[p2p-research] Fwd: FW: forthcoming book (ArcDigital)

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Parikka, Jussi <Jussi.Parikka at anglia.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 2:38 PM
Subject: FW: forthcoming book (ArcDigital)
To: michelsub2004 at gmail.com


 Hi Michel,
did you mean more info on Jodi Dean's book? see below for some blurbs!

all best
J


Jodi Dean
Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left
Politics


Duke University Press (Sept 2009)

Paperback - $21.95

0-8223-4505-6

[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4505-3]

Information from the publisher:

Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies is an impassioned call for the
realization of a progressive left politics in the United States. Through an
assessment of the ideologies underlying contemporary political culture, Jodi
Dean takes the left to task for its capitulations to conservatives and its
failure to take responsibility for the extensive neoliberalization
implemented during the Clinton presidency. She argues that the left's
ability to develop and defend a collective vision of equality and solidarity
has been undermined by the ascendance of "communicative capitalism," a
constellation of consumerism, the privileging of the self over group
interests, and the embrace of the language of victimization. As Dean
explains, communicative capitalism is enabled and exacerbated by the Web and
other networked communications media, which reduce political energies to the
registration of opinion and transmission of feelings. The result is a
psychotic politics where certainty displaces credibility and the circulation
of intense feeling trumps the exchange of reasons.

Dean's critique ranges from her argument that the term democracy has become
a meaningless cipher invoked by the left and right alike to an analysis of
the fantasy of free trade underlying neoliberalism, and from an examination
of new theories of sovereignty advanced by politicians and left academics to
a look at the changing meanings of "evil" in the speeches of U.S. presidents
since the mid-twentieth century. She emphasizes the futility of a politics
enacted by individuals determined not to offend anyone, and she examines
questions of truth, knowledge, and power in relation to 9/11 conspiracy
theories. Dean insists that any reestablishment of a vital and purposeful
left politics will require shedding the mantle of victimization, confronting
the marriage of neoliberalism and democracy, and mobilizing different terms
to represent political strategies and goals.

    "Jodi Dean's new book provides what we have all been waiting for: the
authentic theoretical analysis of how ideology functions in today's global
capitalism. Her diagnosis of 'communicative capitalism' discloses how our
'really existing democracies' curtail prospects of radical emancipatory
politics. Dean demonstrates this status of democracy as a political fantasy
not through cheap pseudo-Marxist denunciations, but through a detailed
examination of social, symbolic, and libidinal mechanisms and practices. To
anyone who continues to dwell on illusions about liberal democracy, one
should simply say: 'Hey, didn't you read Democracy and Other Neoliberal
Fantasies?'"-Slavoj Zizek, Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana,
Slovenia

    "Jodi Dean provides an incredibly lucid explanation of what
neoliberalism has been in terms of both policy and collective fantasies
regarding the relation of markets to freedom. But the really threatening Big
Other in this book is not neoliberal ideology, but the failed and flawed
leftist will that concedes too much power and unity to neoliberalism. This
is a frank polemic that will stimulate many arguments about the past and
future of critical theory and democratic politics in the United
States."-Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington
City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith
Colleges and Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of
Philosophy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She is the author of Zizek's
Politics, Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy,
and Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace.



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