[Minorcompositions] Don’t Network. The Avant Garde after Networks

[Minor Compositions]

*Don’t Network. The Avant Garde after Networks*
Marc James Léger

Explores the nature of avant garde art within contemporary capitalism

There is something rotten about network society. Although the 
information economy promises to create new forms of wealth and social 
cooperation, the real subsumption of labour under post-Fordism has 
instead produced a social factory of precarious labour and cybernetic 
surveillance. In this context people have turned to networks as an 
ersatz solution to social problems. Networks become the agent of 
history, a technological determinism that in the best-case scenario 
leads to post-capitalism but at worst leads to new forms of exploitation 
and inequality. Don’t Network proposes a third option to technocratic 
biocapitalism and social movement horizontalism, an analysis of the ways 
in which vanguard politics and avant-garde aesthetics can today 
challenge the ideologies of the network society.


“The Hacienda has been built, but as a network economy that turns 
everyone into cannibalistic creatives that devour themselves and the 
planet satisfying the insatiable demands of the market. Don’t Network 
offers a lucid analysis of the new class war going on in contemporary 
art and politics.” – Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, author of After the Great 
Refusal

“Don’t Network presents a compelling argument that outlines and 
undermines the hold of contemporary positivisms in politics, aesthetics 
and the social sciences. The book develops Lacanian schemas of 
incompleteness and Marxist dialectics to advance negation, rather than 
connectivity, as the core of any potential cultural avant garde, and as 
part of a manifest vision for radical movements beyond diffuse and 
atomised moments of resistance.” – Marina Vishmidt, author of 
Speculation as a Mode of Production


Bio: Marc James Léger is an independent scholar living in Montreal. He 
is author of Brave New Avant Garde and Drive in Cinema, and editor of 
two volumes of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today.

PDF available freely online: http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=872

Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions now. 
Official release to the book trade in December 2018.

Released by Minor Compositions, Colchester / Brooklyn / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing 
from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of 
everyday life.

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