(Part 2) Best products from r/CriticalTheory

I don't known what your experience was like in NYC, but each of the different startup regions do have their own flavor. Austin isn't like NYC, which isn't like Seattle or San Francisco. I wonder how many people in NYC that you knew went to Burning Man. In the Bay, it is fairly common. Flashy shows of wealth aren't really a thing in SF like they are in NYC either. Pissing matches between the two scenes are actually fairly common. See this and this.

This is something I drafted a while back, which was edited and put into some piece or another, but basically highlights my point:
>
> From its earliest precursors, the Internet has had its evangelists. And the Silicon Valley offered a unique crucible. Deliberate and unintentional interactions among military researchers, academics, and corporate scientists helped to form the technical features of the medium.

> Meanwhile, the region was the center of the countercultural movement in the 1960s, the failings of which, wrapped into a technological optimism for the power of the networked computer. Along side its topological and programmatic development, discussions of its social, cultural, political and economic potential formed the ethical undergirding. Internet policy, especially the network neutrality debate, is made in the shadows of ideals set in this early era. Prime among those ideals is a profound faith in the technology’s emancipatory potential to boost democratic participation, trigger a renaissance of moribund communities, and strengthen associational life.

Maybe this is too much for your project, but I would look at doing a rhetoric construction of the concept of Silicon Valley. I know there is enough online to do this well. And perhaps this is just my distaste from some of the work I had to grade in grad school, but I always found this work far more intriguing.

This also reminds me. You might be looking in the wrong place for this. I would suggest going into the discipline of rhetoric/communication. Check out this, this, this this, and this. You should also check out Evgeny Morozov.

That sounds like a fascinating research topic! I'd love to read your writing down the road.

I have a chapter on Benjamin, esotericism, and the birth of critical theory that you might find useful given your broader research interests. If you can't get my whole book let me know and I could email you a pdf of just that chapter.

Otherwise, for your research project. Sedgwick is great. I'd also recommend Clarke, Black Sun. You might also get something out of Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion. His attitude toward esotericism is purely negative. So it is good to counterbalance it with Hakl, Eranos, which errors the other way. Finally, although not squarely in your research, you might also find useful Pasi, Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics.

Sorry, it's The Critical Tradition, woops.

Here's a link

I wouldn't say it's the end all, be all, but it was what I started with as an undergrad and found it pretty useful as a starting point. It also looks like Amazon has decent suggested books, as well.

I have a pdf of South Asian Technospaces if you want it.

As far as I can tell Techno-Orientalism tends to deal mostly with perceptions of East Asia more than South Asia but there might be a few excerpts that are helpful.

Have you looked into Subaltern Studies at all? A friend of mine has recommended the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty
. I would look through the bibliographies of the theorists associated with the movement.

If you're interested in critical accounts of South Asian immigration, I can recommend Vijay Prashad's texts The Karma of Brown Folk and the more recent Uncle Swami. You can PM me for both.

Haha, it was kind of a tongue in cheek suggestion, since the author (Matthew Kenner) is an extremely online fixture of various leftist twitter groups who also got lit up for stanning some edgelady nazi girl (also on twitter). I won't do the book justice with my own description since I've only read the first chapter (he has his own style and he packs a lot of info and ideas on the page) so here's the amazon link with the blurb.

https://www.amazon.com/Geohell-Imagining-History-Contemporary-World-ebook/dp/B01N0K02CJ

https://twitter.com/cutasterfee?lang=en looks like he pruned a lot of his content, followers, follows, etc. since I last saw. He's an interesting dude and would probably like to talk about his book.

I wish I had more info for you. Hopefully someone else reading this can chime in. I can only recommend the [translation I read.] (https://www.amazon.com/Being-Harper-Perennial-Modern-Thought/dp/0061575593/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8), Macquarrie & Robinson. This is a more recent translation and I don't speak German. The classic version was the [Stambaugh] (https://www.amazon.com/Being-Time-Translation-Contemporary-Continental/dp/1438432763).

Those are the two main ones as far as I know. Once again, I'm sure there are people far better qualified to speak to this than me reading.

Yup, I'd say many of the same as well.

Especially Judith Butler for gender/sexuality stuff; Adorno for culture/capitalism stuff, Foucault for, well, a number of things (his work tends to be more or less readable as well, more than say Bourdieu). I've found people like Levi-Strauss and Barthes to be pretty useful as well .

If I were to form that five-book list based on works I've found to be lucid, good entry points, that would look like 1. Barthes: The Death of The Author. 2. Adorno's The Culture Industry, esp. the essay "Enlightenment as Mass Deception" 3. Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. 4. Gender Trouble, Judith Butler. 5. Ferdinand de Saussure's lectures on General Linguistics.

That wouldn't necessarily be "the essential five" but more of a starting point, works that aren't too obscure/require much annotation or historical context.

If you have access to a library, this seems to be a good reader. http://www.amazon.co.uk/From-Modernism-Postmodernism-Philosophy-Anthologies/dp/0631232133

edit: formatting

https://www.amazon.com/Capitalist-Superheroes-Caped-Crusaders-Neoliberal/dp/1780991797

This is pretty straightfoward.

Zizke did a whole take on his doc on ideology about The Dark Knight being the ideology of "needed lies" after 9/11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRBsvyK_w9o

Also, I know Mark Fisher wrote something about the subject, google it, he's definitely the best of the three.

btw, your friend sounds unsufferable.

Something like the Devil's Pleasure Palace? I saw it at a Barnes and Noble in the philosophy section

Yep here it is

https://www.amazon.com/Devils-Pleasure-Palace-Critical-Subversion/dp/159403768X

The Wellness Syndrome is a good analysis of exactly what you're talking about. DM me if you want the pdf.

For more critique of Buddhist and mindfulness influence more specifically the speculative non-Buddhist project is a fantastic starting point with a lot of further resources https://speculativenonbuddhism.com

If your interested in this question as well as the relationship between art, global capitalism, the internet, communication and war technologies/industries I highly recommend Hito Steyerl's new book Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War I'm currently reading it - its awesome.

my sister's a musicologist, so i have a very limited familiarity with the field in that i buy her books as gifts but don't actually get much chance to read them. so while i'm not sure it's exactly what you're looking for, this book is on my list for her and might give a novel approach. (she loved le guin's other book, "boccherini's body," if it sounds up your alley)

For one of my literary theory classes in undergrad, we used this book. The author analyzes 'The Great Gatsby' through the lens of 10 or 12 critical frameworks. It was really illuminating, clear, and enjoyable to read. Lit theory is the focus, but it also provided a lot of insight into the fundamental ideas of the various critical perspectives that were highlighted. Definitely recommended.

Critical theory does tend to be cryptic, deliberately so in a lot of cases. You might enjoy Baudrillard's America. It's fairly accessible as far as his stuff goes, if you have a rudimentary understanding of his Hyperreal idea.