New Books in Critical Theory

The British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb is now largely forgotten. That’s too bad for a number of reasons. He was a brilliant thinker who wrote some of the most insightful analyses of the development and workings of capitalism around. You can still read his work and profit. He was the intellectual godfather of several notable British Marxist historians of the “New Left” of the 1960s and 1970s: Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, among others. And, perhaps most importantly, his life gives us a window into a forgotten time, one in which a economists took communism seriously and fellows at Cambridge could earnestly believe in a bright communist future. This, I think, is a time we must not forget. Thanks to Timothy Shenk‘s well-researched, readable biography Maurice Dobb: Political Economist (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), we won’t have to. Shenk tells Dobb’s tale in all its tortured complexity. A member of the establishment and an anti-establishmentarian. A dyed-in-the-wool Marxist and a deadly serious empirically-oriented economist. A supporter of the Soviet Union and a critic of Soviet power. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

22 Feb 20141h 3min

Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (Ashgate, 2013), a new book by Constance DeVereaux (Colorado State University) and Martin Griffin (University of Tennessee) sets out to challenge assumptions about policy making and culture in the contemporary world. The book has, at its centre, an understanding of narrative as both a practice that is central to what it means to be human and an analytical tool for understanding policy and culture. The book uses a wide range of case studies to illustrate the importance of this dual understanding of narrative to account for debates and differences between understandings of global culture as potentially threatening, in the form of globalization, or liberating, in the form of transnationalism. The case studies range from film and media studies, historical examples of Berlin and the USA’s National Endowment for the Arts, as well as questions over cultural heritage, through to readings of fictional case studies using the same narrative methods. The book will be essential reading for all scholars working in cultural policy and cultural studies, but also represents a challenge to the mainstream approaches of political science thinking about public policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

14 Feb 201453min

The intersection of empirical research and critical theory is the basis for Anastasia Karandinou‘s new book No Matter: Theories and Practices of the Ephemeral in Architecture (Ashgate, 2013). The book takes as its starting point the growth of interest in ephemeral aspects of architecture, for example sound or time, which has arisen during the era of social and digital media. The two developments are interconnected across the book’s attempt to disrupt the traditional binary hierarchies dominant in architectural theory. Drawing on Derrida, Benjamin and Deluze, alongside a range of architects and architectural theorists, No Matter raises questions about the dominance of the visual over the non-visual; the formal over the material; and the physical over the digital. The range of empirical case studies used to illustrate the instability of the theoretical divisions ranges from audio projects in Edinburgh, Scotland to performative mapping in Shanghai, China. As a result of both its theoretical basis and its use of case study material, No Matter will interest anyone who wants to know more about the intersection of the built environment around us and the digital world that we use to live our lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

30 Jan 201447min

In his new book Making Culture, Changing Society (Routledge, 2013), Professor Tony Bennett aims to change the way we think about culture. The book uses four core ideas about the nature and meaning of culture to present a view that does not see culture as just a set of signs and symbols. Rather culture is a form of knowledge practice, bound up with material conditions and institutions, which is implicated in the production of persons and freedoms. Making Culture, Changing Society justifies this view of culture in two ways. In the first instance the book considers how specific humanities disciplines, associated with anthropology and aesthetics, have been used to distribute ideas of freedom and ideas of the person within liberal government. Bennett uses examples from anthropological studies of colonial societies, along with discussions of the role of aesthetics for theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, to show the function of culture and its interdependence with forms of knowledge. At the same time the book insists on the material aspects of these discussions, using the example of Melbourne’s National Museum of Victoria and Paris’ Musee de l’Homme. The book offers an important intervention into debates on culture and public policy, grounding questions of rights and representations within the historical project of liberal government. Moreover it develops a critique of the assumptions surrounding culture as a potentially positive or beneficial force for social change, raising profound questions for public, politics and policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

13 Nov 20131h 4min

What is noise? In his new book Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Greg Hainge, Reader in French at University of Queensland, Australia, explores this question. The book is written within the tradition of critical theory and is at once playful and punning, as well as suffused with challenging and perceptive analysis. The core position of the book is that we need to move beyond the dichotomous understanding of noise that sees it as either something to be removed or rejected, an unnecessary distraction from a core signal, or something that should be celebrated, but in celebration co-opted into being something that isn’t noise. For Hainge we need a new understanding of noise, an understanding that seeks to celebrate noise through a range of engagements with cultural and theoretical phenomena. Noise is not just about sound, but figures in all forms of communication. The book takes on the accepted readings of work in music, such as John Cage’s 4’33”, literature, such as Sartre’s Nausea, as well as photography and film. These new approaches, mediated by the concern with noise, will be of interest to a range of readers from across the humanities, as well as for specialists in film and music theory and aesthetics. The project of founding on ontology of noise is also a contribution to the growing field of noise studies, which is the kind of interdisciplinary academic area that is emerging within the noisy world of the contemporary academy.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

19 Okt 201341min

Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation (Palgrave, 2013) is written by David Beer, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at York University in the UK. He blogs here and tweets here. The book attempts to describe and analyse the impact of new media on culture and society, using a range of critical theoretical starting points. Its use of theory is especially important to such a fast moving topic. The book aims to have continued and longer term relevance to debates about culture, even as specific technologies come and go, as a result of its theoretical basis David’s book raises a series of challenges for a range of academic areas. Perhaps the most important is the impact of media communications on the sociology of culture. Sociological studies of culture have been slow to consider the impact of new media, as they have tended to focus on debates about the relationship between tastes and class or social status. Popular Culture and New Media argues that the architecture underlying the way many people access culture, from Amazon.com recommendations, through to the metadata tag associated with archiving new media users activity, profoundly shapes peoples relationship to culture. In order to critically engage with modern culture we must understand how cultural objects and artifacts circulate and the modes of that circulation. In addition, David’s book draws our attention to how culture is increasingly becoming a form of data whilst, at the same time, data is becoming culture. Attempts to track what is trending online, what people are interested in, is itself a cultural practice. The emergence of large scale data sources have provided new ways to produce cultural artifacts. Culture is data and data is culture. The book will be of interest to readers from across the social sciences, in particular communications studies, sociology and social theory. However it also speaks directly to what it is like to live and participate in modern culture. It will, therefore, be a good read for anyone interested in the mechanisms that allow contemporary cultural life to function. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

21 Sep 201338min

In Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (NYU Press, 2013), Sarah Banet-Weiser scrutinizes the spread of brand culture into other spheres of social life that the market–at least in our imaginations–had left untouched: politics, religion, creativity, and the self. Banet-Weiser observes that the authenticity concept seems to carry more weight in a culture of selling: We have come to expect, and to some extent accept, that authenticity, like everything else, can be trademarked. Through rich case studies–Dove ad campaigns, Facebook self-performance, street art, green activism, and New Age spirituality among them–Authentic identifies the pervasive (and often troubling) ambivalence of branded living. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

27 Aug 201357min

Brian Michael Goss, professor of communication at St. Louis University in Madrid, has taken one of media’s most studied theories and given it a facelift. In Rebooting the Herman and Chomsky Propaganda Model in the Twenty-First Century (Peter Lang, 2013), Goss revisits the model created by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent. The filters remain, but Goss pushes the model into the modern context of new media models and expanded global exportation. “Far from condemning journalism,” Goss writes, “I hope to see it more closely approximate its mythologies about itself.” “Rebooting” is an important work, relevant not just to scholars, but all consumers of media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

22 Jul 201344min