Late Editions: Cultural Studies for the End of the Century – serie

"Para-Sites", the penultimate volume in the Late Editions series, explores how social actors located within centres of power and privilege develop and express a critical consciousness of their own situations. Departing from the usual focus on ethnography and cultural analysis on the socially marginalized, these pieces probe subjects who are undeniably complicit with powerful institutional engines of contemporary change. In each case, the possibility of alternative thinking or practices is in complex relation to the subject's source of empowerment. These cases challenge the condition of cynicism that has been the favoured mode of characterizing the mind-set of intellectuals and professionals, comfortable in their lives of middle-class consumption and work. In their effort to establish para-sites of critical awareness parallel to the levels of political and economic power at which they function, these subjects suggest that those who lead ordinary lives of modest power and privilege might not be parasites in relation to the systems they serve, but may be creating unique and independent critical perspectives.

This is a collection of ten interviews explore how producers of documentary media - filmmakers, journalists, and artists - located in societies considered marginal to the high-tech global centres respond to local and international audiences in creating their works. Interviewees include: a South African playwright who is shaping a distinctive form of activist journalism; a New Guinean producer who manages several media careers; Polish and German filmmakers developing critical documentaries on compromised new orders; a Columbian artist who provides powerful representations of endemic violence in her society; and writers from Martinique and Argentina with varied careers in the arts, media, and politics who provide tragicomic accounts of the marginal situations of their societies.

This is a collection of ten interviews explore how producers of documentary media - filmmakers, journalists, and artists - located in societies considered marginal to the high-tech global centres respond to local and international audiences in creating their works. Interviewees include: a South African playwright who is shaping a distinctive form of activist journalism; a New Guinean producer who manages several media careers; Polish and German filmmakers developing critical documentaries on compromised new orders; a Columbian artist who provides powerful representations of endemic violence in her society; and writers from Martinique and Argentina with varied careers in the arts, media, and politics who provide tragicomic accounts of the marginal situations of their societies.

From the frontiers of cyberspace to Tibetans in exile, from computer bulletin boards to faxes, film and videotape, the evolution of media continues to generate new avenues for cultural criticism, political activism and self-reflection. How is contemporary life affected by this proliferation of information technologies? How does the Internet influence, and perhaps alter, users' experience of community and their sense of self? In what way are giant media conglomerates implicated in these far-reaching developments? This text, the third volume in the "Late Editions" series, confronts these questions, exploring both the new pathways being forged through media and the predicaments of those struggling to find their way in the twilight of the 20th century.

What is it like to be a scientist at the end of the 20th century? How have shifts in power and in assumptions about knowledge affected scientific practice? Who are the people behind the new technologies, and how do they address the difficult moral and professional issues during a time of global change? This work explores these and other important questions at the approach of the next millennium. 24 contributors from a broad range of fields present the voices of the scientists themselves. Through interviews, conversations and memoirs the text presents: Lithuanian physicists who discuss science after Communism and their own fantasies about what Western science is; a Japanese-American woman struggling with her ambivalence over designing nuclear weapons; political activists in India who examine relations among science, environmental politics and government ideology in the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster; and many others, including biologists, physicians, corporate researchers and scientists working with virtual reality and other cutting-edge technologies.

What is it like to be a scientist at the end of the 20th century? How have shifts in power and in assumptions about knowledge affected scientific practice? Who are the people behind the new technologies, and how do they address the difficult moral and professional issues during a time of global change? This work explores these and other important questions at the approach of the next millennium. 24 contributors from a broad range of fields present the voices of the scientists themselves. Through interviews, conversations and memoirs the text presents: Lithuanian physicists who discuss science after Communism and their own fantasies about what Western science is; a Japanese-American woman struggling with her ambivalence over designing nuclear weapons; political activists in India who examine relations among science, environmental politics and government ideology in the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster; and many others, including biologists, physicians, corporate researchers and scientists working with virtual reality and other cutting-edge technologies.

Encompassing a range of disciplines - notably anthropology, politics, history, comparative literature, and philosophy - the annual publication "Late Editions" exposes unsettling dilemmas and unprecedented challenges facing cultural studies on the brink of the twenty-first century. Successive volumes appear annually until the year 2000, each engaging the predicaments of particular institutions, nations, and persons at this point of social, cultural, and political change. The project will test the limits of scholarly conventions by finding new ways to expose cultural formations emerging from the maturation or exhaustion of once-powerful ideas whose validity is now deeply in question. "Perilous States", the first volume of "Late Editions", presents conversations between American scholars, most of whom are anthropologists, and individuals situated amidst political and social upheaval with whom they share affinities.Primarily but not exclusively from Eastern Europe, the cast includes Russian writers, Hungarian scientists and academics, Armenian politicians, Siberian religious and medical leaders, a Gypsy leader, a Polish poet, a French politician, and a white South African musician who is a self-styled Zulu. Their voices unite around themes of democracy, market economy, individual rights, and the reawakened force of suppressed ethnic and racial identities. To obtain fresh perspectives on these cultural and social transformations, the volumes consist of in-depth conversations, relayed in essay form, between scholars and individuals in other cultures with whom they share affinities. This novel approach blends the immediacy of interviews, the objectivity of journalism, and the intellectual rigor of scholarship. The second volume published in the autumn of 1994 addresses issues of science and culture. Contributors to this volume are Marjorie Balzer, Sam Beck, David B. Coplan, Michael M.J. Fischer, Nia Georges, Bruce Grant, Douglas R. Holmes, Stella Grigorian, George E. Marcus, Kathryn Milun, Eleni Papagaroufali, Paul Rabinow and Julie Taylor.

This is part of a series of annuals designed to probe cultural, institutional and geopolitical change as the 20th century closes. The books provide in-depth interviews with those closely involved with these changes. This volume focuses on the investment of corporations in the concept of culture, long considered the province of anthropologist or those involved in the humanistic disciplines. The idea of a "corporate culture" emerges, with its own organization, management policies, practices and ethos. The text examines this culture of corporations, looking at how it reflects self-contained communities or fragmented human existence in groups under conditions of postmodernity. Conversations with managers, financial and risk analysts and other participants in national and international organizations are used in an attempt to map the terrain of the present and navigate the uncertain future.

Like the McCarthy era of the 1950s, there is a strong current of paranoid social thought at the end of the 20th century. Conspiracy theories abound, not only in extremist ideologies and groups, but in commerce, science, and economics-arenas where a paranoid style is least expected. A curiosity about paranoia at its most reasonable is at the root of this volume. Some pieces develop conversations that reveal the post-Cold War situations of countries such as Italy, Russia, Slovenia, and the United States where conspiratorial explanations of national dramas seem to make sense. Other pieces tackle paranoia as a style of debate in such diverse realms as science, psychotherapy, and popular entertainment, where conspiracy theories emerge as a compelling way to address the inadequacies of rational expertise and organization in the face of immense changes that undermine them.

The final volume in the series devoted to documenting the diverse social and cultural transitions of the fin-de-siecle, this work offers a look back at the inception and progress of the series. The contributors reflect on how the shifting context for the production and reception of the series has been a reliable barometer of the profound ways in which traditional forms of knowledge about society are changing. The focus then changes to dealing with the social phenomena that evoke the value of zero. The idea of a zero state as it relates to artificial intelligence, euthanasia, cryonics, money and the disappearing idea of society itself in the discourse of contemporary politics. Far from being the loss of meaning, the consideration of zero entails the proliferation of meaning in the face of voids, absences and ultimately of puzzles like the contemplation of death in life.