘domesticate’ and strengthen the status quo of subaltern groups, or else ‘liberate’ in the sense of contributing to the ushering in of a new world in which principles of social justice and ecological sustainability are held uppermost. Education is viewed in the broadest sense, the way Gramsci viewed it, seeing it as central and integral to the workings of hegemony itself. This includes a more holistic view of critical engagement in the public sphere, 50 years after the release of Habermas’ famous book on this issue.\n\n~ Ursula Apitzsch, Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Goethe-University of Frankfurt/Maine"", ""Politics of Indignation is a challenging, accessible and exciting book. Not only does it provide a critical analysis of the neoliberal onslaught on public education across a range a countries, it also offers new insights into the dynamics of control, while demonstrating how and where resistance has succeeded. It is a hopeful book; it encourages and inspires the reader to act to protect public interest values in education, not least because action is shown to be effective in different contexts and countries. I strongly recommend it to all of those who wish to comprehend and to resist the attacks on public education.\n\n~ Kathleen Lynch, Professor, UCD Equality Studies Centre, School of Social Justice, University College Dublin"", ""Education and healthcare are spheres in which the failures of capitalism and neoliberalism are unmistakable and mounting. Peter Mayo's masterful book provides fabulous insight connecting Cuban successes in medicine and education, Nicaraguan literacy campaigns, the centrality of the crisis of higher education in Europe today and the recent uprisings in the Middle East. Working through particular cases of atrocity as well as success, Mayo gives an intimate sense of the obstacles and political possibilities facing us today. His broad conception of education and the continuing role of the state within global capitalism are essential. Emphasizing South-South cooperation and non-profit oriented exchange, Mayo provides hopeful alternative to common North-South dynamics. ~ Peter Ives, Professor, Dept. of Politics, University of Winnipeg"", ""Politics of Indignation covers a wide canvas, and is an Insightful\n\nand eclectic book that engages us in a discussion on controversial and\n\ntopical themes including the politics of the new right and privatization,\n\nand the role of the welfare state and social politics. Addressing the key\n\nissue of inequality Mayo offers new approaches, emphasizing the\n\nimportance of solidarity, social justice and political engagement\n\nsustained by a new social contract, between a reformulated state and a\n\nmore prescient and involved civil society. This book will appeal to all\n\nof those out there who are trying to come to terms with and understand the\n\nradically transformed world of 2012. ~ Isabelle Calleja, Head, Department of International Relations, University of Malta""]" Poor but Sexy,"[""Agata Pyzik""]",How the East stayed East and the West stayed West.,"24 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is as divided as ever. The passengers of the low-budget airlines go east for stag parties, and they go West for work; but the East stays East, and West stays West. Caricatures abound - the Polish plumber in the tabloids, the New Cold War in the broadsheets and the endless search for 'the new Berlin' for hipsters. Against the stereotypes, Agata Pyzik peers behind the curtain to take a look at the secret histories of Eastern Europe (and its tortured relations with the 'West'). Neoliberalism and mass migration, post-punk and the Bowiephile obsession with the Eastern Bloc, Orientalism and 'self-colonisation', the emancipatory potentials of Socialist Realism, the possibility of a non-Western idea of modernity and futurism, and the place of Eastern Europe in any current revival of 'the idea of communism' – all are much more complex and surprising than they appear. Poor But Sexy refuses both a dewy-eyed Ostalgia for the 'good old days' and the equally desperate desire to become a 'normal part of Europe', reclaiming instead the idea an Other Europe. Agata can be heard on BBC Radio 4's Four Thought reflecting on divisions between Eastern Europe and the West and the prejudice she sees against Eastern European migrants. Listen here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05s3c5l","24 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is as divided as ever. The passengers of the low-budget airlines go east for stag parties, and they go West for work; but the East stays East, and West stays West. Caricatures abound - the Polish plumber in the tabloids, the New Cold War in the broadsheets and the endless search for 'the new Berlin' for hipsters. Against the stereotypes, Agata Pyzik peers behind the curtain to take a look at the secret histories of Eastern Europe (and its tortured relations with the 'West'). Neoliberalism and mass migration, post-punk and the Bowiephile obsession with the Eastern Bloc, Orientalism and 'self-colonisation', the emancipatory potentials of Socialist Realism, the possibility of a non-Western idea of modernity and futurism, and the place of Eastern Europe in any current revival of 'the idea of communism' – all are much more complex and surprising than they appear. Poor But Sexy refuses both a dewy-eyed Ostalgia for the 'good old days' and the equally desperate desire to become a 'normal part of Europe', reclaiming instead the idea an Other Europe. Agata can be heard on BBC Radio 4's Four Thought reflecting on divisions between Eastern Europe and the West and the prejudice she sees against Eastern European migrants. Listen here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05s3c5l",7,"[""\""Towards the end of We the People (1990), a compilation of eyewitness accounts of the recent revolutions that had taken place across eastern Europe, Timothy Garton Ash quotes a Hungarian friend who told him: \""I have survived 40 years of communism, but I'm not sure that I'll survive one year of capitalism.\"" For all the pleasure he took in the walls tumbling down around him, the Oxford historian was also rather pensive about the future. Ahead, he predicted, lay consumerism and atomisation, \""all the associated blows of unemployment, dislocation and injustice\"".\n\nGarton Ash does not feature in Agata Pyzik's intellectual pantheon. Nor do Anne Applebaum, Norman Davies or Adam Michnik. All these writers, she believes, are entrenched in the establishment, too addicted to lashings of eastern Europe's past, too willing to give neoliberalism a free pass. Still, Poor But Sexy begins with a withering assessment of the achievements of the \""Marriott brigade\"" – those corporate economic shock therapists who urged former communist nations to privatise state-owned assets and offered aid in the form of export credits and loans – that echoes rather than contradicts Garton Ash's earlier prophecy.\n\nPyzik was only six in 1989 and has, she admits, no memories of \""scary officers, no parents interned by communists\"". In her teenage years, she attended a private school. Later, while standing in an airport queue with dozens of migrants trying to enter the UK, she thinks to herself: \""I'm a fake: a middle-class over-educated Polish girl who is here seduced by the cultural lure of the west, rather than led by material necessity.\""\n\nPoor But Sexy (its title comes from a description of Berlin by that city's mayor) emerges from its author's liminal position of being someone who, as a youth, was ashamed of her Polishness, but these days is enraged by portrayals of the east as a basket case or a backwater; a passionate leftist who struggles to be passionate about Solidarity, not least since Lech Walesa's \""public pronouncements now are reduced to advocating police beating up strikers and excluding homosexuals from parliament\"".\n\nPyzik wants to reassess the culture of the cold war period, to give the lie to the widely held impression that eastern Europe must have been uniformly dour and artistically sterile, and to explore the heady mixture of fear, desire and yearning that fuelled the imaginative traffic between east and west. She is at pains to distance this project from \""ostalgia\"", which she characterises as \""vulturism, a dubious sympathy for communist culture and the symbols of the past without any political investment\"".\n\nIn tourists heading to Chernobyl she discerns the same enthusiasm \""as when they penetrated the galleries in New York or any 'hot' place on the art map\"". She is rueful about a former CIA listening station at Teufelsberg (literally: devil's mountain) in West Berlin being featured in a Ryanair in-flight magazine. At Gdansk shipyard, cradle of the revolution, she observes that production has been decimated, its industrial past voided by the bars and hotels of a new waterfront development plan, and that even the International Solidarity Centre there emphasises the \""melancholy of disappearance\"" over the harsh living conditions faced by locals in the adjacent neighbourhood.\n\nThe erased histories Pyzik likes to snout out are scratchy and combative. For instance, there's witty electronic musician Felix Kubin who teamed up with friends to form Margot Liedertafel Honecker (named after the wife of former East Germany president Erich Honecker, a woman so hated by the population that she was referred to as the \""purple witch\""); they claimed to be the choir of a DDR youth organisation and disrupted public events in reunified Germany by singing chirpy ditties in praise of collectivised farms.\n\nIt is refreshing to read about such canny troublemakers: to this day, the British music press is dismally Atlanticist in its pop coverage. Pyzik is also sharp on musicians drawn to the \""Berlin-Warszawa-Moscow express used to map the phantasmagorical geography of the eastern Europe of the mind, which was made in equal part of ashes and of brocade, death and glamour\"". This means Bowie, of course, but also an early incarnation of Ultravox whose 1977 song \""Hiroshima Mon Amour\"" contained the siren call: \""Riding inter-city trains / dressed in European grey\"".\n\nMore obscurely, there was Xex, an all-synthesiser band from New Jersey that sounded like a cross between Kraftwerk and the B-52s, had members named Waw Pierogi and Thumbalina Guglielmo, and recorded a song called \""Svetlana\"" about a daughter of Stalin who defected to the west (\""She's a revisionist nightmare / She's a capitalist pig / If daddy were alive now / He'd depersonalise you\"").\n\nPyzik writes well about fashion, highlighting the work of Barbara Hoff, fashion director of the outward-looking, postwar Przekoj magazine, who encouraged readers to explore DIY and improvisatory techniques (teaching them how to convert sports shoes into ballerina flats). She's also good on cinema, especially unhinged, subversive films such as Vera Chytilovà's Daisies (1966), in which two teenage girls go on an absurdist spree of bourgeoisie-baiting and banquet-trashing, and Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981) – initially categorised as a video nasty in the UK – a lurid melodrama about social repression told through the figure of a schizoid housewife having sex with a multi-tentacled monster.\n\nA sterner editor would have told Pyzik not to cover so many topics. Poland's martyrological complex, modes of social realism, former communist nations as essentially postcolonial – ideas, some more developed than others, tumble from each page creating a kind of swarm energy that's a pleasing antidote to the tasteful mourning found in so many books about eastern Europe. There's an urgency and intensity to Poor But Sexy that's entirely in keeping with Pyzik's assertion that the key cultural feature of pre-1989 Poland was highmindedness: \""We didn't have permissiveness for schlock.\"" ~ Sukhdev Sandhu, The Guardian"", ""\""In Poor But Sexy, Polish writer and critic Agata Pyzik dissolves myths, uncovers hidden histories and synthesises politics, art, psychology and philosophy. The result is a fascinating and deeply informative study of the cultural cross-currents which have shaped 20th and 21st century Europe.\n\nThe book’s title references the attempt in 2004 to market a depopulated and impoverished Berlin on its creative capital — but the concept has wider resonance as a reflection of the insistent objectification of eastern Europe and its interactions with the West. From outdated cold war politics to contemporary stereotypes of Polish plumbers and Ukrainian mail-order brides, eastern Europe is often spoken of but seldom allowed to speak for itself.\n\nAfter 1989, western Europe applauded the adoption of neoliberalism across the East but, as the book’s early sections document, joining Club West is no guarantee of satisfaction or success.\n\nPyzik traces the recent emergence of a precarious independent left in post-communist Europe, against a backdrop of widespread apathy, economic crisis, resurgent fascism and attacks on civil liberties, with governments tackling recession with the imposition of austerity measures rather than alternatives to capitalism.\n\nWhile eastern Europe’s politics are often presented in the West as inscrutably alien, we seem to take note of its popular culture only when straining to view it through a Western lens — witness the striving to explain Pussy Riot in simplified and Western-friendly terms as “Russian riot grrrls,” belatedly joining the ranks of the Western feminist punks they sought to emulate.\n\nThis perspective ignored Pussy Riot’s context as a product of the former Soviet Union’s long history of political protest coalescing around avant-garde art and music.\n\nThe same liberal triumphalism which believed the end of the cold war marked an “end of history” also sees the West as a normative default for popular culture, with the East capable only of reproducing it in drab and off-key ersatz versions.\n\nBy contrast, Poor But Sexy pulls back the curtain on how Western influences, from punk to consumerism, were absorbed by the East in ways that allowed it to generate fashion, art and culture of its own.\n\nThis development was valid and vital on its own terms, not a case of “them” struggling to catch up with “us.”\n\nLike much criticism recently produced by those who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s, Poor But Sexy is concerned with scouring the 20th century to recover paths not taken, missed opportunities, and lost potential which now tends to be disingenuously dismissed — notably the refrain that “socialism has been tried and failed” — despite the redeeming aspects of life in eastern Europe before 1989 which Pyzik identifies here.\n\nAs she states in the book’s introduction: “We have to go beyond the ritual war between security of jobs and flats and lack of democracy in one system, or free speech and the uncontrolled free market, but also with a large danger of poverty, unemployment, lack of education and a crippled welfare state on the other.”\n\nWritten in an absorbing, sardonic and irreverent style and backed by an impressive weight of historical, cultural and political knowledge, Poor But Sexy is a refusal to accept the currently collapsing neoliberal settlement as the best of all possible worlds, and a reopening of spaces where we shouldn’t be hesitant or embarrassed to look for alternatives.\"" ~ Rhian E Jones, Morning Star"", ""Alternative Heroes\n\nAgata Pyzik, Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West\n\nZero Books, 310pp, £15.99, ISBN 9781780993942\n\nreviewed by Sebastian Truskolaski\n\nAgata Pyzik’s Poor But Sexy is a timely and personal rumination on the explosive culture clashes between Eastern and Western Europe. Over the course of five thematically arranged chapters, the author discusses a wide range of examples from art and popular culture, prodding at the fault-lines on the European map left by the dismantling of the ‘iron curtain’. The overall sentiment of the book points in two directions: on the one hand, it expresses the pervasive sense that, after 1989, the newly elected governments of Eastern Europe tended to throw out the child with the proverbial bathwater by instituting policies motivated by a blanket opposition to ‘communism’. That is to say, the transition to capitalism in the ex-Soviet ‘bloc’ came at the expense of a welfare system, whose brutal dismantling has left many in dire straits. On the other hand, the book contains an imperative to re-appraise some of the lessons drawn from the ‘dustbin of history’. To this effect, Pyzik turns to the démodé artefacts from socialist Eastern Europe: Polish lifestyle magazines from the 1960s, such as Ty i Ja – for example – serve as case studies. Poor But Sexy thus recalls something of Walter Benjamin’s surrealist dictum: to reclaim the revolutionary energies of the past in the outmoded, ‘the objects that have begun to be extinct’. From this perspective, the book oscillates between two questions: how does ‘the West’ perceive ‘the East’, and how does ‘the East’ perceive itself? This framework allows Pyzik to unfold her meandering reflections on everything from the ‘Wizz-Air generation’ to the actuality of socialist realism.\n\nThe first chapter, ‘Welcome to the House of Fear’, consists of a series of aphorisms on the state of Eastern Europe, from ’89 to the present, with an emphasis on Pyzik’s native Poland. Here Pyzik flits between the many coordinates of her book: her account of the Ostalgie phenomenon, for instance, is followed by an excursus on the UrbEx industry in Chernobyl; her description of an appearance by the Solidarnosc-activist, Jacek Kuron, at the opening of Warsaw’s first McDonald’s restaurant comes after a reflection on the Polish tendency to justify anti-Semitism with anti-communism. Musings on architecture and memory sit beside passages on films by Krzysztof Kieslowski, the proliferation of prostitution and the haunting of Communist ghosts. The chapter is fragmented, kaleidoscopic. Its overall tenor, however, is discernible from a section titled ‘The Polish Miracle’, where Pyzik cites an article from the German news weekly, Der Spiegel: ‘Germans used to think of Poland as a country full of car thieves and post-communist drabness,’ we are told. Indeed, the saying ‘Kaum gestohlen schon in Polen’ [barely stolen, already in Poland] used to do the rounds in Germany during the 90s – a period of fierce liberalisation east of the river Oder. As Pyzik notes, ‘this perception of the former East as a (…) sick place, needing (…) help/advice/political intervention is enduring.’ It is only gradually being displaced by an equally troubling discourse under the banner of ‘new Europe’, to borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s term. Thus, the Spiegel article continues: ‘on the eve of hosting the European Football Championship’ in 2012, Poland ‘has become the most astonishing success story in Eastern Europe.’ ‘Success’, here, is, of course, equated with the implementation of austerity measures, slashing provisions in healthcare, education, pensions and culture – the remnants of the socialist past. So much, then, for the Polish miracle.\n\nIn turn the next chapter, ‘Ashes and Brocade’, is a veritable treasure trove of popular culture: the cinema of Andrzej Zulawski and Slava Tsukerman are as much on the agenda as the cautionary tale of Christiane F (1981) and the scuzzy punk of Brygada Kryzys. Here Pyzik explores the fascination that ‘the East’ held for a number of West-European pop performers, from David Bowie to Depeche Mode. As Pyzik notes, these artists tended to look, ‘not to the demonic Bloc, but rather its threshold’, Berlin, which served as ‘a window, from which you could comfortably observe the history behind the barbed wire.’ (The continuing love affair between Berlin and Western Europe’s would-be bohemians is but a faint echo of this period.) Pyzik heralds Bowie, in particular, as ‘a model postmodernist, someone who built his life and art out of the artificial, the fabricated, who went through pop art, comic books and Brecht,’ someone who ‘needed the necessary frisson of the real, which he found in Berlin, Warszawa and Moscow.’ Faced with ‘the growing nihilism of his generation,’ she argues, Bowie believed that, ‘as a star of artifice,’ he could be the bearer of a revolutionary ‘political task.’\n\nTo be sure, Bowie’s Berlin trilogy – and, indeed, his ominous track ‘Warszawa’ – are understandably beloved by many, including myself; but the political hopes that Pyzik attaches to Bowie appear to me somewhat far-fetched. It is not clear that Bowie’s ‘Berlinism’, in fact, translates – on either side of the iron curtain – into a ‘sober approach to art’ with the power to ‘transform the world’ inside or out. Is it not, rather, the case – we might ask – that Bowie’s fascination with Eastern Europe amounts to a kind of orientalist kitsch – a morbid preoccupation with the forbidden and unknown, akin to his flirtation with fascism?\n\nOn the other hand, Pyzik argues that, within the ‘bloc’, “alternative communities” formed around the reinterpretation of western pop paradigms (dare we call them productive misunderstandings?) But whilst the view that ‘Depeche Mode brought solace to millions of fans … in the Bloc’ may indeed be accurate, the political significance that Pyzik assigns to this phenomenon seems to me – again – a little overstated. A far more plausible assessment appears in her own conclusion: the ‘nostalgic trend’ of fondly recalling this ‘solace’, expounded with reference to the art-punk formation Laibach, is ‘largely reactionary’. Would the same not be true, then, of trying to resurrect the political hopes – real or imagined – that came with the East-European appreciation for Depeche Mode?\n\nChapter Three, ‘O Mystical East’, aims at nothing less than psychoanalysing ‘the myths around Easternness: geographical, gender-related, religious and philosophical.’ For this purpose, Pyzik draws on several carefully chosen examples, ranging from the outlandish anthropology of Stach z Warty Szukalski to the feminist activism of FEMEN. She characterises ‘the East’, in general’ (and Poland in particular) along broadly postcolonial lines. Accordingly, she argues that the repression of ‘“primitive” Slavic beliefs’ during the region’s Christianisation in the 10th/11th century produced ‘a rift in Polish spirituality, a wound that could not be healed or covered by scar tissue.’ Poland’s post-colonial trauma stems from being ‘mispbapitsed’. The cultural history of Poland that Pyzik thus proposes is, in equal measure, speculative and compelling. For instance: on her reading Jacek Malczewski’s canonical painting, ‘Melancholia’, becomes an image of despair, portraying the loss of Poland’s ‘mythical origin’. Pyzik cites two symptoms of this separation: the first is Poland’s relentless desire to be western; the second is the Polish propensity for ‘martyrophilia’. (We are reminded of paranoid spectacle that swept the country after the 2010 plane crash at Smolensk, during which 93 Polish dignitaries lost their lives.)\n\nPyzik is not proposing some pagan/Slavic renaissance. Rather, she argues, the as-yet ‘unrealized’ content of the ‘socialist past’ can only emerge if we burst open the apologist historical narrative, spun by the cross-wielding bigots on Poland’s outer-right fringe. We must unearth long forgotten counter-histories from the wreckage of Poland’s past: to create ‘alternative heroes’, to reassess ‘the “red” unwanted history (…), instead of relishing in the most reactionary elements of [the] interwar period, with all its xenophobia, anti-Semitism and nationalism.’\n\nThe fourth chapter, ‘Socialist Realism on Trial’, is in many ways the core of the book: an ambitious attempt to re-appraise the actuality of socialist realist aesthetics. Pyzik begins by diagnosing an ‘aesthetic crisis’ in contemporary art. ‘[A]fter 1989 a lot was done so that the notions of history and politicization were dismissed and put in the museum,’ she argues. To be sure, the advent of post-modernism, in the face of Francis Fukuyama’s cynical proclamation of the end of history, has proven to be more than a bump in the road for those seeking an engaged, political art with mass resonance. Pyzik’s ‘theoretical redemption of realism’, then, looks to the likes of Fredric Jameson and Boris Groys in order to (a) isolate the workable elements of socialist realism as it existed, historically; and (b) identify contemporary works in which these elements live on. The realist mode that Pyzik advocates is, then, proclaimed as the most viable option for an aesthetic of resistance, to borrow Peter Weiss’s term. Pyzik illustrates her point by citing TV shows like The Wire and The Sopranos, films by Ken Loach and Andrzej Wajda, artists like Jeremy Deller and Pawel Althamer as well as activist formations like Voina. (Pyzik’s accounts of Polish cinema, in particular, are truly outstanding.)\n\nHer argument depends, to some degree, on the familiar modernism/realism debates of the 1930s: the fragment versus the whole; agitprop versus bourgeois decadence; Adorno versus Lukacs, etc. Its broad contours can be summed up as follows: art has long tended to aestheticise politics; the weakness of modernism is that it’s too non-committal, always working to efface its own traces; what the left needs is an engaged political art that can practice what it preaches – a ‘powerful aesthetic of protest.’\n\nThe wider ramifications of Pyzik’s argument are too complex to adequately discuss in the form of a book review. Accordingly, the best we can do is point to a few contentious issues. Firstly, Pyzik seems to conflate two kinds of realism: the official, state-sanctioned art from the Soviet sphere and the broadly kitchen-sink realism of Ken Loach. It is not clear, I argue, that there is a red thread connecting mosaics from the Moscow metro with Kes. If the strength of the latter lies in an unflinching confrontation with the ills of capitalism, then the question arises how it is tied to the effort to see ‘not what is but what should be,’ which Pyzik attributes to the former. Secondly, the view that ‘critical art was capable of political agency, because it provoked national debates that redefined the status quo’ appears, to me, a little naïve. The standard modernist rebuttal to this view is that art, which simply illustrates a political ‘message’, undermines – both – the poignancy of the ‘message’ and its function as art. Voina, like Banksy, I would argue, is the dreaded aestheticisation of politics by eye-wateringly unsophisticated means. It is not just placing these works in a gallery-context that makes their ideas harmless, as Pyzik argues; their very mode of expression is complicit in reproducing the status quo. That is not to suggest that there is no room for this kind of activism in the context of Russian protest-culture, for instance, but I would seriously hesitate to herald these kinds of tactics as the future of political art. The chapter’s conclusion addresses some of these problems – though it raises another, more fundamental question: if the re-casting of ‘Socialist Realism’ departs so radically from its historical paradigm, why the insistence on its rehabilitation?\n\n[T]he call for new kinds of representation is not meant to imply merely a return to Balzac or Brecht. Realism and the avant-garde are historical concepts rooted in their time and place, and it’d be impossible to bring them back as they were without falling into quite obvious forms of kitsch (…). A new realism will include the new ways we live our lives today, unknown to the previous generations; the ways neoliberalism is perverting the spaces of our work and privacy; a new precarious aesthetic.\n\nAt a time when Nigel Farage’s tirades against Eastern Europeans win him a seat in the European Parliament, Poor But Sexy gives an intelligent and articulate voice to the left opposition. The author’s accessible style, her invaluable citations of musical, literary, artistic and cinematic gems and – above all – her unwavering politics make her book a joy to read. Despite my objections to some of the finer points of Pyzik’s exposition, I see Poor But Sexy as belonging in the proud lineage of Polish dissident journalism, along the lines of Ryszard Kapuscinski. Ending on a personal note, I’d like to add the following: having grown up in Vienna as the son of Polish émigrés, and, having lived in London for the past 10 years (since Poland Joined the EU), Pyzik’s book strikes a strong chord with me. There is, indeed, a prevalent sense that ‘the East’ is a lesser place. Combating this view without lapsing into the usual capitalist apologist mode is, perhaps, the book’s greatest triumph. ~ Sebastian Truskolaski, Review 31"", ""A fascinating and provocative study of Eastern Europe (including her native Poland) in the quarter-century since the Soviet Bloc began to disintegrate, looking at both the realities of post-communist life (transition trauma, precarity, emigration for work, etc) and at the fantasies and misunderstandings that East and West entertain about each other, as figured through pop, fashion, film, and art. Of particular interest to the music-minded: the chapter \""Ashes And Brocade: Berlinism, Bowie, Postpunk, New Romantics and Pop-Culture in the Second Cold War\"". ~ Simon Reynolds, Blissblog blissout.blogspot.com"", ""A necessary corrective to the paper-thin portrayal of Eastern Europe by Western media. Pyzik's writing is clear, direct, knowledgeable - and partisan, in the best sense of the word. ~ Daniel Trilling, author of Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right."", ""What’s a poor girl to do when worlds collide except listen to gloomy rock ’n’ roll bands and dance precariously along the fault-line of history where the Berlin Wall used to be? Born in Poland in the 1980s, Agata Pyzik is barely old enough to remember life under communism. Watching the waves of Ostalgie spreading across the former GDR and other ex-Warsaw Pakt states, she felt compelled to investigate the underlying causes of disenchantment among increasing numbers of Central Europeans hankering for the certainties guaranteed them under Soviet rule. If she began her mission with a sense of bemused contempt for dewy-eyed sentimentalism distorting people’s memory of what life was really like under communism, her investigations reveal a far more complex picture. Poor But Sexy is a fabulous freefall through 25 years of East-West exchanges predicated on the West’s arrogant assumption that at base everybody wants to buy in to their belief systems. Riding these East-West crosscurrents of desire, envy and wounded pride, she has found much to be proud of amid the ruins of communism, and in the process of looking back she has recovered some extraordinary punk, art, fashion and philosophical alternatives to the Western way ahead. ~ Chris Bohn aka Biba Kopf, editor of The Wire."", ""The book, titled Poor But Sexy,\n\npromises something very special. The author is in a unique position,\n\nas she has a long term intimacy with the Polish art world and cultural\n\nworld (as well as a knowledge of everyday life in Poland) and has over\n\nthe past few years acquired a intensive understanding of the British\n\ncultural scene and the political debates that intersect with cultural\n\npolitics in the UK. Her knowledge, as evidenced on her very readable\n\nblog, extends from popular cultural forms, East and West, to avant\n\ngarde movements in the East, some of which have not penetrated the\n\nWest significantly, some of which have. What is remarkable about her\n\ninterest in this diverse material is that she is able to analyse it\n\nand discuss it in relation to political questions and questions of\n\npolitical aesthetics, which bring it into focus in very sharp ways.\n\nShe has thoroughly monitored the ways in which the East has been\n\npresented as an object of artistic and intellectual fascination in the\n\nlast two decades. I can think of few people who command such facility\n\n- who have intimate knowledge of the art collective, for example, but\n\nare not beholden to them through self-interest, who are well versed in\n\nacademic and political debates in culture and economy. She is able to\n\nbring aspects of popular culture, in part unknown in the West, to life\n\nthrough lively and trenchant discussions. She is also able to give\n\naslant reflections on Western constructions of the East (as in Goodbye\n\nLenin) - in a kind of 'East speaks back' sort of way. The author is\n\nperfectly placed to write this survey and analysis of a cultural\n\nmanifestation that has a variety of facets (how the East sees the\n\nWest, how the West sees the East) and which is enduring, that is to\n\nsay, the author argues that the post-communist condition is still a\n\ncondition 22 years after the fall of the wall- and this is right. The\n\nbook aims to analyse this continuing condition as a strange kind of\n\npathology for both the East and the West. Such debates also intersect\n\nwith extremely relevant discussions around tourism and city-marketing.\n\nThis is not simply cultural criticism. There are also strong political\n\npoints to be made and these come out clearly in the book, in relation to the question of the welfare state, a question\n\nthat is once again distinctly of interest and tantalizingly\n\ncontroversial.\n\nI think the book is extremely good, readable, of interest\n\nto a variety of communities (artists, art critics, cultural critics,\n\nhistorians, commentators on the Left etc). I recommend it\n\nenthusiastically.\n\nEsther Leslie\n\nProfessor of Political Aesthetics\n\nBirkbeck ~""]" Pop Grenade,"[""Matthew Collin""]","Thrilling reportage from raves, riots and rebellions documents how rebels with a cause use music as a force for change.","An adrenalin-charged trip through some of the cultural flashpoints of the past few decades, Pop Grenade celebrates the power of music as a force for change. Based on first-hand, personal reportage from raves, riots and rebellions, it explores how music has been used as a weapon in struggles for liberation and attempts to create temporary paradises. From Berlin’s anarchic techno scene after the fall of the Wall to outlaw sound systems in wartime Bosnia, from Moscow during the crackdown on Pussy Riot to New York in the militant early years of hip-hop, it tells the extraordinary stories of some of the world’s most audacious musical freedom fighters, disco visionaries and rock’n’roll rebels with a cause.","An adrenalin-charged trip through some of the cultural flashpoints of the past few decades, Pop Grenade celebrates the power of music as a force for change. Based on first-hand, personal reportage from raves, riots and rebellions, it explores how music has been used as a weapon in struggles for liberation and attempts to create temporary paradises. From Berlin’s anarchic techno scene after the fall of the Wall to outlaw sound systems in wartime Bosnia, from Moscow during the crackdown on Pussy Riot to New York in the militant early years of hip-hop, it tells the extraordinary stories of some of the world’s most audacious musical freedom fighters, disco visionaries and rock’n’roll rebels with a cause.",10,"[""Comment pieces would have you believe that protest music is dead. Matthew Collin's front-line dispatches prove otherwise... Having worked for music and youth culture magazines and also as a foreign correspondent, Matthew Collin has the perfect CV to explode this narrow definition of political music and, in this entertaining collection, he combines original reporting from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s with the wisdom of hindsight. ~ , New Statesman"", ""The book is a fascinating journey into the worlds of social politics and popular music and the freedom fighter artists whose music and message inspired generations, the underground and movements to take effect. ~ , Louder Than War"", ""Skilfully painted landscapes aren’t the grand total of Collin’s style - his storytelling is also dynamic, at times very witty, but always very entertaining along this vertiginous journey from one end of the musical world to another. ~ , SEEbiz.eu"", ""Good, good stuff. Collin can write, no doubt, and evoke a scene with great mastery... What we have here are some great tales, told well. ~ Simon A. Morrison, Silent Radio"", ""An inherently fascinating read from beginning to end, 'Pop Grenade: From Public Enemy to Pussy Riot - Dispatches from Musical Frontlines' offers a unique perspective that will prove to be as compelling as it is informed and informative. Very highly recommended for both community and academic library Pop Culture and Music History reference collections and supplemental studies lists. ~ Micah Andrew, Micah's Bookshelf, MBR Bookwatch: Midwest Book Review - July issue"", ""Reveals how music has been a force for cultural change, rebellion and a way of creating temporary paradises… A unique insight. ~ Vice"", ""Sparkles with a fan’s enthusiasm, yet without losing any of the critic’s astringency… The style is as arresting as the content. ~ i-D magazine"", ""Matthew Collin has made something of a speciality of exploring and writing about places where popular culture is still a counter-culture, perceived as a threat by authorities, and therefore created and enjoyed at some risk by its practitioners and adherents… This is a smart, bracing and thoughtful book. ~ New Humanist"", ""One of the greatest and most important books about music ever written. This is Apocalypse Now with a banging four-four beat and searing FX; an amazing collection of tales of inspirational courage and madness from the front line of popular culture. ~ Irvine Welsh"", ""Matthew Collin has a reporter’s eye, a critic’s erudition and a fan’s passion. Whether embedded with ravers in Berlin and Bosnia or protesters in Istanbul and Moscow, he tells vivid and surprising stories about music’s capacity for resistance and change. ~ Dorian Lynskey, Author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute""]" Porn Panic!,"[""Jerry Barnett""]",The Rise of the New British Anti-Sex Movement.,"First they came for the pornography, and then strip clubs, lads' mags and music videos. Then they came for hate speech, and then speech that was merely offensive. They eroded free speech online and on university campuses. They sought to divide people by gender and by race. Porn Panic! charts the rise of a new social conservatism for the new millennium, coinciding with the collapse of liberalism as a political force. A new fascism is here, and it’s nothing like anyone expected...","First they came for the pornography, and then strip clubs, lads' mags and music videos. Then they came for hate speech, and then speech that was merely offensive. They eroded free speech online and on university campuses. They sought to divide people by gender and by race. Porn Panic! charts the rise of a new social conservatism for the new millennium, coinciding with the collapse of liberalism as a political force. A new fascism is here, and it’s nothing like anyone expected...",3,"[""What an informative read! It gives a very comprehensive summary of the evolution of porn from print to online, and how (British) society has reacted to the changes. I especially enjoyed the author's personal insights and quips. Him having gone through the \""porn revolution\"" first hand gives it an air of credibility and it is peppered with personal anecdotes, which makes for a fun read. Of course, the author is absolutely biased towards porn. (In fact, the whole point of the book is to convince us that there is too much fuss being made about porn, and that the fuss has been far more detrimental than porn itself.) However, one can't help but nod along and agree as the points made are valid, and the author presents the facts as they are (with solid references too), without resorting to overly obtuse language or complex reasoning meant to befuddle the reader.\n\nPick up this book if you are\n\n1. confused about feminism, or if you identify as a feminist\n\n2. curious about why anyone would write a book defending porn\n\n3. interested in politics and censorship\n\n4. intrigued by the eye-catching cover on this book (as I was!) ~ J. Lee, GoodReads"", ""Great window into the society of GB in the last decades, it is well written and with a lot of humor combined, it makes for an interesting read and yes lets face it...we humans all enjoy a little voyeurism too....after all it is an x-rated subject and god knows the general human reaction to the word porn always makes for so many memorable hilarious moments!\n\nI learned some....laughed a lot and will be recommending this one to friends for sure! (at least to some of my friends...lol...).\n\n~ Philippa Song, NetGalley"", ""Porn Panic! documents new and rising threats to free expression, and mounts a fierce and entertaining defence. ~ Nadine Strossen, Professor of Law, New York Law School and former ACLU President""]" Pornography Feminism: As Powerful as She Wants to Be,"[""Rich Moreland""]",Pornography feminists unshackle their desires and celebrate their sexuality in the patriarchal world of filmed sex.,"During the sex wars of the 1980s, sex-positive feminism entered the adult film industry with a performer support group known as Club 90. Over the next three decades feminism found a home among an influential group of women in pornography. Pornography Feminism: As Powerful as She Wants to Be is a popular history of this unfolding saga told largely through personal interviews along with scholarly works, previous popular histories, and film reviews.","During the sex wars of the 1980s, sex-positive feminism entered the adult film industry with a performer support group known as Club 90. Over the next three decades feminism found a home among an influential group of women in pornography. Pornography Feminism: As Powerful as She Wants to Be is a popular history of this unfolding saga told largely through personal interviews along with scholarly works, previous popular histories, and film reviews.",1,"[""Rich Moreland has created a rich and comprehensive study of “pornography feminism” in a style that is accessible to students, academics and laypersons alike. I’m impressed with the depth of material Moreland covers and his willingness not only to take on a subject steeped in controversy and challenge both his own long-held views as well as those of the community at large; but having done so, to come out on the side of the less-popular stance – and have the courage to say so! Bravo Professor Moreland! ~ Candida Royalle, D.H.S., Author, Erotic Filmmaker & Entrepreneur""]" Positive Realism,"[""Maurizio Ferraris""]","Things exist, and therefore undoubtedly resist us, but in doing so they offer affordances, resources, opportunities.","Positive Realism could be seen as the ""sequel"" to Maurizio Ferraris' Manifesto of New Realism and Introduction to New Realism. The focus here is the other side of unamendability: a notion, described in his previous books, according to which reality is ""unamendable"", it cannot be corrected at will. This ""resistance"" of the real is what ultimately tells us that, in opposition to the claims of post-Kantian philosophy, the world is not a result of our conceptual work: if it were so, our power over reality would be much greater. Now, the often disappointing limits that the real sets against our expectations are also a resource: and this is the key point of the present book. Things exist, and therefore undoubtedly resist us, but in doing so they offer affordances, resources, opportunities. And that the greatest opportunity, which underlies all the other ones, is the fact that we share a world that is far from liquid: on the contrary, it provides the solid ground on which everything rests, starting from our happiness or unhappiness.","Positive Realism could be seen as the ""sequel"" to Maurizio Ferraris' Manifesto of New Realism and Introduction to New Realism. The focus here is the other side of unamendability: a notion, described in his previous books, according to which reality is ""unamendable"", it cannot be corrected at will. This ""resistance"" of the real is what ultimately tells us that, in opposition to the claims of post-Kantian philosophy, the world is not a result of our conceptual work: if it were so, our power over reality would be much greater. Now, the often disappointing limits that the real sets against our expectations are also a resource: and this is the key point of the present book. Things exist, and therefore undoubtedly resist us, but in doing so they offer affordances, resources, opportunities. And that the greatest opportunity, which underlies all the other ones, is the fact that we share a world that is far from liquid: on the contrary, it provides the solid ground on which everything rests, starting from our happiness or unhappiness.",1,"[""Ferraris showed great courage in the brutally anti-realist continental philosophy of the early 1990s. He argues rigorously, and is also an erudite and cultured person with an unusually good sense of humor. The combination of Ferraris and his students (in Italy) and Gabriel and his students (in Germany) helps add much-needed geographic diversity to a so far mostly Anglo-Francophone continental realist surge, which will help bring continental realism one step closer to a global philosophical movement. ~ Graham Harman""]" Post Cinematic Affect,"[""Steven Shaviro""]","This book ponders the fate of the movies in a world of digital media, globalization, and massive financial flows.","Post-Cinematic Affect is about what it feels like to live in the affluent West in the early 21st century. Specifically, it explores the structure of feeling that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities. The 20th century was the age of film and television; these dominant media shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities. In the 21st century, new digital media help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility. Movies (moving image and sound works) continue to be made, but they have adopted new formal strategies, they are viewed under massively changed conditions, and they address their spectators in different ways than was the case in the 20th century. The book traces these changes, focusing on four recent moving-image works: Nick Hooker's music video for Grace Jones' song Corporate Cannibal; Olivier Assayas' movie Boarding Gate, starring Asia Argento; Richard Kelly's movie Southland Tales, featuring Justin Timberlake, Dwayne Johnson, and other pop culture celebrities; and Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's Gamer.","Post-Cinematic Affect is about what it feels like to live in the affluent West in the early 21st century. Specifically, it explores the structure of feeling that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities. The 20th century was the age of film and television; these dominant media shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities. In the 21st century, new digital media help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility. Movies (moving image and sound works) continue to be made, but they have adopted new formal strategies, they are viewed under massively changed conditions, and they address their spectators in different ways than was the case in the 20th century. The book traces these changes, focusing on four recent moving-image works: Nick Hooker's music video for Grace Jones' song Corporate Cannibal; Olivier Assayas' movie Boarding Gate, starring Asia Argento; Richard Kelly's movie Southland Tales, featuring Justin Timberlake, Dwayne Johnson, and other pop culture celebrities; and Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's Gamer.",3,"[""A nimble and incisive explication of contemporary social shifts, and it makes concrete some dense and tricky theoretical terrain. For these reasons, it would be a useful addition to a graduate or advanced undergraduate course. ~ Greg Goldberg, Viral Book Review, Women's Quarterly Journal"", ""Post-Cinematic Affect offers an important commentary on the condition of contemporary cinema overtaken by digitization. Zero books aims at inspiring new paths of critical thought, and Post-Cinematic Affect succeeds in this.\n\n~ Varpu Rantala, Aferimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Critism"", ""Shaviro touches on multiple sources for his post-Marxist critique, including Spinoza , Fredric Jameson and Deleuze . His analysis identifies markers for our evolving relationship with new media, but no definite outcome. This book presents an excellent overview of the changing shape of cinema and our engagement with film.\n\n~ Emmet O'Cuana, http://abookadaytillicanstay.wordpress.com""]" Post-Continental Voices: Selected Interviews,"[""Paul J. Ennis""]",This collection brings together seven emerging post-continental philosophers offering a rare insight into the closeted world of academic philosophy.,"This collection of interviews brings together seven post-continental thinkers to discuss their own personal academic development, their experiences of graduate school and their hopes for post-continental philosophy. Each thinker has been chosen for their importance, popularity and potential. Opening with a short introduction this book offers a rare insight into the world of academic philosophy from the inside. Acting as a handbook to post-continental philosophy this book will prepare students for the unique challenges facing academic philosophy in the coming years. The following thinkers appear in the book: Graham Harman, Jeffrey Malpas, Lee Braver, Stuart Elden, Ian Bogost, Levi R. Byrant, and Adrian Ivakhiv.","This collection of interviews brings together seven post-continental thinkers to discuss their own personal academic development, their experiences of graduate school and their hopes for post-continental philosophy. Each thinker has been chosen for their importance, popularity and potential. Opening with a short introduction this book offers a rare insight into the world of academic philosophy from the inside. Acting as a handbook to post-continental philosophy this book will prepare students for the unique challenges facing academic philosophy in the coming years. The following thinkers appear in the book: Graham Harman, Jeffrey Malpas, Lee Braver, Stuart Elden, Ian Bogost, Levi R. Byrant, and Adrian Ivakhiv.",1,"[""Ennis is an expert guide to survey the coming landscape of Continental philosophy. The interviews here offer a fascinating glimpse of a Continental geography in which the analytic/Continental split is rendered meaningless and new methods are being offered to rethink classical philosophical questions. Ennis is a great surrogate for the reader, asking questions that you have in mind as the interviews develop, and the dialogue themselves are approachable to both the lay reader and expert alike. Pick up this book and grab a front seat to those whose work will be in short order the landmarks of our post-Continental futures. ~ Peter Gratton, Assistant Professor, University of San Diego""]" Praise of Motherhood,"[""Phil Jourdan""]",The death of the author's mother sparks a series of reflections on the secret roles mothers play in the lives of troubled adolescents.,"When Phil Jourdan's mother died suddenly in 2009, she left behind a legacy of kindness and charity — but she also left unanswered some troubling questions. Was she, as she once claimed, a spy? Had she suffered more profoundly as a woman and parent than she'd let on? Jourdan's recollections of his struggles with psychosis, and his reconstructions of conversations with his enigmatic mother, form the core of this memoir. Psychoanalysis, poetry and confession all merge to tell the story of an ordinary woman whose death turned her into a symbol for extraordinary motherhood.","When Phil Jourdan's mother died suddenly in 2009, she left behind a legacy of kindness and charity — but she also left unanswered some troubling questions. Was she, as she once claimed, a spy? Had she suffered more profoundly as a woman and parent than she'd let on? Jourdan's recollections of his struggles with psychosis, and his reconstructions of conversations with his enigmatic mother, form the core of this memoir. Psychoanalysis, poetry and confession all merge to tell the story of an ordinary woman whose death turned her into a symbol for extraordinary motherhood.",6,"[""An effective epigraph should prepare a reader for the rest of the work, and the one for Phil Jourdan’s Praise of Motherhood does exactly that. The quotation from Paul Valéry’s Tel quel, ‘Un lapin ne nous effraie point; mais le brusque départ d’un lapin inattendu peut nous mettre en fuite,’ translates more or less as ‘One rabbit does not scare us in the slightest, but the sudden departure of an unexpected rabbit can make us flee’. It functions as a comment on the suddenness of Jourdan’s mother's death from an aneurysm: ‘But nobody had warned me. Nobody had warned anyone’. Interestingly, the section of Tel quel from which this epigraph comes goes on to observe how a person who lacks foresight is less overwhelmed and flustered by a catastrophe than someone who plans ahead. Jourdan explicitly places himself in this latter category when he writes, ‘And though I didn’t cry I kept a series of notes, tiny memories it was important not to forget, ever-ever, things to stick into the book I had already decided to write about my mother’.\n\nThis quality of deliberation appears again midway through the book, when Jourdan writes, ‘I don’t care how things actually happened. I want to rearrange it all, to make it into a streamlined, coherent narrative’. In a way, this desire underpins the project of Praise of Motherhood: memoir as an attempt to make sense of his mother Sofia’s death and her legacy. At the same time, there are novelistic techniques at work, evident in tiny details such as the way Jourdan chooses to spell his mother’s name as ‘Sophia’, but also more broadly in what Caleb J. Ross calls in his foreword a refusal to ‘allow the constraints of perspective or chronology to guide the text’.\n\nTake, for example, Chapter Four, in which Jourdan imagines how his mother might have turned to her friend, a priest, for help in dealing with her son’s teenage struggles with psychosis. The whole chapter is utterly convincing and, were it not for the occasional reminder, a reader could well forget that a good deal of it is being imagined by Jourdan after the fact, ‘guilt-ridden and wearing [his] writer’s hat’. A similar effect occurs in Chapter Ten, where Jourdan imagines the life story of Piotr ‘Brown Bear’ Popov, based on his mother’s claim that she was once a spy, ‘the part of her [he] knew the least, the most surprising aspect of an endless woman now dead but guttering in the back of [his] mind’.\n\nThe book continues to eschew the conventional memoir narrative form, yet still persists in elaborating on the book’s portrayal of Jourdan’s mother. Chapter Eleven does this through a mixture of speeches by Jourdan’s parents, each one lopped off at both ends by ellipses, so that they form an accretion of impressions rather than a straightforward narrative thread. Chapter Twelve operates as a series of open letters by Jourdan to different groups of people who crossed his mother’s path, by turns angry (‘Go back to your stupid house with your stupid family and leave me the hell alone, leave my sister alone, and stop attending funerals to which you weren’t invited. Just go away.’) and tender (‘So dear old homeless lady, you will not die while I am around, not because I care about you, but because it’s what my mother would have wanted.’).\n\nIn its penultimate chapter, Praise of Motherhood pushes the limits of memoir even further by positing, ‘Let this all have been a lie. Let my mother be sitting here next to me; let her have been here the whole time.’ However, this alternate version of events ultimately devolves into a nightmarish vision of matricide, as his mother falls apart and has to be reassembled using duct tape, only for the rebuilt figure to repeat, ‘You killed me. You killed me. You killed me.’ Yet this grim ending is actually laying the ground for the final chapter’s redemptive opening:\n\n\""No, I didn’t kill you.\n\nIf I had killed you, I would have nothing to write about. I’d already have committed every mistake, burned down every bridge, dismissed every memory I have of you as a facsimile.\n\n[…]\n\nYou saw the good in me, as I still see the good in you.\""\n\nIn Ross’ forward, he writes that perhaps the book’s ‘great accomplishment is passing on the legacy of what the reader will come to know as a woman simply meant to exist beyond her own years… Jourdan invites the reader to be a member of his family, literally extending his mother’s impact to new generations and new lineages entirely’. Early on in the book, Jourdan writes, ‘Everyone, even in his profoundest hatred, loves his mother’. So whatever his stated reasons for writing Praise of Motherhood, the end result still feels like an incredible act of generosity on his part, affording the reader the privilege of briefly encountering Sofia, this woman who ‘was Love manifest’. ~ Ian Chung, The Cadaverine, http://www.thecadaverine.com/?p=5198"", ""Phil Jourdan is a musician, translator, and fiction writer originally from Portugal. He now lives in the UK, where he is completing work on a doctorate at Warwick University. His new book, Praise of Motherhood, is a heartbreaking look at the loss of his mother Sophia to an unexpected brain aneurysm. The book is reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye, in terms of its profane language, teenage angst, and youthful rebellion. However, Jourdan follows a different track than Salinger by offering a very vivid portrait of an amazing and compassionate Portuguese mother.\n\nThis memoir includes the difficult journey the author took after the death of his mother, the parent who had primarily raised him and to whom he was the closest. Jourdan also spends considerable time reflecting on his childhood and his adolescence, including his hospitalization for psychological issues during his teen years. These challenges parallel Holden Caulfield’s struggles, in terms of angst, struggles for identity, and loneliness. Another book that comes to mind is The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, where the typical hurdles of maturing are further exacerbated by mental challenges.\n\nJourdan’s book focuses on his struggle through his grief. He began writing this memoir the day his mother passed away, after he was called back to Portugal by his family following his mother’s sudden collapse. His mother’s Ukrainian boyfriend and family members are also devastated by this loss, but it is primarily Jourdan who was the closest to his mother, and therefore he picks up the challenge of bringing her grace and beauty back to life in these pages.\n\nThere is also a mystery about his mother which clearly makes Jourdan wonder what else he might not have known about her. Yet, it is clear that his love for her is unruffled by what might have happened during this time period of potential espionage.\n\nThe book explores the themes of maternal love, the trials of adolescence, and the emotional struggles that shaped the author’s teen years. Through it all, this book stands as a tribute to the mother whose grace is reflected in this book in a timeless way.\n\nIn the end, the reader is struck by the importance of appreciating those family members who give us love and guidance, no matter whether it is in a small town in Portugal or a bustling city in England. ~ Kathi Stafford, Portuguese-American Journal, http://portuguese-american-journal.com/memoir-phil-jordans-praise-of-motherhoo-and-the-challenge-of-grieving-interview/"", ""A loving and heartbreaking tribute, Praise of Motherhood is a candid look at life and all the things we feel, but can never find the words to say.\n\n~ Booked Podcast"", ""Jourdan crafts a story that is both heartbreaking and cathartic.\n\n~ Brandon Tietz, author of Out of Touch"", ""Praise of Motherhood is a brutally honest, touching, and gut-wrenching story about love, loss, family and, possibly, forgiveness. ~ Richard Thomas, author of Transubstantiate"", ""This is a beautiful meditation, simultaneously subtle and powerfully direct, on the depth of emotion between a mother and son. Jourdan's words come back to me long after I've finished the book. Moments of this memoir leave me haunted, and in that way renew my devotion to fragile lives, which is to say all of us, all so human, and to life as wild and fleeting. ~ Monica Drake, author of Clown Girl""]" "Primer on Utopian Philosophy, A","[""Jonathan Greenaway""]",How Ernst Bloch's work can provide new hope for utopian thinking today.,"The utopian project lies in ruins, but perhaps in our present moment, there are elements from the history of thought that can provide fresh resources for utopianism. In this groundbreaking introduction, Jon Greenaway explores the work of German philosopher Ernst Bloch, whose complex and challenging philosophy is a primer for a philosophical renewal of the struggle for a better world.","The utopian project lies in ruins, but perhaps in our present moment, there are elements from the history of thought that can provide fresh resources for utopianism. In this groundbreaking introduction, Jon Greenaway explores the work of German philosopher Ernst Bloch, whose complex and challenging philosophy is a primer for a philosophical renewal of the struggle for a better world.",7,"[""A timely introduction to Bloch and his tireless intellectual labours in the name of hope. Greenaway reminds us of the true political stakes of the utopian dream: though it wanders in other worlds and other times, it must be realised only here and now. ~ Gregory Marks, writer at The Wasted World"", ""The driving force behind Greenaway’s exegesis of Ernst Bloch’s work is the much-needed task of rediscovering hope - not in the form of naive optimism or passive wishful thinking, but in the struggle to find the seeds of utopia in everyday life, to see in the quotidian the 'unbearable nearness of utopia.' ~ Jonas Čeika, author of How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle"", ""An important intellectual history of hope’s chief philosopher, Greenaway’s book reanimates one of European Marxism’s most elusive figures, with a clarity and urgency fitting of the challenges presented by Bloch’s great utopian gamble. A welcome and necessary contribution from a rising voice on the Left. ~ Kyle Kern, historian & YouTuber"", ""Ernst Bloch has been a relatively minor figure within the intellectual history of the Left, until recently. As interest in his work grows, I can think of no better introduction to his work than this book — a super accessible and invigorating read! ~ Matt Colquhoun, author of Narcissus In Bloom"", ""Jon Greenaway shows us that the world is infinitely full of hope, and yes, for us too. Bloch is revealed to us as the romantic materialist who is only too ripe for a full-on revival for the Left today. A thinker who teaches us to embrace the rupture of utopia as the rupture hidden within all previous history, the Old Man with the Raised Fist still has much to teach us! ~ Adam C. Jones, Acid Horizon"", ""'There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe,' someone once said, 'but not for us.' And yet, in an age of economic crisis, ecological catastrophe, and social declension, hope can be nothing less than a revolutionary imperative; it is the name for our collective desire that life might be lived together and otherwise. What this book shows, with an erudition born of love and fury, is that hope might yet be the fire with which we blaze the path to utopia, incinerating this terrible universe along the way. ~ Mark Steven, author of Class War: A Literary History"", ""The philosophy of Ernst Bloch has shaped generations of Marxist philosophers, from Theodor Adorno and Gyorg Lukács to Fredric Jameson, but rarely is Bloch assessed on his own terms in the full range and depth of his thought. Jon Greenaway has managed to bring the fullness of Bloch's concepts into the urgent light of our present, from his theory of fascism, consciousness, revolution, class struggle, and religion to the nature of reality itself. Greenaway's book is an inspired and beautifully written introduction to the revolutionary thought of Ernst Bloch. ~ Daniel Tutt, author of How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche""]" "Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE, The","[""Bruno Latour"", ""Graham Harman"", ""Peter Erdélyi""]",This book contains the transcript of the fascinating 2008 discussion between philosophers Bruno Latour and Graham Harman at the LSE.,"The Prince and the Wolf contains the transcript of a debate which took place on 5th February 2008 at the London School of Economics (LSE) between the prominent French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher Bruno Latour and the Cairo-based American philosopher Graham Harman. The occasion for the debate was the impending publication of Harman’s book, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. During the discussion, Latour (the ‘Prince’) compared the professional philosophers who have pursued him over the years to a pack of wolves. The Prince and the Wolf is the story of what happens when the wolf catches up with the prince. Latour and Harman engage in brisk and witty conversation about questions that go to the heart of both metaphysics and research methodology: What are objects? How do they interact? And best how to study them? '...Harman does for Heidegger what Slavoj Zizek has done for Jacques Lacan: he makes available to an intelligent audience the brilliant insights of a thinker whose tendency to the obscure has been exacerbated by a philosophy industry that has derived much of its influence from a disdain for lucidity.' Mark Fisher, Frieze","The Prince and the Wolf contains the transcript of a debate which took place on 5th February 2008 at the London School of Economics (LSE) between the prominent French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher Bruno Latour and the Cairo-based American philosopher Graham Harman. The occasion for the debate was the impending publication of Harman’s book, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. During the discussion, Latour (the ‘Prince’) compared the professional philosophers who have pursued him over the years to a pack of wolves. The Prince and the Wolf is the story of what happens when the wolf catches up with the prince. Latour and Harman engage in brisk and witty conversation about questions that go to the heart of both metaphysics and research methodology: What are objects? How do they interact? And best how to study them? '...Harman does for Heidegger what Slavoj Zizek has done for Jacques Lacan: he makes available to an intelligent audience the brilliant insights of a thinker whose tendency to the obscure has been exacerbated by a philosophy industry that has derived much of its influence from a disdain for lucidity.' Mark Fisher, Frieze",5,"[""Review of the initial event from Frieze, by Mark Fisher:\n\nClearing the Air\n\nOPINION\n\nFor a long time, continental philosophy has dominated large areas of cultural criticism, not least in the art world. Its orthodoxies have infected the way in which artists understand and describe their own work, as well as the critical reception of that same work. Traditionally, continental philosophy’s main adversary has been a dismissive Anglo-American commonsense. But a sophisticated challenge to continentalism is now emerging, drawing upon some of the same theoretical resources but using them for very different purposes.\n\nAt the forefront of these developments is the philosopher Graham Harman, whose work on cultural theorist Bruno Latour was the subject of a symposium held on February 5th at the LSE. Latour himself was in attendance, and he expressed a certain scepticism towards metaphysics. Harman, however, is an unapologetic metaphysician, and his work makes a powerful case for a return to metaphysics in the grand style.\n\nHarman’s work is rooted in his renegade reading of the notoriously hard-going work of Martin Heidegger. He is enthusiastic about Heidegger’s conceptual breakthroughs but impatient with his tone, which at the LSE symposium Harman dismissed as something to be ‘endured’ rather than emulated. This refreshing contempt for the great philosopher of Being’s ‘oracular heaviness’ sets Harman at odds with the mainstream reception of Heidegger in continental philosophy, which has tended to revel in precisely that tone of mystificatory piety. (At its worst, deconstructive theory ended up being a laborious cultivation of Heidegger’s tone, and little else.) In person and in his writing, Harman’s brisk style – crisply poetic in its lucidity – could not be further from the ponderous perplexities of continentalist theory.\n\nPart of the scandal of Harman’s reading of Heidegger is his belief that Heidegger’s crucial insights can be communicated at all– a thought that for many Heideggerians is itself apostasy. For this priestly cadre, the title of Harman’s superb introductory text, Heidegger Explained (2007), might as well read ‘Heidegger destroyed’. But Harman does for Heidegger what Slavoj Zizek has done for Jacques Lacan: he makes available to an intelligent audience the brilliant insights of a thinker whose tendency to the obscure has been exacerbated by a philosophy industry that has derived much of its influence from a disdain for lucidity.\n\nAt the core of Harman’s reading of Heidegger is his account of the ‘tool analysis’ in Being And Time (1927). When we are using a tool, Heidegger suggests, it cannot be at the forefront of our attention. If we are using a toothbrush, the toothbrush withdraws from visibility; as soon as we concentrate on the toothbrush as a toothbrush, as soon it becomes visible again, it ceases to be functional. It is only broken tools, or tools that are no longer doing their work, which can be made ‘present-at-hand’. So something is always missing from any ‘present-at-hand’ entity. Harman argues that this is true of all objects: every object has a hidden subterranean dimension that cannot be made present.\n\nOne implication of the tool analysis, not appreciated by Heidegger or most of his followers, is a radical de-privileging of human subjectivity. The refusal to put the human mode of being – what Heidegger called ‘Dasein’ – at the heart of philosophy is another heretical move in Harman’s aberrant treatment of Heidegger. It is not only in the lacunae of human attention that objects recline into mysterious depths. When objects engage with each other, without a human observer present, they too ‘caricature’ each other. When fire burns cotton, it does not engage with the entirety of the cotton’s being, only with those aspects of it that are flammable. Something in every object recesses from presence.\n\nHarman’s forthcoming book on Bruno Latour, Prince of Networks, under discussion at the LSE seminar, applies his ‘tool-being’ metaphysics to Latour’s ‘actor-network theory’. Latour’s ‘actors’ and ‘networks’ become ‘objects’ and ‘relations’. But Harman insists that objects have a reality that is irreducible to their relations. A chess piece may derive its meaning from its relation to other pieces, but this by no means exhausts its ‘objectality’: micro-organisms may be nestling inside it, for example. All objects have occulted depths which no external entity can ever fully access.\n\nWhereas continental philosophy has turned endlessly, and increasingly fruitlessly, around problems of human consciousness and language, Harman, along with a small group of other ‘speculative realist’ philosophers, including Ray Brassier and Quentin Meillassoux, is fascinated by non-human worlds, by the interactions of dust mites in a carpet as much as by the dark sides of planets on which no human foot will ever tread. Harman asks us to stop being anxious about what an object means for us, the way in which it is supposedly constructed and constituted by our minds, and consider the object itself, alluring in its partial opacity. He calls his work ‘weird realism’, and wants to attune us to the strangeness of objects once they are liberated from commonsense’s somnambulant gaze.\n\nHarman’s philosophy gives licence for a renewed boldness in cultural criticism. Deconstruction in particular preached against making definitive judgements about texts or artworks, favouring strategies of deferral and equivocation that suspended interpretative closure. The ostensible motivation for these evasions was a reverence for the irreducible complexities of the text. But instead of illuminating cultural objects, this often only obscured them; rather than engaging with the object, theory was induced into interminable meditations on how it was impossible to write about it. Harman shows that any encounter with an object must caricature it – but it is only through such caricaturing that a glimpse of the object’s hidden richness can be gleaned.\n\nMP3s of the talks given at the symposium can be found on the LSE website.\n\nMark Fisher\n\nMark Fisher is a writer based in Kent. His blog can be found at http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/\n\n~ Mark Fisher"", ""This is an especially welcome book. It is rare that one has the opportunity to be a near eye witness to a constructive and intellectually generous exchange of provocative ideas-in-the-making. Graham Harman, Bruno Latour and the assembled audience put on a great show. The exchange is fresh, laced with good humor, and informative. There is much to be learned here about empirical metaphysics and collegiality. ~ Michael Flower, Portland State University"", ""\""Too often debates are sterile. Each participant lines up behind the other, each with their own point of view. All is on show but nothing much happens. This debate is different. Something happened.\"" ~ Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick"", ""\""Many crucial things get exposed and made explicit here. A key access point to the Latourian moment.\"" ~ Fabian Muniesa, École des Mines de Paris"", ""...Harman does for Heidegger what Slavoj Zizek has done for Jacques Lacan: he makes available to an intelligent audience the brilliant insights of a thinker whose tendency to the obscure has been exacerbated by a philosophy industry that has derived much of its influence from a disdain for lucidity. ~ Mark Fisher, Frieze""]" Printed in Utopia,"[""Ed Simon""]","In sailing to Utopia, we must first chart our ships through the Renaissance to discover our radical intellectual origins.","Printed in Utopia examines the bloody era of the Renaissance in all of its contradictions and moments of utopian possibility. From the dissenting religious anarchists of the 17th century, to the feminist verse of Amelia Lanyer and Richard Barnfield's poetics of gay rights. From an analysis of the rhetoric of feces in Martin Luther, to the spiritual liberation of Anna Trapnell. What is presented is the radical Renaissance too often hidden away, an age which birthed our modern world in all of its ugliness, but which still holds the latent seeds for a new and better future world.","Printed in Utopia examines the bloody era of the Renaissance in all of its contradictions and moments of utopian possibility. From the dissenting religious anarchists of the 17th century, to the feminist verse of Amelia Lanyer and Richard Barnfield's poetics of gay rights. From an analysis of the rhetoric of feces in Martin Luther, to the spiritual liberation of Anna Trapnell. What is presented is the radical Renaissance too often hidden away, an age which birthed our modern world in all of its ugliness, but which still holds the latent seeds for a new and better future world.",2,"[""In the pages of \""Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance's Radicalism\"", Ed Simon deftly examines the bloody era of the Renaissance in all of its contradictions and moments of utopian possibility.\n\nFrom the dissenting religious anarchists of the 17th century, to the feminist verse of Amelia Lanyer and Richard Barnfield's poetics of gay rights, from an analysis of the rhetoric of feces in Martin Luther, to the spiritual liberation of Anna Trapnell, what is presented in \""Printed in Utopia\"" is the radical Renaissance that is too often hidden away from the general reading public. It was an age which birthed our modern world in all of its ugliness, but which still holds the latent seeds for a new and better future world.\n\nA meticulous work of historical scholarship that is presented in a narrative style making it an ideal and thoroughly accessible introduction for the non-academic general reader while holding an immense value for the history student and academia, \""Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance's Radicalism\"" is unreservedly recommended for community, college, and university library Renaissance History & Culture collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists. ~ James Cox, Midwest Book Review"", ""From rambunctious Restoration poetry to sceptical Shakespearean metaphysics, Printed in Utopia presents a unity of historical essays at once ludic and lucid. Ed Simon writes about faith with a vivacious originality, celebrating the radically eternal essence of the Renaissance. ~ Russell Bennetts, Editor and Founder of Berfrois""]" "Prisoner's Dilemma, The","[""Sean Stuart O'Connor""]","A claustrophobic and fast-moving game of cat and mouse, as three ruthless men and one woman drive relentlessly towards their destinies.","The Caithness coast. Winter 1745. Rebellion year. A half-mad earl witnesses a murder. But seeing the appalling decision the killer had taken leads him to invent his ‘game of life’ – The Prisoner’s Dilemma – and he writes to his old friend, David Hume, inviting him to his ancient stronghold to explore its meaning. Hume is only too pleased to go. He has just met Adam Smith and the two of them have disagreed about man’s instinct for survival - and how compassion can exist in a world driven by self-interest. But before Hume’s discussions with the earl can begin, two strangers arrive from Prussia who will turn their lives upside down – and attract the attentions of the English army. As the pace of the story quickens to a claustrophobic climax, the greatest questions of the age sluice wildly about the action and people find themselves driven relentlessly towards their destinies in love and betrayal, ambition and failure and, eventually, in life and death. But as the secrets of game theory unfold the characters’ motivations, and their deceits and feints are laid bare, a simpler story is exposed– it is the compelling tale of three utterly ruthless men, each of whom is determined to win for himself the love of an extraordinary woman. Who will win? And why?","The Caithness coast. Winter 1745. Rebellion year. A half-mad earl witnesses a murder. But seeing the appalling decision the killer had taken leads him to invent his ‘game of life’ – The Prisoner’s Dilemma – and he writes to his old friend, David Hume, inviting him to his ancient stronghold to explore its meaning. Hume is only too pleased to go. He has just met Adam Smith and the two of them have disagreed about man’s instinct for survival - and how compassion can exist in a world driven by self-interest. But before Hume’s discussions with the earl can begin, two strangers arrive from Prussia who will turn their lives upside down – and attract the attentions of the English army. As the pace of the story quickens to a claustrophobic climax, the greatest questions of the age sluice wildly about the action and people find themselves driven relentlessly towards their destinies in love and betrayal, ambition and failure and, eventually, in life and death. But as the secrets of game theory unfold the characters’ motivations, and their deceits and feints are laid bare, a simpler story is exposed– it is the compelling tale of three utterly ruthless men, each of whom is determined to win for himself the love of an extraordinary woman. Who will win? And why?",3,"[""The Prisoner’s Dilemma By Sean Stuart O’Connor\n\nJanuary 13, 2014 Susan Heywood\n\nSet in the remote, harsh landscape of the Scottish Highlands, this fast paced historical thriller, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, draws on the charged politics of the mid-1700s. The ruling Hanoverians faced a resurgent threat to the English throne, in the form of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, the charismatic “Bonnie Prince Charlie”. The newly incumbent German monarchs had good reason to fear the recurring challenge from an ousted royal line that many believed to have greater legitimacy and which enjoyed the backing of the volatile Scottish clans; the Jacobite followers of the Stuart claimant had risen up against King George I in 1715. Lingering support for James Edward Stuart, son of the deposed James II and father of Charles Edward, fuelled the crown’s paranoid suspicion of Scottish treachery.\n\nThe Prisoner’s Dilemma is an absorbing first novel by Sean Stuart O’Connor, a former high flier in business and finance. His central protagonist is an eccentric and obsessive Scottish earl, the laird of Dunbeath, a scholarly and choleric recluse who takes time out from his study of the night skies to devise a philosophical “game of life”, the so-called Prisoner’s Dilemma. The writer constructs a tense drama of intrigue, conspiracy and ambition, tempered by a learned, extended philosophical discourse and enlivened by a complicated and ultimately tragic love triangle. The interplay between these three elements dictates the pace of the narrative and I must confess that at times I found myself hoping that the esoteric moral discussion would be cut short by an early return to the thrilling story that was unfolding alongside. In fact, the moral debate, which explores the benefits of social cooperation versus competition, is reflected in the eventful narrative where the characters act out their destinies.\n\nThe writer handles the interface between debate and action with considerable skill and his chosen structure allows him to round out each character with conviction. Credence and depth are amplified by introducing historical persons alongside his more fictionalised characters. Such is the case for the Scottish economist Adam Smith, for David Hume, the advocate of empiricism, and for the young Emmanuel Kant, later to become a leading thinker of the German Enlightenment, and brother to the beautiful and erudite Sophie. Dispatched from Konigsberg (now Russian Kalliningrad) with the astute, tough Captain Zweig in order to discharge her father’s debt, Sophie becomes a pivotal figure in the human drama and articulates a moving case for social behaviour founded in cooperation and compassion. The ship carrying Sophie and Zweig (and a dubious cargo) founders on the coast of Caithness alongside the castle redoubt of Earl Dunbeath, who is busy developing his game theory and unravelling the mystery of longitude. His equilibrium is disturbed by their arrival and as the story unfolds, and Hume, Smith and the sadistic Colonel L’Arquen , commander of the English military, are drawn into the story, circumstances will oblige the two rivals to replace initial hostility with friendship, despite a desperate contest for Sophie’s affection.\n\nThe “Troubles” of 1745 were the culmination of the Jacobite rebellion and a turning point for the future of the unity of the realm, which had been brought together by James I, formerly James VI of Scotland, in 1603, following the death of Elizabeth I. In the light of the current discussion about Scottish independence, it is timely to consider what might otherwise have been. This fine first novel captures both the political and the intellectual fervour of the period, when the quest for a rational explanation of the universe and a dispassionate morality based on equity and consensus, could still be thrown off course by the unpredictable power of love.\n\nThe Prisoner’s Dilemma by Sean Stuart ‘O’Connor is available direct from the publisher, Zero Books: www.zerobooks.net or from Amazon.\n\n~ Sue Heywood, www.platform505.com"", ""The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a thought-provoking treasure trove of ideas wrapped up in a good enough yarn to turn any reader to philosophical thought. However makeshift the foundations of my brain, I feel I am the wiser for this book and I hope it will only be the first step on Sean O’Connor’s new path as a novelist. ~ ANABEL LOYD, Telegraph India"", ""What a great first novel...a real pleasure to read ~ William Boyd, Best-selling novelist, and screenwriter""]" Pro Bono?,"[""Mikkel Thorup""]",Can capitalism promote effective philanthropy and altruism? Have the big society right wing neoliberals got it wrong?,"Pro Bono? discusses philanthropy not as a social or humanitarian practice but as an integrated part of present-day creative capitalism, having a direct relation to its growing inequality. The book investigates four expressions of philanthropy as ideology: consumer philanthropy, where we are asked to consume with good conscience; corporate philanthropy where businesses engage in social work and where philanthropic associations reengineer themselves to mimic corporations; billionaire philanthropy where conspicuous consumption is now being supplemented with conspicuous philanthropy; and finally celebrity philanthropy where now one of the hallmarks of a celebrity is the commitment to use that fame to do good.","Pro Bono? discusses philanthropy not as a social or humanitarian practice but as an integrated part of present-day creative capitalism, having a direct relation to its growing inequality. The book investigates four expressions of philanthropy as ideology: consumer philanthropy, where we are asked to consume with good conscience; corporate philanthropy where businesses engage in social work and where philanthropic associations reengineer themselves to mimic corporations; billionaire philanthropy where conspicuous consumption is now being supplemented with conspicuous philanthropy; and finally celebrity philanthropy where now one of the hallmarks of a celebrity is the commitment to use that fame to do good.",0,[] "Problem with Stupid, The","[""Tom Grimwood""]","How has 'people are stupid' become a political argument, and what does it mean?","In the past two decades, the rise of a particular commonplace in public debate has emerged on both the Left and the Right: the threat of 'the stupid.' Far from a throwaway ad hominem, stupidity has become a key trope for both explaining and criticising the election results, culture wars and the advances of post-truth. But how do we negotiate 'the stupid' in a meaningful way? Does critique and resistance depend on the mobilisation of intellect, and what does the prevalence of stupidity as a commonplace suggest about the risks of such a mobilisation? What are the resources to work through it outside of condemnation or insult? Taking 'the stupid' as a primary figure in today's cultural rhetoric, Tom Grimwood uses internet memes, film and media, alongside philosophical inquiry, to present a series of interventions in the assumptions of what makes 'the stupid' dangerous and how to move beyond these assumptions into effective resistance.","In the past two decades, the rise of a particular commonplace in public debate has emerged on both the Left and the Right: the threat of 'the stupid.' Far from a throwaway ad hominem, stupidity has become a key trope for both explaining and criticising the election results, culture wars and the advances of post-truth. But how do we negotiate 'the stupid' in a meaningful way? Does critique and resistance depend on the mobilisation of intellect, and what does the prevalence of stupidity as a commonplace suggest about the risks of such a mobilisation? What are the resources to work through it outside of condemnation or insult? Taking 'the stupid' as a primary figure in today's cultural rhetoric, Tom Grimwood uses internet memes, film and media, alongside philosophical inquiry, to present a series of interventions in the assumptions of what makes 'the stupid' dangerous and how to move beyond these assumptions into effective resistance.",3,"[""In a post-truth era, how do we deal with democracy? Why do we encounter so many stupidities in politics, media, and culture these days? Through stimulating analyses of public discourse and engagement with thinkers such as Foucault and Groys, Grimwood offers a surprising but convincing diagnosis: the problem is not that we or “they” become stupid, but rather that we live in a society that prompts us to deploy “stupidity” as a rhetorical weapon. ~ Nabutaka Otobe, Osaka University"", ""With the deftness the topic deserves, Tom Grimwood pulls back the curtain on the cultural deployments and assemblages of “stupidity” rhetoric. In doing so, he offers a fair analysis unbound from ideological presuppositions (from “sheeple” to “Covidiots,” the left and right have their own thorny practices), inviting readers to slow down and reflect on how stupidity claims serve as both sites of political struggle and foundations for mobilization. Between the always tricky poles of the earnest and satirical, The Problem with Stupid contributes to interdisciplinary literatures a masterful and lucid examination of this key trope and the interpretive boundaries it (re)produces. Not content to let “deeply persuasive and utterly cynical” stupidity discourse simply run amok, Grimwood ultimately points readers toward a hopeful politics of irony that can help us navigate the fractures and fissures of our times. ~ Don Waisanen, City University of New York"", ""This striking book affirms and seeks to demonstrate Tom Grimwood's remarkable thesis that what we are living through today is the plague of ignorance as our pandemic. His very original contribution to this dialogue reflects on how the experience of the plague of ignorance renders us helpless, showing ways that the epithet of stupidity contributes to the medicalization of ignorance and its corporeal aura as an inevitable condition that seems immune to influence much like a chronic disease or even death.\n\nIn tackling the conventional epithet of stupidity and its prevalent use today, Tom Grimwood does a sociological analysis of this mood in popular culture or contemporary society that laments the ‘fact’ of collective impotence in the face of a widespread disease, seeing it as a feeling that the prevalence of ignorance seems unalterable. In this respect, Grimwood challenges the conventional sense of stupidity as an inarticulate insult in response to another opinion by using such a pejorative occasion to raise the question of how we might characterize work that we contrast from our own in dialogue that overcomes the temptation of polemic to set up discussion. This book succeeds in making such a meeting of minds possible in our society and at this time, as a hint that inquiry could be a vaccine. ~ Alan Blum, York University, Toronto, Canada""]" "Productive Body, The","[""Stephen Shapiro"", ""Philip Barnard"", ""François Guéry"", ""Didier Deleule""]",What can a body do under capitalism? Ground-breaking explanation that links Marx to Foucault.,"The Productive Body asks how the human body and its labor have been expropriated and re-engineered through successive stages of capitalism; and how capitalism’s transformation of the body is related to the rise of scientific psychology and social science disciplines complicit with modern regimes of control. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault cited Guéry and Deleule in order to link Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism with his own critique of power/knowledge. The Productive Body brings together Marxism and theories of the body-machine for the goal of political revolution.","The Productive Body asks how the human body and its labor have been expropriated and re-engineered through successive stages of capitalism; and how capitalism’s transformation of the body is related to the rise of scientific psychology and social science disciplines complicit with modern regimes of control. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault cited Guéry and Deleule in order to link Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism with his own critique of power/knowledge. The Productive Body brings together Marxism and theories of the body-machine for the goal of political revolution.",5,"[""This edition is intended to create a bridge between the later Foucauldian analysis of the relations between power and the body with more canonical Marxist discourse in the Anglo sphere to offset the artificial break between the two philosophers created, involuntary, by Foucault's critique of, and subsequent distancing from, the French Communist party, as well as a general carelessness towards his most left-wing activist writing. ~ Francesco Tenaglia, Kaleidoscope"", ""If Thomas Piketty now alerts us to the deleterious consequences of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, perhaps it might also be useful to remember that, as Guéry and Deleule affirm: \""capitalism is the sophisticated and materialized form of the hatred of Man and of his body.\""\n\n--Ed Cohen, The Los Angeles Review of Books ~ Ed Cohen, The Los Angeles Review of Books"", ""How exactly should we understand this famous productivity that is attributed to labor power [la force du travail], and how should we describe, or rather re-describe it? This is the theme that Didier Deleule and François Guéry took up in their succinct work on The Productive Body. ~ Pierre Macherey, “Power: From Politics to the Economy [Le Pouvoir, de la Politique à l’Economie]”"", ""François Guéry, in his commentary [in The Productive Body] on the fourth section of Book 1 of Capital shows that the humanist protests, such as those of Friedman or Marcuse, against part time work rest on an error in the localization of the scission of the body. ~ Jean-François Lyotard, “The Desire Named Marx” in Libidinal Economy"", ""Very interesting analysis...\n\nThe technological mutations of the apparatus of production, the division of labour and the elaboration of the disciplinary techniques sustained an ensemble of very close relations (cf. Marx, Capital, vol. i, chapter XIII and the very interesting analysis in Guerry and Deleule). Each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a model for the other. ~ Michel Foucault""]" Psy-Complex in Question,"[""Ian Parker""]",Tracing a series of key debates in and against the psy-complex.,"Psy-Complex in Question traces a series of key debates in and against the psy-complex through critical reviews of twenty-five key texts over the last twenty-five years, with an emphasis on recent critical psychological, psychoanalytic and critical social theory contributions to how we think about human agency and subjectivity. The reviews together set out the unfolding context for the debate, and situate the texts under discussion in the cross-cutting debates that define critical psychology today. It also provides an accessible introduction to how psychoanalysis and social theory, with a particular focus on the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, bears upon work carried out by a new generation of researchers. Ian Parker's book is written from the perspective of a critical insider to the discipline of psychology, psychoanalysis and social theory, and it will serve as a primer for those new to the ideas searching for compass points and radical arguments, as well as examples of how to write and how not to write a book review.","Psy-Complex in Question traces a series of key debates in and against the psy-complex through critical reviews of twenty-five key texts over the last twenty-five years, with an emphasis on recent critical psychological, psychoanalytic and critical social theory contributions to how we think about human agency and subjectivity. The reviews together set out the unfolding context for the debate, and situate the texts under discussion in the cross-cutting debates that define critical psychology today. It also provides an accessible introduction to how psychoanalysis and social theory, with a particular focus on the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, bears upon work carried out by a new generation of researchers. Ian Parker's book is written from the perspective of a critical insider to the discipline of psychology, psychoanalysis and social theory, and it will serve as a primer for those new to the ideas searching for compass points and radical arguments, as well as examples of how to write and how not to write a book review.",7,"[""Interesting point of view, this book review the basis of the modern psychology with another perpective. Excellent book!\n\n~ Jo M, NetGalley"", ""Enlightening and Instructive. ~ Breakaway Reviewers, Breakawayreviewers.co.uk"", ""This is an unusual book, drawing together reviews that Parker has written of other books. In each chapter, he offers us a model of the kind of critical engagement that turns a review into a dialogical contribution to debate, enlivening the works of others and bringing them into conversation. Taken as a whole, the book presents Parker’s characteristic take on the psy-complex, developed across time through disciplinary crossings and collegial exchange across a wide international range of contexts, including Japan, South Africa, the US, Europe and the UK. It is a wonderful book to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Discourse Unit and Ian Parker’s unique voice and sustained contribution to rethinking the intellectual psy-terrain. ~ Professor Jill Bradbury, School of Human and Community Development, University of the Witwatersrand"", ""Ian Parker takes us on a critical adventure through the dense undergrowth of the psy-complex exploring the perennial and important questions of psychology and psychoanalysis’s relations to knowledge, ideology, social theory and political practice. This is an unusual book which positively invites the reader not only to think for themselves but to actively question the psy-professions’ construction of the world. ~ Ron Roberts, author of Psychology and Capitalism"", ""One of my favourite challenges in Professional Masterchef is when the contestants are presented with a wide array of left-overs (admittedly seriously generous, varied and up-market ones) and asked to invent an exceptional plate of food in the usual ridiculous timescale. The results are generally much more impressive than you’d expect - real elegance, inventiveness and panache on a plate! This book is in much the same vein as those invention tests, woven from the best part of a life-time’s book reviewing into a extraordinary collection of intriguing, fascinating and inspirational texts. Each one is ‘complete’ in itself - an entertaining, informative and satisfying read; but brought together the collection offers so much more than the sum of its parts. It takes you on a rich and stimulating voyage into the ‘psy’ complex and (way) beyond - to give you insights and experiences far outside of what you may originally expect. Enjoy! ~ Wendy Stainton Roger, Professor Emerita, Faculty of Welfare, Education & Health, The Open University"", ""Extraordinary. All the right (left) names are in place and the volume simultaneously teaches readers how to review books properly. Parker should get a gold (red) star. ~ Craig Newnes, editor, Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy"", ""Parker’s text opens with a question concerning how one writes reviews. This seeming pedagogical question is in fact one that scholars should ask, and its importance weaves itself through this collection of book reviews which Parker has assembled for us in Psy-Complex in Question: Critical Review in Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Social Theory. This is, of course, a case of reading and writing. Indeed the latter permeates a number of reviews in terms of how the reviewed piece actually reads; is the book well written. Parker’s interest in the well written is both the object of sharing these reviews (as well as a conceptual project indexed in the title) and of how the author himself is drawn to a text, even in light of conceptual differences. The reader of this book should be quite pleased in Parker’s preoccupation because it shows in how fabulously readable these reviews are. Reading these reviews is a great pleasure so that one might pick this book up like one might a Sunday paper. Do not think this ease of entry means that Parker’s has simplified ideas or his commitments. There are strong questions about the discourse of the university, of politics, and of the psychoanalytic clinic. How does one write, think or read across these forms of discourse. Parker’s insight into their difference and the often facile fusion of these domains is one of the smartest of the questions he brings to the reviewed texts. There are others. He queries texts that often remain unquestioned, Lacanian ideas that are often scotomized, critical psychological ideas that are often complacently re-iterated, and the marriage of psychanlysis and politics, which appears to attract so many (this list is not exhaustive). Parker’s book is a careful tour of the territory of critical psychology- and students and scholars should read t for that alone. It is also a text that contains in itself the question of reading and writing. In this second task, Parker indicates his brilliant and responsible grasp of a wide spectrum of subjects and, ironically, his clinical acumen, in that he questions the obvious, the impasse, and the style, not with the self-studied style of a literary critic, but rather with the keen eyes of someone, in whatever discourse, is committed to reading its critical edge. Psy-Complex in Question: Critical Review in Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Social Theory presents a collection of book reviews where the author reflects on the seemingly pedagogical question of how one writes reviews. Parker’s interest in the well written is both one reason for assembling these reviews and reflects how the author himself is drawn to a text, despite conceptual differences. The reader of this book is the lucky recipient of Parker’s preoccupation because it shows in how fabulously readable these reviews are. One picks up this book like the Sunday paper, without a single review in the book being intellectually compromised. Nonetheless, there are strong questions about the discourse of the university, of politics, and of the psychoanalytic clinic. In this really careful and important tour of some of the terrain of or adjacent to critical psychology, Parker remains true to the title’s aim; he shines a light on what is often swept under the rug in a given book by its usual readership or by its author(s). As a result, he does a really significant service for student and scholar alike. The reader is much the better intellectually after reading Parker’s work, so skilfully done that one encounters difficult tangles and ideas with an ease and engagement that any reviewer of a book would cherish. ~ Kareen Ror Malone, Professor- Emerita Psychology, Founding Director of Doctoral Program University of West Georgia""]" Psychology and Capitalism,"[""Ron Roberts""]",How your state of mind makes Big Business Happy,Psychology and Capitalism is a critical and accessible account of the ideological and material role of psychology in supporting capitalist enterprise and holding individuals entirely responsible for their fate through the promotion of individualism.,Psychology and Capitalism is a critical and accessible account of the ideological and material role of psychology in supporting capitalist enterprise and holding individuals entirely responsible for their fate through the promotion of individualism.,1,"[""This short book centers on the uses of bourgeois psychology to capital in the realms of control and illusion. Studies have shown that since neo-liberal capitalism was introduced in the late 1970s, rates of mental distress have increased markedly. This has affected oppressed populations the most. Yet the methods of contemporary psychology and psychiatry center their ‘treatment’ on individuals alone, with no historical content. They ignore how capital has configured society. This is on purpose.\n\nYou will note the psychological theories that used to be taught in school - Freud, Adler, Maslow, Jung, Skinner, Rogers and others – all of them conflicted. This undermined any idea that psychology was a science. The present large division between ‘talk therapy’ and biological drugs – the ‘couch and the brain scan’ approaches, as Roberts put it, also conflict, though biological reductionism is now the most prominent. Roberts counts 11 modern forms of psychology at present - all of which are not integrated. These contradictions hint at the ideological aspect of modern psychology.\n\nRoberts looks at the uses ‘personality’ and ‘character’ studies have, and how they enable military and corporate entities to control warfare and workers alike. Pop psychologists on PBS offer up ‘4’ aspects of personality, and rigid individual categories like neurotic, introvert and extrovert, ‘passive aggressive,’ ‘the self,’ ‘A personality,’ ‘beta males,’ nature and nurture, narcissism and intelligence fill common talk – all ahistorical and individualized, with questionable scientific bonifides. Loneliness is the exception, as it is now commonly and obviously understood to be linked to social disconnection.\n\nRoberts outlines the misuses of psychology as an insider. He discusses ‘military psychology’ and its collaboration with torture; advertising manipulation; IQ and the bogus aspect of twin studies; poor drug science and especially the role of the individual. As to the latter, he says about current psychology: “…the individual is the primary reality … By amazing coincidence, it is also the cornerstone of ‘rational’ self interest and individualism upon which the entire field of economics is predicated.” Corporate psychology pushed through HR departments is especially geared to getting the worker to be agreeable, conscientious, punctual, resilient and flexible. Especially flexible! Psychology essentially “privatizes responsibility” in Robert’s words.\n\n.................Roberts lists a few ‘social psychologists’ who look at the links between society and individual functioning and concepts like alienation and consumer fetishism – Wilhelm Reich, Kenneth Gergen, Eric Fromm, R.D. Laing and Slavoj Zizek – all absolutely marginal to the field as practiced now. Every psychology student should read this book. ~ Greg Gibbs, May Day Books & Blog""]" Punk Is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night,"[""Richard Cabut"", ""Andrew Gallix""]","An anthology featuring the most astute commentators and participants of the underground rise of punk, in this nuanced portrait of the era.","This original collection of insight, analysis and conversation charts the course of punk from its underground origins, when it was an un-formed and utterly alluring near-secret, through its rapid development. Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night takes in sex, style, politics and philosophy, filtered through punk experience, while believing in the ruins of memory, to explore a past whose essence is always elusive.","This original collection of insight, analysis and conversation charts the course of punk from its underground origins, when it was an un-formed and utterly alluring near-secret, through its rapid development. Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night takes in sex, style, politics and philosophy, filtered through punk experience, while believing in the ruins of memory, to explore a past whose essence is always elusive.",12,"[""I'm pretty sure that I always gonna be a punk teenager in my heart, so this book gives me a lot of joy....or something like that. Punks was the same kind of philosophy as Mexican Revolution: was created by ideals, not by trades or books, and this book highlights that spirit, so kudos. ~ Diana Alvarez (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Composed of essays, interviews, memoirs and manifestos by veterans of London’s punk scene, Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix’s Punk is Dead is a nostalgic, intelligent homage to the brief, hazy era of “pure” London punk, before it was named, over-described and turned into another sub­cultural phenomenon. This golden age lasted somewhere between four and eighteen months, depending on who’s recollecting, although most agree that by 1978, it was over. . . . A yearning for its own prelapsarian state was built into punk’s ethos. As the punk musician-turned-philosopher Simon Critchley tells Gallix, “Because of the acute awareness of the fact that punk . . . would become a creature of the very music industry whose codes it subverted, we knew that it was going to be shortlived. And that was fine”\n\nThe book is also a homage to youth and lost possibilities. In her foreword, Judy Nylon (formerly Niland) describes arriving in London in 1970 with an overnight bag and $250, wearing jean shorts and a black Borganza coat. . . . “Bands are necessarily approximations of the dreams that conjured them up”, Gallix writes in his essay “Unheard Melodies”. Punk is Dead shows the transmission of culture as a kind of lucid group dreaming. The accounts of its contributors capture the role that coincidence plays in history. Ideas can rarely be traced back to one person; they accrete and recur.\n\n. . . Gallix is eloquent in his defence of nostalgia against the cult of an amnesiac future. Punk might be not only the last great subculture in the rock and roll mode, but the most analysed and documented. Nevertheless, art and cultural histories are always reductive, and, as he writes, “the past is subtly rewritten, every nuance gradually airbrushed out of the picture”. Some of the contributors to Punk is Dead are professional writers and critics, although most of them are not. Cumulatively, their contributions evoke the texture, meaning and sensation of being young four decades ago in a now-unimaginably derelict London. They recall the smell of new vinyl records, beer, cigarettes and hair dye; the pointless squabbles with band mates; the composition of outfits; the eruption of street fights; the sweet taste of cherries picked outside a squat; and the ubiquitous brown packets of speed. . . . Some of the pieces are historical documents, while others appear for the first time in this anthology. Together, they capture the collective soul of an era. ~ Chris Kraus, Times Literary Supplement"", ""Perhaps that’s why this anthology, Punk Is Dead, published on the eve of Never Mind the Bollocks’ 40th, feels so relevant. Punk may be, as co-editor Andrew Gallix admits, “probably the most analyzed youth cult ever,” but its resonances with the contemporary zeitgeist make it ripe for such analysis—even if, he is also quick to add, it continues to resist tidy theses. Gallix, the founder of literary webzine 3:AM, and his fellow editor, music journalist turned playwright Richard Cabut, are wise enough not to attempt any grand summations. Instead, they curate and contribute to an eclectic, dialectic collection of 28 short essays, juxtaposing historical testimonies from the eye of punk’s hurricane with more critically distanced analyses of its aftermath.\n\nThe result admirably captures punk’s fractured, anarchic early spirit—if also, inevitably, some of its clannishness and opacity to newcomers. . . . As its title implies, the ultimate failure of this revolution in the head is the closest thing the book has to a running theme. Virtually every contributor avers that punk, in its most exciting form, was over before it ostensibly began. As Gallix writes in his essay “The Boy Looked at Euridyce,” the movement died “as soon as it ceased being a cult with no name… Punk—in its initial, pre-linguistic incarnation… was the potentiality of punk.” By enshrining these six months or so of ferment, before the cult became a commodity, Punk Is Dead embraces what is, on its surface, a decidedly un-punk emotion: nostalgia. But this is not the ineffectual, ideologically empty nostalgia of events like 2016’s “Punk London” celebration, presided over by the city’s then-mayor, Conservative politician and chief Brexit cheerleader Boris Johnson. Cabut, Gallix and the other contributors use their critically productive nostalgia to correct decades’ worth of the former variety: to prevent punk from being, as Judy Nylon puts it in her foreword, “reduced to a coffee-table book of white English boys spitting.”\n\n. . . [I]f reading these essays in early 2018 brings any solace, it’s the knowledge that punk has retained its vitality as an ideal, even if it has long since failed as a movement. “Once we were part of punk,” Gallix writes. “Now punk is part of us.” ~ Zachary Hoskins, Spectrum Culture"", ""The specific purpose of the book is to celebrate that original evanescent wellspring of creativity when punkemerged as a \""stylish boho response to the modern world of inertia andconsumption\"" and retained the \""innocence characteristic of childhood\"" of a movement yet to be frozen by being named or sullied by exposure topopular vitriol and acclaim alike. ~ Colin Coulter, The Irish Times"", ""In his introduction Gallix admits that punk is not only “probably the most analysed youth culture ever”, but that it’s also one of the most resistant to analysis, a problem that his book “has not quite solved”. Indeed, any attempt at a definitive examination of a movement risks a killing, like an animal categorised through vivisection. Accordingly, he and Richard Cabut have instead chosen the theme of punk as a transformative force, a becoming, not just in terms of the music and the culture around it, but in terms of the humans involved, fans icluded. Cabut and Gallix are just about old enough to be first-hand witnesses to punk: among these pieces are their own memoirs of the time. Accordingly, the book is as much testimony as it is criticism. ...Many of the essays are welcome acts of preservation. Some are taken from rare 1970s fanzines like Kill Your Pet Puppy, long extinct magazines like ZigZag and Sounds, and early 2000s blogposts, such as a typically theoretical take from the late Mark Fisher's blog K-punk. Often, these historical documents are newly annotated by their authors. . . . This layered reading gives the book a feeling of vital historical scope, rather than indulgent nostalgia. ~ Dickon Edwards, The Wire"", ""The punk movement has, as this book readily acknowledges, been more closely analysed and chewed over more thoroughly than any other moment in pop history. While it’s true that it meant and continues to mean very different things to different people, it’s also true that in recent years the potted history version, shorn of its more interesting edges and lesser characters, is the one that’s prevailed in the age of post-pub BBC4 viewing.\n\nWhile this book is more of a collection of everything from academic essays and lists to personal recollections than anything claiming to be a definitive history, its chorus of different voices and agendas ultimately creates a more accurate narrative. The opening piece sees Snatch’s Judy Nylon – that’s her referred to in Brian Eno’s 1974 song ‘Back In Judy’s Jungle’- reminiscing on her time in London, hooking up with Chrissie Hynde and partying with Nureyev and Keith Moon. It sets the tone well, emphasising that punk had a past as well as a future, the role of women and the American contingent in the capital’s scene, and the fact that it didn’t all revolve around McClaren and the Pistols.\n\nElsewhere there are several big name contributions, including an essay that Simon Reynolds wrote in 1986 arguing that, on its tenth anniversary, modern music needed to escape its punk-ness to show any hope of progress. ‘England’s Dreaming’ author Jon Savage provides a fascinating history, in list form, tracking the use of the word ‘punk’ from 1946 onwards in 123 different entries. Crass figurehead Penny Rimbaud, meanwhile, shares the experience of the band’s third ever gig in ‘Banned From The Roxy’, originally penned in 1977 but now viewed with the benefit of hindsight and some honest self criticism.\n\nThe most interesting bits here are the descriptions of the cast of thousands that populated and/or surrounded the scene at the time. People who weren’t in the bands that made it, those that were just there, feeding off the energy and the anarchy and reacting to it in a million different ways. The inhabitants of North London described in ‘Camden’s Dreaming’ by Richard Cabut, for instance, or the more impressionistic ‘Camera Squat Art Smiler’ by Neal Brown. They both stand up as vivid snapshots of the time as seen through their own eyes rather than any all seeing overview.\n\nThis is definitely a book for those who’ve read and digested all the starter level punk literature and are seeking something a little more. They’ll find it here for sure - a generous hit of the hard stuff. ~ Ben Willmott, The Extricate blog"", ""This is a well-selected collection of essays about punk and its cultural impact, which mixes contemporary accounts with more academic reflective approaches (sometimes in the same chapter). This means it's quite uneven but that seems appropriate given its subject. You do come away with some kind of feel how exciting it must have been to be involved in what was happening in 1976 and 1977 and how quickly the excitement seems to have dissipated. A good companion to books like Jon Savage's England's Dreaming. ~ Michael J, NetGalley"", ""The book's title (Modernity Killed Every Night) quotes Jacques Vaché, friend to the surrealist André Breton. But Punk Is Dead isn't end-to-end cultural theory; there's a lot on clothes. Three strands unfurl - papers, essays and first-person accounts. Cabut and Gallix have included historical documents - such as Penny Rimbaud's 1977 essay, Banned from the Roxy, newly annotated by the Crass drummer - while Gallix argues that punk started ending when it acquired a name. Jon Savage is here, and Ted Polhemus and Vermorel. (...) As an interview with the punk turned philosopher Simon Critchley attests, punk unleashed ideas. It palpably changed suburban teenage futures, rather than ending them.\n\n-- Kitty Empire, The Observer, 19 November 2017 ~ Kitty Empire, The Observer"", ""I thoroughly enjoyed Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night (Zero Books). Edited by Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix, this anthology of essays, interviews and personal recollections reflects on the ways in which punk was lived and experienced at the time. Gallix flips his finger at those who see nostalgia as an affliction and rightly attempts to promote the fragmented and contested legend of punk to \""a summation of all the avant-garde movements of the 20th century . . . a revolution for everyday life.\n\n-- Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Deborah Levy has chosen Punk is Dead as one of her books of the year in the New Statesman, 17-23 November 2017: ~ Deborah Levy, New Statesman"", ""A very fascinating book if you are interested in what the punk scene was. ~ , NetGalley"", ""Utterly fascinating and brilliant ~ Lee Rourke, novelist"", ""Punk Is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night\n\n****\n\nEdited by Andrew Gallix and Richard Cabut\n\nZERO BOOKS £17.99\n\nAcademic reactions to punk four decades on\n\nPunk‘s power lies in its highly fragmented legacy: on the one hand, nostalgic weekends in Blackpool, on the other, key critical thinking as collated here. Editors Richard Cabut (formerly of positive punks Brigandage) and Andrew Gallix, founder of 3:AM Magazine, corral some of punk’s finest theorists to document the “blank zone” in which a scene blossomed; early chroniclers such as Jon Savage and Jonh Ingham remind that it was a series of cultural seeds scattered, trigger points for what followed.\n\nPenny Rimbaud of Crass, psychogeographer Tom Vague, Barney Hoskins, Judy Nylon, Simon Reynolds and late theorist Mark Fisher all cast an academic eye over punk, finding it in Parisian art galleries, squat-land, the Angry Brigade, conceptual non-bands (Chrissie Hynde’s The Moors Murderers, Julian Cope’s Nova Mob), jive-talking McLaren wannabes, proto-Dadaist Arthur Cravan , French Situationism and German Romanticism. The subtext here suggests that punk was an outward-looking movement against the end of the British empire.\n\nBen Myers ~ MOJO magazine, Ben Myers""]" "Quadruple Object, The","[""Graham Harman""]","A pack of playing cards illustrates Harman’s metaphysical system of fourfold objects, including human access, Heidegger’s indirect causation, panpsychism and ontography.","In this book the metaphysical system of Graham Harman is presented in lucid form, aided by helpful diagrams. In Chapter 1, Harman gives his most forceful critique to date of philosophies that reject objects as a primary reality. All such rejections are tainted by either an undermining or overmining approach to objects. In Chapters 2 and 3, he reviews his concepts of sensual and real objects. In the process, he attacks the prestige normally granted to philosophies of human access, which Harman links for the first time to the already discredited Menos Paradox. In Chapters 4 through 7, Harman brings the reader up to speed on his interpretation of Heidegger, which culminates in a fourfold structure of objects linked by indirect causation. In Chapter 8, he speculates on the implications of this theory for the debate over panpsychism, which Harman both embraces and rejects. In Chapters 9 and 10, he introduces the term ontography as the study of the different possible permutations of objects and qualities, which he simplifies with easily remembered terminology drawn from standard playing cards.","In this book the metaphysical system of Graham Harman is presented in lucid form, aided by helpful diagrams. In Chapter 1, Harman gives his most forceful critique to date of philosophies that reject objects as a primary reality. All such rejections are tainted by either an undermining or overmining approach to objects. In Chapters 2 and 3, he reviews his concepts of sensual and real objects. In the process, he attacks the prestige normally granted to philosophies of human access, which Harman links for the first time to the already discredited Menos Paradox. In Chapters 4 through 7, Harman brings the reader up to speed on his interpretation of Heidegger, which culminates in a fourfold structure of objects linked by indirect causation. In Chapter 8, he speculates on the implications of this theory for the debate over panpsychism, which Harman both embraces and rejects. In Chapters 9 and 10, he introduces the term ontography as the study of the different possible permutations of objects and qualities, which he simplifies with easily remembered terminology drawn from standard playing cards.",4,"[""I’ve just had the opportunity to finish Graham Harman’s latest publication The Quadruple Object. As we have become accustomed to, Harman constructs a literary diorama of aesthetically pleasing objects (“diamonds, rope, and neutrons” or “rum, parrots, and volcanos”) to help forward his arugments which, in The Quadruple Object, have become even more tightly expressed and erudite. Apparently a combination of art history and sports writing makes for an excellent litarery style. I am totally delighted with his new work. Today I feel like doing a little digging into how OOO visualizes both the human and the cosmos. A perspective which I think has mostly positive, but mixed results.\n\nThere is certainly room to distinguish between humans and other objects from the OOO perspective, but deciding precisely what makes humans different from other animals (or from any other object in the cosmos for that matter) is a sordid affair. I certainly don’t pretend to have anything completely figured out here. However, I do think OOO is greatly enriching our sense of cosmos, whilst (somewhat) impoverishing our sense of anthropos.\n\nWhat I love about OOO is that it relaxes the intense and self-critical glare of the modern subject. It helps soften the eyes and lets them rest on other entities- other entities to whom we owe so much and with which we are so tightly entwined. The modernist gaze is not transformed into an unwitting and uncritical day dream, but the eyes have definitely warmed in their touch to the world outside of human experience. Bruno Latour commented once that doing an actor-network study requires an infralanguage that lets the actors themselves speak, intsead of a metalanguage that would seek to script the whole drama of observation in advance, forcing entities to speak in foreign tongues. OOO is a soft, almost diverted gaze that attempts to witness the human and its worlds along side of all other objects and their worlds.\n\nIn this sense, we are whirring correlations amidst other correlations, each a shifting tide pool of space and time. But perhaps humans are not just another correlation. We can entertain such a line of thinking without engaging in some kind of vulgar ontological exceptionalism. We, as humans, are objects arrayed amidst the parliament of the universe, unfolding alongside an infinitely diverse variety of other objects. We certainly do not need to introduce new substances or create special anthropocentric laws to explain the functioning of our bodies, the emergence of our species, or our genetic relation to the whole universe. In this sense I agree with Harman when he writes:\n\nIt cannot be denied that human experience is rather different from inanimate contact, and presumably richer and more complex. But that is not the point. The more relavent issue is whether the difference between human relations with paper and a flame’s relation with paper is different in kind or only in degree (p.45).\n\nAnd yet, despite this nod to the rich complexity of the human, we find, I think, little commentary on the absolutely fascinating increase in dimensionality that the universe seems to experience with the emergence of the human object in the OOO framework. This not really a criticism of OOO per se, but more of an opening towards the exciting potential for future research. Perhaps this is what Harman is calling for in his appeal to a “speculative psychology” , a philosophical move to describe the different levels of psyche operating in the universe (p. 120). Certainly we don’t want to swing the other way and return to a dull and unsophisticated anthropocentrism, but I think we could situate human qua cosmos in a way slightly different than how Harman does it here:\n\nThe cosmos seems to be gigantic in both space and time. It is more ancient than all our ape-like ancestors and all other life forms. It might also seem safe to assume that the trillions of entities in the cosmos engage in relations and duels even when no human observes them. However interesting we humans may be to ourselves, we are apparently in no way central to the cosmic drama, marooned as we are on an average-sized planet near a mediocre sun, and confined to a tiny portion of the historty of the universe (p 63).\n\nThis depiction of the human-cosmos relationship is one we are all familiar with. Humanity, once thinking itself to be the privileged center of creation, is mercilessly decentered physically (Copernicus), psychologically (Freud), philosophically (Nietszche), socially (Marx), biologically (Darwin) and theologically (Feurbach). Harman’s nod to this history of decentering in the western mind is clear. However, further in The Quadruple Object Harman, writing on Heidegger, adds: “As Heidegger depicts it, the human has world, the stone is worldess, and the animal is “poor” in world” (p. 58). In this context, I think OOO has actually done quite a lot to resituate human beings within a cosmos of objects, and in this way has made the cosmos look more weird but perhaps less alien(ating). Decidedly a step away from modernist thinking.\n\nReturning a sense of “world” back to animals and stones is an important success, but may have cut the human a little bit short. We should push further by again engaging the important question of what it means to be human within a cosmological context. OOO lets us do this without reducing the human to the physics of lithospheres and solar systems. It also lets us do this without absorbing the human into vast evolutionary or thermodynamic networks (all whilst not decrying the importance of either). However, something in me calls to correct the descriptors “average-sized planet” and “mediocre sun.” Of course it is true that the earth is an averaged sized planet and our sun is not the biggest and brightest in the galaxy, not even close.\n\nHowever, clearly life bearing planets are a relative rarity (as far as we know anyway), let alone planets with complex, self-reflective organisms. We also know that life on earth is intimitely tied to our sun, with the millions of single celled organisms on the planet slowly shifting and transforming as the sun throbs, emitting solar radiation towards the earth day in and day out. The atmosphere is a combination of sun and respiration. There is definitely something unusual about this process, something vast but intimate. An infralanguage of the human should surely let the human speak to all this strange excess and complex creative meandering.\n\nPerhaps the opposite perspective of a totally flat ontology is the one offered by mystic and Jesuit scientist Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard clothes the flesh of the cosmos with an epic dignity that places the human at the center of a cosmogenic process, bursting forth into greater depth and dimensionality over billions of years. But Teilhard’s view is too bright, too promethean, and risks losing the human project to a species-wide cataclysm of optimism. Harman’s approach is more sober, less glorifying, and rightly calls to question the primacy of the human-world relation. Somewhere amidst these two perspectives lies something worth thinking about. What we need is a vision of humans and nonhumans that engages their particular nobility of perspective. In the case of the human we have clearly only begun to plumb the depths of whats going on.\n\n~ Adam Robbert, Knolwedge Ecology blog, http://knowledge-ecology.com/2011/07/10/the-quadruple-tension/"", ""http://christopherkullenberg.se/?p=2332\n\nSpoiler warning : For those of you still reading The Quadruple Object , this blog post will reveal most of the content, along with my reflections.\n\nIt is summer and as the e-mails slowly stop flowing in and I accidentally left my mobile phone in a taxi the time is perfect for reading books that have been on my reading list. Sometimes certain objects need to withdraw from my attention for others, like books, to be able to emerge. So here comes a “blog-review” of Graham Harman ‘s The Quadruple Object . And the blog- prefix means, as usual, that it is work in progress and not a final product. Please comment!\n\n***\n\nAfter having read Harman’s Prince of Networks and parts of Tool-being , I felt that The Quadruple Object would be a real treat. I especially found Prince of Networks to be perhaps the most insightful book on Latour’s philosophy yet to have been written, as it is both a warm appreciation, simultaneously as it rejects parts of Latour’s arguments with great consideration, especially what Harman calls “relationism”. I will come back to this point below, since Prince of Networks paradoxically made me more of a relationist than I was before. Having been trained in Science- and Technology Studies for a long time, I guess it becomes more or less a habit to study relations, opening black boxes, and mapping networks. Habits are good to have, but they must every now and then be challenged properly. And The Quadruple Object is certainly one such challenge.\n\nThe book opens up with a brief preface where some interesting facts of the writing of the book are presented. For example, Harman clocked every minute of writing, and the book was completed in the impressing 86 hours and 34 minutes. Then comes an introduction where the most basic features of the object oriented ontology are presented. Here we learn that objects are the basic building block not only of our everyday lives, but also should be at the center of philosophy, that also non-physical entities are objects (but they don’t have to be equally real), and that later on in the book the fourfold (quadruple) structure of objects will be presented.\n\nBut before we can arrive at a model of objects, much of the philosophical terrain needs to be cleared. Being an inventor of concepts, Harman identifies two general obstacles that need to be overcome in order to arrive at objects: “Undermining” and “overmining”. To those not familiar with ontology, these concepts should not be confused with over/under-determination, which has a much more epistemological touch to them.\n\nUndermining is basically a form of reductionism, some of which we may perhaps recognize in their clearest form in atomism and physical reductionism (everything is really just atoms). But included in the undermining camp are also varieties of monism, such as the notion of that “behind” all actual manifestations there is a “virtual plane” (perhaps Deleuze and DeLanda can be accused of this). A while ago I found the philosophies of the virtual quite seductive in argument, but my strong commitment to actualism + relationism has made this more and more impossible.\n\nOvermining, on the other hand, is the opposite problem of that reality is something that we perceive, that a world without humans is unthinkable, and all that exists and can be rendered knowledgeable must go through a thinking subject. In chapter 4 this is defined more closely as:\n\n“If we try to think a world outside human thought, then we are thinking it, and hence it is no longer outside thought. Any attempt to escape this circle is doomed to contradiction”. This is not just a word trick: it is the tacit or explicit credo of a now lengthy tradition of philosophy that might be called the Philosophy of Human Access. (60-61)\n\nHarman traces the “Philosophy of Human Access” to have originated in Kant, but is still the major view of contemporary thought, including such philosophers as for example Žižek. While agreeing with both the critique of “human (privileged) access” and “correlationism” fully, I simultaneously feel that this is a problem you only need to deal with once you encounter it. And personally I barely ever see Philosophy of Human Access any more. Perhaps this is because I lack proper overview of philosophy, or because the local and very small ontology scene in Sweden regards it as a “90:s” problem.\n\nTo me, it is far more interesting when Harman brings in thoughts that were produced outside the Kantian box, for example the passages on occasionalism and Ibn SÄ«nā (Avicenna) (who made very interesting contributions, perhaps the first ones, to contagiontology , long before Gabriel de Tarde). While occasionalism still leaves us with the problem of an omnipotent God that grants all causation, Harman makes some brilliant connections with the “inverted occasionalism” in Kant and Hume, where God is replaced with a no less omnipotent human, who is the only entity allowed to define the world.\n\nSo far so good. Undermining and overmining with exclusive human access are both counter-productive when you want to approach objects (or for that matter actants, rhizomes or even haecceities, to use some other idioms). But, as I mentioned above, I have a passion for relationism. Here, Harman is very clear:\n\nThe only way to do justice to objects is to consider that their reality is free of all relation, deeper than all reciprocity. The object is a dark crystal veiled in a private vacuum: irreducible to its own pieces, and equally irreducible to its outward relations with other things. (47)\n\nIn Prince of Networks this is the core problem that Harman finds in Latour. Being absolutely actualist Latour disqualifies of objects that have no relations. They are not real for Latour, since as we know from reading his Irreductions , real is what resists, and that actants necessarily are defined in relations with other actants (and networks). A “private vacuum” would be impossible for a relationist.\n\nIn place of relationism, Harman aims for his fourfold object. And he does so with the help of Heidegger and Husserl. I am only familiar with the former of these two. I have barely read a page of Husserls phenomenology, but for one year I read the entire Sein und Zeit with my friends over at the History of Ideas department. In retrospect, I unfortunately read the “humanist Heidegger”, the common interpretation, which is surely guilty of the “human access”-problem. The Harman-Heidegger is, on the contrary, and for the better, heavily modified and draws on two manuscripts from 1919 and 1949 that I haven’t yet read. This is where the largely neglected passages of the Gevierte is presented, which forms sort of the starting point of the quadruple object.\n\nThe Quadruple Object\n\nThis is not the place to summarize every step in how the quadruple object is assembled. This is already in the book itself, which is written much like a ladder, going systematically into more and more complexities. A few major characteristics are however necessary to grasp the argument.\n\nFirst of all, there is a distinction between the real object and the sensual object. Here again, there is a strong claim against relationism – “the reality of objects is never fully deployed in their relations”. In fact, real objects is something we can never touch, only sensible objects are “touchable”. And, of course, this is nothing like Kant’s phaenomena . This goes for all objects, even when no human is present. A chair never touches the real object of the floor, only the sensible object of the floor.\n\nThe full fledged quadruple object has four poles: real objects, real qualities, sensual objects and sensual qualities (94, and on the picture above). If I understand this distinction correctly, a real cat-object has real qualities (of swiftness for example, hunting skills etc.). A sensual object would be the cat lurking in the grass. It however has different sensual qualities for me (oh, how cute!) and a mouse (oh, scary!). The scary sensual qualities experienced by the mouse, the tasty qualities that the tick in the grass sees, are withdrawn from me. Yet they are very real. And this initial distinction seems very intuitive. The cat is of course a different object for me and for the mouse, and no matter how much scientific instrumentation I bring along to examine my cat, no scientist would ever say that that would bring out every single feature of it (social, biological, molecular, weight, height, religious symbolism etc.)\n\nThis, if read closely, differs a lot from the cat-actant, found in classical actor-network theory. Here me and the cat would have a social relation, it stays with me when I give it food and comfort, I stay with it as long as I think it is cute and not a monster. The tick-and-the-cat-assemblage forms a parasitic network, and the mouse needs to negotiate every day with the cat, pesticides and cheese. But there can be no such thing as a withdrawn cat, human, mouse or piece of cheese. These are all messy components in networks, components that are defined only by their role in the network (or, how they translate interests). It is food for the mouse, a product for farmers, a commodity for humans and perhaps a fertile breeding ground for bacteria. In actor-network theory there is no essence, only translations and inter-definitions of other actants.\n\nBut this is only the beginning of the quadruple object. For, as it is fundamental, it also affects such things as time and space: “Time is the name for this tension between sensual objects and their sensual qualities” (100). Now, continuing on the example of the cat, this would mean, that the sensual cat-object lurking in the grass has a specific time in relation to the mouse. How long until it runs away? As the cat and the mouse stare at each other, time is not in seconds and minutes, a continuous flow. Rather it is a sort of event, where time is deadly.\n\nThen we have space: “Space is the tension between concealed real objects and the sensual qualities associated with them” (100). The real cat-object is in the grass and I’m sitting on a chair in the sun. It is hiding there so we have no meaningful relation since I can’t see it, but I could go over there for a look and find it. However, looking at it and admiring its cuteness, I still would not exhaust every kind of sensual quality of it (I don’t for example have the nervous system of a tick or a mouse).\n\nIn relationism, Latour says that every actant invents it own time. Me, the cat and the tick have different times. But there is no such thing as a “withdrawn” sensual quality. To me and my network, the tick-sense does not exist (unless I build a scientific laboratory, collect ticks, investigate them with instruments, write reports in zoology). But for Harman, they are very real without me having to become a zoologist.\n\nMoving on we find two more tensions in the quadruple object: Eidos and essence . “This tension between sensual objects and their real hidden qualities is what Husserl calls the Eidos ” (101). If I understand this correctly, the mouse can only see the cat in the grass. But the mouse can for sure know and imagine what would happen if it does not hide properly or run down a hole. It is able to act, even though the cat is still just lurking there. Even though I will probably never experience what it feels like to jump off a bridge, I have some sort of understanding of what will happen to me if I do.\n\nBut then comes essence, that horrible word that everyone tries to erase from their dictionaries. This passage is definitely worth a quote, because I think it is one of the best arguments for essence in a long time:\n\nAnd finally there is the fourth and final tension, never accessible to human experience. I refer to the duel, underway in hidden real things, between the unified real object and its multitude of real hidden features. This tension between the real object and its real qualities has always been called its essence , though traditional realism lacks Heidegger’s remorseless sense that the real is entirely withdrawn from all access. (101)\n\nHow the real object of the cat has its real quality of swiftness (and maybe thousands of other qualities, but to be a cat is to be swift) is something which we can never directly access, but must remain speculative. We can of course measure it scientifically, or just chase the cat for a while and approximate how fast it runs. But what we encounter then is sensual qualities (even when using instruments), or perhaps if lucky eidos . Not essence.\n\nMy first reaction, as an empiricist, is “why invent this strange place of essence if we can’t do anything with it”? That reaction may be justified when I’m writing a dissertation and need to get job done. But it is not a justified position for philosophy in general, and especially not for ontology.\n\nAfter struggling a bit with it, I finally found what disturbed me with this notion of essence. The realness and reality of withdrawn objects, and the essence dimension, is not real enough for me. And then it became clear to me that this is what relationism has been saying all along.\n\nSince I am writing this on my summer holiday outside of the city center, cats and ticks will continue to be my examples, since they are very close to me.\n\nThe relation between me and the cat is very dear. I only exhaust a fraction of the cat-object when giving him food, playing with him or, finding him cute while playing with him. On the other hand, I really loathe ticks. I avoid long grass and even though I intellectually understand their role in an eco-system, I sometimes wish for their extinction. Cats and ticks, are able to do a variety of things with me, make me happy or frightened, scratch my skin with claws and infect me with various diseases; or have fine serotonin produced in my brain so I feel happy and laugh (there is a reason for why cats are called LOLcats on the interweb).\n\nSpeculatively, the objects are richer when withdrawn. My cat is richer than I can ever exhaust in this way. But the withdrawn object does not do very much, not even to itself. The serotonin in my brain and the disease that I received from the tick (this is fictional, don’t worry about my health) exist because of relations with these objects. We could of course argue that these are other objects. But I would argue that serotonin and tick-related diseases are more real because they are “unable” to withdraw. They solely appear in particular relations: Human-cat-assemblage, human-tick-assemblage.\n\nThis brings us to scientific objects.\n\nSome remarks of objects in action and uncertainty\n\nWe have on the one hand objects which are already there, such as chairs, copper wires, my cat, and trains. But there is another type of of objects, probably the weirdest of them all; scientific objects which are still not here, there, or in any fixed position. This is why Latour’s Science in Action is such a thrilling and useful book, and contrary to what Latour himself claims, that it is “tamed for sociologists”, I consider it (along with Harman) to be a very important philosophical book.\n\nIndeed, the passage on the train station in Sein und Zeit is brilliantly weird, but it pales, in my opinion, to the first pages of Science in Action when Latour is reverting the black boxes of molecular biology, to a point when it is legitimate to ask “Is it a double helix or a triple helix?”. For in these moments, it is not merely a “human” perception waiting to unveil the true nature of DNA, it is a matter of a whole assemblage trying to force “something” to withdraw, to resist their models (and thus become real).\n\nDepending on how the equipment of the laboratory is configured, tweaked and debugged, it was possible to extract several competing models of the structure of DNA some decades ago. But only one survived, not because of human theory, but because of violent struggles among nonhuman entities. To me, the strongest realism is paradoxically found precisely in such moments of uncertainty, even though facts are contested and debated. It takes a lot of relations for the double helix to emerge, and only then are we able to make cyborgs such as onco-mice and Dolly the Sheep. Scientific practice is, when on the cutting edges of work, a “bringer of objects”. Perhaps only hacking (as in hacking computers, technology, politics, etc.) is equally entangled in the minute details of objects and their way of functioning and withdrawing, appearing and hiding.\n\nNow, this possibly brings me near “correlationism”. After all, what we understand as science is in fact a human activity. But I think we are still able to navigate without falling into that trap. Technology studies and “posthumanism” has been around for decades. Scientific objects are no less real than chairs, bridges or satellites. Not even trees or grass, since most of them are products of human terraformation. And in fact, the split of the atom and the burning of fossile fuels are potentially even changing what is above us in the sky.\n\nThen again, it would be naive for the domains of philosophy only to go where humans have gone. This is the true meaning ~ Christopher Kullenberg, Swedish blogger, Ph.D. candidate in Theory of Science in Gothenburg"", ""« In this book we again encounter Harman’s voice and the extraordinary force of his theses. Starting from an initial simplicity, they ultimately attain a degree of complexity and fascinating depth— but always step by step, in such a way that the reader is never distracted. »\n\n~ Quentin Meillassoux, École normale supérieure, author of After Finitude"", ""\""Harman's style often evokes that of a William James merged with the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft.\""\n\n~ Olivier Surel, in Actu Philosophia""]" Radical Chains,"[""Chris Nineham""]","Class, consciousness and the end of capitalism.","At a time of almost unimaginable inequality, the mainstream still tries to ignore class. Radical Chains: Why Class Matters argues that denial of class is no coincidence but in fact central to the system’s survival. Exploring largely ignored histories of struggle and challenging the many myths about class today, Radical Chains puts forward the case that it is time to place class once again at the centre of emancipatory politics.","At a time of almost unimaginable inequality, the mainstream still tries to ignore class. Radical Chains: Why Class Matters argues that denial of class is no coincidence but in fact central to the system’s survival. Exploring largely ignored histories of struggle and challenging the many myths about class today, Radical Chains puts forward the case that it is time to place class once again at the centre of emancipatory politics.",9,"[""It would be an understatement to say that Radical Chains: Why Class Matters is needed on the left.\n\nSocialists of all traditions always agree about one thing: the absolute centrality of class as a social relation to understanding the totality, and the necessity of the working class to be a class “for itself” as well as “in itself.”\n\nThe book provides a really useful reminder of that for the labour movement. ~ , Morning Star"", ""Compelling, compact ... wide-ranging ... A much-needed explanation for why a return to class is essential if we are to have a future worthy of human beings. ~ Paul LeBlanc, author of A Short History of the US Working Class and From Marx to Gramsci"", ""Beautifully written, Radical Chains shows how class struggle has put the issue of human freedom on the agenda over and over again. It is panoramic in its historical scope… a much needed challenge to the fragmentation wrought by academic postmodernism. ~ Tony McKenna, author of The War on Marxism"", ""This important and timely book makes the argument that the side-lining of class in mainstream political debate today has only one winner: the establishment. ~ Holly Rigby, teacher, activist, and writer"", ""Sets right the disastrous error of representing class as an identity or a cultural category equivalent to other twenty-first-century identities. An urgent read. ~ Rachel Holmes, author of Eleanor Marx: A Life"", ""Covering a vast terrain from the necessity of organization to the problems of identity politics, this is a much-needed treatise on the emancipatory possibilities of understanding class as a social relation. ~ Alpa Shah, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas"", ""This is a powerful book…It will be controversial with commentators, many academics and mainstream left politicians, but his case that the working class has always been the most important source of radical ideas in society is strong. Read it. ~ Raju J Das, Professor at York University, Toronto, and author of Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World"", ""This fantastic and concise global survey of class struggles … raises questions and teaches lessons that we mustn’t ignore as we head into the coming storms. ~ Mike Wayne, author of England’s Discontents: Political Cultures and National Identities"", ""A much-needed book at a time of growing class struggle, but when class still remains on the margins in the academy. A clear-sighted and accessible analysis of how to understand class in the neoliberal era. ~ Deepa Kumar, Professor of Media Studies, Rutgers University, author of Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike""]" Reading the Way of Things,"[""Daniel Coffeen""]","A guide to making new sense of the world, critically and generously. A techne for the postmodern world.","A Deleuzian guide to reading the world, Reading the Way of Things is an exploration of the ideas of McLuhan, Deleuze, Guattari, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Burroughs, and more. It is a book that aims at getting the reader past teleological interpretations and questions, letting the reader in on new ways of doing criticism as well as new ways of going, being, and thinking.","A Deleuzian guide to reading the world, Reading the Way of Things is an exploration of the ideas of McLuhan, Deleuze, Guattari, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Burroughs, and more. It is a book that aims at getting the reader past teleological interpretations and questions, letting the reader in on new ways of doing criticism as well as new ways of going, being, and thinking.",0,[] Reality Squared,"[""Tom Syverson""]",Reality Squared offers a bold theoretical account of reality television and the conditions of its significance today.,"In this concise but rich book, Syverson refutes the common notion that reality television is superficial or inauthentic, explaining how such criticisms fail to appreciate the way that we form social reality in the first place. By examining shows like The Hills, The Real Housewives, Vanderpump Rules, and The Bachelor alongside postmodern philosophy, feminist theory, and political economy, Syverson argues that we can confront today’s postmodern condition only by accepting it on its own terms. To what extent does reality television mimic and shape our public and personal lives? Is reality television a dangerous, shallow decadence, or can it provide the key to understanding our postmodern moment? And above all, what does the election of Donald Trump mean for progressive fans of the genre? Reality Squared tackles these questions head-on, arguing that reality television represents the great modern art form, and the only entertainment vehicle capable of showing what it feels like to be alive today.","In this concise but rich book, Syverson refutes the common notion that reality television is superficial or inauthentic, explaining how such criticisms fail to appreciate the way that we form social reality in the first place. By examining shows like The Hills, The Real Housewives, Vanderpump Rules, and The Bachelor alongside postmodern philosophy, feminist theory, and political economy, Syverson argues that we can confront today’s postmodern condition only by accepting it on its own terms. To what extent does reality television mimic and shape our public and personal lives? Is reality television a dangerous, shallow decadence, or can it provide the key to understanding our postmodern moment? And above all, what does the election of Donald Trump mean for progressive fans of the genre? Reality Squared tackles these questions head-on, arguing that reality television represents the great modern art form, and the only entertainment vehicle capable of showing what it feels like to be alive today.",5,"[""Reality Squared faces down reality TV with the curiosity and seriousness that the subject deserves and so rarely receives. In Syverson’s hands, there are no lazy cliches or easy jokes, he cuts to the heart of why and how this form carries political and cultural consequence. From Vanderpump Rules to the reality presidency we’re all forced to watch, Syverson provides a necessary theoretical framework to help us understand a phenomenon that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. ~ Lucas Mann, author of Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV"", ""Elegantly written, Tom Syverson’s Reality Squared is at once a love letter to reality TV and a nuanced study of one of the most pervasive forms of media in our contemporary moment. Amid debates on how leftist discourse has been making excessive use of bad faith and paranoid readings, Syverson discursively intervenes with a generosity that does not disavow a rigorous, critical assessment. ~ Kristen Cochrane, @ripannanicolesmith"", ""In a so-called post-truth era, underwritten by the interminable logic of finance, and with a former gameshow host and professional wrestling guest star as president, Syverson invites readers to take seriously that reality television might be the paramount art form of our time. Far from obfuscating reality, its precise performativity plays back the implausibility, instability, and irrationality of our own lives in extraordinarily legible ways. Playing reality shows like The Hills, The Real Housewives, and The Bachelor against ideas from cultural theory, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, Syverson argues that reality television serves as a kind of ethical matrix and, perhaps, a way station onto a grander political consciousness. It is hard to agree with every argument, claim, or provocation but, just like its source material, it's hard to turn away either. Reality Squared plays precisely in a murky zone where one considers what happens if we really do stop being polite and start getting real. ~ Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research"", ""At a time when it so often feels that the truth has become stranger than fiction, Syverson’s dive into the world of reality television suggests a more uncomfortable \""truth\"" - there is no longer a meaningful difference between the two. ~ Naomi Snider, author of Why Does Patriarchy Persist?"", ""Reality Squared proposes a novel idea that’s achingly overdue: rather than wringing our hands over the obviously staged aspects of reality television, perhaps it’s better to think of these mechanisms as a perfect map of our increasingly fictitious world. Syverson’s dead-on understanding of cheap entertainment and its symbiotic relationship to the failures of the Left make this an invaluable read. ~ Jarett Kobek, author of Only Americans Burn in Hell and I Hate the Internet""]" Rebel Rebel,"[""Chris O'Leary""]","David Bowie: every single song. Everything you want to know, everything you didn't know.","David Bowie: every single song. Everything you want to know, everything you didn't know. David Bowie remains mysterious and unknowable, despite 45 years of recording and performing. His legacy is roughly 600 songs, which range from psychedelia to glam rock to Philadelphia soul, from avant-garde instrumentals to global pop anthems. Rebel Rebel catalogs Bowie's songs from 1964 to 1976, examines them in the order of their composition and recording, and digs into what makes them work. Rebel Rebel is an in-depth look at Bowie's early singles and album tracks, unreleased demos, session outtakes and cover songs. The book traces Bowie's literary, film and musical influences and the evolution of his songwriting. It also shows how Bowie exploited studio innovations, and the roles of his producers and supporting musicians, especially major collaborators like Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and Mick Ronson. This book places Bowie's music in the context of its era. Readers will discover the links between Kubrick's 2001 and ""Space Oddity""; how A Clockwork Orange inspired ""Suffragette City"". The pages are a trip through Bowie's various lives as a young man in Swinging London, a Tibetan Buddhist, a disillusioned hippie, a rock god, and a Hollywood recluse. With a cast of thousands, including John Lennon, William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol and Cher.","David Bowie: every single song. Everything you want to know, everything you didn't know. David Bowie remains mysterious and unknowable, despite 45 years of recording and performing. His legacy is roughly 600 songs, which range from psychedelia to glam rock to Philadelphia soul, from avant-garde instrumentals to global pop anthems. Rebel Rebel catalogs Bowie's songs from 1964 to 1976, examines them in the order of their composition and recording, and digs into what makes them work. Rebel Rebel is an in-depth look at Bowie's early singles and album tracks, unreleased demos, session outtakes and cover songs. The book traces Bowie's literary, film and musical influences and the evolution of his songwriting. It also shows how Bowie exploited studio innovations, and the roles of his producers and supporting musicians, especially major collaborators like Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and Mick Ronson. This book places Bowie's music in the context of its era. Readers will discover the links between Kubrick's 2001 and ""Space Oddity""; how A Clockwork Orange inspired ""Suffragette City"". The pages are a trip through Bowie's various lives as a young man in Swinging London, a Tibetan Buddhist, a disillusioned hippie, a rock god, and a Hollywood recluse. With a cast of thousands, including John Lennon, William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol and Cher.",7,"[""4 stars. “The detail is, at times, breathtaking, the cultural contextualizing mostly secure, and the analysis quirky and honest.” ~ David Buckley, Mojo"", ""4 stars. “O’Leary is interested in anything the magpie genius squeezed into his songs…and he can nail a song’s mysterious power in a line…This essential handbook makes old songs feel new again.” ~ Dorian Lynskey, Q"", ""“The only place you’ll get more in-depth details about Bowie’s life is in his Heavenly Book of Life. Unless you have access to God’s archives, you’ll find Rebel Rebel to be an essential book for Bowie enthusiasts and connoisseurs alike.” ~ Joseph Kyle, The Recoup"", ""\""This book isn’t the blog splurged on the page. Each entry has been rebuilt from the ground up. Expanded, edited, revised, reworked, remixed. For any self-respecting Bowie fan, it’s essential.” ~ Mayer Nissim, Digital Spy"", ""“The writing is both meticulous and colourful. At times O’Leary is almost too intense…but he does it through love. He’s written a poem in a letter. ~ Chris Roberts, Classic Rock"", ""Chris O'Leary's \""Pushing Ahead of the Dame\"" contains the best writing on David Bowie bar none. ~ Bob Stanley, writer and a member of the pop group Saint Etienne"", ""If you're a David Bowie fan, you'll love Chris O'Leary's Pushing Ahead of the Dame. Each post is devoted to analyzing a Bowie song, in roughly chronological order: its words, music, history, precursors and influence on other performers...Even if you're not an admirer of the artist sometimes known as Ziggy Stardust, the site's a rewarding read. If nothing else, it may leave you wishing that your favorite musician had a fan as perceptive and prolific as O'Leary. (TIME's Best Blogs of 2011) ~ Harry McCracken, TIME""]" Remapping 'Crisis': A Guide to Athens,"[""Aylwyn Walsh"", ""Myrto Tsilimpounidi""]","A taste of austerity, the limits of democracy and the overlooked, untold stories of a country in 'crisis'.","In periods of intense crisis the pressing need to take sides comes to the surface and trumps neutrality. The claim to objectivity, always a little problematic, can no longer be sustained, and becomes itself a ground of confrontation as the conflicts amongst economists and constitutional lawyers show. As the world is moving towards a state of permanent crisis the engaged intellectual and the committed media are coming back (Costas Douzinas, Professor of Law and Contributor to The Guardian). This is a crucial collection that provides a new perspective on the social dimension of crisis - exemplified in the new wave of social mobilization gaining ground across the globe. The collection is an invigorating addition to the market of ideas circulating at this time of uncertainty, austerity and social change. It is an important and timely contribution to the study of social movements and the rise of direct civil action in pursuit of democracy. In this milieu of social change, Athens is its muse. This book is one of the first collections of chapters devoted to the specificities of Greece’s crisis in English that does not focus solely on economics. Its scope and intention aligns it with other recently published books on the ‘Arab Spring’ and the ‘Occupy’ movements, although its register moves away from journalistic commentary to academic considerations of futurity and the potential of the city to reinvent itself. This makes it a unique interdisciplinary project with a broad appeal.","In periods of intense crisis the pressing need to take sides comes to the surface and trumps neutrality. The claim to objectivity, always a little problematic, can no longer be sustained, and becomes itself a ground of confrontation as the conflicts amongst economists and constitutional lawyers show. As the world is moving towards a state of permanent crisis the engaged intellectual and the committed media are coming back (Costas Douzinas, Professor of Law and Contributor to The Guardian). This is a crucial collection that provides a new perspective on the social dimension of crisis - exemplified in the new wave of social mobilization gaining ground across the globe. The collection is an invigorating addition to the market of ideas circulating at this time of uncertainty, austerity and social change. It is an important and timely contribution to the study of social movements and the rise of direct civil action in pursuit of democracy. In this milieu of social change, Athens is its muse. This book is one of the first collections of chapters devoted to the specificities of Greece’s crisis in English that does not focus solely on economics. Its scope and intention aligns it with other recently published books on the ‘Arab Spring’ and the ‘Occupy’ movements, although its register moves away from journalistic commentary to academic considerations of futurity and the potential of the city to reinvent itself. This makes it a unique interdisciplinary project with a broad appeal.",1,"[""This volume pursues the classical virtues of parrhesia and andreia at a period of crisis. My hope is that this and similar initiatives will revive again the somewhat lost honor of the intellectual. ~ Prof Costas Douzinas""]" Removing the Stalin Stain,"[""William Briggs""]","Can Marxism emerge from the long shadow cast by Stalinism, and challenge capitalism?","Can Marxism emerge from the long shadow cast by Stalinism, and challenge capitalism? There is undoubtedly a growing interest in Marxism and socialism. Opinion polls show a majority that regard socialism as a real option. It is against this reality, and as a contribution to growing debates, that this book has been written. Marxism, as an ideological force and instituted to lead the charge against capitalism, has been poorly served in the past century. Many of its core messages have been obscured. William Briggs gives a rousing defence of Marxism, calling for a return of the working class to the centre of potential struggle. Briggs seeks to heal the damage done to Marxism, in the name of Marxism, over generations past.","Can Marxism emerge from the long shadow cast by Stalinism, and challenge capitalism? There is undoubtedly a growing interest in Marxism and socialism. Opinion polls show a majority that regard socialism as a real option. It is against this reality, and as a contribution to growing debates, that this book has been written. Marxism, as an ideological force and instituted to lead the charge against capitalism, has been poorly served in the past century. Many of its core messages have been obscured. William Briggs gives a rousing defence of Marxism, calling for a return of the working class to the centre of potential struggle. Briggs seeks to heal the damage done to Marxism, in the name of Marxism, over generations past.",4,"[""An erudite and deftly crafted study, \""Removing The Stalin Stain\"" is impressively informative and exceptionally well organized, making it an ideal and unreservedly recommended addition to personal reading lists, as well as community, college, and university library Contemporary Political Science & Philosophy collections. It should be noted for students, academia, political activists, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject. ~ Clint Travis, Midwest Book Review"", ""Briggs tackles head-on the zone of conflict that Marx never quite got to, though not for lack of ambition. How do nation-states both manage and contest the military-industrial surges of global capitalism? Arguing the novel thesis that Stalin did good work for capitalism, offering its defenders an open goal to score against Marxism, Removing the Stalin Stain presents a clearly argued and outward-facing Marxist analysis of contemporary politics. ~ Terrell Carver, Professor of Political Theory, University of Bristol, UK"", ""In this pertinent book, William Briggs urges us to return to a classical Marxism that was distorted and stained by Stalinism and by many Marxists in the 20th century. That means recognising the key elements of crises in capitalism and analysing them scientifically. In particular, Marxists must break from the nationalist, reformist view adopted by Stalinism and social democracy and embrace internationalism. And it must restore the role of the world working class as the international agent of change in a globalising capitalism. If Marxism does so, it can banish pessimism about the ability to end capitalism. ~ Michael Roberts, City of London economist, author of The Long Depression: Marxism and the Global Crisis of Capitalism"", ""At a time of rising global inequality and violence, often caused by capitalism's built-in mechanisms, it's vital to reassess the very basis of our political existence. This book is a necessary read because it both challenges the dangers of romanticising the past and arguing for the importance of Marxism in the 21st century. I welcome its bravery in highlighting the struggles of the working class, without whose success our societies will forever remain incomplete. ~ Antony Loewenstein, independent journalist, film-maker and author of Disaster Capitalism: Making A Killing Out Of Catastrophe""]" "Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, The","[""Mark Fisher""]",The definitive account of Michael Jackson's rise and fall by the world's best music writers.,"The essays in The Resistible Demise Of Michael Jackson consummately demonstrate that writing on popular culture can be both thoughtful and heartfelt. The contributors, who include accomplished music critics as well as renowned theorists, are some of the most astute and eloquent writers on pop today. The collection is made up of new essays written in the wake of the death of Jackson, but also includes the classic NME piece by Barney Hoskyn written at the time of Thriller.","The essays in The Resistible Demise Of Michael Jackson consummately demonstrate that writing on popular culture can be both thoughtful and heartfelt. The contributors, who include accomplished music critics as well as renowned theorists, are some of the most astute and eloquent writers on pop today. The collection is made up of new essays written in the wake of the death of Jackson, but also includes the classic NME piece by Barney Hoskyn written at the time of Thriller.",5,"[""The new anthology of reflections on Jackson's life and work put together by Mark Fisher makes a hugely worthwhile counterweight to the many rush-released cash-in titles published in the indecent aftermath of his death. ~ http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009"", ""Mark Fisher assembles a cast of global music critics who in turn examine the person and the spectacle of the King of Pop, as seen through multiple lenses. These perspectives coupled with detailed historic connections enable us to see Jackson as a problematic symptom of his time. ~ Joe Atkins, San Francisco Book Review and Sacremento Book Review"", ""If you have never bought a book about Michael Jackson, have a go with this: The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson is a thoroughly readable collection of pop-cultural essays, which looks at Jackson's career from political, cultural criticism, pop history or urbanistic points of view (to name just to be a few), in a call to look at Jackson without falling into the pattern of \""unthinking tribute\"" or \""gossiping character assassination\"" .\n\nThe Brecht-reference in the title is entirely appropriate: It's about Jackson's ascent to the status of King of Pop ... as well as his public dismantling a tragic freak accident rather than products or natural phenomena treat it as processes that are linked in many ways parallel to the cultural and political developments. The phenomenal success of Thriller can perhaps be classified in many respects a classic example of a \""black swan\"", that is - according to Nassim Taleb - an unpredictable event with far-reaching consequences for which there are only post factum adequate explanations....\n\nMark Fisher, who has edited the book, writes one of the most interesting outposts of left Bloggentsia with his blog k-punk. (His own manifesto Capitalist Realism has also just appeared, but I had no time to read it.) The contributors are an eclectic but thoroughly representative collection of current pop theoretician positions, while Fisher took into account both the generation that Jackson's breakthrough, directly or learned, as well as younger writers who have been born into the kingdom of Pop. (Unfortunately, Geeta Dayal is the only a female voice here.)\n\nSeveral contributors are themselves a presence with blogs and some of the texts were there in one form or another has already appeared immediately after Mr. Jackson's death, for example, Owen Hatherleys portrait of the Stalinists in Jackson or Evan Calder Williams' balance aesthetics with the metaphysics of Captain Eo of NGOs. That this immediacy and spontaneity of the reflex comes into its own as well as the theoretical and thematic backgrounds, is one of the strengths of this book. ~ clausmoser.com"", ""A satisfying surfeit of intelligent observation; warm, funny and provocative writing; and lack of prurience in this new Zer0 Books tome. 'Shamone' says Jonny Mugwump, our many teeted lizard overlord.\n\nA truly startling comeback.\n\nNo, not Michael Jackson, the subject of this collection of newly-commissioned essays, but Ian Penman. However, more of that later.\n\nZer0 books (founded by the charismatic Tariq Goddard) represent a tangible (as in physical) re-engagement with culture and thought. Positioning themselves beyond the striplit malls of mass-media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy, there is a genuine punk-like feel to their enterprise - Zer0 FEELS like an independent record label. Utilising an understated but immediately recognisable aesthetic at frighteningly reasonable prices (you could pretty much pick up their entire back catalogue on Amazon for less than £40) they have already published a number of works in their short existence (about a year or something) none of which have been less than fascinating. Pulling together younger writers who have been carving out their own singular niches on the internet (Nina Power, Owen Hatherley and Dominic Fox all had excellent works published in 2009) alongside print veterans like David Stubbs and the aforementioned Penman (who has two books coming out this year), Zer0 pull from a multitude of overground, underground and/or ignored corners, tapping into a vein of insight that marries depth with accessibility without sacrificing either.\n\nCollated and edited by Mark (K-Punk) Fisher (who has just published Capitalist Realism and has a further collection due this year), The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (and what a title that is) triumphantly justifies every claim they make for themselves. In concept alone it's perfect - 24 refractions, reflections and collisions with (arguably - although there is only one other contender) the greatest pop cultural phenomenon the world has ever known: an inquiry that covers the Moonwalk (backslide) to Stalin, from Jackson's relationship with India to Jackson's embodiment of the British experience of pop (and therefore of culture as a whole). Some of these pieces turn brevity into poetry (in 5 pages Alex Williams leaps quite logically from Kant and Lyotard via the morgue to Neverland, Inland Empire and Bataille, Bambi and The Sun) whilst others offer descriptions of Jackson's greatest moments that are so exquisite that you'll be playing them before the sentence is through (Fisher himself especially transcendent on 'Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough' and 'Billie Jean'). Oh and Steven Shaviro takes Greil Marcus severely to task for several decades of dodgy white hipsterism which is something that has been at the back of my mind for a long time.\n\nAlong the way you become aware that despite containing the aforementioned BJ and 'Human Nature' (a song that brings me out in goosebumps just thinking about it) Thriller is not THAT great, that Jackson is actually beyond disturbing in his behaviour around women in the post-Bad videos and that Norm from Cheers is a big Husker Du fan (thank you David Stubbs).\n\nBecause of the ludicrously high calibre of writing within (especially considering that Jackson has only just squeak-grunted off the planet he tried to save), the potential danger of cross-over (it suddenly dawns of course that Michael Jackson's recorded legacy is a very small one) actually becomes one of the book's strengths. There are so many different readings, assessments and interpretations of 'Earth Song' for instance that you briefly become convinced that it's a truly fascinating piece of art instead of the work of a madman (although naturally those two things hardly need be exclusive).\n\nAlso, I for one, love to read writing about dancing and I am entirely ecstatic about Costello's misfired dancing about architecture quip - what could be more fun than dancing about architecture? And boy could that man (boy) dance (although Joshua Clover rightly points out that Janet actually had the edge and in fact I would offer that she is also the more musically interesting of the two in the long term).\n\nBut in a book that is already stuffed with ideas, two pieces are pieces of art by themselves. In 'True Enough: Michael in Fifty Shards' Chris Roberts (having had the honour of being commissioned to write a book about Jackson the day after he died and having said book being published 3 weeks later) embarks on a journey through Jackson's life that can best be described as Citizen Kane remixed by Walt Disney. '...Shards' is a darkly ebullient exploding rainbow. A desperate cartoon that seems to perfectly capture the insanity of Jackson's life even though we have no fucking idea WHAT his life was like. But somehow, Roberts DOES. We have Michael searching for the elixir of eternal youth. We have Michael finding the Hollywood celebrity mother he needs in Diana Ross first then Elizabeth Taylor second. There are celebrity dalliances.\n\n'Hey Mikey,' says Lisa-Marie Presley. I had an unorthodox youth and know all about massive head-stewing fame. You had an unorthodox youth and know all about massive head-stewing fame. We have so much in common. And I don't need your money. Wanna fuck?\n\nThe penultimate 'Shard 49' is off-world brilliance with Michael occupying every celebrity corpse of the last 100 years. It's like an undiscovered chapter of Atrocity Exhibition. It really is pretty damn good.\n\nBut Fisher has one more surprise left, a comeback worthy of the King himself (it's hardly the last piece by accident).\n\n'Notes towards the Ritual Exorcism of a Dead King' is the first thing Ian Penman has published for a very long time and I use the word \""thing\"" deliberately as it's hard to define just what it actually is. Starting with a party, sat with some teenagers drinking Malibu, Penman tries to get a reaction on the news of Jackson's death, invokes Faust ('There's no retiring on contracts like these!') collides with the phenomena of the megastar and enters into some dark chaotic war with culture, with the media, practically with himself, collapsing the form of the essay at points as if possessed by Artaud whilst at the same time retaining a surgeon-like precision of pop-savvy:\n\n(The Thriller video - if there's a notable oddity, watching it now, I would say it's how serious it feels - if that makes any sense.)\n\nIt does.\n\n'Notes towards the Ritual Exorcism of a Dead King' however, like its subject matter, is permanently on the verge of profound disintegration. Turn the page and,\n\nIt-don't-matter-if-you're: black-or-white.\n\nIt don't MATTER\n\nIt isn't matter\n\nI am not matter\n\nI am neither black nor white, I am black and white, black AS white, sometimes black sometimes white, sometimes beyond white...\n\nThis is the essay as voodoo ritual (exorcism), as spell. It is genuinely strange and at times, more than a little disturbing.\n\nIt's funny, poignant, deadly serious and dangerous. When Penman gets on the good foot he is entirely untouchable but this represents a new shamanic high. It also justifies the entire Zer0 project - outside of the academy and outside of the tabloids, writing about culture can be so much more than just CRITICISM - way beyond good or bad (black or white). Because you could argue that Ballard was a critic. And Artaud. And Nietzsche. To really engage with culture is to collide with it and out of that wreckage poetry is born...\n\nSo this is an extraordinary culmination in an anthology full of exceedingly fine writing about a subject who (who exactly?) will forever remain a fascinating, grotesque and entirely ungraspable mystery. Jackson's story, despite his own desperate machinations, is also one eerily devoid of magic - full of desperation, pain and a portal to the crushing rise of postmodern media overload. But it's also absolutely essential to remember just why all this fuss, why all this inquiry, why the fascination and none of the contributors ever lose sight of those few magic moments because somewhere in his absolute mess of an existence, Michael Jackson also captured some of the most incredibly pure and joyous moments ever EVER to be found in popular music, especially (but not exclusively) on Off The Wall and The Jacksons' Triumph - music that is literally soaked in some kind of joy and that somehow managed to infatuate an entire planet and despite everything, despite the horrific and quite insane and warped reaction to his demise, well that's something that can never be ignored. ~ The Quietus"", ""Fresh, allegation-free perspectives on Jackson's life provided one of the year's best books: The Resistible Demise Of Michael Jackson is a collection of essays edited by Mark Fisher, who reckons 'only Elvis managed to insinuate himself into practically every living being's body and dreams to the same degree that Jackson did.' ... Tom Ewing... posits that much of the singer's later work 'sounds like multiple drafts of the same song, a crushed and frightened attempt by a desperate man to get the pain out.' With no jokes about Bubbles, and only sadness that he ended up with a 'permanent Pierrot-grimace sneer', this is a fine attempt to reclaim Jackson's reputation from the tabloids. ~ Bob Stanley, The Times""]" Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left,"[""Ian Parker""]",Fifty revolutionary keywords for a new left.,"Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left comprises short essays on fifty revolutionary keywords, each word being put to work on a contemporary political issue. With keywords ranging from academicisation to neoliberalism, from postcolonial to Zionism and with subjects including, Badiou, North Korea, sexual violence and Žižek, the book concludes with an essay mapping the development of progressive keywords before our century of revolution, which began in 1917, keywords that emerged in the fifty years of struggle between 1917 and 1967, and revolutionary keywords for the new left today.","Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left comprises short essays on fifty revolutionary keywords, each word being put to work on a contemporary political issue. With keywords ranging from academicisation to neoliberalism, from postcolonial to Zionism and with subjects including, Badiou, North Korea, sexual violence and Žižek, the book concludes with an essay mapping the development of progressive keywords before our century of revolution, which began in 1917, keywords that emerged in the fifty years of struggle between 1917 and 1967, and revolutionary keywords for the new left today.",9,"[""Ian Parker has a track record as an ecosocialist political activist in Britain. He is a committed but non-dogmatic Marxist and a psychoanalyst so, unsurprisingly, anything he writes is likely to be serious and challenging.\n\nDespite a strong theoretical and academic background, however, Parker writes in a very engaging and interesting fashion.\n\nRevolutionary Keywords does what it says on the tin. Parker has come up with a list of key terms that are used on the left and explains them clearly.\n\nThis book would be a useful political education resource for anyone involved in Marxist, green or intersectional liberation politics. Parker has taken 50 keywords, including ecosocialism, empire and Islamophobia, and described each. He looks at how they have been disputed, contradicted and generally argued over. He offers suggestions for further reading.\n\nThe concept of “keywords” comes from the working-class Welsh cultural theorist and ecosocialist Raymond Williams. He sought to link literary theory with political activism, producing his own keywords book in 1976.\n\nWilliams’ project looked at how the meanings of words had changed in the context of political, social and cultural transformation. His project was more academic and formal than this new book, but Parker draws upon his inspiration.\n\nBoth Parker and Williams believe that words may become more significant and change according to context. The broad context for Parker is the way in which the revolutionary left has come into contact with movements for feminism, ecology and intersectionality in recent decades.\n\nHe assumes that Marxism has an intrinsic sympathy for what might be seen as new notions of liberation — his Marxism is innately “intersectional”. Intersectionality has proven controversial for some Marxists (as has feminism and ecology), but Parker notes its origin as a term is in fact rather straightforward and rooted in working-class struggle.\n\nWorkers at General Motors in the United States sought to sue the firm for discrimination in 1989, but were told that they could only sue on the basis of either gender or ethnicity. African-American women, however, felt that they had been discriminated in both forms.\n\nParker explains that legal theorist Kimberle Crenshaw “came up with a commonsensical term from the metaphor of what in the US is called an ‘intersection’, or a road crossing”.\n\nThe more specific context was the situation British Marxists faced in recent years. A crisis in one of the bigger far left groups opened up prospects for a realignment of left groups, and Marxists like Parker encountered new radical networks. The book was largely inspired by a radical reading group of anti-capitalist activists in Manchester, where Parker is based.\n\nKeywords consistently takes important and sometimes seemingly threatening terms and opens them up for discussion. Parker has the ability to make difficult ideas accessible. He is a strong opponent of theory being used to bolster academic careers separate from political struggle.\n\nParker also shows how theory can be used to belittle new activists or impose a narrow party orthodoxy. The fact that he makes concepts from psychoanalysis more relevant to left activists is another virtue.\n\nCriticisms can be made. Sometimes the examples seem based on often obscure debates between small groups on the far left. Although international in outlook, there is a lot more Manchester than Mumbai here. An index would have been useful and sometimes it is difficult to track down content. For example, a discussion of Rojava and Kurdish politics is under the keyword “Justice”.\n\nThis is an enjoyable and thought-provoking book. Vladimir Lenin said there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory. Any reader will have some disagreements with the author, but Keywords opens discussion rather than closing it down.\n\n[Derek Wall is joint international coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales. His latest book Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals will be published by Pluto this month.] ~ Derek Wall, https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/revolutionary-keywords-opens-useful-discussion"", ""Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left by Ian Parker is a collection of essays on keywords for the political left. Parker is Co-Director (with Erica Burman) of the Discourse Unit, Managing Editor of Annual Review of Critical Psychology, Secretary of Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix, member of the Asylum Magazine editorial collective, and supporter of the Fourth International. He is a researcher, supervisor, and consultant in critical psychology and psychoanalysis.\n\nRevolutionary Keywords is a series of essays based on keywords. It is not a dictionary of definitions but contains commonly used keywords and creates essays built around the word. The essays put the keyword into context in modern socialism. Like most books on socialism, this one, too, becomes complex. The term socialism means many different things to many different people. European socialism, Stalinism, Leninism, Marxism, Democratic Socialism, even America's capitalist based \""socialism\"" is discussed in order to set the common ground.\n\nThe book discusses many aspects of historical socialism as well as modern day. Topics of race, sex, gender, globalism, and campism are discussed in detail throughout the book. Other topics seem mundane but have deep roots such as discourse, postmodernism, identity, and animals. The discussions run deep and turn out complex. At the end, the recap traces the changes in keywords from 1917 -1967 and 1967-2017. The evolution of keywords leads to the 2017 keywords in this volume. Although not intended for the general audience, in fact, I found myself a bit entangled in the subject matter. I felt much the same way on the first day of a semester in graduate school. Needless to say, it is not light reading, but worth the time and effort for those with an interest in the far left. ~ Evil Cyclist, https://evilcyclist.wordpress.com/2017/09/26/book-review-revolutionary-keywords-for-a-new-left/"", ""http://www.criticalinstitute.org/revolutionary-keywords-new-left-ian-parker-book-review/\n\nReview: Revolutionary Keywords For A New Left . Authored book: Ian Parker. Publisher: Zero Books. Publishing Date: December 8, 2017. Review by: Neil Cocks (University of Reading)\n\nOne can make a few predictions about any new book by Prof. Ian Parker. It will be intellectually daring, international in its understandings, and will draw together discourses and events often kept apart within established writing. Above all, it will not be easy to predict. Revolutionary Keywords For A New Left is no exception.\n\nIn the book, Parker acknowledges that the text is in some ways an updating of Raymond William’s classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. When Williams went about charting the history of certain definitive terms within radical discourse, however, his focus was very much the white, straight, European and male. In one respect, then, the updating is necessary to introduce to such a progressive project the feminist, queer and postcolonial, yet Revolutionary Keywords is not simply tasked with returning neglected subjects to the discourse of the left, as through such an operation it also questions the nature of such discourse. In other words, the difficulty for Parker is not only that Williams focuses on the wrong thing, or even that his focus is not sufficiently broad, but rather that the discourse of ‘focus’ itself is at issue. Parker has written a text that, in its every aspect, problematizes a centrism that, left unchecked, can limit revolutionary possibility.\n\nThe reasons for writing the book are set out in the following terms:\n\n‘In the past fifty years the ‘left’ has had to learn about new ways of organising itself to take on board the politics of different social movements, and that has also meant changing the way we describe what we are up against and where we are going’. (6)\n\nThe task of Revolutionary Keywords is to open up an understanding and discussion of these transformations. To achieve this end, the text rejects a conventional linear structure. Instead, fifty chapters engage with fifty keywords, some long established (‘Empire’, ‘Fascism’, ‘Discourse’), some more recent (‘Young Girl’, ‘Brexit’, ‘Cis’). The result is a text that can offer up unexpected connections. I can, for example, very much recommend reading ‘Structurelessness’, followed by ‘Identity’ and by ‘Pabloism’: the impossibility and necessity of structure; its disavowal within Capitalism; its uncanny, disruptive effects within revolutionary thinking and practice. The text is about the meeting of ‘keywords’ in a way that results in tensions between discrete terms whilst also problematising the notion of such hard-impacted distinctions. Revolutionary Keywords is, in these terms, an example of what one chapter names the ‘Prefigurative’, producing a reading that ‘anticpate[s] the world of tomorrow’.\n\nThere is another sense in which the text works to create unexpected spaces and possibilities for thinking, with Parker, in his account of the book’s formation, writing that:\n\n‘I noticed when an unfamiliar word appeared from the Black feminist movement, for example, and how my comrades struggled to make sense of it, and how they reframed it in their old political language. Then I would use that word in a way closer to how it was meant to operate, but instead of simply explaining it I would put it to work on a different topic. Then we could see better what uses it has, how it takes us forward in understanding what is going on, and creates alliances’ (7 – 8)\n\nIn practice, this means for example, that the chapter on ‘Discourse’ reads Foucault through the neo-liberal project of the ANC, whilst that on ‘Cis’ discusses sexuality and Ukranian identity. This is a text that does not dismiss the force of boundaries, nor the necessity of structures, but is consistently challenging and transforming what these might be, and the nature and direction of the forces upon which they call.\n\nIt is an approach exemplified in a chapter entitled ‘Postcolonial’, in which Parker skilfully brings together psychoanalysis, deconstruction, national communist party history, and neo-liberal educational projects. This chapter will be of particular interest to those familiar with The Critical Institute, as it looks to Malta as an example of how an examination of the ways in which ‘economic and cultural entit[ies are] located in relation to the history of colonialism’ can ‘enable critical reflection and resistance to local and imperial state attempts to subjugate populations and destroy the land’ (148). After contrasting various and contradictory critical moves that in some way ‘provincialise Europe’ with those that resist such a reconfiguring and difference, Parker turns to the question of Maltese education. Specifically, he discusses the all too familiar events that saw the government backing a proposal for a Jordanian non-University named the ‘American University of Malta’, one that would require the destruction of both public HE and the natural environment. Parker reads how the resistance to this monocultural, violent enterprise mobilises diversity, further suggesting that:\n\nOne aspect of postcolonial critique that is borne out by these recent attempts to recolonise Malta and by the resistance to that neoliberal exercise in cultural imperialism in the context of the global knowledge economy is that ‘postcolonial subjects’ are not only those who live inside the old colonies. Postcolonial studies describes, among other things, the way in which those at the margins often, in a way that is uncanny for those in the ‘centre’, know more about the colonisers than the colonisers themselves know. And the flip side of this is that those who refuse to be of the ‘centre’ and who make political alliances with ‘outsiders’ can all the more effectively dismantle the legacy of colonialism, anticipating the day when it really will be accurate to refer to it as something that really is ‘post’ (151-2)\n\nWithin Parker’s exacting critique, the tensions between the various discourses he introduces do not simply result in an appeal to comforting, liberal tolerance-inclusiveness. Rather, cultural and geographic ‘contradictions’ both enable Maltese resistance to certain monotheistic structures, and are also the marks of a colonial history now ‘intensified in the pursuit of profit’. Such reversals are consistently read in Revolutionary Keywords not in terms of pessimistic dead-ends, but rather the very stuff of critical and political movements. In this text, Parker proves himself once again a truly great reader of the dialectic. There is a reflexivity that actualises, rather than dilutes, the revolutionary politics. Indeed, this is a text that makes real political movement. It is a text that makes the call and opens up the possibility of going ‘forward’. Or, as Parker has it in his address to his audience: ‘I hope you like the book and argue with it’.\n\nReviewed by Neil Cocks (University of Reading) E-mail: n.h.cocks[at]reading.ac.uk\n\n~ Neil Cocks, Critical Institute"", ""A book liberals, activists, and political enthusiasts should all read. The essays are engaging and well written without being pretentious, and tackle not only the words but what surrounds the words. ~ Lily , Faerie Review"", ""Language for Resisting Oppression\n\n— Robert K. Beshara\n\nRevolutionary Keywords for a New Left\n\nBy Ian Parker\n\nAlresford, UK: Zero Books, 295 pages, $29.95 paperback.\n\nIAN PARKER WEARS many hats, being “the Co-Director (with Erica Burman) of the Discourse Unit, Managing Editor of Annual Review of Critical Psychology, Secretary of Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix, member of the Asylum Magazine editorial collective, and supporter of the Fourth International” (Parker, https://parkerian.com/).\n\nHis new book, Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left, is published in the context of the centennial of the October revolution, and should be read in tandem with similarly themed books recently published by Verso (e.g. Ali, 2017; Miéville, 2017; Žižek, 2017).\n\nParker’s treatise is a critical celebration of “the century of revolutions” (252), his central thesis entails changing the Left in order “to change the world.” (9)\n\nBut in order to change the Left, according to Parker, we first need to pay close attention to “the link between language and action.” The “keywords” we use in describing the world, he writes “are intimately linked to the very possibility of changing that very same world because ‘[l]anguage is woven into reality.’” (6, 8)\n\nThe author charts three key dates or “passwords” from “the century of revolutions” (253) — 1917, 1967, and 2017 —in order to index some of the major debates between the “old” and the “new” Left (signifying Leftists before vs. after 1967), which can be summarized as a shift in analysis from one focused purely on the political economy to another centered on “intersectionality” (i.e., class, sex and race) as “one way of working with the layout of many forms of oppression.” (102)\n\nThis shift is certainly a reflection of the “crises” within both capitalism and the anti-capitalist movement. While Parker draws on his power/knowledge as both an academic and a practicing psychoanalyst in writing his manifesto, his critical reflexivity as an activist — revolutionary Marxist (Trotskyist) — renders his dialectical analysis a valuable contribution to the needed bridging between the centralist “old” and the democratic “new” Left.\n\nThis is principally so as far as open, heterarchical organizing is concerned (5) — i.e. resorting to neither “the tyranny of structurelessness” nor “the tyranny of tyranny” (212, 215). Parker embodies this bridging when he draws particular examples from Britain to make some universal points that will indeed resonate with progressive activists internationally who are committed to the “globalization of resistance.” (127)\n\nInfluenced by Raymond Williams, Parker highlights fifty progressive keywords (e.g. ecosocialism, standpoint, Islamophobia) as an exercise in praxis, in that the keywords are meant as discursive tools in the practical struggle against all “faces” of oppression (Young, 1990). Put differently, activists need radical theories (e.g. Marxism, feminism, anti-racism) in order to interpret and, more importantly, transform the oppressive reality of capitalism-patriarchy-racism.\n\nEach keyword chapter begins with a handy and succinct definition. A few descriptions from the book will give a sense of their pithiness: ecosocialism “is one way of connecting our humanity with our nature, to protect both” (53); standpoint “sees the world against power rather than with it” (207); and Islamophobia is “an orientalist twist on old racism to confirm the value of modern capitalist civilization.” (106)\n\nThere follows a dialectical analysis for and against every keyword as well as an application by way of examples. I recommend that readers begin the book by paying particular attention to the concluding essay, which though technically a postface functions powerfully as a preface to Revolutionary Keywords.\n\nPolitical Compass for Activists\n\nThis book is written mainly for activists, without in-text citations or references (except the Further Reading section at the very end); as a result the book has a nice flow, which is practical if the book is embraced by many activists as a go-to resource. But there is an argument to be made for including in-text citations and references, which has to do with making it easier to look up and challenge the validity of certain truth claims, particularly in “the battles of ideas.” (41)\n\nThe keyword chapters are organized alphabetically, but the book can easily be read in any order since it is structured like an encyclopedia for activists.\n\nIn the spirit of constructive criticism encouraged by the author, his analysis would have benefited from a three-dimensional corrective to the two-dimensional left-right political spectrum (6), which is the economic dimension or the horizontal axis in the “political compass” (The Political Compass, https://www.politicalcompass.org/).\n\nThe antagonism between the “old” and “new” Left’, a “contradiction that marks the political coordinates of a culture” (29), is accounted for by the vertical axis in the “political compass,” denoting the social dimension. The social dimension has to do with the question of political freedom, the two extremes being authoritarianism and libertarianism.\n\nLibertarianism here, of course, refers to anarchism — which is inherently linked to Marxism — not the bastardized version of the term, which is more common in the United States and results in an oxymoron like “anarcho-capitalism.”\n\nJeremy Corbyn, particularly since his ascendancy to the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015 is a name and an “event”, or “the eruption of the unexpected to transform politics” (68), to which Parker keeps returning in regard to the Luxemburgian ghost of reform-revolution that has haunted and divided Marxist activists since 1899.\n\nThe U.S. parallel to Corbyn in 2015 was undoubtedly Bernie Sanders who ran an inspiring grassroots presidential campaign under the banner of democratic socialism — a reforming challenge to the neo-McCarthyist politico-economic establishment.\n\nThen in 2016 came the double trauma of Brexit in the U.K. and of “Mr. Brexit” in the United States. Now in 2017, both are occupying the upper right quadrant of neo-liberal authoritarianism. Parker’s book can help us remagnetize the needle of our politico-economic compass towards the lower left quadrant of libertarian socialism.\n\nOn that note, Parker (2017) is unfair in his assessment of Noam Chomsky when he writes, “In this capacity as activist, he is known to be some kind of anarchist, though it is not always clear to those who invite him to speak what that means.” (83, emphasis added)\n\nThis is unfair because it overlooks Chomsky’s sustained analysis of anarchism over the years as a critical resource for resistance against power. By framing Chomsky as a globalist (85), Parker exhibits the “campism” — the method of “dividing the world into good and bad” (38) — of which he is himself critical, particularly when it divides the Left.\n\nDialectics and Intersectionality\n\nIn conclusion, Parker is at his best when he enriches his dialectical analysis — “these new revolutionary keywords provoke a crisis in academic representation which also pits that academic discourse against itself” (281) — with insights from intersectionality, which he tells us is “one term, that, for sure, divides the old left from the new revolutionary left.” (279)\n\nThis division instigated by the term “intersectionality” is a real antagonism that signifies a traumatic encounter with a gap or fissure within the social order — cf. my psychoanalytic reading of Trump winning the U.S. presidency. (Beshara, 2017)\n\nThis traumatic encounter is also an authentic opportunity. It forces us to ask the question: what kind of a politics do we, the precariat, really want in a world where “[p]recarity sums up the insecurity of much employment today and the demands that we should be flexible at work, and it is both a threat and opportunity”? (158)\n\n“[P]luri-versality as a universal project [of liberation]” (Mignolo, 2007, 499) is an inclusive political vision that Ian Parker certainly believes in and “prefigures” when he writes about “articulating socialist politics with new forms of politics from Black, feminist, queer, ecological and disability activism.” (6) He would have us remember that “with our activity we [are] always on the edge of power, on the edge of the possibility of radical transformation.” (147)\n\nReferences\n\nAli, T. (2017). The dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, war, empire, love, revolution. New York, NY: Verso Books.\n\nBeshara, R. K. (2017). “It’s not the working/middle class’s fault that Trump won: Solidarity is what we need.” Medium. Retrieved from: https://medium.com/@Rupadelik/its-not-the-working-middle-class-s-fault-that-trump-won-solidarity-is-what-we-need-69d2444e3ce7\n\nChomsky, N. (2014). On anarchism. London, UK: Penguin Books.\n\nMiéville, C. (2017). October: The story of the Russian revolution. New York, NY: Verso Books.\n\nMignolo, W. D. (2007). “Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality.” Cultural studies, 21(2-3), 449-514.\n\nYoung, I. M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.\n\nŽižek, S. (2017). Lenin 2017: Remembering, repeating, and working through. New York, NY: Verso Books.\n\nJanuary-February 2018, ATC 192 ~ Robert Beshara, Against the Current, http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/5190"", ""https://www.mixcloud.com/quanticaonline/let-the-dogz-out-73-by-jo%C3%A3o-manuel-de-oliveira-2352017/ ~ João Manuel de Oliveira, Radio Quantica"", ""Wow! What an epic! Not only is your book 'a pioneering convergence of activist writings and philosophical enquiry', it is also a mind-blowing analysis of the 57 varieties of Trotskyist politics. (Would readers under 60 understand that reference, I wonder?). As I have so little knowledge of international politics, (eg 2nd, 3rd or 4th Internationals, troika, entrism etc.) much of it left me puzzled but that is my inadequacy. It's also too late to complain about your tangled, Dickensian sentences - so I shan't. How interesting to discover that my son is still quoting the cultural Marxist Raymond Williams 50 years after I studied and admired him at college. I wrote, for my own edification, a 4-point summary of aspects of the changing contexts for resisting capitalism, only to find that, in your excellent concluding essay, you had written a much better one. Things That Worried Me: The section on Zionism; I found it totally confusing. The admission that there could be radically different interpretations of Marx; it reminded me too much of the Bible. You abhor demonising, but you yourself demonise many groups (in the case of ROOSH V, perfectly understandably). Do 'relationships' actually un-nerve traditional left organisations? Some of your 'new' words are not new at all nor - as far as I can see - have they changed at all. (How about: other, post-modern, post-colonial etc? There are too many traps threatening you in almost every chapter! Do you have to say 'for sure'? You Yankee. Things I particularly liked: Your useful division of the subject matter into the periods 1917-1967 and 1967-2017. Your description of Stalinism as 'a false alternative... simply state capitalism' (see also Putinism). Your contrasting of traditional intellectuals who describe the world but don't take a stand, with organic intellectuals who develop theory in alliance with the exploited and oppressed to end capitalism itself. Your uplifting description of not only small-scale agricultural initiatives but also transition towns. Left Unity - which sounds hopeful. I like your use of the appellation LGBTQ+ which I learned only recently. Thank you for sharing your splendid book with me.\n\nJean Angus Ledigo ~ Jean Angus Ledigo, Email"", ""Ian Parker’s Revolutionary Keywords is an innovative and rigorous analytic for the contemporary left whose passionate discourses sometimes lose the theoretical clarity that distinguishes Marx’s own writings. Revolutionary Keywords takes philosophical risks by unlayering the conceptual densities of such complex concepts as antagonism, normalcy, precarity, and accelerationism. In laying bare each concept, Parker provides the philosophico-historical lines of its formation and situates it within its broad social conditions. The book is a pioneering convergence of activist writings and philosophical inquiry. ~ Teresa Ebert, Author of The Task of Cultural Critique"", ""Ian Parker's Keywords are an extremely useful tool for activists who want to orient themselves among the various words circulating in left discourses. With his clear and accessible prose, Parker manages to successfully combine theoretical and practical concerns, never losing sight of the goal: transforming the world through political practice. ~ Cinzia Arruzza, New School for Social Research, New York""]" "Ringtone and the Drum, The","[""Mark Weston""]","Life, death and a brush with insanity in Africa's wild, forgotten West.","Tucked away in a remote, volatile part of West Africa, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso, three of the world's poorest countries, are in the throes of great upheaval. Globalization has shown their people that a more comfortable life is possible, but as they strive to attain it, climate change, the population boom, the tyrants of the old guard and the firm grip of tradition block their way. The clash between old and new is explosive: civil wars erupt without warning, with drugged up rebels fighting over blood diamonds, gold or a humble bowl of rice; Al Qaeda has infiltrated Burkina Faso and threatens to extend its jihad across the region; Colombian drug gangs have overrun Guinea-Bissau; and Christian and Muslim fanatics battle for African souls, preparing their converts for Armageddon. In The Ringtone and the Drum, Mark Weston dives into this maelstrom. In an often-unsettling adventure, he travels around the three countries and immerses himself in local life. Combining the remarkable stories of those he meets with his deep knowledge of Africa's development, the book sheds new light on a neglected but increasingly important corner of the globe.","Tucked away in a remote, volatile part of West Africa, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso, three of the world's poorest countries, are in the throes of great upheaval. Globalization has shown their people that a more comfortable life is possible, but as they strive to attain it, climate change, the population boom, the tyrants of the old guard and the firm grip of tradition block their way. The clash between old and new is explosive: civil wars erupt without warning, with drugged up rebels fighting over blood diamonds, gold or a humble bowl of rice; Al Qaeda has infiltrated Burkina Faso and threatens to extend its jihad across the region; Colombian drug gangs have overrun Guinea-Bissau; and Christian and Muslim fanatics battle for African souls, preparing their converts for Armageddon. In The Ringtone and the Drum, Mark Weston dives into this maelstrom. In an often-unsettling adventure, he travels around the three countries and immerses himself in local life. Combining the remarkable stories of those he meets with his deep knowledge of Africa's development, the book sheds new light on a neglected but increasingly important corner of the globe.",12,"[""'A travelogue that is incredibly sensitive to nuance and detail. As much about the impression of travel in West Africa as the nuts and bolts of day-to-day routine, the book is structured around short, essay-like chapters and the dates, even the year in which Weston and Ebru travel is never mentioned. This gives the book an almost timeless quality that might help it last as a treatise on globalisation in the developing world.The questions of deep faith raised by the unending poverty, coupled with the lack of trust people have for human systems, are dealt with artfully – becoming a central theme of the book. Whether it is Christian or animist, Weston’s attempt to surrender his Western mind to the magic and superstition of West Africa is a core theme throughout. By the book’s conclusion I began to understand why Weston referred to West Africa in such mystical terms at the outset. The care he has taken along the way leaves a well-crafted travel memoir that appreciates the complexity of countries that have received little mainstream traveller attention.' ~ African Arguments, Royal African Society"", ""'One of the things I like most about Mark Weston’s book ‘The Ringtone and the Drum’ is the honesty of the emotional reactions to being a foreigner in a foreign – in every way – country. Mark has no delusions about what he’s doing there. He’s an observer. He tells people’s stories honestly, respectfully and without an agenda. And he’s open about his own reactions – the difficulty of it all, the time wasted, the physical discomfort, and the emotional strain. In fact, he’s pretty self-revelatory on that front, in a way that I found immensely sympathetic. And as always, talking to people, taking them seriously, and writing it down, gives you endlessly fascinating stories, and also offers a number of challenges to assumptions prevalent in the development business.’ ~ Claire Melamed, Overseas Development Institute"", ""'A wise and compelling book, which offers a real picture of what daily life is like in West Africa. Weston is a brave and resourceful traveller, who has entered the heart of some of the most fascinating and least visited parts of the world.' ~ Toby Green, Author of Meeting the Invisible Man: Secrets and Magic in West Africa"", ""'Fuses the traditions of great travel writing with a deep and sophisticated knowledge of the fast-changing politics and cultures of West Africa. The result is a truly engaging and informative book that provides a rare tour of one of the world’s poorest and least understood regions.' ~ Doug Saunders, Globe and Mail, Canada"", ""'The Ringtone and the Drum is high-energy food for wanderlust. Teeming with interesting facts, it turns Weston's perspicacious eye on some of the least visited countries on earth. The result is an accessible, unique and enchanting account. But beware: it will tempt even the least daring to pack their bags for West Africa!' ~ David Bloom, Professor of Economics and Demography, Harvard University"", ""'The Ringtone and the Drum is a description of the people of West Africa, their daily struggles, hardships and hopes. The book tells the story of the poor in these countries, hawkers, coffee-sellers, market-stall owners trying to survive by working in the largest employment sector in the region, the informal economy. The lives of the people Weston meets are told with sensitivity and compassion. He shows that the poor of the region are like us, deserving of the same interrogation and expressing the same hopes…The Ringtone and the Drum helps us to understand West Africa, with a deeply humane rage against poverty in a region – and world – of abundant wealth.' ~ Leo Zeilig, Socialist Review"", ""'A fascinating and very readable book.' ~ Alex Cobham, Research Director, Save the Children"", ""‘The Ringtone and the Drum’ reminds us of our affluence and privilege as well as taking us on a fascinating journey through West African history and geography. As with any policy review, our response should not simply be to agree to keep giving aid, but to rigorously review to whom and how are we giving. This is not about the powerful making decisions on behalf of the poor and creating dependency, but understanding that the poor have a huge burden of taking responsibility for everything in their lives, much of which we, the wealthy, don’t have to. Therefore our aid needs to relieve some of the burden (such as providing education and healthcare) as well as giving people productive assets. ~ Julia Manning, Daily Mail"", ""'Reading Mark Weston’s The Ringtone and the Drum: Travels in the World’s Poorest Countries shortly after Hotel Africa, I was struck by the echoes of this dilemma. Weston and his wife set out on an ambitious journey through West Africa, but somewhere in Burkina Faso, his mental state begins to deteriorate. For a journalist or a human rights advocate, the consequent loss of objectivity might be disastrous, but the travelogue format gives Weston the leeway to engage his breakdown directly. Instead of minimizing it, or alternately, presenting West Africa as the monolithic “thing that drove him crazy,” he uses it to shrink the distance between himself and his subjects, generating real insight into the emotional lives of the individuals with whom he interacts. The book is full of rich detail and interesting historical anecdotes (as well as a surprising amount of political economy shout-outs) about a part of the world that most readers will never see, but its real value lies in Weston’s success at communicating exactly what he set out to discover: “a better idea of how the world’s poorest people make it through the day.” Worth a read.' ~ Kate Cronin-Furman, Wronging Rights"", ""‘Have you heard about the story of the aid worker who traveled in Africa? Why yes, that is pretty much every book about aid. So you can excuse me for being a bit jaded when approaching Mark Weston’s book that recounts his travels with his wife to the West African countries of Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso. Weston’s The Ringtone and the Drum opens in a way that makes the reader feel as if they are about to read a self-indulged account of his travels through some of the worst countries in the world. That initial impression was dead wrong. The exposition section acted less as a set up and more like a series of information that Weston wanted to shed as quickly possible. Make no mistake about it, the book is about him. However his role is that of the storyteller who happens to be in the story, rather than the main character. Weston is the connective tissue of the stories of the people that he interacts with across the three countries. Weston resists the temptation to fit the people he meets into a neat story about progress or development. Rather, he shares their stories as a way to show the complex ways that the lives of the poor cannot be packaged into a neat box. Readers will likely feel helpless if looking to the book for solutions, but will be better off for having come to understand how life is far messier than we imagine it to be.’ ~ Tom Murphy, www.humanosphere.org"", ""'This is a courageous book, which sheds much-needed light on a corner of Africa that rarely gets media attention. Weston's first hand reporting and analysis will help anyone seeking to understand how poor countries work and poor people live.' ~ Seth Kaplan, Author of Fixing Fragile States"", ""'Weston’s strength is his observation, which brings the region to life with portraits of individuals, snippets of history and local colour. He dwells on the physical aspects of West Africa: the corrugated-iron roofs and papaya trees of Guinea-Bissau, the cockroach-covered table in the first-class lounge of the ferry to Sierra Leone, the seediness of Freetown in whose City Hotel Graham Greene set The Heart of the Matter and the mud walls of Burkina Faso. He builds up a picture of the region through the circumstantial situations he finds himself in and the people he happens to encounter. We are left with an impression of the everyday life of Africans who possess little in relation to Westerners but make the best of the lives they have been given.\n\nWeston is a writer and policy adviser specialising in international development who has advised the UK Government on West Africa. His many insights recall Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and bring West Africa to Western attention. I recommend this book to all who would like to know more about this neglected region.' ~ Nicholas Hagger, author of The Libyan Revolution and Last Tourist in Iran""]" Romeo and Juliet in Palestine,"[""Tom Sperlinger""]","Life in the West Bank, the nature of pedagogy and the role of a university under occupation.","Is 'Romeo and Juliet' really a love story, or is it a play about young people living in dangerous circumstances? How might life under occupation produce a new reading of 'Julius Caesar'? What choices must a group of Palestinian students make, when putting on a play which has Jewish protagonists? And why might a young Palestinian student refuse to read? For five months at the start of 2013, Tom Sperlinger taught English literature at the Abu Dis campus of Al-Quds University in the Occupied West Bank. In this account of the semester, Sperlinger explores his students' encounters with works from 'Hamlet' and 'The Yellow Wallpaper' to Kafka and Malcolm X. By placing stories from the classroom alongside anecdotes about life in the West Bank, Sperlinger shows how his own ideas about literature and teaching changed during his time in Palestine, and asks what such encounters might reveal about the nature of pedagogy and the role of a university under occupation.","Is 'Romeo and Juliet' really a love story, or is it a play about young people living in dangerous circumstances? How might life under occupation produce a new reading of 'Julius Caesar'? What choices must a group of Palestinian students make, when putting on a play which has Jewish protagonists? And why might a young Palestinian student refuse to read? For five months at the start of 2013, Tom Sperlinger taught English literature at the Abu Dis campus of Al-Quds University in the Occupied West Bank. In this account of the semester, Sperlinger explores his students' encounters with works from 'Hamlet' and 'The Yellow Wallpaper' to Kafka and Malcolm X. By placing stories from the classroom alongside anecdotes about life in the West Bank, Sperlinger shows how his own ideas about literature and teaching changed during his time in Palestine, and asks what such encounters might reveal about the nature of pedagogy and the role of a university under occupation.",29,"[""A book of vivid first-hand experience about the daily lives, suffering and courage of Palestinians living in the West Bank. Read it, imagine it and pass it around. ~ John Berger"", ""Excellent... Lucid and open-minded about its location - and education generally - this book deserves a wide audience. ~ Anthony Cummins, The Observer"", ""Romeo and Juliet in Palestine is an inspiring, heartwarming and instrumental book, as well as, for me, extremely moving. There are many books about Palestine and Palestinian citizens, but this is the only one which sees their hearts from their eyes. ~ Walid Khazendar"", ""This short, thoughtful book exemplifies the ways literature can speak for and to us... Sperlinger becomes for a while a part of Palestinian society. Under Israeli military occupation he witnesses daily pain and humiliation and hears stories of injustice, imprisonment and murder. He doesn’t seek to explain or interpret the Palestinians, he merely frames them and amplifies their voices. ~ Ahdaf Soueif, Times Literary Supplement"", ""Sperlinger writes so lucidly, and in few words creates the sense of a world. Romeo and Juliet in Palestine doesn't reinforce any partisan position - in fact it refuses to do so - but it's so deeply about justice and human fulfilment. I hope it will be widely read. ~ Helen Dunmore"", ""This is more than just a rendering of ‘Shakespeare on the Estate’. It is Shakespeare rendered alive in a situation of settler-colonialism, ethnic confrontation, occupation, cleansing and resistance. What we have here is a case of critical appropriation of the established canon from a subaltern perspective. 'Romeo & Juliet' and 'Julius Caesar' are given the kind of critical appropriation which would have made Gramsci and Said proud. Both plays are interpreted in ways that capture a particular 'structure of feeling' in this territory ... Sperlinger does not present any idealised world of students. The world on which his book sheds light is steeped in struggle in which most students are deeply engaged; the struggle concerns their very existence ... In short, this is a wonderful memoir by an educator whose pedagogical approach, in the best of Freirean traditions, is rooted in popular consciousness. It constitutes a compelling narrative or set of narratives in the Zer0 Books tradition. ~ Peter Mayo, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies"", ""Sperlinger is, above all, a humble diarist. He writes as he teaches... In his reluctance to assume the dominant, authoritative voice, he tells much of the story in direct quotes from his students, to whom he often gives the last, devastating word when closing chapters. We are left in no doubt of his affection and admiration for them... This is an honest, deeply thoughtful account of learning under occupation, by a teacher ever ready to swap places in the classroom. ~ Madeleine Davies, Church Times"", ""An honest, thoughtful and modest account of working with students in Palestine. It's a great book and the closest I've read to the Palestine I know. ~ Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham"", ""Trust the Brits to find the humor in anything. Sperlinger deploys wry wit [and his] keen feel for the absurd provides much-needed relief in an often grim story. If, like me, you don’t know much about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, this memoir will open your eyes to Palestinians’ perspectives on the conflict. Sperlinger, whose grandparents fled Vienna in 1938 to escape the Holocaust, is quietly appalled by what people [in] the West Bank endure... At 144 pages, this novella-length memoir flies by. And just as Sperlinger arouses his students’ curiosity about literature, he whets ours for a greater understanding of a people whose oppression is too often overlooked or misunderstood. More, Sperlinger made me want to read or reread not just Shakespeare but Edward Said, Malcolm X, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper¸” Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” Irish and Palestinian poets, Israeli playwrights—and, indeed, whatever Sperlinger writes next. ~ Beth Johnston, Cleaver Magazine"", ""Tom Sperlinger's splendid short book shows there are many divisions in Palestinian society that mirror the drama of [Shakespeare's] play. Some of those divisions are the product of the brutal occupation... which Sperlinger records through the stories his students shared with him during the semester... Rightly critical of the British higher education system that only welcomes the international elite, Sperlinger argues that the UK could benefit greatly by hosting students like those he met in Palestine, who have \""practical knowledge of ideas that we too often study as abstract concepts in the humanities\"". This is a book that deserves to be widely read. ~ Hassan Abdulrazzak, Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature"", ""The book will appeal to adult education practitioners or anyone interested in either the transformative power of literature or the ground-level reality of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. However, it is probably best read simply as a wise, thoughtful, sometimes very funny memoir of a teacher trying to understand and connect with his students, while overcoming a number of personal and professional challenges of his own... The story may be simple and straightforward, but nothing else is, and Sperlinger’s honest storytelling draws you into all the complexity surrounding him. ~ Paul Stanistreet, International Review of Education"", ""As a polyphonic text, Romeo and Juliet in Palestine is more than just the voices of its author and his students included amongst its pages […] Perhaps the voice that resonates most strongly in the text is that of Lisl Sperlinger, Sperlinger’s grandmother who fled Vienna in 1938 and lived out her adult life as a committed Zionist [… This] is a difficult book to categorise: Is it a pedagogical text? A political one? Is it autobiography? How many stories of how many people’s lives does it tell? The book is not organised chronologically but, as Sperlinger professes himself, anecdotally, composed out of the interspersed fragments of his own story and experiences, alongside the experiences of others. The book makes no grand claims, but herein lies its strength: it cannot speak for Palestine, nor be the authoritative voice on Palestine, but it can, and does, give us a small, but incredibly personal, insight into Palestine, grafted from the relationship that Sperlinger garnered with his students while teaching there. ~ Rachel Fox, Hong Kong Review of Books"", ""This is an important book. What makes it more persuasive than many other accounts I have heard or read about the Occupied Territories is the simplicity and restraint with which Sperlinger tells the tale... Written with a humility and respect for others that belie its considerable scholarly insights, it shows how teaching can change minds and lives. ~ Jenny Lewis, Raceme"", ""[A] slim but engaging debut... Sperlinger's pen-portraits show a sharp eye for detail. ~ Adam Lebor, New Statesman"", ""This is a beautiful story... Partly a travel diary, the inner thoughts of a professor always engaged in trying to understand, to wonder, to improve himself and his students, partly a manifesto and a message to the outside world. (È una bella storia... Un po’ diario di viaggio e pensieri, un po’ appunti mentali di un professore sempre impegnato nel cercare di capire, interrogarsi, migliorarsi per sé e per i suoi studenti, un po’ manifesto e messaggio al mondo che c’è fuori.) ~ Costanza Pasquali Lasagni, Q Code Magazine"", ""The power of the book is that it is a personal story, based on Sperlinger's diary, anecdotes, and how his familial history, especially his family's Jewishness, all came forward during his experience. Sperlinger's writing style is creative and intentional; when describing how a student misspelled 'metaphor', he uses a metaphor to explain the experience... The book [has] an intimate tone... Sperlinger begins to recognise his own privilege and positionality; he writes one student \""taught me, among other things, what it feels like to have no part in the story\"". He observes, \""And it was Shakespeare's plays, above all, that offered my students a space to reflect on their lives, without seeming to do so.\"" This could be said for Sperlinger as well. ~ Carla Della Gatta, The Shakespearean International Yearbook"", ""The journey to understand is the ultimate purpose of the book...Sperlinger provides his readers with enough historical context while allowing them to come to an understanding of the situation in Palestine through his own struggle to do so. He believes that his Palestinian students have much to teach their counterparts in the UK — as well as those who read this short but informative memoir. ~ Bayan Haddad, Electronic Intifada"", ""Original and fresh... An assumption-shattering book that offers a perspective on Palestinian life not often seen on the news or in the papers. The book will suit students and academics as well as those readers merely intrigued by the topic. ~ Charlie Pullen, The Bookbag"", ""Highly recommended... An autobiographical account, rather than an academic text, and a great read. At the root of the narrative is the English teacher’s perennial struggle to make engagement with and learning about literature something genuine and meaningful. ~ Gary Snapper, Teaching English"", ""The story is told with a cool eye for detail and is often quietly moving. ~ Andrew Dickson, The Globe Guide to Shakespeare"", ""An intriguing and insightful portrayal of life for Palestinians, mainly students, living in the occupied West Bank and their outlook at the texts they read in English in their university classroom. Sperlinger observes the restrictions imposed on Palestinian mobility, and refers to the numerous, intrusive ways in which the occupation colours his students’ everyday reality. The close relation Sperlinger established with his students nurtured his curiosity to understand the structures and tensions of the society he lives within although he does not speak its language. Being a prospective lecturer in English at An-najah National University in Palestine, I have been motivated by Sperlinger to think of poetical ways that help me circumvent the traditional approach of teaching literature at Palestinian universities wherein the student is usually a passive recipient of what his or her instructor dictates. ~ Ahmad Qabaha, Life Writing"", ""Circumscribed temporally (one semester) and spatially (in “Palestine”) as the story might appear to be the parameters are only too flexible, fluid, unstable—circumstantial... The author cautions, in what superficially appears to be a form of the standard disclaimer, that his narrative will be a “story about the particular students and colleagues I encountered and is not intended as a general account of life in Palestine or at the university”. Rather than the pro forma disclaimer, however, of the sort that absolves others—readers and writers, students and teachers—of accountability or responsibility for what is to follow, Sperlinger’s caveat, in its relentless insistence on specificity and context, eschews spurious claims to a putative universality that threatens to conceal instead a will to domination... The narrative of Romeo and Juliet in Palestine is construed episodically, with each of its thirteen chapters recounting a particular, singular, engagement between a traditional educational mission under duress and the contextual details that both inform and mitigate the fault lines of that historical force field. In Chapter 4, for example, entitled “I was part of the story,” Sperlinger—since become at once teacher and learner— reflects self-consciously, indeed self-critically, on the “parallels between what I was doing [teaching Shakespeare in occupied Palestine] and the subject’s history as part of the curriculum in colonial settings...”. Just four chapters later, in “When I was out” (Chapter 8), Al-Quds is once again on strike, this time, as is also often the case, over unpaid wages, especially given Israel’s repeatedly punishing failures to reimburse the taxes that it has collected from the Palestinians. Such closures, however, provide the serendipitous opportunities to explore alternative syllabi, in the political geography and cultural history of the occupied Palestinian territories: to join the regularly held protests against the apartheid wall in the village of Ni’lin, for example, or, on still another occasion, in Chapter 11 (“Split the Air”), to compare the Freedom Bus Theatre in Nabi Saleh with its namesake from the civil rights protests from the 1960s in the US south, or to look askance at the infamous experiment in neoliberal modernization represented in a “planned Palestinian city,” Rawabi. ~ Barbara Harlow, SCTIW Review"", ""Sperlinger shows us a mostly unfamiliar aspect of the occupied territory — higher education. The students of Al-Quds live with the understanding that something catastrophic is always about to happen. This is their reality — one characterized by the conditions of inequality, violence, and war... What could be more appropriate [to them] than a play about young lovers from warring families? And what better for them to read about than Caesar’s betrayal or Hamlet’s madness in the face of loss? Shakespeare is more relevant than ever in the Middle East. Sperlinger offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of his students. ~ Ira Sukrungruang, Los Angeles Review of Books"", ""Sperlinger’s book has the freedom of a diary, allowing the reader to build a vivid picture... More than many sociological and political descriptions or television documentaries... this book exposes the myriads of personal humiliations relentlessly heaped on the emerging generations of Palestinians. Hopefully, it also suggests that education will provide a telling weapon in the ongoing struggle to achieve the sense of dignity which must contribute to and come with independence. ~ Gordon Parsons, Morning Star"", ""This first book by Tom Sperlinger held my interest throughout each chapter... I welcomed Sperlinger's clarity that in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict there are not two equal sides. He taught students whose entire lives have been lived under Occupation. Sperlinger became fond of his students and thought that they displayed extraordinary creativity, courage and humour in their daily lives and in navigating the obstacles they faced in getting to class. ~ Linda Ramsden, Third Way Magazine"", ""Cool and understated, Romeo and Juliet in Palestine is at once a finely observant account of a teacher at work in the Occupied Territories and a cumulatively powerful indictment of the systematic constraints young Palestinian men and women experience, as they try to get a university education in difficult times. Sperlinger comes across as a gifted, sympathetic, and resourceful classroom teacher, wonderfully inventive in his approach to his texts and to his students, humorous, hard on himself, open to all the strangeness of his situation. This is a wise and moving document. ~ Neil Hertz, author of Pastoral in Palestine and Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University"", ""It’s often said that Romeo and Juliet is a universal tale, carrying its story of love across languages and cultures. Tom Sperlinger’s elegantly-written prose instead gently unpicks the array of meanings, experiences and emotions which his Palestinian university students find in Shakespeare. Reminiscent of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, this is a wise, humble meditation on knowledge, learning, and the challenges of imagining a life beyond occupation. ~ Sarah Irving, author of Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation and The Bradt Guide to Palestine and co-editor of A Bird is Not a Stone"", ""This honest and thoughtful memoir is also a good introduction to a slice of Palestinian reality. Sperlinger has the decency not to pretend to understand everything he sees; the reader learns along with him. When he and his students at Abu Dis achieve a moment of connection over English literature (even as Sperlinger struggles with the postcolonial implications of what he is doing) the reader is moved. ~ Margaret Litvin, author of Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost"", ""Romeo and Juliet in Palestine has a visionary force and clarity. ~ Tom Paulin""]" "Rough Guide To The Dark Side, A","[""Daniel Simpson""]","Why a young reporter quit his job at The New York Times, and got himself mixed up with Balkan gangsters.","Ever dreamed of changing the world? Daniel Simpson shows how not to do it. His memoir charts a gonzo career at The New York Times. Ambitious and idealistic, he was hired to report on the Balkans but quit within months, freaked out by his editor s zeal for starting wars. Disillusioned, he went native in Belgrade. Together with the charismatic G, who had appeared one night in lavish puffs of dope smoke, he decided to organize a Serbian version of Woodstock: a festival on an island in the Danube. Music could revolutionize the country. It was run by a wartime mafia, and most young people dreamed of leaving. But what if they made it Ibiza crossed with Glastonbury? To fund this transition, they hustled his contacts. But shady local businessmen had other ideas. Mr Big muscled in, and embroiled them with his henchmen. Why do good intentions go awry? With brutally honest humor, Daniel recounts his journey to the edge, and a desperate drug-fuelled quest for the truth. A Rough Guide To The Dark Side is a real-life trip through Balkan organized crime. More irreverent than McMafia, it has the vicarious kicks of Mr Nice and Shantaram, plus the travelogue style of a Bill Bryson or Tony Hawks, but with added bile and an overdose of drugs. http://www.roughguidedarkside.com","Ever dreamed of changing the world? Daniel Simpson shows how not to do it. His memoir charts a gonzo career at The New York Times. Ambitious and idealistic, he was hired to report on the Balkans but quit within months, freaked out by his editor s zeal for starting wars. Disillusioned, he went native in Belgrade. Together with the charismatic G, who had appeared one night in lavish puffs of dope smoke, he decided to organize a Serbian version of Woodstock: a festival on an island in the Danube. Music could revolutionize the country. It was run by a wartime mafia, and most young people dreamed of leaving. But what if they made it Ibiza crossed with Glastonbury? To fund this transition, they hustled his contacts. But shady local businessmen had other ideas. Mr Big muscled in, and embroiled them with his henchmen. Why do good intentions go awry? With brutally honest humor, Daniel recounts his journey to the edge, and a desperate drug-fuelled quest for the truth. A Rough Guide To The Dark Side is a real-life trip through Balkan organized crime. More irreverent than McMafia, it has the vicarious kicks of Mr Nice and Shantaram, plus the travelogue style of a Bill Bryson or Tony Hawks, but with added bile and an overdose of drugs. http://www.roughguidedarkside.com",13,"[""Simpson’s humorous, rollicking first-person story follows the young, principled, and ambitious New York Times foreign correspondent as he travels to the post-conflict Balkans […] Unlike Serbia’s neighbors, Simpson got off easy: He didn’t get executed nor was he sent to a concentration camp by his business partners. ~ Kenan Trebincevic, The Brooklyn Rail"", ""Simpson, with journalistic page-turner brilliance, starts with the killer first line, \""I never really meant to join the underworld. I fell in.\"" […] Had I not sat down with the author and heard his story first-hand, I may have imagined his memoir was fantasy. It was not. […] A Rough Guide to the Dark Side tells his life in gripping staccato style. His dark side chronicles hallucinatory time passages through a hip-hop culture - evoked to sanction the retreat from himself and his outrageous actions. ~ Anita Venezia, Alive Magazine"", ""Simpson was on a journey away from mainstream journalism, and he describes that rollicking and sometimes shocking voyage with considerable flair [...] In telling his story, he has found an ideal home for original, colourful and opinionated prose that would never have made the news wires of Reuters or the news pages of the New York Times. ~ Andrew Gray, The Herald"", ""Reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson [...] a compelling critique of the media, international politics, and, ultimately, the author himself. An insightful and thoroughly enjoyable read. ~ Marc Schuster, Small Press Reviews"", ""Simpson's reasons for quitting the Times are spelled out with immaculate skill [...] editors were hoodwinked into asking so many wrong questions and ordering up stories that - given their foolish premise - could only result in erroneous, misleading crap. He names names, too. These pages should be mined by historians. ~ Ivan Goldman, Red Room"", ""Unlike most mainstream media journalists, Simpson is deeply introspective, constantly questioning the way he sees the world and himself. [...] A Rough Guide To The Dark Side is packed with the kind of uncontrived humour that will leave readers laughing out loud while wondering, Hang on, how did he do that? ~ Mat Ward, Green Left Weekly"", ""One of A Rough Guide's strong points is that it doesn’t sugarcoat any details. [...] It's up to the individual reader to decide if Simpson's end goal of starting ECHO to revitalize Serbia's youth culture – and to prove to himself that he could live up to the challenge – justifies his exploitation of the mainstream media's power, while simultaneously condemning it. ~ Danielle Sottosanti, Souciant magazine"", ""For more insights about the news world [...], you have to turn to someone with less celebrity and more knowledge of its real function. Someone such as Daniel Simpson, perhaps, who quit the New York Times and wrote a book about it. ~ Danny Schechter, Al Jazeera"", ""A young and naive New York Times reporter abandons everything he has believed about the role of the media in Western society to run a music festival in Serbia. An uproarious story that has an important message. ~ Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty and twice named UK journalist of the year"", ""Daniel Simpson took a courageous quest in pursuit of truth and found himself at a crossroad. A Rough Guide To The Dark Side is a telling memoir, which shows that while music has the power to change the world, it is the heart of the individual that truly makes a difference. ~ Michael Lang, co-producer of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, 1969"", ""A Rough Guide to the Dark Side is a funny, angry and insightful indictment of modern media practice. Daniel Simpson shows us a remarkably dangerous world shaped by the fantasies of the elite and journalists who have embraced subservient fear, savage cost-cutting and institutional laziness. Simpsons writing demonstrates that we not only deserve better journalism, but that its still out there: observing, investigating and informing with humanity and passion. ~ A.L. Kennedy, writer and comedian; author of the Costa Prize-winning Day"", ""Daniel Simpsons amazing book should be read by everyone who is interested in how the human side of this world really works -- which means EVERYONE! He uses humor as Shakespeare did - to lighten the load of a heavy, dark, and important story. ~ John Perkins, author of the bestselling Confessions of an Economic Hitman"", ""The archetypal innocent abroad, Daniel Simpson thought he could help the locals. He dropped out of journalism to run a music festival in Serbia, imagining himself a jaundiced man of the world. But his project became a study in modern corruption, with a learning curve so steep it was more like a suicides screaming spiral. Witty and compassionate, yet merciless on himself, he tells a story thats a constant pleasure to read. ~ Michela Wrong, author of Its Our Turn to Eat. The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, short-listed for the Orwell Prize""]" Rowdy Entrepreneurs and Insecure Dinosaurs,"[""Murat Karamuftuoglu""]",Mingling popular-culture theory with innovation theory and entrepreneurship in a lively style with textual and visual puns.,"Rowdy Entrepreneurs and Insecure Dinosaurs is about invention and innovation in the context of postmodern society and information economy. It applies ""popular culture"" theory to such companies as Virgin, Microsoft, and Apple, to analyse their innovation strategies. This is the first book of its kind that mingles popular culture theory with innovation theory and entrepreneurship. It is written, true to the spirit of popular culture, in a lively style with abundant popular cultural references, and textual and visual puns.","Rowdy Entrepreneurs and Insecure Dinosaurs is about invention and innovation in the context of postmodern society and information economy. It applies ""popular culture"" theory to such companies as Virgin, Microsoft, and Apple, to analyse their innovation strategies. This is the first book of its kind that mingles popular culture theory with innovation theory and entrepreneurship. It is written, true to the spirit of popular culture, in a lively style with abundant popular cultural references, and textual and visual puns.",2,"[""Well-researched and entertaining...crisp and well-paced...will appeal to the widest possible audience, from those who appreciate Krugman to those who revel in Branson. ~ Carol Givner, Best-selling author and literary agent"", ""The subject of the book is very interesting, and describes the unfolding of so many cultural and social formulations that are part of the day to day life here in the Bay Area of California.\n\nPhil Ross, artist, educator, inventor. ~ Phil Ross, Personal communication (email)""]" Rules Without Rulers,"[""Matthew Wilson""]","Is life without the state really possible, and, if so, what would such a life look like?","This book is about the possibility of organising society without the state, but, crucially, it makes the claim, contrary to much anarchist theory, that such a life would not entail absolute freedom; rather, as the title suggests, it would mean creating new forms of social organisation which, whilst offering more freedom than state-capitalism, would nonetheless still entail certain limits to freedom. In making this argument, a secondary point is made, which highlights the book’s originality; namely, that, whilst anarchism is defended by an increasing number of radicals, the reality of what an anarchist society might look like, and the problems that such a society might encounter, are rarely discussed or acknowledged, either in academic or activist writings. Longlisted for the BREAD AND ROSES PRIZE 2015","This book is about the possibility of organising society without the state, but, crucially, it makes the claim, contrary to much anarchist theory, that such a life would not entail absolute freedom; rather, as the title suggests, it would mean creating new forms of social organisation which, whilst offering more freedom than state-capitalism, would nonetheless still entail certain limits to freedom. In making this argument, a secondary point is made, which highlights the book’s originality; namely, that, whilst anarchism is defended by an increasing number of radicals, the reality of what an anarchist society might look like, and the problems that such a society might encounter, are rarely discussed or acknowledged, either in academic or activist writings. Longlisted for the BREAD AND ROSES PRIZE 2015",3,"[""Review of\n\nMatthew Wilson, Rules Without Rulers: The Possibilities and Limits of Anarchism (Winchester/Washington: Zero Books, 2014)\n\nMatthew Wilson’s Rules Without Rulers is a curious book. Just when I thought that I had read the most convincing pummeling of anarchism ever, Wilson, nonchalantly, states in the beginning of his final chapter: “Yet none of what I have had to say has been written with the intention of encouraging the reader to abandon anarchism (or to continue dismissing it). In fact, my rather grandiose hope is that, in challenging anarchism so thoroughly, I will not have killed it, but made it stronger.” (p. 172) Grandiose indeed.\n\nBut let’s back up for a moment. Wilson opens his book with bravado. In the “Preface”, he states:\n\n“...the following work is ultimately an attempt to address just one reason why anarchism remains a distant dream. That reason? Anarchism. We can blame the corporate media, blame the police, the state, the schools and history books, none of which do anarchism any real favours; but if anarchism is ever to grow, to inspire, to challenge, it is anarchism itself which needs to be rethought and rearticulated. Although there is much to be said for plenty of anarchist theory and practice, on the whole it is a political movement, a political idea, which is struggling to present itself as a viable alternative. Of perhaps more concern still is how few anarchists appear bothered by this.” (p. xii-xiii).\n\nHe continues:\n\n“It is time we took the blinkers off, stopped, or at least paused, from our critique of the world out there, and looked inwards. People will be convinced by our arguments only when our arguments are convincing.” (p. xiv)\n\nThis is brilliant. So brilliant that it is easy to lose steam as you’re diving into detailed philosophical descriptions of anarchist dilemmas, grouped around the notions of freedom, ethics, and power, which, according to Wilson, “form the basis of the … enquiry” (p. 4).\n\nNow, steam doesn’t equal quality, and just because the philosophical reflections don’t always double down on the rhetorical punches delivered early on, they are no less important. In fact, the rare combination of philosophical sharpness and anarchist sympathy is one of the great virtues of the book.\n\nWilson rightfully points out that there are surprisingly few earnest discussions about some of the key challenges that anarchism has to accept if it really wants to be a serious contender for ushering in a better world. Among the many questions addressed by Wilson are how to deal with anti-social behavior, the pitfalls of consensus decision-making, and informal power structures. The book is full of precious statements such as the following about the common rejection of offering concrete anarchist visions: “...how can ‘resistance open the way to alternative’ if we cannot discuss, or debate, or share our thoughts on what these alternatives might be? … [Anarchists are often] denying not only the validity of a vanguard to prescribe how we ought to live, but, in the process, limiting the potential for anyone to engage in such thinking. What we are left with is a plurality of silences.” (p. 39)\n\nSometimes, Wilson’s critique of the intellectual level of anarchist discussion (or lack thereof) verges on the sarcastic, but it never runs short of entertainment value, for example when he responds to an anonymous anarchist author’s proclamation that “some communities will be dedicated to crime and drug use” with the sober comment: “It is of course hard to imagine an entire community dedicated to crime; in fact, it is not clear how we would conceptualise crime within a community if all its members were committed to it.” (p. 164-165)\n\nWilson is certainly right in taking anarchists to task for evading uncomfortable discussion with a “live and let live” attitude, often expressed through comments we’re all too familiar with, such as the rather meaningless “You may think what you want, but I think what I think”.\n\nLet us return to Wilson’s concluding chapter, which I referenced above. Wilson emphasizes that his main hope for anarchism relates to its “prefigurative” dimensions. He makes a distinction between “social prefiguration” as “the creation of spaces and processes which fulfil the needs and desires of members of any community, and which do so along anarchist principles of horizontal control and mutual aid” (p. 179), and “personal prefiguration”, which presents “the case for an increased support of lifestyle politics” (p. 189). This is useful, not least because it helps overcome the tiring juxtaposition of “organization” and “lifestyle”. However, I believe that Wilson, in his sudden optimism, shies away from some of the logical consequences of his own critique: Anarchism is in many ways important, but also severely limited. The important part is to act as a permanent critic, an engine for social change, a field of experimentation for different kinds of life. We will always defend this on Alpine Anarchist. But anarchism does not offer a viable path for revolutionary change in the complex societies we live in. (For those interested: we have written more about this in “Revolution Is More Than a Word: 23 Theses on Anarchism”.)\n\nIt seems that in order to avoid drawing these conclusions, Wilson resorts to some of the phraseology he lambastes throughout his book. For example, he states in the “Preface” that “it matters little what horrors the system throws at us, as long as we are left without an alternative”, and that “at present, anarchism is not giving people the confidence to believe it can offer that” (p. xiv). But how can you ever give anyone that confidence when, in the context of sketching alternatives, “we simply need to accept that they do not provide anything like a full picture” (p. 178)? I understand that there is a gradual difference. But a substantial one?\n\nA more serious problem might be the following: Wilson says that anarchists need to have answers to the questions he is raising in his book. But how can anarchism, a political movement that eschews doctrines, ever provide anything more than diverse and ephemeral answers? In order to meet Wilson’s expectations, there’d need to be among anarchists a common agreement on the best possible answers and a common commitment to pursue relevant political action. I cannot see that happening. Wilson himself concedes that the questions he is raising have hardly received any attention since anarchism’s inception. With all respect for Wilson and his very fine book – this will not change now either. Agreeing on answers and pursuing a particular political line is what Marxist parties have done for the past hundred years, most of them without the tiniest bit of success, but some of them with tremendous success if measured by the scope of social transformation alone. Perhaps, instead of trying to reenact this, the anarchists’ historical task is to influence such politics in a way that keeps them from degenerating into tyranny.\n\nIn this context, it is interesting to look at another recent release by Zero Books. While Wilson tries to renew the anarchist tradition, J. Moufawad-Paul’s Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain is looking for the latest and most timely interpretation of Marxism. Those who have read Moufawad-Paul’s The Communist Necessity (reviewed on this site) know that his critique of “movementism” echoes Wilson’s take on the vague and intellectually often poor foundations of contemporary anarchist-inspired activist culture. Now, the consequences that the authors draw are very different: protracted people’s wars vs. “practising forms of prefigurative politics” (p. 178). But somewhere along that spectrum there’s gotta be something that can get us out of the mess we’re in.\n\nGabriel Kuhn\n\n(January 2017) ~ Gabriel Kuhn, Alpine Anarchist Productions"", ""If a realm of pure freedom is impossible, how should anarchists think realistically about the formal and informal rules that structure our communities? Can anarchists endorse rules without rulers? This is the problem Wilson engages directly, without jargon and constructively. This valuable book helps untangle some of the principles and rationalities that currently limit, but might help set free, the range of ways in which freedom can be realised without domination. ~ Alex Prichard, Department of Politics, University of Exeter"", ""Bakunin's claim to have been a fanatical lover of liberty is familiar to anarchists and those who work on anarchism. The extent to which the liberty anarchists seek might be realised and the implications for the practice of prefigurative politics are less well understood. This sympathetic critique examines anarchist understandings of liberty and probes the tensions of anarchist theory and practice, drawing on liberal political theory and activist experience. The book is provocative, highly readable and written with a genuine passion for and deep engagement with anarchist politics. It is likely to spark considerable, productive debate. ~ Professor Ruth Kinna, P.H.I.R Loughborough University""]" "Ruling Ideas, The","[""Ari Ofengenden""]","The ideas of the entrepreneurial-self, technological progress, God, nation, and race legitimize hierarchy and will make you depressed and anxious.","Ideas that are employed to legitimize and make us consent to authority and its hierarchies also disempower us, leaving us anxious, depressed, and discontent. They are constantly hammered into us by the media, by our friends and family, and by institutions. They also come to us by way of films, motivational speakers, business gurus, as well as in the actions we take in our everyday lives and in the experiences of who we are. In The Ruling Ideas: How They Ruin Society and Make You Miserable, Ari Ofengenden examines many of these ideas, such as the entrepreneurial-self, the utility-oriented economic man, technological progress, virtues and values, as well as family values, God, nation and race. Ofengenden provides a deft analysis, on the one hand, of the beliefs we hold, the ideas behind them that make us consent to the social order, and how we often fool ourselves into believing these ideas; on the other hand, the author proffers a way to combat these ideas, to live without them and develop alternatives.","Ideas that are employed to legitimize and make us consent to authority and its hierarchies also disempower us, leaving us anxious, depressed, and discontent. They are constantly hammered into us by the media, by our friends and family, and by institutions. They also come to us by way of films, motivational speakers, business gurus, as well as in the actions we take in our everyday lives and in the experiences of who we are. In The Ruling Ideas: How They Ruin Society and Make You Miserable, Ari Ofengenden examines many of these ideas, such as the entrepreneurial-self, the utility-oriented economic man, technological progress, virtues and values, as well as family values, God, nation and race. Ofengenden provides a deft analysis, on the one hand, of the beliefs we hold, the ideas behind them that make us consent to the social order, and how we often fool ourselves into believing these ideas; on the other hand, the author proffers a way to combat these ideas, to live without them and develop alternatives.",0,[] "Sacred And The Profane, The","[""Jake Kinzey""]","The Sacred and the Profane examines the hipster and the current cultural impasse by going beyond ""going-against-the-grain.""","The Sacred and the Profane is a work that combines local and global analysis to examine our age's often-talked about, but mostly misunderstood, mainstream subculture: the hipster. This book seeks to answer questions like, Why don't hipsters want to be called hipsters? and Why do they act like they are different when they are just like all the other hipsters? If you can't stand hipsters, are a hipster, or don't know what a hipster is, this book is for you.","The Sacred and the Profane is a work that combines local and global analysis to examine our age's often-talked about, but mostly misunderstood, mainstream subculture: the hipster. This book seeks to answer questions like, Why don't hipsters want to be called hipsters? and Why do they act like they are different when they are just like all the other hipsters? If you can't stand hipsters, are a hipster, or don't know what a hipster is, this book is for you.",0,[] "Scratching the Surface : Posties, Privatisation and Strikes in the Royal Mail","[""Phil Chadwick""]",The story of those in the frontline of change in the Royal Mail.,"Since 2000, there has been an ideologically driven experiment carried out in the UK to change the postal service provided by Royal Mail, to one beholden to the mantra of competition, profit and privatisation. This is the story of those in the frontline of change.","Since 2000, there has been an ideologically driven experiment carried out in the UK to change the postal service provided by Royal Mail, to one beholden to the mantra of competition, profit and privatisation. This is the story of those in the frontline of change.",0,[] Seen and Not Seen,"[""Jasun Horsley""]","If movies and popular culture shape us from an early age, how do we separate the real from the imaginary?","Popular culture mirrors the human soul and it can't lie about the state it is in—which is what makes it an essential guide on the quest for self-knowledge. Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist is a series of autobiographical explorations which slowly uncover the author's secret life to himself. Revisiting his former writings on film and deconstructing old texts, he engages in a literary dialogue with his past as he struggles to bust open his fantasy life and reach the truth behind it. Moving into and through the cultural, social and political dimensions of movies, the book maps previously undiscovered psychological and spiritual realms of the movie-going experience to create an engaging, thought-provoking, utterly original narrative about the essential acts of movie-watching, writing, and self-examination.","Popular culture mirrors the human soul and it can't lie about the state it is in—which is what makes it an essential guide on the quest for self-knowledge. Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist is a series of autobiographical explorations which slowly uncover the author's secret life to himself. Revisiting his former writings on film and deconstructing old texts, he engages in a literary dialogue with his past as he struggles to bust open his fantasy life and reach the truth behind it. Moving into and through the cultural, social and political dimensions of movies, the book maps previously undiscovered psychological and spiritual realms of the movie-going experience to create an engaging, thought-provoking, utterly original narrative about the essential acts of movie-watching, writing, and self-examination.",1,"[""\""Horsley's book is indeed a confession, full of the kind of frank talk one would expect in a tale touted as confessional. In fact, in places the book is jaw-dropping in its raw honesty and relentless self-critical insight. Here is a writer not the least interested in marrying his auteur self to a poseur self. . . . I would go so far as to say to everyone, but especially adolescents and young adults, that Horsley's book can serve well as \""the bible\"" for how to navigate through the treacherous shoals of popular culture, particularly in the form of violent screen entertainment.\"" ~ Gregory Desilet (author of Our Faith in Evil), Amazon""]" Selling Our Death Masks,"[""Yesenia Barragan""]",Are we pawning our golden immortality for a fistful of cash?,A radical historical ethnography on the meaning of a fundamentally new physical landscape of our age of austerity: cash-for-gold shops that numerically exploded in the wake of the worst economic crisis of our times.,A radical historical ethnography on the meaning of a fundamentally new physical landscape of our age of austerity: cash-for-gold shops that numerically exploded in the wake of the worst economic crisis of our times.,3,"[""It is not easy to deal with a curse as old as mankind, to keep it at arms’ length and, if possible, transform its ominous power into healing. Yet this is what Yesenia Barragan achieves—to the extent possible—in her fast-paced brilliant, and exceedingly original history of gold and its roller coastering life under contemporary capitalism…This is the sparkling achievement of Yesenia Barragan. ~ Michael Taussig (Columbia University), author of My Cocaine Museum and The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America"", ""Yesenia Barragan’s world-tour, deeply political but no less personal, brings back to mind the old aphorism that money, or rather the gold backing for money, is the root of all evil—or at least both symbolizes and worsens the social evils all around us. Beautifully written, the book finds in the “cash-for-gold” enterprises the very essence of the global crisis, not only for those who are pressed to sell anything precious but for every inch of the planet penetrated in search of new gold supplies. Read, cry, and learn. ~ Paul Buhle (Brown University), author of Marxism in the United States and A People's History of American Empire"", ""From Colombia to China and from Greece to Spain, gold, which once evoked the warmth and power of the sun, became the legal tender of super-exploitation and suffering. Yesenia Barragan, with the language, sensibility, and power of an epic poet, reaches from the gold bars and gold exchanges that have marked the most recent period of capitalist crisis back to the history of the conquests of Latin America, Asia, and Africa to show how gold underwrote a Boschian world of capitalist exploitation. Yet, despite the horror to which Barragan bears witness, she still holds out the hope that consciousness, struggle, and poetry can bring. Everyone committed to social transformation must read this book. ~ Temma Kaplan (Rutgers University), author of Crazy for Democracy and Taking Back the Streets""]" Send Them Victorious,"[""David Stubbs""]","As another World Cup campaign is upon us, England expects, none more so than the Wing Commander, whose past reports on England matches magnificently capture the John Bull spirit of fevered xenophobia and deluded optimism.","Since 2006, under the guise of the Wing Commander, a somewhat xenophobic veteran of numerous campaigns including the Boer War, David Stubbs has written reports on every major England fixture. These lay stress just not on the inestimable virtues of the England team, who merely by being English hold an advantage over the opposition, but on the shabby deficiencies of their hapless foreign opponents. They're larded with historical reference and cultural speculation as to the frightfulness of the swarthy foe. England, as ever, expects in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup. These reports capture the essence of fervent, St George cross flag waving optimism as footballing fever grips the nation. These reports are interspersed with a brace of other football-based characters conceived by Stubbs, including Hartley Sebag-Ffiennes, pompous aesthete and Arsenal supporter, Hugh McLaughton, the broadsheet correspondent nostalgic for football's golden age of voluminous shorts and lace up balls, Self Righteous Liverpool fan and the appallingly sleazy Inappropriate Championship Manager. They amount to an unrivalled compendium of satire on the febrile and fervent world of modern football. Sample quote (from a match report against Russia): “Upfront, they [the Russians] were miserably ineffective. Small wonder that many Russians are wistful for the days of Stalin – there, at least, was a man who, when faced with his rivals and opponents, wasn’t afraid to shoot.” Wing Commander Stubbs' England match reports make me weep with laughter. Ben Marshall, The Guardian","Since 2006, under the guise of the Wing Commander, a somewhat xenophobic veteran of numerous campaigns including the Boer War, David Stubbs has written reports on every major England fixture. These lay stress just not on the inestimable virtues of the England team, who merely by being English hold an advantage over the opposition, but on the shabby deficiencies of their hapless foreign opponents. They're larded with historical reference and cultural speculation as to the frightfulness of the swarthy foe. England, as ever, expects in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup. These reports capture the essence of fervent, St George cross flag waving optimism as footballing fever grips the nation. These reports are interspersed with a brace of other football-based characters conceived by Stubbs, including Hartley Sebag-Ffiennes, pompous aesthete and Arsenal supporter, Hugh McLaughton, the broadsheet correspondent nostalgic for football's golden age of voluminous shorts and lace up balls, Self Righteous Liverpool fan and the appallingly sleazy Inappropriate Championship Manager. They amount to an unrivalled compendium of satire on the febrile and fervent world of modern football. Sample quote (from a match report against Russia): “Upfront, they [the Russians] were miserably ineffective. Small wonder that many Russians are wistful for the days of Stalin – there, at least, was a man who, when faced with his rivals and opponents, wasn’t afraid to shoot.” Wing Commander Stubbs' England match reports make me weep with laughter. Ben Marshall, The Guardian",6,"[""Football is all too often a serious business, so for extreme light relief turn to David Stubbs’ bug-eyed, handlebar-moustached match reporter of England internationals – a retired wing commander and Boer War veteran who believes firmly in England, Empire, flogging his manservant, and the virtues of John Terry’s firm, oak thighs. Defeats are painted as morale-boosting victories (“Excellent Englishmen Rout Crying Frenchwomen 0-1″ is the headline for a March, 2008 loss), while all opponents, by their mere foreign nature, are barely worthy of competing against the mighty flag of St. George. ~ Waterstones - A World Cup Reading List 2014, http://www.waterstones.com/blog/2014/06/a-world-cup-reading-list/#more-34098"", ""The funniest World Cup book of all time. ~ Brian Phillips, Dirty Tackle, Yahoo Sports"", ""http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/06/05/world-cup-2010-a-new-book-offers-look-at-english-soccer-madness/\n\nMost countries – the notable exception being the U.S. – are fired up for the soccer World Cup, which starts next week in South Africa. While the match commentary will no doubt get overheated, David Stubbs’ new book “Send Them Victorious” is a cool, quizzical look at the self-delusion of the entire English soccer industry.\n\nFor those readers whose sporting knowledge is on par with the Crane brothers from “Frazier,” the story goes like this: The one and only time England won the World Cup was in the 1966 final against West Germany, when Beatlemania was in bloom, and man had yet to set foot on the moon.\n\nSince then, many words of punditry, tears, as well as lager and kebabs have been wasted in England, all the while singing the vain refrain of “football’s coming home,” which roughly translates as “we invented it, so we should be allowed to win its sometime.”\n\nMeanwhile, at the back of each English soccer supporter’s mind, there is the pesky fact that Brazil has won the cup five times, Italy four times, Germany three times and Argentina twice.\n\nStubbs neatly skewers his targets–team managers, players, commentators and self-righteous fans–capturing through the prism of soccer how the English see themselves, how they would like to be seen and most importantly, how they really are.\n\n“Send Them Victorious” is published by Zero Books. ~ Paul Sharma, Wall Street Journal"", ""Anyway, the English papers have been embarrassing themselves today, as you'd expect. It's been war this, blitz that, Churchill speeches the other. Any English fan thoroughly sick of this myopic nonsense – and anyone else interested in football, frankly – is advised to read a new book called Send Them Victorious: England's Path To Glory 2006-2010 by David Stubbs. A series of England match reports written by \""biased but fair\"" jingoistic Boer War veteran The Wing Commander, it gives both the Fourth Estate and the players they overhype a right old shoeing, and is pretty much the funniest book about football ever written. Here's a tinder-dry snippet from an England-Germany report:\n\n\""It is no exaggeration, but rather an imaginative simile, to compare this game to World War II – World War II, that is, minus the participation of Churchill, Field Marshall Montgomery, Adolf Hitler, Herman Goering, and Douglas Bader, who like our own Frank Lampard, suffered from the handicap of not being able to use his legs in any effective way.\""\n\nYou have got to love this book. ~ Scott Murray, The Guardian"", ""The Bulldog spirit in print has never before reached these heights. This is England match reporting as if written by Al Murray's Pub Landlord. Read it and weep with laughter while remembering World Cup 2010's what-might-have-beens before we actually met those pesky foreigners on the pitch of battle.\n\n~ Philosophy Football News"", ""David Stubbs's England match reports make me weep with laughter. ~ Ben Marshall, The Guardian""]" "Serf's Journal, A","[""Terry Tapp""]",The Story of the United States' Longest Wildcat Strike.,"Recalling the JeffBoat incident of 2001, A Serf's Journal is Terry Tapp's formidable first-hand account of American workers in Jeffersonville, Indiana, as they fought a multinational company and their corrupt union to stage the longest wildcat strike in US history.","Recalling the JeffBoat incident of 2001, A Serf's Journal is Terry Tapp's formidable first-hand account of American workers in Jeffersonville, Indiana, as they fought a multinational company and their corrupt union to stage the longest wildcat strike in US history.",5,"[""Subtitled “The story of the United States’ longest wildcat strike”, A serf’s journal depicts the months leading up to, as well as the undertaking of, the strike at JeffBoat in Jeffersonville, Indiana, in 2001, through the eyes of welder Terry Tapp.\n\nSetting the scene with his initial hiring at the company and going through his life at work, he details how the continued grind and dehumanisation of the JeffBoat workforce leads to a confrontation with both the company and their union, which, rather than fighting for the workers’ interests, largely acts as a middle manager, enforcing the company’s rules except when forced otherwise. At the same time, he intersperses this narrative with vignettes of the JeffBoat workers attempting to maintain some level of humanity and control over their lives, both on and off the job. While formally united in the sense that both stories take place in the context of the JeffBoat shipyard, they do not fully come together until the shipyard workers reject the pittance contract they were offered and are abandoned by their union in the strike that is supposed to follow, forcing them to either knuckle under or take the strike into their own hands. It is a story of hard, dangerous work, the machinations of trade union misleadership, and the ordinary heroics that people are able to undertake when pushed to the limit of their own lives, yet still able to reach out and support others, and makes for inspiring reading.\n\nIn some ways, though, the epilogue to the book - written a decade after the strike - is almost as important as the description of the events that came before. Tapp writes of a new spirit of togetherness felt by the workers at JeffBoat in the initial months after the strike, directly stemming from the workers on the site having had to organise not only the picket lines, but also the family and community support that was needed for their action to succeed, especially since they were getting no help from their union. But because of the success of the strikers (in that they got the union to back down on forcing through the contract and were able to return to work with no retaliation), that spirit among the workers survived, and even spread. Indeed, as Tapp writes, “[the] JeffBoat wildcat strike of 2001… inspired a number of actions regionally, nationally and internationally”.\n\nWhile these actions were largely un- or under-reported in mainstream media, enthusiastic coverage on the relatively new and alternative venue of the internet meant that the strikers “received many emails from people who had heard of what we did and felt stronger about making positive change in their workplaces”. And, when a strike in a nearby city was called that September, JeffBoat workers and their supporters started organising people and resources to support it, so it could be at least as successful as the JeffBoat workers felt theirs was.\n\nThen September 11 happened. In the shock and disorientation that followed, the company struck back against the JeffBoat workers - not through disciplinary action, but through charts, graphs and other propaganda of statistics. Despite having been defeated in its attempt to force though a contract, and theoretically then agreeing that a new one be drafted, the company’s representatives explained that, due to the economic circumstances they found themselves in, it was unable to share out the prosperity it had achieved at all, meaning that striking would be ineffective and pointless.\n\nFurthermore, now that the United States had been attacked, and was (so it was said) under constant threat, striking would not only be pointless, but actively harmful to the well-being of the nation. To strike would be “a form of terrorism ... aiding America’s enemies” in its assault on the nation. While by and large the JeffBoat workers were not fooled by the spiel of “economic terrorism”, it did serve to disrupt the sense of collective power that had been built up over the strike and sustained since. And over the following few years, many workers simply drifted away to other jobs.\n\nLessons\n\nCould things have happened differently? Tapp reckons so; he notes that, while they were able to successfully strike for a marginally better contract a year later with some tepid union support, he thinks that, had “those events of September” not taken place, then the energy built up by the wildcat strike would not have been so thoroughly undercut, and any future strikes would have been able to draw from those lessons to force a different outcome. This could easily have been so, but more should be added.\n\nThe last lines of A serf’s journal are of one of Tapp’s co-workers saying to him: “We won. What are we going to do now?” It is an important question, which starts to get at the limits of what is achievable within a single action or workplace. On the one hand, when the JeffBoat workers went out on strike, they started to circumvent the limits placed upon them by lack of union support through pooling their own money in strike funds, and organising food and care for both the strikers and their families. Combined with reaching out for (and getting) broader community support, this was the main reason why the strike was able to last as long as it did and end in what the workers felt was a victory. And, as noted above, the JeffBoat workers were starting to spread those lessons to help out strikers in nearby workplaces. But the fact that the company was able to counterattack so effectively, thereby cutting the thread of the lessons learned at JeffBoat (except through long-after-the-fact retellings like this book), points to the lack of an organisation that could absorb those lessons for the long term.\n\nFor communists, this organisation - at least in its highest form - would be the Communist Party, which can provide a centralisation of the experiences of the working class in all its forms in order to struggle more effectively for workers’ immediate interests, as well as develop a programme which can politically arm the working class to rule society and offer practical (if partial) experience in that rulership.\n\nBut such a party did not exist in the United States during the strike; indeed, it has not existed in a meaningful form in over half a century due to a concerted effort on the part of rightwing labour bureaucrats and the capitalist state to purge the labour movement of socialists, communists and other radicals. Larger and smaller groups attempt to carry on some of the tasks that such a party would need to undertake, but their relative detachment from the workers’ movement as a whole has meant that their successes would be limited, and that even these limited successes would be interpreted through the sectarian blinders of most of these organisations primarily as the success of their particular sect, rather than of the workers’ movement as a whole. Communist politics still exist in the US, but largely do so on the fringes of that movement rather than as an all-pervasive force.\n\nFortunately, however, the struggle to defend and advance immediate conditions still continues, as A serf’s journal wonderfully illustrates. For that, the book serves to hearten partisans of working class power and communism that the current broad period of defeat and reaction is not absolute, and can be turned around. For a short period of time, and in its own small way, the JeffBoat strike did just that. ~ Weekly Worker"", ""Every day, millions of people grind their way through miserable work. And every day, a few of them decide the status quo cannot stand - they have to fight back. Very few of either of those stories ever get told, particularly by the heroic people who lived them. Terry Tapp does both in a tale of unbelievably miserable, dangerous work and courageous, fed-up workers up against incredibly tall odds. Anyone who has worked a terrible job should read it. Anyone who has dreamed about fighting back should study it. ~ Micah Uetricht, Jacobin Magazine"", ""Felix Guattari once wrote that ‘it is not only species that are becoming extinct but also the words, phrases and gestures of human solidarity.’ Tapp’s journal/memoir, an exploration of a single workers strike in the age of surveillance and the police state, helps us work against this disaster perceived by Guattari years ago. A Serf’s Journal is a powerful and much needed overdue call for solidarity today. ~ Alfie Bown, Hong Kong Review of Books"", ""Working dangerous jobs in an unsafe shipyard, Terry Tapp was up against oppressive company management, a corrupt union in cahoots with the company and the everyday struggle to survive on inadequate pay. But rather than be in competition with one another, he and his co-workers learn to instead cooperate with each other and even win some battles. He tells this story of working people learning to fight back with the soul of a poet and an ability to connect individual struggles with the far larger economic forces that are making life so miserable for so many. ~ Pete Dolack, author of It's Not Over: Learning From the Socialist Experiment"", ""This is a fascinating narrative of what it's like to work as a genuine, authentic worker producing real goods in a physical dimension. Someday this book may be viewed as long-gone nostalgia, but perhaps not! Read And Enjoy... ~ V. Vale, founder of Search & Destroy and RE/Search, Research Publications""]" Serial Agencies,"[""Frank Kelleter""]",Serial Agencies investigates how public and academic reactions to The Wire have contributed to the narrative's serial evolution and cultural performance,"Serial Agencies investigates how public and academic reactions to the TV show ""The Wire"" have contributed to the narrative's serial evolution and cultural performance.","Serial Agencies investigates how public and academic reactions to the TV show ""The Wire"" have contributed to the narrative's serial evolution and cultural performance.",4,"[""Frank Kelleter's Serial Agencies is sharp, savvy, and sophisticated, offering a fresh angle of vision on a much-discussed TV drama. This is a must-read book for fans of The Wire as well as anyone interested in the relations between actor-network-theory and media studies. ~ Rita Felski, University of Virginia, author of Uses of Literature"", ""Frank Kelleter's Serial Agencies is a model of the kind of work we dream about but so rarely see in the study of popular serialities—a book that eschews both the easy and threadbare options of by-the-numbers ideological critique and digital age utopianism that imagines unfettered possibilities for readerly agency and empowerment. Kelleter offers a critique of The Wire and its cult that is witty, nuanced, and utterly compelling—from his account of how the text produces the conditions of its own reading as the \""greatest show in the history of television,\"" to his account of the show's nostalgia for models of labor lost in the post-industrial and digital age. Kelleter's analysis extends beyond the show's producers and creators to include the growing army of reviewers, bloggers, and academic critics who all play a role in its circulation. For TV Studies, there is a cautionary tale here very much worth pausing over, wherein the academic celebration of a program confers cultural value with institutional benefits not only to the program's producers but also to the scholars who underwrite the fantasy that \""it's not TV, it's HBO.\"" It is very much TV, Kelleter reminds us, but a 21st-century TV that expertly manages the post-industrial economies of capital, culture, and citizenship. ~ Jared Gardner, Ohio State University, author of /Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling"", ""Kelleter succeeds in letting us hear what The Wire says about itself, what its readers do in their reading practices, and how scholarship shapes its critical objects of serialized culture. In doing so, this engaging book does more than just illuminate this canonical television text; it provides an original approach to understanding serial media and its critical practices. Serial Agencies will hopefully prove to be a powerful actor on the future of media and cultural studies. ~ Jason Mittell, Middlebury College, author of Television and American Culture"", ""Frank Kelleter's analysis of The Wire skillfully interrogates the ways in which this TV show has been authorially promoted, journalistically valued, and industrially described. Relating texts to paratexts (whilst cutting across TV Studies and American Studies), Kelleter critically threads together The Wire's pop-cultural circulations, tapping into its serial \""outbidding\"" and placing its claims to realistic, novelistic, and mythic resonances under the closest of surveillance. Always vigilant and thoughtful, this smart book tackles how The Wire has been used, all in the game of cultural and national status. Serial Agencies is essential reading for scholars, fans, and aca-fans alike. ~ Matt Hills, Aberystwyth University, author of Fan Cultures""]" Serkeftin,"[""Marcel Cartier""]",Serkeftin: A Narrative of the Rojava Revolution takes a first-hand look at the complex process of grassroots democracy and women’s liberation that is radically altering life in northern Syria’s predominately Kurdish areas.,"In the Spring of 2017, activist, journalist and hip-hop artist Marcel Cartier was given exclusive access to the structures set up in the predominately Kurdish areas in northern Syria. Over the course of more than a month, Cartier travelled across the terrain known as Rojava, experiencing the radical grassroots revolution that is sweeping the region. He spoke with commanders of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), visited women’s organisations, saw the cooperatives and communes in action that have transformed the concept of democracy, and found his understanding of revolution challenged and reinvigorated. Unique in its access, emotion and humanity, Serkeftin: A Narrative of the Rojava Revolution, is a beautiful account of a contradictory and complex process that is fundamentally changing society in the midst of the 21st century’s most brutal civil war. Meaning ‘victory’, the Kurdish word ‘serkeftin’ captures the spirit of optimism in the catastrophe that has engulfed this beautiful country since 2011 and has simultaneously brought the possibility of freedom ever closer.","In the Spring of 2017, activist, journalist and hip-hop artist Marcel Cartier was given exclusive access to the structures set up in the predominately Kurdish areas in northern Syria. Over the course of more than a month, Cartier travelled across the terrain known as Rojava, experiencing the radical grassroots revolution that is sweeping the region. He spoke with commanders of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), visited women’s organisations, saw the cooperatives and communes in action that have transformed the concept of democracy, and found his understanding of revolution challenged and reinvigorated. Unique in its access, emotion and humanity, Serkeftin: A Narrative of the Rojava Revolution, is a beautiful account of a contradictory and complex process that is fundamentally changing society in the midst of the 21st century’s most brutal civil war. Meaning ‘victory’, the Kurdish word ‘serkeftin’ captures the spirit of optimism in the catastrophe that has engulfed this beautiful country since 2011 and has simultaneously brought the possibility of freedom ever closer.",1,"[""In this extremely enthusiastic political travelogue, Cartier, a communist hip-hop artist and journalist, traveled with an international delegation to the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (popularly known as Rojava, where Kurds have established an autonomous region) to learn from the revolutionaries. In Rojava, he found the “living, breathing, non-dogmatic and genuine democratic and social process of complete change... I had been searching for my entire life.” This slim volume, largely aimed at convincing fellow leftists that the Kurdish militias collectively known as the People’s Protection Units forces are sincere allies and not “pawns” of the U.S. (which gives arms to them), gives a revealing, if rose-colored, look at the area... this is a valuable and revealing account of the nascent institutions of Syria’s Kurdish warriors. Though the utilitarian prose may dissuade some readers, this should appeal to those interested in firsthand reporting from the Syrian civil war and the struggle for Kurdish autonomy. ~ Publisher's Weekly""]" Shakespeare for Snowflakes,"[""Ian Burrows""]","An examination of how dramatists including Shakespeare, Sarah Kane and Samuel Beckett manipulated actors' bodies for laughter or sympathy, discussed in relation to the social construction of ‘snowflake culture’ as a 21st century phenomenon.","Drawing on plays by Shakespeare, Sarah Kane, Sophocles, Samuel Beckett, and others, this book examines the ways in which these dramatists manipulated the actor’s body to demand laughter and/or sympathy. Ian Burrows shows how these strategies can be thought about beyond the stage-space: in the classroom, in the media, and in relation to the social construction of ‘snowflake culture’ as a 21st century phenomenon.","Drawing on plays by Shakespeare, Sarah Kane, Sophocles, Samuel Beckett, and others, this book examines the ways in which these dramatists manipulated the actor’s body to demand laughter and/or sympathy. Ian Burrows shows how these strategies can be thought about beyond the stage-space: in the classroom, in the media, and in relation to the social construction of ‘snowflake culture’ as a 21st century phenomenon.",4,"[""Shakespeare for Snowflakes is a provocative book, and a brave, thoughtful attempt to reclaim the meaning and context of those trigger warnings. It makes intriguing connections between contemporary conservative anxieties and the ontology of spectatorship. It takes real delight in physical comedy; it ranges from custard pies to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; it takes non-scholarly material seriously as evidence for audience reactions; and it works with exemplary courtesy and rigour to refute lazy and reactionary thinking. [...]\n\nBurrows’ is a calmly and idiosyncratically ethical voice. His elegant ability to literalize metaphors and figures of speech in refreshing ways, and his steely critical urgency, softly presented in this book for a wider audience, are full of intellectual promise. I look forward to the next one. ~ Emma Smith, University of Oxford; author of 'This is Shakespeare: How to Read the World's Greatest Playwright'"", ""A lively and nuanced foray into the culture wars, inspired by both theatrical scholarship and personal experience ... This brisk consideration of the power of words to suppress or awaken empathy strikes a timely note in the context of today’s debates about free speech and tolerance. ~ Publishers Weekly"", ""It’s probably the best presentation of this sort of an argument I’ve seen about content warnings in university classrooms. ~ Andy Boyd, New Books Network"", ""The line between laughter and tears is dotted at best, and Ian Burrows’ inspired alignment of slapstick and tragedy gets to the heart of human response to pain and the unexpected. In his nuanced analysis of drama from Sophocles to Kane, Burrows unpacks the complexities of reaction to trauma and the ways in which artists have utilised laughter. Alongside this, in responding to the wider media discourse generated by the lectures in which the book originated, Burrows turns controversy in on itself, offering mature, important reflection on what it means to find empathy in the ridiculous or to mock the trauma of others. ~ Peter Kirwan, University of Nottingham""]" Shaping for Mediocrity,"[""David Harvie""]",An insider account of the struggle for the soul of the university.,"In 2021, as part of a programme called Shaping for Excellence, bosses at the University of Leicester made redundant numerous scholars in what was simultaneously an attack on academic freedom and trade union organisation. The authors of Shaping for Mediocrity not only had front-row seats in the campaign against these mass redundancies, they were in the ring - both as targeted employees and as trade union officers and negotiators. Shaping for Mediocrity tells the inside story of these attacks and the campaign against them. It situates this story within a longer history of struggle to make the university a place where critical thinking is possible, showing how events in Leicester are both reflective of higher education in the UK following four decades of neoliberal 'reform' and a particularly egregious instance of the increasingly authoritarian management of public institutions such as universities.","In 2021, as part of a programme called Shaping for Excellence, bosses at the University of Leicester made redundant numerous scholars in what was simultaneously an attack on academic freedom and trade union organisation. The authors of Shaping for Mediocrity not only had front-row seats in the campaign against these mass redundancies, they were in the ring - both as targeted employees and as trade union officers and negotiators. Shaping for Mediocrity tells the inside story of these attacks and the campaign against them. It situates this story within a longer history of struggle to make the university a place where critical thinking is possible, showing how events in Leicester are both reflective of higher education in the UK following four decades of neoliberal 'reform' and a particularly egregious instance of the increasingly authoritarian management of public institutions such as universities.",8,"[""‘Do you think business schools should be helping to produce a low carbon, high inclusion, high democracy economy? Or should they be sacking academics who work towards these goals in order to produce a business-as-usual b-school that makes big profits? This urgent and beautifully written book shows why universities need to change, and what happens to free speech when higher education becomes a product.’ ~ Martin Parker, author of Shut Down the Business School: What’s Wrong with Management Education and Against Management: Organization in the Age of Managerialism"", ""‘Gibson Burrell, Ronald Hartz, David Harvie, Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley and Friends have provided the academic community with a comprehensive narrative of the most shameless and blatant violation of academic freedom I have ever personally witnessed. The authors were all made redundant as a result of Leicester University’s 2021 “Shaping for Excellence” – the vision of vice chancellor Nishan Canagarajah – which pitted management’s “right” to “disinvest” from an area of research against academics’ freedom to pursue an autonomous program of enquiry.\n\n‘Critical management studies had been a beacon of success at Leicester and the international reputations of its exponents were beyond question. Canagarajah felt, however, that CMS didn’t attract the right kind of customer, and so its perceived adherents were targeted for redundancy on the flimsiest of assumptions. What placed them at highest risk, though, was a history of union organizing.\n\n‘The authors expose the moral dissolution of a university’s leadership team in an era of competition, marketisation and managerialism where everything including research must be ‘governed’. In an era where university management seems impervious to accountability, Burrell et al name names including who was silent, who lent support and who were “the enforcers”. Their reflexivity and honesty stand in contrast to the deviousness and cynicism of the managers they encountered. Other administrators, they note, carried a weight of shame for the shabby scheme they were obliged to participate in, and resigned.\n\n‘This is a book that should be read by every academic and trade unionist. What happened at the University of Leicester in 2021 could happen anywhere. Indeed, we see an escalation of “restructurings” which target arts, humanities and social sciences which are traditionally home to the kinds of critiques that irk the managerial cadre. Shaping for Mediocrity is a call to resist, to take back control of the university, and, above all, recognise the power of solidarity against the implacable tyranny of managerialism.’ ~ Liz Morrish, co-author of Academic Irregularities: Discourse and Neoliberalism in Higher Education"", ""‘No area of existence is exempt from exploitation, including the acquisition of knowledge. State authority decides the matter, with particular regard to the needs of Global Capital. Our universities were thrown to the wolves many years ago; now students are being thrown too. There is no “right to education”. An ignorant public is the preferred option. The difficulty with “thinking” is that it leads to asking questions. The authors of this book expose the cynicism, the hypocrisy and the appalling cowardice of the British education authorities.’ ~ James Kelman, author most recently of God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena and The State Is the Enemy: Essays on Liberation and Racial Justice"", ""‘This most welcome book uses an act of intellectual vandalism perpetrated by management at Leicester University as its springboard. This is part of a growing trend in the UK and US, where centres of critical thinking are dismantled as universities resemble corporations, using “market forces” as an alibi, in order to treat staff and support-service workers as disposable entities. The authors analyze this trend superbly while providing an intellectual basis for countering dismal developments such as the one at Leicester.’ ~ Kenneth Surin, professor emeritus, Duke University"", ""‘Next generations will read Shaping for Mediocrity as a “future archive” of what we could have done collectively to save public higher education, and how those who fought the hardest battles were failed not just by the system but by the movement itself. Yet, the book is written with a humour, hope and humility that defy bitterness and defeatism. It documents forensically how small leaks of individual mediocrity sink large vessels built on collective hard work and benevolence. It teaches us important lessons about what can still be done to stop the toxic spread of neo-managerial capitalism in our public universities, before it is too late.’ ~ Mariya Ivancheva, author of The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela"", ""‘Shaping for Mediocrity is an exposé of what neoliberal university management does when academic workers passionately promote a rigorous and useful critical education. Without fear or favour, the authors journey through a notorious seven-month battle at one university, which ended in bitter defeat with tragic personal and professional costs. While it is a saddening and emotional read, their experiences are invaluable hard lessons for all education workers engaged in struggles everywhere. I’ve read nothing like this book in five decades. I salute those involved.’ ~ Alpesh Maisuria, co-author of Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University"", ""‘Anyone who works in a university business school should read this book. No, anyone who works in a university should read this book. Actually, make that anyone who is interested in the abuse of power, rampant neoliberalism and how employees can be treated as mere resources, to be disposed of on baseless, knee-jerk, reactionary managerialist whims. It’s an absolute tour de force, a perfect example of parrhesia in a context where speaking truth to power is becoming more and more risky. I salute my friends and former colleagues for writing it.’ ~ Jo Brewis, Professor of People and Organisations, The Open University"", ""‘While we have a lot of literature on the hypocrisy of the university as a supposed place of critical thinking, we have nothing so forensic and stinging as this real-time account of mass redundancies at one of the leading centres for critical scholarship and teaching in the UK, and perhaps the world. And yet despite the viciousness and brutality of the University of Leicester’s hostility to thinking, this is the story of fierce and creative resistance, common courage and care, and the ultimate victory of collective critique over capitalist perfidy at work in the university. In other words, you are reading the last word on the University of Leicester.’ ~ Stefano Harney, co-author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study""]" Shooting the Moon,"[""Brian Willems""]",The first book to examine the multiple and contradictory strategies for putting the moon on film.,"Films about the moon show that even after the lunar landing of 1969 our celestial neighbor has lost none of its aptitude for being made of green cheese. In fact, as soon as you put the moon on screen it is lost. This is equally true for a wide range of moon films, including the theatricality of Méliès, the incredulity of camp, the illegibility of footage shot by Apollo astronauts and the revisionary history of Transformers 3. Yet, as paradoxical as it might seem at first, it is only when we ""lose sight"" of the moon that lunar truths begin to come forth. This is because fantastic elements of the moon—by their mere absurdity—can indicate non-fantastic elements. However, what is of interest here is not realistic or fantastic lunar truths but rather that the moon is an object which invites, or even demands, more than one truth at once.","Films about the moon show that even after the lunar landing of 1969 our celestial neighbor has lost none of its aptitude for being made of green cheese. In fact, as soon as you put the moon on screen it is lost. This is equally true for a wide range of moon films, including the theatricality of Méliès, the incredulity of camp, the illegibility of footage shot by Apollo astronauts and the revisionary history of Transformers 3. Yet, as paradoxical as it might seem at first, it is only when we ""lose sight"" of the moon that lunar truths begin to come forth. This is because fantastic elements of the moon—by their mere absurdity—can indicate non-fantastic elements. However, what is of interest here is not realistic or fantastic lunar truths but rather that the moon is an object which invites, or even demands, more than one truth at once.",4,"[""[Those who] engage with Willems’s scholarly theories will certainly view the moon and its representation in cinema from\n\na much more informed and opinionated perspective. Though thousands of miles away, our lunar neighbor feels within arm’s reach through Willems’s ardent, detailed analyses.\n\nKailyn Warpole ~ Film Matters magazine, Intellect"", ""Synopsis: Films about the moon show that even after the lunar landing of 1969 our celestial neighbor has lost none of its aptitude for being made of green cheese. In fact, as soon as you put the moon on screen it is lost. This is equally true for a wide range of moon films, including the theatricality of Melies, the incredulity of camp, the illegibility of footage shot by Apollo astronauts and the revisionary history of Transformers 3. Yet, as paradoxical as it might seem at first, it is only when we \""lose sight\"" of the moon that lunar truths begin to come forth. This is because fantastic elements of the moon, by their mere absurdity, can indicate non-fantastic elements. However, what is of interest in Brian Williams' \""Shooting the Moon\"" is not realistic or fantastic lunar truths but rather that the moon is an object which invites, or even demands, more than one truth at once.\n\nCritique: An inherently fascinating, informative, and thoughtful read, \""Shooting the Moon\"" by Brian Williams (Assistant Professor of Literature and Film Theory at the University of Split, Croatia) is an extraordinary read and very highly recommended for both community and academic library Cinematic Studies reference collections. For personal reading lists it should be noted that \""Shooting the Moon\"" is also available in an inexpensive Kindle edition ($0.99).\n\nPaul T. Vogel\n\nReviewer\n\n~ Paul T. Vogel, Midwest Book Review"", ""Shooting the Moon shows how our most abiding object or objective on reality’s horizon was overshot and displaced by the other reality of realization of our wish fantasies. When we ask for the moon we travel a jump cut from an idealized past to a future of wish fulfillment lying deep inside the film medium and its ongoing history. Willems' brilliant exhibition of this exemplary fantasy artefact is at the same time a decisive contribution to the phenomenology of cinema.\n\n~ Laurence A. Rickels, Art and Theory department at the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe, author of Germany: A Science Fiction, Personal"", ""Willems' text impressively traces the conceptual consequences of the moon's appearance in roughly a century of film. Utilizing a wide-range of contemporary continental philosophy, Shooting the Moon treats the familiar lunar body less as site of conventional exploration and more of a device that constructively alienates our philosophical investment in being earth-bound thinkers...the moon becomes a particularly strange free-floating camera.\n\n~ Ben Woodard, author of On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy""]" Slave States,"[""Yasin Kakande""]","Enslavement, trafficking, sexual starvation. Abuse of workers in the Gulf Arab Region.","A stark expose of the enslavement, trafficking, sexual starvation and general abuse of workers in the Gulf Arab Region.","A stark expose of the enslavement, trafficking, sexual starvation and general abuse of workers in the Gulf Arab Region.",4,"[""..........Kakande reports on the terrible conditions and quandaries faced by Kafala proletarians from Pakistan, India, Ethiopia, Uganda, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines and the like. Many fall out of the system and continue illegally within the GCC as ‘runaways’ or escapees. Mass deportations occur. Strikes break out which do not last or succeed. The immigrants are the great majority in these countries, which have never had a local proletariat. As such, Kafala is the local capitalists’ way of controlling or crushing that proletariat. Kakande gives you an inside, personal look into how these glitzy profiteering economies work that no GCC government or corporation wants known. ~ Gregg Gibbs, May Day Books & Blog"", ""With the world climate at peak awareness at this point it is important for all of us to become familiar with the information Presented by the fine journalist Yasin Kakande. The more we know the better informed we can be about both sides of the clash of titans that exists at present. Grady Harp ~ Grady Harp, http://www.amazon.com/Slave-States-Practice-Kafala-Region-ebook/dp/B0182XGO88/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top?ie=UTF8"", ""Kakande's expose of the seamy side of life in the Gulf is an important counterweight to the free pass the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) gets in the western press. Oil corrupts, and the oil alliance that the West has with primitive tribal 'emirates' and the Saudi kingdom has poisoned world politics for long enough. Time for a new world order, where the practice of kafala plays no part. ~ Eric Walberg, author of Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games"", ""In this moving and inconvenient account Yasin Kakande makes a compelling case for labor rights, press freedom and a reform of the kafala-sponsorship system. ~ Eckart Woertz, Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) and author of Oil for Food""]" Slime Dynamics,"[""Ben Woodard""]","Through speculative philosophy and lurid cultural objects, Slime Dynamics explores the muck of life as a darkly vitalistic substance.","Despite humanity's gradual ascent from clustered pools of it, slime is more often than not relegated to a mere residue—the trail of a verminous life form, the trace of decomposition, or an entertaining synthetic material—thereby leaving its generative and mutative associations with life neatly removed from the human sphere of thought and existence. Arguing that slime is a viable physical and metaphysical object necessary to produce a realist bio-philosophy void of anthrocentricity, this text explores naturephilosophie, speculative realism, and contemporary science; hyperbolic representations of slime found in the weird texts of HP Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; as well as survival horror films, video games, and graphic novels, in order to present the dynamics of slime not only as the trace of life but as the darkly vitalistic substance of life.","Despite humanity's gradual ascent from clustered pools of it, slime is more often than not relegated to a mere residue—the trail of a verminous life form, the trace of decomposition, or an entertaining synthetic material—thereby leaving its generative and mutative associations with life neatly removed from the human sphere of thought and existence. Arguing that slime is a viable physical and metaphysical object necessary to produce a realist bio-philosophy void of anthrocentricity, this text explores naturephilosophie, speculative realism, and contemporary science; hyperbolic representations of slime found in the weird texts of HP Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; as well as survival horror films, video games, and graphic novels, in order to present the dynamics of slime not only as the trace of life but as the darkly vitalistic substance of life.",0,[] Small Gods,"[""Alex Quicho""]","A lucid, unexpected look at how the drone imports its bloodied legacy into contemporary art and everyday life.","Small Gods deconstructs the mythology of the drone: as soothing sound, aerial spy, and killing machine. When we say 'drone technology,' we can mean the tanpura, a plucked-string instrument originating in 16th century India, or the Gorgon Stare, an aerial surveillance technology designed by the US military - and evoke competing notions of terror and transcendence. Small Gods leans into this ambiguity. As each chapter focuses on the work of an artist with a unique understanding of 'the drone', the book illuminates myriad facets of these entangled technological entities. Opening with William Basinki's first glimpse of the ash-clouds of 9/11 - which spawned both The Disintegration Loops and the drone-driven War on Terror - the narrative then zooms into the representational sleights of hand of British and American artists preoccupied with the West's stake in endless drone wars. Its midsection lands us in the doldrums: where Anne Imhof's Angst, Anna Mikkola's drone-watched runner, and Atef Abu Saif's drone war memoir find maddening safety in boredom, raising questions about the trade-offs between security and surveillance. In the final section, the narrative uncouples from earthly oppression - we're freed to explore future and spirit worlds with artists including Korakrit Arunanondchai, Lawrence Lek, and WangShui, all of whom use drone technology to envision a future beyond the burden of colonialism, racism, exclusion or, simply, representation. Empty metal becomes a vessel for escape, connection, or intention; a future-facing spirit, a ride into the afterlife, a god or a ghost.","Small Gods deconstructs the mythology of the drone: as soothing sound, aerial spy, and killing machine. When we say 'drone technology,' we can mean the tanpura, a plucked-string instrument originating in 16th century India, or the Gorgon Stare, an aerial surveillance technology designed by the US military - and evoke competing notions of terror and transcendence. Small Gods leans into this ambiguity. As each chapter focuses on the work of an artist with a unique understanding of 'the drone', the book illuminates myriad facets of these entangled technological entities. Opening with William Basinki's first glimpse of the ash-clouds of 9/11 - which spawned both The Disintegration Loops and the drone-driven War on Terror - the narrative then zooms into the representational sleights of hand of British and American artists preoccupied with the West's stake in endless drone wars. Its midsection lands us in the doldrums: where Anne Imhof's Angst, Anna Mikkola's drone-watched runner, and Atef Abu Saif's drone war memoir find maddening safety in boredom, raising questions about the trade-offs between security and surveillance. In the final section, the narrative uncouples from earthly oppression - we're freed to explore future and spirit worlds with artists including Korakrit Arunanondchai, Lawrence Lek, and WangShui, all of whom use drone technology to envision a future beyond the burden of colonialism, racism, exclusion or, simply, representation. Empty metal becomes a vessel for escape, connection, or intention; a future-facing spirit, a ride into the afterlife, a god or a ghost.",3,"[""Surprising, delightful, engrossing, disturbing, and ultimately inspiring, Small Gods is a thoughtful and and urgent meditation on the ways that life is being re-constituted by technology. Alex Quicho is a fiercely talented young writer who nestles unexpected insights into a well-researched study of contemporary art's engagement with drones, and of the drone's re-configuration of subjectivity and global systems. Relying on extensive interviews and fieldwork, she combines the affective poetry of art writing with the cold clarity of geopolitical analysis, and rightfully places these powerful new entities in the long history of a world forged through empire. As a result, Small Gods is revelatory. ~ Vincent Bevins, author of The Jakarta Method"", ""\""A luminous exploration of drone technology in the gallery and in open air, Alex Quicho gives form to the machinic gaze and asks what we see when we self-surveil, what view of the human is conjured by the drone's-eye perspective. Haunting and revelatory, this book will have you searching the skies above you for the unseen presence of these small gods, their hidden reach.\"" ~ Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine"", ""Alex Quicho approaches her vivisection of the new, droning flesh with Ballardian playfulness, Mark Fisher’s ethical backbone, and Mary Shelley’s hunger for new visions. Some books I can see myself reading again and again, always discovering them anew; Small Gods, with its commitment to endless frontiers, metamorphosing skies, and slippages of the self and all other borders, is already one of them. ~ Ales Kot, author of Days of Hate""]" "Small Towns, Austere Times","[""Steve Hanson""]",This book explores small town austere Britain.,"This book explores small town austere Britain. The text argues for a return to both dialectical thinking and politicized community research, in light of the current 'austere' landscape, in order to intellectually militate against centre-right think tanks. It also urges for a kind of epistemological anarchism, which refuses to view the small towns which are the subject of the book through existing 'common sense' paradigms, particularly those of state and capital, but also those of cosy localism.","This book explores small town austere Britain. The text argues for a return to both dialectical thinking and politicized community research, in light of the current 'austere' landscape, in order to intellectually militate against centre-right think tanks. It also urges for a kind of epistemological anarchism, which refuses to view the small towns which are the subject of the book through existing 'common sense' paradigms, particularly those of state and capital, but also those of cosy localism.",1,"[""In his 'Little poems in prose' Baudelaire talks about feeling drunk on the promiscuity of the crowds on the Paris boulevards. There would soon be a mini-genre in painting: the rag-picker, who lived in a no-man's land at the edge of the city which doesn't immediately become countryside. Sociology had to be invented to expole new ways of living. Britain has made a big contribution in the work of Raymond Williams and that of Stuart Hall and colleagues in Birmingham. Steve Hanson recently published a superb catalogue essay for a photographic project on the Oldam Road in Manchester by Charlie Meecham. Another compliment I would pay Steve is that I get echoes of another explorer of these working-class landscapes, Ray Gosling. The exigences of a certain version of progress, and its inevitable upheavals and messes are endlessly defended as 'realistic'. As George Orwell might have said, they are a whole lot more real for some than for others. ~ Dr Robert Galeta, Lecturer, Bradford School of Arts and Media, Bradford College, and translator of Deleuze's Cinema 2.""]" Society Elsewhere,"[""Francis Sanzaro, Ph.D.""]","The gravest threat to humanity in this century will not come from war, disease, overpopulation or the environment, but from boredom and uselessness.","The biggest political and economic issue of the 21st and 22nd centuries will not be food, war, overpopulation, or the environment, but boredom and uselessness. The biggest problem will be figuring out how to manage people’s emotional lives in a time when their intelligence, brains and consciousness will become irrelevant. The writers of the 2050s will observe that the idea of outsourcing our lives to software algorithms began around the turn of the millennium with small tasks (dating, entertainment, directions), until, decades later the transition was complete; human decision making, which is the font of consciousness, is no longer necessary. Boredom and malaise are the biggest threats to global public health. With a unique blend of pop culture, history, philosophy, psychology, art theory, among others, Society Elsewhere is both evocative and engaging across a wide array of demographics.","The biggest political and economic issue of the 21st and 22nd centuries will not be food, war, overpopulation, or the environment, but boredom and uselessness. The biggest problem will be figuring out how to manage people’s emotional lives in a time when their intelligence, brains and consciousness will become irrelevant. The writers of the 2050s will observe that the idea of outsourcing our lives to software algorithms began around the turn of the millennium with small tasks (dating, entertainment, directions), until, decades later the transition was complete; human decision making, which is the font of consciousness, is no longer necessary. Boredom and malaise are the biggest threats to global public health. With a unique blend of pop culture, history, philosophy, psychology, art theory, among others, Society Elsewhere is both evocative and engaging across a wide array of demographics.",1,"[""\""Francis Sanzaro's book is a welcome counter-narrative to all the 'just so' stories out there about how computers, especially with the acceleration of artificial intelligence, not only explain the nature of human cognition but will inevitably surpass it. The book is a masterful threading of actual research and data with serious philosophical reflection, and is an indispensable addition to a growing list of authors who are reminding us that the emperors of Silicon Valley are not wearing any clothes.\""\n\n- Carl Raschke, University of Denver, author of Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy ~ Carl Raschke, Ph.D.""]" Speculative Annihilationism,"[""Matt Rosen""]",A presentation of new archaeological ontology in light of our age of extinctions.,"If Levinas and Negarestani raised a child enchanted by the dark, then this is his debut. In this book, Rosen argues that current archaeological theoretic approaches are not up to the task of adequately theorizing exhumation in our present age of extinctions. Speculative Annihilationism attempts to “think thought’s extinction,” suggesting a new ontological ground for archaeology. Combining contemporary work in speculative philosophy, saprophytic dialectics, and Levinasian ethics, Rosen’s “putrefied-thought” explores themes of the unthought and unthinkable, anonymity, otherness, and meaninglessness so that archaeology can be granted a new basis, a new avenue of inquiry at its intersection with extinction.","If Levinas and Negarestani raised a child enchanted by the dark, then this is his debut. In this book, Rosen argues that current archaeological theoretic approaches are not up to the task of adequately theorizing exhumation in our present age of extinctions. Speculative Annihilationism attempts to “think thought’s extinction,” suggesting a new ontological ground for archaeology. Combining contemporary work in speculative philosophy, saprophytic dialectics, and Levinasian ethics, Rosen’s “putrefied-thought” explores themes of the unthought and unthinkable, anonymity, otherness, and meaninglessness so that archaeology can be granted a new basis, a new avenue of inquiry at its intersection with extinction.",4,"[""Too often speculative philosophies forget that the thought of extinction invariably opens onto the extinction of thought, and that this may very well be what thinking is. Rosen's book takes up this insight and extends it, levelling up Levinas beyond the staid traditions of phenomenology and ethics into which his work is so often pigeonholed. In the process, Rosen discovers an archaeology that is more philosophical than speculative philosophy, an archae-ontology that is the alpha and omega of the species that thinks itself as a species. ~ Eugene Thacker, author of In The Dust Of This Planet"", ""While there is no shortage of engagements with Speculative Realism and its varied effects, Rosen takes up the strange diachronic form of Quentin Meillassoux's temporality in a fascinating manner. Emphasizing the thinkability of extinction through these temporal divergences, Rosen investigates the peculiarities of archaeology and proto-human life and ends with a novel engagement with Levinas and the inevitable but unavoidable encounter with a putrefied otherness. ~ Ben Woodard. author of On an Ungrounded Earth"", ""Rosen’s Speculative Annihilationism brilliantly poses difficult questions, about the facticity of extinction, about being without thought, and dares to answer them. We should thank him for showing us the way in such clear, concise language, for peeling back the bruised veil and rendering the utterances of the abyss intelligible. Here now we can grasp extinction for what it really is, not possibility, but inevitability. ~ David Peak, author of The Spectacle of the Void"", ""Speculative Annihilationism attempts something with archaeology that will seem absurd to so many working in the field: the decoupling of the archaeologist’s thinking from the artifacts that archaeology unearths. But in light of Quentin Meillassoux’s groundbreaking work of speculative materialism in After Finitude and related maneuvers conducted in contemporary speculative metaphysics, we can identify Rosen’s project for what it is: a risky work of noncorrelationist archaeology, a speculative thinking that attempts to extricate the past from history, to tear the past out of time itself, and in the attempt finds decay, horror, and nihilism at its center. In other words, it aims to think the Absolute at the peril of thought itself, and it’s not afraid to do so. ~ Tom Sparrow, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Slippery Rock University""]" Starry Speculative Corpse,"[""Eugene Thacker""]","Philosophy meets horror against the backdrop of an indifferent, unhuman cosmos.","Could it be that the more we know about the world, the less we understand it? Could it be that, while everything has been explained, nothing has meaning? Extending the ideas presented in his book In The Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker explores these and other issues in Starry Speculative Corpse. But instead of using philosophy to define or to explain the horror genre, Thacker reads works of philosophy as if they were horror stories themselves, revealing a rift between human beings and the unhuman world of which they are part. Along the way we see philosophers grappling with demons, struggling with doubt, and wrestling with an indifferent cosmos. At the center of it all is the philosophical drama of the human being confronting its own limits. Not a philosophy of horror, but a horror of philosophy. Thought that stumbles over itself, as if at the edge of an abyss. Starry Speculative Corpse is the second volume of the ""Horror of Philosophy"" trilogy, together with the first volume, In The Dust of This Planet, and the third volume, Tentacles Longer Than Night. The cover of In the Dust of this Planet can be seen in a New York gallery, on a banner at the 2014 Climate Change march in New York and on Jay-Z’s back promoting Run. The book influenced the writers of the US TV series True Detective and has been lambasted by ex-Fox News broadcaster, Glenn Beck in his podcast.","Could it be that the more we know about the world, the less we understand it? Could it be that, while everything has been explained, nothing has meaning? Extending the ideas presented in his book In The Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker explores these and other issues in Starry Speculative Corpse. But instead of using philosophy to define or to explain the horror genre, Thacker reads works of philosophy as if they were horror stories themselves, revealing a rift between human beings and the unhuman world of which they are part. Along the way we see philosophers grappling with demons, struggling with doubt, and wrestling with an indifferent cosmos. At the center of it all is the philosophical drama of the human being confronting its own limits. Not a philosophy of horror, but a horror of philosophy. Thought that stumbles over itself, as if at the edge of an abyss. Starry Speculative Corpse is the second volume of the ""Horror of Philosophy"" trilogy, together with the first volume, In The Dust of This Planet, and the third volume, Tentacles Longer Than Night. The cover of In the Dust of this Planet can be seen in a New York gallery, on a banner at the 2014 Climate Change march in New York and on Jay-Z’s back promoting Run. The book influenced the writers of the US TV series True Detective and has been lambasted by ex-Fox News broadcaster, Glenn Beck in his podcast.",1,"[""In showing that it can sustain a lucid conversation with philosophy, Thacker's writing also treats horror literature as literature. Students of both philosophy and horror will find surprising inter-illuminations in these three books.\n\n~ Michael Cisco, author of The Divinity Student""]" Stay Alive,"[""Michael Harris""]",Stay Alive reveals the hidden revolution at the heart of The Hunger Games and what it means for our age of defiant youth-led revolt.,"When The Hunger Games series began in 2008, many commentators lumped it in with other young adult genre fiction. But The Hunger Games was always more political. It’s since become the defining story for a generation that’s grown up with economic crisis and never ending war. An uber-rich ruling class gorge themselves in their gleaming high-tech Capitol, while working people are left behind to survive in exploited districts. Revolution is a forgotten hope kept at bay by brutal policing, aching poverty, and rigid class segregation. Suzanne Collins' dark vision has only become more relevant as The Hunger Games generation are thrown into an arena of increasingly brutal competition from which it seems like there is no escape, amid the climate crisis, global pandemics, rampant inequality, authoritarianism, media misinformation, and violence and cruelty as TV spectacle. It's no wonder the story continues to resonate. Stay Alive uses the story to shed light on our own age of extreme inequalities and climate collapse, in which elites use state power, compliant media, and violent spectacle to pacify their populations. The elite endgame is leading us towards our own version of Panem, an authoritarian state order we’ll call Capitolism. The world is catching fire. Elites have no intention of burning with us. And yet there is hope, which Michael Harris finds for his readers in revolution and radical solidarity, in the anti-authoritarian, empathetic, cooperative politics of a generation that has no choice but to rebel.","When The Hunger Games series began in 2008, many commentators lumped it in with other young adult genre fiction. But The Hunger Games was always more political. It’s since become the defining story for a generation that’s grown up with economic crisis and never ending war. An uber-rich ruling class gorge themselves in their gleaming high-tech Capitol, while working people are left behind to survive in exploited districts. Revolution is a forgotten hope kept at bay by brutal policing, aching poverty, and rigid class segregation. Suzanne Collins' dark vision has only become more relevant as The Hunger Games generation are thrown into an arena of increasingly brutal competition from which it seems like there is no escape, amid the climate crisis, global pandemics, rampant inequality, authoritarianism, media misinformation, and violence and cruelty as TV spectacle. It's no wonder the story continues to resonate. Stay Alive uses the story to shed light on our own age of extreme inequalities and climate collapse, in which elites use state power, compliant media, and violent spectacle to pacify their populations. The elite endgame is leading us towards our own version of Panem, an authoritarian state order we’ll call Capitolism. The world is catching fire. Elites have no intention of burning with us. And yet there is hope, which Michael Harris finds for his readers in revolution and radical solidarity, in the anti-authoritarian, empathetic, cooperative politics of a generation that has no choice but to rebel.",4,"[""\""In Stay Alive, Michael Harris demonstrates how neoliberal capitalism is conspiring to create a real-life dystopia where the odds only ever favor the elite. Using The Hunger Games to illuminate a series of social forces that are behind problems such as class inequality and climate change, Harris shows how a growing number of young people are rejecting their role in a game the powerful have constructed for them. Instead, by taking collective action, they are sparking a rebellion against systemic oppression and social injustice. This timely book offers readers hope that the problems that confront contemporary society are not insurmountable provided people are willing to work together to address them.\"" ~ Séan P. Connors, Associate Professor, English Education, University of Arkansas"", ""\""Michael Harris has done something important – he has written a book that takes very seriously the form and content of The Hunger Games, a book trilogy and four movies based on it, and the responses of audiences to them. And then he enhances readers’ and viewers’ experiences by way of an appreciation of relevant history, science and political theory. Harris has read widely and well and he draws upon numerous sources to construct and support his arguments about serious matters such as the ways in which political submission is enforced and rebellion can make its way in spite of that submission. Without saying so much, he invites his readers to go and read for themselves. He never stoops to the dopey level of criticism that all but instinctively disparages the popular. Instead, in the footsteps of CLR James in American Civilization, he insists that popularity is the reason to pay close attention – it reveals what we otherwise seldom see. As I read his book, I was re-reading Suzanne Collins’s book and re-watching the movies – with a difference. It reminded me of an experience I had many decades ago when I read What Happens in Hamlet – reading closely has its own rewards. You read again and you understand more. I also realized that I was reading a distinct work of political literature – with its own drama and language. At the end, the book gave me a whole set of new reasons to admire Katniss Everdeen – a rebel girl if we’ve ever known one.\"" ~ John Garvey, Hard Crackers editorial group"", ""\""An insightful look at how much Collins' series highlights the have-nots and their plight in our modern society. Harris skillfully explores the series' criticisms of virulent, frivolous capitalism, propaganda, torture, anarchy, deregulation, hypocrisy, and of course the nature of revolution. It's a book that challenges both left and right as it considers the story in the context of current America. Further, it factors in historical concepts and educates readers on psychological concepts like the prisoner's dilemma, false consciousness, just war theory, and authoritarianism. Serious fans will delight in the symbolism and deep insights revealed here. If you think you understand The Hunger Games, this book will blow your mind with how much is lurking under the surface.\"" ~ Valerie Estelle Frankel, author of Katniss the Cattail and The Many Faces of Katniss Everdeen"", ""“Engaging and rewarding, Michael Harris’ new study of the Hunger Games ...offers a multi-layered analysis of Suzanne Collins’s enduring phenomena – from the significance of child abuse and juvenile alienation, and from the series’ attack against neoliberalism/capitalism, to its embrace of anarchism. In doing so, Harris makes a compelling contribution to the study of the Hunger Games... His efforts focus on both the personal and the political in the context of characters and readers, addressing, among other issues of interest, why the Mockingjay salute endures ...In Harris’ words, the legacy of the Hunger Games finds affirmation in what he aptly characterizes as The Dandelion Revolution.” ~ Bill Clemente, Emeritus Professor of English, Peru State College, Nebraska""]" Stepp'd in Blood,"[""Andrew Wallis""]","Twenty-five years on from the heinous events, Andrew Wallis uncovers the life and crimes of the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi.","The 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi was the signature moral horror of the late 20th century. Andrew Wallis reveals, for the first time, the personal lives and crimes of the family group (‘Akazu’) that destroyed their country and left one million dead. Wallis’ meticulous research uncovers a broad landscape of terror, looking back to the ‘forgotten’ Rwandan genocide of the early 1960s and the failure by the international community, to learn lessons of prevention and punishment, a failure that would be repeated thirty years later. Taking the rise and fall of Akazu personalities and their mafia-like network as its central strand, Stepp'd in Blood reveals how they were aided and abetted by western governments and the churches for decades. And how post-1994, many successfully evaded international justice to enjoy comfortable retirements in the same countries that supported them when they were in power. Stepp'd in Blood publishes in the year of the 25th commemoration of the Rwandan Genocide.","The 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi was the signature moral horror of the late 20th century. Andrew Wallis reveals, for the first time, the personal lives and crimes of the family group (‘Akazu’) that destroyed their country and left one million dead. Wallis’ meticulous research uncovers a broad landscape of terror, looking back to the ‘forgotten’ Rwandan genocide of the early 1960s and the failure by the international community, to learn lessons of prevention and punishment, a failure that would be repeated thirty years later. Taking the rise and fall of Akazu personalities and their mafia-like network as its central strand, Stepp'd in Blood reveals how they were aided and abetted by western governments and the churches for decades. And how post-1994, many successfully evaded international justice to enjoy comfortable retirements in the same countries that supported them when they were in power. Stepp'd in Blood publishes in the year of the 25th commemoration of the Rwandan Genocide.",7,"[""An essential read for anyone trying to understand how the genocide against the Tutsi came about. Andrew Wallis provides a compelling analysis of the critical role played by a core group of individuals who decided the extermination of a million people was preferable to losing their power, wealth and position. He casts new light on background factors of the tragedy, including Akazu’s broad network of foreign supporters who helped them get away with mass murder.\n\nAs genocide deniers are getting louder, he brings compelling evidence the genocide of the Tutsi was far from the spontaneous event that was presented to the world by the perpetrators of the genocide and their supporters. Twenty-five years later, he also reminds us much remains to be done to bring justice to the victims of the genocide. This is a masterful research job. ~ Alain Destexhe, Initiator and then-Secretary of the Belgian Senate Inquiry Committee into the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda in 1997"", ""This highly significant book tells the story behind the final greatest tragedy of the XXth century: the genocide of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda. At its heart was a family with a crazed obsession with power. The personal story of their rise and fall and the failures of the international community before, during and after the genocide makes for a deeply troubling, but fascinating, read.\n\n~ Maria Malagardis, author and Africa correspondant, Libération"", ""Andrew Wallis provides a timely and powerful antidote to the continuing efforts of those who would implement the last phase of the Rwanda genocide—its denial. Wallis focuses on the role of the Akazu, a small group centered among the “in-laws” of President Habyarimana that controlled key elements of the state, military, media and economy. Based on evidence of perpetrators, survivors, and independent witnesses he shows us that the murder of at least 800,000 men, women and children was not the result of a spontaneous eruption of inter-ethnic violence. His ground-breaking research provides persuasive proof that it was the culmination of ongoing efforts by members of the Akazu to preserve their own power and wealth by deploying forces under their control to marginalize and murder the Tutsis of Rwanda. Everyone interested in the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities needs to read this book. ~ Stephen J. Rapp, former Chief of Prosecutions, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda; former US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice; Distinguished Fellow, Center for Prevention of Genocide, US Holocau"", ""A deeply researched and absorbing account of the ruling clique that orchestrated the Rwandan genocide. Wallis's expertise and narrative flair are evident on every page of this groundbreaking book. ~ Adam Jones, author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction; Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, Canada"", ""This pioneering study of how the Rwandan genocide was engineered is a much-needed antidote to accounts that seek to turn history on its head. Andrew Wallis has combined broad knowledge with deep research to produce a groundbreaking work. It is about Rwanda, but also about the way powerful elites can manipulate ordinary people into carrying out horrific crimes. ~ Stephen Kinzer, author and journalist, former NY Times foreign correspondent and Boston Globe columnist"", ""In this remarkable book, Andrew Wallis documents Western complicity before, during and after the Rwandan genocide. The international community continues to let down the genocide survivors by reducing the prison terms of those found responsible. Truly, Rwandan lives seem to matter little, despite our politicians’ lip service to human rights. Essential reading for anyone striving to comprehend mankind’s dark soul and the weakness of the international justice system. ~ Rebecca Tinsley, founder of Waging Peace and Network for Africa; journalist and author"", ""‘I have to say that the content is sensational, a real bombshell. This book will be a shattering blow to all deniers.’\n\n~ Gerald Caplan, Co-author of 'Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide', (2000), Organisation of African Unity report on the genocide; academic and columnist for Toronto Globe and Mail""]" Strangled,"[""Phil Knight""]","If the Sex Pistols and The Clash represented punk's sacred, then The Stranglers were its profane. Strangled sets out to explain why discussion of this most taboo of bands has for so long been silenced-a collective cultural Omerta.","The Stranglers occupy a paradoxical position within the history of popular music. Although major artists within the punk and new-wave movements, their contribution to those genres has been effectively quarantined by subsequent critical and historical analyses. They are somehow ""outside"" the realm of what responsible accounts of the period consider to be worthy of chronicling. Why is this so? Certainly The Stranglers' seedy and intimidating demeanor, and well-deserved reputation for misogyny and violence, offer a superficial explanation for their cultural excommunication. However, this landmark work suggests that the unsettling aura that permeated the group and their music had much more profound origins; ones that continue to have disturbing implications even today. The Stranglers, it argues, continue to be marginalised because, whether by accident or design, they brought to the fore the underlying issues of identity, status and structure that must by necessity be hidden from society's conscious awareness. For this, they would not be forgiven.","The Stranglers occupy a paradoxical position within the history of popular music. Although major artists within the punk and new-wave movements, their contribution to those genres has been effectively quarantined by subsequent critical and historical analyses. They are somehow ""outside"" the realm of what responsible accounts of the period consider to be worthy of chronicling. Why is this so? Certainly The Stranglers' seedy and intimidating demeanor, and well-deserved reputation for misogyny and violence, offer a superficial explanation for their cultural excommunication. However, this landmark work suggests that the unsettling aura that permeated the group and their music had much more profound origins; ones that continue to have disturbing implications even today. The Stranglers, it argues, continue to be marginalised because, whether by accident or design, they brought to the fore the underlying issues of identity, status and structure that must by necessity be hidden from society's conscious awareness. For this, they would not be forgiven.",3,"[""The precarious existence in a band is vividly described in this book from independent British publisher Zero Books.\n\n~ Gesellschaft + Kultur, May 2015"", ""I finished STRANGLED at three o'clock this morning. Best book, in any genre, I've read in years. A brilliantly unique dissection of postwar Western decline and ... somehow it contains my favourite band, too. Genius. ~ Alison Rae, Managing Editor, Polygon Books"", ""One of the most brilliantly unusual brains to emerge from the blogosphere lovingly dissects one of the most brilliantly unorthodox bands to emerge from punk. Using their savagely under-celebrated songs as a dark prism for the decline of the West, Phil Knight constructs a gripping entertainment for the mind that will convince even anti-fans that The Stranglers were the crucial band of their era. ~ Simon Reynolds, author of Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84.""]" Student as Producer,"[""Mike Neary""]","Student as Producer brings critical theory to life in a contribution to the dynamic, emerging genre of critical higher education studies. It is for students and teachers who want to change the world through critical pedagogy and popular education.","Mike Neary's account finds itself set in a particular moment of time: between the student protests and urban riots that erupted in England in 2010-2011 and the 2017 General Election, during which students and young people played a significant role by protesting the politics of austerity and by supporting the politics of Corbynism. The revolutionary curriculum in this book is framed around unlearning the law of labour and the institutions through which the law of labour is enforced, including the capitalist university which, more and more, seeks growth and expansion for the sake of growth, neglecting the intellectual and educational needs of students in favour of the needs of the capitalist state. Through thought experiments and reference to the work of the Soviet legal theorist, Evgeny Pashukanis, Student as Producer searches for solutions to how cooperatives might be brought about by a sense of common purpose and social defense. This is a practical, probing response to the ongoing assault on higher education by the social power of Money and the State. Mike Neary grounds his answers in a version of Marx's social theory known as 'a new reading of Marx', as advanced by authors such as Werner Bonefeld and Moishe Postone. The theory is applied to various aspects of pedagogy, criminology, and political sociology to create a curricula for revolutionary teaching that will aid activists and those involved with co-operative movements who are seeking ways in which to engage critically with higher education.","Mike Neary's account finds itself set in a particular moment of time: between the student protests and urban riots that erupted in England in 2010-2011 and the 2017 General Election, during which students and young people played a significant role by protesting the politics of austerity and by supporting the politics of Corbynism. The revolutionary curriculum in this book is framed around unlearning the law of labour and the institutions through which the law of labour is enforced, including the capitalist university which, more and more, seeks growth and expansion for the sake of growth, neglecting the intellectual and educational needs of students in favour of the needs of the capitalist state. Through thought experiments and reference to the work of the Soviet legal theorist, Evgeny Pashukanis, Student as Producer searches for solutions to how cooperatives might be brought about by a sense of common purpose and social defense. This is a practical, probing response to the ongoing assault on higher education by the social power of Money and the State. Mike Neary grounds his answers in a version of Marx's social theory known as 'a new reading of Marx', as advanced by authors such as Werner Bonefeld and Moishe Postone. The theory is applied to various aspects of pedagogy, criminology, and political sociology to create a curricula for revolutionary teaching that will aid activists and those involved with co-operative movements who are seeking ways in which to engage critically with higher education.",2,"[""Thoughtful and thought-provoking, \""Student as Producer: How do Revolutionary Teachers Teach?\"" is an inherently interesting and occasionally iconoclastic read that will have particular appeal for readers with an interest in higher and continuing education, the philosophy and social aspects of education, Communism & Socialism with respect to the process of education and educational institutions. ~ Midwest Book Review.com"", ""Neary’s brilliant and timely book sets forth an inspiring alternative to today’s neoliberal university – teaching and learning are no longer to be mere training for wage labour but a ‘commons’ in which the roles of student and teacher circulate freely. The production of knowledge – by student and teacher alike – becomes the dynamic principle of a critical pedagogy with revolutionary horizons. In Neary’s fascinating work learning becomes liberation and the university begins to prefigure an emancipated world.\n\n~ Richard Gunn & Adrian Wilding, authors of Revolutionary Recognition""]" Superactually,"[""Chuk Moran""]","A bunch of tiny essays on life after irony, this is a book to help smart people feel hip and hip people feel smart.","To speak ironically is to speak just for the effect. To speak superactually is to do something with words and take responsibility for that action. This is a book of short, provocative essays. Some are on fun topics in pop culture (hackers, dubstep, cat memes, thinking green, parkour, and the girl next door). Others are takes on technical topics in social theory (sensation, hype, discrimination, imagination, and the typical). This is a book to help smart people feel hip and hip people feel smart.","To speak ironically is to speak just for the effect. To speak superactually is to do something with words and take responsibility for that action. This is a book of short, provocative essays. Some are on fun topics in pop culture (hackers, dubstep, cat memes, thinking green, parkour, and the girl next door). Others are takes on technical topics in social theory (sensation, hype, discrimination, imagination, and the typical). This is a book to help smart people feel hip and hip people feel smart.",2,"[""Theory today is not dead, but perhaps it should be euthanized. We can no longer hear signal over the noise of its predictable wheeze, its message long since shrouded by an illness borne long ago from youthful indulgences. Chucking aside this death mask, Moran asks, what if theory arose not from the obsessive study of meaning, representation, sexuality, economics, culture, and so on, but from the real ordinariness of chicken salad and ultimate fighting and hoodies and automobiles. ~ Ian Bogost, author of Persuasive Games and Alien Phenomenology"", ""Superactually is aphoristic anti-philosophy in the spirit of Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. But these short meditations are lighter and sweeter, more writerly, at times funny and fun, directed straight at the world. Something like Barthes' Mythologies for the new millennium. You will find much to like here, from dubstep to sex, from parkour to the apocalypse, from cliches like \""the girl next door\"" to the high theory of Deleuze or Foucault. The question: why write? The answer: to provoke thought. ~ Alexander Galloway, author of The Exploit, Protocol, and Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture.""]" Surrealpolitik,"[""John Schoneboom""]","Dream, myth, delusion, and reality collide in this surrealist navigation of the national security state.","Our times are not just weird, but literally surreal: we live in a paranoid, increasingly authoritarian culture in which the real, the presumed and the purported are indistinguishable strands of a dense hallucinatory web of mediated spectacles. Surrealpolitik takes up cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s challenge to expose capitalist realism’s 'realism' as nothing of the sort. To subject the symbolic order to a surrealist mode of inquiry is to transgress taboos, reveal biases and inconsistencies, test assumptions and investigate the extent to which the real is, like our dreams - a fungible projection of our unconscious expectations. The nexus of dreams, hyperreality, paranoia, totalitarianism, terror, art, myth and culture is where realpolitik becomes the surrealpolitik of the title.","Our times are not just weird, but literally surreal: we live in a paranoid, increasingly authoritarian culture in which the real, the presumed and the purported are indistinguishable strands of a dense hallucinatory web of mediated spectacles. Surrealpolitik takes up cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s challenge to expose capitalist realism’s 'realism' as nothing of the sort. To subject the symbolic order to a surrealist mode of inquiry is to transgress taboos, reveal biases and inconsistencies, test assumptions and investigate the extent to which the real is, like our dreams - a fungible projection of our unconscious expectations. The nexus of dreams, hyperreality, paranoia, totalitarianism, terror, art, myth and culture is where realpolitik becomes the surrealpolitik of the title.",2,"[""\""Amazing...A fierce, lucid intervention against the regime of an exclusionary 'realism' which, in its marginalization of the dreamlife, not only starves us with a deadly-dull aesthetics but forms a lid clamped on the imaginative urgencies required to fight our way into a post-capitalist, post-surveillance future.\"" ~ Jonathan Lethem, via email"", ""Novelist and cultural critic John Schoneboom confronts the weirdness of modernity with humour, originality and insight. Wide ranging and engagingly written, Surrealpolitik argues that today’s consumerist surveillance state is not merely surreal in the everyday sense, but can be understood through the concerns of the original Surrealist art movement. Surprising and at times unsettling, it’s a consistently thought-provoking intervention in the debate of our time. ~ Andrew Crumey (novelist), via email""]" Sweetening the Pill,"[""Holly Grigg-Spall""]",Is it really true? Has contraception liberated or oppressed women?,"Millions of healthy women take a powerful medication every day from their mid-teens to menopause - the Pill - but few know how this drug works or the potential side effects. Contrary to cultural myth, the birth-control pill impacts on every organ and function of the body, and yet most women do not even think of it as a drug. Depression, anxiety, paranoia, rage, panic attacks - just a few of the effects of the Pill on half of the over 80% of women who pop these tablets during their lifetimes. When the Pill was released, it was thought that women would not submit to taking a medication each day when they were not sick. Now the Pill is making women sick. However, there are a growing number of women looking for non-hormonal alternatives for preventing pregnancy. In a bid to spark the backlash against hormonal contraceptives, this book asks: Why can't we criticize the Pill?","Millions of healthy women take a powerful medication every day from their mid-teens to menopause - the Pill - but few know how this drug works or the potential side effects. Contrary to cultural myth, the birth-control pill impacts on every organ and function of the body, and yet most women do not even think of it as a drug. Depression, anxiety, paranoia, rage, panic attacks - just a few of the effects of the Pill on half of the over 80% of women who pop these tablets during their lifetimes. When the Pill was released, it was thought that women would not submit to taking a medication each day when they were not sick. Now the Pill is making women sick. However, there are a growing number of women looking for non-hormonal alternatives for preventing pregnancy. In a bid to spark the backlash against hormonal contraceptives, this book asks: Why can't we criticize the Pill?",7,"[""Thank you! Grigg-Spall hit the the mark with this book. The pill always struck me as wrong for a multitude of reasons. I am so glad so many younger women are coming around to see it as the toxin it is. Yes, this is one great book and well worth reading- and giving as a gift to our daughters, nieces, other female friends. Kudos on a very well written and insightful book! ~ Catherine Hankins, Cleveland Public Library Brooklyn Branch"", ""Featured with 6 other Zero titles on \""Publishers in Focus\"" webpage by Blackwell Oxford\n\n\""Many publishers struggle to get the exposure that we feel their books deserve. On this page we will bring you a selection of the independent, interesting and essential that are worthy of greater attention\"" ~ Blackwell Oxford"", ""Holly Grigg-Spall is fearless, and her courageous advocacy on behalf of women whose stories are too often silenced is a model for others trying to make positive change through health activism. Read the book and get inspired, get angry, and most importantly get information. Sweetening the Pill is exactly the thing needed to energize and mobilize this important women's health conversation.\n\n~ Laura Eldridge, author of In Our Control: The Complete Guide to Contraceptive Choices for Women"", ""Holly Grigg-Spall effectively melts the candy coating that obscures a simple truth: what we don’t know, can indeed hurt us. Sweetening the Pill, equal parts personal journey, investigative journalism and feminist manifesto, cracks open the paternalist and corporate-driven ethos of self-improvement that undermines women’s body literacy. We’ve got to demand better: more transparency, more options and more support for self-determined health care. Getting there begins with the kind of courageous inquiry Grigg-Spall inspires.\n\n~ Chris Bobel, associate professor of Women’s Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston and author of New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politic"", ""In Sweetening the Pill, Holly Grigg-Spall lays out the reality of hormonal contraception, and the ubiquitous political and commercial interests at play, with breathtaking precision. With most young women using these drugs, and providers cynically side-stepping informed consent and respectful consultation, this is a core and urgent issue of our time. If you are interested in teen girl and womens' health, and the wellbeing and evolution of society as a whole, read Sweetening the Pill. It's a riveting read and a powerful tool for change.\n\n~ Jane Bennett, co-author of The Pill: Are You Sure It’s For You? and The Natural Fertility Management Contraception Kit and A Blessing Not A Curse."", ""We discovered in the ‘70s that the personal is political. Holly Grigg-Spall starts with her and other women’s personal experiences with the Pill, then thoughtfully and thoroughly considers it scientifically, medically and philosophically to discover the political truth of the Pill. She shares strategies for finding new ways to control our fertility while regaining control of our destiny. Grigg-Spall’s careful study on the Pill’s effect on women’s health is long, long overdue. We are so busy fighting to keep hormonal birth control available that we don’t want to question what it is doing to our health and our lives. After reading this book, we can never see the Pill in the same way again.\n\n~ Carol Downer, veteran women’s health activist and author of A New View of a Woman’s Body, How to Stay Out of the Gynecologist’s Office, A Woman’s Book"", ""Oral contraceptives have done so much for so many, but when they don't stand up to scrutiny, women have a right to know more.\n\nSweetening The Pill is a fascinating and up-to-the-minute account of the persistent questions around the effects of birth-control pills. Holly Grigg-Spall's cross-cultural perspective provides keen insights into the impact of the latest US health care initiatives.\n\nConsolidating personal testimonies, current thought and the controversy surrounding the widespread and prolonged use of oral contraception, this book is a toolkit for action.\n\n~ Chella Quint is a writer, performer and educator at Adventures in Menstruating.""]" Take Hold of Our History,"[""Harvey J. Kaye""]","A call to remember, redeem, and embrace the American radical tradition in favor of cultivating American historical memory and imagination, and making America radical once again.","The eighteen essays and speeches in Take Hold of Our History render a manifesto – a call to remember, redeem, and embrace the American radical story and tradition in favor of cultivating American historical memory and imagination and making America radical once again. For too long we have allowed the right to hijack the past and suppress, efface, lie about, and/or appropriate the essentially radical story of America from the struggles of the Revolution to those of the Age of Roosevelt and the 1960s. And no less tragically, we on the left, apparently haunted by the worst of our national experience, have turned our back on our own story and deferred to the tales of conservatives and reactionaries. Fleeing from the past, we merely compound the tragedies and ironies of American history, for we turn our backs on both the nation’s democratic creed and radical imperative, but also the struggles from the bottom up, the struggles in which working people and others have laid hold of America’s revolutionary promise and succeeded in making the United States freer, more equal and more democratic, at times, radically so. As Bill Moyers put it in 2008: “Here in the first decade of the twenty-first century the story that becomes America’s dominant narrative will shape our collective imagination and our politics for a long time.” The time has come for us to advance that narrative.","The eighteen essays and speeches in Take Hold of Our History render a manifesto – a call to remember, redeem, and embrace the American radical story and tradition in favor of cultivating American historical memory and imagination and making America radical once again. For too long we have allowed the right to hijack the past and suppress, efface, lie about, and/or appropriate the essentially radical story of America from the struggles of the Revolution to those of the Age of Roosevelt and the 1960s. And no less tragically, we on the left, apparently haunted by the worst of our national experience, have turned our back on our own story and deferred to the tales of conservatives and reactionaries. Fleeing from the past, we merely compound the tragedies and ironies of American history, for we turn our backs on both the nation’s democratic creed and radical imperative, but also the struggles from the bottom up, the struggles in which working people and others have laid hold of America’s revolutionary promise and succeeded in making the United States freer, more equal and more democratic, at times, radically so. As Bill Moyers put it in 2008: “Here in the first decade of the twenty-first century the story that becomes America’s dominant narrative will shape our collective imagination and our politics for a long time.” The time has come for us to advance that narrative.",11,"[""5 out of 5 stars: I've read all of Harvey Kaye's books and this one is just as energizing, just as thoughtful, and just as full of history and the vital things citizens of democracy need to know. In these dark times, if you're searching for a light run toward Prof. Kaye's books. ~ Sarah Sime, Amazon"", ""5 out of 5 stars: An excellent look into the American political system and how we have shifted so far from our radical roots. Harvey Kaye yet again inspires readers to return to what made America great in the first place while captivating audiences with historical context. ~ Jamine & Moriah White, Amazon"", ""5 out of 5 stars: If you're looking at this just buy it, trust me. Great research you can have without having to do any of the work... the author did it for us. Thank you kind Sir. ~ Brooke, Amazon"", ""5 out of 5 stars: In order to understand the present moment in American history and to look toward the future with hope, it’s essential that we understand our history, our revolutionary past. This book explains the root of progressive thought in America all the way to our founding fathers and Thomas Paine. I love picking up a book that I can open and begin reading on any page! The essays are a great collections of writings and speeches by Professor Harvey Kaye. I could not agree with him more, we need a new story in America and we need leaders who tell that story honestly. This country was founded by revolutionaries and asThomas Paine once said it , we have it in our power to begin the world over again. This book offers serious reflection on our present moment and many quotable lines. Highly recommend. ~ Simon Grace, Amazon"", ""5 out of 5 stars: Words we need today! Great collection from the author - specifically on reclaiming ideas like “American Exceptionalism” (which was commandeered by the right) and embracing an American tradition of radical action for the left. ~ Christian, Amazon"", ""Standing at the intersection of the past and the future stands Harvey Kaye, our great radical historian. Kaye practices his craft in the tradition of E.P. Thompson and Howard Zinn, turning our attention to neglected individuals, moments and messages that illuminate our understanding of who we have been and who we are. Yet, Harvey Kaye brings to his scholarship a distinctive academic commitment, as readers of this fine book will quickly and surely recognize. He believes, correctly, that our revolutionary past provides the truest evidence that another world is possible. ~ John Nichols, The Nation"", ""Harvey Kaye doesn’t just write about history, he uses history to show exactly where we are today - and where we could take it. He has the wisdom of a sage, the passion of a prophet, and the intelligence of a true patriot. And he writes with compassion and guts. ~ John Fugelsang, host of SiriusXM’s Tell Me Everything"", ""Harvey Kaye is our essential and always engaging guide to owning our progressive history. America has a rich progressive social-democratic history that has been obscured by the Right and all too often ignored by the Left. But now, as Bernie Sanders leads a social-democratic presidential campaign, we have an opportunity to assert a new politics. Whatever your politics are, you need to know this history and argument. ~ Michael Brooks, The Michael Brooks Show"", ""No one has ever loved a nation more or spanked it harder for straying from its premise than Harvey Kaye. ~ Norman Lear, TV/Writer and Producer (All in the Family) and Founder of People for the American Way"", ""Progressives have often allowed the right to co-opt American values and history, distorting them for their own use. This collection is a call to arms for progressives to reclaim the mantle of patriotism and resist right wing authoritarianism with the only thing that has ever worked, a pro-worker progressive agenda. Harvey Kaye does the essential work of explaining why now is the time to be in the words of FDR: “fairly radical for a generation.” ~ Krystal Ball, Rising on Hill.TV"", ""Harvey Kaye does it again, with a brilliant, historically-grounded, deeply insightful prescription to our nation's ills – grounded in what we already know works! Read, share, and act! ~ Thom Hartmann, The Thom Hartmann Show""]" Tentacles Longer Than Night,"[""Eugene Thacker""]","Systematic, comprehensive exploration of the links between philosophy, religion, and the horror genre.","Our contemporary horror stories are written in a world where there seems little faith, lost hope, and no salvation. All that remains is the fragmentary and occasionally lyrical testimony of the human being struggling to confront its lack of reason for being in the vast cosmos. This is the terrain of the horror genre. Eugene Thacker explores this situation in Tentacles Longer Than Night. Extending the ideas presented in his book In The Dust of This Planet, Thacker considers the relationship between philosophy and the horror genre. But instead of taking fiction as the mere illustration of ideas, Thacker reads horror stories as if they themselves were works of philosophy, driven by a speculative urge to question human knowledge and the human-centric view of the world, ultimately leading to the limit of the human - thought undermining itself, in thought. Tentacles Longer Than Night is the third volume of the ""horror of philosophy"" trilogy, together with the first volume, In The Dust of This Planet, and the second volume, Starry Speculative Corpse.","Our contemporary horror stories are written in a world where there seems little faith, lost hope, and no salvation. All that remains is the fragmentary and occasionally lyrical testimony of the human being struggling to confront its lack of reason for being in the vast cosmos. This is the terrain of the horror genre. Eugene Thacker explores this situation in Tentacles Longer Than Night. Extending the ideas presented in his book In The Dust of This Planet, Thacker considers the relationship between philosophy and the horror genre. But instead of taking fiction as the mere illustration of ideas, Thacker reads horror stories as if they themselves were works of philosophy, driven by a speculative urge to question human knowledge and the human-centric view of the world, ultimately leading to the limit of the human - thought undermining itself, in thought. Tentacles Longer Than Night is the third volume of the ""horror of philosophy"" trilogy, together with the first volume, In The Dust of This Planet, and the second volume, Starry Speculative Corpse.",1,"[""\""In showing that it can sustain a lucid conversation with philosophy, Thacker's writing also treats horror literature as literature. Students of both philosophy and horror will find surprising inter-illuminations in these three books.\""\n\nMichael Cisco, author of The Divinity Student ~ Michael Cisco""]" That Existential Leap: a crime story,"[""Dolan Cummings""]","A riveting novel that toys with the conventions of detective and gangster novels, giving them a sharp, philosophical twist.","Part bildungsroman and part psychological thriller, That Existential Leap is a novel of ideas about the struggle for self-realisation and belonging in the postmodern West. Claudette Dasgupta is a thoughtful but unremarkable American teenager unenthusiastic about the prospect of college and a conventional life. When she meets the heroically mysterious Siegfried at the New York Public Library, she barely hesitates to throw in her lot with him, but soon finds an unscripted life is scarier, and harder, than she could have imagined. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Siegfried’s home town Glasgow, unconventional police detective Alexander investigates his disappearance. Alexander is soon caught up in still more unworldly affairs as his work spirals out of control and his personal life unravels. As the two stories wrap around one another, encompassing the worlds of crime and gangsterism, the law and police work, music and the supernatural, Dolan Cummings' novel explores the terrifying uncertainty at the core of all human relationships.","Part bildungsroman and part psychological thriller, That Existential Leap is a novel of ideas about the struggle for self-realisation and belonging in the postmodern West. Claudette Dasgupta is a thoughtful but unremarkable American teenager unenthusiastic about the prospect of college and a conventional life. When she meets the heroically mysterious Siegfried at the New York Public Library, she barely hesitates to throw in her lot with him, but soon finds an unscripted life is scarier, and harder, than she could have imagined. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Siegfried’s home town Glasgow, unconventional police detective Alexander investigates his disappearance. Alexander is soon caught up in still more unworldly affairs as his work spirals out of control and his personal life unravels. As the two stories wrap around one another, encompassing the worlds of crime and gangsterism, the law and police work, music and the supernatural, Dolan Cummings' novel explores the terrifying uncertainty at the core of all human relationships.",3,"[""Dolan Cummings built his novel around a set of ideas. The prime virtue is individualism, the prime vice conformity. There are two stories — not stories, really, but idea vehicles — loosely connected. One is set in New York and features a narrator who named herself Claudette, and her boyfriend, Seigfried. The latter is the book’s hero because he is supposedly an arch individual, demanding that the world move out of his way so he can define him-self. The other story is narrated by some sort of ephemeral being that examines a Scottish police inspector named Alexander; this arc does have some elements of storytelling due to Alexander’s string of romances. He is the head of the Occult Crimes unit, his self-defined project to negate occult motives and thus demand full perpetrator responsibility.\n\nThe philosophical discussion about free will and responsibility for both the good and evil in one’s life is the book’s strongest point. There are moments that are intriguing, such as when Satan tells Alexander how he found it “creepy” the way Jesus’ disciples followed him automatically. This suggests that they were essentially brainwashed and connects to the larger discussion of the hordes of anti-Seigfrieds who voluntarily sacrifice their precious freedom to self-define by opting for conformity. In contrast to the brainwashing rapists who abound in the novel, Seigfried’s group commit victimless crimes that supposedly accentuate their selfhood.\n\nThe problem with this novel is that I was able to fit way too much of its whole in my summary above. Aside from the somewhat involving romances of Alexander, the characters all fall flat because the entire book is summary with-out evocative detail. Cummings sacrificed the couching I intended to do by having a documentarian studying Seigfried directly criticize the useful-if-banal writing tenet “show, don’t tell.” On the same page, Claudette made a joke lambasting solipsism and I actually laughed aloud, since she and Seigfried are the most navel-gazing characters I have ever read. If Cummings had shown instead of told/summarized, he would have had to answer in advance my five bajillion plausibility questions and had living characters.\n\nLet Seigfried stand as my example. Seigfried is a genius who can embezzle at will. As with most of Alexander’s police procedure, the mechanics of the embezzling are never explained. Seigfried, who has five or 10 lines of dialogue in the entire book, is also a masterful fighter. There are casual references to other things he’s magically able to do. If you’re going to write a book about humans forging their own identities, don’t centre it around a superhuman human. ~ Norman Feliks Jezioranski, http://www.brokenpencil.com/news/book-review-that-existential-leap"", ""How dreadful the knowledge of truth can be’, says the unfortunate hero of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, ‘when there is no help in truth’. So concludes one of the Western canon’s earliest extant detective stories – a cool rational attempt to uncover the source of a society’s malaise, which, ultimately, leaves us wondering what the point of it all is.\n\nStill, the genre of crime novels and detective stories has flourished in modern times. It seeks to reassure us of the fundamental soundness of society’s laws and institutions, while creating attractively lone, determinedly individual heroes to do so. It recognises the persistence of evil, but provides us with the consolation that it can be temporarily halted.\n\nBut why, a reader might wonder, has author (and regular spiked contributor) Dolan Cummings dressed up his debut crime novel, That Existential Leap: A Crime Story, in the esoteric language of existential philosophy? Perhaps it is because almost all crime stories require us to take an existential leap at some point, in deciding, for instance, to side with the criminal or the law, the desire for justice or the appearance of it.\n\nWhile the majority of That Existential Leap’s action takes place in New York and Glasgow, it would be a foolish TV producer who pitched this novel as CSI meets Taggart. It centres on a detective and a criminal, and features a high enough body count in its 200 pages to keep crime-genre fans happy, but it is far from a straightforward take on the genre. It might just get by as True Detective meets Gregory’s Girl, after a few drinks.\n\nStructurally, the novel sets itself up as a classic struggle between a compelling criminal and a doubt-struck detective. Siegfried is an otherwise unremarkable but supremely resourceful young man who, in one daring act of fraud and another opportunistic act of selfless larceny, flees Glasgow for New York and becomes – in a possible nod to the contemporary TV Sherlock’s Moriarty – a sort of consulting criminal.\n\nBack in Scotland, DI Alexander (we never find out his first name) is stuck investigating a crime for which there is little social benefit in solving – the murder of a petty criminal and thug by a protective older sister – and a series of occult-related deaths for which there is a clear social benefit in solving, but little actual evidence. At work he is facing pressure from an NGO with a strong purpose and sinisterly ill-defined demands. And at home, his head is being turned from a loveless marriage towards an underage schoolgirl through some possibly psychotic visions of the devil.\n\nOur criminal spends the novel not committing crimes but solving problems; our detective manages to solve most of his problems but hardly any of the crimes. Yet the novel neither damns the law nor advocates extra-judicial killing. As an orthodox crime story then, That Existential Leap is an unqualified disaster.\n\nFortunately, it is clearly not intended as such. Alexander and Siegfried are only tangentially connected; the novel is largely told from the perspective of Siegfried’s girlfriend Claudette, a precocious Indian-American college student. It is predominantly through her conjecture, assumptions and fantasies about the interior worlds of others that the action of the novel unfolds. It is she who eventually develops as the most interesting character.\n\nThat Existential Leap gradually reveals itself to be not so much a battle between good and evil, or law versus natural right, as a portrait of the contemporary besieged individual trying to come of age in a world of few clear moral certainties.\n\nSuch an approach – evident in its Wagnerian leitmotif and its dark picaresque – may seem a curiously convoluted one. Then again, you only need to spend an afternoon trawling through the demi-worlds of online youth culture to remind yourself how thrillingly exhausting it is to develop an individual ethical framework where your only references are pop culture.\n\nFrom the social-justice warfare of Tumblr to the bracing cruelties of alt-right trolls, we are never far from the spectacle of young people attempting to make some kind of moral and intellectual sense of the world with few traditional institutions to guide them. It is an often grisly sight, especially as the unresolved intra-generational culture wars move increasingly into the real world.\n\nIn many ways, That Existential Leap is a sincere attempt to grapple with and articulate that struggle between the individual and society, and perhaps find a way to transcend it. Siegfried initially appears as a kind of ultra-individualist Übermensch ripped straight from the pages of Ayn Rand: resourceful, pro-active and hyper-rationalist. Alexander is the self-reflective guardian of the social good, whose work has come at the cost of his own life and those closest to him.\n\nYet while Sartre’s oft-misunderstood claim that ‘hell is other people’ may be every teenage existentialist’s maxim, That Existential Leap gives other people a much better hearing. It is left to the most infuriating and well-rounded character to suggest there may be a third way between the rugged individual and society’s sacrificial lamb:\n\n‘Somewhere between individual self-mastery and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is, or ought to be, real life. That is the human world of possibilities and constraints that make sense because even if we are not individually responsible for them, we are in some sense connected to them, complicit in them…Isn’t the point of human society to diminish contingency, or at least to render it human? To make us all, collectively if not individually, the authors of our own destiny?’\n\nThis is the door that That Existential Leap prises open for the reader.\n\nThat is not to say there aren’t problems with That Existential Leap. It can be overly episodic and suffers at points from being poorly structured. But it can also be very funny and, in showing how self-alienation suffocates attempts at human connection, it is beautifully observed. This is a debut of genuine promise.\n\nLike all fiction, That Existential Leap is not much of a manual for living. Yet it does start to provide a glimpse of how you could start. Hopefully we’ll get to see where Cummings leads us next.\n\nDavid Bowden is a writer and reviewer based in London. ~ David Bowden, http://www.spiked-online.com"", ""That Existential Leap: a crime story by Dolan Cummings is the kind of book you just want to be immersed in, hoping it doesn’t end.\n\nThe two male protagonists, one primarily in New York, one in Scotland, both flawed and engaging, allow the reader a thought-provoking exposure to two minds that stimulate your own existential thoughts as these characters navigate their worlds. Most interesting, That Existential Leap:…does not hit you over the head with heady academic philosophy. Rather these young men of working class roots take you into their insights and struggles with just the right amount of intrigue of character and quirky uniqueness without being annoying—a feat not easily attained.\n\nWe are introduced to Siegfried, who seems to be a cross between his idol, Raskolnikov, from Crime and Punishment and Ignatius J. Reilly, from Confederacy of Dunces, through the insightful eyes of his young girlfriend as she attempts to manage her own existential questions of how to enter adulthood. She notes that according to Siegfried:\n\n\""The narrow and predictable biography of the average human being is really quite disturbing. What is more disturbing perhaps is that this is no secret. Everybody who has ever bothered to think about it can see that there are infinite possibilities in life, and yet still they plow that same furrow, or at least choose their furrows from the same field, so to speak. Siegfried wouldn’t have objected if they were talking about a good field, but really it isn’t a good field at all. The deliberate choice of a dull and miserable life seemed to Siegfried to be inexcusable, and yet it was the norm, the reality.\""\n\nAnd Alexander, our brilliantly dysphoric detective from Scotland presents his own existential musings that are less heady yet equally intriguing and seductive.\n\n\""Alexander realized that his love was dead. But he began to see something new in Laura. Something that suggested the relationship might be worth pursuing after all. Not the promise of happiness that he had never really wanted anyway, but something far more in keeping with his personality, and indeed his ambition. As the love that had become lust turned finally to resentment, it hit him. Laura would make an excellent wife.\""\n\nI found that I was highlighting and re-reading many lines or full paragraphs, looking up to ponder the narrative, smiling to myself about the places it led me, or reading to whomever was near—this is a sign of a novel that challenges without overwhelming. I highly recommend The Existential Leap: a crime story, and look forward to the next novel by Dolan Cummings.\n\nI received this novel as an Advanced Reader Copy from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. As you can see from my review, I very much appreciated the opportunity. Publication date is May 26,2017. ~ Nancy Burkey, www.nancyburkey.com""]" That Option No Longer Exists,"[""John Medhurst""]","The 1970s in Britain were years of immense social, cultural and political liberation aborted by a right-wing counter revolution.","It is time to look afresh at the 1970s. It was not a grey decade of decline, defeat and power blackouts. Bursting with cultural experimentation, sexual liberation and industrial militancy, the 1970s saw the ruling elites of Britain challenged at every level, most especially by a Labour left led by Tony Benn which aimed to effect a ""fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people"". That Option No Longer Exists reveals a hidden history - how Benn and the left tried to reform British industry, to introduce democracy in the workplace and overturn the power of Finance; and how Whitehall, the security services and the City fought back, paving the way for Thatcher to re-establish the rule of money and the markets. Britain almost took a different path in 1974-76 to that of massive wealth inequality, the dominance of the City, and the slow death of the welfare state. This is the story of a struggle within government almost forgotten, and of a tragic turning point in British history.","It is time to look afresh at the 1970s. It was not a grey decade of decline, defeat and power blackouts. Bursting with cultural experimentation, sexual liberation and industrial militancy, the 1970s saw the ruling elites of Britain challenged at every level, most especially by a Labour left led by Tony Benn which aimed to effect a ""fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people"". That Option No Longer Exists reveals a hidden history - how Benn and the left tried to reform British industry, to introduce democracy in the workplace and overturn the power of Finance; and how Whitehall, the security services and the City fought back, paving the way for Thatcher to re-establish the rule of money and the markets. Britain almost took a different path in 1974-76 to that of massive wealth inequality, the dominance of the City, and the slow death of the welfare state. This is the story of a struggle within government almost forgotten, and of a tragic turning point in British history.",5,"[""An excellent outline of the political landscape of the 1970s is a welcome antidote to cliched analyses of the decade, http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-618d-Myth-buster#.VIdWAtKDmSp ~ Steve Andrews, Morning Star"", ""The 1970's were a turning point in a fiercely contested transition between the exhaustion of the post-war order and what was to follow the welfare state. Because of the radical directions and possibilities opened up by the wider left of the 70s – and the powerful interests challenged by their self-confident democracy - the period has since been demonised by media, corporate and political establishments alike. And yet retrieving the real history and ideas born in the experimental turmoil of those years, is vital for breaking out of the present era of reaction. In That Option No Longer Exists John Medhurst has done the left a huge service by carrying out exactly this retrieval and doing it with rigour and flair. A really excellent book. ~ Hilary Wainwright, editor Red Pepper, author Beyond the Fragments."", ""In That Option No longer Exists, John Medhurst provides a lucid and powerfully argued case for returning to the middle years of the 1970s to understand what social, economic and political progress could have been made in Britain. He shows that these years were a turning point, with the potential for progress stymied by the forces of right-wing conservativism and reaction.\n\nCritically, he suggests that we have in our power the ability to re-imagine that sort of potential today. ~ Gregor Gall, Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Bradford."", ""John Medhurst has produced a brilliantly written polemic, with real verve and style, on leftwing politics and policies in the Britain of the 1970s. He demonstrates how the left of the Labour Party had both cogent analysis and viable policies to move the country forward but was undermined by right-wing colleagues, the media, and the entire panoply of the secret state apparatus.\n\nThe book redefines the 1970s and will be widely read as a contribution to the current debate on the future of the Labour Party and the labour movement. ~ Roger Seifert, Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Wolverhampton Business School."", ""John Medhurst offers a important and well-informed account of the state of the UK during the early and mid-1970s, and a new perspective on the Wilson and Callaghan governments of the mid to late 70s. The analysis challenges the prevailing mainstream view of this period as one dominated only by crisis and instability and offers a more positive interpretation. As such the book present a long overdue alternative perspective on the period before the advent of the Thatcher era, particularly when it comes to the role of the trade unions and broader left. Medhurst presents a thorough analysis of the internal and external challenges the Labour governments in Britain faced during that period.\n\nThe book is written in an approachable and readable style and Medhurst avoids becoming a hostage of unreasonable bias himself. His observations are well-founded and based on evidential historic analysis. This book is a highly recommended read for anyone with an interest in British political history. It will hopefully contribute to a new perspective on Britain under Labour in the 1970s. ~ Christian Schweiger, Professor of Government and International Affairs, Durham University.""]" The Ultraviolet Catastrophe,"[""Susan Finlay""]",A head-trip through capitalism’s final frontier.,"Legal-high addict, gaming enthusiast, and principal shareholder of AstroLabs™, Lex Rameses, has recently discovered—and purchased—Proserpina: a planet with a near-identical ecosystem to Earth’s. Yet, although his humanistic, hipster pretensions mean that many people admire him, there is still one thing standing in the way of his space-colonization program: as of yet, there is no way to travel to Proserpina safely. Enter a cast of mad scientists, Astro–Marxists, a neurorobotic AI hivemind, an extinction anxiety addict, the victims of an interrelated crypto-currency gaming scam, and a seemingly endless succession of ravers and gamers in search of the ultimate hallucinogenic, carcinogenic, neü-space-age high…","Legal-high addict, gaming enthusiast, and principal shareholder of AstroLabs™, Lex Rameses, has recently discovered—and purchased—Proserpina: a planet with a near-identical ecosystem to Earth’s. Yet, although his humanistic, hipster pretensions mean that many people admire him, there is still one thing standing in the way of his space-colonization program: as of yet, there is no way to travel to Proserpina safely. Enter a cast of mad scientists, Astro–Marxists, a neurorobotic AI hivemind, an extinction anxiety addict, the victims of an interrelated crypto-currency gaming scam, and a seemingly endless succession of ravers and gamers in search of the ultimate hallucinogenic, carcinogenic, neü-space-age high…",6,"[""\""Nothing and no-one is spared by the acid tongue of this novel – not even the kitchen implements, not even you. A techno-utopia-takedown-turned-techno-curious-trip, The Ultraviolet Catastrophe is a jolt to the brain, a nightmare, a riot and, like everything Finlay does, impossible not to love.\"" ~ Amber Husain, author of Tell Me How You Eat"", ""\""Susan Finlay's The Ultraviolet Catastrophe is a vivid techno-apocalypso, a work of hard(ly) SF wherein designer-drugged, synthetically-opioid, over-stimulated prose vonnegutly pynchons its way through an alternative present/near future/ five minutes past New Berlin populated by (P.K.) dick-ish characters. It features a proper baddie called Lex Ramesses, giraffes, rubber masks, floating heads, and a hero worried about his sperm count. Follow the book's own (il)logic, get lost, enjoy the detour into (to mod a blurbing cliché) the anxious thrill of what it means to be post-human, or just alive, now, in the MMORPG which we might call the grinning nightmare which is contemporary life.\"" ~ C.D. Rose, Goldsmiths Prize winning author of We Live Here Now"", ""\""Susan Finlay has her finger on the pulse of Berlin.\"" ~ Tom McCarthy, two-time Booker Prize shortlisted author of C and Satin Island"", ""\""The Ultraviolet Catastrophe is raucous, hilarious, irreverent, and wildly smart, taking aim at techno-salvation fantasies, startup culture, and the eternal humiliation of having a body under the ridiculous conditions of late capitalism. Finlay's new novel is as unexpected and unique as all of her work. Read it now.\"" ~ Elvia Wilk, author of Oval and Death by Landscape"", ""\""A wild, genre-bending blast with real scale and sweep. The Three Body Problem meets Blue Lard.\"" ~ Mariel Franklin author of Bonding"", ""Hallucinatory and haunting, the reverse-accelerationist dystopia of The Ultraviolet Catastrophe is pure stinging pleasure. Satire targets range from Muskian tech overlords harvesting memories for an illusory offworld, to gender-blending plebes in a post-woke Berlin. Throughout, there’s an end-of-days dread of pending doom. This Götterdämmerung rings for them and thee. ~ Jack Skelley, author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker""]" "Thing, The","[""Dylan Trigg""]",Phenomenology redefined through body horror.,"What is the human body? Both the most familiar and unfamiliar of things, the body is the centre of experience but also the site of a prehistory anterior to any experience. Alien and uncanny, this other side of the body has all too often been overlooked by phenomenology. In confronting this oversight, Dylan Trigg’s The Thing redefines phenomenology as a species of realism, which he terms unhuman phenomenology. Far from being the vehicle of a human voice, this unhuman phenomenology gives expression to the alien materiality at the limit of experience. By fusing the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Levinas with the horrors of John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and H.P. Lovecraft, Trigg explores the ways in which an unhuman phenomenology positions the body out of time. At once a challenge to traditional notions of phenomenology, The Thing is also a timely rejoinder to contemporary philosophies of realism. The result is nothing less than a rebirth of phenomenology as redefined through the lens of horror.","What is the human body? Both the most familiar and unfamiliar of things, the body is the centre of experience but also the site of a prehistory anterior to any experience. Alien and uncanny, this other side of the body has all too often been overlooked by phenomenology. In confronting this oversight, Dylan Trigg’s The Thing redefines phenomenology as a species of realism, which he terms unhuman phenomenology. Far from being the vehicle of a human voice, this unhuman phenomenology gives expression to the alien materiality at the limit of experience. By fusing the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Levinas with the horrors of John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and H.P. Lovecraft, Trigg explores the ways in which an unhuman phenomenology positions the body out of time. At once a challenge to traditional notions of phenomenology, The Thing is also a timely rejoinder to contemporary philosophies of realism. The result is nothing less than a rebirth of phenomenology as redefined through the lens of horror.",2,"[""Dylan Trigg's The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror takes up the central challenge of contemporary philosophy - grappling with the world as indifferent to human constructs and concepts. Trigg's analysis suggests to us that phenomenology - too often regarded as a philosophy of the human par excellence - is uncannily suited to thinking the world-without-us. Husserl writing horror fiction is the spirit of this study. ~ Eugene Thacker, author of In The Dust Of This Planet"", ""Dylan Trigg's The Thing is a sophisticated melding of philosophy, literary criticism, and film criticism that underscores his major thesis that 'the horror of the cosmos is essentially the horror of the body.' Its discussions of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, the films of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, and other texts and films allow us to look at these works from a fascinating new perspective while shedding light on humanity's fragility in a boundless cosmos. ~ S. T. Joshi""]" This Space of Writing,"[""Stephen Mitchelmore""]",A renewed appreciation of the mystery and promise of writing.,"What does 'literature' mean in our time? While names like Proust, Kafka and Woolf still stand for something, what that something actually is has become obscured by the claims of commerce and journalism. Perhaps a new form of attention is required. Stephen Mitchelmore began writing online in 1996 and became Britain's first book blogger soon after, developing the form so that it can respond in kind to the singular space opened by writing. Across 44 essays, he discusses among many others the novels of Richard Ford, Jeanette Winterson and Karl Ove Knausgaard, the significance for modern writers of cave paintings and the moai of Easter Island, and the enduring fallacy of 'Reality Hunger', all the while maintaining a focus on the strange nature of literary space. By listening to the echoes and resonances of writing, this book enables a unique encounter with literature that many critics habitually ignore. With an introduction by the acclaimed novelist Lars Iyer, This Space of Writing offers a renewed appreciation of the mystery and promise of writing.","What does 'literature' mean in our time? While names like Proust, Kafka and Woolf still stand for something, what that something actually is has become obscured by the claims of commerce and journalism. Perhaps a new form of attention is required. Stephen Mitchelmore began writing online in 1996 and became Britain's first book blogger soon after, developing the form so that it can respond in kind to the singular space opened by writing. Across 44 essays, he discusses among many others the novels of Richard Ford, Jeanette Winterson and Karl Ove Knausgaard, the significance for modern writers of cave paintings and the moai of Easter Island, and the enduring fallacy of 'Reality Hunger', all the while maintaining a focus on the strange nature of literary space. By listening to the echoes and resonances of writing, this book enables a unique encounter with literature that many critics habitually ignore. With an introduction by the acclaimed novelist Lars Iyer, This Space of Writing offers a renewed appreciation of the mystery and promise of writing.",7,"[""Stephen Mitchelmore has, over the years, in his blog, This Space, shown himself to be one of the acutest critics of contemporary writing anywhere. I do not always agree with him, but his work always makes me think and often helps me to understand.\n\n~ Gabriel Josipovici, author and critic"", ""Stephen Mitchelmore was the first literary-critical blogger, and has remained the best. His blog, This Space, ten years in existence, and commanding a wide readership, contains exquisite long-form meditations on literary fiction of the kind only the blogosphere can allow. Gathered here, Mitchemore’s essays show a cumulative power, developing a philosophy of literature in a manner that recalls Blanchot’s The Space of Literature.\n\n~ Lars Iyer, author of Spurious and Wittgenstein Jr"", ""It would be fulsome praise indeed to announce that This Space contains some of the very best writing in the literary blogosphere, but it would be more true to say that it contains some of the very finest writing on literature I've ever read anywhere.\n\n~ Mark Thwaite, Head of Online at Foyles and editor of Ready Steady Book"", ""This Space of Writing is such a lovely, luminous thing in my reading life.\n\n~ Jen Craig, author of Panthers and the Museum of Fire"", ""I've been an avid reader of Stephen Mitchelmore's posts on This Space for well over a decade. He not only shows us what to read, but new ways to read. His insights and analysis always leave me inspired. This new collection is a reason to celebrate.\n\n~ Todd Colby, author of Splash State"", ""Stephen Mitchelmore is one of the best minds of my generation and an inspiration. ~ Lee Rourke, author of The Canal"", ""For many years, Steve Mitchelmore has been a source of both inspiration and envy: introducing me not only to new writers but also to new ways of thinking. ~ John Self, blogger at the Asylum""]" Thoughts on an Index Not Freely Given,"[""John Roberts""]","In this unprecedented ‘fictive’ construction of the work of five imaginary artists from the 1980s, John Roberts produces an exhilarating theoretical encounter between futures past and futures present.","In this ambitious theoretical encounter with five imaginary artists from the 1980s, John Roberts produces a set of richly constructed artistic thought experiments. But in creating the work on the page these thought experiments are not thereby novelistic fictions. On the contrary, the fictiveness of each artist’s work and biography is formed from Roberts’s critical engagement with the historical and theoretical determinates of the work he has created - artwork and its theoretical engagement forming an interdependent whole.","In this ambitious theoretical encounter with five imaginary artists from the 1980s, John Roberts produces a set of richly constructed artistic thought experiments. But in creating the work on the page these thought experiments are not thereby novelistic fictions. On the contrary, the fictiveness of each artist’s work and biography is formed from Roberts’s critical engagement with the historical and theoretical determinates of the work he has created - artwork and its theoretical engagement forming an interdependent whole.",0,[] Time's Lie,"[""Leo Cookman""]","Time's Lie helps decode how news and media have changed drastically since 2016 and examines the polarisation of the Left, the Right and the fight to control the Narrative.","Why are facts and statistics disparaged and dismissed, now more than ever? Why do people trust 'fake news'? If we have 'had enough of experts' who should we listen to? Rather than the possible collapse of modern society, could this be an opportunity to look at not just society but our own lives in a different way? Whoever controls the narrative is the one who is in control. Time’s Lie analyses the history, the science and the philosophy behind the creation of linear stories, or Narrativisation, as this book dubs it. 'The importance of understanding how we frame the world through story cannot be overstated. Leo has tapped into something really profound with Time's Lie.' Jared Bauer, Wisecrack","Why are facts and statistics disparaged and dismissed, now more than ever? Why do people trust 'fake news'? If we have 'had enough of experts' who should we listen to? Rather than the possible collapse of modern society, could this be an opportunity to look at not just society but our own lives in a different way? Whoever controls the narrative is the one who is in control. Time’s Lie analyses the history, the science and the philosophy behind the creation of linear stories, or Narrativisation, as this book dubs it. 'The importance of understanding how we frame the world through story cannot be overstated. Leo has tapped into something really profound with Time's Lie.' Jared Bauer, Wisecrack",3,"[""Key among the multiple functions of narrative in our lives, Cookman says — literary narrative is not his prime concern, it should be pointed out — are the organisation of reality so as to make it comprehensible, the construction of identity, contextualisation of ourselves in society, a way of relating to others, and a mode of catharsis.\n\nWith acuity and enthusiasm, he reminds us how profoundly important narrative is to our existence. We tell stories to entertain, inform, educate, to control, understand, heal, clarify and unify: ‘Narrative is at the very core of our being … we are just stories we tell each other, but it is in the telling, the presentation, of these stories that they become reality, it is where they take on their meaning.’ Certainly, it’s the manner as well as the matter.\n\nAlthough the term ‘post-truth’ does not appear in the book, Cookman’s point is that truth is dependent upon narrative — the particular narrative one chooses to accept. Indeed, he states (in italics for emphasis): ‘All narratives are only true to you.’ Presumably with the ‘objective’ standards of consensus and consistency that he promotes, undisputable truth — if that’s not a contradiction in terms –is ‘hard to come by’. Hasn’t it always been?\n\nThis doesn’t mean truth doesn’t matter, Cookman assures us, or that there’s no point in trying to discover the truth. He does seem to believe there is such a thing as objective or absolute truth, albeit elusive. But it still means that, generally speaking, truth is relative: what is true for one person is not true for another — the ‘true for me’ syndrome is surprisingly popular when one realises the implications (not least for narrative) of something being merely true for me.\n\nPerhaps ‘Truth’s Lie’, admittedly oxymoronic, would be an alternative title for Cookman’s book, although time and point of view, as referred to above as they affect narration, are necessarily of concern to him.\n\nProduct of human invention\n\nIn many ways, ‘time is the base layer of narrative for the way we tell our bigger, broader stories’. But the ‘lie of time’ is that it’s simply part of the fabric of the universe and can’t be disputed: ‘Time and all its effects is just as much a product of human invention as it is a product of entropy.’\n\nWe create time, says Cookman, by witnessing entropy, the change, or process, from order to disorder, or randomness, in a system — the conflict between vitality and entropy makes for a powerful but tragic metaphor, one recalls, in the fiction, for example, of Norman Mailer, William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon.\n\nPerception controls the flow of time, as does concentration, Cookman points out. He intuits the intentionality of consciousness when he says ‘an event that is given a huge level of meaning is given a great deal of focus and thus time is perceived to slow down’ (his italics): the greater the intentionality, the greater the meaning.\n\nAnd it’s the question of meaningfulness in life that made Cookman want to write about narrativisation in the first place. Despite being secular, he has always believed that things happen for a reason because ‘whether discussing luck, chance, fortune, coincidence or synchronicity they are all a method for creating meaning out of random, entropic interactions’. (His italics).\n\nAnd this is surely the crux of the issue, or of the narrative, this narrative. We are meaning-seeking creatures, after all, whether through pattern, sign or symbol.\n\n~ Geoff Ward/Medium .com"", ""The importance of understanding how we frame the world through story cannot be overstated. Leo has tapped into something really profound with 'Time's Lie'. ~ Jared Bauer, Wisecrack"", ""Discussions of literature, storytelling and writing often fail to address the political and social implications of those processes themselves. In this refreshing intervention, Cookman gives a writer's perspective on all manner of narratives, from the bedtime story and the lie to the news narrative and the apparently narrative-less scientific claim. His compelling rumination, both personal and philosophical, considers the role of storytelling in constructing identity, philosophy and pretty much everything else. ~ Alfie Bown, author of Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism""]" Too Fat to go to the Moon,"[""Rob McCleary""]",2030; America is broke. When NASA is forced to raffle off a trip to outer space the ticket is won by a guy who is so fat he can’t make it out of his own house...,"In 2030 America is broke. When NASA is forced to raffle off a trip to outer space and the orbiting Houston Astrodome, Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty, the ticket is won by a guy from Cleveland who is so fat he can’t make it out of his own house, let alone get crammed in a rocket ship. Instead he auctions the ticket off, and the winning bid belongs to the patriarch of the Van Kruup family, an American dynasty founded on coal, railroads, and masturbation (not necessarily in that order). But when they lose their inter-generation fortune in the Great Funk Crash, Stanely Van Kruup, sole heir to the Van Kruup fortune, is evicted from the ten thousand acre estate in rural Pennsylvania he has left only once since birth and must search for his (presumed dead) older brother in an attempt to restore his inheritance. Too Fat to go to the Moon is Zero Books' latest foray into avant-garde fiction.","In 2030 America is broke. When NASA is forced to raffle off a trip to outer space and the orbiting Houston Astrodome, Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty, the ticket is won by a guy from Cleveland who is so fat he can’t make it out of his own house, let alone get crammed in a rocket ship. Instead he auctions the ticket off, and the winning bid belongs to the patriarch of the Van Kruup family, an American dynasty founded on coal, railroads, and masturbation (not necessarily in that order). But when they lose their inter-generation fortune in the Great Funk Crash, Stanely Van Kruup, sole heir to the Van Kruup fortune, is evicted from the ten thousand acre estate in rural Pennsylvania he has left only once since birth and must search for his (presumed dead) older brother in an attempt to restore his inheritance. Too Fat to go to the Moon is Zero Books' latest foray into avant-garde fiction.",9,"[""One of the most creative, fun, and disturbing narratives you'll ever read--a challenge to readers as the prose is knowingly avant-garde but yet still accessible for those willing to let it all wash over them. ~ Daniel Casey (Reviewer), NetGalley"", ""Critique: \""Too Fat to Go to the Moon: Gay Sasquatch Saved My Life\"" by Rob McCleary is a deftly crafted and absorbingly entertaining work of avant-garde fiction that will prove to be an enduringly popular addition to community, college, and university library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections. ~ Clint Travis, Mid West Book Review"", ""A hilarious dystopia about America. In 2030 America is no longer a world power, but a land colonized by the Chinese. Americans are no longer free to walk because trees invaded every place and blocked people where they are. America is no more a safe place, but a dangerous place tattered in rags, with abandoned shopping centers and dodging gangs. America is no longer the place of advanced medical science, but the land of polio, cholera, and lingering deaths. The astonishing image of America is that of a place full of piss, garbage and shit. America is described as the world’s largest ecological disaster. Americans are now using rockets to get rid of garbage. America, therefore, is described as a horrible place to live in and unfit for human life. Lotteries started running in America, one of them from NASA. The prize was to put some random winner into space. The winner is a fat guy from Cleveland named Jimmy, but he can’t even make it out of his own home so he sold his tickets off to the highest bidder. To sum up, this book, with a fragmentary tone and full of repetitions, makes you laugh and at the same time reflect about what is really happening in the world. I read in it an ecological message: 'We are not caring too much about nature and preserving it for the future generations'.. ~ Francesco Camodeca , NetGalley"", ""Rob McCleary has written the book that my heart always wanted. It's like if The Royal Tenenbaums had a dadaist baby with Geek Love that was born with a thousand dick jokes ready to go. The novel is hilarious, but sad, outlandish, but honest. A laugh out loud tragedy that replays in your head over and over like that time you saw a duck dry hump a baby in its face. Everything I never knew I wanted from a book ~ Jared Rasic, NetGalley"", ""\""This is a story about America, and jerking off, not necessarily in that order.\""\n\nWhat a strange, but entertaining book! Reviews have referred to Too Fat to go to the Moon as an avant-guard novel. A few other adjectives came to mind when I read the book: eccentric, British, farcical, a ribald version of Hitchhikers Guide.\n\nAmerica has fallen on hard times. After the invasion of the Trees (commencing the period referred to as \""AT\""), the country is now broke and many states have been sold off to Chinese. The narrator, Stanley Kruup, is made President of the Remaining States. His father, a \""midget (or if you prefer, Little Person)\"", made the family fortune with public acts of masturbation and by launching our nations garbage and sewage into space. He also sent the Empire State Building into space. The Kruup family owns a 10,000-acre estate in rural Pennsylvania, but the property is now occupied by a very strange Native American tribe who we later find out played a central role in the Kruup history.\n\nThis book is definitely not for everyone; some I’d say may even be offended (the narrator definitely has a preoccupation with various forms and manners of masturbation). I can particularly see the PC crowd taking offense, with the book’s frequently unflattering (but humurous) references to midgets, blacks, whites, Native Americans, etc. Performing lewd acts for the Kennedys, etc. Itsy Bitsy Bourbon Pissing FDRs. And the reader MUST be in the mood. I read Too Fat... on vacation – it’s a short read – and I laughed my ass off. My family thought I’d lost it (possible true).\n\nThanks to NetGalley and Zer0 Books for the opportunity to read Too Fat.... ~ Jay Pruitt, NetGalley"", ""This is a sort of Vonnegut-esque novel, although more...off-color? (I have never read the phrase \""jerking off\"" so many times before and certainly not in the first sentence of a book.) Really the whole thing was kind of ludicrous, but I still mostly liked it. I don't really know how to explain the plot, if there is one. It was absurd and overall enjoyable. 3.5 stars rounded to 4. ~ Annie Bruno , NetGalley"", ""I knew I HAD to read the book after reading the description of the book. Even the name of the book makes sense. What a wild, hilarious read. Do not try to sneak read this during work. You have been warned. Enjoyed. ~ Edna Gadoury, NetGalley"", ""The title of this book - Too Fat to go to the Moon - Gay Sasquatch Saved My Life - may be the best or strangest book title ever. It may also be one of the strangest books I have ever read. It took me a while to get into it, but once I did I was laughing out loud and shaking my head with mirth and wonderment. I kept thinking \""DID I REALLY JUST READ THAT?\"" and yes, the author did.\n\nExtremely avant-garde and deeply dark, this book is a joy to read and ponder. DO NOT read on public transit, though, as people will think you're a nutter.\n\nWhy give stars when you can give ~ Janet Pole Cousineau , NetGalley"", ""Praise for 'Nixon In Space': ' The story is exuberant and rageful, political and eccentric, relevant and timeless.' ~ Jonathan Lethem, author of Fortress of Solitude, Brooklyn Journal""]" Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art,"[""Tony McKenna""]","From the genesis of Islam as a social movement, to an account of Goya's art in the context of feudal absolutism and the Napoleonic wars, to The Da Vinci Code, and much more besides.","Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art is a diverse, colourful and eclectic set of essays of historical and cultural analyses. From the genesis of Islam as a social movement, to an account of Goya's art in the context of feudal absolutism and the Napoleonic wars, to The Da Vinci Code, and much more besides. McKenna is a classical Marxist not shy of addressing popular culture, past and present, works often ignored by other Marxist critics increasingly confined to Academia and its high-brow concerns.","Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art is a diverse, colourful and eclectic set of essays of historical and cultural analyses. From the genesis of Islam as a social movement, to an account of Goya's art in the context of feudal absolutism and the Napoleonic wars, to The Da Vinci Code, and much more besides. McKenna is a classical Marxist not shy of addressing popular culture, past and present, works often ignored by other Marxist critics increasingly confined to Academia and its high-brow concerns.",1,"[""Praise for Tony McKenna: '...informative, intelligent, thought-provoking, and always highly readable.' ~ Sean Sayers, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Kent""]" Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures,"[""Graham Harman""]",These writings chart Harman's rise from Chicago sportswriter to co founder of one of Europe's most promising philosophical movements: Speculative Realism.,These writings chart Harman's rise from Chicago sportswriter to co founder of one of Europe's most promising philosophical movements: Speculative Realism. In 1997 Graham Harman was an obscure graduate student covering Chicago sporting events for a California website. Unpublished in philosophy at the time he was already a popular conference speaker on Heidegger and related themes. A decade later he is the author of highly visible books on continental philosophy is Associate Vice Provost for Research at the American University in Cairo and a key member of the Speculative Realist movement along with Ray Brassier Iain Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux. This fascinating collection of eleven essays and lectures from 1997 to 2009 anchored by Harman's rebellious transformation of Heideggerian philosophy show the evolution of his object oriented metaphysics from its early days into an increasingly developed philosophical position. Each chapter is preceded by Harman's witty scene setting commentary.,These writings chart Harman's rise from Chicago sportswriter to co founder of one of Europe's most promising philosophical movements: Speculative Realism. In 1997 Graham Harman was an obscure graduate student covering Chicago sporting events for a California website. Unpublished in philosophy at the time he was already a popular conference speaker on Heidegger and related themes. A decade later he is the author of highly visible books on continental philosophy is Associate Vice Provost for Research at the American University in Cairo and a key member of the Speculative Realist movement along with Ray Brassier Iain Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux. This fascinating collection of eleven essays and lectures from 1997 to 2009 anchored by Harman's rebellious transformation of Heideggerian philosophy show the evolution of his object oriented metaphysics from its early days into an increasingly developed philosophical position. Each chapter is preceded by Harman's witty scene setting commentary.,3,"[""The style of Harman often evokes that of a William James joined to the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft. ~ Olivier Surel,in Actu Philosophia"", ""In his letter to the young Beatrice [Chapter 9], Graham Harman offers the clearest exposition of object-oriented philosophy to date. With grace, wit, and a remarkable inventiveness Harman invites us to return to basic philosophical questions. Whether or not one agrees with Harman's conclusions his work will be an inspiration for many. ~ Martin Hägglund, Harvard University, author of Radical Atheism"", ""This wonderfully engaging book asks the most important metaphysical and epistemological questions of our time. What does it mean to be human? How do objects relate to each other? How might our understandings of object relations change if we take the cosmos into account? In a series of beautifully written chapters, Harman carefully builds his pathbreaking argument that objects relate through vicarious asymmetrical causation. Harman transforms complex ideas into digestible form, at the same time that he provides a refreshingly honest account of how his theory has developed over time, and the reactions it has garnered within the academy. This is a must-read for scholars interested in metaphysics, philosophy or science studies, and for students who want invaluable insights into how scholars theory-build. ~ Myra Hird, Queen's University, Canada. Author of The Origins of Sociable Life .""]" Traces of Modernity,"[""Dan Smith""]",A collection of critical encounters with the material remains of the past as living and dynamic influences upon the present.,"This book offers critical engagements with four objects from the nineteenth century: The ruins of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham and the dinosaurs that remain, the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum and the short novel by H.G. Wells – The Time Machine. These provide very different forms of encounter, but are bound by the shadow of the Great Exhibition of 1851. This immense spectacle helped forge our understanding of display, surveillance and commodity. This legacy can be detected in the development of the modern museum and gallery as well as the shaping of spaces and structures of trade, commerce and political display, denying any possibility of conceptually separating these sites. Linked by a cumulative narrative that binds the mid nineteenth century to the early twenty first, these four objects are identified as formative traces of the past within the present. They provide models for critical thought and suggest answers to the problematic conditions that they present as ideologically specific relics from a previous age.","This book offers critical engagements with four objects from the nineteenth century: The ruins of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham and the dinosaurs that remain, the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum and the short novel by H.G. Wells – The Time Machine. These provide very different forms of encounter, but are bound by the shadow of the Great Exhibition of 1851. This immense spectacle helped forge our understanding of display, surveillance and commodity. This legacy can be detected in the development of the modern museum and gallery as well as the shaping of spaces and structures of trade, commerce and political display, denying any possibility of conceptually separating these sites. Linked by a cumulative narrative that binds the mid nineteenth century to the early twenty first, these four objects are identified as formative traces of the past within the present. They provide models for critical thought and suggest answers to the problematic conditions that they present as ideologically specific relics from a previous age.",0,[] Transcending Racial Divisions,"[""Christine Louis-Dit-Sully""]","Christine Louis-Dit-Sully examines the origins of racial thinking and the relationship between race and culture, asking us to recognise that racial thinking is not the only way of understanding ourselves and the world around us.","Martin Luther King, Jr once said, ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character’. This is one of the aspirations many had when they fought against racism. They understood that for this aspiration to succeed everyone must participate in the project of completely transforming society to eradicate racial divisions and achieve equal treatment. Today, with the increasing demand to recognize the seemingly insurmountable gap between black people and white people, identity-based anti-racism has become more of a hindrance than a solution for a better and freer world for us all. The shift, from aspiring to transform social organization in order to transcend racial divisions to demanding recognition of racial divisions and identities and protection for minorities, represents the defeat of the universalist and radical politics of the past. Racial thinking, actively promoted by racists, has now become an acceptable tool for identity-based anti-racist activists in their demand for representation, diversity, inclusivity, segregation and safe spaces. Christine Louis-Dit-Sully examines the origins of racial thinking and the relationship between race and culture, she asks us to recognise that racial thinking is not the only way of understanding ourselves and the world around us.","Martin Luther King, Jr once said, ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character’. This is one of the aspirations many had when they fought against racism. They understood that for this aspiration to succeed everyone must participate in the project of completely transforming society to eradicate racial divisions and achieve equal treatment. Today, with the increasing demand to recognize the seemingly insurmountable gap between black people and white people, identity-based anti-racism has become more of a hindrance than a solution for a better and freer world for us all. The shift, from aspiring to transform social organization in order to transcend racial divisions to demanding recognition of racial divisions and identities and protection for minorities, represents the defeat of the universalist and radical politics of the past. Racial thinking, actively promoted by racists, has now become an acceptable tool for identity-based anti-racist activists in their demand for representation, diversity, inclusivity, segregation and safe spaces. Christine Louis-Dit-Sully examines the origins of racial thinking and the relationship between race and culture, she asks us to recognise that racial thinking is not the only way of understanding ourselves and the world around us.",4,"[""Transcending Racial Divisions may get some readers’ blood boiling, but Louis-Dit-Sully would be nonplussed. To her, justice for all will only be achieved through energetic engagement and vigorous debate of our cherished ideals.\n\n~ Genevieve A. Chornenski, C.Med, C.Arb, ADR Update Newsletter, Issue 108, Fall-Winter 2021"", ""It is therefore refreshing to read Christine Louis Dit-Sully’s sharp polemic, Transcending Racial Divisions: Will You Stand By Me?. The book is a well-written, impressive analysis of contemporary racial thinking and identity politics and of their historical precedents. It is also a humanist critique of identity-based anti-racism, a movement which, instead of challenging racial thinking, has emphasised it and abandoned the goal of eliminating racial divisions (...) It is a passionate cri de cœur advocating a politics based on humanism, universalism, individual agency and the use of reason to alter the human condition. ~ Ralph Leonard, British-Nigerian writer who writes on international politics, religion, culture and humanism, Areo magazine"", ""In Transcending Racial Divisions, the humanist thinker argues against the ascendant school of anti-racist thought, which she believes encourages racial essentialism (...)\n\nTranscending Racial Divisions is a thought-provoking analysis of identity politics – and a call for other ways of thinking about race. ~ Tara Henley, The Globe and Mail"", ""Brilliant book. Easy to understand and very impressive analysis of modern identity politics and the history of race. ~ Jackson Park, Amazon.co.uk""]" Translating Anarchy,"[""Mark Bray""]",An insider's account of the anarchists who ignited Occupy Wall Street.,"Translating Anarchy tells the story of the anti-capitalist anti-authoritarians of Occupy Wall Street who strategically communicated their revolutionary politics to the public in a way that was both accessible and revolutionary. By “translating” their ideas into everyday concepts like community empowerment and collective needs, these anarchists sparked the most dynamic American social movement in decades.","Translating Anarchy tells the story of the anti-capitalist anti-authoritarians of Occupy Wall Street who strategically communicated their revolutionary politics to the public in a way that was both accessible and revolutionary. By “translating” their ideas into everyday concepts like community empowerment and collective needs, these anarchists sparked the most dynamic American social movement in decades.",4,"[""This is a remarkable book and, of all the \""insider\"" stories of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the most compelling. ~ Paul Buhle, author of Marxism in the United States, truthout"", ""Translating Anarchy is an impressive example of movement analysis, one of the most important books about anarchism of its time, and a must read for anyone studying contemporary anarchism and its implications, challenges, and possibilities. ~ Gabriel Kuhn, editor of Gustav Landauer: Revolution and Other Writings and Erich Mühsam: Liberating Society from the State and Other Writings, Alpine Anarchist Productions"", ""Bray's meticulous, rich insider account of Occupy Wall Street demonstrates the central influence of anarchism on its core militants, but refuses to shy away from drawing hard lessons from its limitations. Anarchism, he convincingly argues, must position itself as an everyday movement of the 'ordinary' folks who alone can change the world - this requires a positive, practical programme and message, self-reflective and accountable politics, solid organisation, and clear tactics and strategy. ~ Lucien van der Walt (Rhodes University), co-author of Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism"", ""In Translating Anarchy Mark Bray provides unique insight into the inner workings and politics of OWS and its interactions with the press and the public. The book not only describes how OWS \""strategically articulated our politics\"" to the press and public, but provides an inside narrative of key OWS events; delineates the strands of anarchist and other thought that contributed to its political orientation; and draws lessons regarding key but controversial OWS approaches to the role of demands, the process of consensus, violence and non-violence, and other critical questions for future radical organizing.\n\nStraightforward and non-academic but in fact scholarly and historically informed, it provides an often witty good read. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the OWS phenomenon or who may ever interpret social movements for the public and the media. ~ Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike! and Save the Humans?""]" Trav,"[""Taylor Burns""]","There is the day it happens, and then there is everything after.","Trav, thirteen, is trying to come to terms with the death of his father. Jay, Trav’s best friend, is tasked with going through a decade’s worth of writing that Trav wrote after finding his father dead. Stella, Trav’s mother, is trying to keep it together for her son while dealing with irreparable fallout in her adopted family. Together, they try to make sense of grief and its druggy comedown, and what happens when cursed destinies intersect. Powered by the prose — the rhythm and technique — of accent, sociolect, and place, this novel is working-class but not council-estate chic, grim but not grey, and blessed with a slangy Birmingham vernacular not readily found in modern fiction.","Trav, thirteen, is trying to come to terms with the death of his father. Jay, Trav’s best friend, is tasked with going through a decade’s worth of writing that Trav wrote after finding his father dead. Stella, Trav’s mother, is trying to keep it together for her son while dealing with irreparable fallout in her adopted family. Together, they try to make sense of grief and its druggy comedown, and what happens when cursed destinies intersect. Powered by the prose — the rhythm and technique — of accent, sociolect, and place, this novel is working-class but not council-estate chic, grim but not grey, and blessed with a slangy Birmingham vernacular not readily found in modern fiction.",5,"[""Trav is told with appropriate bravado. The prose blazes across the page, alive with pinpoint imagery. It had me from the start, with its close attention to detail, its touches of comedy, and the way it follows how relationships between family members alter over the years. I could feel the generosity behind the laser-eyed vision, the longing for a better way of doing things. A very strong, heartfelt, deeply affecting debut. I'm looking forward to more from Burns. ~ Alan Beard, author of Afternoon Drinking"", ""A voice that dazzles as much as it devastates. This is a raw, luminous portrait of growing up, grief and the fragile armour of masculinity. Unsentimental yet unexpectedly full of grace, every page thrums with truth, humour and heartbreak. A phenomenal achievement. ~ Ashley Hickson-Lovence, author of About to Fall Apart"", ""With maximum verve and energy, the world of Travis Barnes is rendered with authenticity and a glorious specificity. Taylor Burns writes with exceptional heart, intelligence, and fearlessness. ~ Wendy Erskine, author of The Benefactors"", ""A moving, memorable exploration of masculinity, class and family, Trav fizzes with life. Taylor Burns navigates these prickly themes with an unflinching eye and brio; there is verve in every sentence. ~ Nicolas Padamsee, author of England is Mine"", ""Trav is funny as fuck and fragile as glass. Rarely do you enter through the eyes and into the heart of a character with such unfiltered access, such vulnerability. But Travis Barnes — the novel's troubled but truthful anti-hero — is all the things that make us the brilliant, brutal, soft and stupid humans we are. Burns' writing, the kind I am endlessly, fruitlessly, in search of, is generous, but don't expect to come out unscathed, unshaken, unmoved. It is THE novel of New Birmingham, a place you think you know but probably, almost certainly do not. You will be closer after reading this. A working-class masterwork from one of the most stylish writers around. ~ Clive Judd, author of Here""]" Trump's Counter-Revolution,"[""Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen""]",A radical Marxist analysis of Trump which finds Trump to be a preventive counter-revolutionary derailment of the coming-into-being of a new world.,"In Trump's Counter-Revolution, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen looks behind the craziness of Donald Trump to decipher the formation of a new kind of fascism, late-capitalist fascism, that is intent on preventing any kind of real social change. Trump projects an image of America as threatened, but capable of re-creating itself as a united, white and patriarchal community: ""Make America great again"". After forty years of extreme, uneven development in the US, Trump's late-capitalist fascism fuses popular culture and ultra-nationalism in an attempt to renew the old alliance between the white working class and the capitalist class, preventing the coming into being of an anti-capitalist alliance between Occupy and Black Lives Matter. 'A lucid, clear-eyed analysis of the morbid spectacle of Trump's racist counterrevolution. Mikkel Bolt proposes to add to the rubble of the neoliberal order by demolishing the political form of capitalism - democracy itself - as it slides into fascism. Welcome to life in the postcolony.' Iain Boal, co-author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War","In Trump's Counter-Revolution, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen looks behind the craziness of Donald Trump to decipher the formation of a new kind of fascism, late-capitalist fascism, that is intent on preventing any kind of real social change. Trump projects an image of America as threatened, but capable of re-creating itself as a united, white and patriarchal community: ""Make America great again"". After forty years of extreme, uneven development in the US, Trump's late-capitalist fascism fuses popular culture and ultra-nationalism in an attempt to renew the old alliance between the white working class and the capitalist class, preventing the coming into being of an anti-capitalist alliance between Occupy and Black Lives Matter. 'A lucid, clear-eyed analysis of the morbid spectacle of Trump's racist counterrevolution. Mikkel Bolt proposes to add to the rubble of the neoliberal order by demolishing the political form of capitalism - democracy itself - as it slides into fascism. Welcome to life in the postcolony.' Iain Boal, co-author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War",3,"[""A lucid, clear-eyed analysis of the morbid spectacle of Trump's racist counterrevolution. Mikkel Bolt proposes to add to the rubble of the neoliberal order by demolishing the political form of capitalism - democracy itself - as it slides into fascism. Welcome to life in the postcolony. ~ Iain Boal, co-author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War"", ""The rise of Donald Trump and his regime has produced an abundance of analysis, much of it merely ideological. But Marx cautioned us that it is not the job of a worker's movement to inquire into the thinking of capitalists, but to inquire into their power. Mikkel Bolt takes up this challenge with this important inquiry into what W.E.B. Dubois anticipated in his concept of 'democratic despotism' - a cross-class white alliance, allied with ethnocentric fascism around the globe. Bolt asks us to consider the potentiality of an emergent communist counter-power - the very one that provoked this fascist turn. ~ Stefano Harney, co-author of The Undercommons"", ""Trump is the symptom – but of what? Mikkel Bolt’s provocative answer is “of democracy,” that is, of democracy under conditions of capitalism and white supremacy. With this original intervention, Bolt rejects the conventional wisdom that makes democracy the cure for all that ails it. He challenges any and all concerned about the politics of Trump to consider what his victory tells us about democracy. ~ Jodi Dean, author of The Communist Horizon""]" "Truth about Art, The","[""Patrick Doorly""]","The book traces the multiple meanings of art to their various sources, and equips the reader to choose between them.","‘Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the Good is other and more beautiful than they.’ — Plato, Republic, 508e. This book traces the multiple meanings of art back to their historical roots, and equips the reader to choose between them. Art with a capital A turns out to be an invention of German Romantic philosophers, who endowed their creation with the attributes of genius, originality, rule breaking, and self-expression, directed by the spirit of the age. Recovering the problems that these attributes were devised to solve dispels many of the obscurities and contradictions that accompany them. What artists have always sought is excellence, and they become artists in so far as they achieve it. Quality was the supreme value in Renaissance Italy, and in early Greece it offered mortals glimpses of the divine. Today art historians avoid references to beauty or Quality, since neither is objective or definable, the boundaries beyond which scholars dare not roam. In reality subject and object are united and dissolved in the Quality event, which forms the bow wave of culture, leaving patterns of value and meaning in its wake.","‘Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the Good is other and more beautiful than they.’ — Plato, Republic, 508e. This book traces the multiple meanings of art back to their historical roots, and equips the reader to choose between them. Art with a capital A turns out to be an invention of German Romantic philosophers, who endowed their creation with the attributes of genius, originality, rule breaking, and self-expression, directed by the spirit of the age. Recovering the problems that these attributes were devised to solve dispels many of the obscurities and contradictions that accompany them. What artists have always sought is excellence, and they become artists in so far as they achieve it. Quality was the supreme value in Renaissance Italy, and in early Greece it offered mortals glimpses of the divine. Today art historians avoid references to beauty or Quality, since neither is objective or definable, the boundaries beyond which scholars dare not roam. In reality subject and object are united and dissolved in the Quality event, which forms the bow wave of culture, leaving patterns of value and meaning in its wake.",3,"[""E H Gombrich and Robert Pirsig might seem as unlikely bedfellows as the hobby-horse and the motorcycle of which they wrote, yet in Patrick Doorly’s meticulous and lucid quest for the Truth about Art they stand side by side as the two lone providers of insight. Over the course of a journey of exploration ranging from Plato to Marcel Duchamp, and encompassing not just the visual arts but philosophy and literature, their shared, though very differently expressed, conviction of the importance of tradition and of excellence is constantly held before the reader as the key to a proper understanding of the intellectual structures that have been superimposed on artistic creation by generations of philosophers, critics and historians of art. The message that Doorly seeks to drive home, sometimes with almost missionary zeal, is that Art and Truth are not facts of nature but constructs with a cultural legacy, and that the word ‘art’ in particular has throughout its history had changing meanings attached to it.\n\nHis aim is systematically to question, from first principles and without preconceived ideas, what it is that distinguishes art from artefact or object. His approach to the half-jocular question “but is it Art?” is deeply serious, and impatient of orthodoxies, whether those of Kant or Winckelmann or of more recent critical theory; he has a sharp eye for flawed argument, and takes a slightly schoolmasterly delight in leading his class through the basic facts, the etymologies and semantics, the evolution of ideas, so as to lay bare a long history of misapprehension.\n\nThe fundamental hypothesis that he proposes and proceeds to test is that art is ‘high quality endeavour’ (a hypothesis that tellingly only fails when confronted with what he calls the ‘intellectual pranks’ of Duchamp), aiming to show that significant artists have at all times sought to achieve excellence by building on and improving or transcending the tradition that they have inherited. Doorly concludes that Quality is of the essence, and that Pirsig’s model of the interaction between the Dynamic Quality of the creative individual and the Static Patterns of a culture is the most promising conceptual model of artistic endeavour that he has encountered.\n\nReaders who delight in the works of artists of all periods (other than the professionals of the art and art-historical worlds, who may well not welcome this book on account of its uncomfortable home truths) will find Doorly’s systematic demystification of the critical apparatus surrounding these works enlightening. The obvious integrity of his enquiry and the clarity with which it is conducted enrich our ability to understand what it is that delights us, and give a further dimension to our appreciation of the creative process.\n\n~ Nicholas Mann, Director of the Warburg Institute (1990–2001)"", ""Readers and admirers of E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art will be grateful for this book. It explores the idea of artistic quality, which is not a phantom but a reality. Debates about quality have a long and complex history, through which Doorly guides the attentive reader. As it says on the cover, this book reclaims quality in art.\n\n~ Richard Woodfield, editor of The Essential Gombrich"", ""Doorly has written a book that is full of interest, and he presents his thesis in language that sparkles with clarity. I am in broad agreement with his treatment of the Italian Renaissance, and with his views of virtue, quality, and related topics. In areas where I have no expertise, I learned a lot about artistic creation from his ideas and from the conclusions he draws from an enormous amount of essential reading. The book deserves to be widely read.\n\n~ John Woodhouse, Fiat-Serena Professor Emeritus of Italian, Oxford University""]" Twerking to Turking,"[""EDA Collective""]","Analysing the signs of everyday life in an ABC of modern phenomena from Advertising to Language, Sport to Education, Film and TV to Work and Play, and Politics to Comic Universes.","In this follow-up to the first volume of Everyday Analysis articles, Why are Animals Funny?, the EDA Collective tracks through an ABC of modern phenomena ordered by analytic theme, widely ranging from Advertising to Language, Sport to Education, Film and TV to Work and Play, and Politics to Comic Universes. Punctuating these phenomenal pieces are illustrations from a range of artists and cartoonists, including Martin Rowson of the London Guardian.","In this follow-up to the first volume of Everyday Analysis articles, Why are Animals Funny?, the EDA Collective tracks through an ABC of modern phenomena ordered by analytic theme, widely ranging from Advertising to Language, Sport to Education, Film and TV to Work and Play, and Politics to Comic Universes. Punctuating these phenomenal pieces are illustrations from a range of artists and cartoonists, including Martin Rowson of the London Guardian.",4,"[""What we want to avoid at all costs is something that is common inside both academic and journalistic discourse; that is, criticising the popular from an imaginary privileged position of knowledge, and even setting up this imaginary position in the process, making it seem as though we can speak from somewhere outside of these discourses.\n\nThe above quote, taken from the introduction to the magnificently titled Twerking to Turking: Everyday Analysis Volume Two, encapsulates what is superb about the Everyday Analysis Collective and their enquiry into the banal minutiae of contemporary culture. The Collective are a group of students, scholars, writers, artists and activists pulled from all corners of the Earth, and are attempting to lower the highbrow of critical theory with short and snappy essays that deconstruct social and political life in an accessible, bit-sized format. They have only been operative since 2013, yet here we are already on Volume Two of the group's collected writings, just a year or so after Volume One, Why Are Animals Funny? (2014) made a small but significant splash. The writings here are more confident, vibrant, funny and lucid than that previous effort. With such a diverse range of subjects covered it is difficult to offer a constructive and concise review of everything covered in this volume. The term 'something for everybody' certainly applies, yet hardy goes far enough. Žižek, Derrida, and Lacan, sit side-by-side with Cowell, Gosling and Geldof, a mash-up of high and low culture which could, in other philosophical hands, have proved unwieldy.\n\nHelpfully, the Collective have broken their analyses down into fields of interest: art, film, sports, work, digital cultures, sex and love, books and comics. This array of subjects offers an easy way in for the prospective reader, who can dip into the text at random and bounce from subject to subject at will, a literary equivalent to skipping television channels or, perhaps more fitting, surfing the internet. Rarely do the essays exceed 1,000 words; some barely scrap past 500. Perhaps this is increasingly the only way to grab the attention of an internet-obsessed generation who can't get through a EDA post without simultaneously opening a tab for Boredpanda.com to look at pictures of cats sleeping on top of dogs. A number of essays in particular stand out. ‘Getting Google's Approval’ is sharp in its assumption that Google is silently disapproving of your search topics, especially those it considers depraved. ‘Sending Shit to UKIP’ documents the UK populace’s juvenile, yet hilarious, ‘dirty’ protest at the politics of the far-right UK Independence Party. Dissenters took advantage of the party's freepost address to send it an assortment of unsolicited gifts, ranging from bricks to faeces.\n\nWhilst a majority of the subject matter is overtly party political, some of the items are more subtle. The section devoted to sport, for example, digs deep into issues of racism in football ('Croatian Football and Racism' and 'Dani Alves: A Banana Used as a Banana'), and the spectacle of the sporting event ('Loving Football' and ‘World Cup 2014: Sky Sports Live! and Alain Badiou's “Event”’). The section marked 'Miscellaneous' explores the ridiculousness of modern life with essays on social awkwardness, 'On Almost Bumping into Someone when Walking Around a Corner' and 'On Seeing Yourself on a Big Screen' are particularly cringeworthy ruminations on how we react to ourselves and each other in modern society.\n\nHowever, no matter the subject, a spectre haunts Turking to Twerking: the spectre of David Cameron and Nick Clegg. It seems to me that a collective such as the EDA could only exist and thrive in Austerity Britain. Their currency is the the sheer absurdity of the past five years, of nation ruled over by a toff version of The Office’s David Brent and a feebler Gareth Keenan at his side. The EDA Collective embody this schism in history; their work wouldn't resonate so well in any other recent political era. There was genuine warfare under Thatcher's iron rule, and only satire, or straight-up violence could explain and dispel it. Under Tony Blair’s New Labour the nation was caught up in its own exhilaration at once again being Cool Britannia to question the pillars of society. And why on Earth would we? We were also prosperous under New Labour, at least for a short while. In 2010 the United Kingdom decided to experiment with a form of sitcom style politics in which we as a nation collectively played the straight man. In the wake of the comedy of errors dealt out to us over the past five years, we have become more questioning of our leaders’ motives. We have become partial to other forms of political engagement, through protest, Occupy, online social media, music and street poetry. We are finding new avenues to communicate with one another, and are reclaiming language from the idiotic soundbites of political discourse.\n\nWe are looking everywhere – and in the case of EDA, at everything – for answers, and finding them in the most mundane of objects and situations. Political criticism and incisive commentary are no longer coming out of academia, or traditional outlets such as Newsnight or The Andrew Marr Show. Through social media we are transcending the old forms, and opening the argument up to all. And this argument will not go away now we that we face another five years of austerity measures – this time with an absolute Conservative majority. We will need the EDA Collective and their like to continue to articulate, with wit and humour, our resistance to the cruelty of austerity politics. ~ Stephen Lee Naish, Review 31"", ""Write about what you enjoy.. and what you shouldn’t enjoy or cant explain why. The world is in front of us, a world of “new” enjoyment. Enjoyment we no longer easily understand, yet that enjoyment is at times piped.\n\nTake the wonderful essay on the gender alignment of Kinder Surprise eggs. I have always taken Kinder eggs to be a symbol of the modern world. All substance, agreed form, no real surprise. And now they are narrowing down the surprise risk with pink and blue eggs. If Kinder are doing this they must be onto something.The essay sees Kinder eggs as part of desire over functionality, shit and sugar perhaps. They are now pink and blue because… that’s how we express our desires.\n\nI nodded intently at 'if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all' and the premise that whilst we can express negative energy without speaking, when we get the chance to express ourselves we should take it, grab it and use it.\n\nThere's a Gramscian element to the media analysis. Poversion. Do makers of reality TV shows about the poor reflect the poor? Is the reflection artificial? The mirror reflecting them is more like a Victorian hall of mirrors, a new reality created to reflect your ideological viewpoint of the poor and their plight. Of course for all reality TV there is no reality. The reality issue is also reflected in an essay on the BBC media hegemony. Red wedge is used as a focus point, that people created an artificial reality around its political pulling power. Those of us who remember it, remember it as weak, wet, political light (Weller had advocated for Thatcher in 79 so was hardly the socialist spokesman, Bragg went on to ask us to vote Lib Dem and look what happened then!). The BBC though would like us to think that its historical safety makes it factual. If they can recreate a myth around Red Wedge what wouldn’t they do?\n\nIt was the Politics section of essays that caught my interest more than any others. Though I was sure McCarthy were being sarcastic when they sang about writing to your MP it’s a great intro to any essay. The Home Office's anti-immigration tweets are looked at for what they really are and Cameron as a knave not a fool makes interesting analysis.\n\nIt's Brand/Badio on (non)voting that stands out for me though as a subject close to my heart. The rise of a gaggle of commentators and pundits to dismiss the idea of not voting with the usual lines of ”then what do you expect” or “you can’t complain” need fully juxtaposing with the reality of Lib Dems betraying everything they asked you to support once they took your vote. Not voting is an action with as much meaning as voting, it can have an effect as well.\n\nThere's plenty also on the language of UKIP and its demonization of “others” and “politicians”, which of course they are not! Depoliticization further reinforces that there is a them and us and we will never be them even if we look, speak, act and think that way. Where this all ends is anyone's guess.\n\nI think the book got it wrong, it’s not write about what you enjoy its read about it, and this is a wonderful way to open yourself to the task. ~ Kuneblog"", ""These young thinkers use what they have – intelligence, resourcefulness and an eye for the everyday – to produce readings at a pace that the academy cannot mirror. At its best this collection sets a precedent for a new generation of critical engagement with popular culture. EDA is fighting to carve a new space for the intellectual in popular media. Its battle is just beginning. ~ Matt Foley, Irish Times"", ""The EDA collective comes across as young, intelligent, thoughtful and energetic at a time when the university has become exhausted by the reactionary defence of its own suspicious ideals... It is not often that theory is this fun to read, and less often still that satire is so well versed in the language of its assailants. ~ Jamie Mackay, Review 31""]" TWICE: A Novel,"[""Susanna Kleeman""]",It's not true. It never was.,"TWICE is a speculative thriller about false fronts and coercive control on a global and personal scale. It tells the story of Nim, who discovers that her childhood games taught her dangerous secrets she must now keep from her first love - and his doubles. Nim's ex-love returns from Silicon Valley, wanting a book from their childhood. She chucks him out. Moments later, he's back again, one fingertip missing, claiming he's the real Chris and that Nim's first visitor was an imposter. Nim doesn't believe him, so he abducts her, forcing her on a journey where nothing is as it seems.","TWICE is a speculative thriller about false fronts and coercive control on a global and personal scale. It tells the story of Nim, who discovers that her childhood games taught her dangerous secrets she must now keep from her first love - and his doubles. Nim's ex-love returns from Silicon Valley, wanting a book from their childhood. She chucks him out. Moments later, he's back again, one fingertip missing, claiming he's the real Chris and that Nim's first visitor was an imposter. Nim doesn't believe him, so he abducts her, forcing her on a journey where nothing is as it seems.",4,"[""A Novel keeps the reader guessing with its twists and turns. A woman named Nim finds herself at the center of an intrigue between Chris, a man she used to love, and his doubles. The man who claims to be the real Chris forces her to come with him on a trip where illusion and reality overlap. Nim must figure out who and what she can trust - including among her own memories! An absorbing page-turner that balances psychological suspense, duplicity, and the human need for trust, TWICE is highly recommended ~ James Cox, Midwest Book Review"", ""Wryly hilarious and utterly bonkers, TWICE is like nothing I've encountered. Imagine David Cronenberg making a horror film after binge-watching Fleabag, and you'll have a general idea of the kind of roller-coaster ride that awaits in Kleeman's delightful horror. ~ Dan Chaon , author of ILL WILL"", ""Dark and dazzling, with mesmeric twists and much to say about where we are today. ~ Anna Minton, Ground Control, Big Capital"", ""Drawn breathlessly into a nightmare world in which the usual conventions do not apply, there is no reprieve until one insecurely draws near to the conclusion. Written with skilful pace and polished art, we are presented with a first rate fantasy and something that is more than mere fantasy. Here is a dextrously woven tale with deftly drawn characters that will cause as much intellectual stimulus as it does readership enjoyment. One is left gasping. ~ Peter Tremayne, Sister Fidelma Mysteries""]" Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century,"[""Philip Freeman""]","Far from dead, jazz is more vital than it's been in decades. These are some of the artists keeping it alive in the twenty-first century.","What does jazz “mean” 20 years into the 21st century? Has streaming culture rendered music literally meaningless, thanks to the removal of all context beyond the playlist? Are there any traditions left to explore? Has the destruction of the apprenticeship model (young musicians learning from their elders) changed the music irrevocably? Are any sounds off limits? How far out can you go and still call it “jazz”? Or should the term be retired? These questions, and many more, are answered in Ugly Beauty, as Phil Freeman digs through his own experiences and conversations with present-day players. Jazz has never seemed as vital as it does right now, and has a genuine role to play in 21st-century culture, particularly in the US and the UK.","What does jazz “mean” 20 years into the 21st century? Has streaming culture rendered music literally meaningless, thanks to the removal of all context beyond the playlist? Are there any traditions left to explore? Has the destruction of the apprenticeship model (young musicians learning from their elders) changed the music irrevocably? Are any sounds off limits? How far out can you go and still call it “jazz”? Or should the term be retired? These questions, and many more, are answered in Ugly Beauty, as Phil Freeman digs through his own experiences and conversations with present-day players. Jazz has never seemed as vital as it does right now, and has a genuine role to play in 21st-century culture, particularly in the US and the UK.",10,"[""\""Ugly Beauty... provides a number of well-constructed signposts to understanding the complexities of jazz in the twenty-first century, sheds light on several dozen of its chief protagonists and provides listening guides that will serve as reference points for anyone coming to any of the music for the first time.\"" ~ Ian Patterson, All About Jazz"", ""As I began writing this review, I was about half-way through Phil Freeman's Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century. I had been picking it up and putting it down for a week or so, which is no fault of the author, rather I blame my computer-mediated attention deficit disorder. The thing is, Ugly Beauty is perfect for this approach to reading. The stories, anecdotes and encounters with musicians, choice quotes woven in from longer interviews, and smartly detailed tangents linking the musicians, the gigs, and the music are served well in short richly detailed chapters.\n\nIt is clear from the start that Freeman has listened to a wide and varied assortment of music and has done a painstaking job of keeping the details of the recordings, encounters, and concert dates straight. A sampling of artists are profiled in each chapter, but the subjects of the chapter are embedded in various networks. The enumerations of who has played with who, releasing this or that album, paints a picture of artistic development of both the artists and the scene they come from. Each artist/scene is treated to a similar presentation and by the end of each neatly structured chapter, you may, like me, find yourself popping off immediately to search your collection or check Spotify for one or more of the recordings you've just read about.\n\nFreeman begins with the mainstream musicians, capturing several in the mid-point of their careers, including JD Allen, Ethan Iverson, Wayne Escoffery, Jason Moran and Orrin Evans. In Part II, he moves into the somewhat more experimental players, the ones who are reshaping 'jazz' and blending genres, like pianist Vijay Iyer, whose music straddles mainstream and avant-garde, as well as other fan favorites like Mary Halvorson, Tomeka Reid, Linda May Han Oh, Nicole Mitchell and Tyshawn Sorey. Throughout, the writing is crisp and smart. For example, an anecdote leads to Iyer through a concert from the Art Ensemble of Chicago and various offshoots. These connections, be they through people, places, or events, serve as path markers.\n\nThat is what this book does best, connecting the dots, giving shape to what jazz is today, though what it actually looks like, is fuzzier than ever before. Freeman starts with his nodes, offering a somewhat solid taxonomy, with each \""part\"" of the book exploring a branch of the jazz family tree. To improve on that metaphor, I would recommend thinking of a giant Mangrove tree. In addition to what is on the page, the more the reader fills in the interconnections, the more this slim book fills in. Hell, this is the type of stuff we used to do teasing every piece of possible information out of LP liner notes.\n\nIn addition to the aforementioned topics, Freeman dedicates a chapter to spiritual jazz, rooting the work of Shabaka Hutchings, Yazz Ahmed, Makaya McCravan, Kamasi Washington, and Darius Jones (among others) loosely to the forebears: Albert Ayler, John and Alice Coltrane, and the general spiritual movement in the 60s and 70s. Then, he moves on to a set players of a specific instrument, the trumpet. He also notes that each player in this part, Ambrose Akinmusire, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Kenyon Harold, Theo Crocker and Marquis Hill also incorporate hip-hop into their music. In the final part, and maybe what it was all leading up to anyway, the work of Jamie Branch, James Brandon Lewis, Matana Roberts, Kassa Overall, Moor Mother and Luke Stewart is connected through its raw and uncompromising genre-bending urgency.\n\nThis book will likely sit near to the Penguin Guide to Jazz by Brian Morton and Richard Cook on my shelf, whose thin pages of tiny font I once poured over religiously, seeking connections, trying to understand what I needed to know to 'know Jazz.' Here we follow Freeman doing the same. Ugly Beauty is less of a reference and more of a living history, where he's putting what these musicians are doing right now, into the context of, well, jazz in the 21st century.\n\n~ Paul Acquaro, The Free Jazz Collective"", ""Phil Freeman Knows His Jazz.\n\nThe acclaimed music critic and impresario delivers the only book on jazz in the 21st Century that matters.\n\n~ Todd Manning, Rock and Roll Globe"", ""Insightful, intelligent and thought provoking. Freeman makes a compelling and convincing case for the ongoing importance and vitality of jazz in the 21st century. ~ Ian Mann, The Jazz Mann"", ""Read Ugly Beauty twice: once quickly to view the landscape; once slowly, sampling the music as you go. ~ Jon Turney | London Jazz News"", ""Freeman’s portrayals of musicians are personal. He remembers the rush of the first time he saw them live, and what the weather was like. He remembers what they were wearing when he interviewed them. There is a risk in first-person criticism: The critic can become the story. Freeman never crosses that line.\n\nWriting about music has famously been compared to dancing about architecture. The only hope is metaphor. Freeman has a poet’s instinct for it. Here’s just one example, describing Shabaka Hutchings’ collaboration with musicians from Cape Town: “… a pulsing, shuffling vamp that feels like dancing barefoot in the dust as the stars whirl above you.” ~ Thomas Conrad, Jazz Times"", ""Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century will introduce the reader to dozens of artists making genuinely new music in what is undeniably one of the strongest eras in jazz history. It will change the way you listen, and the way you hear. ~ Bass Magazine"", ""For the past 10+ years, Phil Freeman’s journal, Burning Ambulance, has planted a flag for thoughtful, ear-first, socially attuned music criticism — at a time when this kind of writing is far too rare. By documenting his devotion to creative music, Freeman has given a platform to some of today’s most badly under-recognized artists, while inviting readers to fall in love with the work on their own terms. With Ugly Beauty, Freeman gamely wrestles with some hard but important questions: What does it mean to be an improvising musician today? Where does this music come from, and where will it lead? Drawn from his own rich experiences on the noisy, knotty landscape of 21st-century jazz, Freeman's travelogue becomes a guide. ~ Giovanni Russonello, critic, New York Times, email"", ""Phil Freeman has always been a free-thinking jazz critic, wary of majority opinion and allergic to conventional wisdom. In Ugly Beauty he applies that sensibility to a series of dispatches from a fast-moving scene, portraying some of the most vibrant artists of our time. A welcome addition to the growing literature around 21st century improvised music, with a crucial awareness of its relationship to a broader culture. ~ Nate Chinen, author of Playing Changes: Jazz For the New Century"", ""Phil Freeman composes a much-needed text pointing towards the futures of an important art form while making connections to its origins and histories over a century. He doesn’t only touch on the telling of a jazz story in the 21st century, but also prescribes a soundtrack within which to situate a time in history. His register of writing flows with rhythm, and this is a definite must get!\n\n~ Nduduzo Makhathini, improviser, healer and scholar from South Africa""]" Ultrablack of Music,"[""Claire Elise Herzberg"", ""Achim Szepanski""]","Anonymous, hidden, encrypted, incomprehensible - these are the forces and sounds that tell us the unheard in music.","Iconic Frankfurt techno and experimental label -Mille Plateaux- returns with a new anthology of texts written by a collective of voices who assembled around the resurrection of the label, taking Ultrablack as its organising principle. This volume features various forms of writing with and through - as opposed to about - music, including essays on quantum aesthetics, mythology, semiotics, experimental glitch literature, and macabre philofictions. As the primordial Ultrablack Noise fluctuates in intensity, it ruptures into sound and silence. Noise intensifies until it bursts over a limit; it erupts into our World through our ears. Silence comes after Noise, and only then can we arrive at Sound. What was that Noise? It was a Sound, a moment of Noise. Once you have two Sounds, you can have Rhythm. Once you have Rhythm, you have Code. Ultrablack is the Noise which escapes these dualisms: Noise/Silence, Noise/Sound, Noise/Rhythm, Noise/Code. It is the Noise that continuously exceeds the limits of its own sign, the Noise which keeps breaking until a Rhythm emerges from breaks - a break-beat - on-off, tick-tock. There is no positive, only double-negative, as Noise creates gaps within itself. Only where there is no sound, and no silence, can you hear the music of this infinite meta-rhythm, this rhythm-without-rhythm, this Noise-beyond-Noise. Featuring works from: Achim Szepanski, Eugene Thacker, Gary Shipley, Eldritch Priest, Frédéric Neyrat, Jens Schröter, Obsolete Capitalism, Alessandro Sbordoni, Lain Iwakura, Giorgi Vachnadze, Palais Sinclaire, Darko Vukić, Stefan Paulus, Alberto Ricca, Holger Schulze, Jan Heintz, Luigi Monteanni & Gabriele de Seta, Kenji Siratori, Ross Birdwise, and Andrea Taeggi.","Iconic Frankfurt techno and experimental label -Mille Plateaux- returns with a new anthology of texts written by a collective of voices who assembled around the resurrection of the label, taking Ultrablack as its organising principle. This volume features various forms of writing with and through - as opposed to about - music, including essays on quantum aesthetics, mythology, semiotics, experimental glitch literature, and macabre philofictions. As the primordial Ultrablack Noise fluctuates in intensity, it ruptures into sound and silence. Noise intensifies until it bursts over a limit; it erupts into our World through our ears. Silence comes after Noise, and only then can we arrive at Sound. What was that Noise? It was a Sound, a moment of Noise. Once you have two Sounds, you can have Rhythm. Once you have Rhythm, you have Code. Ultrablack is the Noise which escapes these dualisms: Noise/Silence, Noise/Sound, Noise/Rhythm, Noise/Code. It is the Noise that continuously exceeds the limits of its own sign, the Noise which keeps breaking until a Rhythm emerges from breaks - a break-beat - on-off, tick-tock. There is no positive, only double-negative, as Noise creates gaps within itself. Only where there is no sound, and no silence, can you hear the music of this infinite meta-rhythm, this rhythm-without-rhythm, this Noise-beyond-Noise. Featuring works from: Achim Szepanski, Eugene Thacker, Gary Shipley, Eldritch Priest, Frédéric Neyrat, Jens Schröter, Obsolete Capitalism, Alessandro Sbordoni, Lain Iwakura, Giorgi Vachnadze, Palais Sinclaire, Darko Vukić, Stefan Paulus, Alberto Ricca, Holger Schulze, Jan Heintz, Luigi Monteanni & Gabriele de Seta, Kenji Siratori, Ross Birdwise, and Andrea Taeggi.",0,[] Uncertain Futures,"[""Edmund Berger""]",A detailed look into the economic and political conditions of our present moment from a Marxist perspective.,"Uncertain Futures: An Assessment of the Conditions of the Present provides a detailed look into the economic and political conditions of our present moment from a Marxist perspective. Key aspects of Marxist economic theory are illustrated in clear ways in order to provide an easy introduction to Marxist thought and their applicability. The book also examines the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession, in the context of the long-term feasibility of sustaining the capitalist system by placing it into a historical framework. It considers the necessity of social democratic reforms while calling for an anarchic re-invigoration of the politics of everyday life.","Uncertain Futures: An Assessment of the Conditions of the Present provides a detailed look into the economic and political conditions of our present moment from a Marxist perspective. Key aspects of Marxist economic theory are illustrated in clear ways in order to provide an easy introduction to Marxist thought and their applicability. The book also examines the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession, in the context of the long-term feasibility of sustaining the capitalist system by placing it into a historical framework. It considers the necessity of social democratic reforms while calling for an anarchic re-invigoration of the politics of everyday life.",3,"[""As I finished Edmund’s new book Uncertain Futures: An Assessment of the Conditions of the Present (Get it: here) I realized why I’ve followed his blog Deterritorial Investigations Unit for the past few years: keen intelligence, an encyclopedic breadth of vision encompassing an ethical commitment to the real movement of change, and a loquacious and gracious scholarly acumen and sense of excellence stylistically and in regards of other thinkers place within our cultural history. Critical, observant, detailed – a thinker whose historical sense is not overburdened by a false historicism, but peers into that dark mirror of our near future as if his diagnosis and cure of our ailing civilization were neither a swan song to its demise, nor a belabored undermining of its forward movement into ruin and decay, but rather as a physician of time – a creature from the far flung future seeking to retroactively elide the toxic effects of our dark modernism....\n\n....Whether you side with the Ogres or the socialists is your choice. Either way we will know you as you are in the near future. Read Edmund Berger’s book, get to know this political economic history in a series of doses that will help you understand what choices are available. You may or may not agree with his socialist agenda, but you can still understand what brought him to his conclusions and why. That in itself is genius.\n\nExtract from https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/edmund-berger-uncertain-futures-a-review/ ~ S.C. Hickam, Social Ecologies blog"", ""Put two economists in the same room and you will understand why Congress never works. Put a book together with economists’ views on neoliberalism and socialism, and you get a bickering collection of angles and aspects, all of which can be disputed.\n\nUncertain Futures is a title that captures this ethos well. It consists of three chapters, roughly past present and future. The future is of the one of most interest, and is therefore the most disappointing. Berger is very cautious, maybe because he himself has just demonstrated the potential of instant criticism, or maybe because he is uncertain himself. Or both. But his final recommendation is to create support networks around the world. Put the 99% in touch, with co-operatives, unions and movements. This will raise the profile of socialism as viable, and provide a concrete answer to the precarity that neoliberalism has entrenched. Sounds like a very long term plan.\n\nThe race to the bottom should now be obvious to everyone. Fascism, an inherent if not necessary component of capitalism, has been dramatically rising in numerous democracies. It absolutely must, as the 99% looks for a savior from their absurd position and condition. Yet the fear it plays on helps cement the status quo, because fascists are dictators protecting their gains. Berger says “Fascism is nothing less than the intensification of every regressive sentiment to be found in the whole of society, mobilized and put on the march by elements in the ruling class.” And “To reform capitalism at this stage is a revolutionary act.” That’s how far we’ve fallen.\n\n~ David Wineberg, Amazon/The Straight Dope (Medium)"", ""4/5 Stars This book covers the world economic crisis in 2007. Edmund Berger puts forward some compelling theories and reasons why it happened. His assessment of Marxism is interesting too. His history of the beginning of Capitalism is fascinating, but it all comes down to greed by the bankers, other people and institutions. Iceland went another way by closing down the banks. Today the country is thriving after going through hard, difficult times. The world didn't end for them. I can't see why other countries didn't do the same.\n\nUnfortunately the financial sector has tentacles which spread to all areas of governments in many countries, especially US and UK.\n\nThe US frighteningly has players from the big banks in charge now. Will they learn from the past? I hope so.\n\nRecommended. ~ Eileen Hall, NetGalley/GoodReads/Amazon""]" Uncommon,"[""Owen Hatherley""]","The history of the Jarvis Cocker’s 1990s Britpop band, Pulp,through sex, pop, class war and Sheffield.","If we remember them at all, the Sheffield pop group Pulp are remembered for jolly class warfare ditty 'Common People', for the celebrity of their interestingly-named frontman, for the latter waving his arse at Michael Jackson at the Brit awards, for being part of a non-movement called 'Britpop', and for disappearing almost without trace shortly after. They made a few good tunes, they did some funny videos, and while they might be National Treasures, they're nothing serious. Are they? This book argues that they should be taken seriously - very seriously indeed. Attempting to wrest Pulp away from the grim jingoistic spectacle of Britpop and the revivals-of-a-revival circuit, this book charts the very strange things that occur in their records, taking us deep into a strange exotic land; a land of acrylics, adultery, architecture, analogue synthesisers and burning class anger. This is book about pop music, but it is mainly a book about sex, the city and class via the 1990s finest British pop group.","If we remember them at all, the Sheffield pop group Pulp are remembered for jolly class warfare ditty 'Common People', for the celebrity of their interestingly-named frontman, for the latter waving his arse at Michael Jackson at the Brit awards, for being part of a non-movement called 'Britpop', and for disappearing almost without trace shortly after. They made a few good tunes, they did some funny videos, and while they might be National Treasures, they're nothing serious. Are they? This book argues that they should be taken seriously - very seriously indeed. Attempting to wrest Pulp away from the grim jingoistic spectacle of Britpop and the revivals-of-a-revival circuit, this book charts the very strange things that occur in their records, taking us deep into a strange exotic land; a land of acrylics, adultery, architecture, analogue synthesisers and burning class anger. This is book about pop music, but it is mainly a book about sex, the city and class via the 1990s finest British pop group.",5,"[""The Battle of Orgreave may have been lost, but Cocker never forgave nor forgot the violence wreaked on his native Sheffield. In the pointillist details of his songs – “The smell of gas and potato peelings” in Street Lites (1994); “Net curtains blowing slightly in the breeze/ Lemonade light filtering through the trees” in Acrylic Afternoons (1994) – there’s a palpable desire not just to Keep It Real (in rap parlance), but to make the past seem as vivid and raw as a bruise.\n\nThis political Cocker is the subject of Uncommon, Owen Hatherley’s bracingly intelligent book-length essay about a band he praises for “holding on to the possibility of utopias and alternatives, in being able to use the word ‘socialism’ without smirking”. A superior architecture critic, he’s especially acute on the ways in which post-industrial Sheffield, its modernist buildings and flawed urbanism, infuses many of Pulp’s finest songs. ~ Sukhdev Sandhu, The Daily Telegraph"", ""It seems that now might be an appropriate time to revisit the remarkable music of Pulp. Luckily, we have an excellent gazetter on this journey - Uncommon. Hatherley is a prolific and insightful critic.\n\n~ Leonard Nevarez, Musical Urbanism"", ""Hatherley has produced a perfect tribute to Pulp and the time that produced them as a band, invoking the sincerity of their ambitions as musicians and story-tellers. This account of their career is an excellent excoriation of Britpop and New Labour hagiographies.\n\n~ Emmet O'Cuana, abookadaytillicanstay"", ""This book is a small marvel. Even within the most ambiguous cultural flowering, something transcendent is cached. Owen Hatherley knows this. Possessed of an architect's clarity and a modernist's astringent vision, he draws forth the the paradoxical and brilliant core of Britpop, and restores Pulp's contradictory genius to its proper place in history. Behind the Blairite swagger of Cool Britannia and the spackle of commercial spectacle, Hatherley finds the truth of pop culture and social antagonism, entangled with the glory and oddity of Pulp's musical career and evanescent fame. Elegant about the songs, lucid about the band's warped trajectory, and incisive about the politics of daily life coiled within the sound and lyrics and moment, Hatherley chronicles the adventures of the Sheffield gang and their \""class war casanova\"" who came forth as the truth of a deeply false moment, bad faith you could dance to, a dialectical verdict on a singular passage in time.\n\n~ Joshua Clover"", ""\""Britain's best writer on modern architecture on Britain's best pop group informed by modern architecture.\""\n\nBob Stanley\n\n~ Bob Stanley""]" Under Foreign Eyes,"[""James King""]",This book is about an important sub-genre: the sixty Western films set in post World War II.,"This book is about the perception of Japan in the sixty films set there by gaijin (foreigners) —outsiders who almost always do not speak or read Japanese. This book discusses films depicting post World War II Japan and the Japanese, and, in many cases, films showing how foreigners in the same time frame respond to Japan. Why have a substantial number of films been set there by strangers? As a body of work, what do they tell us about contemporary Japan and about cinema? These films certainly provide a new cultural history of the West and its reaction to Japan, but, even more, they are constructions that demonstrate how the West gazes at Japan. As such, more information can often be derived about the onlookers as on those looked-upon.","This book is about the perception of Japan in the sixty films set there by gaijin (foreigners) —outsiders who almost always do not speak or read Japanese. This book discusses films depicting post World War II Japan and the Japanese, and, in many cases, films showing how foreigners in the same time frame respond to Japan. Why have a substantial number of films been set there by strangers? As a body of work, what do they tell us about contemporary Japan and about cinema? These films certainly provide a new cultural history of the West and its reaction to Japan, but, even more, they are constructions that demonstrate how the West gazes at Japan. As such, more information can often be derived about the onlookers as on those looked-upon.",0,[] Unf*cking Work,"[""Neil Usher""]","A bold, fearless, uncompromising and yet practical advocacy for a more humane, honest and open world of work.","Every journey starts with the realization that we don’t have to take any more of this crap. The world of work – and all that’s wrong with it – is dominated by 12 statements. We hear them every day. We utter them at will. But they’re all garbage. What if we said – no more? This is the business book for everyone who can’t bear to read business books. Which is most of us. It considers that in being part of the problem – an uncomfortable admission – we may also be the creators of the solution. In uncompromising, engaging and humorous fashion, it dismantles each statement and sets us on the path to a better world of work. You can read each essay between meetings you’d rather not be at, after which, your working life will never be the same again.","Every journey starts with the realization that we don’t have to take any more of this crap. The world of work – and all that’s wrong with it – is dominated by 12 statements. We hear them every day. We utter them at will. But they’re all garbage. What if we said – no more? This is the business book for everyone who can’t bear to read business books. Which is most of us. It considers that in being part of the problem – an uncomfortable admission – we may also be the creators of the solution. In uncompromising, engaging and humorous fashion, it dismantles each statement and sets us on the path to a better world of work. You can read each essay between meetings you’d rather not be at, after which, your working life will never be the same again.",3,"[""The reality is it’s far easier to convince yourself you’re good at HR or management through platitudes than it is to actually hold a mirror up to yourself and really understand what needs to change. That’s what I got from this book - a call to forget everything you learned and re-frame what work is for, and where work is.\n\nIt takes the inscrutable understanding of work and through Socratic questioning leads you to better understand work - and your role in it. ~ Gethin Nadin | Author of A World of Good"", ""I wanted to stand and applaud all the way through. It just flows perfectly. ~ Khurshed Dehnugara | Co-founder and co-owner, Relume"", ""Insanely smart, funny and insightful. ~ Amelia Saberwal | Founder and owner, Kinesthetica Coaching""]" Uninhabited,"[""Ben Woodard""]",A fresh view on sci-fi and colonialism.,"Is it inhabited? This question makes the shared stakes of science fiction and colonialism obvious, wherein the wide imaginaries of empire and what counts as life - scientifically, ethically, politically - and the moral and technological possibilities of terraforming and the impulse for exploration are all fused. Science fiction, and the genres that preceded and grounded it, such as scientific romance and tales of lost civilizations, emerged alongside the birth of industrialized global trade and imperial rushes for new resources. If the scientific romance dramatized the effects of new technologies on history and forms of life, then lost civilization stories dealt with themes of the alien, the forgetting of history, and more explicitly, with episodes of war and oppression.","Is it inhabited? This question makes the shared stakes of science fiction and colonialism obvious, wherein the wide imaginaries of empire and what counts as life - scientifically, ethically, politically - and the moral and technological possibilities of terraforming and the impulse for exploration are all fused. Science fiction, and the genres that preceded and grounded it, such as scientific romance and tales of lost civilizations, emerged alongside the birth of industrialized global trade and imperial rushes for new resources. If the scientific romance dramatized the effects of new technologies on history and forms of life, then lost civilization stories dealt with themes of the alien, the forgetting of history, and more explicitly, with episodes of war and oppression.",0,[] "Universal Subject of Our Time, The","[""Darius Nikbin""]",The Subject itself is the Subject of the Machine.,"The Subject itself is the Subject of the Machine. What does it mean to be human? We live in a technological age, where rapid advances in personal tech and the science of Artificial Intelligence are challenging us in ways never before imagined. A book in two parts, The Universal Subject of Our Time begins with an exploration of 20th Century post-modernism's undermining of subjectivity with thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard and Althusser and continues with a description of the science wars, where physical realists challenged the post-modernists up to the 1990s when the intellectual conflict resulted in an uncompromising stand-off after the Sokal Hoax. In Part II the subject is resurrected by taking a look at arguments for machine intelligence and AI and also, from the perspective of physics, examines what subjectivity means, particularly in relation to black holes or black stars, and look to what lies ahead in the future, in terms of space exploration, Martian habitats and even the possibility of first contact with extra-terrestrials.","The Subject itself is the Subject of the Machine. What does it mean to be human? We live in a technological age, where rapid advances in personal tech and the science of Artificial Intelligence are challenging us in ways never before imagined. A book in two parts, The Universal Subject of Our Time begins with an exploration of 20th Century post-modernism's undermining of subjectivity with thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard and Althusser and continues with a description of the science wars, where physical realists challenged the post-modernists up to the 1990s when the intellectual conflict resulted in an uncompromising stand-off after the Sokal Hoax. In Part II the subject is resurrected by taking a look at arguments for machine intelligence and AI and also, from the perspective of physics, examines what subjectivity means, particularly in relation to black holes or black stars, and look to what lies ahead in the future, in terms of space exploration, Martian habitats and even the possibility of first contact with extra-terrestrials.",3,"[""Nikbin's The Universal Subject of Our Time challenges the current discourse on human subjectivity and its difficult encounter with virtual technologies. Lucidly written and well argued, it is a concise philosophical-scientific primer for anybody who is concerned with the predicament of the human subject facing machine and its uncertain future—this is a necessary reading. ~ Nadir Lahiji"", ""\""This could be the Big Bang of philosophy...\"" ~ Slavoj Zizek"", ""\""In the last decades, the notion of human subject was undermined at two totally different levels: in deconstructionist theory which played with \""the death of the subject\"", and in cognitive sciences which debunked the myth of unified conscious subject controlling its acts. Nikbin's book intervenes into this debates in a double way: it brings deconstructionism and cognitive sciences into a dialogue, plus it demonstrates how, out of this dialogue, a new universal subject can emerge. The Universal Subject of Our Time strikes at the very heart of our theoretical (and not only theoretical) traumas. It hurts, but all true healing begins with pain.\"" ~ Slavoj Zizek""]" Unlearning Marx,"[""Steve Paxton""]",An authentically Marxist understanding of the USSR's place in Russian history. Unlearning Marx will surprise Marx’s admirers and his detractors alike.,"The theories of Karl Marx and the practical existence of the Soviet Union are inseparable in the public imagination, but for all the wrong reasons. This book provides detailed analyses of both Marx’s theory of history and the course of Russian and Soviet development and delivers a new and insightful approach to the relationship between the two. Most analyses of the Soviet Union, from any perspective, focus on trying to explain the failure to establish socialism, giving too much weight to the political pronouncements of the regime. But, for Marx, this approach to historical explanation is back-to-front, it's the political tail wagging the economic dog. When we move our focus from the stated aims of building socialism, and look at what actually happened in Russia from emancipation in the 1860s, through the Soviet era to the 1990s, we can clearly see the patterns which Marx identified as the essential features of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. As such, the Soviet experiment forms an important part of Russia’s transition from feudalism to capitalism and provides an excellent example of the underlying forces at play in the course of historical development. Unlearning Marx will surprise Marx’s admirers and his detractors alike, and not only shed new light on Marxism's relationship with the Soviet Union, but on his ongoing relationship with our world.","The theories of Karl Marx and the practical existence of the Soviet Union are inseparable in the public imagination, but for all the wrong reasons. This book provides detailed analyses of both Marx’s theory of history and the course of Russian and Soviet development and delivers a new and insightful approach to the relationship between the two. Most analyses of the Soviet Union, from any perspective, focus on trying to explain the failure to establish socialism, giving too much weight to the political pronouncements of the regime. But, for Marx, this approach to historical explanation is back-to-front, it's the political tail wagging the economic dog. When we move our focus from the stated aims of building socialism, and look at what actually happened in Russia from emancipation in the 1860s, through the Soviet era to the 1990s, we can clearly see the patterns which Marx identified as the essential features of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. As such, the Soviet experiment forms an important part of Russia’s transition from feudalism to capitalism and provides an excellent example of the underlying forces at play in the course of historical development. Unlearning Marx will surprise Marx’s admirers and his detractors alike, and not only shed new light on Marxism's relationship with the Soviet Union, but on his ongoing relationship with our world.",2,"[""With its robust argument that the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicated rather than disproved Marxian theory, Steve Paxton’s timely book reclaims a vital part of humanity’s conceptual toolbox, just as we witness the persisting dry cough of capitalism approach its distressing conclusion. Highly recommended. ~ Alan Moore, author of novels and graphic novels including Watchmen and V for Vendetta"", ""By returning to a carefully assembled ground of classical materialist analysis, Steve Paxton brings a rare clarity of critical perspective to the complexities of Soviet history and their placement in a larger framework of comparative socio-economic development. ~ Geoff Eley, Professor of Contemporary History, University of Michigan, author of Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000""]" Unmaking Merlin,"[""Elliot Murphy""]","A unique exploration of how anarchist philosophy and practice has inspired some of the English language's most revered, and reviled, authors.","A unique exploration of how anarchist philosophy and practice has inspired some of the English language's most revered, and reviled, authors.","A unique exploration of how anarchist philosophy and practice has inspired some of the English language's most revered, and reviled, authors.",2,"[""'Murphy is remarkably erudite for such a young scholar. Though not even 25 years old, he zooms with apparent ease and familiarity from George Orwell to Friedrich Nietzsche to James Joyce to Christopher Hitchens ... The book is wide-ranging, touching on a number of themes – including education, representative democracy, the New Atheism, corporate power, crime, and poststructuralism. Throughout, Murphy does a good job of showing that the popular association of anarchism with violence and chaos is deeply inaccurate. He shows that the central concerns of anarchists have always been self-determination, mutual aid, and an end to structural violence.' ~ Tom Malleson, author of After Occupy: Economic Democracy for the 21st Century, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/review-unmaking-merlin-anarchist-tendencies-english-literature-zero-books//"", ""Elliot Murphy is a superb guide and analyst of the repressed and marginalised anarchist tradition in British culture. His fresh readings of both renowned and obscure writers and the historical political undercurrents with which they engaged will intrigue scholars and activists interested in politics and culture. The relevance of these concerns to our current neoliberal condition renders this a gripping and important book. ~ Anita Biressi, co-author of 'Class and Contemporary British Culture'""]" Unpatriotic History of the Second World War,"[""James Heartfield""]","The Second World War was not the Good War of legend. James Heartfield explains that both Allies and Axis powers fought for the same goals - territory, markets and natural resources.","Sixty million people died in the Second World War, and still they tell us it was the Peoples War. The official history of the Second World War is Victors History. This is the history of the Second World War without the patriotic whitewash. The Second World War was not fought to stop fascism, or to liberate Europe. It was a war between imperialist powers to decide which among them would rule over the world, a division of the spoils of empire, and an iron cage for working people, enslaved to the war production drive. The unpatriotic history of the Second World War explains why the Great Powers fought most of their war not in their own countries, but in colonies in North Africa, in the Far East and in Germanys hoped-for Empire in the East. Find out how wildcat strikes, partisans in Europe and Asia, and soldiers mutinies came close to ending the war. And find out how the Allies invaded Europe and the Far East to save capitalism from being overthrown. James Heartfield challenges the received wisdom of the Second World War.","Sixty million people died in the Second World War, and still they tell us it was the Peoples War. The official history of the Second World War is Victors History. This is the history of the Second World War without the patriotic whitewash. The Second World War was not fought to stop fascism, or to liberate Europe. It was a war between imperialist powers to decide which among them would rule over the world, a division of the spoils of empire, and an iron cage for working people, enslaved to the war production drive. The unpatriotic history of the Second World War explains why the Great Powers fought most of their war not in their own countries, but in colonies in North Africa, in the Far East and in Germanys hoped-for Empire in the East. Find out how wildcat strikes, partisans in Europe and Asia, and soldiers mutinies came close to ending the war. And find out how the Allies invaded Europe and the Far East to save capitalism from being overthrown. James Heartfield challenges the received wisdom of the Second World War.",6,"[""James Heartfields’s book, ..is an impressive piece of research: 472 pages of text contain a wealth of information, and the 76 pages of notes reveal the huge range of sources that have been consulted ...\n\nThe book covers the whole course of the war and its impact on the shape of the post-war world. Everything is packed in, from major atrocities to minor absurdities.\n\nRead more: http://londonsocialisthistorians.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/book-review-more-on-wwii.html ~ Ian Birchall, Socialist Historians Group"", ""Beneath the fog of the People's War\n\nIn this reinterpretation of the events surrounding World War Two James Heartfield invites readers to reconsider the accepted victors’ histories of the period. This is not a run-of-the-mill retelling ...he gives us an unsanitised version of events and an analysis of the fundamental realities behind the conflict that cost sixty million lives and caused almost incalculable destruction of useful constructions (factories, railways, ships, dwellings and other buildings).\n\nRead more: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1300-december-2012/book-reviews-unpatriotic-history-second-world-wa ~ Socialist Standard, http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1300-december-2012/book-reviews-unpatriotic-history-second-world-wa"", ""James Heartfield: setting the record straight\n\nThe author of ‘Unpatriotic History of the Second World War’ talks about another ‘holocaust’ and why America dropped atomic bombs on Japan\n\nThe Second World War is often presented in the West as the example of a “good war”. In fact it has been a reference point for many politicians and intellectuals to justify participation of Western countries in various conflicts around the world for more than half a century. This is perhaps why the subject matter of Heartfield’s book is so intriguing, and I was curious to find out his motivation for choosing to tell an “unpatriotic” history about the war.\n\nRead more at: http://gulfnews.com/about-gulf-news/al-nisr-portfolio/weekend-review/james-heartfield-setting-the-record-straight-1.1249638 ~ Syed Hamad Ali, Gulf News"", ""Friday 26 October 2012\n\nExploding the myth of a ‘People’s War’\n\nJames Heartfield demolishes the dominant anti-fascist narrative to reveal the truth about the Second World War: six years of slaughter, poverty and exploitation.\n\nNeil Davenport\n\na trenchant and sustained demolition of the People’s War mythology. It provides a cogent account and analysis of how that conflict was ultimately a war against the people rather than for democracy.\n\nRead more http://www.spiked-online.com/site/reviewofbooks_article/13025/ ~ Neil Davenport, http://www.spiked-online.com/site/reviewofbooks_article/13025/"", ""The truth behind the Second World War\n\nChris Davison | August 16, 2012 |\n\na compelling and fascinating analysis, demolishing conventional accounts of the War and successfully constructing an alternative imperialist- and class-based model\n\nread more: http://anticapitalists.org/2012/08/16/the-truth-behind-the-second-world-war/ ~ Anti-Capitalist Initiative, http://anticapitalists.org/2012/08/16/the-truth-behind-the-second-world-war/"", ""‘It was either us or them’\n\nPatrick West\n\nIt takes a brave soul to write a revisionist history of the Second World War, one that goes against the orthodoxy that it was a noble fight against Nazism and evil. strong stuff, and in sharp contrast with today’s best-selling histories\n\nRead more: http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/article/it_was_either_us_or_them/ ~ Culture Wars, http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/article/it_was_either_us_or_them/""]" Vade Mecum,"[""Richard Skinner""]","A collection of highly-informed essays offering fresh perspectives on cutting-edge writers, musicians and filmmakers.","Vade Mecum brings together Richard Skinner’s best essays, reviews and interviews from 1992-2014. There are close critical engagements with writers (Kazuo Ishiguro, Italo Calvino, Shakespeare’s The Tempest) and composers (Erik Satie, Iannis Xenakis, Luc Ferrari), meditations on films and filmmakers (Antonioni, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Chinatown) and idiosyncratic reflections on Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice and Steely Dan.","Vade Mecum brings together Richard Skinner’s best essays, reviews and interviews from 1992-2014. There are close critical engagements with writers (Kazuo Ishiguro, Italo Calvino, Shakespeare’s The Tempest) and composers (Erik Satie, Iannis Xenakis, Luc Ferrari), meditations on films and filmmakers (Antonioni, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Chinatown) and idiosyncratic reflections on Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice and Steely Dan.",5,"[""'The British writer Richard Skinner has found new inputs in Erik Satie's creation in his dual/double narrative ‘The Mirror’. From the mundane to the imaginary, without adding anything, you just follow the stream of impressions, the silences that occur and the freedom in the small and simple ... through the feat of dissolving the real contours, Skinner manages to get the dream architecture to emerge, not unlike Satie's cartoon fantasies of Gothic cathedrals and hidden schemes.' ~ Magnus Haglund, GöteborgsPosten"", ""'These novellas are two meditations on life. They resonate in the reader's imagination in truly memorable ways, often for what is left unsaid. We carry away the sense of two rich lives: from the perspective of one life yet to be lived and another that has been fully and truly lived.' ~ Dermot Bolger, Sunday Business Post"", ""'There are tinges of the uncanny, strains of the gothic, to both stories. In each there are corridors and locked doors it would be best not to pry into. Skinner’s prose has the strangely contradictory quality of being so clear and crystalline that you feel it must be hiding something. It’s an effect that is, like the settings of both these highly unusual tales, creepingly claustrophobic.' ~ Lucy Daniel, Telegraph"", ""'The story [of The Mirror] trickles out daintily at first before building to a torrent; Skinner’s elegant prose is restrained and increasingly hypnotic. These two narratives are linked by one eternal question: why are we here?' ~ Alexander Gilmour, Financial Times"", ""'Bucking the trend for bulky, sweeping narratives, Skinner has produced two tightly crafted novellas with a dreamlike quality ... Two absorbing meditations on art and identity with a common thread: obsessive dedication to a calling and its effects, self-destructive or creative.' Book of the Week ~ Juanita Coulson, The Lady""]" Vagabond Witness:,"[""Paul Gordon""]","A unique witness to the revolutionary upheavals of the last century, endlessly creative, deeply humanist, Serge is a resource of hope for today.","Victor Serge was the first and the greatest witness of the twentieth century. An anarchist in France, a syndicalist in Spain, a critical Bolshevik in Russia, an agent of the Comintern in Germany and Austria, an exile, Serge once said that people judged history, but they did so without knowing what really happened and who the actors really were. All his work - novels. reportage, poetry, criticism - was an attempt to show what really happened, and why. Serge never lost hope, that ordinary people would act for themselves and take control of their own lives. On the ship taking him to exile in Mexico, where he would die isolated and in poverty, he recalled, 'The Russians and Spaniards among us know what it is to take the world into their hands, to set the railways running and the factories working...no kind of predestination impels us to become the offal of the concentration camps.'","Victor Serge was the first and the greatest witness of the twentieth century. An anarchist in France, a syndicalist in Spain, a critical Bolshevik in Russia, an agent of the Comintern in Germany and Austria, an exile, Serge once said that people judged history, but they did so without knowing what really happened and who the actors really were. All his work - novels. reportage, poetry, criticism - was an attempt to show what really happened, and why. Serge never lost hope, that ordinary people would act for themselves and take control of their own lives. On the ship taking him to exile in Mexico, where he would die isolated and in poverty, he recalled, 'The Russians and Spaniards among us know what it is to take the world into their hands, to set the railways running and the factories working...no kind of predestination impels us to become the offal of the concentration camps.'",0,[] Voodoo Science Park,"[""Steve Beard""]","A filmic essay which cross-cuts between Thomas Hobbes, William Blake, the science of accident investigation and the psychogeography of the Peak District.","Voodoo Science Park started life as a poetic film about the science of accident investigation practised by the Health and Safety Laboratory in the Peak District of England. In the book of the film, Victoria Halford and Steve Beard reveal the thinking that went into the preparation of the script. The Health and Safety Lab is the place where large-scale accidents such as tunnel collapses, fires and rail crashes are recreated to examine their destructive pathways. Halford and Beard explore the connections with imitative magic, drawing on the secret histories of dissident religious sects, miners and shamans as well as the prophecies of William Blake. They rethink the lab's industrial safety rigs as monstrous emblems of the state, as theorised by Thomas Hobbes, and retrace the steps of a journey the political philosopher took through the hollow lands of the Peak in 1626. Testimony from highwaymen, ramblers and urban explorers is collected along the way. The book is composed in a fragmentary style which weaves together philosophy, travelogue, history of science, sociology and religious study.","Voodoo Science Park started life as a poetic film about the science of accident investigation practised by the Health and Safety Laboratory in the Peak District of England. In the book of the film, Victoria Halford and Steve Beard reveal the thinking that went into the preparation of the script. The Health and Safety Lab is the place where large-scale accidents such as tunnel collapses, fires and rail crashes are recreated to examine their destructive pathways. Halford and Beard explore the connections with imitative magic, drawing on the secret histories of dissident religious sects, miners and shamans as well as the prophecies of William Blake. They rethink the lab's industrial safety rigs as monstrous emblems of the state, as theorised by Thomas Hobbes, and retrace the steps of a journey the political philosopher took through the hollow lands of the Peak in 1626. Testimony from highwaymen, ramblers and urban explorers is collected along the way. The book is composed in a fragmentary style which weaves together philosophy, travelogue, history of science, sociology and religious study.",3,"[""Voodoo Science Park convincingly demonstrates that history is only ever rewritten and that there can consequently be little room for ‘accidents’ in any of our accepted historical accounts. If this text overturns all orthodox readings of the documented past, it does so simply in the name of prophecy, the authors being bold enough to let the existing state of affairs speak for itself. Such eloquent restraint is extremely rare, extracting a simple yet undeniable poetry from the unearthing of connections between events. Through this gently persistent accumulation of facts, an enigmatic half-hidden landscape is gradually transformed into the starkest of mythologies.\n\n~ Ken Hollings, Author of Welcome to Mars"", ""Combining compelling archive with contemporary footage of the Health and Safety Laboratory in the Peak District, Derbyshire, Voodoo Science Park summons the poetic and political archetypes of Leviathan, Albion and Gogmagog in order to anatomise the powers of accident, reenactment, sacrifice, punishment, artificial life, magic, sleep and civil war in the state of Britain. Part video-essay, video-poem and video-guide, Voodoo Science Park is a vivid and erudite conjuration that redreams the history of our present with a passion and a purpose that is entirely visionary.\n\n~ Kodwo Eshun, on the film-of-the-book"", ""“Here maverick theorist Steve Beard, working with Victoria Halford, fashions a fascinating, Keiller-esque meditation on Hobbes’s Leviathan , the covert geographies of Albion and post-Ballardian crash theory.”\n\n~ Sukhdev Sandhu, on the film-of-the-book""]" We Have Never Been Neoliberal,"[""Kean Birch""]",How to understand the crisis and stop the top 1% all at the same time.,"A number of people have claimed that the ongoing financial crisis has revealed the problems with neoliberal thought and neoliberal policies in the 'Atlantic Heartland'. However, if we look at the history of the 'Heartland' economies then it becomes evident that they were never neoliberal in the first place - that is, the economic policies and discourses in these countries did not follow neoliberal prescriptions. /We Have Never Been Neoliberal/ explores this divergence between neoliberal theory and 'neoliberal' practice by focusing on the underlying contradictions in monetarism, private monopolies, and financialization. The book finishes by proposing a 'manifesto for a doomed youth' in which it argues that younger generations should refuse to pay interest on anything in order to avoid the trap of debt-driven living.","A number of people have claimed that the ongoing financial crisis has revealed the problems with neoliberal thought and neoliberal policies in the 'Atlantic Heartland'. However, if we look at the history of the 'Heartland' economies then it becomes evident that they were never neoliberal in the first place - that is, the economic policies and discourses in these countries did not follow neoliberal prescriptions. /We Have Never Been Neoliberal/ explores this divergence between neoliberal theory and 'neoliberal' practice by focusing on the underlying contradictions in monetarism, private monopolies, and financialization. The book finishes by proposing a 'manifesto for a doomed youth' in which it argues that younger generations should refuse to pay interest on anything in order to avoid the trap of debt-driven living.",9,"[""Neoliberalism is an unjust system, but the system in which we actually findourselves is much worse. This is the premise of Kean Birch’s important book,WeHave Never Been Neoliberal: A Manifesto for a doomed Youth. The rhetoric ofneoliberalism, Birch argues, has been enthusiastically peddled by politicians,economists and industrialists, and while it has been used to justify severe cuts topublic services and to demolish labour protections, the fiscally prudent small Statehas been a myth. In reality, state spending has been redirected (rather than reduced)to finance ballooning debt, and as states have become beholden to internationalfinance, their potential potency at managing their economies has been thwarted.This, Birch argues, has resulted in a situation whereby many of us are indeed subjectto the brutality of free market forces, but in which the big, important transactionsand decisions that may impact many millions of lives take place outside of themarket (and beyond democratic oversight) within privileged networks, such aswithin corporate monopolies and bank boardrooms. The argument chimes of coursewith accounts of the global financial crisis: a too-big-to-fail network of financialservices and rating agencies sunk itself and millions of others with innovativefinancial instruments that become toxic, only to be bailed out by panickedgovernments with public money.\n\n....\n\nWebpage: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41285-017-0058-x ~ John Gardner, Social Theory & Health 16(4)"", ""‘Down with neoliberalism’ seems to be an almost ubiquitous cry from activists who position themselves on the ‘left’ (the diminishing merit of using a left-right spectrum is for another time). Decrying neoliberalism seems to nicely encapsulate people’s unease and anger with the inequality, precarity, privatisation, and consumerism spawned by Anglo-Saxon varieties of capitalism.\n\nSlogans have their place, but what if this particular one is founded on a theory not borne out by reality?\n\nIn his new book, geographer Kean Birch – someone more than sympathetic to those seeking to transform capitialism from its extractive mode – points to a raft of evidence showing that not only does the mode of capitalism we’re now seeing pre-date the intellectual ascendancy of neoliberalism, it also does not conform to the theoretical axioms text books would lead us to expect'\n\n....\n\nWebpage: http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2015/03/24/we-have-never-been-neoliberal-a-manifesto-for-a-doomed-youth/ ~ Katherine Trebeck, Bella Caledonia website"", ""We Have Never Been Neoliberal (hereafter WHNBN) is a fresh contribution to swirling debates about neoliberalism, the nature of contemporary capitalism (in the “Anglo-American” advanced-capitalist heartlands of North America and the UK–Birch is careful to circumscribe his treatment in this respect), and about the distinctiveness or otherwise of capitalism in its putatively neoliberal form. Fully aware that the field is already awash with critical readings of the politics, economics and political economy of neoliberalism, Birch, to his credit, tries to do something a little bit different–to make the debates in question both comprehensible and of interest to a readership not steeped and saturated therein, while advancing, in the process, his own particular “take” on neoliberalism and on existing readings thereof. Written in a style situated somewhere between the scholarly and the journalistic, the book assuredly delivers exactly the type of text championed by Birch’s publisher, Zero (or is it Zer0?) Books–“intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist”, as its website puts it. In this respect it is somewhat comparable to Geoff Mann’s (2013) Disassembly Required, which also tries to write about capitalism in a different way and for a different set of audiences.\n\nWebpage: http://antipodefoundation.org/2015/03/30/we-have-never-been-neoliberal/\n\nMy response: http://antipodefoundation.org/2015/04/07/critical-dialogue-birch-christophers/ ~ Brett Christophers, AntipodeFoundation.org"", ""[In Croatian}\n\nSince the onset of the global economic crisis in 2008, attitudes against neoliberal doctrines that contributed to the collapse of the free market have been articulated very loudly, with critics saying the crisis was caused by the systematic implementation of neoliberal practices established in the 1970s and 1980s. . When we look at activist practices in times of crisis, neoliberalism is one of the first addressees, which has led to the term itself becoming of great importance to any more meaningful critique of modern capitalist society.\n\n....\n\nWebpage: https://www.kulturpunkt.hr/content/onkraj-kritike ~ Tomislav Žilić, kulturpunkt"", ""Kean Birch argues that today’s economy is not organized around the free markets of neoliberal fantasy but through a financialized system of corporate monopoly – a system neoliberals actually promoted in contradiction to their stated commitments to free markets. Along the way, he provides accessible introductions to the history of neoliberal thought, monetarism, the causes and consequences of ballooning public debt, the growth of internationally mobile capital, the relations between asset values and corporate governance, and the dire straits of individuals in our current debt economy. His conclusions suggest ways of making our economies more just and equitable that deserve careful attention from both scholars and activists. ~ Joshua Barkan, Department of Geography, University of Georgia, USA"", ""Kean Birch has a written a fresh and fascinating account of the relationships between neoliberalism, economic power and crises. Cutting incisively through the accepted, but largely mistaken, nostrums surrounding neoliberal rhetoric and reality, his book makes a valuable contribution to understanding the continuing grip of a corporate elite on the global economy and the devastating consequences that flow from it. ~ Andrew Cumbers, Professor of Political Economy, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, UK"", ""Kean Birch has written a book that is accessible to his target audience: young, inquiring minds wanting to know why this is happening to them, but not quite knowing where to begin looking for answers. This timely book is the beginning of an important conversation that today’s youth must have about the practical possibilities for coping with the present economic crisis. ~ Eddie Nik-Khah, Department of Economics, Roanoke University, USA"", ""Framed by an energetic and engaging prose, Kean Birch has written a compelling book that challenges us to reexamine what we think we know about neoliberalism. Much more than a mere volte-face to the contemporary tide of academic thought on the topic, Kean instead offers a deeply reflexive and appropriately provocative reassessment that brings the corporation back into view to demonstrate how neoliberalism is riven with contradictions that cannot be easily resolved by simply citing hybridity and process. ~ Simon Springer, Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada"", ""Kean Birch tackles a key question of the moment: how should we, and how shouldn’t we, understand the ubiquitous term of neoliberalism? Written in a clear and accessible style, that is often both amusing and angry, Kean shows that the current crisis cannot be understood when neoliberalism is understood purely in terms of a history of ideas, focused on the development, especially within academic economics, of a set of free market principles. Instead, he directs our attention to the structural transformations to the political economy in recent decades – transformations that often bear little direct resemblance to supposedly ‘neoliberal’ policy prescriptions. His discussion of the assetization of the economy is a crucial contribution to our understanding of the current conjuncture, while the key insight that the crux of these systemic problems is that we stopped taxing the rich and started borrowing from them should be the political slogan of the moment. This is an important book, and it should be read by anyone concerned about constructing a progressive alternative to the destructive and dysfunctional politics of the present. ~ David Tyfield, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK""]" We Hear Only Ourselves,"[""Bill Cashmore""]",A bold response to a question everyone asks but few answer: What is utopia?,"We Hear Only Ourselves is a study of utopia and its contradictions. If a future beyond capitalism cannot be imagined, what is the place of utopia today? The answer, Cashmore argues, lies beyond either idle speculation or merely hopeful optimism. We Hear Only Ourselves seeks a concept of utopia which is strengthened, not undermined, by its contradictions. From the dialectics of the Frankfurt School to the energetics of resistance in the writings of the Black Panthers, this book draws on a wide range of thought to offer a new concept of utopia, one adequate for our present moment.","We Hear Only Ourselves is a study of utopia and its contradictions. If a future beyond capitalism cannot be imagined, what is the place of utopia today? The answer, Cashmore argues, lies beyond either idle speculation or merely hopeful optimism. We Hear Only Ourselves seeks a concept of utopia which is strengthened, not undermined, by its contradictions. From the dialectics of the Frankfurt School to the energetics of resistance in the writings of the Black Panthers, this book draws on a wide range of thought to offer a new concept of utopia, one adequate for our present moment.",1,"[""First, this book is the beautiful breakthrough of an enormously gifted young philosopher. Then, an original elaboration of the aporias affecting the concept of utopia, after Marx, Bloch, and Jameson. Above all, it demonstrates how decisive the \""narration of blackness\"", as cast by Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman, will be for energizing an actual resistance to our catastrophic actuality. On all three accounts, I highly recommend it. ~ Étienne Balibar, author of The Philosophy of Marx""]" We Must Begin with the Land,"[""Stephen E. Hunt""]","A polyculture of ideas, decolonising, reframing, and transforming how we think about the things we grow through a social-ecology lens.","We live at a time of intractable armed conflicts starved of resolution. We inhabit a planet where damaged ecosystems are hungry for restoration. We endure chronic inequalities of wealth and power which crave redistribution. During the past decade, such intertwined factors have precipitated a food crisis, in which increasingly millions experience malnutrition. As elsewhere, the UK is constrained by legacies of structural injustice and failing neoliberal policies. Yet We Must Begin with the Land is not another account of global doom. It explores an abundance of innovative and traditional alternatives for producing food, renewable energies, and organic materials through agroecology. Using the anti-colonial lens of social ecology, Stephen E. Hunt considers mini real-world case studies for diversifying and democratising how we might grow, share, and eat. Gleaning such examples takes us from La Via Campesina, the world’s largest food-sovereignty network, to efforts to preserve Indigenous knowledges; from radical material sciences using hemp, seaweed, and fungi to the defiant trees and fruits of revolutionary Rojava; from proliferating Kleingärten to micro-projects at home, such as an inner-city growing community where refugees sprout hope and Japanese Shumei cultivation unexpectedly thriving in a Wiltshire hamlet. Social ecology is a powerful set of conceptual principles for transforming our relationship to food. It offers a critique of existing supply chains that all-too-often shackle producers and consumers alike in dependency and poverty. But it also sparks different conversations about how we might delink from and reconnect into food chains that are more intricate and, ultimately, more resilient. It signals priorities not just to meet social needs and for ecological survival but also for human liberation and pleasure and flourishing sustainability.","We live at a time of intractable armed conflicts starved of resolution. We inhabit a planet where damaged ecosystems are hungry for restoration. We endure chronic inequalities of wealth and power which crave redistribution. During the past decade, such intertwined factors have precipitated a food crisis, in which increasingly millions experience malnutrition. As elsewhere, the UK is constrained by legacies of structural injustice and failing neoliberal policies. Yet We Must Begin with the Land is not another account of global doom. It explores an abundance of innovative and traditional alternatives for producing food, renewable energies, and organic materials through agroecology. Using the anti-colonial lens of social ecology, Stephen E. Hunt considers mini real-world case studies for diversifying and democratising how we might grow, share, and eat. Gleaning such examples takes us from La Via Campesina, the world’s largest food-sovereignty network, to efforts to preserve Indigenous knowledges; from radical material sciences using hemp, seaweed, and fungi to the defiant trees and fruits of revolutionary Rojava; from proliferating Kleingärten to micro-projects at home, such as an inner-city growing community where refugees sprout hope and Japanese Shumei cultivation unexpectedly thriving in a Wiltshire hamlet. Social ecology is a powerful set of conceptual principles for transforming our relationship to food. It offers a critique of existing supply chains that all-too-often shackle producers and consumers alike in dependency and poverty. But it also sparks different conversations about how we might delink from and reconnect into food chains that are more intricate and, ultimately, more resilient. It signals priorities not just to meet social needs and for ecological survival but also for human liberation and pleasure and flourishing sustainability.",4,"[""We Must Begin with the Land is a rich and nourishing work written by someone passionate about good food - good for the people, for the planet, for society - and extremely well acquainted to ecological thought and theory. Looking at food and agricultural production through the lens of social ecology, it takes us on a tour from the UK to India, Rojava, Brazil, and back, to show how dominatory agriculture has always been tied to forms of violence not only against the land and the planet, but against the people, society, and all beings. This book highlights the ingenuity and generosity of Bookchin’s social ecology based around values of complementarity, diversity, solidarity, abundance and quality of life - values embraced by many actors and activists of good food production around the world. It shows how social ecology can help us think in practical terms about food and bring practical solutions to nourish and reenchant the many places that make our world. ~ Dr Clemence Scalbert Yucel, Senior Lecturer, University of Exeter"", ""Drawing on rich insights from social ecology, this book offers a reconstructive and revolutionary vision for food, agriculture, and land use. Stephen Hunt takes us on a remarkable journey across ‘grounded utopias’ and real-world experiences of people who are inventing more just and sustainable food systems outside of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. This is a must-read for social movements struggling for emancipatory agroecologies, radical ecological democracy, and food justice. ~ Prof Michel Pimbert, Emeritus Professor of Agroecology and Food Politics, Coventry University"", ""Stephen Hunt has written a fine book taking in a multitude of agricultural and ecological stories to inspire and signpost us past the impending multi-crises. This book has a sci-fi quality about it, feeling like a report from the future. It takes in the barely believable as if it were a film, but it actually happened — revolution in Rojava, inspired by Murray Bookchin, whose ideas of social ecology provide the main trunk of this book. The project of democratic confederalism provides an example of what Bookchin’s vision could look like in the real world, albeit under the immense pressure of war. Hunt draws out complementary and different themes like Indigenous agriculture and stewardship, the conviviality of a simple meal together, and the potential for a liberatory human-sized technology to prevent scarcity. This is without the bombastic claims of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and like Bookchin, Hunt is a fierce critic of productivist Marxism. But he does not fall into the liberal trap of looking for the government or the market to save us. He draws upon different ideas of land ownership, property relations, permaculture, and contemporary experiments in collective food production to show some tentative steps forward. This means that /We Must Begin with the Land/ can stand alongside and complement the emerging 'degrowth communism' movement, which is providing a similarly rich critique of capitalism but often without the finer details of how we will get there. This book fills that gap. ~ Steve Stuffit, Trapese Collective"", ""This remarkable book presents big-picture thinking that can truly help to envision innovative strategies and practical pathways to reverse the expanding corporate food system. In the process, Stephen E. Hunt brings the concepts and spirit of social ecology to everyone concerned about the underlying causes of dominatory agriculture. He writes this book with the finest research, accompanied by worldwide stories and grounded experiences, yet easy to understand and captivating. Facing the recent poly-crisis, this timely book stirs us to join the global movement for food and climate justice urgently. ~ Angus Lam, Board member, Sims Hill Shared Harvest (Bristol)""]" Weird Realism,"[""Graham Harman""]","As Hölderlin was to Martin Heidegger and Mallarmé to Jacques Derrida, so is H.P. Lovecraft to the Speculative Realist philosophers.","As Hölderlin was to Martin Heidegger and Mallarmé to Jacques Derrida, so is H.P. Lovecraft to the Speculative Realist philosophers. Lovecraft was one of the brightest stars of the horror and science fiction magazines, but died in poverty and relative obscurity in the 1930s. In 2005 he was finally elevated from pulp status to the classical literary canon with the release of a Library of America volume dedicated to his work. The impact of Lovecraft on philosophy has been building for more than a decade. Initially championed by shadowy guru Nick Land at Warwick during the 1990s, he was later discovered to be an object of private fascination for all four original members of the twenty-first century Speculative Realist movement. In this book, Graham Harman extracts the basic philosophical concepts underlying the work of Lovecraft, yielding a weird realism capable of freeing continental philosophy from its current soul-crushing impasse. Abandoning pious references by Heidegger to Hölderlin and the Greeks, Harman develops a new philosophical mythology centered in such Lovecraftian figures as Cthulhu, Wilbur Whately, and the rat-like monstrosity Brown Jenkin. The Miskatonic River replaces the Rhine and the Ister, while the Caucasus of Hölderlin gives way to the Antarctic mountains of madness of Lovecraft.","As Hölderlin was to Martin Heidegger and Mallarmé to Jacques Derrida, so is H.P. Lovecraft to the Speculative Realist philosophers. Lovecraft was one of the brightest stars of the horror and science fiction magazines, but died in poverty and relative obscurity in the 1930s. In 2005 he was finally elevated from pulp status to the classical literary canon with the release of a Library of America volume dedicated to his work. The impact of Lovecraft on philosophy has been building for more than a decade. Initially championed by shadowy guru Nick Land at Warwick during the 1990s, he was later discovered to be an object of private fascination for all four original members of the twenty-first century Speculative Realist movement. In this book, Graham Harman extracts the basic philosophical concepts underlying the work of Lovecraft, yielding a weird realism capable of freeing continental philosophy from its current soul-crushing impasse. Abandoning pious references by Heidegger to Hölderlin and the Greeks, Harman develops a new philosophical mythology centered in such Lovecraftian figures as Cthulhu, Wilbur Whately, and the rat-like monstrosity Brown Jenkin. The Miskatonic River replaces the Rhine and the Ister, while the Caucasus of Hölderlin gives way to the Antarctic mountains of madness of Lovecraft.",1,"[""http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1556&fulltext=1\n\nBrian Kim Stefans on Weird Realism\n\nLet’s Get Weird: On Graham Harman’s H.P. Lovecraft\n\nApril 6th, 2013 reset - +\n\nH.P. LOVECRAFT'S WORK has not received a great deal of attention from literary critics. Until relatively recently, the majority of “treatments” of his oeuvre have been in the form of B-movies. While it’s surprising that Roger Corman, director of seven features based on the stories of Lovecraft’s great predecessor, Poe, only did one Lovecraft film (The Haunted Palace, itself marketed as “Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace,” despite being based on Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward), some of the stable of effects of Lovecraft’s fiction — his characters’ tendencies to simply tell you their emotions (usually on a scale between repulsion and disgust), their inability to adequately describe the most startling creatures and architectures — make his stories ripe for the B-movie treatment. The telegraphed emotions of his characters justify stilted or hysterical acting, and the incomplete, contradictory visual descriptions of creatures like Cthulhu or the Old Ones — not to mention the “strange, beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars” hovering miles above us in the At the Mountains of Madness — seem to cry out for a gauzy camera style that conceals the tawdriness of the set design, the recycled monster costumes, and the failures of the lighting crew.\n\nEach Lovecraft story seems at once an absurd improvisation — pulling stuff out of his hat for the sake of filling pulp magazine column inches — and a careful extension of his basic principle that humans, were we to have any access to the true nature of the universe, would recoil with horror at how small a role we play in it and how much the universe doesn’t seem to care. He often introduces an entire new species of ancient, if not thriving, life form while also confirming, often by quick allusion or repeated phrase, the persistent powers of some previously introduced creature or cultural item, notably the monster Cthulhu or the writings of the “mad Arab Abdul Alhazred” contained in the Necronomicon. His oeuvre, expressed in fragments (Lovecraft never wrote a novel) did spawn a large body of what has come to be called “fan fiction” — even within his own lifetime, writers such as Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth devoted their careers to extensions of the Lovecraft universe — but little more than condescension from his intellectual contemporaries.\n\nLately this is beginning to change. The Library of America published a collection of Lovecraft’s best works in 2005, and today literary critics, and even philosophers, are finally beginning to pay attention to this defiantly unfashionable writer. In a way, this makes a certain kind of sense. Even if Lovecraft were not writing philosophy proper, much of the coherence of his “cosmicism” results not in the noncontradictory material or technological universes typical of most science fiction — think of the droids and lightsabers that populate the world of Star Wars — but in a singularly fraught metaphysical universe. In Lovecraft’s version of reality, laws seem to function in ways that make our foundational certainties — Euclidean geometry, the private experience of dreams, the inviolable divisions between human, animal, plant, and the nonliving, etc. — merely contingent: just the way things appear to us, rather than absolute necessities.\n\nPerhaps the reason Lovecraft never wrote a novel is that he refused to be authoritative, a god in full control of a world, with total access to every drive and thought of its well-rounded characters. Novelists, with their pretenses to total access to their universes, invariably argue for the distinctiveness, not to mention the primacy, of human agency. Instead, Lovecraft wrote fragments of a novel, bits and pieces that never reveal the whole story but which, put together, poignantly suggest the impotence of human aspiration. If the short list of “failures” of Lovecraft as a writer drives away the average literary critic — who, like the novelist, will want to project some degree of panoptic vision — it’s proven fertile ground for the American “speculative realist” philosopher Graham Harman, whose new book on Lovecraft is not only an odd and exciting addition to his own rapidly expanding bibliography but also an affront to those critics who have mistaken Lovecraft’s virtues for faults.\n\n¤\n\nFew movements in recent philosophy have had as startling a rise as that of the writers loosely grouped under the heading “Speculative Realists.” Attention to this movement, which includes Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Levi Bryant, and Quentin Meillassoux — sidestepping the controversy of whether it in fact is a “movement,” and, if it is, whether “speculative realism” accurately describes their program — is growing exponentially, not just in universities but also among the unaffiliated continental philosophy junkies who troll the blogosphere. The one principle that is inarguably shared by these philosophers is quite simple: they wish to retrieve philosophy from a tendency initiated, or at least made unavoidable, by the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that the subject (meaning a human being) can ever know anything about the external world due to the very fact of subjectivity. For him, reality is always mediated by cognition, and the thinkable has a basic handicap: it is just thought. Nothing comes from outside into the mind, in other words, that is not turned into thought; the radical epistemologist argues that all we can know lies in the firm foundations of what is available to the senses, while the radical idealist argues that nothing remains in this thinking of whatever it was that spawned the thought, leaving one at the impasse of believing that all of reality is virtual, a bunch of mental actions. The result, according to the speculative realists, is that philosophy since Kant has been stuck with making this very mind→object relationship the locus and subject of philosophy, thus shutting down the project of metaphysics, the search for absolute laws beyond what can be established by experimental science.\n\nQuentin Meillassoux has dubbed this mind→object relationship — the impasse that is at the heart of the Kantian tradition — “correlationism,” and the term has become a rallying cry for speculative realists. Harman’s philosophy displaces the mind→object relationship with that of object→object, the “mind” being just one object among many. Oddly, though Meillassoux names correlationism as the primary curse of the Kantian tradition, he also seems the most devoted of his peers to preserving the best part of it by making it the one place where he claims anything like an absolute exists. To Meillassoux (who, coincidentally or consequently, is also a fan of Lovecraft), the universe is not characterized by necessity (God-given or inevitable laws) but by a radical contingency, a “hyper-chaos” amidst which the only thing that could be seen as absolute is the mind→object relationship itself. How Meillassoux gets there is not our concern here; suffice it to say that the two philosophers share a fairly Lovecraftian attitude. They believe that there is a form of “realism” available to metaphysics, even when mucking in the world of what will always be unknown to human consciousness. This second Copernican revolution in philosophy, which situates the mind as one object in dizzying free-fall among many, might seem “the end of the world as we know it” for normative humanists, but the speculative realists, like Michael Stipe before them, “feel fine.”\n\n¤\n\nHarman, for all of his concern with objects (his branch of speculative realism has been christened “object-oriented philosophy”), is not a materialist, and he’s certainly no empiricist. He believes that scientific pursuits that seek the elemental building blocks of the universe are getting most of the story wrong, for though we might be able to learn of the subatomic composition of, say, uranium, the banana or the West Nile virus, none of that knowledge exhausts the ways that an object can affect reality — which is to say, the way objects can relate to each other. An idiosyncratic feature of Harman’s philosophy is that “objects” for him are not just things, and certainly not just natural things, but also concepts, imagined entities, and nearly any entity that can have some effect on reality for however long or short a time, on however large or small a scale, and at whatever level of availability to human perception or “science.”\n\nIn Harman’s universe, then, not only are bananas objects, but so are aggregate things we create out of bananas (like banana splits), the component things that make up the banana (like the banana’s skin and its pulpy interior), imagined things we derive from bananas (like the Bananaman cartoon, or, I guess, Bananarama), as well as the corporations behind the cultivation, delivery, and marketing of bananas (like Chiquita Banana). This free-flow among a plethora of relations — from artificial to nature, from human to nonhuman, from “thing” to “idea,” with no possibility for hierarchy or a taxonomy — is a theme Harman picks up from “actor-network” theory, a creation of sociologist Bruno Latour, which posits the necessarily “hybrid” nature of a reality in which an arcane experiment in quantum physics could be affected by a sex scandal, an epidemic, Hurricane Sandy, political indifference, or a speed bump.\n\nHarman worked as a sportswriter while pursuing his degree in philosophy, and any baseball fan knows that limiting your study of “reality” to the operations of physics misses nearly the whole story. Like a scientist, a fan might speculate on ball speed, the fitness of players, and even the level of oxygen available in Coors Field, but the play-by-play is incomplete without banter about the outrageous contracts, speculations about drug use, general kibitzing about the mythologies behind certain stadiums or franchises, the scandalous press relations of certain players, the classic games, the world records, and so on. We can discuss “baseball,” then, as an object composed of hundreds of other objects all in interrelation; to discuss the game merely on the level of physics — what empirical science would be able to tell us exists — would be absurd.\n\nHarman is unusual in the metaphysical tradition in that he is comfortable with the fact that objects will never be fully revealed and that they in fact are always in a state of retreat, not simply from the mind (which is just another object) but also from each other. In Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Harman enlists Lovecraft in his battle with epistemology and materialism — Lovecraft himself expressed loathing for normative science, and certainly had no love for legitimate academics — but also against correlationism: the conviction that all the mind could ever know are purely mental phenomena, which ultimately led (and here we are brushing with broad strokes) to the so-called “linguistic” turn of much 20th-century philosophy (most characteristically that of Wittgenstein and Derrida). To that extent, Lovecraft’s failure to engage in the linguistic experimentation of his high Modernist contemporaries does not make him some kind of recalcitrant provincial, but rather a sensible voyager who simply did not want to make the claim that language was all there was. Lovecraft’s language “fails” only insofar as the narrators fail to get into words, to journalize, some experience that simply cannot be fully available to the meager human senses and mind. For the most part, Lovecraft is happy to use language as a simple, functional tool, rather than to insist at every moment through linguistic estrangement — like, say, a Stein or a Beckett — that language is not what you think it is (and, consequently, that language is everything). For Lovecraft, it's the universe, not language, that is not what you think it is. So what is it then? Well, weird.\n\nWeird Realism opens with an idiosyncratic set of short essays that lay out the method of the book. Harman notes that there is a choice that philosophers generally make between being a “destroyer of gaps” — those who want to reduce reality to a simple principle — and “creators of gaps” — those who point to those areas to which we will possibly never have access. He deems the latter “productionists” (in contrast to reductionists) and writes: “If we apply this distinction to imaginative writers, then H.P. Lovecraft is clearly a productionist author. No other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess.” He then describes the more literary aspects of his method. “The Problem with Paraphrase” takes aim at critic Edmund Wilson’s tendency to rewrite the “content” of Lovecraft’s stories in his own terms and then attack that effigy rather than the writing itself. “The Inherent Stupidity of All Content” develops Slavoj Žižek’s theme of the “inherent stupidity of all proverbs” (in The Abyss of Freedom, which Žižek amusingly proves that any proverb can be entirely reversed and give us access to an equally wise perspective). Harman combines both Wilson’s and Žižek’s techniques — ridiculously literal paraphrases in a variety of styles and attempted textual reversals — in a method of his own that he calls “ruination,” arguing that “after all, the fact that a statement can be ruined means that this has not already occurred. It also means that we can use possibly ruinations, and sometimes possible improvements, as a method of analyzing the effects of a literary statement.” This is, in some ways, a scientific method: Harman wishes to isolate qualities of Lovecraft’s writings by driving them out of their hiding places, like subjecting a bacterium to a stain, intense heat, or a college lecture by Newt Gingrich in order to elicit new behaviors.\n\nThe practice of “ruination” demonstrates the incredible precision with which Lovecraft approached description. If Harman is enlisting Lovecraft as a foot soldier against bland, realist empiricism, he has to prove that Lovecraft’s apparent failures to describe were a form of intellectual honesty rather than simply bad, clumsy style. Harman describes two stylistic techniques of Lovecraft’s that highlight this very theme of failure. The first is the “vertical” or “allusive” style, typified in this passage from the “Call of Cthulhu”:\n\nIf I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing […] but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.\n\nFor Harman, such a passage draws us away from trying to recreate the creature in the terms of our loathsome, mundane world of Euclidean time and space. Lovecraft situates the creature partly in the diseased imagination of a narrator who claims that the description is “not unfaithful” but hardly correct, and also “asks us to ignore the surface properties of dragon and octopus […] and to focus instead on the fearsome ‘general outline of the whole.’” In this way, Lovecraft opens up a “gap”: things are moving along swimmingly in the story, with the narrator's sane and physical reality recognizably accessible and ordered; just at the moment when the narrator experiences something truly astounding — the color out of space, the shadow out of time, like in the title! — language breaks down, and all you are left with is the “general outline of the whole.”\n\nThe opposite method, which Harman calls “horizontal” or “cubist,” occurs when Lovecraft begins a description by claiming that he’s at an impasse, but then lets fly with an abundance of information, as in this passage from “The Dunwich Horror”:\n\nIt would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and the known three dimensions. It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous […] Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest […] had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worse; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.\n\nAnd that’s just the beginning. “The power of language is no longer enfeebled by an impossibly deep and distant reality,” Harman writes. “Instead, language is overloaded by a gluttonous excess of surfaces and aspects of the thing.” It’s like one of those scenes that seem to occur at the climax of any long-form Japanese fantasy anime: a creature starts to expand, but rather than simply getting fatter, every aspect begins to take on its own form, like a Rembrandt turning into an Arcimboldo. Both methods isolate moments of “crisis,” in the sense Thomas Kuhn describes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: observations can be made but there is no place for them in the dominant scientific paradigm and hence no language, setting the stage for a “paradigm shift” that not only turns the apparent anomalies into “facts” but also drives a few scientists bonkers in the meantime. Maybe that’s why Lovecraft’s heroes are always getting nauseous when I, a Star Wars kid, would most expect them to be quite thrilled.\n\n¤\n\nThe bulk of Weird Realism is comprised of 100 mini-essays, many only a page long, each of which examines a short passage of one of Lovecraft’s major stories. Most expand outward to examine narrative tropes and stylistic tics that recur across several stories. Fans of Lovecraft will be satisfied: Harman seems to have missed nothing. Of the volume of writings by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred called the Necronomicon, Harman outlines the many ways Lovecraft establishes its reality: by reminding us of the copies scattered in libraries across the world (notably a heavily-guarded copy in Harvard’s Widener library); by having the book appear in several lists with actual and fictitious books; by referring to several translations of the book; and finally — this goes beyond Lovecraft himself — by the fact of the book’s appearance in the stories of his circle of friends. (Curious to me is that Harman doesn’t address whether or not the Necronomicon actually exists, if not as a book then as a concept that has reality-effects. But perhaps that is a foregone conclusion for Harman.)\n\nHarman’s take on a certain famous passage in which a sailor is “swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse” gives a particularly good sense of how he is able to skirt between literary and philosophical language with ease:\n\nLovecraft introduces a problem. Not only is Cthulhu something over and above the three creatures he partially resembles […] we now find that even acute and obtuse angles must be something over and above their qualities. There seems to be a “spirit” of acute angles, a “general outline of the whole” which allows them to remain acute angles even in cases where they behave as if they were obtuse. Not since Pythagoras have geometrical entities been granted this sort of psychic potency, to the point that they have a deeper being over and above their measurable and experienceable traits.\n\nWhile the lovers of literature might be less pleased when Harman makes grand statements about Lovecraft’s greater importance to literature than Proust or Joyce (he does!), those of us with no visceral knowledge of the nooks and crannies of the history of philosophy can find pleasure in learning that there is a tradition of attributing “psychic potency” to squares and circles. “[I]t is unclear how the mere fact of ‘behaving as obtuse’ would allow an angle to ‘swallow up’ an unwary sailor,” Harman continues:\n\nSketch the diagram of an obtuse angle for yourself, and you will see the difficulty in intuitively grasping what has happened. If the phrase “she looked daggers at him” is an example of catachresis in language, a misapplication of a word to gain metaphorical effects, then the acute angle obtusely swallowing a sailor is a fine example of catachresis in geometry. We might as well say: “It was the number 21, but it behaved as though it were the number 6.”\n\nOne way of reconciling this might be to consider the problem of painting. Any image that pretends to take place in “Renaissance perspective” is bound to have a “vanishing point” at which parallel lines will appear to converge. Consequently, in films — say an Expressionist one like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or the finale to Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, or Michel Gondry’s delirious music video for the Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be” — we are repeatedly confronted with seemingly depthless triangles turning out to be boxes with hidden monsters or dancing girls in them, not to mention the reverse (poor Wile E. Coyote): landscapes with deep perspective turning out to be flat, painful façades.\n\nBut Harman’s approach is more interesting. Rather than treating the passage as a problem of ekphrasis (from my perspective it appeared acute, but it was really obtuse), he treats it as a statement about reality: the angle really is acute, but lo and behold, it has properties it simply hasn’t revealed to us yet! The knowledge that acute angles actually have four equal sides, or that an acute angle is really the discorporated spirit of Liberace, may be just around the corner.\n\nThere are some places where Weird Realism seems to fail, most notably when Harman makes evaluative claims about other writers; he doesn’t seem content to merely situate Lovecraft among the likes of Proust and Joyce, but suggests, if only briefly, that he surpasses them. He also doesn’t engage with any literary critical method later than that of Edmund Wilson and the New Critics. His apparent conviction, expressed largely through exclusion, that no features of other writers seem to produce the sorts of “gaps” that he finds so valuable in Lovecraft will no doubt be tested. I couldn’t help thinking of John Ashbery’s mid-career poetry, for example, or the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, both of which are filled with such mystifying gaps between object and description. The mini-essays seem to peter out at around 85 or so, especially during the last 11, where Harman seems content to note how the late story “The Shadow Out of Time” is just not as good as the earlier stuff; a little snip and tuck might have been in order. On occasion, it doesn’t quite seem like Harman is writing “philosophy” so much as noting a feature of the Lovecraft universe — which is to say, he slips into writing “literary criticism,” and might be just as happy citing Lovecraft’s linkages to Shelley and, say, later weird realist writers like Philip K. Dick or Samuel Delany as noting a feature of Hume or Kant.\n\nBut all of this points to what is one of the most salient aspects of Harman’s philosophical writing as a whole, which is that he sees his project as an ongoing conversation with his readers and with other philosophers. The title of his excellent book on Quentin Meillassoux, Philosophy in the Making, might just as well refer to his own work; philosophy, for Harman, isn’t just great minds articulating correct ideas, but philosophers building a structure together, testing it, revising it, and trusting that they will continue to disagree. So the porousness and apparent brokenness of these structural components of Weird Realism might just be my own misreading of the acute angle that chooses to act obtuse — as if a critic of literature could ever hope for things to be otherwise. ~ Brian Kim Stefans, L.A. Review of Books, April 6, 2013""]" Welcome to the Rebellion,"[""Michael Harris""]","In the first book to present Star Wars as a mirror for contemporary politics, Michael Harris reveals Star Wars' new Left roots.","What does it mean that our most popular modern myth is a radical left story about fighting corporate authoritarianism? From its roots in the 1960s new left, Star Wars still speaks to millions of people today. By design, the saga mirrors our own time and politics. A real empire of corporate domination has arisen within weakened and corrupted republics. Now it threatens our existence on a planetary scale. But, the popularity of Star Wars also suggests that if we tell the right stories, we can Welcome to the Rebellion many more people to fight for a better world...","What does it mean that our most popular modern myth is a radical left story about fighting corporate authoritarianism? From its roots in the 1960s new left, Star Wars still speaks to millions of people today. By design, the saga mirrors our own time and politics. A real empire of corporate domination has arisen within weakened and corrupted republics. Now it threatens our existence on a planetary scale. But, the popularity of Star Wars also suggests that if we tell the right stories, we can Welcome to the Rebellion many more people to fight for a better world...",0,[] What Is Post-Modern Conservatism,"[""Matthew McManus""]",What Is Post-Modern Conservatism develops a way to understand the emergence of right wing populism in the era of postmodern capitalism.,"What is post-modern conservatism? How it has come to dominate the political landscape in many developed countries? Edited by Matt McManus, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Tec de Monterrey, What Is Post-Modern Conservatism touches on how technological, economic, and social transformations of the post-modern epoch have brought about a political landscape where the irrational and traditionalist aspects of conservative thought have mutated into the hugely tremendous forms we see today. With contributory essays from Dylan De Jong, Erik Tate, Borna Radnik, David Hollands and Conrad Hamilton.","What is post-modern conservatism? How it has come to dominate the political landscape in many developed countries? Edited by Matt McManus, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Tec de Monterrey, What Is Post-Modern Conservatism touches on how technological, economic, and social transformations of the post-modern epoch have brought about a political landscape where the irrational and traditionalist aspects of conservative thought have mutated into the hugely tremendous forms we see today. With contributory essays from Dylan De Jong, Erik Tate, Borna Radnik, David Hollands and Conrad Hamilton.",2,"[""Featuring contributory essays from Dylan De Jong, Erik Tate, Borna Radnik, David Hollands and Conrad Hamilton, \""What Is Post-Modern Conservatism: Essays On Our Hugely Tremendous Times\"" is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand why so many traditional Republicans have left the Republic Party, which itself has mutated into a haven for white supremacists, anti-immigrants, isolationists, entrench hostilities toward democratic institutions such as the State Department and the Judiciary, and effectively becoming a Donald Trump oriented cult of personality movement willing to abandoned traditional conservative Republic values of personal decency, balanced budgets, small government, and congressional oversight of the executive branch. \""What Is Post-Modern Conservatism\"" truly lives up to its subtitle and is unreservedly recommended for community and academic library Contemporary Political Science collections, as well as the personal reading lists of political science students, academia, political activists, and all former and current members of the Republican Party. ~ James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, Mid West Book Review"", ""This thoughtful essay collection speaks to a fundamental question of our times: when abundance and technological advance render struggle and meaning less pressing, what comes to replace these longstanding cornerstones of life? Sometimes the effort to fill that gap leads societies to some unexpected places. ~ Erich J Prince, Editor of Merion West""]" What's Left of the World,"[""David J. Blacker""]",For long-term viability the left must move beyond identity emotivism and articulate a larger worldview.,"In 1960, Paul Goodman argued that the Fordist system that treated people as mere cogs in a machine had created a profound unhappiness in young people and in American society as a whole. More than half a century later, professor David Blacker recognizes that decades of neoliberalism have pushed young people beyond unhappiness and into a collective identity crisis. Overall, Americans no longer feel needed to do jobs that had previously anchored them in society and are becoming disconnected and purposeless. The proliferation of new identities, based not on work but on consumption, is symptomatic of neoliberalism and its hyper-commodification and deregulation of everyday life.","In 1960, Paul Goodman argued that the Fordist system that treated people as mere cogs in a machine had created a profound unhappiness in young people and in American society as a whole. More than half a century later, professor David Blacker recognizes that decades of neoliberalism have pushed young people beyond unhappiness and into a collective identity crisis. Overall, Americans no longer feel needed to do jobs that had previously anchored them in society and are becoming disconnected and purposeless. The proliferation of new identities, based not on work but on consumption, is symptomatic of neoliberalism and its hyper-commodification and deregulation of everyday life.",3,"[""This is an impressive overview of the enduring effects of neoliberalism on the interdependent areas of identity politics, progressivism. education and climate change. Its sweep is impressive, but at times, it does not allow its argument to breathe. The discussion of education is a case in point, focused predominantly on higher education in the USA; this undermines the generalisations it makes about education more widely (leaving aside the fact that many are accurate). Its concluding promotion of a pro-Gaia approach to climate recovery, although signalled earlier, is a little surprising but reasonably convincing, and Blacker's investment is obvious. A fascinating and informative overview overall. ~ Michael J , Netgalley"", ""From a difficult beginning, the book manages to break through the soil and flower into something incredibly interesting. I kind of want to hand out copies, but the list of people who need to read it is too large and unfortunately I think those who could benefit most probably wouldn't read it because of how well it challenges their perspectives!\n\nThis is a book worth reading.\n\nFull review at:\n\nhttps://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2734745668 ~ Ellie Strickland, GoodReads"", ""A very timely and painstakingly done book. Interesting and well done, very highly informative and has a lot pf effort put in. The post modern style is very well done.\n\n~ Tasnima Yasmin, NetGalley""]" When Journalism was a Thing,"[""Alexandra Kitty""]",Journalism used to be everything until the day it became nothing. What happened and why?,"Journalism used to be a thing. It used to be a powerful and wonderful thing, yet now it has become a curiosity, and not even the Internet can resurrect it. When Journalism was a Thing considers the downfall and the reasons why, but also offers a model for a new approach to the once-noble profession.","Journalism used to be a thing. It used to be a powerful and wonderful thing, yet now it has become a curiosity, and not even the Internet can resurrect it. When Journalism was a Thing considers the downfall and the reasons why, but also offers a model for a new approach to the once-noble profession.",4,"[""Timely and needed analysis of the media relation to our common world. Perhaps since medium really became a message the trouble started. Propaganda-based broadcasting and writing was an exception (or a rule reserved only for tabloid-media) until the news and opinion became a product. Until that time one could expect from serious journalist informed opinion and balanced judgement. The young generation of media workers do not know about these standards. It is being attracted often by quick fame (social media) rather than work for common good. Ms Kitty elaborates on the problem brilliantly. Anyone who perceives herself or himself as an intelligent person should familiarise themselves with \""When Journalism was a Thing\"". ~ Ben Goldberg, Journalist"", ""A very timely book at a era when journalism and journalists are being attacked as fake news,this is a clear concise look at what journalists do & how important their jobs are.Young journalists should grab this book anyone interested in free presses role wil find this book well worth reading. ~ Rhonda Lomazow , NetGalley"", ""As a lover in investigative journalism, I wanted to learn about the author's take on the rise and fall of general journalism.\n\nJournalism is still everything, yet to some it has become like a joke.. Kitty explores the downfall of the profession and presents a solid strategy for its resurrection.\n\nInformative read!\n\n~ Erica Watkins, NetGalley"", ""Growing up in a journalist’s home and having been a journalist myself, I was keen to read When Journalism was a Thing. As a profession, journalism used to be a powerful, positive force, one many young people aspired to pursue, especially after The Washington Post broke the Watergate scandal and helped to depose a President.\n\nThe advent and explosive growth of digital, however, relegated print to a red-haired stepchild position or worse ... changing the face of journalism forever. And the evolution from a truth-seeking entity to a biased ratings-driven hack has destroyed the profession’s credibility, claims author Alexandra Kitty.\n\nKitty, who has published three books, including Don’t Believe It!: How Lies Become News, and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, explains the forces that led to the death of “old journalism” while offering a model for a new version she believes can be noble again. She says, “It will take humility, honesty, idealism, and most of all, bravery to make the bold revolutionary changes ... where the battle for truth [not ratings] counts the most.” Highly recommended! ~ Literary Soiree, NetGalley""]" Where God Comes From,"[""Ira Livingston""]",What happens when language and thought come face-to-face with their maker: the self-organizing processes out of which they emerge?,"Where God Comes From explores how the sublime and miraculous can be found in a whole range of processes-- from chemistry and biology to language and literature and social interactions -- and how they loop back on themselves to form complex systems, stitching themselves and their environments together. The book traces an arc that passes through a series of different essay forms: a prose poem in Twitter-length units, a philosophical dialogue, traditional essays, and finally a story. Each is a metacognitive investigation of mystical experience as what happens when consciousness discovers its family resemblances with other recursive processes.","Where God Comes From explores how the sublime and miraculous can be found in a whole range of processes-- from chemistry and biology to language and literature and social interactions -- and how they loop back on themselves to form complex systems, stitching themselves and their environments together. The book traces an arc that passes through a series of different essay forms: a prose poem in Twitter-length units, a philosophical dialogue, traditional essays, and finally a story. Each is a metacognitive investigation of mystical experience as what happens when consciousness discovers its family resemblances with other recursive processes.",1,"[""Livingston’s unique and beautiful book is a soulful mixture of memoir and theoretical meditation. Ideas move in fractal trajectories across boundaries, coupling up multiple systems of thought. This is high-level discursive performance art full of conceptual kicks.\n\n~ Bruce Clarke, Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science, Texas Tech University, --""]" Where the Beast is Buried,"[""Joanna Rajkowska""]","The first English-language book about Joanna Rajkowska and her unique practice of work in public space, in extremely diverse cultures and geographies.","Rajkowska’s unique artistic vision and methodology combines subjective narratives and critical discourses with a deeply felt concern for the spaces in which her works appear and the people they touch. Instead of simply invading or occupying public spaces, she blurs the identities and hidden tensions associated with them, navigating around communal dreams and fears. Historical trauma, cultural discourse, aesthetic relevance and geopolitical references all blend in her works in ways which both distress and heal, challenge and resolve, attack and absolve. Rajkowska deals with all these issues on an intuitive level, digging for desires and myths in ways which are not spoken of directly, far from a discursive level which would disrupt the physical and emotional realms involved. Her works resist interpretations which could offer simple solutions to complex problems. Instead, they are conceived of as social utopias to be tested in practice and frameworks for individuals or communities to experience, discuss and give meaning to. WHERE THE BEAST IS BURIED is the first English-language book about Joanna Rajkowska and her unique practice of work in public space, in extremely diverse cultures and geographies: from Konya in Anatolia, through Warsaw and Berlin up to Curitiba in Brazil. A collection of stories, essays, interviews and images covers her best-known projects. The most intimate insight into them offer her own stories, which form a dramatic enquiry into both the personal and the conceptual roots of her work.","Rajkowska’s unique artistic vision and methodology combines subjective narratives and critical discourses with a deeply felt concern for the spaces in which her works appear and the people they touch. Instead of simply invading or occupying public spaces, she blurs the identities and hidden tensions associated with them, navigating around communal dreams and fears. Historical trauma, cultural discourse, aesthetic relevance and geopolitical references all blend in her works in ways which both distress and heal, challenge and resolve, attack and absolve. Rajkowska deals with all these issues on an intuitive level, digging for desires and myths in ways which are not spoken of directly, far from a discursive level which would disrupt the physical and emotional realms involved. Her works resist interpretations which could offer simple solutions to complex problems. Instead, they are conceived of as social utopias to be tested in practice and frameworks for individuals or communities to experience, discuss and give meaning to. WHERE THE BEAST IS BURIED is the first English-language book about Joanna Rajkowska and her unique practice of work in public space, in extremely diverse cultures and geographies: from Konya in Anatolia, through Warsaw and Berlin up to Curitiba in Brazil. A collection of stories, essays, interviews and images covers her best-known projects. The most intimate insight into them offer her own stories, which form a dramatic enquiry into both the personal and the conceptual roots of her work.",1,"[""Joanna Rajkowska explores urban spaces and experiential stories. Her concern is with the regeneration of ‘atrophied’ public spaces and their political and social histories. Rajkowska’s art offers new ways of experiencing space and sociality, whether in Berlin, Warsaw, the West Bank, Turkey, Peterborough, London or Copenhagen. She is one of the most significant women creating public art in today’s art world. ~ Maggie Humm""]" Who Makes the Fash,"[""Luca Carboni""]","A compelling analysis of the relationships between fascism, neoliberalism, art and popular culture over the last century, and their contemporary manifestations.","Who makes the Fash is a compelling analysis of the relationships between art and fascism. Originating from the desire of conceptualising an antifascist artistic practice, this book investigates fascism in Italy and its relationships with futurism and neoliberalism. When seen in a historical context, the aesthetic appeal of the “new”, glamorous fascism is unmasked as a media-sponsored strategy of smoke and mirrors, functional to the preservation of a racist and patriarchal capitalism disguised as anti-systemic and innovative; from CasaPound, to the 5 Star Movement in Italy, to Elon Musk (hopefully soon in space). What role can the arts have in this scenario? The assumption that this field is a stronghold of the left can not be held true anymore: if as artists we want to counter the making of fascist hegemony, we must embrace a responsibility that goes beyond our practice. This book offers an accessible historical overview, political analysis and a passionate call to radicalise the politics and practices of arts and culture around an outspokenly antifascist praxis.","Who makes the Fash is a compelling analysis of the relationships between art and fascism. Originating from the desire of conceptualising an antifascist artistic practice, this book investigates fascism in Italy and its relationships with futurism and neoliberalism. When seen in a historical context, the aesthetic appeal of the “new”, glamorous fascism is unmasked as a media-sponsored strategy of smoke and mirrors, functional to the preservation of a racist and patriarchal capitalism disguised as anti-systemic and innovative; from CasaPound, to the 5 Star Movement in Italy, to Elon Musk (hopefully soon in space). What role can the arts have in this scenario? The assumption that this field is a stronghold of the left can not be held true anymore: if as artists we want to counter the making of fascist hegemony, we must embrace a responsibility that goes beyond our practice. This book offers an accessible historical overview, political analysis and a passionate call to radicalise the politics and practices of arts and culture around an outspokenly antifascist praxis.",2,"[""From Breitbart to the New York Times to Jacobin, the consensus on the international resurgence of the far-right is that it is a cultural movement first, and a political movement second. Here is the first close-up English-language case study of another 'Italian laboratory' than the one we have been shown by the post-Operaist discourse of the recent past: how the cultural politics of Fascism unfolded from the Futurist and Mussolini all the way up to CasaPound and Salvini. Who Makes the Fash is a brilliantly executed genealogy of the Italian far-right from the perspective of cultural struggle, but it goes further, making a case for the importance of partisan activity for artists and cultural workers, lest the tired avowals of liberal subjectivity lead us directly to the gardens of 'CasaWeiwei'. ~ Marina Vishmidt, Goldsmith University, London"", ""“Can art kill fascists?” “Why art of all things?” Two timely questions to be asked to anybody involved in art production and art education with a claim to relevance. Luca Carboni in his incisive book, Who makes the Fash poses them in the context of a carefully constructed case-study called “Italy”, and underpins them by linking local history and actuality to the present hegemony worldwide.\n\nCarboni offers a much-needed antidote to the spectacularization of new fascisms by the neo-liberal media. By doing this he intricately lays bare one of the most painful truths of our time: fascism and neoliberalism are not in opposition, but can function perfectly well side by side. Art can and must confront this uncomfortable reality by firmly taking an anti-fascist stance without ever giving up on the notion of complexity (however tempting). ~ Gabriëlle Schleijpen, artistic director, Head of Program DAI Art Praxis, Arnhem""]" Who's Afraid of the Easter Rising? 1916-2016,"[""James Heartfield"", ""Kevin Rooney""]","One hundred years on from the Rising that set Ireland free, Ireland's leaders in politics and letters are running scared from their history.","One hundred years ago, Easter 1916, Irish revolutionaries rose against the British Empire proclaiming a Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin. The men and women of the Easter Rising were defeated by the overwhelming force of the British Army, in five days of intense fighting. Their leaders were executed. But the Easter Rising lit a fire that ended with the whole country turning against Westminster’s rule, and founding a nation. But today, the heirs to the Irish state are embarrassed about 1916. They are ashamed that their state owes its origins to a revolution. Along with academics and other commentators in the press and on television they dismiss the Rising as the work of violent fanatics, and the defeat of constitutional politics. Who’s Afraid of the Easter Rising? explains why today’s Dublin elite are recoiling from the origins of their state in a popular struggle. Where the critics paint the Rising as an armed conspiracy, we explain that it was in fact a revolt against war; not a militaristic upsurge, but the first challenge to the awful slaughter of the First World War. The Statesmen of Europe sacrificed millions upon the altar of war. Their recruiting sergeants in Ireland, Edward Carson and John Redmond sent 200,000 Irishmen into the slaughter and nearly 50,000 were killed. The Easter Rising drew a halt to British recruitment, and the blow to the Empire was the first crack in a growing revolt against the war, followed by the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the German revolution the following year – which ended the conflict. The Easter Rising was an inspiration to those who were challenging the Empires of Europe, from India to Vietnam, from New Zealand to Moscow; it was an inspiration to British activists like John Maclean and Sylvia Pankhurst; and it was an inspiration to the Irish men and women who rose up against British rule to free their nation.","One hundred years ago, Easter 1916, Irish revolutionaries rose against the British Empire proclaiming a Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin. The men and women of the Easter Rising were defeated by the overwhelming force of the British Army, in five days of intense fighting. Their leaders were executed. But the Easter Rising lit a fire that ended with the whole country turning against Westminster’s rule, and founding a nation. But today, the heirs to the Irish state are embarrassed about 1916. They are ashamed that their state owes its origins to a revolution. Along with academics and other commentators in the press and on television they dismiss the Rising as the work of violent fanatics, and the defeat of constitutional politics. Who’s Afraid of the Easter Rising? explains why today’s Dublin elite are recoiling from the origins of their state in a popular struggle. Where the critics paint the Rising as an armed conspiracy, we explain that it was in fact a revolt against war; not a militaristic upsurge, but the first challenge to the awful slaughter of the First World War. The Statesmen of Europe sacrificed millions upon the altar of war. Their recruiting sergeants in Ireland, Edward Carson and John Redmond sent 200,000 Irishmen into the slaughter and nearly 50,000 were killed. The Easter Rising drew a halt to British recruitment, and the blow to the Empire was the first crack in a growing revolt against the war, followed by the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the German revolution the following year – which ended the conflict. The Easter Rising was an inspiration to those who were challenging the Empires of Europe, from India to Vietnam, from New Zealand to Moscow; it was an inspiration to British activists like John Maclean and Sylvia Pankhurst; and it was an inspiration to the Irish men and women who rose up against British rule to free their nation.",3,"[""'I recommend this book'\n\n~ Professor Paul Bew"", ""'a penetrating reflection on the controversies surrounding the Dublin revolt of 1916 as its centenary year approaches.'\n\nhttp://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/recalling-the-spirit-of-the-easter-rising/17675#.Vv2EEZwguM9 ~ Michael Fitzpatrick, Spiked Online"", ""'an interesting, valuable and timely short book on the 1916 Easter Rising and how it has been commemorated since 1966. ... a fine account of the Easter Rising and its context'\n\nhttps://theirishrevolution.wordpress.com/2015/11/25/book-review-whos-afraid-of-the-easter-rising/ ~ Liam Ó Ruairc, The Irish Revolution blog""]" Why are Animals Funny?,"[""EDA Collective""]",Analysing the signs of everyday life.,"Why are Animals Funny? comprises 46 articles in which nigh on everything is analysed, from the smartphone to the 2010 general election, from toasties to Margaret Thatcher, from anxiety in children's literature to David Cameron's music tastes... Everyday Analysis (for which we use the author name EDA Collective) is a group of writers, mostly in Manchester, in the UK, who have been posting short articles on everyday events, phenomena, affairs, popular and avant garde culture, and anything else, online at http://everydayanalysis.tumblr.com/, and have begun to amass quite a following in the blogosphere, in a relatively short time. Our work has been shared by various outlets over the internet, from Verso Books to the poet, Sam Riviere, with certain articles also appearing in our weekly column in the country's biggest University newspaper, The Mancunion.","Why are Animals Funny? comprises 46 articles in which nigh on everything is analysed, from the smartphone to the 2010 general election, from toasties to Margaret Thatcher, from anxiety in children's literature to David Cameron's music tastes... Everyday Analysis (for which we use the author name EDA Collective) is a group of writers, mostly in Manchester, in the UK, who have been posting short articles on everyday events, phenomena, affairs, popular and avant garde culture, and anything else, online at http://everydayanalysis.tumblr.com/, and have begun to amass quite a following in the blogosphere, in a relatively short time. Our work has been shared by various outlets over the internet, from Verso Books to the poet, Sam Riviere, with certain articles also appearing in our weekly column in the country's biggest University newspaper, The Mancunion.",9,"[""I’ll be one of the first to admit, I love “Grumpy Cat” (fun aside though, the 2-year old American shorthair cat is actually named Tardar Sauce, and looks the way she does thanks to feline dwarfism and an under bite . . . and is apparently quite the loving little animal). I love pop-cultural tropes and memes like it should be my job, and occasionally wish that I could reconcile that with the fact that I pride myself on my intellect and education, and the fact that in little more than two years (fingers crossed on that one), I’d really prefer that you call me “Doctor”. The Everyday Analysis Collective is one of the answers to my inability to reconcile my adulthood with my childlike attraction to the insane minutiae of daily life and popular culture.\n\nSo the hot pink cover of the new book, with a black and white illustration of one of the Internet’s most revered animal memes, Why Are Animals Funny? was an immediate draw. Originally begun in January 2013 as a blog based between Manchester and London, the project has grown to include a run as a column in the University of Manchester’s Mancunion, entries on the international news website The Huffington Post, and the UK’s Guardian. That EDA has taken off in less than eighteen months is impressive, and something that I think is sorely and amusingly needed. The first of what I really do hope will become an engaging series of books brings together some of EDA’s finest contributions to date, at the hands of editors Alfie Bown and Daniel Bristow.\n\nThe book, as with its original home on the Internet, lacks individually credited authors (similar in tactic to the Art & Language collective practices), and each mini-essay is instead listed by title and entry number. They are short, averaging approximately two pages per entry, and each title almost reads like something off of an early Fall Out Boy or Panic! At the Disco album, less a suggestive title than a brief, yet detailed account: customary for tedious works of theory, not necessarily for vignettes, novels, or songs even.\n\nIndeed, the introduction to the book is the longest single entry in the entire thing, and offers a good explanation of not only the critical inspiration for the project, but also offers reasoning as to exactly why this project is so . . . well, intellectually and culturally necessary. The second half of the introduction, subtitled A Defence of Theory, explains this well.\n\nLike a literary two-way street, this book acts as an accessible inlet for outsiders of the ivory tower that is academia, and a much-needed outlet for those trapped inside (both students and accomplished instructors alike). In brief, it serves to ponder all aspects of cultural minutiae through pickings and choosings of theoretical heavy-hitters like Lacan and Marx, without removing the joy of the sheer insanity and absurdity of it all.\n\nI think that in reading this book for the sake of generating an adequate review, I had to do my best to remove myself from my powerful urge to actively and vehemently engage with the assertions that its pages put forth (because some of them really are quite fascinating, and it’s a difficult impulse to turn off, sort of like a word-vomit reflex).\n\nThis might actually shed light on what I think is really the only unfair part of the whole thing: you only get a taster for each subject. Of course, this is also one of the most appealing points of the project. For most, anything more than an introductory analysis to say, American food challenges (we Americans do find an unabashed sense of joy in this sort of thing even without seeing it though a lens that infantilizes this variety of consumption, as is suggested in entry number three: “Baby Food, or How to Eat Like an American”), can quickly become burdensome and risk being outright boring. The trick with EDA is to only give the reader a basis for the author’s argument, and to make the reader think, ideally resulting in engaging conversation, rather than making one to feel that they’ve just been talked at for an annoyingly long time. This ends up acting more as an exercise for the reader than for the authors. The authors present the situation and the initial thought. It’s the job of the reader to think about it and, God willing, even find some way to agree and complement it or counter it.\n\nThe nineteenth entry in the book, a rather poignant observation on the personal and mass cultural perceptions of death titled “Does it Really Make a Difference Whether it was James Gandolfini or Tony Soprano who Died?”, is probably my favourite entry in the whole thing. At first stop, a likely answer to the question-title could be something akin to: “Yes, of course. One was a real live human being, the other was a character on a television show.” There’s far more to it, though. The vignette’s real impact in the book lies in the fact that it almost entirely avoids explicit mention of any particular “theory” until the last paragraph, in which mention of Freud and Peter Brooks are made, though the point at which this occurs is so late that the author can do little more than mention them in passing. Because of this, the author relies almost completely on cultural and logical reference, arguing that while yes it was indeed sad when James Gandolfini suddenly died, it may very well have been the actor’s famous character of Tony Soprano that passed, for as much of a tie as many people actually had to the actor versus how the internet-connected world seemed to mourn his passing. Without personal experience to speak of, the author suggests, the character was just as real as the actor (and vice versa). The essay as a whole manages itself quite well for its length, and was probably the only entry where I found myself largely satisfied at its conclusion instead of clamouring for more.\n\nTo say nothing else, I would recommend the book on the basis of this entry alone.\n\nThat, and the commentary in entry number six on the strange sense of identity (or complete disregard for) presented in advertising campaigns like the Old Spice adverts featuring former American footballer Isaiah Mustafa as the hunky, manly-man centre of attention, known to the digital world as “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”. If you’ve not seen the adverts, I recommend watching them, then reading the entry.\n\nThere is a slight deceptiveness at work with the format of the book however, and one could start to think with the project in general. As a burgeoning academic, this format makes sense to me. I’ve read Barthes’ Mythologies, which the editors of EDA reference in the introduction to the book. Analytical commentary on the oddly mundane (yet simultaneously fascinating) aspects of everyday life is a useful tool to help us realize that, my god, there isn’t a single pointless part of life. Even the lowest dregs of cultural detritus (I’m looking at you, Beliebers) reflect something about us, and life in general, that is worth acknowledging. But the project, broadly operated by academics, relies on academic vernacular to claim its stake. It thereby almost restricts its accessibility to a very specialized type of mind. The average individual is not likely to be terribly familiar with Benjamin or Derrida, but this book could in fact ultimately serve as a useful way of piquing interest in the new and unfamiliar.\n\nOverall, I’m excited that something like EDA has not only built a following and reputation that, in today’s attention-deficit world, is increasingly difficult to manage, but that it has also expanded into media outside of its original domain. Quite a bit can be said to the simple fact that in the span of less than two years, it has managed to achieve a shift in physical status from the digitally-pervasive, to being blessed with its first ISBN. This is hugely impressive, and I can’t wait to see what the collective does next. ~ Allison Norris, The Manchester Review"", ""“Death Drive,” “hauntology,” “in horror vacui,” and “uber-chutzpa” are just a few of the phrases that grace the pages of “Why are Animals Funny? Everday Analysis: Volume 1,” published in the UK by independent publisher, Zero Books. “Why are Animals Funny?” is written by a band of, well, what I call renegades. They, however, call themselves the Everyday Analysis Collective (EDA Collective), a group comprised mostly of journalists and academics out of England.\n\nThe book is a compilation of forty-six articles that move flawlessly from the particular to the universal, and only one of which is actually about why animals are funny, and let’s be real – they are hilarious, but not for the reasons you’d expect. The EDA Collective brings in heavy hitters like G.W.F. Hegel and Georges Bataille to show us what’s really going on with the cat video and Corgi beach party obsession. I’ll say that my “animal drives” will no longer be suppressed after that article.\n\nA note on the title (ironically, probably intentionally), the second article in the book is called, “On the Impossiblity of Judging a Book by its Cover.” The cover is a loud hottish-pink color, hideous, with what I can only describe as an existentially terrified cat on the front. This is probably what I looked like while I purposefully read the book in various public settings: in a park, on the train (note: to get the full effect of “Cross country trains: How can we measure ideology today”, it is best read on a crowded train), at Starbucks, in public toilets, but little did the passersby know, I was actually reading about, “Why Justin Bieber Should Listen to Neutral Milk Hotel,” and, “Symbols of the Working Class: The Call Centre and Alienating Advertising.”\n\nIf you haven’t figured it out by now, the EDA Collective analyzes phenomena that have become culturally banalized, at an intersection where the absurd and strange become intimate, and the reader is left with no choice but to put his or her’s everyday existence into question. Their critiques, averaging two pages each, magnify to an unsightly degree the linguistic, social, and cultural constructions we live in, how this reality functions onto us, and then ends each article with an always all too human provocation. That is their method. It is sharp and it penetrates. If you’re at all familiar with Slavoj Zizek and have seen his films, “The Perverts Guide to Ideology,” or “The Perverts Guide to Cinema,” you’ll appreciate and respect the work the EDA Collective has done in just one hundred short pages. And unlike Zizek, there are very few: “as-such’s,” “precisely’s,” “and-so-on’s.” The Collective means exactly what they say and say exactly what they mean. Each of the 46 articles can stand alone in this way.\n\nOn that same note, everything about “Why are Animals Funny?” is contra to contemporary academia. That is it’s charm. And what I mean by this, is that the hot-pink cover with a cat on it, the short articles, and the hilarious quips, will not be found anywhere in the buttoned-up, stuffy University air of today. Even if the reader is unfamiliar with Marxist attack on ideology, Lacan’s tripartite model of the mind, and Baudrillard’s definition of hyperreality, you can enjoy what these writers have set out to do, which is force readers to put down the book and question the nature and construction of their reality in that particular, atomized moment. It is best read on the train, at Starbucks, or in a crowded park. You will get the full empirical experience of the theory this way. The articles will come to life in a Frankensteinian-way, and whether that is frightening or hilarious is, I guess up to you.\n\nI think it was Wittgenstein who said that the only way to confront something truly awful is through humor. “Why are Animals Funny?” is itself funny, but please note, this is a serious book, and the jokes it makes are to be taken seriously.\n\nIt’s theory is concrete. For instance, in “One Grande Super Skinny Latte with an Extra Shot and Sugar Free Vanilla Syrup Please!”\n\n“I recognize the cultural need to consume American-style coffee, placing the mind in the position of the subject-who-desires, and I instead need to gratify this cultural or social desire without contaminating the purity of my body; the body is in on it, the mind is fooled (75).”\n\nIt is obvious the American style coffee referenced above is Starbucks. Anybody who hasn’t had their head buried in sand for the past decade has seen someone order this exact drink–probably in a pair of Lululemon pants, eats gluten free, and pays on his or her cell phone–and maybe your response is to scoff, laugh, or order that exact same drink right afterwards, totally un-phased. Moments like these that go that unquestioned everyday are thrown under the microscope, and everything becomes implicated in a massive web. Language, culture, sociostructures, the body, the mind, and most importantly, you, just another fly stuck on the web, reading this review on the internet, are implicated, yes, whether you like it or not you are in on it.\n\nThe EDA Collective’s mission is simply stated in the introduction to the book. They want to make us think, and constantly re-think our reality, a reality that is full of impossible complexities: skinny lattes, Toasties[1], anxiety in children’s novels, and The Flaming Lips. To this end, their goal, as simple as it is, is hard to achieve. But they do achieve it. I think these renegades attack this challenge in the best possible way, and that is from the multi-vantage point that only a collective can offer, a panoramic view of different voices, that see different signs, objects, and symbols, and amalgamate them together in a creative register, that makes for a delightful and engaging read.\n\n[1] This was one of the more opaque objects alluded to that I came across while reading. I had no idea what in the hell a Toastie was, beyond being a a boring grilled cheese. One of the Collective’s editors cleared this up for me, “The best ones are made in a kind of machine which cooks the bread and sort of seals it together. I haven’t had one for about 10 years, but I want one now. I guess the best way to describe it is – its a kind of shit Panini.” ~ Zachary Siegel, Critical-Theory.com"", ""The career prospects for young academics, especially in the humanities, are dire. But the barriers to full-time, long-term contracts for young thinkers across the British Isles have in some cases bred creativity. The daring of young thought is still potentially as invigorating as in decades past. The problem is that the academy has little space for risk taking.\n\nUniversities are restricted more and more by unadventurous business models. And their timidity is reflected in their often conservative choices when funding research by young scholars.\n\nYet rare beacons of young dissenting voices persist and adapt to this inhospitable climate. Those who operate on the margins of traditional publishing, paradoxically, are starting to represent the cutting edge of the academy. These are writers who are hungry to continue the healthy tradition of new thinkers who challenge the status quo.\n\nTheir trick is to make more accessible highbrow theories of gender, ideology and the postmodern in order to influence public debate. Readers may be familiar with one of these collectives, the Everyday Sexism movement, but perhaps fewer will have taken note of Everyday Analysis (or EDA for short). The latter has gained a number of admirers in more niche circles.\n\nIts blog, everydayanalysis.com, has caught the imagination, in particular, of those intellectuals who are forced to the margins of the academy. EDA embraces the internet as a primary platform of publication and has mobilised in new ways to stand out from the countless young academics with whom it must compete for attention. It publishes almost weekly – a significant challenge to the slower and more traditional forms of academic publishing.\n\nAttempting to attract a new audience, EDA has now released its first collection of essays in traditional print, Why Are Animals Funny? The title may intentionally suggest a certain inanity, but, given the collective’s intellectual rigour, this first impression is misleading.\n\nThe collective organisation of EDA counters refreshingly the narcissism (in other words, the individualism) of more mainstream scholarly writing. Perhaps counterintuitively for a medium that allows us more and more to curate our own virtual lives, at least some of the narcissistic tendencies of academic writing are eradicated if the work appears online and is authored collectively: anonymity is now well established as advantageous to the radical thinker.\n\nThe collective, in turn, may take the intellectual high ground over the superstar academic; the introduction to Why Are Animals Funny? makes EDA’s position clear: “We hope that having no presiding authorial voice is part of our fidelity to the cause.” The “cause” is proving the usefulness of theory to disentangling the hidden complexities that structure our everyday lives.\n\nEDA’s publisher, Zero Books, also pours scorn on the mainstream in its mission statement. In the academy, it suggests, “A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheered by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations.” Revolution is in the air, at least in this corner of cyberspace.\n\nThe numerous readings presented here meticulously pay respect to the work of theorists and philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Slavoj Zizek. In so doing these essays harness and distil complex theory to show us the full ideological significance of that which we may otherwise regard as insignificant; a game of Angry Birds, the phrase “man-up”, the collapse of support in Britain for the Liberal Democrats, and the cable programme Man v. Food are just some of the subjects reframed by Why Are Animals Funny?\n\nThis is not just the posturing of the disenfranchised. At its astute best, Why Are Animals Funny? invites us to become the subjects of its analysis and to recognise that which we disavow: that desire and ideology control us even in the most mundane situations. EDA inverts the “commonsense” knowledge dished out by the accepted experts of our age.\n\nTake the cult of “curing” our neuroses and our modern obsession with restorative therapies. Following the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, EDA insists we should embrace rather than dismiss our unique quirks and habits: “To assume our symptom [. . .] is to realise that our very ‘consistency’ is to be found precisely in our ‘pathological’ singularity.” In other words, we should accept our symptoms as our unique qualities, as intrinsic to our being.\n\nEven the “common sense” lauding of charity is challenged. Drawing from Zizek, EDA asks us to consider that which economic charity smudges over: it “avoids the confrontation with the question of how it became necessary in the first place – and how its causes might be addressed by changing the system”. We should see charity as necessary only because of the inhumanity of the capitalist structures that necessitate it.\n\nIt is not only a desire for change that drives the writers of EDA but also intoxication with the theoretical text. These young thinkers use what they have – intelligence, resourcefulness and an eye for the everyday – to produce readings at a pace that the academy cannot mirror.\n\nAt its best this collection sets a precedent for a new generation of critical engagement with popular culture. EDA is fighting to carve a new space for the intellectual in popular media. Its battle is just beginning. ~ Matt Foley, Irish Times"", ""With their first book, Why are Animals Funny?, the collective offers an intriguing insight into the symbiosis of theory and practice in the everyday; and precisely that symbiosis is at the heart of EDA’s brilliance. Aware of the dangers of theory in popular writing, the collective manages to make use of sometimes awfully complex ideas and concepts without losing much of their nuances. This book is thus a delightful example of the importance of theory in understanding the everyday, and a perfect testimony to Slavoj Žižek’s statement on the importance of theory: ‘life without theory is gray, a flat stupid reality – it is only theory which makes it “green”, truly alive, bringing out the complex underlying network of mediations and tensions which makes it move’. Unsurprisingly (although not solely), it is Lacanian psychoanalytic theory that features most prominently in this book; and it is a smooth and unforced marriage between politics and psychoanalysis where this book is at its best.\n\nThis book also comes as a proper refreshment to the current academic environment which, at least in social sciences (and one would venture a guess that humanities are not far behind), is more and more driven by funding and impact agendas, by a cut-throat competition as to who is to come closer to the holy grail of power and, as an expert, become new politicians’ best friend. EDA collective sheds light not only on the conduct of politics, but with its collective writing practice (crowd-writing), the ethics of sharing ideas and the non-existent questions of ownership, puts up a mirror to their peers and invites them to consider their policy-driven endeavors in light of what academic profession is supposed to be.\n\nI wish politics people – those in office or perhaps, even more, the others/experts who are sitting in their academic ivory towers whispering in their masters’ ears – would read this book and open their eyes and minds to a different kind of politics; a politics which perhaps underlies their unchallenged faith and trust in knowledge that is squeezed out of the public by forms of survey-type number-crunching. An essay on 2010 UK general elections shows why political agendas should not (solely) be placed in the hands of numbers; the Liberal Democrats, after what was a well-foreseen success at the elections, driven by a promise of a different politics and aided by a general dissatisfaction with the (New Labourite) politics of an average Briton, lost their political momentum. Instead of capitalizing on their success, the party (Nick Clegg) got scared of their perceived and potentially transforming power. To turn to psychoanalysis, they became 'the phallus par excellence' – this being a form of power, which in the process of exercising its potential, castrates itself. And what else did Nick Clegg do, but castrate himself and the party? The most powerful politician in the country, as essay 14 nicely explains, is bound by being only able to ask himself the one question: 'who must we choose to render our party impotent?'\n\nPolitically inspired revelations continue in numerous other essays. For example, the reader is faced with the well-instated and popular liberal practice of charity. EDA invites us to ask the question for whom charity works best. Their unsurprising answer is of course for those who give to charity; and that, not only because, as again Žižek somewhere else wrote, with charity, ‘we’ – comfortably-living Western individuals – buy out our bad conscience of consuming more than we need, but because charity avoids conflict and maintains status quo. It surpasses and further delays asking the most important question, that is: how charity became necessary in the first place? And how its causes might be addressed by changing the system? Or further, the reader is confronted with questions of death – why are deaths almost aestheticised when they are far off? The representation of death and suffering turns into a profitable business, but only for as long as it is far removed from its viewers. Imagine, as EDA asks us to do, that instead of suffering bodies in the Vietnam War, starving children in Africa or the portrayals of de-humanised workers in Bangladesh, the factory accident in Ellesmere Port is described in the same aestheticised and de-humanised way. What would our reaction then be?\n\nWritten in clear opposition to a growing academic practice where knowledge control, gate-keeping and intellectual property have become key assets, Why Are Animals Funny? is a serious book that deserves close consideration by those interested in the possible futures of political, social and cultural criticism. It is a serious book that is fun to read and perhaps even a book with an unexplored didactic purpose: try introducing your students to postmodernism and critical thinking through this book and see what happens, I suggest. As Mladen Dolar put it, it’s a real grook! ~ Andreja Zevnik, OpenDemocracy"", ""The phallus par excellence:\n\nFor its ambition and integrity alone the new book by the Everyday Analysis Collective is a welcome release, an inspiring antidote to the stifling malaise that haunts the glass corridors of neoliberalism’s shiny new cathedrals. The material, collected from the group’s blog, is panoramic in its search for subject matter but remains focused in its attempt to build a critical grammar fully conversant with popular culture. The gaudy title and vomit-inducing cover in themselves constitute an affront to the kind of readers that prefer the comforting authority of the academic colon. Don’t let this fool you, though. In the spirit of Slavoj Žižek, the most obvious influence here, the distancing techniques are all part of the message. Why Are Animals Funny? is a serious book and deserves close consideration by those interested in the possible futures of cultural criticism. ...\n\nUnlike postmodernism with its self-referential jargon and masturbatory collage techniques the authority of this collection comes from its well-tuned ear, its sensitivity to the rhythms of contemporary history. As the book’s introduction and the name of the group make clear: ‘In the everyday there are radical inconsistencies that should spur us into thinking, and reading, analytically and critically, and we defend theory as the inseparable tool by which we can inaugurate this mode of reading and thought.’ The irreverent attitude towards the divisions between high and low culture, then, are less a rejection of ‘high art’ per se than a rejection of its dependence on a narrow tradition of class, race and gender referents. This extends to the collective’s method. While Freud, Lacan and Kristeva all make their appearances the appropriation of their ideas outside of the organic heritage of the university enables the group to take their concepts in unexpected directions.\n\nThe scope of these adventures is impossible to reduce to a simple list of highlights. For me, though, the cutting criticisms of parliamentary politics, mainly in the form of sporadic assaults on the 2010 Westminster Coalition, were particularly enjoyable. These moments, which manage to avoid the rehearsed carping of social media, are hilarious and charged with the same devious humanity that made Armando Iannuci’s The Thick of It such a joy to watch. A description of the Liberal Democrats, for example, splendidly portrays their election dilemma as a red-faced drama of Freudian emasculation: ‘For a brief moment Nick Clegg was the phallus par excellence. The most powerful politician in the country and yet bound by being only able to ask himself the one question: who must we choose to render our party impotent?’ ...\n\nThe EDA collective comes across as young, intelligent, thoughtful and energetic at a time when the university has become exhausted by the reactionary defence of its own suspicious ideals. More importantly, its intellectual assertions are watertight; it would be hard indeed to view the analysis on offer here as a diluted form of a purer form of philosophy. Together, the authors have captured the joy of performance, the energy of protest and embedded this spirit within a theoretical framework that is admirably deliberative. There is not a whiff of desperate careerism, not a trace of greed or networking in these pages. I only hope that this kind of nuanced commentary can find a way to sustain itself financially and creatively in the coming years against the barrage of copy/paste critiques still being peddled by the inflated egos of the mainstream commentariat. It is not often that theory is this fun to read, and less often still that satire is so well versed in the language of its assailants. ~ Jamie Mackay, Review 31"", ""Have you ever considered the ideological function of standing on a crowded train? Maybe not, because (in my experience) usually the only thought that comes to mind is how horrible and overpriced the train is and what your plans are upon arriving at your destination. In their new book ‘Why Are Animals Funny?’ Everyday Analysis (EDA) – a group of Manchester- and London-based writers known as the ‘EDA Collective’ – offers a critical, philosophical, psychoanalytical perspective of things we experience every day that are often accepted, unchallenged and unquestioned.\n\nIn the spirit of Roland Barthes’ ‘Mythologies’, the 46 short articles make up a compendium of cultural and political analysis. The articles were collected from their blog http://www.everydayanalysis.com/ which began back in January 2013 and is still regularly being updated. Some of the articles are funny and droll, while some incite discontent, and others evoke empathic understanding and a sheepish “I never thought about it that way before”; all are wonderfully written, well-informed, and (most importantly, I think) accessible.\n\nOne of my favourite features about this book is how aware the writers are of the difficulty and complexity of their material, and how they are able to avoid long, winding explanations, giving only the important information and presenting it in such a manner that educational and reading level is all but rendered moot. One of the great successes of the book is its ability to simplify without patronising its readers or losing any of the academic rigour upon which it is founded.\n\nWhile being as entertaining and as enjoyable to read as any mainstream novel or magazine, the book also serves a didactic purpose: it shows lucidly that everything we see and say and do in our lives, every song on the radio, every film in the theatre, every tweet on the Twitter has a wider impact than we might originally think. All too many reviewers have said about a book that it will change the way you look at the world and now the phrase is tired and meaningless. In this case, however, the book’s critical eye affects your real one and does (in a very literal sense) change the way you look at the world.\n\nSo, if you want to know more about Jacques Lacan’s ham & cheese toastie of the mind, Justin Bieber’s latest faux pas, your favourite internet meme, or why Richard Dawkins is a b*llend, I absolutely recommend you read this book. ~ Ruari Paton, Voix Magazine"", ""Featured with 6 other Zero titles on \""Publishers in Focus\"" webpage by Blackwell Oxford\n\n\""Many publishers struggle to get the exposure that we feel their books deserve. On this page we will bring you a selection of the independent, interesting and essential that are worthy of greater attention\"" http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/stores/oxford-bookshop/publisher-in-focus/ ~ Blackwell Oxford"", ""If you agree, as Lacan said, that psychoanalysis comes closest to being the real deal the funnier it is, then this is the book for you. If, as Adorno said, in psychoanalysis only exaggeration is true, then everyday analysis fits the bill. What a great book. ~ Ian Parker, Psychoanalyst, Professor of Management, University of Leicester, UK.,"", ""In this new A-Z (animals to Žižek) of the psychopathology of everyday life common signs, images, events, slogans, trivia are deciphered as symptoms of covert ideological scripts, site of antagonisms, stage of comedy, call for the intervention of theory, all in one go, both nonchalant and strict. In the spirit of one of the entries, that on worbining (word-combining): a real grook (great book). ~ Mladen Dolar, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana.""]" Why Are We The Good Guys?,"[""David Cromwell""]",A provocative challenge to the standard ideology that Western power is a benevolent force in the world.,"One of the unspoken assumptions of the Western world is that we are great defenders of human rights, a free press and the benefits of market economics. Mistakes might be made along the way, perhaps even tragic errors of judgement such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But the prevailing view is that the West is essentially a force for good in the wider world. Why Are We The Good Guys? is a provocative challenge of this false ideology. David Cromwell digs beneath standard accounts of crucial issues such as foreign policy, climate change and the constant struggle between state-corporate power and genuine democracy. The powerful evidence-based analysis of current affairs is leavened by some of the formative experiences that led the author to question the basic myth of Western benevolence: from schoolroom experiments in democracy, exposure to radical ideas at home, and a mercy mission while at sea; to an unexpected encounter with former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, the struggles to publish hard-hitting journalism, and the founding of Media Lens in 2001.","One of the unspoken assumptions of the Western world is that we are great defenders of human rights, a free press and the benefits of market economics. Mistakes might be made along the way, perhaps even tragic errors of judgement such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But the prevailing view is that the West is essentially a force for good in the wider world. Why Are We The Good Guys? is a provocative challenge of this false ideology. David Cromwell digs beneath standard accounts of crucial issues such as foreign policy, climate change and the constant struggle between state-corporate power and genuine democracy. The powerful evidence-based analysis of current affairs is leavened by some of the formative experiences that led the author to question the basic myth of Western benevolence: from schoolroom experiments in democracy, exposure to radical ideas at home, and a mercy mission while at sea; to an unexpected encounter with former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, the struggles to publish hard-hitting journalism, and the founding of Media Lens in 2001.",11,"[""Media Lens's editors David Cromwell and David Edwards have over the years become important analysts of the corporate media's failure to meaningfully engage with the real world of greed, mendacity, destructive economic and financial practices, relentless environmental destruction and constant mounting of illegal wars. [...]\n\nCromwell has now written another useful book about these themes with some interesting self-biographical interludes. He also includes many exchanges with mainstream media journalists which never cease to amaze me. [...]\n\nThese elite journalists seem incapable of understanding why they are being criticized. Cromwell sums up the failure of mainstream media thus: “… media professionals have long played a crucial role in the protection of private power by maintaining the illusion that members of the public are offered an ‘ímpartial' and wide selection of facts, opinions and perspectives from which any individual can derive his or her own well-informed world view.” (p. 142)\n\nhttp://www.lausti.com/articles/media/cromwell.html ~ Tapani Lausti, Finnish blogger"", ""Why Are We the Good Guys? is proof Cromwell is one of the most incisive and humane radical writers working today. ~ Ian Sinclair, Morning Star"", ""'I've had the privilege of reading this book before it went on sale, and I genuinely can't recommend it enough - please buy/download it, read it and pass it on. It examines the construction of neoliberal societies from all angles - economical, political, philosophical, social etc - and lays it bare. The analysis of how these societies are propped up by a complicit media is brilliant. Once you've read this book, you'll be an expert in arguing the case for a different way of structuring society against anyone who argues in defence of the current system! Please read it :-) Amena Saleem'\n\n~ Amena Saleem, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Facebook"", ""Tweeting about the book:\n\n'Brilliant antidote to the pro-war propaganda we're subject to.'\n\nJournalist and broadcaster Neil Clark, Twitter, 14 September 2012, 10.34am; https://twitter.com/NeilClark66/status/246543263627096064 ~ Neil Clark, Twitter"", ""I struggled with this book review. I struggled to find something to disagree with or to suggest an improvement. This is a tremendously comprehensive review of all the ways in which mainstream Western media distort our view of reality in the key context of foreign affairs. With a particular emphasis on the Middle East but with good historical depth rooting understanding in US policy after World War II, Cromwell does an excellent job of organising a wide range of evidence, neglected by our media, yet fundamental to any meaningful understanding of our deeply embedded bad faith. The bad faith, which enables our media and many of its consumers to think that we are ‘the good guys’.\n\nThis is an ideal introduction for any reader and, also, is a very useful source for students in schools, colleges and universities. Flaws? I found one! When you’ve finished with this excellent book, go on to read Edward Said whose ‘Orientalism’ will deepen your understanding of how ‘The West’, including the liberal academic elite, is imbued with discriminatory biases regarding Arabs and Islam. ~ Dr John Robertson, Reader in Media Politics, University of West Scotland"", ""One of the beacons in a politically dark world is the light cast by a moral few who analyse and reveal how journalism works in the cause of power. David Cromwell has pride of place in this company. Every member of the public and every journalist with an ounce of scepticism about authority should read his outstanding book. ~ John Pilger, journalist and documentary maker"", ""Cromwell displays his unbending commitment to follow the facts wherever they lead. Asks the questions about OUR leaders that polite society and the mainstream media will not go near. An indispensable tool of intellectual self defence. ~ David Miller, co-author of A Century of Spin, co-founder of Spinwatch, Professor of Sociology at the University of Bath.UK"", ""‘Propaganda is something they do; news what we do. They commit terror; we seek to create stability. Our enemies are inhuman; we, only too human, occasionally demonstrate our fallibility. David Cromwell brilliantly exposes the daily lies our media feed us to reassure us that we are a force for good in the world, while our governments, militaries and corporations are free to rape and pillage weaker nations and the planet. This book is an invaluable antidote to the conditioning that all those living in the west are constantly subjected to.’ - ~ Jonathan Cook, author of Disappearing Palestine"", ""'This book is truly essential reading, focusing on one of the key issues, if not THE issue, of our age: how to recognise the deep, everyday brainwashing to which we are subjected, and how to escape from it. This book brilliantly exposes the extent of media disinformation, and does so in a compelling and engaging way.' ~ Mark Curtis, author of 'Web of Deceit' and 'Unpeople'"", ""David Cromwell knows that media power works by acting on consciousness; by shaping our individual sense of values, identity and belonging to normalise the mores of the powerful. This creates the collective false self of a 'we' that controls the hammer of violence, leaving more violated empathy and senselessness in its wake. How do we wake up from the frozen awareness of such psychic numbing? Understanding the drivers and techniques of media power is a good starting point. This is what 'Why Are *We* The Good Guys?' sets out to do, and valiantly so. ~ Professor Alastair McIntosh, author of 'Soil and Soul'."", ""'Part memoir, part media critique, Why Are *We* The Good Guys? is also an eye-opening survey of \""things they don't want you to know\"". If you've ever been curious about Media Lens, Britain's most radical media monitoring group, co-founder David Cromwell explains how it came about and produces examples of its polite but in-your-face approach to dealing with journalists. A valuable account of an invaluable project.' - Milan Rai, activist, co-editor of 'Peace News' and author of 'War Plan Iraq' ~""]" Why We Love Sociopaths,"[""Adam Kotsko""]",Argues that our fascination with cold and ruthless television characters reflects a broken social contract.,"Sociopaths are pervasive in contemporary television, from high-brow drama all the way down to cartoons -- and of course the news as well. From the scheming Eric Cartman of South Park to the seductive imposter Don Draper of Mad Men, cold and ruthless characters captivate us, making us wish that we could be so effective and successful. Yet why should we admire characters who get ahead by being amoral and uncaring? In his follow-up to Awkwardness, Adam Kotsko argues that the popularity of the ruthless sociopath reflects our dissatisfaction with a failed social contract, showing that we believe that the world rewards the evil and uncaring rather than the good. By analyzing characters like the serial killer star of Dexter and the cynical Dr. House, Kotsko shows that the fantasy of the sociopath distracts us from our real problems -- but that we still might benefit from being a little more sociopathic.","Sociopaths are pervasive in contemporary television, from high-brow drama all the way down to cartoons -- and of course the news as well. From the scheming Eric Cartman of South Park to the seductive imposter Don Draper of Mad Men, cold and ruthless characters captivate us, making us wish that we could be so effective and successful. Yet why should we admire characters who get ahead by being amoral and uncaring? In his follow-up to Awkwardness, Adam Kotsko argues that the popularity of the ruthless sociopath reflects our dissatisfaction with a failed social contract, showing that we believe that the world rewards the evil and uncaring rather than the good. By analyzing characters like the serial killer star of Dexter and the cynical Dr. House, Kotsko shows that the fantasy of the sociopath distracts us from our real problems -- but that we still might benefit from being a little more sociopathic.",2,"[""amusing thoughts on the true meaning of Homer Simpson ~ Lucy Steigerwald, Reason Magazine US"", ""What is it about our society, which makes sociopaths, i.e., the kind of ruthless individuals who make their own rules, so appealing? With his usual acuity, Adam Kotsko gives an analysis of contemporary TV shows (South Park, Mad Men, The Wire, etc.) to make the case that depictions of social disconnection are especially seductive at a time when our own society has become ever more destructive and amoral. Kotsko provokes us in suggesting how we might combine and reshape several features of the television sociopath, so that we might break the hold of the societal norms prevalent in late capitalism.\n\n~ Lars Lyer, Author of the novel Spurious""]" Why Young People Don’t Vote,"[""Mitchell Agg""]","Why don't young people vote? Through four main reasons, Mitchell helps us answer this question as well as giving some solutions.","Why don't young people vote? It's a question that has been asked by pollsters for years. The 18- to 24-year-old demographic records the lowest voter turnout at elections and it doesn't look to be showing signs of stopping. Being one of this demographic, Mitchell Agg looks into this question and tries to shed light on why his peers don't enter polling stations on election day. Through four main reasons, Mitchell helps us answer this question as well as giving some solutions.","Why don't young people vote? It's a question that has been asked by pollsters for years. The 18- to 24-year-old demographic records the lowest voter turnout at elections and it doesn't look to be showing signs of stopping. Being one of this demographic, Mitchell Agg looks into this question and tries to shed light on why his peers don't enter polling stations on election day. Through four main reasons, Mitchell helps us answer this question as well as giving some solutions.",0,[] Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption,"[""Robert Appelbaum""]","All the world is not a stage, anymore - the world is a supermarket. This book relates one man's struggle to go 'working the aisles'.","Working the Aisles takes the reader on tumultuous driving trips across the United States and France, on phone sex escapades in San Francisco, on banking battles in Sweden, and many other adventures – including, of course, on trips to supermarkets, where the author has had to ‘work the aisles’. Moving back and forth through time, like a novelist, indeed in something of a memoirist tour de force, the book develops the story of struggle, of poverty and depression, but also of gaiety and desire, of a will to live in spite of it all, and to keep working the aisles. It moves the reader through highs and lows, through episodes of ecstasy and thoughts about suicide, and tells how this particular Everyman ended up sane but sorry.","Working the Aisles takes the reader on tumultuous driving trips across the United States and France, on phone sex escapades in San Francisco, on banking battles in Sweden, and many other adventures – including, of course, on trips to supermarkets, where the author has had to ‘work the aisles’. Moving back and forth through time, like a novelist, indeed in something of a memoirist tour de force, the book develops the story of struggle, of poverty and depression, but also of gaiety and desire, of a will to live in spite of it all, and to keep working the aisles. It moves the reader through highs and lows, through episodes of ecstasy and thoughts about suicide, and tells how this particular Everyman ended up sane but sorry.",8,"[""Robert Appelbaum, Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption. Winchester:\n\nZero Books, 2013. 244 pp. £12.99 pb. ISBN 978-1-78279-357-1.\n\nIn this autobiographical history of consumption from the 1960s onwards,\n\nRobert Appelbaum teeters on the balancing wire between depression and\n\ndesire. ‘The first thing you have to remember when you walk down the aisles of\n\nyour local supermarket is that they do not love you’ (1): that is Appelbaum’s mantra\n\nto avoid the pitfall of vacuous elation in a consumer-driven society with the\n\nsupermarket at its centre. It is also the thread on which this engagingly curious\n\ntale hangs, about how a New York-born, Chicago-bred, Jewish boy restlessly\n\ncrisscrosses North America before making a leap for Europe, hopping from\n\nprofessional despair to prosperity. His heart and mind are as complex and\n\nmultifaceted as the culture around him. A sometime limousine driver-gigolo\n\nand second-hand purveyor of semi-sadistic telesex, he is also an unhappily\n\ndistant father, a love-thirsty boyfriend and, later, a devoted husband, tossed\n\nbetween being a victim of and a hapless semi-agent within neoliberal consumer\n\nsociety. The book successfully entwines personal and cultural history through\n\na dope-fuelled cross-continental car journey, with its only interruption a night\n\nspent in jail, a booze-cruise with a twist and a fortnight drenched in a tent in\n\nthe Loire Valley.\n\nOne of Appelbaum’s absolute strengths is his flawless sensitivity to the\n\nsignificance to be found in meticulous detail. Casually situating his analysis\n\nin the context of Raymond Williams, Appelbaum lifts his gaze to reflect on\n\nhis own arduously attained maturity in terms of ‘the gap between my parents\n\nand me [being] representative of the new salience of “culture” as a domain\n\nof struggle’ (77). To shape his analysis, he compares a good range of national\n\ncontexts from the ‘orderly, mannerly, respectful’ aisles of a British Sainsbury’s\n\nsupermarket (8) to the suave casualness of a French youth coming out of\n\nhis local supermarché carrying a baguette. The Swedish state-monopoly alcohol\n\nshop, Systembolaget, comes off by far the worst as ‘in effect a communist\n\nsupermarket’ with its mission ‘to serve the people [and] to give them what\n\nthey think they want. But not too much: its mission is also to shame the people\n\nand suppress the crime of excess’ (229). At the other extreme, Applebaum\n\nfinds the alienating brutality of an American Walmart or Meijer’s hypermarket\n\n‘where the ketchup bottles are next to the athlete’s foot powder and the pantyhose,\n\nand the beef steaks are set across from a stack of polyester sweaters’ (9).\n\nAppelbaum’s everyday paranoia about supermarkets’ power to simulate\n\nlove seems wholly justified. What connects these mercantile ventures globally\n\nis how they lure customers by appealing to their supposedly individual tastes,\n\nwhile at the same time enforcing predefined and artificial categories of\n\npersonal identity. By providing its customers with tailor-made special offers\n\nReviews\n\n165\n\nand other forms of targeted advertising, supermarkets use complex algorithms\n\nto calculate who we are based only on what we buy, even when the choices we\n\nmake as customers are at their most erratic.\n\nThis is a racy, provocative and largely male-centred story, at times a tad\n\nbitter, which embodies its publisher Zero Books’ commitment to ‘another\n\nkind of discourse – intellectual without being academic, popular without being\n\npopulist’ (245). The occasional editorial roughness gives the text authenticity\n\nand immediacy, and although there are a few too many typos, the pace of the\n\ntext makes up for the odd copy-editing slip.\n\nAppelbaum ties the two narrative strands of cultural analysis and cathartic\n\nmemoir together with physical precision. At one point, he even ends up with\n\na shopping bag round his head in a failed suicide attempt. Tacitly explored\n\nthroughout is the impact on mental health in general of a neoliberal system\n\nliving off consumerism, individualism, isolation and humiliation.\n\nBut there is hope. What Appelbaum really mourns in the supermarketisation\n\nof the West and beyond is heart and connectedness: interhuman contact as\n\nwell as contact between us and the raw materials of existence. He finds such\n\nhumanity and warmth in France: in the delicate sensitivity of a provincial\n\nrestaurateur who has gently boiled and seasoned the bouillabaisse he serves to\n\nhis customers, and who cares with his heart and soul about its delectation. As\n\nan upbeat mock-Joycean conclusion to this often rather gloomy cross section\n\nof contemporary everyday life comes a handful of semi-orgasmic yeses in the\n\nprotagonist’s sleep (244); though it remains unsaid whether these are spoken\n\nin good faith or in bad.\n\nKristin Ewins\n\nÖrebro University ~ Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 13 (2015)"", ""Walter Benjamin writes of the “idea of what the commodity whispers to a poor wretch who passes a shop window containing beautiful and expensive things. These objects are not interested in this person; they do not empathize with him.” This is precisely the point at which Robert Appelbaum begins his incisive and wide-ranging analysis – except that Appelbaum extends the scope of his work to include not only the commodity, but also those persons and corporate entities that sell, distribute, advertise, and otherwise market those commodities.\n\nFrances Corner has opined that \""It was at the end of the nineteenth century when Marx dubbed religion 'the opium of the people'. In our increasingly secular world, I would now replace 'religion' with 'shopping'.\"" All of “Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption” can be seen as an object lesson demonstrating the validity of this statement.\n\nCoincidentally, right before reading Appelbaum’s book, I had gotten through memoirs by Joseph Brodsky, Geoff Dyer, and Sonali Deraniyagala, plus another two by Edmund White. Appelbaum’s prose is more evocative than all of the aforementioned: he presents complex ideas more lucidly, his writing flows better, and he tells better stories. For example, don’t miss the college road-trip episode that reads like a zany Hollywood comedy take on Jack Kerouac; or, likewise, the quite definitive account of what it’s like to be kept up all night by an alcoholic who is determined to drag you along into their current party-cum-binge and all the hoops they make you jump through along the way. And Appelbaum's descriptions of the San Francisco Bay Area are as trenchant as any I’ve read anywhere.\n\nIt takes a special writing talent to turn philosophy into fun, and commodity fetishism into comic material: Prof. Appelbaum has succeeded admirably. ~ Glenn Peterson, Amazon.com"", ""This book sticks in your head well after you put it it down. The author is a great story teller. His personal journey is both funny and profoundly sad. This was a great read for anyone anyone who enjoys a good book. ~ Dale Ridge, Amazon.com"", ""By Chrispher Schaberg, Loyola Unversity, Excerpts:\n\nOstensibly a nonfiction account of growing up and living in various corners of consumer culture in the twentieth century and beyond, Appelbaum’s book works its way into all sorts of unexpected zones of thought and life. As the book’s story unfolds, the author questions the very possibilities and limits of memoir and academic study in modern society. To say this book is hard to pin down genre-wise doesn’t quite get it right, because the book sticks together so well that one has the distinct sensation of experiencing an altogether new form. ..............................................................................................................................................................................\n\nWorking the Aisles is profoundly sad and intensely harrowing at times—yet it also manages to elicit bursts of laughter, even a joyful sense of camaraderie (at least it did from this reader). It is a book that so deftly manages its narrative movements, intellectual struggles, and emotional energies, all while paragraphs unfurl and pages turn, that it actually warrants its definition of being a “book.” This may sound obvious or odd, but in fact I think it is another way that this book rubs critically against its topic of consumption. .....................................................................................................................................................................\n\nAppelbaum has written a book that reminds us what a book is, what it can be. This is especially important for the “us” who are academics, whose writing can all too often seem destined only to the miserably predictable forms of monograph or edited collection. And this goes as well for creative writers, who must produce marketable forms at regular intervals (or else). But a book need not be another commodity in the chain of consumption—whether it happens for the bored traveler in the airport bookstore, in the academic’s abject file for tenure and promotion, or for the superstar novelist who delivers the same reading bookstore after bookstore before profitable book signings. A book might be something to be digested, maybe even something difficult to digest. Working the Aisles reminds us of this, of the pleasures and sorrows of life, and of reading—and how these things can be rendered in writing, written in a book. ~ Christopher Schaberg, New Orleans Review"", ""By Peter C. Herman - Published on Amazon.com. June 9, 2014.\n\nThis is a magnificent book that beautifully combines an unsparing analysis of capitalism and an equally unsparing memoir of Appelbaum's struggle to find a place in this world. This is not a book for the faint of heart, or for readers who expect easy solutions. But it will remain in your memory. With all due respect to Appelbaum's critique of the culture of consumption, I urge the reader to buy this book. It's amazing.\n\n~ Peter C. Herman, San Diego State University, Amazon.com"", ""Robert Appelbaum's new book is a deep and passionate meditation on the meaning of consumption in contemporary society. Its engagement with the concept, while primarily auto-biographical, offers a number of theoretical pointers and extended critical openings that turn this book into an example of what good, experientially relevant, cultural studies might read like today. There is a lot here to remind us that capitalism is as much about systemic expropriation and value accumulation as about `immaterial' struggle on the terrain of affects and desires. Appelbaum's incantatory and recurrent motto - `they do not love you' - comes to life in a series of vignettes, ranging from the warmly frivolous to the painfully moving, in which the alien seductions of the commodified universe of the supermarket combine and alternate with the enslaving pressures of precarious work. Whether recreating scenes of youthful angst or adult pleasure, of despair or survival, his claim is coherent and indisputable: either way, whether it is your spurious satisfaction or your capacity to sell and provide satisfaction for others that is on offer, they do not love you because love is what exceeds the limits of the marketable. Appelbaum makes a very Spinozian and revolutionary point in reclaiming desire - and love - from the claws of the system and in reminding us of what is really at stake in this universe of 24/7 capitalism. ~ Roberto del Valle Alcala, Amazon.co.uk"", ""This exploration of our desires, commercial and otherwise, and how we are manipulated by them and how we manipulate, reaches far beyond the shopping mall critique: Mr Appelbaum ranges from the highly intellectual social psychology and literary deconstruction to a highly personal narrative, with dramatic scenes of arrest and odd love encounters and vivid details from the United States, England, and France. Covering roughly 50 years, from 1960 till a few years ago, Working the Aisles paints a telling picture of the astounding economic and social changes of the half century. This is a very entertaining and at the same time melancholy and thoughtful novel-like trip into our ever-growing appetites. It should satisfy reading appetites of nearly everybody: rigorous scholars and those looking for a good and fresh story. Mr Appelbaum will keep you lively company for a couple of nights. You might even want to light a pipe.\n\n~ Josip Novakovich, finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, author of April Fool's Day and Shopping for a Better Country."", ""Robert Appelbaum’s Working the Aisles is a harrowing performance in lived theory. In these pages, Appelbaum reflects on life within our cultural of consumerism, and identifies the ways in which his decisions and desires have been circumscribed by the market itself. Appelbaum turns a clear and brave eye on the events of his own life, and reveals, in surprising and sometimes heartbreaking detail, the humanity that aches to be loved, wanted,valued, both within the system and independent of it. Appelbaum's experiences, even the exorbitant ones, are striking not because they could never have happened to anyone else among us, but because they are happening in some version all the time, to all of us.\n\n~ Kimberly Johnson, Brigham Young University, author of Uncommon Prayer and translator of Virgil's Georgics: A Poem of the Land.""]" "World of Failing Machines, The","[""Grant Hamilton""]",How speculative realism impacts the art of literary criticism.,"The World of Failing Machines offers the first full-length discussion of the relationship between speculative realism and literary criticism. In identifying some of the most significant coordinates of speculative-realist thought, this book asks what the implications might be for the study of literature. It is argued that the first casualty might well be the form of the traditional essay.","The World of Failing Machines offers the first full-length discussion of the relationship between speculative realism and literary criticism. In identifying some of the most significant coordinates of speculative-realist thought, this book asks what the implications might be for the study of literature. It is argued that the first casualty might well be the form of the traditional essay.",3,"[""It is rare that one can claim a truly groundbreaking approach to critical theory but this book has all the ingredients. What you hold in your hands is a lively and accessible discourse on reading and (literary) writing that cuts through the obfuscation to reveal a really new approach. ~ Bill Ashcroft, Professor of English Literature, UNSW"", ""“Unputdownable! This book has enlarged my mind!” ~ Cha: An Asian Literary Journal"", ""“What kind of existence do objects have, separate from our subjective interpretations of them? This is the provocative and controversial question posed by OOO and speculative realism, and in this book Grant Hamilton is the first to apply it to the most powerful and captivating of all objects: the book. What kind of object is a literary text and what existence can it have, independent of our subjective readings? Hamilton’s analysis is as fascinating as this question and the powerful little object that is this book takes on a life of its own, throwing open existing ideas of reader and text and re-interrogating theories of meaning.” ~ Hong Kong Review of Books""]" "Writing on the Wall, The","[""Anselm Jappe"", ""Alastair Hemmens""]",A new approach to the meaning of social emancipation,"The 2008 global financial crisis has led to the re-emergence in public discourse of the idea that capitalism could end. For many, it was proof of the notion that capitalist civilisation has an endemic tendency towards crisis that will ultimately bring about its demise. Must we assume, however, that such an eventuality would inevitably result in the liberation of humanity, as many orthodox Marxists claim? Through a collection of specially revised essays, first published in France between 2007 and 2010, Anselm Jappe draws on the radical new perspective of “the critique of value” as a critical tool with which to understand today’s world and to re-examine the question of human emancipation. The Writing on the Wall offers a powerful new analysis of the decomposition of capitalism and its critics.","The 2008 global financial crisis has led to the re-emergence in public discourse of the idea that capitalism could end. For many, it was proof of the notion that capitalist civilisation has an endemic tendency towards crisis that will ultimately bring about its demise. Must we assume, however, that such an eventuality would inevitably result in the liberation of humanity, as many orthodox Marxists claim? Through a collection of specially revised essays, first published in France between 2007 and 2010, Anselm Jappe draws on the radical new perspective of “the critique of value” as a critical tool with which to understand today’s world and to re-examine the question of human emancipation. The Writing on the Wall offers a powerful new analysis of the decomposition of capitalism and its critics.",3,"[""The Writing on the Wall: On the Decomposition of Capitalism and Its Critics by Anselm Jappe and translated by Alastair Hemmens is a study of capitalism and its future failure. Jappe grew up in Cologne and in the Périgord. He studied in Paris and Rome where he obtained, respectively, a master’s and then a doctorate degree in philosophy. In his writings, he has attempted to revive critical theory through a new interpretation of the work of Karl Marx. His book Guy Debord was an intellectual biography of Guy Debord, the prime mover of the Situationist International.\n\nMarx’s specter did put a fright into Europe in the late 19th century. Industries treated employees better. The work week was limited. The industrial worker now enjoyed something new called leisure time. The specter seemed satisfied and a new era of growing wealth and security that lasted until the out break of WWI. Unions and socialists still kept the pressure on governments and industries, but failed to keep workers from fighting other workers who lived under a different flag. After the war and the Russian revolution, governments and industry struggled to prevent socialists from rising to governmental power. There was a rise in anti-socialism backed by industry and wealth. This was best seen in Germany and Italy. In the US, socialism was controlled by laws, especially the espionage acts that put Eugene Debs in jail. There was also violence against unions.\n\nMarx predicted that Capitalism would fail. It was a beast that consumed everything in front of it and would eventually devour itself. Workers were the first to get eaten and spit out broken. When they fought back the jobs left or they were replaced. Now, it is resources and our planet, in general, that is suffering. Industrialization and consumerism have upset the environment from climate change to pollution, to the giant island of floating plastic in the Pacific Ocean. Wages of workers remain stagnant while the top percentage of white collar workers see increases in earnings. Industrial jobs are moved overseas for the cheap labor and lack of regulation. Countries like China and India benefit only because they were so far behind the Western World. Workers there are paid low and are worked long almost like the industrialized revolution here. Some benefit greatly the vast majority do not.\n\nJappe leads the reader through his thinking with ten, very well documented, essays. One point that particularly stuck in my mind was behavior. We have four taste senses; sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. A child will only ask for sweet and salty. We learn to like the other tastes and develop an appreciation for them with time. Cut out the learning and what we have left is basically McDonald’s — salty food and sugary drinks. Cut out the education, or dumb it down, and we have people whose only qualifications are unskilled labor, the so-called McJobs. What is needed to pass high school today is a lot less than fifty or seventy years ago. An associates degree that would secure a tech job in the past carries much less weight today. Jobs that used to have insurance, vacations, pensions, and holidays don’t anymore.\n\nWe are in an era of “Bread and Circuses.” The system is starting to consume itself and we are told not to worry. We have cable television, cell phones that are used for mindless games rather than talking. Social media that helps pit one side against another. In America, our political system is split into only two sides an “us versus them” scenario. Realistically the parties are not that far apart on the political spectrum. It is not socialism versus fascism. The rich still benefit no matter who is in control. The system encourages people to vote against their own interests with sound bites and catch phrases rather than thoughtful discussion. The idea of capitalism trumps the idea of democracy.\n\nThe fear that capitalism will fall to socialism is not one that is based in reality. Capitalism will destroy itself and it will not be a workers revolt that will rise but rather barbarism. Much like a building crumbling to the ground and new better building will not arise unless there is the organization, skilled labor, and a popular willingness to build a new, better building. That is what is missing and the system, in order to protect itself, the system works to undermine that organization. Society is not going to fall into socialism when capitalism fails. Mankind will enter a Hobbesian state of nature. Jappe explains to the reader that the writing is on the wall and it is up to us to first notice and then react. ~ Evil Cyclist, https://evilcyclist.wordpress.com/2017/08/22/book-review-the-writing-on-the-wall-on-the-decomposition-of-capitalism-and-its-critics/"", ""This passionate collection of essays by Anselm Jappe, a critique of value theorist, is a significant contribution to the critical analysis of contemporary capitalism. Resolutely anti-capitalist, the author reminds us that by demanding submission of all aspects of life to market relationships, the system inexorably leads to the destruction of human communities and the environment. ~ Michael Löwy, Alternative Libertaire"", ""Contact with reality makes a theory stronger and the importance of Anselm Jappe’s book is that it allows us to measure the explicatory power of the ‘critique of value’ when it is applied to a number of different subjects, from political life to contemporary art. The central chapter, where he analyses the subprimes crisis, is the most striking. Here Jappe reminds us of the founding paradox of capitalism as originally formulated by Marx: capitalism realises profits by exploiting human labour, yet every increase in productivity made possible by automation and technology reduces human input into the goods that are produced. ~ Eric Aeschimann, Libération""]" Writing Urban Space,"[""Liam Murray Bell"", ""Gavin Goodwin""]",A collection of essays that explore the relationship between imaginative writing and the built environment.,"From William Blake through to Iain Sinclair, literature has sought to engage with and transform urban space. Architects now seek the input of poets, and storytelling is employed in urban regeneration. Writing Urban Space investigates this relationship between imaginative writing and the built environment.","From William Blake through to Iain Sinclair, literature has sought to engage with and transform urban space. Architects now seek the input of poets, and storytelling is employed in urban regeneration. Writing Urban Space investigates this relationship between imaginative writing and the built environment.",0,[] Youth Group,"[""Lance Aksamit""]","Following the life of a missionary kid as he traverses the bizarre world of Evangelicalism, Youth Group explores how and why the Evangelical church didn’t simply jump into bed with but became Christian Nationalists.","The aughts was a strange era for everyone. America finally filled that hammer-and-sickle-size hole in its heart with turbans and beards. High schoolers went from wearing JNCO denim tents to hermetically sealed Jeggings. And someone declared war on Christmas. Youth Group: Coming of age in the church of Christian nationalism follows the life of a missionary kid as he traverses the bizarre world of anti-masturbation purity groups, CD immolation parties, the culture wars, and an occasional exorcism. Author Lance Aksamit explores how and why the Evangelical church didn’t simply jump into bed with but became Christian Nationalists.","The aughts was a strange era for everyone. America finally filled that hammer-and-sickle-size hole in its heart with turbans and beards. High schoolers went from wearing JNCO denim tents to hermetically sealed Jeggings. And someone declared war on Christmas. Youth Group: Coming of age in the church of Christian nationalism follows the life of a missionary kid as he traverses the bizarre world of anti-masturbation purity groups, CD immolation parties, the culture wars, and an occasional exorcism. Author Lance Aksamit explores how and why the Evangelical church didn’t simply jump into bed with but became Christian Nationalists.",1,"[""Youth Group: Coming of Age in the Church of Christian Nationalism is a book that effortlessly blends hilarious personal experiences with serious examination of both the author's motives and the movement in which he was born. People who weren't born and raised in extremist religious movements often find it difficult to understand how totally serious the leaders and followers are about their beliefs. Memoirs like Lance's are a great way to open their eyes. The fight for pluralism and tolerance begins by understanding what their opponents actually think.\n\n~ Matthew Sheffield, former Mormon and founder of Flux.community""]" Zeitgeist Nostalgia,"[""Alessandro Gandini""]",The society constructed upon work has collapsed. The answer? Nostalgia.,"We live an age of nostalgia, incarnated by populist fantasies of “taking back control” and making nations “great again"". In the long aftermath of the 2007-08 economic crisis, nostalgia has been established as the cultural zeitgeist of Western society. Populist fantasies of nostalgia represent a cry for help against the demise of the societal model of the postwar era, based on stable employment and mass consumption. The promise of an impossible return to the 'good life' of the 20th century, Gandini contends, particularly appeals to the older generations, who are incapable of making sense of the evolution of Western societies after decades of globalization and neoliberal policies. The younger generations, in the meantime, are instead trying to build a new 'good life' based on another form of return, this time to old practices of craft production and consumption.","We live an age of nostalgia, incarnated by populist fantasies of “taking back control” and making nations “great again"". In the long aftermath of the 2007-08 economic crisis, nostalgia has been established as the cultural zeitgeist of Western society. Populist fantasies of nostalgia represent a cry for help against the demise of the societal model of the postwar era, based on stable employment and mass consumption. The promise of an impossible return to the 'good life' of the 20th century, Gandini contends, particularly appeals to the older generations, who are incapable of making sense of the evolution of Western societies after decades of globalization and neoliberal policies. The younger generations, in the meantime, are instead trying to build a new 'good life' based on another form of return, this time to old practices of craft production and consumption.",5,"[""I highly recommend Zeitgeist Nostalgia to those with an interest in culture, history, politics, and economics. Gandini has filled the pages with thoughtful social critique backed by plenty of research and anecdotal examples of what he is discussing. Particularly in light of the radical divide between the values of older and younger generations, this book is helpful in understanding how we’ve gotten to this place as a society.\n\n~ Alanna Kali musingmystical.com, Review"", ""From Trump's backward-looking promise to \""make America great again\"" to the hipster's fondness for a pre-industrial age of craft, nostalgia saturates our world. Gandini's book is a remarkable and insightful guide to this phenomenon, laying out the deep roots of its origins and setting out the contours of its limits. ~ Nick Srnicek, co-author of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work"", ""Nostalgia has become a pivotal driver in politics, work and consumption, but the role it plays is complex. This book is the most insightful and accessible treatment of this important topic that I have read. A key text for understanding contemporary modernity. ~ Giana M. Eckhardt, Professor of Marketing, Royal Holloway University of London"", ""An essential map for anyone seeking to navigate a time that is thoroughly out of joint. Gandini steers us through the rear-view fantasies of contemporary populist politics, the retro-artisanal imaginaries of consumption and work in the Hipster economy, and the spectre of Marx animating techno-utopian dreams of a fully-automated luxury communism. The result is enlightening and unsettling in equal measures. ~ Chris Land, Professor of Work and Organization, Anglia Ruskin University"", ""Agree or disagree with its rangy, punchy takes spanning Brexit, hipsterdom, Trump, postcapitalism and the world of work, Gandini's page-turner is a a pacy and accessible primer to some of the central cultural, political and economic dynamics of our time and the possible futures that lie ahead. ~ Frederick Harry Pitts, Lecturer in Management, University of Bristol and co-editor of Futures of Work""]" Zen City,"[""Eliot Fintushel""]",From the author of Breakfast with the Ones You Love comes Zen City. This thought-experiment novella brilliantly critiques spirituality in America,"The world of ZEN CITY is a world of passionate desires: the desire for power, the desire for order, and the desire for self-transcendence. ZEN CITY is a story about the struggle and violence of people who see themselves as striving for the ultimate. Along the way, ZEN CITY presents a sly critique of the practice and perversions of imported spirituality in twentieth-century America. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY starred review ""...this book succeeds brilliantly, deftly weaving a tragic romance that’s about all of us, and none at all!","The world of ZEN CITY is a world of passionate desires: the desire for power, the desire for order, and the desire for self-transcendence. ZEN CITY is a story about the struggle and violence of people who see themselves as striving for the ultimate. Along the way, ZEN CITY presents a sly critique of the practice and perversions of imported spirituality in twentieth-century America. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY starred review ""...this book succeeds brilliantly, deftly weaving a tragic romance that’s about all of us, and none at all!",12,"[""Zen City is like nothing I've ever read before, an eccentric book indeed. But the brillant author knows Zen philosophy and scifi, and the art of weaving them together to create a unique urban tale. ~ Maha Erwin, GoodReads"", ""Zen City\n\nby\n\nEliot Fintushel\n\n(Zero Books, June 2016, pb, 125 pp.)\n\nReviewed by Dave Truesdale\n\nI have been a fan of Eliot Fintushel's work since his first published story in the late Algis Budry's Tomorrow magazine, the fledgling magazine's 5th issue cover dated October 1993. With a title like \""Herbrand's Conjecture and the White Sox Scandal\"" you knew you were in for something different.\n\nFrom that first story Eliot has sold 41 others through 2012, and from 1993 through 2004 no fewer than 16 to Asimov's with others scattered among such magazines as Amazing, Science Fiction Age, Tomorrow, Crank!, and Strange Horizons (with several being chosen for several Best Of collections). Taking time off to write his only full-fledged novel in 2007, Breakfast with the Ones You Love (Bantam Spectra), his short fiction output has taken a back seat for the past four years. Until now, and his long novella Zen City (packaged as a paperback short novel).\n\nFintushel's fiction is difficult to pigeon-hole into any one sub-genre of science fiction or fantasy, for he mixes and matches elements of both to suit his own view of the world, which often is not quite like anyone else's. Early in his career his fiction was likened to that of the late R. A. Lafferty, in that many of his stories ended up reading like tall tales, so wildly imaginative and with an internal logic of their own they defied categorization, yet delighted readers in such a way that their charm was impossible to resist (whether they fully understood what they'd just read or not). Such a reaction might very well prove to be the case with Zen City.\n\nZen City takes place in a post-collapse society where many live outside the City in old, rusted cars and vans and make do while studying to pass the strict tests allowing them entry into the City, where they believe they will be \""enlightened\"" (the city representing the embodiment of the enlightened state) and will no longer be forced to live their hardscrabble lives in the wasted environs of the outside. While some eventually pass the criteria and are admitted to the City, never to be heard from again, others—including the protagonist, Big Man—attempt to sneak in, and this is where most of the story action takes place. All the strange goings-on are based on two ideas Fintushel has used before in short stories—hypostating and hypodyning. Hypostat comes from the actual word hypostatize, which means to take some abstract idea to be an actual physical thing. In the world of Zen City, thoughts, ideas, or feelings are transformed into physical objects by means of a hypostatizing ray (or something, it doesn't matter.) Hypodyne, on the other hand, is an invented word and the opposite of hypostat. (Static vs. dynamic.) Thus, you can hypodyne any physical being to make it into something abstract, non-substantial.\n\nSuccessful applicants to the City are transferred into it by a combination of these two processes: first they lose their physical bodies through hypodyning, turning, as some of the characters say, \""into jazz,\"" and then that \""jazz\"" is hypostatted into the City, becoming part of the general condition of the City, without any personal self left. The \""whaddayagets,\"" who live down in the caves, are the rejected experiments that led up to the city-making process of hypodying and hypostatting—they are wild, crazy combinations of various feelings and ideas made together into weird fleshly creatures. One of them, for example, is a combination of weltshmerz, nooky, and genital crabs.\n\nEveryone wants to get into the City because of the promise it holds, but many are rejected and must try over and over.\n\nBig Man's attempt to sneak into the City involves fragments of insider knowledge pieced together from hearsay; some reliable, some not—and possibly deadly. The obstacles he faces—both external and physical as well as emotional and mental—lead him on a journey which will change not only his life but those of others as well (including outsiders as well as those already in the City) as the philosophy of the Far East made real via advanced technology meets the materialistic world view of the West. Can they co-exist? Can the idealistic promises of both worldviews deliver? Are both viable in their own way? Are both hiding an ultimate lie? Zen City offers but one possible scenario and springs from the fertile imagination of its author, born in the West but spending many years in the East as a Zen student, and now through his fiction attempting to possibly reconcile these two wildly opposing world views.\n\nThe best advice I can offer any reader unfamiliar with Eliot Fintushel's work is to give your imagination a thorough dusting off, and if your \""suspension of disbelief\"" is a quart low, top it off before reading Zen City. And try to keep up.\n\n♣ ♣ ♣\n\nDave Truesdale has edited Tangent and now Tangent Online since 1993. It has been nominated for the Hugo Award six times, and the World Fantasy Award once. A former editor of the Bulletin of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, he also served as a World Fantasy Award judge in 1998, and for several years wrote an original online column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Now retired, he keeps close company with his SF/F library, the coffeepot, and old movie channels on TV. He lives in Kansas City, MO. ~ Tangent Magazine: Dave Truesdale, http://www.tangentonline.com/print--other-reviewsmenu-263/novellas-chapbooks-misc-reviewsmenu-338/3192-zen-city-by-eliot-fintushel"", ""Fintushel, Eliot. Breakfast with the Ones You Love. Mar. 2007. 288p. Bantam, paper, $12 (9780553384055).\n\nFintushel’s first novel has it all: a girl who can kill with her mind, an opinionated cat, strange little old ladies who believe they’re daughters of the devil, the Mob, and a spaceship stashed in the abandoned part of a Sears & Roebuck building. Lea Tillim, aka Cadaver Dimples, killed her face so that people wouldn’t bother her. She kills with her mind, which her cat, Tule, disapproves of (Lea thinks her targets are probably better off that way). When she rescues the Yid from a couple of toughs with her power, the two become friends, and he tells her about the room he is making into a spaceship. When it’s complete, the Mesiach, a ship that has been waiting for its moment to come, will join it to take 13 people who’ll be called when the time is right to the promised land. Lea wants to go, too. Bad attitude and all, Lea’s an interesting narrator, whose changes as the story gets more and more bizarre keep the reader guessing. ––Regina Schroeder\n\n2/5/07 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY review\n\n~"", ""Breakfast with the Ones You Love\n\nEliot Fintushel. Bantam Spectra, $12 paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-553-38405-5\n\nThe standup comedy of Fintushel's stage work echoes through his debut novel, a highly original, seriously skewed take on kabbalistic lore, like a shofar on Yom Kippur. Lea Tillim, a 16-year-old runaway, has a psychic \""talent\"" that allows her to kill anyone who gets in her way. She begins to blossom after she rescues Jack \""the Yid\"" Konar, a smalltime drug dealer who also happens to be \""the Chosen of the Chosen of the Chosen.\"" The Yid has constructed a mystical spaceship—complete with a Fleshpot and the Holy of Holies—to transport the select few to the true Ish-ra-el. As Lea aids Jack on his quest, she gets stoned, receives epiphanies, is chased by the mob, is befriended by an adorably whiny minyan, helps foil the Evil One and his marquetry ladies and teams with an unlikely multitude from various religious persuasions. Though Lea's voice wanders from infatuated teen to world-weary kvetch, this uneven coming-of-age story is a virtual cornucopia of strange delights. (Mar.)\n\nhttp://www.denverpost.com/reviews/ci_5514537 ~"", ""Author and performance artist Fintushel blends Asian philosophy with science fiction in a mind-melting exploration of love, loss, and cultural appropriation. Like every other “hick” on the outside of the City, Big Man dreams of gaining access to it: a place of pure Buddha-nature, where every inhabitant has abandoned desire and reached a state of absolute oneness. Unable to enter by official channels, Big Man enlists the help of his would-be lover, Angela, to sneak in through a back way. In the process, he attracts the attention of the supposed bodhisattva No Mind and the less-than-holy Buddhist teacher Bobo Shin, who pursue him into the City for their own ends. Each character is fascinatingly developed in a somewhat Dadaist fashion, all while moving the plot along. Fintushel’s goal is never to mock or deride Buddhism itself, but rather to expose the ways in which the Eightfold Path is corrupted by human nature; in that regard, this book succeeds brilliantly, deftly weaving a tragic romance that’s about all of us, and none at all. (Featured review (June) online and in print) ~ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY"", ""You seem to be quite a polymath—and a mime too! ~ Oliver Sacks, letter in response to my writing"", ""“I’m sure that a certain percentage of my readership, the less sophisticated readers, are going to find it completely incomprehensible, and be infuriated as a result. But hey, as we used to say in the Army, fuck them if they can’t take a joke.” ~ Gardner Dozois, perennial Hugo Award winner, former editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine"", ""“It reads like a road map to one of my brains.” – Art Spiegelman (Maus) ~ Art Spiegelman, post card to me from Art, 1993"", ""BREAKFAST WITH THE ONES YOU LOVE will enlarge your consciousness, tickle your soul, stop your heart and make you laugh out loud. Although you board this interdimensional roller coaster of a book just around the block, before the ride is over you'll get a glimpse of the Promised Land -- guaranteed! By conjuring up a gaggle of characters that give new meaning to the adjective 'quirky' and typing some of the most amazing sentences you'll ever read, Eliot Fintushel has established himself as the Master of High Strangeness. ~ James Patrick Kelly, author of Burn"", ""Eliot Fintushel and his nifty stories have been an ongoing joy for me for years. ~ Harlan Ellison"", ""If the world ended tomorrow and your soul was ready and your loins were sated, next you’d need a good yarn and a hard laugh. That’s Eliot Fintushel’s brilliant Breakfast with the Ones You Love, a deft, hilarious, and lovable apocalyptic tale that mashes the hardboiled, the nightmarish and the absurdly mundane like some new pharmaceutical with side effects that are equal parts joy, terror and wisdom. Not a bad way to go. ~ Patrick O'Leary, author of The Gift and The Impossible Bird"", ""Eliot Fintushel's BREAKFAST WITH THE ONES YOU LOVE is a fantasy like no other. Certified meshugge Fintushel presents for our edification a Jewish comic knockabout metaphysical thriller, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. You should be so lucky as to own this book. ~ John Kessel, author of Corrupting Dr. Nice""]" Zinnophobia,"[""David Detmer""]",A detailed defense of the work of radical historian Howard Zinn against his many critics.,"Zinnophobia offers an extended defense of the work of radical historian Howard Zinn, author of the bestselling A People's History of the United States, against his many critics. It includes a discussion of the attempt to ban Zinn's book from Indiana classrooms; a brief summary of Zinn's life and work; an analysis of Zinn's theorizing about bias and objectivity in history; and a detailed response to twenty-five of Zinn's most hostile critics, many of whom are (or were) eminent historians. 'A major contribution to bringing Zinn’s great contributions to even broader public attention, and exposing features of intellectual and political culture that are of no little interest.' Noam Chomsky","Zinnophobia offers an extended defense of the work of radical historian Howard Zinn, author of the bestselling A People's History of the United States, against his many critics. It includes a discussion of the attempt to ban Zinn's book from Indiana classrooms; a brief summary of Zinn's life and work; an analysis of Zinn's theorizing about bias and objectivity in history; and a detailed response to twenty-five of Zinn's most hostile critics, many of whom are (or were) eminent historians. 'A major contribution to bringing Zinn’s great contributions to even broader public attention, and exposing features of intellectual and political culture that are of no little interest.' Noam Chomsky",5,"[""The Battle Over History and Howard Zinn\n\nby KIM SCIPES\n\nIt is rare to get an intelligent, well-sourced and coherent discussion of issues today such as the role of history in education, politics and scholarship, but David Detmer of Purdue University Northwest has provided such with his new book, Zinnophobia: The Battle over History in Education, Politics and Scholarship. Detmer has very carefully dismembered much of the right wing’s “intellectual” assault on critical scholarship.\n\nDr. Detmer, Professor of Philosophy, has used the attack on the historical work of the late Howard Zinn as his entrée to the discussion. And Detmer starts close to home, discussing then-Indiana governor and current President of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels’, efforts to ensure that Zinn’s work not be allowed in any Indiana classroom. In February 2010, while governor, Daniels sent e-mails to several subordinates, “to make sure that a book he did not like, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, would not be ‘in use anywhere in Indiana’” (p. 17). Detmer used e-mails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by the Associated Press (AP) to examine Daniels’ deplorable behavior.\n\nDaniels’ problem with Zinn? The heart of it, from a Daniels’ e-mail, “It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page” (18).\n\nOnce the e-mails were published by the AP, Daniels and members of his administration tried to mitigate the ensuing controversy by trying obfuscation. To divert the attention on his efforts, Daniels referred to “Respected scholars and communicators of all ideologies agree that the work of Howard Zinn was irredeemably slanted, and unsuited for teaching to school children” (19).\n\nDetmer has none of it: he carefully discusses the charges and countercharges and, in this book, also examines the work of his critics, both those Daniels relies on as well as others, to examine the quality of right-wing commentary on Zinn’s thinking and his research.\n\nHe starts with Daniels: “Notice, first, that in the initial emails, Daniels offers no evidence, argument or reasoning of any kind in support or his harsh judgment of Zinn’s work. Nor does he engage Zinn’s text—no page numbers or specific claims or analyses are cited.” Obviously, Detmer is not impressed: “we demand much more of our freshman students in the papers they write for our introductory courses” (21).\n\nDaniels will probably not get this, as the current President of Purdue University has no academic qualifications to even be appointed into this position; as Detmer notes, “[Daniels] did not have a Ph.D. or comparable research degree; he had no teaching experience; and he had never published any peer reviewed scholarly research.” However, Daniels had an advantage with those who hired him: “the trustees [of Purdue University] owed their own positions as trustees to him—as governor, he had appointed eight of them to the Board of Trustees, and had re-appointed the other two” (17) But despite whatever he’s learned since becoming Purdue’s president in January 2013, it is difficult to imagine a more damning condemnation from a Faculty member, comparing Daniels’ work unfavorably to that required of freshman students in an introductory course.\n\nYet, as Detmer shows again and again in his consideration of Zinn’s esteemed critics—and he respectfully examines and then dissects the work of 25 of them—most of them don’t meet the standards required of Freshman students either: so Daniels is not alone, as the people upon whom Daniels relies on in his vain effort to discredit Zinn also do an incompetent job when discussing Zinn and his work.\n\nOne can have fun reading Detmer’s intellectual devastation of Zinn’s critics—I especially appreciated his dismembering of David Horowitz’ supposed “scholarship” (pp. 271-308)—but, for me the meat of the book is in the second chapter, “Bias and Objectively in History,” where Detmer discusses Zinn’s personal and intellectual history, and his approaches to history. This is an area where Zinn has been criticized. Detmer explains:\n\nGenerally, the idea of ‘objectivity’ has to do with carrying out activities such as thinking and writing (activities that are subjective in the sense that they are done by subjects—that is, by humans, who have feelings, attributes, desires and biases) in a manner that is maximally faithful to the external objects with which those activities deal. Objectivity in this sense, is most likely to be achieved when one’s conclusions are based on precise measurements, careful observations, and rigorously logical appraisals of relevant evidence—in short, on a maximally attentive and responsive engagement with the object being investigated (115-116).\n\nWhile beginning here, Detmer continues, “But the tasks of the historian are very different from those of the tennis line judge, and Zinn argues that objectivity-as-neutrality is neither possible nor desirable for historians.” He elucidates, “First, historians, unlike tennis line judges, must make decisions about what to include, what to exclude, and what to emphasize” (117). These choices, accordingly, are based on each historian’s personal values about what is interesting or not, what is important or illuminating.\n\nSecondly, society at any time is moving in some direction, and one can accept, acquiesce to or reject that direction. Refusing to take sides, according to Detmer’s take on Zinn, is that “the decision to refrain from taking sides does not constitute genuine neutrality, but rather acquiescence to the status quo” (118).\n\nAfter discussing this, Detmer returns to Daniels: “We are now in a position to appreciate the jaw-dropping depths of Mitch Daniels’ intellectual dishonesty, in asserting, without any kind of explanation or qualification, that Zinn simply rejected objectivity disdainfully…” (126). As Detmer explains, Zinn believed that “all of these tools of good scholarship,” which he had previously identified as accuracy, careful observations, precision or intellectual rigor and related efforts, “should be brought to bear on pressing social problems, even if scholarly engagement with such problems might require scholars to take sides on controversial issues” (127). So, contrary to Daniels’ ideological assertion, Zinn’s work was thoughtful, very seriously researched, and based on serious consideration of evidence that both supported and challenged his own thinking: Howard Zinn and his work deserve respectful appreciation.\n\nAt first, however, I was critical of Detmer’s approach to Zinn’s many critics in this book, feeling like it was “overkill”; I would have suggested that he pick out three or four of the most cogent critiques and rigorously examine them—there’s no reason to have examined 25 different critics. Considering the time and energy it took Detmer to do such rigorous examination of the different critics, I can imagine him having much better things to do with his time. Yet, in reviewing his book, I came to realize that Detmer’s target was more than just Mitch Daniels, or even these critics: Detmer’s project was to challenge what passes for all-too-many people the cogency of current right-wing thinking in this country, whether in or out of the academy. To say Detmer “struck gold” would be an understatement, as this book is a very closely researched and well-thought out examination of its subject in various manifestations.\n\nIn short, I think it’s fair to say that David Detmer has not only successfully defended Howard Zinn and his work, but assertively embraced Zinn’s approach to historical work. He certainly has embraced critical thinking and sober reflection over the ideological blatherings of Zinn’s critics and their ilk. This approach is relevant to much more than a former governor of the State of Indiana, but arguably, should be extended to the current inhabitant of the Oval Office. ~ Kim Scipes, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/22/the-battle-over-history-and-howard-zinn/"", ""David Detmer, a philosopher, has done what no historian to date has accomplished—he has undertaken a systematic examination of Zinn’’s critics’’ arguments against him and basically has dismantled them. In the process he offers a clinic on how to evaluate the validity of other people’’s arguments...…. Detmer has done justice to the complexity of Howard Zinn’’s work and has evaluated Zinn’’s critics fairly, if unsparingly...…. The book is written in clear and compelling prose—it would be accessible to undergraduate students and could be used in History methods classes, in courses on critical thinking, and I would not be averse to assigning it in a graduate seminar.\n\nSusan Curtis, Professor of History and American Studies, Purdue University\n\n~ Susan Curtis, blurb in the book, but not yet on the website"", ""I've been waiting for this book! Howard Zinn's remarkably passionate and erudite work has attracted a huge readership, even while it has also been the target of shrill attacks by both politicians and academics, and not only rightwing academics. Now finally David Detmer has stepped up to the plate on Zinn's behalf with a calm and careful dissection of the logic and evidence, and Zinn emerges as he should, unscathed and indeed triumphant! ~ Frances Fox Piven"", ""In his life and work, Howard Zinn made an immeasurable contribution to a more educated, enlightened, and civilized generation of Americans, more aware of the authentic history of their country and inspired by his example of courage and integrity. While justly honored and admired for his accomplishments, these also aroused bitter resentment and anger in certain circles, and he was subjected to venomous, contemptible attacks. The critiques and vituperation are subjected to rigorous and informed exposure and refutation in this spirited and comprehensive defense of one of the most admirable figures of the modern period. A major contribution to bringing Zinn’s great contributions to even broader public attention, and exposing features of intellectual and political culture that are of no little interest. ~ Noam Chomsky"", ""Detmer offers a fascinating look at the anti-liberal prejudices of Mitch Daniels, a powerful politician turned university president. He exposes the uneducated foundation of Daniels’ hatred for Howard Zinn, and…reveals insights about broader attacks on intellectual freedom. But this is also a hopeful story, because the revelation of Daniels’ attempted censorship sparked a new wave of interest in Zinn’s work and the opportunity to examine his writings and his critics. ~ John K. Wilson, author President Trump Unveiled: Exposing the Bigoted Billionaire""]" — —,"[""Wade Parrish""]",A City where the light has never been.,"- - is a blank city. There’s a sick glow to the clouds, and it always seems to be raining here even when it isn’t. Only sad and wounded people live here anymore. They are homeless in their apartments. They are unemployed at their jobs. They are widows in their marriage beds and celibates in amours and loners with many friends because - - is a sad city, full of sad and lonely people. I can’t say very much about myself now, only that we have known each other before and for a very short, very slight while. We had a class together and I grew up down the block and our mothers say hello still from time to time in the aisles of a grocery store somewhere north of Tampa. Somewhere deep in Maryland. Somewhere down in Solano County. Somewhere out where the winds never seem to change and the days tick by like cars on a beltway. Things have not worked out for me in life as they may have for you. I have seen your visions of this world flickering on the outsides of my eyelids for a very long time and now and for many other reasons, I cannot stand to see them anymore.","- - is a blank city. There’s a sick glow to the clouds, and it always seems to be raining here even when it isn’t. Only sad and wounded people live here anymore. They are homeless in their apartments. They are unemployed at their jobs. They are widows in their marriage beds and celibates in amours and loners with many friends because - - is a sad city, full of sad and lonely people. I can’t say very much about myself now, only that we have known each other before and for a very short, very slight while. We had a class together and I grew up down the block and our mothers say hello still from time to time in the aisles of a grocery store somewhere north of Tampa. Somewhere deep in Maryland. Somewhere down in Solano County. Somewhere out where the winds never seem to change and the days tick by like cars on a beltway. Things have not worked out for me in life as they may have for you. I have seen your visions of this world flickering on the outsides of my eyelids for a very long time and now and for many other reasons, I cannot stand to see them anymore.",1,"[""Sprinkled with endless amounts of surrealism and peculiarly curious observations, at times ― ―: A Novel comes across as it we are ourselves wafting gently through a dreamlike state, guiding by the aforementioned voice of the narrator; who, at all times, tells the story their way (one assumes, no matter what they see or come across).\n\nWritten during the pandemic, the book has a feeling, and ebb and flow to it, a claustrophobic element to it, if you will, that we have all, one way or another, experienced ourselves over the past two years or so. ~ Anne Carlini, Exclusive Magazine""]"