Arthur Kroker

Digital Delirium writes the new horizon of electronic culture. The latest addition to the Culture Texts Series, Digital Delirium brings together some of the best minds involved in rethinking technoculture in the 90s.

"Digital studies is a rapidly expanding field that encompasses the research interests of social scientists and humanities scholars, multimedia artists, and activists. With this ground-breaking reader, we are introduced to a new style of thought that has emerged directly from Internet culture itself. Critical Digital Studies is inspired by the same spirit that gave rise to the Open Architecture Movement, Shareware, Web 2.0 - a creative mashup, mixing the enduring human demand to understand the world around us with the new means of analysis, communication, and living that define the twenty-first century. Among the contributors are: Sara Diamond, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Lynn Hershmann, Lev Manovich, Charles Mudede, Stephen Pfohl, and Stelarc." "An indispensable resource for instructors and students in digital studies programs, Critical Digital Studies is a comprehensive, creative, and fascinating look at a digital culture that is struggling to be born, survive, and flourish."--BOOK JACKET.

"Exits to the Posthuman Future is media theory for a global digital society which thrives, and sometimes perishes, at the intersection of technologies of speed, distant ethics and a pervasive cultural anxiety. Arthur Kroker's incisive and insightful text presents the emerging pattern of a posthuman future: life at the tip of technologies of acceleration, drift and crash. Kroker links key concepts such as "Guardian Liberalism" and Obama's vision of the "Just War" with a striking account of "culture drift" as the essence of real world technoculture. He argues that contemporary society displays growing uncertainty about the ultimate ends of technological innovation and the intelligibility of the digital future. The posthuman future is elusive: is it a gathering storm of cynical abandonment, inertia, disappearance and substitution? Or else the development of a new form of critical consciousness - the posthuman imagination - as a means of comprehending the full complexity of life? Depending on which exit to the posthuman future we choose or, perhaps, which exit chooses us, Kroker argues that a very different posthuman future will likely ensue."--Publisher's website.

Ideology and Power in the Age of Lenin in Ruins is written in the shadow of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here, the meaning of power and ideology is finally thought with and against the shattered horizon of socialist and capitalist realism. Thinking anew the theory and practice of democratic politics, the essays put into question the meaning of ideology (as false consciousness) and the meaning of power (as seduction). On the question of ideology, political theorists, including Anthony Giddens, Jurgen Habermas, Claude Lefort, and Zygmunt Bauman, challenge the privileging of ideology-critique in orthodox Marxism. This critical reinterpretation of ideology is then accelerated by a radical (Baudrillardian) rereading of the meaning of power as seduction. The book concludes with political analyses of demon politics in the post-Cold War era.

The Last Sex continues the exploration of gender politics in the 1990s, begun in The Hysterical Male and Body Invaders; with the addition of key articles on lesbian and gay sexuality, The Last Sex broadens its survey of issues to include a reflexive consideration of themes related to transgender and trans-sexuality. This provocative collection responds to a major shift taking place both in feminist theory as well as in the very style of feminist writing.