[ecrea] New reviews in Culture Machine

>CULTURE MACHINE <http://www.culturemachine.net> 
>is pleased to announce the publication of the following new book reviews:
>
>* Dave Boothroyd (2006) Culture on Drugs: 
>Narco-Cultural Studies of High Modernity. 
>Manchester: Manchester University Press. Reviewed by Rich Cante.
>
>Taking drugs is a crucial phrase in Dave 
>Boothroyds Culture on Drugs: Narco-Cultural 
>Studies of High Modernity. Through such devices, 
>the book manages, to its great credit, not to be 
>too much about drugs. Boothroyd repeatedly uses 
>taking drugs in the sense both of 
>ingestion/injection/inhalation and of an 
>already-deconstructed epistemology. The latter 
>amounts, if not to taking drugs as traditionally 
>delimitable objects, then to taking them 
>otherwise: as not analytically severable from 
>their spatial and temporal surrounds, or from 
>the fabrics they share - as poisons and as 
>cures - with any such near and far surrounds 
>(including their entailed abstinences and 
>sobrieties). ... For the places it takes 
>cultural theoryand shows that cultural theory 
>can, in fact, be taken by taking drugs otherwise 
>- my hat goes off to the potency as well as the 
>measures of Boothroyds subtly potent 
>concoctions, which are only as evasive and as they are head-on.
>
>* Ned Rossiter (2006) Organised Networks: Media 
>Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions. 
>Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Reviewed by Kirsty Robertson.
>
>Ned Rossiters complex and thought-provoking 
>book, Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative 
>Labour, New Institutions, focuses on emergent 
>institutional forms characterizing systems of 
>networked communication. Rossiter argues 
>persuasively that in the discussion of networked 
>culture, a reformulation of traditional thinking 
>around organizations is necessary in order to 
>counteract the obsolescence of representational 
>democracy, and to refocus attention on 
>relational moments of antagonism outside of 
>state structure and immanent to online networks. 
>Thinking about network culture in this manner 
>offers the possibility of rethinking the 
>sustainability of critique in a world that is 
>often characterized as one with no outside, 
>that is, a society in which everything is 
>co-opted, leaving no independent position from which to stage a critique.
>
>* Bernadette Wegenstein (2006) Getting Under the 
>Skin: Body and Media Theory. Cambridge and 
>London: MIT Press. Reviewed by Meredith Jones.
>
>Marshall McLuhan wrote in /Understanding Media/ 
>(1964) that the medium is the message, meaning 
>not only that subject matter and technical form 
>are intrinsically tied together but that, 
>crucially, the mode of delivery has more 
>importance than its content. Later he amended 
>his famous sound bite to the medium is the 
>massage, a variation that has been interpreted 
>in many ways but is perhaps most interestingly 
>understood as a distinctly corporeal notion 
>about the ways bodies are touched and affected 
>by media. Bernadette Wegenstein takes this 
>relationship between media and bodies and 
>expands it within her thesis that bodies and 
>media are so profoundly interlinked in the 
>contemporary world that they are 
>interchangeable. The final chapter of her 
>excellent book /Getting Under the Skin: Body and 
>Media Theory/ is simply titled The Medium is 
>the Body ­ by this stage of the argument an almost superfluous statement.
>
>
>TO READ THE FULL REVIEWS:
>
>1. Go to <http://www.culturemachine.net>
>
>2. Click on the E-journal blue button
>
>3. Click on the Reviews purple button at the bottom of the screen.
>
>CULTURE MACHINE <http://www.culturemachine.net/> 
>is an open-access journal of cultural studies 
>and cultural theory which publishes new work 
>from both established figures and up-and-coming 
>writers. It is fully refereed and has an 
>International Editorial Advisory Board which 
>includes Geoffrey Bennington, Robert Bernasconi, 
>Sue Golding, Lawrence Grossberg, Peggy Kamuf, 
>Alphonso Lingis, Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton, 
>Mark Poster, Avital Ronell, Nicholas Royle, Tadeusz Slawek and Kenneth Surin.
>
>--
>Dr Joanna Zylinska
>Department of Media and Communications
>Goldsmiths, University of London
>New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK
>
>My website: http://www.joannazylinska.net
>Reviews Editor for Culture Machine: http://www.culturemachine.net

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Nico Carpentier (Phd)
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Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.56
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.36.84
Office: 5B.401a
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&
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Web: http://www.ecrea.eu
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