Search results for ""Author Professor Steve Redhead""

Is it possible that various disciplines, theorists and cultural commentators have been hurtling down a blind alley in the last thirty years, searching for the holy grail of the postmodern? What if, after all, we have never have been postmodern? Or what if we are, instead, now living 'after postmodernity'? As global culture rushes off the cliff of catastrophe with its neo-liberal, neo-conservative ideologies mangled in the process, this book provides theory at the speed of light designed to capture the fast flickering images of the real, gone before you can blink in today's accelerated culture. Key Features * Sets out a variety of reasons why we should move away from seeing the recent era as 'postmodern' and our culture as 'postmodernist' through a series of analyses of contemporary culture. * Highlights key theorists, such as Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard, who, despite the pitfalls of their work, chart a new route map out of the trajectories of the catastrophic. * Envisages a new object of knowledge for the contemporary world - mobile accelerated nonpostmodern culture (MANC). *Provides some of the building blocks and conceptual resources for a 'claustropolitan sociology' of the global future in order to better understand the catastrophic present, where claustropolis is rapidly replacing cosmopolis.

Read more less

Jean Baudrillard was perhaps the most controversial of all social and cultural theorists. He has been variously vilified as a 'postmodernist', an 'overrated French theorist' and one of the 'intellectual imposters'. In his seventies he survived global fame and a name check in The Matrix; he also contracted cancer. His comments on 9/11, Abu Ghraib and Europe's suburban riots have been eagerly sought and digested. However, his translated publications since his first book in 1968 have left a trail of confusion and misinterpretation. Jean Baudrillard is a notorious figure but few have read many examples of his entire oeuvre. There is now though a chance to read Baudrillard's texts in an overall historical, social and political context and for a cool re-assessment to be made of his life and work, after his death. This book is a central part of that project. It concentrates on what Baudrillard has written over five decades and the order in which he wrote it. The Reader comprises extracts of Baudrillard's writings from the sixties to the noughties, with an editorial introduction and a concluding reading guide. Key Features *Arranged chronologically in order of first publication in French, the Reader illustrates the development and interconnectedness of Baudrillard's work since the 1960s. *Each section has an extract of one of Jean Baudrillard's writings translated into English, prefaced by a short bibliographical introduction setting the scene. *The Reader will be of interest to students and staff in a range of university courses across the globe and to those general readers interested in public intellectuals, media events and contemporary theory.

Read more less

A critic of the art of technology, Paul Virilio has taught us that much media image is a strategy of war and that accident is becoming indistinguishable from attack. In these times of fierce conflict over which kind of capitalism is to take over the shrinking globe, and indeed which modernities we will live in during the twenty-first century, Paul Virilio is a significant contemporary theorist. But Virilio's work, originally published in French and stretching back to the 1950s, has until now been very difficult to access in full in English translation, available as it is in expensive little books or obscure catalogues and journals. The Paul Virilio Reader collects together for the first time readable extracts of Virilio's work from the entire range of his career. It is prefaced by an editorial introduction showing that Virilio has produced important - if controversial - 'theory at the speed of light' that can uncannily illuminate the impact of new information and communications technologies in a world which collapses time and distance as never before.Features * Extracts have been carefully selected to reflect the whole of Virilio's diverse career * A chronological ordering illustrates the development, and interconnectedness, of Virilio's work * Each extract is prefaced by a bibliographical and contextual commentary, and the book is completed by an innovative guide to reading Virilio.

Read more less