[csaa-forum] Culture Machine: New Review, Book and Deposits

[Gary Hall]

CULTURE MACHINE <http://www.culturemachine.net> is pleased to announce
the publication of the following:

1. NEW BOOK REVIEW:

* Timothy Clark (2005), The Poetics of Singularity: The
Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later
Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Reviewed by Robert
Eaglestone.

Timothy Clark is one of the best-kept secrets of British intellectual
and literary-theoretical life. Quietly working away, specialising in the

fertile ground which mixes Romanticism, European philosophy and literary

theory, he has produced some of the most striking and demanding work in
this field in English
. Clark’s work in general is characterised by
scholarly care and scrupulous attention, by a commitment to its own
motivation and movement and by its wide range of reference and scope of
thought ... The Poetics of Singularity takes it place as one of the most

thoughtful and meticulous works in what it calls, uneasily, the ‘school
of singularity’ and what others have named the ‘New Aestheticism’. This
name brings together a number of fairly disparate thinkers and finds in
them a central idea: that art is not simply re- or pre-baked ideology,
but something important, revelatory and foundational in its own right
.

The review is available at:
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/bk_rev.htm

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2. NEW BOOK IN THE CULTURE MACHINE SERIES:

* Clare Birchall (2006), Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to
Gossip, Oxford and New York: Berg. ISBN:1 84520 143 4

A voice on late night radio tells you that Kentucky Fried Chicken
injects
its food with drugs that render men impotent. An alien abductee on the
Internet claims
extraterrestrials have planted a microchip in her left buttock. 'Julia
Roberts in Porn Scandal' shouts the front page of a gossip mag.

Knowledge Goes Pop examines the popular knowledges that saturate our
everyday experience. We mediate and are mediated by them; they influence

the
way we position ourselves in the world and shape the way we imagine the
world works. Naming such wayward phenomena 'knowledge' prompts vital
questions about the status of legitimacy. Do popular knowledges get
marginalized by official discourse? Why does their irrepressible
presence cause so much institutional anxiety?

Clare Birchall's dual enquiry asks not only what cultural studies can
tell
us about the politics of popular knowledges (at a time when wars can be
waged on the basis of gossip and conspiracy theory saturates all kinds
of
public discourse), but also what popular knowledges can tell us about
cultural studies itself as a discipline of uncertain, ambiguous
legitimacy
and marginal origins.

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3. NEW DEPOSITS IN THE CSeARCH OPEN ACCESS ARCHIVE

These include:

* Paul Bowman, (2006), ‘McDeconstruction; or: (Trans)Mission
Impossible’, paper given at IAPL annual conference, Freiburg, Germany

* Marq Smith (2005), ‘Visual Studies, or the Ossification of Thought’,
Journal of Visual Culture, 2005, 4

* Anastasia Kavada (2005), ‘Exploring the role of the internet in the
“movement for alternative globalization”: The case of the Paris 2003
European Social Forum’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture,

vol.2, no.1 June

* Mark Poster (1988), Critical Theory of the Family, New York: Continuum

The above are all available, for free, along with 600 + others, at:
http://www.culturemachine.net/csearch