Blog Theory: feedback and capture in the circuits of drive (available now)

I just got my advance copy of Blog Theory from Polity. It looks great. The image is from Johan Grimonprez's Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Here is the back copy:

Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications.

Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system.

In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchanges--from blog posts to text messages--have widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination.

Geert Lovink

"If Ballard invited the 20th century viewer to witness their own mass atrocity exhibition, we now have the update for the 21st century: Jodi Dean's demolition job of the Internet as we know it. With Blog Theory we can finally terminate the hype of blogging and seriously engage the deeply distracted condition of the networked present. The incestuous relationship between journalism and bloggers is exposed to make way for critical reflections on techniques of self-management for our all-too-fragile identities."

McKenzie Wark

"Blog Theory is refreshingly free of received ideas about the wonderful new world of media. Jodi Dean manages the difficult art of being critical of new media without becoming a cranky curmudgeon. She uses psychoanalytic concepts to produce a synoptic view of the decline of symbolic efficiency under communicative capitalism, and the way the blogosphere participates in this dissipation of the totems and tokens of what we once thought of as the public sphere. She clears the way for imagining the politics of media by other means."

Sean Cubitt

"What happens to politics when there is no one in charge? The answer Jodi Dean gives, in this coruscating, rock'n'roll ride through new political and media theory, is communicative capitalism--the obligation to communicate in a new world turned into a market for communications. Dean's radical call for a new media politics will challenge political scientists, communication theorists, and media activists to sever the ties, and create and unforeseeable, dramatically material future."

Comments

[Raoul Perezoso]

Rock n roll?? Hah. Joody D & pals are to rock n roll as like JD's role model Hillary, Snitch-in-Chief, is to authentic leftist politics.

[Neographite]

Great looking book, congratulations. What font did they use for the supertitle? It's beautiful, while being weirdly computery and non-computery at the same time.

(And to Mr. Perezoso: it helps to keep your hostilities disaggregated. As it stands, it seems you are more opposed to women in popular music than anything else.)

[Imagestoliveby.wordpress.com]

Jodi, this looks great, congratulations! Can't wait to read it :)