In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Steven Knepper and Robert Wyllie about their article “In the Swarm of Byung-Chul Han,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store.
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Now available! Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society, by Timothy W. Luke. Purchase your copy in our online store and save 20% by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during checkout. Also available in Kindle ebook format at Amazon.com. Screens of Power This new edition of Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society, first published in 1989, reintroduces the innovative critique of informational culture, politics, and society outlined by Timothy W. Luke in Telos and other publications during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Much has changed, but far more has stayed the same, making this new edition useful for many readers, as digital images ground personal identity, informatics is geopolitics, grand history endlessly reruns as televisually formatted ritual, electronic electioneering never ends, tele-traditional cultures spin up the spirit of tele-ethnicity in new social movements, and digital divides continue crashing against cybernetic exchange. Now available for pre-order: Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society, by Timothy W. Luke. Pre-order today in our online store and save 30% off the list price. Release date: December 1, 2020. Also save 30% on Luke’s Anthropocene Alerts: Critical Theory of the Contemporary as Ecocritique and on A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory, edited by Tim Luke and Ben Agger. Screens of Power This new edition of Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society, first published in 1989, reintroduces the innovative critique of informational culture, politics, and society outlined by Timothy W. Luke in Telos and other publications during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Much has changed, but far more has stayed the same, making this new edition useful for many readers, as digital images ground personal identity, informatics is geopolitics, grand history endlessly reruns as televisually formatted ritual, electronic electioneering never ends, tele-traditional cultures spin up the spirit of tele-ethnicity in new social movements, and digital divides continue crashing against cybernetic exchange. On now countless screens of power, which are embedded in billions of smartphones, taxi seats, elevator panels, automobile dashboards, refrigerator doors, airport walls, work cubicles, skyscraper displays, exercise machines, and home video centers, a mix of disinformative mystifications exploits with vivid images of violence the unprecedented inequalities and inequities expressed in America’s bitter racial, gender, ethnic, and class conflicts. Their impact is sparking widespread popular resistance because many citizens feel oligarchy and demagoguery in both political parties are eclipsing democracy and opportunity. There are conspiracies. Many learned of Catiline, the ideal type of a conspirator, in Latin lessons. But even the memory of Richard Nixon in the Watergate affair suffices. The secret agreements by the powerful in back rooms, the hidden workings of the intelligence services, and all forms of secret diplomacy stir in us the suspicion of conspiracy. As a general rule, we only have knowledge of failed conspiracies. And their failure, as once noted by Machiavelli in his Discorsi, is highly probable, for when more than a handful of people conspire to commit a crime, the danger posed by whistleblowers grows exponentially. Yet it does not naturally follow that conspiracies cannot succeed. We just know nothing about them. The perfect conspiracy remains just as invisible as the perfect murder. The following essay comments on the interview with Hans-Georg Maaßen conducted by Moritz Schwarz and published in Junge Freiheit on August 14, 2020. An English translation of the interview appears here. In the wake of the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it appeared that liberal democracy was on an inexorable victory march around the world. The Soviet satellite states threw off their Communist shackles, and the occupied Baltics regained their independence. Even Russia seemed briefly to be lurching toward modern governance structures, and the Central Asian states, the “stans,” claimed their own sovereignty (if only, often as not, to revert to indigenous forms of authoritarianism). The age of Latin American dictatorships belonged to the past, certainly in the southern cone and in Brazil, although not in Venezuela and Cuba. The last aftershocks of that democratic optimism informed the hope that toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq would set off a similar democracy wave in the Middle East; no doubt the demonstration of the vulnerability of the dictator in Baghdad set the stage for the Arab Spring of 2011, another burst of hope. That Arab Spring of hope gave way to a new winter in the Middle East and not only there. The wave of democracy has been followed by a wave of repression. Perhaps one should have paid more attention in 1989, which not only witnessed the November celebration in Berlin but also the bloody June in Beijing, where the democracy movement at Tiananmen was murdered by the Communist Party and its tanks. It was wrong to assume that the formal end of the Soviet Union meant the end of Communism altogether or that Communist agitation would cease to undermine free societies. That old mole continues to burrow. |
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