Mark Poster
Biographic Data
| ID | 92307 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark Poster |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Poster |
| SIGNATURE | POSTER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2433-4550 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 85 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 172 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 83 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Who Controls Digital Culture
Critical Theory and Poststructuralism
In Critical Theory and Poststructuralism Mark Poster enacts a dialogue between the French poststructuralists, especially Michel Foucault, and the tradition of critical social theory as developed by the Frankfurt School and by other Continental theorists such as Jean-Paul Sartre. These confrontations between poststructuralists who represent "postmodern" thought and theorists committed the "modern" project of the Enlightenment is, according to Post…
Georg Groddeck
Thoughts on war, trauma, and the need for diplomacy
War is a uniquely human scourge with complex biological, psychological, social, and political determinants. In this paper, repetition-compulsions both in making war and in the diagnosis and treatment of war trauma are documented. The diagnosis and treatment of war trauma are reviewed from the Napoleonic wars until the present, and parallel tracks in the development of military history, neurology, and psychoanalysis are traced. A personal history …
Georg Groddeck’s Maternal Turn
Into the Universe of Technical Images
"Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent communication crisis, this work by Vilém Flusser forecasts either the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a society of unbearable, oppressive sameness, locked in a pattern it cannot change. First published in German in 1985 and now available in English for the first time, Into the Universe of Technical Images outlines the history of communication technology …
Systematische Medienphilosophie
Deleuze and New Technology
Ferenczi and Groddeck
Global Media and Culture
Global Media and Culture Mark Poster (bio) The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . . . In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of …
Swan's Way
Swan's Way:Care of Self in the Hyperreal Mark Poster (bio) Reality Media As the last century came to an end and the new one began, media culture in the United States has taken increasingly surprising turns toward "reality." On the Jerry Springer, show ordinary folk reveal and act out their loves and hates before a national television audience. Broadcasting in talk-radio format, Howard Stern insults listeners and guests alike, and Rush Limbaugh sc…
The Secret Self
In the late 1990s, ‘Identity Theft’ became a crime in the United States. At that time ‘Identity Theft’ was determined to be the fastest rising crime in the country. It is a crime that depends on digital culture and networked computing. I ask how this crime works to redefine the nature of identity, how it exteriorizes identity, separating it from the interiority of consciousness and moving it into the realm of information machines. The implication…
Information Please
Information Please advances the ongoing critical project of the media scholar Mark Poster: theorizing the social and cultural effects of electronically mediated information. In this book Poster conceptualizes a new relation of humans to information machines, a relation that avoids privileging either the human or the machine but instead focuses on the structures of their interactions. Synthesizing a broad range of critical theory, he explores how …
Information Please
Hardt and Negri’s Information Empire
Hardt and Negri’s Empire contains dystopian gestures toward information technology. In this essay I examine these aspects of their important work, without ignoring their more positive understandings of the topic. I hope to sustain three arguments about networked digital information humachines that counter the dystopian thesis: (1) They are an evolving, unavoidable and central aspect of globalization; (2) they contain countless dangers and afford …
History in the Digital Domain
no abstract
Consumption and digital commodities in the everyday
The category of the everyday has designated in social theory the remainder, what is left over after the important regions of politics and production. This left consumption in the under-theorized domain of the everyday. Since Veblen – and more recently Baudrillard and de Certeau – consumption has been reconfigured as significant in its own right, as a complex, articulated area related directly to culture. Liberal thinkers have also claimed consume…
Perfect Transmissions
In the globally networked world, strange, unexpected, and sometimes amusing events occur. This article analyzes one such happening with the purpose of understanding how the global communication system affects national cultures. It is the author's hypothesis that the current state of globalization, of which the internet is a major component, imposes a new and heightened level of interaction between cultures. This interactivity changes each culture…
Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings
This is an expanded edition of the first comprehensive overview of the work of Jean Baudrillard, one of the most fascinating thinkers on the French intellectual scene. To the original selection of his writings from 1968 to 1985, this new edition adds examples of Baudrillard's work since that time. Reviews of the First Edition "This is a good book, and the author of its selected writings, Jean Baudrillard, deserves only a share of the compliment. …
Visual studies as media studies
Framing the Rational in Fieldwork
Everyday (Virtual) Life
The concept of everyday life has been central to the discourse of critical theory at least since the early 1960s when Henri Lefebvre devoted several volumes to elaborating the idea. 1 In this essay I shall review the category of the everyday and test its critical capacities in the current context, when information machines or media have been disseminated widely in places like the home and the street, perhaps undermining the boundary between the q…
Jean Baudrillard
Underdetermination
The Gordian Knot
Critical Theory and Poststructuralism
In Critical Theory and Poststructuralism Mark Poster enacts a dialogue between the French poststructuralists, especially Michel Foucault, and the tradition of critical social theory as developed by the Frankfurt School and by other Continental theorists such as Jean-Paul Sartre. These confrontations between poststructuralists who represent "postmodern" thought and theorists committed the "modern" project of the Enlightenment is, according to Post…
Psychoanalysis and Feminism
This is a courageous book, one that is likely to have a deep impact on the theoretical development of the women's movement. In the book, Freud, who has been the movement's bête notr, is first cleansed of all traces of anti-feminism and then elevated as the movement's principal theorist. Brashly defying so many axioms of feminism, Mitchell is likely to arouse a storm of controversy. Having learned of Mitchell's thesis in this book, I opened its pa…
National Identities and Communications Technologies
1999). National Identities and Communications Technologies. The Information Society: Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 235-240
Consumption and digital commodities in the everyday
The category of the everyday has designated in social theory the remainder, what is left over after the important regions of politics and production. This left consumption in the under-theorized domain of the everyday. Since Veblen – and more recently Baudrillard and de Certeau – consumption has been reconfigured as significant in its own right, as a complex, articulated area related directly to culture. Liberal thinkers have also claimed consume…
Hardt and Negri’s Information Empire
Hardt and Negri’s Empire contains dystopian gestures toward information technology. In this essay I examine these aspects of their important work, without ignoring their more positive understandings of the topic. I hope to sustain three arguments about networked digital information humachines that counter the dystopian thesis: (1) They are an evolving, unavoidable and central aspect of globalization; (2) they contain countless dangers and afford …
Michel Foucault
Hubert Dreyfus, and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, with an afterword by Michel Foucault (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. xxiii 231
Underdetermination
Words without Things
An increasing segment of communications is mediated by electronic devices. People watch television; make phone calls; listen to radio; go to movies; use computers, fax machines, VCRs, and stereos. Such communications occur in every institution and in every social group. Politics, work, consumption, family, military, church, education, leisure activities-in varying degrees all employ electronic mechanisms in their communications. In each instance,…
Everyday (Virtual) Life
The concept of everyday life has been central to the discourse of critical theory at least since the early 1960s when Henri Lefebvre devoted several volumes to elaborating the idea. 1 In this essay I shall review the category of the everyday and test its critical capacities in the current context, when information machines or media have been disseminated widely in places like the home and the street, perhaps undermining the boundary between the q…
Althusser on History without Man
HE SOCIAL THOUGHT of Louis Althusser1 began as a direct attack against Marxist humanists.2 Most closely identified in France with the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Roger Garaudy, and Maximilien Rubel, Marxist humanism emphasized the active and creative role of men and women in the shaping of history. For too long, the humanists argued, Marxism has been identified with a determinism that limited the role of human beings in history to one of passivit…
Le Miroir de la Production
Jean Baudrillard, Le Miroir de la Production, ou l'Illusion Critique du Materialisme Historique. Tournai, Belgium: Casterman, 1973. 145 pp
Global Media and Culture
Global Media and Culture Mark Poster (bio) The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . . . In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of …
Why not to Read Foucault
FOUCAULT by J. G. Merquior Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. 188pp., $8.95 (paper
Postmodern Virtualities
Sartre's Second Critique. Ronald Aronson
Foucault, the Present and History
oucault's historical work initiates a thematic of discontinuity.' That much is well known. What is less well recognized is that his work also implies a discontinuity in present social formation, a discontinuity that resituates historian's relation to past, that suggests a theoretical reorientation of historical discipline, and that calls for a reexamination of appropriate topics of historical investigation. Foucault's work enacts this second type…
Foucault, Marxism and History
Foucault, Marxism and History
Technology and Culture in Habermas and Baudrillard
Since the Second World War Marxist theory has confronted a conjuncture that has proven increasingly recalcitrant to its categories and analysis. Although the mode of production has remained capitalist, and therefore amenable to the critique of political economy, the locus of revolution and social protest has shifted further and further away from the labor process within the most advanced capitalist nations. In the period 1840 to 1880, when Marx s…
The Hegel Renaissance
Before World War II French intellectuals had paid little attention to Hegel. Only offbeat intellectuals like André Breton's surrealists and a circle of young Marxists in the 1920s paid tribute to the German dialectician. Among the reasons suggested by Alexandra Koyré for the lack of interest were the obscurity of Hegel's writing, the strength of Cartesian and Kantian traditions, Hegel's Protestantism, but, above all, the incredulity of the French…
Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment
The Hegel Renaissance
Before World War II French intellectuals had paid little attention to Hegel. Only offbeat intellectuals like André Breton's surrealists and a circle of young Marxists in the 1920s paid tribute to the German dialectician. Among the reasons suggested by Alexandra Koyré for the lack of interest were the obscurity of Hegel's writing, the strength of Cartesian and Kantian traditions, Hegel's Protestantism, but, above all, the incredulity of the French…
Le Miroir de la Production
Jean Baudrillard, Le Miroir de la Production, ou l'Illusion Critique du Materialisme Historique. Tournai, Belgium: Casterman, 1973. 145 pp
Althusser on History without Man
HE SOCIAL THOUGHT of Louis Althusser1 began as a direct attack against Marxist humanists.2 Most closely identified in France with the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Roger Garaudy, and Maximilien Rubel, Marxist humanism emphasized the active and creative role of men and women in the shaping of history. For too long, the humanists argued, Marxism has been identified with a determinism that limited the role of human beings in history to one of passivit…
Psychoanalysis and Feminism
This is a courageous book, one that is likely to have a deep impact on the theoretical development of the women's movement. In the book, Freud, who has been the movement's bête notr, is first cleansed of all traces of anti-feminism and then elevated as the movement's principal theorist. Brashly defying so many axioms of feminism, Mitchell is likely to arouse a storm of controversy. Having learned of Mitchell's thesis in this book, I opened its pa…
Histoire et Dialectique de la Violence
The Utopian Thought of Restif de la Bretonne
Les Staliniens
Dominique Desanti, Les Staliniens: une expérience politique, 1944-1956. Paris: Fayard, 1975
Mirror of Production
Are the concepts of labor and of production adaptable to a developing industrial society? What is the meaning of "pre-industrial organization"? In attempting to answer these questions, Jean Baudrillard examines the lessons of Marxism which has created a productivist model and a fetishism of labor. He argues that we must break the mirror of production which "reflects all of Western metaphysics," and free the Marxist logic from the restrictive cont…
Marx, Freud and the Critique of Everyday Life
The theory and practice of revolutionary social transformation, Bruce Brown argues, cannot rest content with the exclusive emphasis of traditional Marxism on world-historic processes and the struggle of the working classes for their collective emancipation. This means to discover how capitalist rule becomes internalized in individuals who suffer not only from economic and political oppression, but also from forms of specifically psychological opp…
Existential Marxism in Postwar France
Freud's Concept of the Family
Freud did not self-consciously develop a theory of the family. He speaks of it at many points in case studies, in technical papers on psychoanalysis, in studies of metapsychology, in interpretive works on history, society and culture. But everywhere his dominant concepts are the individual personality and the psychoanalytically reduced social totality, a focus which systematically disfigures the referential social relations. Freud states that the…
Existentialism and Sociology
Existential Marxism in Postwar France
Existential Marxism in Postwar France. From Sartre to Althusser
Critical theory of the family
Marx's Fate
Marx's Fate is an intellectual biography of Marx that combines historical, textual and psychological analyses to provide major new insights into the philosopher's writings and development.
Sartre's Marxism
Semiology and Critical Theory
In the twentieth century several groups of social theorists have labored to unlock the Marxist paradigm from the grip of economic reductionism in which it was held by the Second International and Stalinism. The Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, the theorists of the Frankfurt School, Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, independent critics such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Karl Korsch, Eastern European Communists, Georg Lukacs in Hungary, Adam…
Critical Theory of the Family
Existential Marxism in Postwar France, from Sartre to Althusser.
The Description for this book, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser, will be forthcoming.
Critical Theory of the Family
Technology and Culture in Habermas and Baudrillard
Since the Second World War Marxist theory has confronted a conjuncture that has proven increasingly recalcitrant to its categories and analysis. Although the mode of production has remained capitalist, and therefore amenable to the critique of political economy, the locus of revolution and social protest has shifted further and further away from the labor process within the most advanced capitalist nations. In the period 1840 to 1880, when Marx s…
The Policing of Families.Jacques Donzelot , Robert Hurley
The Myths of Information
Sociology (48 works) · Philosophy (40 works) · Epistemology (32 works) · Political science (29 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Psychology (24 works) · History (22 works) · Law (22 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Aesthetics (16 works)