You can feel people trying to theorise the future in real time, while standing knee-deep in culture-war residue and CRT monitors.
Long before social media platforms, algorithmic identity or digital selfhood became everyday realities, these essays were already grappling with pornography and simulation, AIDS activism, reproductive politics, cybernetics, postmodernism, biotechnology and the cultural consequences of emerging technological systems.
Edited by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross for the Social Text collective, the collection brings together an unusually wide-ranging group of writers working across cultural studies, media theory, feminist critique, political philosophy and visual culture. Again and again, the essays circle questions that now feel startlingly contemporary: technological mediation, institutional trust, the body under systems of control, the politics of visibility, and the uneasy merging of intimacy, media and power.
A fascinating artefact from the transitional zone between late postmodern theory and networked digital life. Particularly suited to readers interested in media archaeology, cyberculture, cultural studies, internet history, queer theory, visual culture, posthumanism and the intellectual atmosphere surrounding the end of the twentieth century.
University of Minnesota Press paperback edition. In very good condition with light shelf wear and minor edge rubbing to wraps. Internally clean and well preserved throughout.
