Aesthetic Transparency

In my previous two texts for &&&, “The Narcissist-Image” and “Interpretation Contra Structural Reading”, I talked about two distinct modes of reading art and the problems they respond to. These two modes are that of structural reading and interpretation. An interpretative reading of a work of art encodes the work of art in the language… Read More »

Community of Irreal

Isn’t community outside intelligibility?–Maurice Blanchot In a recent seminar, Jason Mohaghegh posed a question that even many avant-garde movements were too cautious to ask: “What would thought look like without any formulation of reality?” I would like to briefly explore this question in another form: What would community look like without any formulation of reality?… Read More »

The Stirner Affair

Against Normative Morality  If amoralists are gathered in the history of philosophy, the initial catalog features two figures: Stirner and Nietzsche. The former appeared first, which has led to speculative claims of plagiarism by the latter. However, it is more appropriate to place Stirner among the individualists and hedonists, both before and during his time,… Read More »

A Note on the Catastrophe of Late Art

“The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation.” – Theodor Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven” The effects of senescence… Read More »

On Minor Bestiary

In this text, Eduarda Neves elaborates and expands on the critique of the contemporary artworld that underpins her book Minor Bestiary: Time and Labyrinth in Contemporary Art, published in English by &&& Books, available for purchase through here.    Minor Bestiary, my latest book, contributes to the debate about a few issues in contemporary art:… Read More »

The Problem of the Nature of Thought

Paulin Hountondji, the Beninese author who died in February and taught philosophy at the National University of Benin, was clearly aware of the magnitude and impact of politician Kwame Nkrumah, since, as he recalls in his autobiography The Struggle for Meaning, his presentation in Paris on the Ghanaian leader’s 1964 book Consciencism caused headlines for… Read More »

I Am A Philosopher

Last year—two years ago?—Cássia Siqueira tweeted: “Better Call Saul S06E07.” I was mystified, but didn’t ask her what it was about. I’d never watched the TV show. But anything Cássia wrote, wherever she wrote it, however cryptic, deserved investigation. So I watched the whole show, knowing I was looking for the meaning of her tweet.… Read More »

FUCK CULTURE

In memory of Cassia Siqueira, a brilliant young researcher whose promising career was tragically abbreviated… Her work, featured in the 2023 volume Model Is the Message published by &&&, showcased her exceptional talent and innovative approach to research. Her dedication, intellectual curiosity, and vibrant spirit left an indelible mark on colleagues and the scientific community.… Read More »

Good Times

This piece, initiated and commissioned by Marten Spangberg, is part of a larger project called “When The Museum is Closed” at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva.   All ideas are bad ideas. They are bad not insofar as they are impractical, useless, or lacking in any such respect. They are bad in that… Read More »

Escaping Post-Sellarsian Marxism’s Transcategorial Maze – Part II

[Due to space constraints, the foregoing essay was published in two instalments. Part I can be found here.—Ed.] 2. A Desperate Marxist’s Attempt We need but a moment of reflection to realize that the problematic of real abstraction in Marxism is the tortuous issue of the transposition of the language of normativity onto that of… Read More »

The Human Centipede: A View From the Art World*

In time for the opening of Art Basel on June 13 and the release of Eduarda Neves’s Minor Bestiary next month as a more recent critique of contemporary art, we are publishing Reza Negarestani’s “The Human Centipede: A View From The Artworld.” Only delivered once in lecture format at e-flux, New York, in November 2013,… Read More »

Other Endings

Found in the Hyperstition archives, “Other Endings” is the never-published preface to Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia by Nick land, the controversial former Instructor of philosophy at The New Centre which in light of the author’s recent public declaration of his faith in Allah and Islam becomes more than just a premonition but an essential part of… Read More »

Also Reality and the Weight of Conjunctions

Determinant meaning within the English language exists by virtue of the glue that is conjunctions. Sticky little words like “but” and “also” join together, compartmentalize, and disjoint our speech, thoughts, social structure, and reality, in the mathematics of meaning. Even the American legal system depends upon conjunctions like “either/or” and the contrasts they create. Both… Read More »

Letter to the Washed Away

Dear Lee, I texted you earlier today about how Ava went missing during the fires. I’m going up the coast to look for her in a yacht I’ve stolen that belongs to friends of my parents who are away in the Austrian Alps until Christmas. Did you know that the term “yacht” comes from the… Read More »

Interpretation Contra Structural Reading

This article is an extension of “The Narcissist-Image,” departing from Fares Chalabi’s presentation in “Deleuzian Aesthetics.”  Much of Chalabi’s Deleuzian Aesthetics is based on a critique of interpretation, which for Chalabi, is a procedure for reading art where “this means that, and that means this,” that something like the color black points to a feeling… Read More »

Anti-Hauntology & the Semiotics of the End

A ghost haunts the end: the ghost of the future. Mark Fisher writes in What is Hauntology? that “the future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production.” But the future is no longer what it was. The future is not future… Read More »

Escaping Post-Sellarsian Marxism’s Transcategorial Maze – Part I

Due to spatial constraints, the foregoing essay will be published in two installments.—Ed. Introduction For picturings to picture the pictureds; at the very least, for descriptions to index the world, the framework of picturing or the descriptive language of the sciences have to be committed to a worldly ontological complexity, causal uniformity, or an immutable “dimension of givenness… Read More »

The 1968 Venice Biennale & Boycotting the exhibition: An account of three extraordinary days

Italy, too, experienced the events of 1968—a year marked by protests against the establishment and its institutions. Against this background, the student movement attacked the Biennale aiming to bring down a pillar of the Italian art establishment which, in their eyes, combined art and money in an unholy alliance. The malaise surrounding the Venice exhibition… Read More »

Kunstwollen* Minus the Human (Painting in the Age of Machinic Will to Art)

1 Imagine describing the series of Jeff Perrott’s paintings New Construction (Pharmakon, Subject, Natural, Denatural, Door, Sublime, Red Interior, and Cosmic) to an AI or a blind person. How would you start? By listing which elements come first, and how the layers of lines in each painting are ordered? Describing an artwork is deconstructing or… Read More »

Blood and Oil in the Orient: A 2023 Update

1. The Hamas-Israel War The 2023 war between Hamas and Israel elicits many different explanations. As with previous regional hostilities, here too, the pundits and commentators have numerous overlapping processes to draw on—from the struggle between the Zionist and Palestinian national movements, to the deep hostility between the Rabbinate and Islamic churches, to the many… Read More »

Ruangrupa: Contemporary Art or Friendship Industry?*

In the past two decades, more than in the past hundred years, authoritarian regimes have risen to power globally. Today, fascist parties are occupying seats in many countries’ governments, such as in the Israeli Knesset, the Dutch Tweede Kamer, the American Congress, and the German Bundestag. Meanwhile, the collective memory of European fascism and its… Read More »

Call the Bronze Age… they forgot their pictograms!

“In the preceding chapter we discussed the development of technoeconomic organization and the establishment of social machinery closely connected with the evolution of techniques. Here I propose to consider the evolution of a fact that emerged together with Homo sapiens in the development of anthropoids: the capacity to express thought in material symbols. (…) As… Read More »

Interferential Axiology: Excess & Disruption

What is tragic about choice is no longer fundamental if choice is no longer what establishes communication between an independent city and an independent individual as substances. —Gilbert Simondon1   Excess and disruption are different modes of systemic interferences, providing differing sets of axiological implications. This essay seeks to explore their tragic interface in the… Read More »

Shades of Green in Praxis

Introduction  EcoMuvi is a film production protocol set in place by Tempesta Films studios in 2014. Its approach implies a consciousness of the environmental  impact of film production and seeks to mitigate the overall harm done to the Earth. The protocol has a list of requirements which must be met in order for a film to… Read More »

Here & Elsewhere, at War, & Into the Future

The Middle East continues to painfully be a primary site for the blood-drenched transformations of our planetary geopolitical system. However, about ten years ago and during another Israeli operation in Gaza, an uncanny timeliness opened an unexpected connection between global contemporary art and geopolitics in August 2014 when, following the escalation of Israel’s Gaza operations,… Read More »

Artext: What Postpones the Union between Symbolic Systems & Language? – Part III

[Due to space constraints, the foregoing essay was be published in three instalments. Parts I and II can be found here and here.—Ed.] Struggle between Symbol Equality and Logocentrism  The way out of the irrationality of imagery—understood as a united symbolic system—lies precisely opposite to physical objects, in reason. None of the philosophers mentioned earlier… Read More »

Zionism Reconsidered

The seminal essay below by Hannah Arendt, spanning 15,000 words was first published in the Menorah Journal in October 1944. This work was inspired by the meeting of the World Zionist Organization’s American section in Atlantic City. This congress was notable for its assertive call for a Jewish state covering the entire territory of Palestine,… Read More »

Artext: What Postpones the Union between Symbolic Systems & Language? – Part II

[Due to space constraints, the foregoing essay will be published in three instalments. Part I can be read here.—Ed.] From Object to Image through Displacement In art history there is an implicit belief that human intuition is limited by external physiological mechanisms. The encounter with an object may thus be seen as a traumatizing event.… Read More »

Artext: What Postpones the Union between Symbolic Systems & Language? – Part I

[Due to space constraints, the foregoing essay will be published in three instalments.—Ed.] Introduction The author of this text is confident that none of these reflections are timely during the war, and harbors doubts about their subsequent significance. It is difficult to escape a common remark about the impossibility of poetry after Bucha—with all kinds… Read More »

Spaces & Places, an Interview with Bastian Gehbauer

Memories of A Place I Have Never Been… Part II is the title of the most recent solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Bastian Gehbauer. The exhibit was open for viewing from August 25th until October 7th, 2023 at Hoto Gallery—a repurposed former cinema situated in Bergmannkiez. The exhibited series represents an extension of the initial… Read More »

Some Brief Notes on Reza Negarestani’s Intelligence & Spirit

Synopsis Reza Negarestani’s “Intelligence and Spirit”1 stands as an intersectional exploration of philosophy, mathematics, logic, and computer science. The work is an intricate tapestry weaving together threads from various disciplines in order to present a comprehensive understanding of intelligence, in both its human and artificial manifestations. Negarestani draws from category theory—a branch of mathematics that… Read More »

Franz Boas & the Founding of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, A Never Published letter

Before the establishment of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), displays at museums of nature, science and culture involved their preparation and arrangement in glass boxes by those who had never seen the subjects in their actual habitat and who had little interest in acquiring related ecological or cultural information. From its beginning, however,… Read More »

The Case for Artplay

01 Let me present a compelling perspective: Games and art exist as distinct entities on an ontological level, fulfilling different needs. Art, in its purest form, flourishes without requiring interactivity, while games engage players through their inherent interactive nature. However, this does not imply a complete dichotomy. A space for compromise exists, and I call… Read More »

Creative Groundlessness: A Rehearsal in Self-Translation

Is this a rehearsal for dying? –Vilém Flusser, “The Bed”[1] Flowers in a vase, on the dinner table, are examples of absurd life. If we wish to intuit these flowers, we can feel their tendency to sprout roots, and to push them into any soil. The rootless flowers’ tendency is the climate of groundlessness. –Vilém… Read More »

Crisis, What Crisis: 21 Notes on the Difficulties of What Needs to be Done

The worst thing about the two dominant and intellectually popular conceptions of the future – either as pure capitalist utopia where private property and technology deliver us from politics or pure communist utopia in which the fall of capitalism and the emergence of communism is inevitable – is that they have engendered lethargy in regards… Read More »

A Black is Not a Man: Fanon, Sartre, and Racial Metamorphosis

In the Introduction to his Black Skin, White Masks (BSWM), Frantz Fanon makes the claim that ‘a Black is not a man’.[1] To understand what Fanon means by the claim that the Black is not a man, a claim that he admits is ‘at risk of angering [his] black brothers’, we must explore the construction… Read More »

Notes on Hypervision

Theory-fiction is a genre of thought in the process of making and becoming. And, as any genre of that kind on such a stage, what it needs for thriving is methodology: not from the side of ‘theory’ — for there are a lot of possible ways of theoretical inquiry present at hand today (which is,… Read More »

The Dead God, A short story in two parts

Things had been getting strange at the firm, since the boss had come back from holidays. The black cape and the pile of Crowley books strewn about the office were the first clue. What was Hardeep, the Singaporean tech bro CEO, doing with all this, mused Pierre, a level 7 sales executive, en route to… Read More »

Of Contradictions Between Sociology & Neoliberalism

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), one of the founders of sociology as a science, undertook a great effort for this area of knowledge to overcome its so-called ideological burdens. For him, “it is necessary to free oneself from the false evidence that dominates the common spirit” (Durkheim, 2004: 64). Sociology should become a science of empirical strength,… Read More »

Not Giving Up On Humans

There have been rumors about the disappearance of desire from cinema and even museums or art spaces in general, leaving us with a sheer mirror of what reality is, or feeding us with constant information about the world being an unsavory place: climate catastrophes, migrant crisis, Taliban in Afghanistan, the rise of nationalism throughout the… Read More »

More Articles »

More Articles from &&&

The Stirner Affair

Against Normative Morality  If amoralists are gathered in the history of philosophy, the initial catalog features two figures: Stirner and Nietzsche. The former appeared first, which has led to speculative claims of plagiarism by the latter. However, it is more appropriate to place Stirner among the individualists and hedonists, both before and during his time,… Read More »

The Problem of the Nature of Thought

Paulin Hountondji, the Beninese author who died in February and taught philosophy at the National University of Benin, was clearly aware of the magnitude and impact of politician Kwame Nkrumah, since, as he recalls in his autobiography The Struggle for Meaning, his presentation in Paris on the Ghanaian leader’s 1964 book Consciencism caused headlines for… Read More »

I Am A Philosopher

Last year—two years ago?—Cássia Siqueira tweeted: “Better Call Saul S06E07.” I was mystified, but didn’t ask her what it was about. I’d never watched the TV show. But anything Cássia wrote, wherever she wrote it, however cryptic, deserved investigation. So I watched the whole show, knowing I was looking for the meaning of her tweet.… Read More »

Good Times

This piece, initiated and commissioned by Marten Spangberg, is part of a larger project called “When The Museum is Closed” at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva.   All ideas are bad ideas. They are bad not insofar as they are impractical, useless, or lacking in any such respect. They are bad in that… Read More »

The Human Centipede: A View From the Art World*

In time for the opening of Art Basel on June 13 and the release of Eduarda Neves’s Minor Bestiary next month as a more recent critique of contemporary art, we are publishing Reza Negarestani’s “The Human Centipede: A View From The Artworld.” Only delivered once in lecture format at e-flux, New York, in November 2013,… Read More »

Other Endings

Found in the Hyperstition archives, “Other Endings” is the never-published preface to Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia by Nick land, the controversial former Instructor of philosophy at The New Centre which in light of the author’s recent public declaration of his faith in Allah and Islam becomes more than just a premonition but an essential part of… Read More »

Also Reality and the Weight of Conjunctions

Determinant meaning within the English language exists by virtue of the glue that is conjunctions. Sticky little words like “but” and “also” join together, compartmentalize, and disjoint our speech, thoughts, social structure, and reality, in the mathematics of meaning. Even the American legal system depends upon conjunctions like “either/or” and the contrasts they create. Both… Read More »

Letter to the Washed Away

Dear Lee, I texted you earlier today about how Ava went missing during the fires. I’m going up the coast to look for her in a yacht I’ve stolen that belongs to friends of my parents who are away in the Austrian Alps until Christmas. Did you know that the term “yacht” comes from the… Read More »

Interpretation Contra Structural Reading

This article is an extension of “The Narcissist-Image,” departing from Fares Chalabi’s presentation in “Deleuzian Aesthetics.”  Much of Chalabi’s Deleuzian Aesthetics is based on a critique of interpretation, which for Chalabi, is a procedure for reading art where “this means that, and that means this,” that something like the color black points to a feeling… Read More »

Kunstwollen* Minus the Human (Painting in the Age of Machinic Will to Art)

1 Imagine describing the series of Jeff Perrott’s paintings New Construction (Pharmakon, Subject, Natural, Denatural, Door, Sublime, Red Interior, and Cosmic) to an AI or a blind person. How would you start? By listing which elements come first, and how the layers of lines in each painting are ordered? Describing an artwork is deconstructing or… Read More »

Ruangrupa: Contemporary Art or Friendship Industry?*

In the past two decades, more than in the past hundred years, authoritarian regimes have risen to power globally. Today, fascist parties are occupying seats in many countries’ governments, such as in the Israeli Knesset, the Dutch Tweede Kamer, the American Congress, and the German Bundestag. Meanwhile, the collective memory of European fascism and its… Read More »

Call the Bronze Age… they forgot their pictograms!

“In the preceding chapter we discussed the development of technoeconomic organization and the establishment of social machinery closely connected with the evolution of techniques. Here I propose to consider the evolution of a fact that emerged together with Homo sapiens in the development of anthropoids: the capacity to express thought in material symbols. (…) As… Read More »

Interferential Axiology: Excess & Disruption

What is tragic about choice is no longer fundamental if choice is no longer what establishes communication between an independent city and an independent individual as substances. —Gilbert Simondon1   Excess and disruption are different modes of systemic interferences, providing differing sets of axiological implications. This essay seeks to explore their tragic interface in the… Read More »

Here & Elsewhere, at War, & Into the Future

The Middle East continues to painfully be a primary site for the blood-drenched transformations of our planetary geopolitical system. However, about ten years ago and during another Israeli operation in Gaza, an uncanny timeliness opened an unexpected connection between global contemporary art and geopolitics in August 2014 when, following the escalation of Israel’s Gaza operations,… Read More »

Zionism Reconsidered

The seminal essay below by Hannah Arendt, spanning 15,000 words was first published in the Menorah Journal in October 1944. This work was inspired by the meeting of the World Zionist Organization’s American section in Atlantic City. This congress was notable for its assertive call for a Jewish state covering the entire territory of Palestine,… Read More »

The Dead God, A short story in two parts

Things had been getting strange at the firm, since the boss had come back from holidays. The black cape and the pile of Crowley books strewn about the office were the first clue. What was Hardeep, the Singaporean tech bro CEO, doing with all this, mused Pierre, a level 7 sales executive, en route to… Read More »

The Purist

Filipe Felizardo is a philosophy student, artist and musician from Lisbon, with an informal education in film, comics, and musical pedagogy. Currently a Researcher on Critical Philosophy at the New Centre for Research & Practice, Felizardo focuses on systematic reconceptions of learning and alienation, as understood from the workspaces of inferentialism, Marxist activity-approach, and anti-vitalism.

Retinol: A Mode of Action

“Condensed in a formula, the Technological Civilization can be characterized as the transition from ratio to generativity, from matter to process, from nature to the hybrid.” –Davor Löffler If we follow the self-avowed German Accelerationism and deep futurology of Davor Löffler (Löffler 2021), we can posit that everything is co-evolutionary and that there are no… Read More »

The Narcissist Image

In his course Deleuzian Aesthetics Fares Chalabi presents an extended typology of mutually exclusive, rigorously defined image-types, or what I like to call aesthetic structures or aesthetic logics. An image-type or aesthetic logic is a form that structures the entirety of a work of art – take, for example, the ‘series’. The logic of series,… Read More »

Sorry You Can’t Pass a Turing Test But I’m Different 

Five hundred million individuals tried to monetize their social media last year, according to a recent Linktree survey. As a lucky member of this esteemed group, I recently found myself surfing through the entrepreneurial side of TikTok, captivated by a video titled “How to make money with Chat GPT”. The clip tells you to go… Read More »

Unthought Apparitions

In this video essay, Brent Cox works through the poetry of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite and his Sycorax Video Style, which he developed in the early 1980s using a Mac SE/30 and which offers myriad compelling extra-linguistic or extra-conceptual ideas in relation to citationality, literary convention, the constative/performative distinction, the temporality of neologisms, and the… Read More »

The Work of Art in the Age of Cybernetic Criticism

Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” wrestled with the effects of powerful technologies upon culture, and presaged much subsequent writing, e.g. Martin Heidegger and Italo Calvino. Here I want to consider not the artwork-qua-object as in Benjamin, but rather the work of art as an active force, in… Read More »