XCO READINGS: 090224/Sec.2/Session#7/Agamben-Douglas/Purity&Danger-ComingCommunity

XCO READINGS: 090224/Sec.2/Session#7/Douglas-Agamben

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Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. 1966.

Below overview taken from:
http://www.routledge.com/books/Purity-and-Danger-isbn9780415289955

In Purity and Danger Mary Douglas identifies the concern for purity as a key theme at the heart of every society. In lively and lucid prose she explains its relevance for every reader by revealing its wide-ranging impact on our attitudes to society, values, cosmology and knowledge. The book has been hugely influential in many areas of debate – from religion to social theory. But perhaps its most important role is to offer each reader a new explanation of why people behave in the way they do. With a specially commissioned introduction by the author which assesses the continuing significance of the work thirty-five years on, this Routledge Classics edition will ensure that Purity and Danger continues to challenge and question well into the new millennium.

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Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minnesotta Press. 1993.
(selections)

Below overview taken from:
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/A/agamben_coming.html

In this extraordinary and original philosophical achievement, Agamben develops the concept of community and the social implications of his philosophical thought. Agamben’s exploration is, in part, a contemporary response to the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, more historically, Plato, Spinoza, and medieval scholars and theorists of Judeo-Christian scriptures.

“This book needs to be sampled for its purity and effervescence. There is an antic humor that I experience reading Agamben as well, and that occurs in acrobatic leaps from popular culture to writers like Aquinas. Beautifully translated by Michael Hardt, with the help of Brian Massumi, Mike Sullivan, and the author, Agamben comes through clearly in English, with an incandescence that is to be treasured, especially when it crops up in the realm of questions that point us in the direction of the very ground/lessness of our being—beings in the same spaces, yet not together.” —SubStance

“A superb introduction to English-speaking readers of this important thinker and writer.” —Rebecca Comay

“Giorgio Agamben, Italy’s leading philosopher and essayist, is one of the most delicate and probing writers I have encountered in recent years. His work, which belongs to the type of writing we tend to associate with Walter Benjamin, is elegant, cheerful and–to resurrect a somewhat exhausted term–utterly revolutionary.” —Avital Ronell

“Agamben’s text is a rare philosophical meditation on community as a kind of linguistic belonging that moves beyond both identity and universality. Erudite and expansive, yet delivered with epigrammatic ease, this writing brings forth the most promising equivocations of meaning in Talmudic tales, Plato, Spinoza, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein to avow the contingency and communal ‘being’ within a history whose value is its irreparability. This is a moving and disruptive work that brings what is most dynamic in ontological thought to bear on what is most difficult to think about: contemporary forms of sociality.” —Judith Butler

“The Coming Community tries to designate a community beyond any conception available under this name; not a community of essence, a being-together of existences; that is to say: precisely what political as well as religious identities can no longer grasp. Nothing less.” —Jean-Luc Nancy

Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Language and Death (1991), Stanzas (1992), and Means without End (2000).

STUDENTS: FOR INDIVIDUAL CHAPTER ASSIGNMENTS AND DOWNLOADS VISIT:
http://www.duke.edu/~ak88/plasch/

XCO READINGS: 090217/Sec.2/Session#6/Sholette-Stimson/Collectivism

XCO READINGS: 090217/Sec.2/Session#6/Sholette-Stimson/Collectivism After Modernism
(different chapters assigned per individual-look for your initials under each chapter in table of contents below)

Below overview taken from:
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/S/stimson_collectivism.html

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Collectivism after Modernism
The Art of Social Imagination after 1945
Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, editors

Analyzes collective artistic practice from the Cold War to the global present.

The desire to speak in a collective voice has long fueled social imagination and artistic production. Prior to the Second World War, artists understood collectivization as an expression of the promise or failure of industrial and political modernity envisioned as a mass phenomenon. After the war, artists moved beyond the old ideal of progress by tying the radicalism of their political dreams to the free play of differences.

Organized around a series of case studies spanning the globe from Europe, Japan, and the United States to Africa, Cuba, and Mexico, Collectivism after Modernism covers such renowned collectives as the Guerrilla Girls and the Yes Men, as well as lesser-known groups. Contributors explore the ways in which collectives function within cultural norms, social conventions, and corporate or state-sanctioned art. They examine the impact of new technologies on artistic practice, the emergence of networked group identity, and the common characteristic of collective production to blur the typical separations between artists, activists, service workers, and communities in need.

Together, these essays demonstrate that collectivism survives as an influential and increasingly visible artistic practice despite the art world’s star system of individuality. Collectivism after Modernism provides the historical understanding necessary for thinking through postmodern collective practice, now and into the future.

“Blake Stimson and Gregory Shollete skillfully utilize collectivism’s inherent ambiguities and contradictions to open a book that examines collectively produced art across many cultural divides and political contexts.” —Artforum

“Stimson [and Sholette]‘s project is one to be engaged with, as it wreaks necessary havoc with that dominant reductive perspective that too easily casts consumerism versus idealism, Postmodernism versus Modernism.” —Art Monthly

“Collectivism After Modernism, The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 provides us with a new ‘map’ of Modernism since World War II/ A very challenging and exciting map, since it is one that is not compatible with any dominant paradigm or conceptualization of what Modernism used to be and could become once again in the near future.” —Leonardo

Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, National U of Singapore; Jesse Drew, San Francisco Art Institute; Okwui Enwezor, U of Pittsburgh; Rubén Gallo, Princeton U; Chris Gilbert, Baltimore Museum of Art; Brian Holmes; Alan Moore; Jelena Stojanovi´c; Reiko Tomii; Rachel Weiss, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Blake Stimson is associate professor of art history at the University of California Davis, the author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, and coeditor of Visual Worlds and Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology.

Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, and cofounder of collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution and REPOhistory. He is coeditor of The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life.

304 pages | 80 halftones | 7 x 10 | 2007

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Periodizing Collectivism by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette
AT

1. Internationaleries: Collectivism, the Grotesque and Cold War Functionalism
Jelena Stojanovic´
RS

2. After the “Descent to the Everyday:” Japanese Collectivism from Hi Red Center to The Play, 1964-1973
Reiko Tomii
MB

3. Art & Language and the Institutional Form in Anglo-American Collectivism
Chris Gilbert
VF

4. The Collective Camcorder in Art and Activism
Jesse Drew
CA

5. Performing Revolution: Arte Calle, Grupo Provisional, and the Response to Cuban National Crisis, 1986-1989
Rachel Weiss
BA

6. The Mexican Pentagon: Adventures in Collectivism during the 1970s
Rubén Gallo
LH

7. Artists’ Collectives Mostly in New York, 1975-2000
Alan Moore
CA

8. The Production of Social Space as Artwork: Protocols of Community in the Work of Le Groupe Amos and Huit Facettes
Okwui Enwezor
RS

9. Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics: Cartographies of Art in the World
Brian Holmes
SK

10. Beyond Representation and Affiliation: Collective Action in Post-Soviet Russia
Irina Aristarkhova
VF

Contributors
Index

XCO READINGS: 090113/Complete Bibliography/Assigned-Suggested

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Assigned:
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(…blog versions under construction…)

Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minnesotta Press. 1993.
(selections)

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. ed. ed.). London: Verso. 1991.
(selections)

Barabási, Albert László. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for
Business, Science, and Everyday Life
(complete)

Bishop, Claire (editor). PARTICIPATION: Documents of Contemporary Art
(complete/comments assigned only to specific chapters)

Barthes, Roland. Sade/Fourier/Loyola
(complete)

Critical Art Ensemble. Digital Resistance.
(selections)

DeLanda, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity
(complete)

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger
(complete)

Feher, Michael (editor). Non-Governmental Politics.
(complete/comments assigned only to specific chapters)

Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin Press. 2004.
(selections)

Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000)
(selections)

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Edited by Peter Conner. Foreword by Christopher Fynsk. Minnesotta Press. 1991
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/N/nancy_inoperative.html
(selections)

Stimson, Blake and Sholette, Gregory (editors). Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945. (complete/comments assigned only to specific chapters)

(…blog versions under construction…)

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Suggested:
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(…blog versions under construction…)

XCO READINGS: 090210/Sec.1/Session#5/Bishop

XCO READINGS: 090210/Sec.1/Session#5/Bishop

Bishop, Claire (editor). PARTICIPATION: Documents of Contemporary Art
[read all / your hard copy / no pdfs]
[create at least one comment for five self-selected chapters. post as separate comments with chapter title/author in your title]

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Following book overview taken from:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10962

Participation
Edited by Claire Bishop

The desire to move viewers out of the role of passive observers and into the role of producers is one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century art. This tendency can be found in practices and projects ranging from El Lissitzky’s exhibition designs to Allan Kaprow’s happenings, from minimalist objects to installation art. More recently, this kind of participatory art has gone so far as to encourage and produce new social relationships. Guy Debord’s celebrated argument that capitalism fragments the social bond has become the premise for much relational art seeking to challenge and provide alternatives to the discontents of contemporary life. This publication collects texts that place this artistic development in historical and theoretical context.

Participation begins with writings that provide a theoretical framework for relational art, with essays by Umberto Eco, Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, Peter Bürger, Jen-Luc Nancy, Edoaurd Glissant, and Félix Guattari, as well as the first translation into English of Jacques Rancière’s influential “Problems and Transformations in Critical Art.” The book also includes central writings by such artists as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Joseph Beuys, Augusto Boal, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. And it features recent critical and curatorial debates, with discussions by Lars Bang Larsen, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.

Copublished with Whitechapel Art Gallery, London

About the Editor

Claire Bishop is the author of Installation Art: A Critical History and a contributor to many art journals, including ArtForum, Flash Art, and October. She is a Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Warwick.

XCO READINGS: 090203/Sec.1/Session#4/Barabasi-Barthes-DeLanda

XCO READINGS: 090203/Sec.1/Session#4/Barabasi-Barthes-DeLanda

For details on these books and their authors go to:
http://experimentalcommunities.blogspot.com/2009/02/xco-readings-090120sec1session2barabasi.html

XCO READINGS: 090127/Sec.1/Session#3/Barabasi-Barthes-DeLanda

XCO READINGS: 090127/Sec.1/Session#3/Barabasi-Barthes-DeLanda

For details on these books and their authors go to:
http://experimentalcommunities.blogspot.com/2009/02/xco-readings-090120sec1session2barabasi.html

XCO READINGS: 090120/Sec.1/Session#2/Barabasi-Barthes-DeLanda

XCO READINGS: 090120/Sec.1/Session#2/Barabasi-Barthes-DeLanda

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Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. Penguin, 2003.

Book overview found at:
http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780452284395,00.html?strSrchSql=barabasi/Linked_Albert-Laszlo_Barabasi

A cocktail party.? A terrorist cell.? Ancient bacteria.? An international conglomerate.

All are networks, and all are a part of a surprising scientific revolution. Albert-László Barabási, the nation’s foremost expert in the new science of networks, takes us on an intellectual adventure to prove that social networks, corporations, and living organisms are more similar than previously thought. Grasping a full understanding of network science will someday allow us to design blue-chip businesses, stop the outbreak of deadly diseases, and influence the exchange of ideas and information. Just as James Gleick brought the discovery of chaos theory to the general public, Linked tells the story of the true science of the future.

Barabasi’s Page at Physics, Notre Dame:
http://www.nd.edu/~alb/

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Roland Barthes. Sade/Fourier/Loyola. Hill and Wang, 1976.

A treatise on the nature of philosophical creation. Barthes examines the parallel impulses of Loyola, the Jesuit saint, Sade, the renowned and sometimes pornographic libertine philosopher, and Fourier, the utopian theorist. All three, he makes clear, have been founders of languages Loyola the language of divine address: Sade, the language of erotic freedom: and Fourier, the language of social perfection and happiness. Each language is an all-enveloping system, a “secondary language” that isolates the adherent from the conventional world. The object of this book, is not to decipher the content of these respective works, but to consider Sade, Fourier, and Loyola as creators of text.

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Manuel DeLanda. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Continuum, 2006.