The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973): Volume I, Ideology and Politics

The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. With a Marxist orientation inspired by the thinking of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, the "red years" of Cahiers du cinéma produced a theoretical outpouring that was formative for the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s, and is still of vital relevance for the contemporary audiovisual landscape. It was also the seminal experience for a generation of critics who have dedicated the following half-century to the task of critically responding to the cinema. The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) gives a historical overview of this period in the journal's history, combining biographical accounts of the critics who were involved with Cahiers in the post-1968 and theoretical explorations of the text they wrote.

https://library.oapen.org/viewer/web/viewer.html?file=/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/51151/9789048543908.pdf

The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973): Volume II, Aesthetics and Ontology

The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. With a Marxist orientation inspired by the thinking of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, the "red years" of Cahiers du cinéma produced a theoretical outpouring that was formative for the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s, and is still of vital relevance for the contemporary audiovisual landscape. It was also the seminal experience for a generation of critics who have dedicated the following half-century to the task of critically responding to the cinema. The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) gives a historical overview of this period in the journal's history, combining biographical accounts of the critics who were involved with Cahiers in the post-1968 and theoretical explorations of the text they wrote.

https://library.oapen.org/viewer/web/viewer.html?file=/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/51152/9789048543915.pdf

Debra Bricker Balken - Harold Rosenberg: A Critic‘s Life

Despite being one of the foremost American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) was utterly incapable of fitting in and he liked it that way. Signature cane in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he cut a distinctive figure on the New York City culture scene, with his radiant dark eyes and black bushy brows. A gangly giant at six foot four, he would tower over others as he forcefully expounded on his latest obsession in an oddly high-pitched, nasal voice. And people would listen, captivated by his ideas.

With Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life, Debra Bricker Balken offers the first-ever complete biography of this great and eccentric man. Although he is now known mainly for his role as an art critic at the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, Balken weaves together a complete tapestry of Rosenberg’s life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. She explores his role in some of the most contentious cultural debates of the Cold War period, including those over the commodification of art and the erosion of individuality in favor of celebrity, demonstrated in his famous essay “The Herd of Independent Minds.” An outspoken socialist and advocate for the political agency of art, he formed deep alliances with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, all of whom Balken portrays with vivid accounts from Rosenberg’s life.

Пьерик Марисаль - Законодательное ограничение цифровых платформ

В результате протестов водителей платформа Uber перестала работать на территории Бельгии. Теперь европейские органы власти должны разработать проект директивы, в соответствии с которой так называемые самозанятые будут считаться обычными работниками. Во многих странах Европы курьеры и таксисты выигрывают суды против цифровых гигантов. А во Франции, наоборот, правительство идёт на поводу у лобби этих компаний.

https://humanite-russie.ru/2021/12/09/zakonodatelnoe-ogranichenie-tsifrovyh-platform/

Ник Дайер-Уитфорд - Левый популизм и капитализм платформ

Североамериканский социолог Ник Дайер-Уитфорд (Университет Западного Онтарио) известен своими исследованиями темных сторон цифровых технологий, Интернета и того, как они меняют современное общество. Он является автором таких книг, как «Кибер-Маркс» и «Киберпролетариат», в которых раскрывает механизмы классового господства и экономической поляризации, которые принесла цифровая революция. Одна из его последних работ – написанная в соавторстве книга «Нечеловеческая сила» вышла в независимом британском издательстве Pluto Press в 2019 году и посвящена противоречивой роли искусственного интеллекта в цифровом капитализме. 

В своей статье, опубликованной в журнале tripleC в 2020 году, Дайер-Уитфорд фокусируется на программных предложениях левых политиков по реформированию платформенного капитализма. И хотя с тех пор некоторые из «популистских левых» партий пережили сдвиг вправо, как например Лейбористская партия в Британии, а влияние и доходы технологических корпораций на фоне глобальной пандемии только возросли, общий настрой по отношению к Big Tech сменятся на критический. Все больше беспокойства вызывает тот факт, что в руках платформ сосредоточено слишком много власти, и потому они нуждаются, как минимум, во внешнем регулировании, поскольку не способны изменить себя сами. А это значит, что и некоторые из реформ и экспериментов, предложенных «левыми популистами», тоже будут становиться частью политического мейнстрима.

https://commons.com.ua/ru/levyj-populizm-i-kapitalizm-platform/

Ines Schwerdtner - Germany’s New Government Is in Thrall to Neoliberal Hawks

Today, the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz became leader of Germany’s new government. But with fiscal hawk Christian Lindner in charge of the finance ministry, there’s little hope of Germany or Europe breaking free of neoliberal dogmas.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/12/elections-spd-fdp-cdu-scholz-lindner-merkel

Achille Mbembe - Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization

Achille Mbembe is one of the world's most profound critics of colonialism and its consequences, a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory. His writings examine the complexities of decolonization for African subjectivities and the possibilities emerging in its wake. In Out of the Great Darkness, he offers a rich analysis of the paradoxes of the postcolonial moment that points toward new liberatory models of community and humanity. In a nuanced consideration of the African experience, Mbembe makes sweeping interventions into debates about citizenship, identity, democracy, and modernity. He eruditely ranges across European and African thought to provide a powerful assessment of common ways of writing and thinking about Africa. Mbembe criticizes the blinders of European intellectuals, analyzing France's failure to heed postcolonial critiques of ongoing exclusions masked by pretenses of universalism. He develops a new reading of African modernity that further develops the notion of Afropolitanism, a novel way of being in the world that has arisen in decolonized Africa in the midst of both destruction and the birth of new societies, making the case for South Africa as its laboratory. Out of the Great Darkness reconstructs critical theory's historical and philosophical framework for understanding colonial and postcolonial events and expands our sense of the futures made possible by decolonization.

Quinn Slobodian: A Century of Disappointment, Reappraising Neoliberalism

Quinn Slobodian debunks the widely held belief that neoliberal globalists planned to unite free market capitalism and democracy by designing a single world market without borders. A project of law and statecraft, the ideologues of The Geneva School did not in fact believe in self-regulating markets as autonomous entities, argues Slobodain. Nor did they see democracy and capitalism as synonymous the reality was the inverse.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PA_RrgmQCcg

Цифровой капитализм и утопии Интернета. Тематический сборник (под ред. В. Атанасова)

Виталий Атанасов - Цифровой капитализм и утопии Интернета
Кристиан Фукс - Карл Маркс в эпоху капитализма больших данных
Евгений Морозов - Цифровой социализм? Дискуссия об экономическом расчете в эпоху больших данных
Ник Дайер­Уитфорд - Левый популизм и капитализм платформ

Liza Featherstone - Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation

Over the course of the last century, the focus group has become an increasingly vital part of the way companies and politicians sell their products and policies. Few areas of life, from salad dressing to health care legislation to our favorite TV shows, have been left untouched by the questions put to controlled groups about what they do and don’t like. Divining Desire is the first-ever popular survey of this rich topic. In a lively, sweeping history, Liza Featherstone traces the surprising roots of the focus group in early-twentieth century European socialism, its subsequent use by the “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue, and its widespread deployment today. She also explores such famous “failures” of the method as the doomed launch of the Ford Edsel with its vagina shaped radiator grille, and the even more ill-fated attempt to introduce a new flavor of Coca Cola (which prompted street protests from devotees of the old formula).

As elites have become increasingly detached from the general public, they rely ever more on focus groups, whether to win votes or to sell products. And, in a society where many feel increasingly powerless, the focus group has at least offered the illusion that ordinary people will be listened to and that their opinions count. Yet, it seems the more we are consulted, the less power we have. That paradox is particularly stark today, when everyone can post an opinion on social media our 24 hour “focus group” yet only plutocrats can shape policy. In telling this fascinating story, Featherstone raises profound questions about democracy, desire and the innermost workings of consumer society.

Camila Vergara - Chilean Stalemate?

In the upcoming presidential ballot on 19 December, Chileans will be asked to choose between a far-right Pinochet apologist and a social democrat – not, as outlets like the Economist and Financial Times have claimed, between ‘two extremists’ offering different variants of populism.  
In the first round of the elections on 21 November, which drew only 47% of the electorate to the polls, José Antonio Kast – a member of the Chamber of Deputies who founded the nationalist Republican Party – won a majority with 1.96 million votes (28% of votes cast). In close second, with 1.8 million votes, was Gabriel Boric: also a member of the Chamber of Deputies, a former student leader turned candidate of the Apruebo Dignidad, which includes the ‘new left’ coalition Frente Amplio and the electoral pact Chile Digno, composed of the Communist Party, ecologists, regionalists and the Christian left. Commentators were once again dumbfounded. How, after a popular uprising against neoliberalism and Pinochet’s constitution, could an unashamed neofascist win the largest share of the vote?

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/chilean-stalemate

James Muldoon - Regulating Big Tech is not enough. We need platform socialism

Facebook won't let state oversight trump shareholder interest, so alternatives based on common ownership and community control are needed

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/technology-and-democracy/regulating-big-tech-is-not-enough-we-need-platform-socialism/

Patricia Stuelke - The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique

Since the 1990s, literary and queer studies scholars have eschewed Marxist and Foucauldian critique and hailed the reparative mode of criticism as a more humane and humble way of approaching literature and culture. The reparative turn has traveled far beyond the academy, influencing how people imagine justice, solidarity, and social change. In The Ruse of Repair, Patricia Stuelke locates the reparative turn's hidden history in the failed struggle against US empire and neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s. She shows how feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist liberation movements' visions of connection across difference, practices of self care, and other reparative modes of artistic and cultural production have unintentionally reinforced forms of neoliberal governance. At the same time, the US government and military, universities, and other institutions have appropriated and depoliticized these same techniques to sidestep addressing structural racism and imperialism in more substantive ways. In tracing the reparative turn's complicated and fraught genealogy, Stuelke questions reparative criticism's efficacy in ways that will prompt critics to reevaluate their own reading practices.

Liza Featherstone - Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights At Wal-Mart

On television, Wal-Mart employees are smiling women delighted with their jobs. But reality is another story. In 2000, Betty Dukes, a 52-year-old black woman in Pittsburg, California, became the lead plaintiff in Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, a class action representing 1.4 million women. In an explosive investigation of this historic lawsuit, journalist Liza Featherstone reveals how Wal-Mart, a self-styled "family-oriented," Christian company: Deprives women (but not men) of the training they need to advance. Relegates women to lower-paying jobs, like selling baby clothes, reserving the more lucrative positions for men. Inflicts punitive demotions on employees who object to discrimination. Exploits Asian women in its sweatshops in Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth. Featherstone reveals the creative solutions Wal-Mart workers around the country have found-like fighting for unions, living-wage ordinances, and childcare options. Selling Women Short combines the personal stories of these employees with superb investigative journalism to show why women who work low-wage jobs are getting a raw deal, and what they are doing about it.