Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl - Tiqqun

The Young-Girl is not always young; more and more frequently, she is not even female. She is the figure of total integration in a disintegrating social totality.--from Theory of the Young-Girl

First published in France in 1999, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl dissects the impossibility of love under Empire. The Young-Girl is consumer society's total product and model citizen: whatever "type" of Young-Girl she may embody, whether by whim or concerted performance, she can only seduce by consuming. Filled with the language of French women's magazines, rooted in Proust's figure of Albertine and the amusing misery of (teenage) romance in Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, and informed by Pierre Klossowski's notion of "living currency" and libidinal economy, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl diagnoses -- and makes visible -- a phenomenon that is so ubiquitous as to have become transparent.

In the years since the book's first publication in French, the worlds of fashion, shopping, seduction plans, makeover projects, and eating disorders have moved beyond the comparatively tame domain of paper magazines into the perpetual accessibility of Internet culture. Here the Young-Girl can seek her own reflection in corporate universals and social media exchanges of "personalities" within the impersonal realm of the marketplace. Tracing consumer society's colonization of youth and sexuality through the Young-Girl's "freedom" (in magazine terms) to do whatever she wants with her body, Tiqqun exposes the rapaciously competitive and psychically ruinous landscape of modern love.

State and Society: The Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and Political Centralization - John Gledhill, Barbara Bender, Mogens Trolle Larsen

The traditional Eurocentric view of state formation and the rise of civilization is vigorously challeged in this unusually broad-ranging, up-to-date and innovative book. Using research from archaeology, ethnology, and anthropology, the authors examine the dynamics of political centralization, the nature of social inequalities, state formation, the nature of bureaucracy and the role of literacy in a variety of historical and geographical contexts. They examine the developments and resistences encountered in state formation and the mechanisms which produce cumulative development on a world-historical scale.

United by a common committment to dialogue and to the idea that archaeology cannot exist in isolation from other social and historical sciences, this volume will be essential to all those working on issues of social inequality.

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Dynamics of Contention - Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly

 

Dissatisfied with the compartmentalization of studies concerning strikes, wars, revolutions, social movements, and other forms of political struggle, McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly identify causal mechanisms and processes that recur across a wide range of contentious politics. Critical of the static, single-actor models (including their own) that have prevailed in the field, they shift the focus of analysis to dynamic interaction. Doubtful that large, complex series of events such as revolutions and social movements conform to general laws, they break events into smaller episodes, then identify recurrent mechanisms and proceses within them. Dynamics of Contention examines and compares eighteen contentious episodes drawn from many different parts of the world since the French Revolution, probing them for consequential and widely applicable mechanisms, for example, brokerage, category formation, and elite defection. The episodes range from nineteenth-century nationalist movements to contemporary Muslim-Hindu conflict to the Tiananmen crisis of 1989 to disintegration of the Soviet Union. The authors spell out the implications of their approach for explanation of revolutions, nationalism, and democratization, then lay out a more general program for study of contentious episodes wherever and whenever they occur.

Karl Marx and the Anarchists - Paul Thomas

Karl Marx and the Anarchists examines Marx's disputes with the anarchist theoreticians he encountered at various stages of his career as a revolutionist. Marx's attacks on Stirner, Proudhon, and Bakunin are shown to be of vital importance to the understanding not only of the subsequent enmity between Marxists and anarchists, but also of Marx's own interpretation of revolutionary politics.