Apologies for cross-posting, but I thought list members might be interested
in these two books I came across in the latest issue of the excellent
'Cabinet' magazine (http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/):

Ben Kafka *The Demon Of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork*. New
York: Zone Books, 2012

"Since the middle of the eighteenth century, political thinkers of all
kinds–radical and reactionary, professional and amateur–have been
complaining about “bureaucracy.” But what, exactly, are they complaining
about?
In The Demon of Writing, Ben Kafka offers a critical history and theory of
one of the most ubiquitous, least understood forms of media: paperwork.
States rely on records to tax and spend, protect and serve, discipline and
punish. But time and again, this paperwork proves to be unreliable.
Examining episodes that range from the story of a clerk who lost his job
and then his mind in the French Revolution to an account of Roland
Barthes’s brief stint as a university administrator, Kafka reveals the
powers, the failures, and even the pleasures of paperwork. Many of its
complexities, he argues, have been obscured by the comic-paranoid style
that characterizes much of our criticism of bureaucracy. Kafka proposes a
new theory of what Karl Marx called the “bureaucratic medium.” Moving from
Marx to Freud, he argues that this theory of paperwork must include both a
theory of praxis and of parapraxis."
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/demon-writing-0


Ian Farr (ed) *Memory*. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2012. (Part of the
series Documents of Contemporary Art)

"This anthology investigates the turn in art not only towards archives and
histories, the relics of modernities past, but toward the phenomena, in
themselves, of “haunting” and the activation of memory. It looks at a wide
array of artistic relationships to memory association, repetition and
reappearance, as well as forms of “active” forgetting. Its discussions
encompass artworks from the late 1940s onward, ranging from reperformances
such as Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces (embodied resurrections of
decades-removed performance pieces by her contemporaries) to the inanimate
trace of “memory” Robert Morris assigns to his free-form felt pieces, which
“forget” in their present configurations their previous slides and falls.
..."

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/31/product_id/1267

Regards,
Rachel.

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