TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

The members of the Indonesian artist collective Ruangrupa presented the concept for the Documenta 15 (official spelling: Documenta fifteen) that they curated. The world’s largest exhibition of contemporary art, at least in terms of visitor numbers, which is scheduled to open in Kassel in summer 2022, will be titled lumbung. What is “lumbung”? A traditional… Read More »

It was with sadness that we heard of Alina Popa’s passing today. To honor her memory, we are re-publishing her last text dealing with her illness. her last writing was earlier on shared as a Google Document on social media.

What Is #AltWoke? #AltWoke is: The Catalytic Left. Post-Landian Left-Accelerationism. Team Reza Negarestani. ‘The Dark Insurrection.’ Direct action hacktivism. Free market socialism. Apocalyptic communism. Intersectional xenofeminism. Environmentally conscientious nihilism. Libidinal Marxism. Platform stacktivism. IoT urban policy. High post-post-structuralism. The Corporate Undercommons. Gratuitous neologism and nomenclature trolling. Lifestyle branding as political ideology & vice versa. AltWoke™:… Read More »

The joy of time travel isn’t to see how the world or people will look at a very distant point in time, but to find that there some concepts, pictures, artifacts, lifehacks, etc, that derive exclusively from one’s own era. Yet, what’s found is actually brought by the time traveler himself in order to save today’s artifacts and circumstances from decay, or — even better — from critique and close scrutiny . . . the time traveler becomes a smuggler: in order to stop something from being questioned, he smuggles it into the distant future, since no one is yet there to have any doubts about the many issues, ideas and controversies of our highly nontransparent age. It appears therefore, as though the real achievement of the future — its comparative advantage — is the absence of doubts, cognitive disorders, paradoxes and dissonances. There are no double binds in the future! In the future everybody cares for art and artists and we don’t even need to ask ‘why?’ . . . In the future, such questions, as well as many others, no longer exist . . .

Day 56: Jason Adams responds to Jussi Parikka, “The Alchemic Digital, The Planetary Elemental” “. . . it is the planetary computational accoutrement to the economic proper that ensures the just-in-time acquirability of the needed elements, such as the practice of High Frequency Trading (HFT) requires the development of software and hardware through which nanosecond-level… Read More »

Mohammad Salemy outlines some of the main criticisms of Accelerationism today and shares “a few insights (and perhaps critiques) in order to judge this intellectual movement from within its ranks [while providing] constructive insights on how to move forward from here”

. . . what to make of objects whose properties and relations are magical, decidedly unreal? Philosophy constitutes itself in opposition to magic; realism and rationality are understood to be incompatible with the inexplicable, unpredictable nature of wish-granting boxes, immortal apples who long for death, and other supernatural phenomena. While OOO and SR point towards a universe in which everything exists, the objects in these stories press further, insisting upon their own agency, centrality and unknowability. They are magic objects; they constitute miniature universes in which the tragedies and commonplaces of the “real” are constantly displaced by the possibility of unexpected transformation . . . [magic objects] offer an escape from the codified, knowable real, but one grounded in the reality of tangible things and the relations between them. They are magic not because of some illusionistic quality—that they are not, or something more than, what they seem—but because they possess supernatural abilities, affective and material capabilities literally beyond nature.

In order to respond to Carolyn L. Kane’s well researched history of plastic, I am expanding on the ontology of this synthetic substance and am highlighting the traces of its alien existence in various fields of knowledge by putting together a selection of images as well as introductory paragraphs from 12 wikipedia pages to reveal the extent of plastic’s penetration into our world.

What is left of Fedorov’s program after its patristic cast is demolished? Arguably, the core insights of cosmism survive intact, only cleared of obfuscation. These are: the intuition that science and technology will enable us to direct our own evolution; the recognition that this enablement is itself a feature of the machinery of the universe; and the conviction that this activity should be both the subject and object of our species’ self-education. Fedorov both expands the Museum to encompass all the data of the world, and shrinks it to the size of the individual soul. The cosmist imperative, its cosmopolitan scope, results from this enlistment of human beings by the universe, to consolidate it as a whole through their observation and participation. Human history encodes cosmic history . . . Fedorov’s incipient cosmism, too, expresses both a local and a global trajectory, the rupture of Christian particularism by a scientific universalism that it had, in part, presaged. The role of the Museum in Fedorov’s essay becomes less strained when liberated from the convolution of filial veneration, and its status as an instrument of cultural unification becomes more compelling.

An exquisite cadaver, Fidel ossified in his undead flesh, clings to and haunts dreams, a specter haunting the Caribbean, not the Marxian spectre of Communism, rather an Inquiet Spirit, walking age upon age – not unlike that monarchial exquisite corpse of England, Elizabeth and her cadaverous Prince-Consort, undead, vampires haunting the living from the age of the past century. Fidel, the end of an age, the last of the revolutionaries, takes a last undead glance over Havana as he dreams his failed revolution into the silence of the grave not yet opened to receive him, a ghastly mouth awaiting his final oneiric emission, los sueños de 26 Julio, no sería realidad; the dreams of the 26th of July will not be realized.

How can we think of something we never before thought? How can we feel it? What is the feeling of it? Actually, this was [the] question when we began trying to understand form in the time of cosmos. I think an artifact, or the form of an artifact is always somewhat unknown because it also carries a potential.

. . . while Kant and Hegel are narrated as embracing the “inhumanness within humanness”, ACC/SR/OOO is said to posit alienation as something that must be endured beyond the human entirely, since the human is incapable of encountering the alien from within the human, as remains possible in Kant and Hegel. . .Such a claim seems a strange one . . . Does Chukhrov mean to say, rather, that for ACC/SR/OOO, the noumenal is inaccessible to the phenomenal subject, which must rely instead, upon reason, mathematics, carbon-dating, and other abstractions? . . . The fact that Reza Negerastani’s concept of the “inhuman”, for instance, supports neither Chukhrov’s rhetorical choice nor the distinction it is attached to, would seem to deepen the stakes of answering these queries properly.

. . .how is it possible for human beings to be both embodied and distributed at the same time. . .? How is it that they report on the experience of an emergent whole larger than that sum of the individuals involved? More to the point, to generalize the implications of my thought experiment: in light of the reference to the term “solidarity,” how can one get individuals to spontaneously behave in accord with the best interests of all, without coercion?

If the XXI century has shown us anything, it is that it has been a very fractured one. The same can be also said about the Islamic State, which is composed by independent hubs, each one an ensemble manifested through a virtual platform and without any objective but the spread of acts of extreme violence, and a message of hate at its most elementary level . . . having wanted to destroy any resemblance of what they are against, they show themselves as the ultimate example of the object in their destructive hands. The only point they might be proving therefore is that subjectivity has ceased to exist so that, basically, we can easily conclude that they are condemning themselves.

What does it mean to leave an art world? . . . It speaks to a specific relationship to history and historicization, but also to a self-conscious positioning within an avant-garde that reveals the horizons of its possibilities, the limits of transgression and the boundaries of a community’s expectations. The myriad departures and renunciations that mark Qian Weikang and the New Measurement Group’s careers as individuals and as a group sketch not only the bounds of China’s mainstream art world but also the parameters of its avant-garde . . . their refusal of the self-conscious forms of being a contemporary artist within a domestic avant-garde, an increasingly marketized cultural sphere and, finally, within a global transnational environment demonstrates a persistent resistance to instrumentality and the collective and social life it sustains.

Its mechanistic protocols of control, exploitation, and expansion catalyzed by industrialization, the geopolitical incursions of highly-toxic Western masculinity have everywhere produced pockets of keen awareness of this masculinity’s illegitimacy and inadequacy. The virtual potential for various forms of liberatory politics to have purchase on the real is increased when these pockets gain depth, density, rationale, and kinesis. It is clear that the dual emergence of telecomputation and the Carbon Liberation Front has given the left project accidental access to the privileged space of End-Game Fantasy . . . and participation in what Uzma Z. Rizvi calls “the speculative fiction of time.

Can we truly embrace the great lesson of ecology, namely, that we are part of a complex array of vulnerable systems, without sparking another reboot in our imaginary cosmogonies? Is representation partly to blame for presenting the world as a digital rendering (everything in it is discreet and divided) instead of a tableaux formed by a multiplicity of topological surfaces that overlap and alter our perception?

The game is to overturn the Pythagorean conception of the string, its harmonics and their respective relations with the series of natural numbers. Under this hegemony, the sound object is conceived of in terms of, or as a number, which in turn becomes the condition for physical structures of the body, initiating sound-action from the executive neurological capacity alone . . . These dynamics, when set into motion, exceed all models founded on transverse vibrations of the string and suggest resonant capacities and emergent properties in the manner of a complex physical system. In practice, the game of Harmonic Criticality is an entrainment with the instrument as object on a neurophysiological level which can be extended to the biochemical and mineral substrates.

The art world shows how the engine of capitalism rather than running on notions of production and labor, or the concept of supply and demand, is actually fueled by capitalization, or how much one is prepared, or rather has been prepared, to pay the price today in order to receive a profit tomorrow. What guarantees future profits in the financial markets as well as the art world is not the logical algorithm of growth but the social power that can be systematically mobilized in both environments to enforce today’s prices and to guarantee a higher return in the future.

Allure, a lure for feeling: shine is a performative operation in which the felt aesthetics of refraction and diffraction reorganize relationality in a radiant choreography of thrown shimmers. Glittering in suspension between revelation and occlusion, between subject and object, between becoming-commodity and its radical disavowal, performances of shine shine light on ways that the derealization of hypervisuality—through embodying the opaque, ornamental, opalescent, obfuscatory—complicate, or even deracinate traditional discourses of visibility in what has come to be known (and often disdained) as conventional “identity” politics . . . Both Holert and Cheng continuously gesture toward a conception of shine beyond its Marxo-Freudian elaboration as “the lure of commodity or sexual fetishism”: a shine, in fact, “that resists precisely the concept of commodification.” This project resonates productively for me . . .

‘Fiction’ is in the air, and it has been for a while. We are all thinking about how plots and narratives are constructed, how convincing stories are told—whether legal, racial, financial, sexual—but what about character:

–as a moral quantity?
–as a narrative agitant?
–as a constructed practice?

If corruption is a process, character is a practice.

Is there not a corresponding danger inherent in the affirmationist discourses around new materialism? If we can locate a symbiosis between new materialism and animation do they not both point to a similar regression to ontological platitudes about internal intensities and oscillating spirits? Does the new materialism end up saying much the same thing as the hit song from The Lego Movie, another recent animated blockbuster: ‘Everything is Awesome!’’

Olivia Leiter responds with a diagram, produced as an algorithmic procedure in order for users to personally cope with the ramifications of sociopolitical corruption.

. . . [f]rom Feuerbach to Rich, we see the utilization of the Spectacle as the means of ensuring a governable population (whose individuals are recruited to die on behalf of the State) and ensuring a specific vision of the future for global politics.[2] What marks this competition as one for ‘divinity’ is not simply the struggle between a ‘secular’ West and a caliphate vying for global dominance – both facts which are nothing but surface effects and require no analysis whatsoever. As Feuerbach notes, even if religion disappears there can remain various substitutes that fulfill its function . . . these spectacular forms of governance are essentially religious because they require populations to be held in states of fear or hope – fear of some divine retribution/damnation, or the hope of a ‘democracy to come’ once the true enemy of the West has been exterminated through a strategy of ‘infinite justice.’

In considering art, culture and workers of every field, it seems that the craving for ‘New Relational Modes’ can be heard from every corner, yet, if one includes colonial history, the Ottoman Empire and the making of the new states mentioned in the text, the formation of the Western world and its relation and imposition of its provincial relational modes (including art), one thing that is easily avoided are the non-Arab Muslim cultures of the same region, and their historic relational modes that pass through the art-highway. What makes us close our eyes to the position of art for Urdu, Persian and Turkish speakers?

Suhail Malik’s “The Ontology of Finance: Price, Power, and the Arkhéderivative” from Urbanomic’s Collapse VIII and is now available online.

Meraud advances a persuasive cartography of the contemporary generic. But for all the polymorphous animism of its rhetoric, the screen remains stubbornly tethered to the device. Yet the Skirmonaut never was beholden to the Californian ideology. The most skillful of their number have always concealed their compulsive piracy under cover of dead media. Painting remains the ultimate scrim, as every good investor knows; neo-formalism the definitive study in purloined iridescence.

While the scientific world never underwent a Kuhnian paradigm shift, it still demonstrated its willingness to doing so, had the evidence proved conclusive. And while science does not simply reveal truths waiting to be discovered, but instead engages things and processes that remain indifferent to our assumptions – at least, until we engage them – we should not read Whitehead or Peirce as asserting that only non-rational negotiations with non-human entities yield results . . . Might it be the case that reason has yet to be considered as itself a material or real process, one in which there is no rationality aside from the invocation of potential yet also material or real reasons?

The Supercommunity Agency, a formal moniker for the millions of intricately networked, constantly mutating social constellations that composed the Government of Earth, transmitted its deliberations over a period of a few months, finally drafting a conclusive decision: humanity would mobilize itself towards the TOTALwork, the voluntary commitment to see through the extinction of the human species altogether. Everyone was to renounce biological reproduction – no more new generations, no more strife against the future, no more investment of desire to find itself better fulfilled in those to come. The species would die out together . . . A concession was made within the Supercommunity: for those who longed for a child, a new birth would be accompanied by the enforced sacrifice of the parents. Soon, even those children who grew up into the Supercommunity once the TOTALwork was well underway would no longer know that it was even possible to reproduce. Sterilization procedures had greatly helped. Sex was just that, sex. Work was creativity, without the anxiety of accumulation and inheritance.

While the genres of the past have been exhausted by the revolutions of modernity, the particular practices and functions of our theoretical knowledge provide normative criteria for judging the intent of artistic gestures. An art which takes seriously the constructive application of its role as a cognitive mediator, and responds to the specific content of the special sciences, may no longer speak to the debased average man, but it might join the chorus of that anonymous anyone who is a vector of liberation.

How would the post-humans of the future cope with immortality and unlimited leisure time? Or access to interplanetary travel? While techno-scientific innovations would be indispensable for achieving these ambitious aims, and the dismantling of the myth of the given not only makes such ambitions possible but demands their realization, it is pure fantasy to imagine that the psychopathologies that haunt the present would not continue to manifest themselves in other guises, even in a post-scarcity and post-mortality future . . . Even if the myth of the given is fully dismantled, and scientific nihilism is taken to its final conclusions, with the human fully ‘hacked’ and programmable as the biological machine that it is, the question still remains as to what we ought to do with this amplified power of self-transformation.

Anche had learned early in her education to not accept fate, that *if nature is unjust, change nature*. She had done this with her formula, saving humanity from the pain of decay, but now, in her inclination to find a solution to the suicide epidemic, she could no longer tell if she was looking to change nature again out of a search for justice, or out of sentimentality and a personal sense of loss.

There seems to be quite a lot of reverence for indifferent necessity, for the animals and gods that ‘live outside the languages that name them.’ Can we see here the philosopher peeking out from beneath the poet’s ill-fitting tunic? Or are Nancy’s stanzas so many stages on which the philosopher performs a tragic-comic drama in which he comes to terms with the fact that he must part ways with both animals and gods, reconciling himself to the fact that he, like the poet, must make do with a language that, though it is estranged from truth—or perhaps because it is estranged from truth—might still furnish a life…

See, but don’t be seen, [Tobias] thought, drifting off to sleep while devising half-conscious plans for repurposing technologies such that, rather than surveilling, they could be used as an even more powerful mode of communication.

Plants precede us, and they will continue on after we’ve passed. This is not a denial of the destruction that humans have wrought on the planet, but rather, a speculation of what may come after the Anthropocene. The Otolith Group’s Radiant (2012), presented at dOCUMENTA (13), examines the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The evacuated villages testify to the presence of radiation—toxic to humans but seemingly ignored by plants, which grow unfettered in our absence. They play the long game, one in which neither tortoise nor hare have a chance.

Mohammad Salemy tells us a story of “a group of men and women . . . meeting to discuss the future. . . [A] gathering of a variety of odd characters [Alfred McCormack, Abby Aldrich, Clement Greenberg, John Foster Dulles, David Rockefeller, George Orwell, Alfred Barr, William Stephenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, James Connan, and William Phillips discuss] the charged intersection of art, money, literature, geopolitics, and counterintelligence.”

It is not so much the future that is forecast by DIS editors, but a hyperbole of the present. Forever now for more of the same, only more so: “The future is a season.”, “The future does not exist but in snapshots.”, “The future is layered and inconsistent.”, “The future is widely reproduced and distributed.” As a series of speculative musings, “Styles and Customs of the 2020’s” is as incoherent as HUO’s curated collection of statements about the future in The Future Will Be…, from which the contributors have stridently lifted a generous helping of their sentences (11 to be exact). The case of these “predictions” have only succeeded in creating a dry script art world version of Coffee and Cigarettes. “All we can really hope for is some good designer drugs that actually wake us up from the matrix” is not precisely what Foucault may have had in mind when he wrote that ‘[p]erhaps someday we will no longer know what madness was.’

. . . How could human beings decolonize their minds when neoliberalism radically structures human identities and the seemingly bleak future of organic life on Earth? In the absence of remediation of the geological-agental consequences of the nihilistic cycle of consumption and pollution upon which capitalocentrism utterly depends, how could new worlds emerge? Is it enough to spirit away statues, or is something more radical demanded?

One way of thinking about the word radical is the act of growth, a plant or branch emerging from a root or stem. In this sense being radical is related to slow and evolving development. Childhood prepares us for the absurd, grotesque and perverse situations of adulthood. The coping strategies of the child—free play, open and visceral acknowledgement of emotions, embodied listening, lack of focus, boredom, embracing the random — all present alternative responses to the status quo of adult life.

We all know kids say the darndest things. Engaging the tactics of our younger selves and simultaneously creating space for children’s perspective, experience and ever changing subject positions are core radical and political acts.

In exchange for securing ourselves against the haunting pink mass out there—amassing, overcoming everything into something unknown and unfaithful to our memory of how the world is—we begin to lose the opportunity for novelty to reveal itself. Aberrance is abhorrent.

. . . What kinds of memories are permissible in the city? What practices do we have that enable us to elide our relationships to one another in a place that eludes our initial comprehension? Whose family practices will be tolerated?