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Our relationship to consumption is not an easy one. Apart from being self-centred, superficial and narcissistic, the consumer is held responsible for global warming, poverty and now, by binging on easy credit, economic crisis. A straw man has many uses, including being part of the solution by reducing carbon footprints, consuming more ethically and tightening the proverbial belt. iCommunism defends the consumer against the prevailing politics of austerity. It splits the fetish from the commodity fetish by taking the shine away from the commodity now signified in the ubiquitous i of i branded products and transfers it over to communism. With ideology once again alive on the streets of Europe, iCommunism reimagines Herbert Marcuse 1960s artistic critique of capitalism s repressive performance principle for today s consumer society. Capitalism promised us shiny things but only communism can deliver them in a different, more liberating, universal and sustainable form.
The Unpredictability of Gameplay explores the many forms of unpredictability in games and proposes a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding and categorizing non-deterministic game mechanics. Rather than viewing all game mechanics with unpredictable outcomes as a single concept, Mark R. Johnson develops a three-part typology for such mechanics, distinguishing between randomness, chance, and luck in gameplay, assessing games that range from grand strategy and MMORPGs to slot machines and card games. He also explores forms of unanticipated unpredictability, where elements of games fail to function as intended and create new forms of gameplay in the process. Covering a range of ga...
Intellectual disability is often overlooked within mainstream disability studies, and theories developed about disability and physical impairment may not always be appropriate when thinking about intellectual (or learning) disability. This pioneering book, in considering intellectually disabled people's lives, sets out a care ethics model of disability that outlines the emotional caring sphere, where love and care are psycho-socially questioned, the practical caring sphere, where day-to-day care is carried out, and the socio-political caring sphere, where social intolerance and aversion to difficult differences are addressed. It does so by discussing issue-based everyday life, such as family...
States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist Scenarios engages with the crisis of our capitalist world, with a view to explaining its origins, unravelling its symptoms, and demystifying the anodyne corrective solutions so far proposed. At the same time, it endorses the necessity for utopian interventions aimed at drastically rethinking our social order. Organised around the themes of economy and politics, critical theory, and culture in order to offer an impressive range of thematic perspectives and critical angles, the book delves into the most pressing of today’s quandaries by combining stringent critical analysis with creative foresight. A rigorous examination of the current crisis of late-capitalist society, States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist Scenarios develops paradigms that promise to rekindle the desire to move beyond capitalism towards a different social order. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences with particular interests in social and political theory, contemporary philosophy and the crises faced by the current capitalist order.
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Throughout the 1990s, artists experimented with game engine technologies to disrupt our habitual relationships to video games. They hacked, glitched, and dismantled popular first-person shooters such as Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) to engage players in new kinds of embodied activity. In Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Art Modding, Eddie Lohmeyer investigates historical episodes of art modding practices-the alteration of a game system's existing code or hardware to generate abstract spaces-situated around a recent archaeology of the game engine: software for rendering two and three-dimensional gameworlds. The contemporary artists highlighted throughout this book-Cory ...
Horror cinema is a genre that is undergoing constant evolution, from the sub-genre of 'found footage,' to post-cinematic new media forms such as Youtube horror, horror video games and cinematic virtual reality horror. By investigating how these new forms alter the dynamics of spectatorship, this book charts how cinema's affective capacities have shifted in relation to these modifications in the forms of cinematic horror. It applies a rich theoretical synthesis of phenomenological and Deleuzian approaches to a number of case studies, including films like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and Creep as well as video games such as Alien: Isolation and new media forms such as Youtube horror and virtual reality horror.
In broadsheet newspapers, television shows and Hollywood films, capitalism is increasingly recognized as a system detrimental to human existence. Colin Cremin investigates why, despite this de-robing, capitalism remains a powerful and seductive force. Using materialist, psychoanalytic and linguistic approaches, Cremin shows how capitalism, anxiety and desire enter into a productive/destructive relationship. He identifies three related kinds of social engagement. These are enterprise and employment, ethics and left-oriented social action, and enjoyment and consumption. As these ideological strands overlap and reinforce one another, the exploitation, violence, injustice, alienation and ecological destruction the system breeds is revealed, but not necessarily identified or addressed as a failure of capitalism.The nuanced and sophisticated argument in Capitalism's New Clothes goes a long way to explaining the contradictions of contemporary existence under a system that has been revealed as damaging and regressive, but is more dominant than ever.
An auto-ethnography of cross-dressing, framed by Marxism and psychoanalytic theory
The public is so central to discussions of the role of broadcasting in civil society that it often passes without comment. This work offers a critical insight into this key component of media policy and practice. It covers areas such as techniques of political interview and political discussion programmes.