Bookshop

Welcome to the Critical Studies Bookshop 

You will find books published under the Center for Discursive Inquiry as well as student anthologies from the School of Critical Studies, some of which are free downloadable pdfs.


The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Volume One

The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Volume One

The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Volume One, eds., Arne de Boever and Warren Neidich, Archive Books, 2014. 

How have emancipatory politics, art and architecture, and education been refined by semio-capitalism? What might be the lasting, material ramifications of semio-capitalism on the mind and brain? This book brings together an international array of philosophers, critical theorists, media theorists, art historians, architects, and artists to discuss the state of the mind and the brain under the conditions of cognitive capitalism, in which they have become the new focus of laboring.

Contributors: Jonathan Beller, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Arne De Boever, Jodi Dean, Warren Neidich, Patricia Pisters, Jason Smith, Tiziana Terranova, Bruce Wexler.

The publication collects papers presented at the conference, “The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One,” held in Los Angeles in November 2012. 

Bernard Stiegler: Amateur Philosophy

Bernard Stiegler: Amateur Philosophy

Bernard Stiegler: Amateur Philosophy, ed., Arne De Boever, Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. (Special issue of boundary 2

This issue brings together three lectures on aesthetics delivered by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler in Los Angeles in 2011 with articles by scholars of Stiegler’s work. Aesthetics, understood as the theoretical investigation of sensibility, has been central to Stiegler’s work since the mid-1990s. The lectures featured here explicitly link Stiegler’s interest in sensibility to aesthetic theory proper as well as to art history. In “The Proletarianization of Sensibility,” “Kant, Art, and Time,” and “The Quarrel of the Amateurs,” Stiegler expounds his philosophy of technics and its effects on human sensibility, centering on how the figure of the amateur—who loves what he or she does—must be recovered from beneath the ruins of technical history. The other contributors engage the topics covered in the lectures, including the figure of the amateur, cinema, the digital, and extinction.

Contributors: Stephen Barker, Ed Cohen, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Arne De Boever, Benoît Dillet, Alexander R. Galloway, Mark B. N. Hansen, Jason R. LaRivière, Gerald Moore, Daniel Ross, Bernard Stiegler.

The publication arose from a series of lectures and responses organized by Arne De Boever.

Cold War/Cold World: Knowledge, Representation and the Outside in the Cold War and Contemporary Art

Cold War/Cold World: Knowledge, Representation and the Outside in the Cold War and Contemporary Art
Cold War/Cold World: Knowledge, Representation and the Outside in the Cold War and Contemporary Art, eds., Amanda Beech, Robin Mackay, James Wiltgen, London: Urbanomic Press, 2017.
 
If the term 'Cold World' describes a world of infinite complexity, algorithmic capital, and the technological sublime, in many ways the dread experienced during the Cold War, when clear oppositions were laid out between nation states, is echoed in the hall of mirrors that is contemporary globalization. In this Cold World, whose repercussions in many ways amplify, relay and replay those of the Cold War, our collective consciousness is being overtaken by a flood of difference, uncertainty, and the dread of the incompatibility of an alien yet constructed world. Technological subjectivation, political malaise, cultural dysphoria, and ecological crisis abound against an experiential and experimental horizon that prompts many to pose, and to stage, in myriad forms, a fundamental question: 'What will we make of ourselves?'
  

Contributors: Éric Alliez, Maurizio Lazzarato, Amanda Beech, Robin Mackay, Christine Wertheim, Brian Evenson, Reza Negarestani, Joshua Johnson, Patricia Reed.

Publication arises from: the work of the Cold World/Cold War Research Group.

Contrapuntal Media, Vol. 1

Contrapuntal Media, Vol. 1

Contrapuntal Media (CPM) is a pamphlet series published through the MA Aesthetics and Politics program housed in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. CPM seeks to be an aesthetic medium for provocative, polemical points that incite counterpoints. CPM features research-in-progress that is presented publicly with minimal editorial intervention or attention to the formalities of scholarly publishing.

Contrapuntal Media, Vol. 1
Art and Reason, Spring 2018
Edited by Arne de Boever

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