TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

As has been noted in discussions of Nelson Goodman’s theory of worldmaking, for Goodman worldmaking is always a product of various operations on pre-existing worlds—worlds are made from other worlds,[1] a stance which I will refer to as his ‘worldmaking thesis’. Moreover, Goodman’s orientation is marked by a skepticism (or perhaps an agnosticism [2]) about the difference… Read More »

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 »

M. S. Yániz: Titled The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism, your new book focuses heavily on how the internet derails any attempt at cogent responses to the biggest crises of our time. In so doing, it recalls the work of Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse, who identified similar processes in… Read More »

1. An Ecology of Possible Worlds I am often amazed to have access to satellite images with thundering evidence of our species’ capabilities to transform the environment. It is an Earthrise-like aesthetic experience that naturally calls for a philosophical inquiry about the ontology of the human self as part of the Earth’s systems. This essay… Read More »

The Planetary Health Stack is a metaplatform, or platform of platforms, which incorporates the planetary model of perceiving Earth. It articulates the different living and nonliving, human and nonhuman entities that inhabit the planet. This is a prompt to conceive a geopolitical infrastructural model of planetary governance to solve or at least deal with emergencies… Read More »

“…It feels strange. In a way […] you would think it would be strange to do it every day, but you get this kind of feeling that it feels strange actually just the first time you do it. The second time it’s still exciting and the third time it becomes work. Because you have to… Read More »

Initially, when I started writing about monstrosity mechanics in computer games, I expected the idea of “reverse horror” to become my guiding notion. The recent release of reverse horror game Carrion plus older games like Plague Inc or Prototype offer a unique opportunity to take a closer look at the phenomenon of inhabiting a monstrous… Read More »

“Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void.” –Robespierre It would not be controversial to say that, over the past few years, the socialist left in the United States has… Read More »

I. Mania «Recently my thoughts have been pointillistic: timeless markers, like an old prison tattoo, a program for a learning addiction. You see, friend, I have been trying to compose myself, tentatively, as an archetype for a Learner, the archetype to kill all archetypes. This is based on my intuition or the real possibility that… Read More »

In the epistemic context of terraforming, geoengineering, and geophilosophy, this essay navigates the literary ecosystem through certain poetic devices, derives a conceptual trajectory, and applies it to its own architectonical posture. In it, we attempt to formulate an understanding of new experimental domains in the terrains of literary ecologies, specifically the surface of the desert,… Read More »

“It was in the scenario of the dream that we first received, as children, the lesson that things can be other than how they manifest” Vicente Ferreira da Silva “These dreams, it is necessary to inhabit them in order to convince ourselves they were ours” Gaston Bachelard “Dreams burn / but in ashes are gold”… Read More »

  “…in order to overcome modernity, it is necessary to go back to the question of time and to open up a pluralism which allows a new world history to emerge, but one which is subordinated neither to global capitalism and nationalism, nor to an absolute metaphysical ground.”1 – Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology… Read More »

Published today in the news service Iran Wire, Kambiz Ghafoori’s investigative report is translated and presented here for the first time to shed light on the illegal and murderous activities of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Europe. — In the hot July of 2018, in a Peugeot 308 car with license plate number VJU061,… Read More »

“An early winter moon was rising in front of them, and chill wind came with it, penetrating feet and hands. Tayo held the bundle tighter. He felt humbled by the size of the full moon, by the chill wind that swept wide across the foothills of the mountain. They said the deer gave itself to… Read More »

(A design reimagining and reenacting Superstudio’s THIRD CITY: NY of BRAINS 1971. Invited by Storefront for Art and Architecture & exhibited in October 2012 as part of “Past Futures, Present, Futures: 101 unrealized visions of New York City.”) “…they ate to integrate…” “Why did the monad cross the road? T’was the other side.” When they left,… Read More »

Since Heidegger first raised the issue of an end to philosophy in light of the auto-completing feedback loops of cybernetics as the logic to ground all “appearance of the totality of the world and the position of man in it” (Heidegger, 1972), this exact problematic continues to shape the forefront of philosophical anticipation. As technological… Read More »

For a Demos of the Audiosphere What are unheard-of relations? What could the silence and noise out of our “intensive incompatibility”¹ mean? How do we modulate inequalities to amplify higher variables that distend imbalances, economic and political, for those that refuse to listen? The weight of these questions seemingly slope towards an anticipatory demos of… Read More »

“In your research, the two of you have critically examined the extremist or the sectarian, as well as violent rhetoric and violent acts. Interestingly, both of you untangle these movements from the political discourse that typically frames such discussions. What is the methodological and/or theoretical import of decoupling these phenomena from the political? Furthermore, how… Read More »

Given the educational mandate of The New Centre, at the start a new Season of publishing on &&&, we thought that Arrighi’s advice about constructing theoretical models might be useful for our students, researchers and members. Taken from his short book The Geometry of Imperialism (Verso, 1987) these short passages define the relationship between particulars… Read More »

With this paper I want to carry out a non-philosophical analysis of post-media that aims to bring in its bad object, “analog” sculpture. The process of integrating sculpture into discussions of post-media will involve a Laruellian reduction of the theoretical material of post-media, the latter being typically concerned with virtual, non-object-based or otherwise immaterial practices.… Read More »

Video recordings of the presentation by Nina Power discussed here, “Materialist Feminism and Radical Feminism: Revisiting the Second Wave in the Light of Recent Controversies,” as well my own, “Vertigos of Materiality: A Marxism of Moments,” are available on the Facebook page “Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities – Skopje.” Also available at that location… Read More »

It no longer makes sense, wrote Anne-Marie Duguet (2009), to search for the absolute essence of cinema, since all its original aspects have become mutable, i.e., those aspects that had defined it in the past. With the hyper-aceleration of the co-evolution of cinematographic techniques, most of the essentialist demarcations about the nature of cinema do… Read More »

Abstract: This is a description and an exploration of current cosmopolitical orientations concerning two major events – the enterprise of human knowledge and the development of capital. The cosmopolitical orientations – the cosmopolitical parties – are shown to be orthogonal to usual macropolitical orientations – left and right. Coalitions between these parties are challenging but… Read More »

Any collective effort is a game of risk with only two outcomes. It is a matter of nothing and of all. Either we construct complex cooperative bonds or cut the same threads and accept the resultant collapse. In facing what could be considered an apparent liminal-historical scenario of our species, we should take issue with… Read More »

  The line of thought common to Blumenberg, Nietzsche, Freud and Davidson suggests that we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasidivinty, where we treat everything – our language, our conscience, our community – as a product of time and chance. — Richard… Read More »

PREMISE To the extent that the exercise of ethics is a practical matter based on counterfactual scenarios there is room for considering particular scenarios that eliminate as many extrinsic elements as possible in order to highlight structures of responsibility. Even if the scenarios in question exceed likelihood they can presumably be used as one step… Read More »

“II If you make noise it is likely that somebody else is going to hear you, this means Noise is a social activity. XI The old conception of noise was to believe in freedom, the new conception of Noise is to achieve freedom.” – Mattin – Thesis on Noise In his recently published book Tetralogos,… Read More »

Functionalism has its early genealogical roots partially in behaviorism; according to the behaviorist, intelligence is the propensity to do or behave a certain way, given some set of appropriate circumstances. For soft-behaviorists like Gilbert Ryle, for instance, mental statements can be understood and made identical to a series of dispositional statements. Specifically, Ryle’s position can… Read More »

Originally published in the online edition of Contemporânea Magazine. 1. Viral capital—Attachment to the ventilator A coronavirus claims its place in the world. In the world of contemporary art, too. To SARS-CoV-2, which brought forth Covid-19, we owe a certain program of metaphysical unveiling. Affected by our condition of hidden hosts, we are unaware of… Read More »

The Game Begins To even breathe the words “insurrection versus extinction” is to transport us into a malevolent game, one that threatens us by being based on a single concept: the ultimatum. The very question itself, staged as a fatalistic either/or, assumes a significant breach in the continuum of things, and so we immediately must… Read More »

“Time, Dr. Freeman? Is it really that time again? […] Rather than offer you the illusion of free choice, I will take the liberty of choosing for you […] if and when your time comes round again. I do apologize for what must seem to you an arbitrary imposition, Dr. Freeman. I trust it will all make sense to you in the… Read More »

Within Quentin Meillassoux’s sweeping critique of the entire history of Western philosophy, a special place seems to be granted to the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Meillassoux sees Deleuze as one of the few philosophers who tried to break out of the ‘linguistic turn’ of the 20th century and, more broadly, of what he calls the… Read More »

“It is certain that men will be born as bullocks in their next life if they consume food cooked by menstruating women. I don’t care if you do not like my views, but this is written in our Shastras [scriptures]. If a menstruating woman cooks food for her husband, she will definitely be born as… Read More »

Contemporary digital technology, particularly the unsupervised strains of contemporary “machine learning”, can be approached with two mental images. The first is de-spatialization, or “black boxing”. The second is re-spatialization, or “spectacle”. The following short essay will be of use to those interested in the work of the ‘critical phase’ of computational media theory and practice… Read More »

day 0 (wed) breathing in this mask makes me sleepy my skin itches under the rubber gloves the bus has been driving for three hours in my district dropping all ten passengers at their designated quarantine locations i am the last and i lost count of how many times the bus stopped i am finally… Read More »

Within Deleuze scholarship there has been a relatively recent turn towards Deleuzian negativity. While brought forward most prominently in Andrew Culp’s Dark Deleuze (2016), J. Adams put forward a notion of Deleuzian negativity in 2010 with a focus on the selective process of Deleuze’s “Dionysian yes”—an affirmation which draws upon the powers of the negative… Read More »

THE HOUSE IS BLACK ON YOUTUBE Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black stands tall, somewhere between moving images and words, sound and music, cinema and poetry, documentary and experimental film; between Realism, Surrealism and Magical Realism, while being none in particular. The work is a mere twenty-minute strip of film, fragments of a special type of precarious… Read More »

Introduction The discipline of art history relies on the practice of preservation. The art historian typically understands the work of art in relation to an established canon, and this canon can only be referred to if its contents are in some way preserved. Yet any act of preservation is also an act of revision: material… Read More »

In the paper, I briefly intend to contrast two contemporary proposals of what is known as the “inhuman” through the works of Nick Land and Reza Negarestani. The aim of this contrast is to draft a critique against Land’s conception of the inhuman as a largely fallible proposal that still depends radically and even strengthens… Read More »

Let us criticize contemporary analytic metaphysics’ tacit reliance upon the coarse categories of Theory T thinking, wherein we are referring to scientific theorization by means of approximation, which has directed philosophical attention away from the puzzles of applied mathematical technique that originally concerned Leibniz.[1]  By Theory T thinking, we are borrowing a term from philosopher… Read More »

Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism – Rosa Luxemburg Bruegel the Elders’ Triumph of Death (1562) depicts the victory of death over life, as death riding a red horse and wielding his scythe leads a skeleton hoard against what remains of the living. In the painting the… Read More »

  This paper will explore the social history and legacy of the perceptron. I begin by tracing a genealogy of this technical object through the work of its designer, Frank Rosenblatt, paying particularly close attention to the construction of his Mark I Perceptron at Cornell University in 1962. I outline the neurophysiological framework that inspired… Read More »

The present text is a slightly revised version of a skype conference commissioned by artist Luiza Crosman for the exhibition Open Skies, hosted at, the WIELS Contemporary art center, Brussels   “The exit from art is the crossing of a limit. But in the crossing of the limit the act is dissolved in empirical reality.… Read More »

Despite the rhetoric of globalization, nations have historically remained walled off behind militarized borders. Over the last few years, even greater restrictions have been imposed on those most troubled by wars, tyranny, and economic sanctions. Despite all that, a cough, due to COVID-19, cannot be contained in one place, either in a nation or in… Read More »

This text was published for the first time in the catalog for INFOSEQUE, a 2017 solo exhibition by Navine G, Khan-Dossos at Fridman Gallery in New York.

A few weeks ago, bassist Jonas Hellborg announced on Facebook that he would be “leading by example” by removing all of his music from “so called digital distribution”, after receiving a meager payment from his distributor. While I wouldn’t necessarily count myself as a fan, the music I’ve heard (on Apple Music) is enjoyable enough… Read More »

The US-led economic sanctions have caused a great deal of death and destruction in Iranian society, and the IMF policies in Iran, similar to other developing countries, have resulted in a widening of the class gap, poverty, severe marginalization of the peripheries, and a lowering of living standards. Yet, the US sanctions together with IMF… Read More »

Introduction In the following essay, we will undertake a critique of the discussion of nanotechnology[1] in the works of Nick Land as a prism by which we can undertake a larger critique of certain themes within his philosophy. Land regards nano-engineering as an insurgent horror vacui capable of reorganizing organic matter autonomously and against the… Read More »

This piece was originally commissioned for Jacobin’s web site but for some unexplained reason, it was never published. After having read it, we thought it would have been a waste not to publish it for the benefit of those who are interested to know more about recent events in Ecuador.   When the Ecuadorian Lenin… Read More »

Starting December 7th, David Auerbach will be leading The New Centre Seminar From Leibniz to Google: Five Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence. It will investigate AI within the framework of philosophy where it is not simply a technological artifact but rather a part of human conceptual armature. In this short introductory essay,  Auerbach provides a background for his… Read More »

Cinema was the first new media. New media did not begin in the 1980s in Silicon Valley; it began a hundred years prior at Etienne-Jules Marey’s Station Physiologique in the outskirts of Paris…cinema is the first medium to bring together techniques like compositing, recombination, digital sampling…and machine automation, techniques that, of course, are present in… Read More »

  Why is it so difficult to simply begin with the definition of violence? -Judith Butler (2017)   This essay will redefine the terms of violence in order to produce a useful terminology for the politics of resistance. This will be achieved in three stages: 1. The proposal of the problem of violence In the… Read More »

“When you maintain a top-down view of the world, everything seems bottom-up.” -Mongolian proverb Matteo Pasquinelli’s June 2019 e-flux article “Three Thousand Years of Algorithmic Rituals: The Emergence of AI from the Computation of Space”[1] is a hurried attempt at providing a deep historiography of algorithms, beginning with the topology of Hindu culture via examining… Read More »

The bodies of the multitude, finally, are queer bodies that are insusceptible to the forces of discipline and normalization but sensitive only to their own powers of invention. (Hardt, Negri 2002, 335) It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality. (Deleuze, Guattari 1983, 112) The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes… Read More »

The following text is a brief excerpt from the preface of Colin Drumm’s in-progress dissertation on the relationship between state power and the logic and structure of money and monetary relations. It is offered here, not as having established the truth of any propositions, but as an invitation to a conversation. Money is an irreducibly… Read More »

Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” advances the claim that, for the first time in history, the “function” of the work of art is political, as evidenced by cinema. For Benjamin, film is the “first art form whose artistic character is entirely determined by its… Read More »

Since 1895, art professionals, and those who want to be considered as such, travel to the island city of Venice to attend the Venice Biennale. The city itself is maybe the only one not built near water but on top of it. Built on a wooden support system that reaches the bottom of the sea, Venice… Read More »

  “Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see.” —Maurice Merleau-Ponty | Phenomenology of Perception “But let us reflect; it is high time to do so. ‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’ Kant asked himself—and what really is his answer? ‘By virtue of a faculty’—but unfortunately not in five words.” —Friedrich… Read More »

The Human-Machine Dialectic To cede is to to give something up, to relinquish control over it. To position technology as ‘other’ is an attempt to interfile it; in other words, to differentiate it in a sequence, to interfile our relationship with it. This idea of interfiling suggests a type of sequencing that necessitates the dominance… Read More »

How does a book arrive in the world? In the case of Reza Negarestani’s ‘Intelligence and Spirit’ (I&S), the text appears to burst forth as from a breached dam – Hegelian tributaries, Sellarsian currents and Turing tides previously stemmed by a conceptual blockage so immense as to constitute a fatberg of thought. This stagnation is down… Read More »

A large body of classical Persian visual art of the last millennium consists of illuminated manuscripts. These paintings on paper have often been compared to the similar tradition of Byzantine miniatures and therefore referred to as “Persian miniatures.” André Godard and Basil Gray, two prominent scholars who studied Persian art in the early 20th century,… Read More »

Can a machine think? Can a machine desire? It’s typical to look for the positive answer to such questions in the fantasies about what the machine would think about, or what would it want to do. Those fantasies, as applied to the psychoanalytic concept of desire, lead us nowhere in understanding the machine, as any… Read More »

In this essay, I will situate some of Wilfrid Sellars’ epistemology and metaphysics in the context of broad methodological concerns that have brought about a fundamental divergence in mainstream approaches of the so-called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ traditions in 20th Century philosophy. In particular, I trace how Sellars’ appropriation of Kant – his ‘naturalism with a normative turn’, as James O’Shea calls it – can be helpfully understood as a possible resolution of the disjunction between the wholesale depreciation of epistemology conceived by some strands within the Continental post-Heideggerian tradition, and the continuation of epistemology and of the scientific aspirations of philosophy within the context of the analytic ‘linguistic turn’.

The Revolution was Islamic, even though at the moment of its victory in 1979, the majority of the groups and political formations which made up its body politics were secular and non-Islamic. The Islamic essence of the revolution had to do with how Iranian seculars A) accepted Khomeini’s leadership B) agreed and promoted the revolution’s Islamic slogans and virtues C) agreed to vote yes for an unknown entity called the Islamic Republic in the 1979 referendum to replace the Monarchy. Any other narrative told about the nature and essence of the revolution which rejects or denies this obvious fact is a complete falsification. While Iranians have overwhelmingly understood the revolution retrospectively as a disaster, most opposition groups except the Monarchists still hold on to the event as an inevitable and positive development, two false notions whose rejection is the first step towards the development of a sound alternative and secure methods for replacing the current system with a secular and democratic state.

Fernando Zalamea es un filósofo de las matemáticas, uno de los más destacados de las últimas décadas en América Latina. Su libro más reciente, Filosofía sintética de las matemáticas contemporáneas (publicado por Urbanomic), es un testimonio de la impresionante amplitud de sus conocimientos en el campo de las matemáticas contemporáneas, las cuales afirma pueden ser de invaluable utilidad para la filosofía más allá de las herramientas meramente formales y lógicas que éstas proporcionaron a la filosofía analítica del siglo XX.

Fernando Zalamea is one of the most prominent philosophers of mathematics to have appeared in Latin America in the last couple of decades. His most recent English-translated book, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics (2014, Urbanomic), testifies to the impressive breadth of his knowledge in the field of modern mathematics, as well as to his conviction that mathematics can present philosophy with invaluable insights, over and beyond the merely formal and logical tools that resulted from its engagement with 20th century analytic philosophy.

Sollten wir, angesichts der einseitigen Aufkündigung des internationalen Nuklearabkommens mit dem Iran und der entsetzlichen Folgen dieser kriegstreibenden Entscheidung Angst haben oder sollten wir uns diese Gelegenheit, mit Hilfe anderer Bündnispartner, zunutze machen? Handelt es sich um einen Fluch oder ist es nur ein Vorwand, die Hegemonie der US-Regierung zu unterlaufen und die Energie- und die Waffenindustrie der Vereinigten Staaten zu isolieren? Können wir uns eine Welt vorstellen, die nicht länger die Interessen der US-Regierung als entscheidenden Parameter in internationalen Beziehungen annimmt; in der die Beziehungen zwischen benachbarten Ländern mit einer langen Geschichte friedlicher Koexistenz nicht dem Kalkül des amerikanischen Waffen- und Energiehandels unterliegen?

Should we be afraid of the unilateral departure of the United States from the international nuclear agreement with Iran and passively wait for the horrendous results of this warmongering decision, or should we take advantage of this opportunity with the help of other countries party to the agreement? Is this a curse or an excuse to circumvent the US Government’s hegemony? Can we imagine a world which no longer allows the interests of the US Government to be the decisive parameter in international relations, in which relations between neighboring countries with a long history of peaceful coexistence is not subject to the calculations of American arms and energy dealers?

It is typical for any modern ideology to turn to scientific discourse as a way to self-naturalize. The science writers, the least conscious abusers of science, typically try to connect it to ‘common sense’ in the most exegetical, uncritical manner; science in their works never acts, and is instead quoted. In doing so they, however, make visible the power of scientific discourse itself, as only in this type of discourse – and never in the consciously ideological writings nor in the science papers themselves – we can hear science speaking, that it says this and that. Science is thus constructed as a subject, and this allows for a new space of critique – not the critique of the relation of its utterances to the truth, but rather the critique of its subjective structure, and most importantly of the narcissistic image that this science-subject has of itself. As is the deal with such images, what science communication can thus reveal is that science is actually much more complex, interesting, ambiguous and free than the way it sees itself, at the painful cost of losing the faux-stoical image to which it holds on fearfully as its only claim to truth.

A spider creates its home by attaching its building material to foreign structures, then uses it as a trap to catch insects, small birds, reptiles and mammals. In a number of tribal societies scattered across Central Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, there exists a myth about the origins of spiders. For these tribes, there used to exist two species of spiders, but we only know one of them since the other went extinct. The one that remains today searches for spots where other animals could be found. The cleverest of these spiders analyzes the changing flight patterns of its preys and constantly moves from one location to another in their search. The extinct species of spider did something else. Once they found a large carcass of a dead or dying animal it would build its cobweb around it. These spiders would stay around their net even long after the carcass would turn to dust and most of these spiders would then start to starve. All the while the net would expand in the hope that some small insects could be found along the way. In the end, most of the spiders either left to become solitary hunters, forming other species of spiders or fought for the few scraps of insects still coming to their bloated net.

The temporal nature of technological progress is arguably two-fold. We encounter frequent editions of incremental changes aiding us along our timeline, negligible updates, 10.13.1 ad infinitum with the occasional ‘big’ leap – an app that appeals to your better side and knows you. This exists parallel to a singularity where technology’s future trajectory preemptively folds… Read More »

I remember years ago I was watching the scene from Sophia Cappola’s  Marie Antoinette in which the protagonist and some other aristocrats were sitting in a garden reading Rousseau. At the time this confused me — I couldn’t help but notice a certain contradiction here. Were they unaware that these ideas would be wielded by the great masses of… Read More »

Throughout its brief existence within the long trajectory of natural history, the human species has evolved alongside communication technologies which, according to the anthropologist Andrè Leroi-Gourhan, were developed only after we were able to free our hands and began standing and moving solely on our feet. Consequently, communicative signs were the offsprings of our liberated… Read More »

#MeToo The final months of 2017 saw campaigns against sexual harassment in the workplace. #MeToo—initiated within the American blockbuster industry—swept social media, sending many male gatekeepers packing (for the time being). A backlash followed when a letter co-written by five French women denounced #MeToo as a reactionary regression towards an antiquated puritanism. Beyond a conservative… Read More »

In his book, The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells makes a distinction between the “space of places” and the “space of flows.” The space of flows is the spatial logic of autonomous circuits—the expression and arrangement of flows (flows of information, social operations, social bodies, etc.) distributed across space, independent of territorial sites… Read More »

The following interview was conducted in October 2017 and was originally intended to serve as printed material to accompany the Grammar of Postcontemporary autumn school near Moscow, Russia, that Nick Srnicek participated in. Beyond a simple introduction to accelerationist theory and its consequences, the talk evolved into a full-fledged discussion that touched upon much deeper… Read More »

Written in 2013 for the blog Communists In Situ, “Moscow January 1st, 2019” charts the dystopian future of global capitalism, unwittingly painting an accurate picture of the crumbling US empire in the post-Trump era while pointing to the radical dangers embedded in the neoreactionary nightmare of state secession and techno cosmopolitanism.   KADASHEVSKAYA HOTEL 26 Kadashevskaya… Read More »

NOTE: Against Curating was first published by the German Daily Zeit in German language. The English version on &&& Platform matches the original in all but the title, which the Zeit editors had decided to change to “Get Rid of Curators.” Curating is undemocratic, authoritarian, opaque and corruptible. Without giving reasons, without discussion, curators choose… Read More »

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 »

Political debates surrounding the question of democracy versus elite despotism has an interesting history. As a Persian, I find the passages 80-87 from Herodotus’ Histories demonstrating how these debates predate modern Europe and are rooted, at least in written text, in the struggle between Persia and Greece for civilizational hegemony: 80. And now when five… Read More »

This is Nick Land, one of the most important philosophers of the last 20 years, and one the most innovative thinkers on the subjects of cybernetics and late capitalism. He is also one of the theorists of NRx, and is one of accelerationism’s primary figureheads. Nick Land didn’t always belong to the Right. Initially, he… Read More »

“Ontology of Finance Redux” is an abridged version of Suhail Malik’s long essay “The Ontology of Finance: Price, Power, and the Arkhéderivative” published in Collapse Volume VIII Edited by Robin Mackay. Interweaving the works of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Elena Esposito and Elie Ayache, Malik provides a tour de force critique of the critique… Read More »

Introduction: There is no term more ubiquitous, obnoxious, and self-serving in our current lexicon as “woke.” Woke is safety-pin politics, masturbatory symbolism, and virtue signaling of a deflated Left insulated by algorithms, filter bubbles, and browser extensions that replace pictures of Donald Trump with Pinterest recipes. Woke is a misnomer — it’s actually asleep and… Read More »

Ideology is a cynical self defence against the subject’s inability to reconcile themselves with their social existence, the selection between ideal adaptations to the world.* It is neither a surface effect or ‘false consciousness’ of an exterior force with which the subject [subjectum] contends, nor a material substrate of subjection. It is rather the means… Read More »

This piece was developed while participating in Matteo Pasquinelli‘s seminar, Capital as Computation & Cognition: From Babbage’s Factory to Google’s Algorithmic Governance, hosted by The New Centre for Research & Practice in March 2015… The status of robots and workers under cognitive capitalism can be likened to Searle’s Chinese Room, as noted by Srnicek and Williams when writing on… Read More »

Originally published in Portuguese as DA FICÇÃO in Jornal O Diário de Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, on 26 August 1966. Consider Newton’s famous sentence:  “hypothese non fingo” (my hypotheses are not feigned). On the other hand consider Wittgenstein’s sentence: The sciences discover nothing: [they] invent. The contradiction between the two sentences unveils a profound change of our concept of… Read More »

Jerry Saltz, You have just publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton on Facebook with a two-thousand word text that you title “Why I Am Voting for Hillary Clinton; The Smell of Napalm the Morning of November 9, 2016.” I feel it necessary to respond to you publicly, because your text is totally reprehensible. Napalm. Are you crazy?… Read More »

“Anytime we’re talking about cultural objects like Avatar, in a corporate dominant culture, we are playing with fire, clearly. When the so-called indigenous is so-called natural, the extraordinary naturalization of the indigenous, no matter how talented, no matter how really, really, really, really great, no matter how many inventions they may have invented. But it requires the other half of the equation, which is a particular production of whiteness. Even though there were plenty of people of color occupying the category of whiteness in that film. Whiteness is a space to occupy for those who are associated with the technologies of conquest, extraction, commerce, etc. and that strikes me. Both of those two require each other. And actual, living people believe these things of each other, to damaging degrees. Such that I know no small number of white people, some of whom I’ve found in my own skin, at various moments, you know, who somehow feel less able to speak up, in a critical way, in a conversation with someone who is produced as more natural. Whether it’s in an indigenous rights discussion, a discussion about who owns race, class, and gender properties, and so on, and so on. The very much in-play ways that these story-fragments continue to set people out around these nature/technology contrasts, to perpetuate the trouble – people actually inhabit these imagined positions and do it to one another, including doing it to oneself.”

Originally published in English by Jason Adams as “Occupy Time”, in Critical Inquiry: In The Moment This is the second of many Spanish language translations that we will be releasing on &&& open-access. Giancarlo Sandoval will be translating current Philosophy and Theory over the next few months in order to make important recent texts available to the Spanish-speaking world.

. . . art tries to represent nature. Not necessarily in a direct sense, like you paint a nice field and in that painting, you’ve represented it one to one; embracing that you’re capturing something very fundamental there.. But even in abstract painting and various forms of sculpture or digital art; that what you’re really trying to capture is a representation of the process of representation itself. That’s basically how Schelling discusses art. To say that art represents nature, you’re not saying that art represents a representation of nature in an image, but that an image is actually pointing to the processes within nature that creates not only what we would call natural objects – plants or animals – but also thought. So art in a sense, is thought’s attempt to capture itself as a creation of nature, as creation.

The Seven Propositions About The Global were written after the completion of Produktionsmittel III and were used as program notes for its first public interpretation, which took place at the Ryan Opera Theater in Evanston, Illinois on May 17, 2016. The propositions are incomplete conclusions. These are thoughts that surfaced after having finished Produktionsmittel III, but they require further examination and growth. They represent both the final and the first—in that order—stages of a holistic thought process that permeates a variety of fields of knowledge. One hopes that, while the propositions emerged from an artistically creative activity, they may be repurposed into other contexts, perhaps far from their ontological origin.

Originally published in English by Siegfried Zielinski as “Against psychopathia medialis — For normal schizophrenia”, in the APRJA Journal, issue1.2(2012): “In/Compatible Research.” This is the first of many Spanish language translations that we will be releasing on &&& open-access. Giancarlo Sandoval will be translating current Philosophy and Theory over the next few months in order to make important recent texts available to the Spanish-speaking world.

(Esta es una de las muchas traducciones al español que estaremos publicando en &&& y distribuyendo en open access. Giancarlo Sandoval estará traduciendo Filosofía y Teoría actual en los siguientes meses para que textos actuales importantes estén disponibles en el mundo hispano. Manténganse al tanto…)

The straight line, and everything it enables, such as right angles and regular geometric figures, is an astonishing invention. The straight edges of crystals might have been noticed by our stone tool making ancestors, and some grasses have straight stalks, but otherwise straight lines in nature are very rare. As I sit and look out at a human environment entirely built on straight lines and regular curves I can’t help but admire the imagination and will that has cut through the irregularities and digressions of nature to impose something new and unprecedented on the world… it is the very image of how human society has distinguished itself from everything else, to make a safe space for the body and a formative, limiting space for the mind… the speed of our labours is nothing compared to the rapidity of our thought. The speed of thought must have evolved to exceed the reaction time of animals—we could draw conclusions from observation, make plans and act before lunch got away— but the movement of our minds is on a completely other scale than any aspect of nature. The physical motion of living things is slower, the growth and development of any organism slower still, the capacity of the environment to neutralize all the toxins we’ve dumped into it yet slower, evolution still slower, and geological time massively slow, in proportion as its productions are also massive. Meanwhile the human mind can range from the Big Bang to the end of time in an instant.

. . . possibilities already rest . . . in the undead Marx. The challenge is to nurture them, develop them, and make them flourish. Our wager is that the undead can lead us toward a better life and that a post-capitalist future is not only desirable but necessary.

A portion of these notes were delivered as a guest lecturer for Diann Bauer and Patricia Reed’s “Art and its Reason(s)” class at the New Centre for Research and Practice on June 8th, 2015. I have since added to them and cleaned up the presentation. The intent of this material was to present a broad outline of Wilfrid Sellars philosophy and make suggestions as to how we might think of some of his positions in relation to problems with recent art practice, and in what ways it may help us reconsider certain positions on art. For the most part it remains focused on Sellars’s philosophy with a few suggestive remarks on how it may be applied to art which could surely be expanded. In composing these notes I relied not only upon Sellars’s own texts, but the indispensable commentary of the late Jay Rosenberg, Willem deVries and Tom Triplett’s reading of Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, Steven Levine’s insightful criticism of Sellars’s positions, and Johanna Seibt’s process ontology reading of Sellars.

The Laboria Cuboniks collective have just released their widely-anticipated “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation”.

Already, it is being lauded by such cultural critics as Mark Fisher for “definitively grasp[ing] feminism back from the… hands of the moralising-spiteful petit-bourgeoisie,” and indicating that “a new counterculture is emerging from the shadows.” Rejecting originary authenticity, affirming technological alienation, and firmly regrounding accelerationism in its cyberfeminist antecedents, the xenofeminist call-to-arms has unleashed an alien storm system from which terrestrial subjectivity will not emerge unaltered.

Time & Televisual Intersubjectivity, McLuhan’s idea of globalized presence as the prehistory of telecomputation. The 1960s was the decade in which satellite technology was introduced to the television world via a series of live broadcasts. However, with the active participation of 46 stations, BBC’s Our World (1967) was undoubtedly the most globally far reaching of them all. Conceived around Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the communicative global village, the special program took full advantage of satellites to both reach a truly global audience and use the occasion to announce the dawn of globalization and what living in a small and thoroughly connected world would mean for its inhabitants. Prominent in the broadcast was the program’s Canadian segment, which aired right after the introduction and included Marshal McLuhan interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and broadcast from their studio in Toronto.

. . . the #Accelerate Manifesto, both in form and content, is also indicative of the limited utility philosophy might have in a crisis situation like that of 2008 and on, hence, the need for a full-fledged turn away from speculative philosophy towards proper political economy. However, it is important to note that this political turn was filtered mostly through speculative realism, on the positive side, because of their shared emphasis on materiality & the place of technology, and on the negative, through SR’s spectacular failure in offering a new epistemology and the accelerationist demand for one. And yet, SR did offer a way out of Continental theory loops, via the works of Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani, mostly through their defense of the idea of Enlightenment and reason or what later was called neorationalism . . . their brand of realism offers a new way of thinking about the political that is not overdetermined and therefore limited by Western anarcho-Marxist cynicism towards government institutions and social planning, or the dominant discursive politics of poststructuralism or the Latourian hegemonic hyper-relativism that insists everything is a network.

So, how do we move beyond the past? How do we move past the phallocratic traditions and its subjective invariants? In the aftermath of emancipatory politics and within a current age of media deliriums, where we are all allowed to scream and cry our outrage and become the users and producers of media and the illusions and dreams of detournements of Debord have been given to us all within the virtual-actual spaces of social networks; or at least, keeps us chained to a Freudian unconscious (a Freudian Robot). The question, Ex Machina then brings to the forefront, is more than a simple question of Feminist emancipatory politics, it’s a position outside of striving perhaps to take on the compulsion of consumption today: the consumption and compulsion to Identify, to share Identification, and to consume Identity. Then, how can we begin to grasp a capacity to think within the ever-changing landscape today in a manner where we take up a mode of consumption that would be akin to a capacity and novel mode of thinking within our current landscape of post-digital culture?

The philosopher Gilbert Simondon states in his work that the machine or robot in relation to its human creator, takes on a position that in the past was granted to the slave or foreigner or stranger. That is, the machine takes on a position whereby humans try to not identify completely with it, and seek a distancing from technologies they have created. Simondon, however also thinks that monikers and conceptions of technology that refer to machines as separate from human, that is, as autonomous robots and the like, are an erroneous way to envision them. For Simondon, machines are extensions of the human. If Ex Machina had another chapter, perhaps Ava, if she followed the hopes Simondon strives to set forth in his book, On the Modes of Existence of Technical Objects (see part one or this in-progress translation for English versions), would recognize her position as an extension of the human, as a care-giving machine and a negentropic, stabilizing part of humanity.