The Energy of Dwelling

The environmental crisis we are living through has colored the thinking of ecology with reactive hues. We grow worried about dwelling when it is on the verge of expelling us altogether from its midst. Not only in ecological discourses and practices but also in politics and civil society (particularly, virtual civil society fomented by the… Read More »

Manifesto for Post Pandemic Politics by Aelita Collective

1. Where We Are Now 1. In Spring 2020, the world was plunged into a new kind of crisis. This crisis necessitated a decision. The capacity of COVID-19 to inflict mass death, it quickly became clear, rendered comparison to SARs—or worse, the common flu—disingenuous. If nothing was done, millions would die unnecessarily. Yet while the… Read More »

As If a Planet is a Camera Obscura of Itself

01 Burrowed somewhat deep in the human ocular globe lies what will, for the sake of this essay, be called a bottleneck or a gate which functionally delimits the liminal zone between thought and cognition, between self and alien, between globularity and planetarity, between being and worlding. Punctum caecum is the scientific name of that… Read More »

Political Economy of Postmodernism & the Spirit of Post-Bourgeois Capitalism

Abstract* If there still is a hegemony of postmodernism in today’s leftist academia, and if it can be analysed as the spirit of contemporary capitalism, then this poses a problem for nowadays’ leftist academia itself. I start with the premise that the just mentioned hegemony exists and present its analysis in neo-Marxist historical-materialist fashion (1).… Read More »

Engauzements of Sky Rivers in Finnegans Wake

What follows is an exposition and a conceptual experiment around James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, with attention directed at what we might call the work’s ambient logic, or its atmospheric sense-field. I wish to examine FW as a turbid medium, as the written rendering of a tropospheric river, a filamentary water vapor conveyance channel also called… Read More »

Statelessness: Forms of Life Without Worlds & Spatial Interpretation of Logic

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 »

Lumbung: The Return of the Barn
by Jan von Brevern

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 »

Memes, Capitalism and Desire:
An Interview with Mike Watson

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 »

A Foray into the Ecology of Possible Worlds

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 »

Planetary Health Stack

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 »

Is Art Made of Green Chips?

“…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 »

How to Kill Monsters with a Plasma Cutter

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 »

Moralism & Its Uses

“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 »

The Learner

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 »

Desertification of Silence

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 »

Recovering Dreams: Studio Ghibli, Avatar & Manifestations of the Unattainable

“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 »

Notes on Unilinear Time

  “…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 »

A Diplomat Bomber, His Mysterious Notebooks & Disturbing Dreams

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 »

Ceremony

“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 »

mBRANE, by Spec.Æ

(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 »

Horizonal Machinery & the Sites of Non-Anthropocentric Worlding

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 »

Inhabitable Silence & Unheard-Of Relations

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 »

Point of No Return: Extremism, Sectarian Violence
& the Militant Subject

“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 »

How to Construct a Theoretical Model?

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 »

Sculpture & Post-Media

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 »

SEX IN THE AGE OF CAPITAL

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 »

The Impossibility of Cinema: Intertwinings of Pre & Post Cinema in Contemporary Art

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 »

Cosmopolitical Parties in the Post-Human Age

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 »

What is a Shelter?

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 »

De-Epistemization of Manifest Reality: A Teratology of Philosophy

  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 »

The Beast Beneath

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 »

Noise = X and Transcendental Decoherence

“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 »

Analytical vs Ontological: Gilbert Ryle & the Question of Behaviorism

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 »

Not Cancelled! The Work of Art in the Age of Viral Propagation

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 »

Insurrection vs. Extinction: Excerpt from the Book of Games

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 »

Philosophy, Memes & the Outside

“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 »

On Meillassoux’s Critique of Vitalist Subjectalism

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 »

Period: Stop the Stigma

“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 »

Where Does the Power Go?

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 »

14 DAY ROMANCE WITH CORANTINE

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 »

Deleuzian Pessimism

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 »

It Is Only Sound That Remains: Reconstructing Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black

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 »

Organising Attention: Art Practice as Building Preservation

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 »

Skeletal Frameworks Against Abject Rot

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 »

On ‘Cause’ and Laws: Grounding Laws in Counterfactuals

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 »

The Danse Macabre: The COVID-19 Pandemic & the Allocation of Risk Under Capitalism

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 »

Kernelled Connections: Perceptron as Diagram

  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 »

Art & the Suspension of Subjectivity

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 »

Political Geography of COVID-19 Pandemic

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 »

Last Fiction 2019: Future is a cut, “Without” is not a lack

On the Aesthetic Stability of Philosophical Systems It is the beginning of the end of the course, the professor sees the effect on all students, they can invent in their field. The surprise is that these effects are not only in philosophy but about invention in several fields. For philosophy, the result was abstracted into… Read More »

Constructing the Infrastructure of Future

It is after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet San Ra’s “It’s after the end of the world” is apparently especially suitable for a gloomy Moscow morning. The repeated screams of Sun Ra “It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?” resonates with the low grey sky’s… Read More »

Reserve Death Army

Gržini?? and Tatli? with Mbembe: Parallel Colonial Regime In their book Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism Marina Gržini?? and Šefik Tatli? discuss in great detail the connection between neoliberal rationality and biopolitics, but they specifically underline that this is a framework made to fit the so-called First World. They theorize that the First World and… Read More »

Along the Liquid Path

Introduction The formation of a given city is predicated on access to its productive peripheries. Cities were first created as intentionally unproductive centres in which the goods from surrounding hinterlands could be stored and distributed. The success and growth of early cities was entirely dependent on the expansion of their footprint – the area from… Read More »

The Sacred Meme Magic

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.

Fuck Anil Prasad’s Big Music Boycott or Why Music Journalists Shouldn’t Give Career Advice to Musicians

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 »

Anti Imperialism as an Intellectual Trap

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 »

Beyond Nano-Monadology:
Exorcizing the Leibnizian ghost from the philosophy of nanotechnology

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 »

Reconfiguring Populism:
On Recent Upheavals in Ecuador

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 »

A Brief Prehistory of AI & Computation

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 »

Cryptophasia & the Question of Database

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 »

For a New Terminology of Violence

  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 »

Geneology of a Conflation

“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 Multitude & Its Discontents

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 »

Money Changes Everything

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 »

The Generic Unmasked:
Reproducibility & Profanation

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 »

Art without A Proper Pedestal: Patrick Schabus on the 58th Edition of Venice Biennale

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 »

Differentia Ex Nihilo: The Problem of Difference in Kant’s Critical Philosophy

  “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 »

A Ceded Interfile: Future-Oriented
Social & Cognitive Design

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 »

Stupidity & Geist: A Review of Intelligence and Spirit by Reza Negarestani

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 »

Persistence of Manichaean Aesthetics
in Persian Art

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 Lack? The Lacanian computation

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 »

On Philosophical Methodology: A Sellarsian Look at the Analytic / Continental Divide

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’.

13 Notes on the 40th Anniversary of the Iranian Revolution

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.

Disease As an Aesthetic Project

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.

Politica de la Matematica en la era de las Posverdad, una entervista con Fernando Zalamea

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.

Politics of Math in the Age of Post-Truth, an interview with Fernando Zalamea

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.

Für eine nicht-amerikanische Weltsicht

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?

Iranian Nuclear Agreement and a Non-American Vision of the World*

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?

The Science-Subject of Vladimir Kobrin

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.

Abandoning Necropoesis Once & For All

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.

Chimeric-Bodies, Transparency & Nuanima

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 »

What does it Mean to ‘Step Outside of Ones Bubble?’

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 »

Overcoming Left’s Mythopoetic Deficit

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 »

Cash Out Now: On the Strange Symbiosis of Sexual Harassment and Contemporary Art

#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 »

People Are People: From Mass to Network Models of Governance

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 »

Beyond Endless Winter: An Interview with Nick Srnicek

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 »

Moscow, January 1st, 2019

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 »

Against Curating

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 »

#AltWoke Companion

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 Persian Empire & the Question of Democracy in Herodotus’s Histories

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 »

Nick Land & Accelerationism

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

“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 »

#AltWoke Manifesto

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 »

Brief Notes on Ideological Complicity

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 »

9/11 & Televisual Intersubjectivity

The six-channel work I presented at Art In The Age Of…Asymmetrical Warfare exhibition reconstructs from video archives of the September 11th attacks the televisual unfolding of the event on CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC and BBC news networks. The synchronic and uninterrupted footage which is playing on a continuous loop starts with the networks’ mundane… Read More »

For Machine Use Only: A New Publication by &&& / The New Centre

We are excited to announce the release of our publication produced in conjunction with Mohammad Salemy’s installation at the 11th Gwangju Biennale 2016. The book expands on the idea of machinic vision, featuring short texts by a range of thinkers, philosophers and scholars who were asked to contemplate about the possibilities and limitation of a… Read More »

The Chinese Rooms of Cognitive Capital

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 »

Vilém Flusser — On Fiction

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 »

Blood Politics? An Open letter to Jerry Saltz

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 »

The Dialogical Avatar

“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.”

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Woke Is Dead? Not So Fast!

I am not sure exactly what “woke” is supposed to mean, but from what I have observed in not-so-academic debates that flirt with theory, it is an individualistic liberal appropriation of the so-called “constructivist” argument. In other words, the value system of “woke” derives from critical theory and the “constructivist,” or rather poststructuralist, social argument.… Read More »

Mohammad Salemy: La estructura retorcida del populismo

Este artículo fue investigado y desarrollado para el ciclo de conferencias #SinFiltros y presentado por el autor en la Universidad Zeppelin el 4 de marzo. El ciclo también contó con conferencias de Armen Avanessian, Cécile Malaspina y Hito Steyrl, entre otros. El ciclo de conferencias explora cómo la mentalidad #sinfiltros, que enfatiza la inmediatez y… Read More »

Have I Got News for You: The Road to Neo-feudalism

Originally published in Media Theory Vol. 8 No. 2 (2024), Korinna Patelis’s essay, “Have I Got News for You: The Road to Neo-feudalism,” offers a highly original critique of contemporary leftist propositions about the death of capitalism and the ushering of what they term ‘”techno-feudalism.” Situating her analysis within Greece’s political landscape and Syriza’s rise,… Read More »

Twisted Structure of Populism

This paper was researched and developed for the ‘#NoFilter Lecture Series’ and delivered by the author at the Zeppelin University on March 4. The series also featured lectures by Armen Avanessian, Cécile Malaspina & Hito Steyrl among others. The series of lectures explores how the #nofilter mindset, emphasizing unfiltered immediacy and authenticity, permeates various spheres… Read More »

Abdullah Öcalan’s Letter Demanding Unilateral End to Kurdish Armed Conflict with Turkish State

Abdullah Öcalan, the founding leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been a key figure in the Kurdish struggle for autonomy in Turkey. Captured in 1999, he has been imprisoned, gradually shifting his focus from armed resistance to advocating for “democratic confederalism”—a model promoting grassroots democracy, gender equality, and coexistence. His writings continue to… Read More »

PASSIVE-MAGA & the retvrn to vintage 2007-era tech CEO fawn response: Chris Smalls vs Joshua Citarella in their own words

Editor’s Note: This text was previously published by the author on https://timeseunuch.substack.com/. 1. ‘Thank you for reading my wikipedia bio.’ The other night I took some friends and students to a panel with the worker’s hero Chris Smalls. He spent ages 25 to 30 at Bezos’ warehouses, then unionized them from scratch, autonomous from the… 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 »

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 »

Modern Art: A True Conspiracy

*Originally delivered as a response to Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans” on Day 27 of Superconversations, a collaboration between e-flux and The New Centre for Research & Practice in 2015. The most recent wartime Christmas in New York was as cold and bright as any other holiday season had ever been in the city. As usual, a… Read More »