Deleuze, Marx and Politics Thoburn, Nicholas
2003, 20030902, 2004-03-09, 2003-09-02, 20030101, Volume:
38
eBook
A critical and provocative exploration of the political, conceptual and cultural points of resonance between Deleuze's minor politics and Marx's critique of capitalist dynamics, engaging with ...Deleuze's missing work, The Grandeur of Marx . This book explores the core categories of communism and capital in conjunction with a wealth of contemporary and historical political concepts and movements - from the lumpenproletariat and anarchism, to Italian autonomia and Antonio Negri, immaterial labour and the refusal of work. This book will serve as an introduction to Deleuze's politics and the contemporary vitality of Marx for students and will challenge scholars in the fields of social and political theory, sociology and cultural studies.
1. Introduction: The Grandeur of Marx 2. Minor Politics: The Styles of Cramped Creation 3. The Lumpenproletariat and the Proletarian Unnamable 4. The Social Factory: Machines-Work-Control 5. The Refusal of Work 6. Conclusion: The Strange Joy of Politics
Nicholas Thoburn teaches in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester.
Deleuze and Politics brings together some of the most important Deleuze scholars in the field today to explore and explain Deleuzes political philosophy.
No,Anti-Bookis not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms "a communism of textual matter," Nicholas Thoburn ...explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a "post-digital" approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books-to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in themanymaterialities of text.
Anti-Bookengages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud's papergris-gris,Valerie Solanas'sSCUM Manifesto,Guy Debord's sandpaper-boundMémoires,the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid ofMutemagazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as "communist object," the magazine as "diagrammatic publishing," political books in the modes of "root" and "rhizome," the "multiple single" of anonymous authorship, and myth as "unidentified narrative object."
An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations,Anti-Bookwill enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists' books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.
This article critically assesses the recent return of “communism” in contemporary political theory. The principal focus is Alain Badiou's formulation of the “Idea of communism” and its “sequences,” ...which are approached here in relation to the body of work collected in Douzinas and Žižek'sThe Idea of Communism. Strongly critical of Badiou, the article argues that communism should be understood as a “real movement” immanent to the mutating limits of capital, and not as a subjective “truth procedure.” In taking the latter route, Badiou not only produces a faulty philosophy of communism but also misdiagnoses its historical record, allowing Lenin and Mao, the spectacle of revolution, to stand as its genuine expressions. In this, Badiou contributes to the contemporary nostalgic image of a “real communism” that in practice was nothing of the sort.
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This article considers today’s ‘post-digital’ political publishing through the material forms of an experimental book, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary. Anonymously published and devoid ...of all editorial text, the book is comprised entirely of some 650 screen-grabbed tweets, tweets posted by black Baltimore youth during the riots that ensued on the police killing of Freddie Gray. It is a crisis-ridden book, bearing the wrenching anti-black terror and rebellion of Baltimore 2015 into the horizon of publishing. Drawing on critical theories of books and digital media, and bringing Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson to bear on issues of publishing, the article appraises seven aspects of this book’s materiality: its epistolary structure and rupture with the book-as-closure; its undoing of the commodity form of books; the ‘poor image’ of its visual scene; its recourse to facial redaction and voiding of narrative progression; and its destabilization of readers’ empathy.
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Examines the concept of anonymous authorship with reference to the "multiple name" Luther Blissett Project (1995-1999) and the related Wu Ming Foundation (2000-) which together have authored five ...novels plus critical works; and takes as an example the mythopoetic engagement of Wu Ming with the styles of Malcolm X as both a historical figure and a contemporary myth. The essay begins with the critique of the authorship function in Foucault and Marx, focusing on the Marxist criticism of the personality cult, as expressed by Amadeo Bordiga, and on Foucault's famous association of the author with texts that function, via copyright, as units of property. It distinguishes between the pseudonymous multiplicity of Luther Blissett and the unidentified myth which is generated by investigating and circulating affects, styles and values over the divide between fiction and reality.
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8.
Concrete and council housing Thoburn, Nicholas
City (London, England),
11/2018, Volume:
22, Issue:
5-6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
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It is commonly appreciated that issues of ‘class’ are significant to Brutalist architecture, yet in the two main trends of today’s Brutalist critical revival, the place and features of class are ...sidelined or obscured. Addressing that problem, this article proposes an original concept of ‘class architecture’ through analysis of the social and aesthetic form of Robin Hood Gardens, the east London council estate designed by ‘New Brutalist’ architects Alison and Peter Smithson and currently undergoing demolition. The concept of class architecture is developed here in two ways. First, it appraises the imagistic aspects of the estate’s route to demolition, as the urban ejection of working-class populations is cloaked and lent motive force by its repackaging as a ‘blitz’ on the putative ‘concrete monstrosities’ of post-war estates. Second, class architecture reconstructs how class – a fraught and unstable condition, ever pulled out of shape – is modulated in Robin Hood Gardens’ built form. Through these two aspects of class architecture, the article seeks to reclaim the aesthetics of Brutalism from discourses of abjection and the burgeoning ‘middle-class Brutalism’ that would cleanse concrete modernism of its working-class dimensions. Based on three years’ research at Robin Hood Gardens, the article enlists the Smithsons’ critically neglected methodology of the ‘as found’ and draws on interviews with residents, site observation, photography, and the Smithsons’ architectural writing.
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The People Are Missing Thoburn, Nicholas
International journal of politics, culture, and society,
12/2016, Volume:
29, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article investigates the place of social relations in Deleuze and Guattari’s figure of ‘cramped space’, a figure integral to their ‘minor politics’. Against social and political theories that ...seek the source of political practice in a collective identity, the theory of cramped space contends that politics arises among those who lack and refuse coherent identity, in their encounter with the impasses, limits, or impossibilities of individual and collective subjectivity. Cramped space, as Deleuze puts it, is a condition where ‘the people are missing’. This is not, however, a condition of asocial isolation, but one full of social relations; the loss of identity is a condition comprised only of social relations. The ramifications of this thesis are here explored through Marx’s critique of citizenship, the socio-historical conjuncture of cramped space in relation to the ‘communization’ problematic, and the Palestinian mediator of sumud.
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