Bøker av Steven Connor

Asking is one of the simplest and most familiar of human actions, and has a right to be thought of as single most powerful and most variously cohering form of social-symbolic gesture. Because so much is at stake in the act of asking, asking, or asking for, almost anything, whether information, help, love or respect, can be asking for trouble, so a great deal of care must be taken with the ways in which asking occurs and is responded. A History of Asking is the first attempt to grasp the unity and variety of the technics and technologies of asking, in all its modalities, as they extend across a spectrum from weak forms like begging, pleading, praying, imploring, beseeching, entreating, suing, supplicating and soliciting, through to the more assertively and even aggressively self-authorising modes of asking, like proposing, offering, inviting, requesting, appealing, applying, petitioning, claiming and demanding. The book considers the history of 6 broad modes of petitory practice. The act of begging, both among animals and humans is considered in terms of its theatrics. The institution of the political petition, protocols for which seem to arise in also every system of government of which we have knowledge, is tracked through from late medieval to nineteenth-century Britain. The act of prayer, central to religious practice, though often the last form of religious behaviour to fall away among those lapsing from adherence, and one of the religious practices that is most likely to be adhered to in the absence of any other religious commitment, is the subject of sustained scrutiny. The appeal of prayer is essentially to the fact of participation in language, and the specific forms of commitment to the condition of being bound, bindable, or biddable by it. Wooing and the associated economics of seduction and solicitation are tracked through from the formalisation of the conventions of courtly love in the 12th century through to modern techniques of flirtation. The book revives the antique term 'suitage' in order to discuss all the forms of sueing and suitorship for favours or advantage, as well as, more broadly the act, pursued almost life-long, of trying to get one another to do things for us, in particular in indirect or vicarious forms of what may be called 'interpetition', such as the dedications of books to patrons, the institution of the testimonial or letter of reference and the practices of flattery. A History of Asking concludes with a discussion of the many ways in which our necessarily parasitic relations on each other in a complex society are both conveyed and dissimulated, especially through the ways in which we summon and salute different kinds of service.

Upending our perception of employment, a surprising investigation into the mystical nature of our daily toil. Dreamwork is a book about the ideas, dreams, dreads, and ideals we have about work. Its central argument is this: Although we depend on the idea of work for our identity as humans, we feel we must disguise from ourselves the fact that we do not know what work is. There is no example of work that nobody might, under some circumstances, do for fun. All work is imaginary--which is not to say that it is simply illusory, but rather that, to count as work, it must be imagined to be work. In other words, a large part of what we mean by working is this work of imagining. Work is therefore essentially mystical--just the opposite of what it is taken to be by all of us spending our days at desks, behind cash registers, and in factories. Delving into this complex mythos, Dreamwork looks in turn at worries about whether or not work is hard; the importance of places of work; the meanings of hobbies, holidays, and sabbaths; and the history of dreams of redeeming work.

Championing what it sees as a family of mischaracterized and undervalued actions and attitudes, this book proposes a new understanding of human behavior, one that encourages self-limitation and restraint.

"Many human beings have considered the powers and the limits of human knowledge, but few have wondered about the power that the idea of knowledge has over us. Steven Connor's The Madness of Knowledge is the first book to investigate this emotional inner life of knowledge - the lusts, fantasies, dreams, and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. There are in-depth discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud's epistemophilia (or love of knowledge), and the curiously insistent links between madness, magical thinking, and the desire for knowledge. Connor also probes secrets and revelations, quarreling and the history of quizzes and "general knowledge," charlatanry and pretension, both the violent disdain and the sanctification of the stupid, as well as the emotional investment in the spaces and places of knowledge, from the study to the library. In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts, and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging, and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life."--Jacket flap.

Dream Machines is a history of imaginary machines and the ways in which machines come to be imagined. It considers seven different kinds of speculative, projected or impossible machine: machines for teleportation, dream-production, sexual pleasure and medical treatment and cure, along with 'influencing machines', invisibility machines and perpetual motion machines. The process of imagining ideal or impossible forms of machinery tends backwards or inwards, allowing a way for imagination itelf to be conceived as a kind of machinery, or ingenious engineering. Machines suggest to us ways of imagining the machinery we take ourselves to be, the workings not only of immune systems and neural networks, but also of dreams, desires and aspirations. This reflexivity means that representations of machines are always suffused with intense feeling. The larger aim of Dream Machines is to isolate a strain of the visionary that may be involved in all thinking and writing about machines. An imaginary machine may also be a way of imagining other kinds of thing that a machine can do and be. This is the sense in which all machines may in fact be said to be forms of media; for we have always dreamed of and with machines, always therefore dreaming through the machines we have been dreaming about.

Providing a new philosophical understanding of sport, which defines what sport essentially is and means by setting out a complete grammar of sport, treating in turn its essential elements, A Philosophy of Sport will inform, surprise and delight those who have always thought sport should be taken more seriously.

This anthology explores all the major critical approaches to Dickens of the 1970s-1990s, including psychoanalytic, deconstructive, discourse-analytic, feminist and Marxist, enabling the reader to compare and contrast different treatments of particular Dickens novels.

Gathers together interpretations of Beckett's best-known plays, illustrating a range of theoretical approaches from deconstruction to reader-response theory, psychoanalysis and feminism. Steven Connor has written books on Dickens, Beckett and Postmodernist culture.

Considers the work of the most influential postmodern theorists, including Lyotard and Jameson, and offers accounts both of the work of newly emerging theorists and new areas of postmodernist culture which have developed over the years, especially in law, music, dance, spatial theory, ethnography, ecology, and the new technologies.