'Examining the persistence of the Cold War's massive restructuring of our lifeworld, this fascinating collection provides a series of incisive case studies that explores key sites of interaction between politics, technoscience and various modalities of cultural production since the mid-twentieth century. Taken together, these interlinked microhistories provide both a powerful demonstration of the book's central thesis regarding the Cold War - the degree to which, even 'after', we continue to live within it - and an important resource for the challenge of thinking beyond its legacies.'
Mark Dorrian, Forbes Chair in Architecture, University of Edinburgh
Reveals how the twenty-first century is the world the Cold War made
What are the legacies of the Cold War? This interdisciplinary collection explores how, in a number of fundamental ways, contemporary life and thought continue to be shaped by theories, technologies and attitudes that were forged during World War II and developed into organisational structures during the long Cold War.
From futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and surveillance technologies to smart weapons systems and contemporary fiction and art, this book shows that we are now living in a world imagined and engineered during the Cold War.
Drawing on theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Friedrich Kittler, Michel Serres, Peter Sloterdijk, Carl Schmitt, Bernard Stiegler and Paul Virilio, this collection makes connections between Cold War material and conceptual technologies as they relate to the arts, society and culture.
John Beck is Professor of Modern Literature and Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, London. Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.
Cover image: Ability-Composite, 2015 © Jordan Crandall
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John Beck is Professor of Modern Literature and Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, London. He is the author of Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics (SUNY, 2001) and Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2009) co-editor of American Visual Cultures (Continuum, 2005).

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Arts and Politics and Co-director of the research group Archaeologies of Media and Technology at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He co-edits the journal Cultural Politics (Duke UP), and is a series editor for Technicities (Edinburgh University Press) and Cultural Politics (Duke UP).

Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; Notes on contributors; Introduction; I. Pattern Recognition: 1. The Future: RAND, Brand and Dangerous to Know; 2. Simulate, Optimise, Partition: Algorithmic Diagrams of Pattern Recognition from 1953 Onwards; 3. Impulsive Synchronisation: A Conversation on Military Technologies and Audiovisual Arts; II The Persistence of the Nuclear: 4. The Meaning of Monte Bello; 5. Deep Geological Disposal and Radioactive Time: Beckett, Bowen, Nirex and Onkalo; 6. Shifting the Nuclear Imaginary: Art and the Flight from Nuclear Modernity; 7. Alchemical Transformations?: Fictions of the Nuclear State after 1989; III. Ubiquitous Surveillance: 8. 'The Very Form of Perverse Artificial Societies': The Unstable Emergence of the Network Family From its Cold War Nuclear Bunker; 9. The Signal Haunted Cold War: Persistence of the SIGINT Ontology; 10. 'Bulk Surveillance' or, the Elegant Technicities of Metadata; IV. Pervasive Mediations: 11. Notes from the Underground: Microwaves, Backbones, Party Lines and the Post Office Tower; 12. Insect Technics: War Vision Machines; 13. Overt Research; 14. Smart Dust and Remote Sensing: The Political Subject in Autonomous Systems; Index.