The Last Word | Professor Andy Miah

Psychogeography

Coverley, M. (2006). Psychogeography. Harpenden, Pocket Essentials.

‘Of course, it is through the media that psychogeography has gained a degree of mainstream acknowledgement and it is through the varied mediums of the novel and poetry, of film and internet, that it is able to leave a lasting record and to establish a tradition of its own. But, with the return of Robinson in Keiller’s work, we are recalled finally to Defoe himself in whom the figure of novelist, pamphleteer and radical combined to provide a lasting template for a future psychogeography in which literary endeavour and political activism are once again inseparable.’ (p.137)

Virtual Anxiety

Kember, S. (1998). Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies, and Subjectivity. Manchester, Manchester University Press.

“…the raising of the undead in technoscientific discourse signifies not only the validation of difference but the desire to effect new and illicit kinds of connection within and across academic and disciplinary boundaries as well as organic and inorganic realsm. Vampires in this context are about difference, technology and writing linked by the possibilities of ‘as if’. They are a facet of feminist figurative writing in academic discourse which, tied to specific and declared investments, help to keep the monsters out of the closets and divert us from our virtual anxieties.”

City of Bits

Mitchell, W. J. (1995). City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press.

‘The uncertainties and dangers of the bitsphere frontier are great, but it is a place of new opportunity and hope. So forget the global couch-potato patches that Marshall McLuhan surveyed back in the sixties. This will be the place for a global village.’

Organs without Bodies

Žižek, S. (2004). Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. London & New York, Routledge.

“How then are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is self-revolutionizing? Perhaps this is the question today.”

About the Last Word

The Last Word is a category I’ve decided to start, which will be constituted simply by the last sentence (or two) of books I am reading.