politics

Lisa Stampnitzky: Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented ‘Terrorism’ (2013)

in Art, eBooks, File Sharing, Games, News

Since 9/11 we have been told that terrorists are pathological evildoers, beyond our comprehension. Before the 1970s, however, hijackings, assassinations, and other acts we now call “terrorism” were considered the work of rational strategic actors. Disciplining Terror examines how political violence became “terrorism,” and how this transformation ultimately led to the current “war on terror.” [...]

Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8390

Clifford Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973-) [English, Czech, Catalan]

In The Interpretation of Cultures, the most original anthropologist of his generation moved far beyond the traditional confines of his discipline to develop an important new concept of culture. This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their field is [...]

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Dolores L Augustine: Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1945-1990 (2007)

In Cold War-era East Germany, the German tradition of science-based technology merged with a socialist system that made technological progress central to its ideology. Technology became an important part of East German socialist identity—crucial to how Communists saw their system and how citizens saw their state. In Red Prometheus, Dolores Augustine examines the relationship between [...]

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Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, The Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (2013)

Hacking Politics is a firsthand account of how a ragtag band of activists and technologists overcame a $90 million lobbying machine to defeat the most serious threat to Internet freedom in memory. The book is a revealing look at how Washington works today – and how citizens successfully fought back. Written by the core Internet [...]

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Wang Hui: The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (2009)

A compelling examination of the future of Chinese modernity by the leading member of China’s “New Left.” Challenging both the bureaucratic one-party regime and the Western neoliberal paradigm, China’s leading critic shatters the myth of progress and reflects upon the inheritance of a revolutionary past. In this original and wide-ranging study, Wang Hui examines the [...]

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Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, Mike McGuire (eds.): We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy From Occupation to Liberation (2012)

We have all been swept up by the momentum of the Occupy movement. We have seen the results of years of organizing in different communities come together in ways that few could have imagined, bolstered by the scores of people who have left the comfort of their daily routine behind and taken to the streets. [...]

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Andrew Hsiao, Audrea Lim (eds.): The Verso Book of Dissent: From Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad (2010)

A sparkling anthology of revolt and resistance to orthodoxy and repression. Throughout the ages and across every continent, people have struggled against those in power and raised their voices in protest—rallying others around them and inspiring uprisings in eras yet to come. Their echoes reverberate from Ancient Greece, China and Egypt, via the dissident poets [...]

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Simone Weil: An Anthology (1986/2005)

Simone Weil was one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century: a philosopher, theologian, critic, sociologist and political activist. This anthology spans the wide range of her thought, and includes an extract from her best-known work The Need for Roots, exploring the ways in which modern society fails the human soul; her thoughts on [...]

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Giovanni Ziccardi: Resistance, Liberation Technology and Human Rights in the Digital Age (2013)

This book explains strategies, techniques, legal issues and the relationships between digital resistance activities, information warfare actions, liberation technology and human rights. It studies the concept of authority in the digital era and focuses in particular on the actions of so-called digital dissidents. Moving from the difference between hacking and computer crimes, the book explains [...]

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Slavs and Tatars: Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz (2013)

Beginning as an investigation into the apparently disparate events that bookend the twentieth and twenty-first century – the collapse of Communism and the Islamic Revolution in Iran – Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz traces unlikely points of convergence in Iran and Poland’s economic, social, political, religious and cultural histories. Drawing on Slavs and Tatars’ [...]

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Jan Cohen-Cruz (ed.): Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology (1998)

Radical Street Performance is the first volume to collect together the fascinating array of writings by activists, directors, performers, critics, scholars and journalists who have documented street theatre around the world. More than thirty essays explore the myriad forms this most public of performances can take: agit-prop, invisible theatre, demonstrations and rallies, direct action, puppetry, [...]

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Yongming Zhou: Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China (2006)

It is widely recognized that internet technology has had a profound effect on political participation in China, but this new use of technology is not unprecedented in Chinese history. This is a pioneering work that systematically describes and analyzes the manner in which the Chinese used telegraphy during the late Qing, and the internet in [...]

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Colin MacCabe: Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (1980)

Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics is an important step in making Godard’s experiments in image and sound beyond the institutions of cinema and television visible. It reads the earlier films through the more recent work, focusing on politics, technology and sexuality. These insistent themes dominate Godard’s investigation of our representation in the image, a representation always [...]

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Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Surveillance Law – NYTimes.com

The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned back a challenge to a federal law that broadened the government’s power to eavesdrop on international phone calls and e-mails. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/us/politics/supreme-court-rejects-challenge-to-fisa-surveillance-law.htmlRelated PostsCatherine Karen Roy: File-based Autobiographies After 1989 (2011) Dana Priest, William M. Arkin: Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (2011) China, Russia buying [...]

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James C. Scott: Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (2012)

James Scott taught us what’s wrong with seeing like a state. Now, in his most accessible and personal book to date, the acclaimed social scientist makes the case for seeing like an anarchist. Inspired by the core anarchist faith in the possibilities of voluntary cooperation without hierarchy, Two Cheers for Anarchism is an engaging, high-spirited, [...]

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Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy journal, No. 2: Materialism, No. 3: Realism (2011-2012)

“This issue arose out of a series of reflections on the contemporary meaning of realism in the representational strategies of the design disciplines. Realism, in this context, departs from the nineteenth century preoccupation with presenting environments and subjects typically excluded from pictorial representation. Today, while the ‘realistic’ is favoured and celebrated in student and professional [...]

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Nato Thompson, Gregory Sholette (eds.): The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (2004)

Art made to attach to buildings or to be given away? Wearable art for street demonstrations or art that sets up a booth at a trade show? This is the art of the interventionists, who trespass into the everyday world to raise our awareness of injustice and other social problems. These artists don’t preach or [...]

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Continent. journal, No. 2.4 (2013)

Continent. maps a topology of unstable confluences and ranges across new thinking, traversing interstices and alternate directions in culture, theory, politics and art. Continent. exists as a platform for thinking through media. text, image, video, sound and new forms of publishing online are presented as reflections on and challenges to contemporary conditions in politics, media [...]

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