Mark Poster

The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context

From the Publisher: Electronic communications are new language experiences in part by virtue of electrification. But how are they different from ordinary speech and writing? And what is the significance of this difference? This book explores these differences and in particular considers various theoretical perspectives that might be useful for opening new interpretive strategies for critical social theory in relation to these differences.

Foucault, Marxism, and History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Information

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Existential Marxism in postwar France : from Sartre to Althusser

The Description for this book, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser, will be forthcoming.

Consumption and digital commodities in the everyday

The category of the everyday has designated in social theory the remainder, what is left over after the important regions of politics and production. This left consumption in the under-theorized domain of the everyday. Since Veblen – and more recently Baudrillard and de Certeau – consumption has been reconfigured as significant in its own right, as a complex, articulated area related directly to culture. Liberal thinkers have also claimed consumer activity as central to society, as the domain where the individual is realized. This paper will review these positions and attempt to develop an understanding of consumption in daily life in relation to digital cultural objects. It will also argue that these mediated commodities, in the practices of appropriation connected with them, configure subjects in ways that are difficult to reconcile with existing structures of domination.

Global Media and Culture

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . . . In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. . . . And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. —Karl Marx1

Everyday (Virtual) Life

The concept of everyday life has been central to the discourse of critical theory at least since the early 1960s when Henri Lefebvre devoted several volumes to elaborating the idea.1 In this essay I shall review the category of the everyday and test its critical capacities in the current context, when information machines or media have been disseminated widely in places like the home and the street, perhaps undermining the boundary between the quotidian and the extraordinary, the private and the public. I shall argue that the media transform place and space in such a way that what had been regarded as the locus of the everyday can no longer be distinguished as separate from its opposite. This change operates to nullify earlier notions of the everyday but also opens the possibility for a reconfigured concept of daily life which might yet contain critical potentials.2

THE SECRET SELF : The case of identity theft

In the late 1990s, ‘Identity Theft’ became a crime in the United States. At that time ‘Identity Theft’ was determined to be the fastest rising crime in the country. It is a crime that depends on digital culture and networked computing. I ask how this crime works to redefine the nature of identity, how it exteriorizes identity, separating it from the interiority of consciousness and moving it into the realm of information machines. The implications of identity theft for privacy and security are also examined. I ask as well about the implications of such theft for an emerging Western and Global culture that relies increasingly on digital media, the interaction of humans and information machines.

Postcolonial Theory in the Age of Planetary Communications

Is the epoch of postcolonial studies over? Is the present era still one best characterized in terms of resistance to Western hegemony by states that formerly were administered by the imperial branches of European and American governments? Or are we now in a post-postcolonial epoch? Put differently, I offer the hypothesis that as globalizing processes continue to disseminate and to multiply, postcoloniality appears more and more as a moment in a declining phase, continuing or shifting to be sure, of the larger phenomenon of globalization. To put the matter somewhat differently one might ask the following: From the standpoint of the former colonies of Europe, the United States and Japan, also known as the postcolonial nations, can it be said that the chief hegemonic power limiting their freedom is the heritage of colonialism or is it rather the spreading and deepening tentacles of globalization? Certainly there is a continuing heritage of Western imperialism in many parts of the world. This heritage can be seen in the institutional forms that persist from the Imperialist era, along with the elites that emerged under the condition of colonial rule. It is also the case that many, if not most, of the colonized nations of the Western imperial epoch from 1500 to 1950 continue to suffer from subordinate relations with the United States and Europe. Even granting these continuities with the past, the current situation of globalization, spearheaded by transnational corporations, might best be comprehended not from a standpoint of postcolonialism but from one that takes its point of departure from emergent forms of domination. After the Western nations established a so-called free market system in the 1980s with the NAFTA and GATT treaties on international trade,

Why not to Read Foucault

FOUCAULT by J. G. Merquior Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. 188pp.,

Perfect Transmissions Evil Bert Laden

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