Préface

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About this book

(input/notes for an introduction FRANCAIS)

'Google didn’t pick random collections of content. Instead the company’s venture into the world of literature started by digitizing millions of books from some of the most venerable research libraries — Harvard, the New York Public Library, Stanford, the University of Michigan and Oxford — with plans to expand to libraries around the world. These are highly curated collections of books which have been built by cultural workers over hundreds of years, and with considerable public funding. As Google devoured these library collections, the company also invisibly absorbed the countless hours of labor that had been expended by the cultural workers who had built those collections – without paying a dime in compensation and with few commitments to any kind of democratic accountability beyond “access.”'[1]

'I’m proposing that we consider movements and our digital records in the context of “cycles of contention.” Think about these cycles as the opening and closing of windows of opportunities for people to realize that their problems aren’t individual failings, but systemic, and then to act on those grievances as a group.'[2]

'Culture has not only created epistemology, but indeed also signal-processing machines, which are then by definition detached from culture: they do not ‘count’ semantic aspects; they do not view images as icons; they do not perceive sound as music; and they read texts with the aesthetics of a scanner, by Optical Character Recognition.'[3]

'The engagement with the present -- and the spirit of the times -- set the political agenda in a variety of realms, (ranging from sexuality and and kinship system to religious and discursive practices). The analyses of these themes are transmitted through narratives -- mythologies or fictions, which I have renamed as "figurations" or cartographies of the present. A cartography is a politically informed map of one's historical and social locations, enabling the analysis of situated formations of power and hence the elaboration of adequate forms of resistance'[4]
  1. http://informationobservatory.info/2015/10/27/google-books-fair-use-or-anti-democratic-preemption/#more-279
  2. https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/radical-archives-and-the-new-cycles-of-contention/
  3. Wolfgang Ernst: “From Media History to Zeitkritik“.
  4. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Theory (2011)

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