Reading paths

Nothing here is long except by choice. Four of the seven below are essays, and two of those are under twenty pages.

First seven, for a newcomer with no background

1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, chapter 1. The move this entire site is built on: personal troubles into public issues.
2. Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless. Essay length. The greengrocer, and the best single text on control that runs without belief. Discussed on the East and West page.
3. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society. Short, furious, and the fastest route to radical monopoly.
4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Part Three, "Panopticism". One chapter. Read the chapter before you decide whether to read the book.
5. Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control". Six pages. Read it immediately after Foucault, in the same week, or it loses half its force.
6. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital". Essay length, and the clearest statement of the school argument.
7. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, introduction and chapter 1. The five filters, in the authors' own words rather than in summary.

Extension path, if you already have the core

1. Deleuze, "Postscript" again, properly this time. It reframes everything written about discipline before it.
2. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings. Supplies the mechanism underneath the philosophy. See the Macy Conferences.
3. Lazarsfeld's 1941 essay on administrative and critical research, then Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion. How the funding structure of a field determines its findings. See the Radio Project.
4. Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication. The materialist base for everything about media.
5. Michael Mann on infrastructural power, then Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy. Moves the analysis from ideas to pipes. See infrastructural power.
6. Illich, Tools for Conviviality. The only text in this project oriented to building rather than diagnosing.
7. La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Short, and the oldest statement of the central question.

Journals and outlets

Theory, Culture & Society. Critical Inquiry. New Left Review. Radical Philosophy. Journal of Political Ideologies. Constellations. Eurozine, which is essential for Central and Eastern European debate and is multilingual. Aeon. Boston Review.

Archives and open resources

Marxists Internet Archive, for Gramsci. UbuWeb and Monoskop, for theory and film. Open Library. Foucault.info. Illich's collected works at The Preserve, davidtinapple.com/illich. The Internet Archive for out-of-print material.

Film and documentary

Adam Curtis, with the caveat on the media page attached: watch, then check what moved you. The Century of the Self is the one to start with.

The Corporation (2003). Godard's La Chinoise and Tout va bien as period artifacts rather than arguments. The Lives of Others (2006) for the Eastern surveillance state. Videocracy (2009) on Berlusconi's media hegemony.

Contemporary continuations

Byung-Chul Han on achievement society and self-exploitation, which is probably the easiest way into this material if you are under forty. Wendy Brown on neoliberal subject formation. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, on the inability to imagine alternatives. Ivan Krastev on Europe's east and west split. Shoshana Zuboff, with the objections attached.

The counter-tradition

Analysis with no constructive edge produces exactly the paralysis this material is accused of. Mills, La Boétie, Freire, Gramsci, Illich, Wiener, Havel, Scott and Bourdieu on reflexivity make up the other half, and they have a page of their own.