Some Brief Notes on Reza Negarestani’s Intelligence & Spirit

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

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

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

The Case for Artplay

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

Creative Groundlessness: A Rehearsal in Self-Translation

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

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 »

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

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

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

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

Notes on Hypervision

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

The Dead God, A short story in two parts

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

Of Contradictions Between Sociology & Neoliberalism

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

Not Giving Up On Humans

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

The Purist

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

Pyromaniac Research Unit Manifesto

§0 “Lo que el hombre no sabe, o no ha pensado, vaga en la noche por el laberinto de la mente”. [“What man does not know, or has not thought of, wanders in the night through the labyrinth of the mind.”] —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe §1 The kids who played with fire: Pyromania, play and… Read More »

Retinol: A Mode of Action

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

Manifesto for Uchronic Gardens, pt. I

A speculative atlas: to dilate the geography of the imagination with our hands, like clay. That which now sits on nowhere and nowhen. Which simply lies there. We must recover it. It will soon become a sort of labor, this hyperlucid craft. An engineering of worlds in chimerical diagrams of nylon allure. The task is… Read More »

The Narcissist Image

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

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

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

Unthought Apparitions

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

The Work of Art in the Age of Cybernetic Criticism

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

Cosmotechnics & the Multicultural Trap

1. Although still a young writer and researcher, it is probably not an exaggeration to say that Yuk Hui is already one of the most influential contemporary thinkers of technology working today. This position is certainly warranted by the strength and scope of his work, the expansive drive and breadth of which is inspiring, especially… Read More »

Pandemic, Time for a Transversal Political Imagination*

I: Symptoms With the omnipresence of the term “symptom” these days, it seems that a plausible escape from the deep horror of this pandemic would be to conduct a symptomatic reading of it. Attributed to Louis Althusser, this method of reading literary and historical texts focuses not on what a text evidently expresses, but on… Read More »

Generation Z: Invincible, Angry & Radical*

*Originally published by BBC Persian, to read the original, please click here.  Following the protests that are taking place in Iran after the killing of Mahsa Amini by the forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the attention of the people and the media has been drawn to the role, and strong presence of the… Read More »

Law & Platform Architecture

Note: This piece was co-produced as a dialogue in the manner of a feedback between the authors. They reacted to each other’s thoughts on Law about Space while having as a single rule that each would use a different language as a tool of communication. Zé would use written text, whereas Artemis would use visual expressions. When… Read More »

Arriving from the Future: Sinofuturism & the post-human in the philosophy of Nick Land & Yuk Hui

Modernity and technics “If you think about the Silk Road in the past, there’s this idea of eastern and western people meeting on some kind of big road and maybe selling and buying things. I think this history repeats itself, and some kind of new and interesting phenomenon is happening.” —Kim Namjoon, member of the group… Read More »

Dimes is of the Essence: Gardeners of the creative

Editor’s Note: This piece, written by several authors, oscillates between plural and singular voices, with the intended effect of collaging three perspectives together in a unified décollage. “I’ll never forget the time I went to Dimes Cafe at 4 am for an after party in 2015. Max Brand was there, and I was trying to… Read More »

Artist as a Formal System: Towards a general theory of art

For the past few years, I’ve been engaged with writing a footnote to an essay with an attempted theoretical explication of what is meant by the word “art”. For a much longer time, I’ve pursued a very abstract but also very specific direction in my own art practice – like any other artist. One little… Read More »

On Daniel Hölzl’s Grounded

“Oil is the undercurrent of all narrations, not only the political but also that of the ethics of life on earth. This undercurrent material, petroleum narrates the dynamics of planetary events from macroscopic scales such as hot and cold wars, migrations, religious and political uprisings, to micro or even nanoscopic scales such as the chemical… Read More »

The Future History of Skills

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us. — John Culkin (1967) “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review) Human creativity is often driven by lateral thinking, which according to Margaret Boden has a weakness. She posits that AI can introduce better “standards of rigor, […]… Read More »

Metamorphoses of Crypto Capital

  His favourites received contracts under conditions whereby they, cleverer than the alchemists, made gold out of nothing. – Karl Marx, Capital Vol.1   Introduction The spread of distributed ledger technologies in the Information and Technology sector has been the cause for much speculation and hype. The modern blockchain is rooted in the work of… Read More »

Copy, Object & Matter in 3D Printed Historical Monuments

The deployment of 3D modeling and 3D printing techniques in historical heritage is nothing new. 3D modeling has been used in creating digital environments since the mid-1990s. These models were created mainly to situate its users among the reconstructed ruins of historical landscapes, especially from antiquity and the Middle Ages, such as Ancient Rome, Egypt,… Read More »

Babylonian Neo-mustaqbal: Continental Vibe and the Metaverse

My aim here is to venture a scholarly definition of the Continental Vibe, but allow me to arrive there via an anecdote, or an impression, really – one of my earliest memories of viewing the world as a cast of signs and symbols. A somersault of senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory. A sum of building blocks and a bevy… Read More »

Stellar Bile, Terrestrial Extraction & Carrie Blast Furnaces

  INTRODUCTION The following analyses are hypothetical entries into Karen Pinkus’ Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary, a dictionary which itself ought to be read as a work in perpetual progress.[1] Drawing upon Pinkus’ work—cross-referencing, if you will—I want to introduce two entries (themselves, necessarily works in perpetual progress) into Pinkus’ registry; one site-specific, one ‘generic’: “Carrie Furnace”… Read More »

Interfacing Materials: An Experiment with Self-Organized Writing

      – Ana Paula Silva & Digital Symbiotic Interface & Matheus Ferreira[1]    I: Hello, there, I’m the selected object-interface for this co-authored conversation-essay. You may call me cyborg, or the interface of internet conversation, or whatever. I am the standard medium and interface, as that which is between the faces of the other authors… Read More »

The Summer Exhibitions of Discontent

From Venice to Berlin, Kassel, and… Davos There’s little that the art world has missed during the pandemic more than airport lounges. I was no exception and, despite having made a series of gloomy predictions about art’s return in a diminished yet more self-satisfied form, I was eager to chase my hits of aviation fuel… Read More »

Telos at the End: A Meditation on Dysteleological Superintelligence

I proceed from an actual fact. For all the scenarios of existential risk from Artificial Intelligence/Superintelligence, there’s always been the same thing. There’s always been this aspect, put tacitly or implicitly, either merely enlisted, or considered to be decisive. And what is it? It is the presupposed teleology. Varying in movements and outcomes, all AI-concerned… Read More »

Second-order Design Fictions in End Times

This conversation on Second-order design fiction is part of an ongoing collective research project by Fry and Perera on Technology, Cosmotechnics, Design and Resistance. In their conversation Fry and Perera explore the concept of second-order design fiction (SoDF) as an emergent means of addressing how design is understood and practiced in the context of the… Read More »

Documenta 15: Captured & Content

Documenta 15, heterogeneous, accessible, resplendent in-process and incomplete, present-here-and-now, and affirmative, is soft-imperialist, globalist art at its apex. New Edge — it’s gentle, loving, soothing, and light, art for the righteous decline of the Western enlightenment project and paean for the rise of the Global South, salvaging what it finds useful from Western ruins, vainglory,… Read More »

Hito Steyerl: Context is Everything, Except When It Comes to Germany

Intro from Zeit Newspaper, Germany Does the upcoming Documenta exhibition in Kassel promote anti-Semitic tendencies in art? Are some female artists too close to the BDS movement? Should the curators have paid more attention to the fact that Israeli-Jewish artists are also present – ??and not just those who are themselves opposed to the country’s… Read More »

Hermeneutics of Ether: Immanuel Kant’s thing in itself in the Opus Postumum

  “Some see the glass as empty, I see a glass full of ether.” — J. Cole We are entangled in a love-hate relationship with Immanuel Kant. Throughout the last two centuries, those who have an affinity for the philosophical task have directly or indirectly been involved with his postulations, mainly those pertaining to his… Read More »

Of Bartleby & Blockchain: Digital Scriveners in the Age of Cryptocurrencies

Herman Melville wrote a story about a curious fellow, a scrivener: a clerk for his employer upon Wall Street, a “conveyancer and title hunter, and drawer-up of recondite documents”.[1] Bartleby’s disinclination to do any work was, repeatedly and almost without variation, couched in a phrase of maddening brevity and disturbing ambiguity. The man wasn’t quite… Read More »

The Substitution of John Cage

For this brief essay, I suggest running a simple thought experiment. As suggested in the header, it will concern one avant-garde composer, about whom one biographical fact will be substituted. In the first part of the essay, I’ll explain my interest in Cage’s practice and its reception — after that, the experiment itself takes place. Hopefully, by… Read More »

Planetary Scale Art

It’s well known that when people venture into the far reaches of consciousness, they do so at the peril of their sanity, that is, of their humanity. But the “human scale” or humanistic standard proper to ordinary life and conduct seems misplaced when applied to art. It oversimplifies. If within the last century art conceived… Read More »

Mathemetaphysics Exordium*

Preface Through my Prolegomenon, I am attempting to create a «transcendental method» which is arrived at from self-evident axiomatic truths (‹truth› with lowercase t) of mathematics and de-ontologized without a necessary background ontology (for examples of «background ontologies» see how the realm of the virtual supports the realm of actuality in Gilles Deleuze, or how… Read More »

Secret Origin

You can read the full comic in higher quality here.

Styles of Misanthropy

I like DeLanda’s abstract machines (1) – more precise, more concrete than metaphors, but still loose and capable of creativity. But what’s the point of writing anyway? Who reads the words and thinks the thoughts instead of simply filling something else in the vacuum – you look and see but do not see, still and that… Read More »

Misleading Projectiles

1. To outdraw the introduction… (1) ‘The kill-chain can be thought of as a dispersed and distributed apparatus, a congeries of actors, objects, practices, discourses and affects, that entrains the people who are made part of it and constitutes them as particular kinds of subjects(2).’ … one has to think about where the fired shots… Read More »

Retrievals of the Lost Past: Jewish Mysticism and Cinema

  In common sense, history is considered as a series of events that follow one another in a one-dimensional, irreversible, and forward-looking direction. This is the familiar understanding that considers history as chronological. In this case, which requires imagining a timeline, past events are separated from future events by the present moment. Each of the… Read More »

Shannon’s Demon

Consider an information sponge so vast it amasses a billion suns—absorbing all surrounding structure and pattern, its interior would converge on a maximal entropy state. Matter succumbing to its gravitational spell would find itself drawn into a gaseous vortex, a chaotic collapse of form and order, approaching a singularity in which spacetime itself is infinitely compressed. An accretion disk would form a nebulous halo around this dark region, marking it out as an indiscriminate attractor of light, its sheer density trapping matter in a photonic cell of its own making. Such galactic nuclei, namely black holes, serve as the principal discursive site of information theory in physics, setting the stage for contested claims regarding the nature of encoding.

To Write with Blood: Discursive Authorship and Inner Experience

In ”On Reading and Writing”, a chapter in his seminal work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche speaks through his prophet Zarathustra, who declares: “Of all that is written I love only that which one writes with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit. It is not easily possible to understand the… Read More »

A Walk in the Park, Revisited

Let’s take a walk in the park. I began my last series of work with this phrase as my guide. Appropriating the name from a set of choreography a collaborator and friend of mine, Nikima Jagudajev, uses in multiple dance-based works, and has taught me. It involves choreographed, pedestrian-like movements that are meant to be… Read More »

On Soaring Gas Prices & Neo-Authoritarianism

Vancouver Russian Community Centre vandalized with blue and yellow paint. It shouldn’t have to be said that millions of Russians are against this war. It shouldn’t have to be said that you can stand with the people of Russia and the people of Ukraine at the same time. Alas, this is the problem with liberalism:… Read More »

Post Scriptum: Art After Ideology

In one of his well known essays, Art After Philosophy, (1) Joseph Kosuth presents several propositions regarding the function of art, arguing that it only has obligations to itself. He declares that, after Duchamp, the value of certain artists should “be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art; which is another way… Read More »

Reform the Social Sciences – Or Burn Them Down

Recently I have been thinking about what would happen if all the sociology departments in the world would suddenly burn down. Would anyone besides the staff really miss them? Do they really provide any value to society and by extension, to people? While having these ponderings, I discovered a group of scholars in management studies,… Read More »

A Bridge & a Sunset

The purpose of this contribution is not to provide a philologically accurate reading of Nietzsche’s writings. That is notoriously a daunting task. What we are going to discuss here is a particular reading of Nietzsche, which inevitably carries its own peculiar type of misinterpretation, a reading that develops within a specific political and philosophical context,… Read More »

We Deserve Better Than NFTs

Having emerged from the relative obscurity of crypto enthusiasts’ niches, thanks to some major corporate push and celebrity endorsement, NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) now regularly feature at the forefront of mainstream publications, and they are already moving millions of dollars in cryptocurrency transactions each month. NFTs generated over 23 billion dollars in trading volume over the… Read More »

Parasites, A Biennale Manifestation

This is the concept text for the 36th Youth Salon, a biennial manifestation organized by the Croatian Association of Visual Artists (HDLU), that his year will be curated by the KUCCA collective. The Salon will open in April 2022 in Zagreb. The parasite is an infectant. Far from actually transforming a system’s nature, its form, elements, relations, and paths,… Read More »

The Weird Elephant

For Object-Oriented Philosophy, there is no direct access to the outside reality. Instead, this access is indirect, allusive, or vicarious. Since traditional Islamic thought is not strange to OOP, this text uses Rumi’s fable “Elephant in the Dark” to place the use of metaphoric language in a central means of the technology of speculation so crucial for… Read More »

Style & Thought Rerouted

“and the matron mourns, forlorn and forsaken, like Hecuba:” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason 1. INTRODUCTION “Bring something incomprehensible into the world(!)”. The rallying cry of Deleuze & Guattari resounded across the field of poststructuralism and theory, and then faded off into the distance. The field of theoretical practice today, while cognisant of… Read More »

A Vertiginous Enlightenment
(On James Webb Telescope)

In tandem with the launch of James Webb Space telescope and its journey to Lagrange point 2, we decided to republish this essay by Reza Negarestani from 2012. It was originally published in Savage Objects, ed. Godofredo Pereira (Guimarães: 2012). __ The James Webb Space Telescope (sometimes called JWST) is a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter… Read More »

Shadows of a Utopia:
Debugging of a Reoccuring Dream

The global political crises of the last decade have renewed a call for the consideration of decolonial strategies as an effective response. As peripheral the place and voice of art in these debates might seem, from the time of the Paris Communes to the present, art has been corresponding to revolutionary and transformational developments around… Read More »

Signifying Nothing: The Dialectical Rope-a-Dope

The space of the virtual Thursday May 20th 2019 Categories: Pop, Boxing, Transcript Ladies and Gentlemen a very good evening to you and welcome to the Zenith Hall in Toronto Ontario as we present the featured round of the evening brought to you by Ataraxia starring Bill Murray in Theatres March 15th, Dion5 the official… Read More »

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 »

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More Articles from &&&

Genealogy of Wokeism

Introduction The last thing most progressives think we need is another male writer complaining about “wokeism.” Why not talk about more important things? Wokeism has become somewhat of a floating signifier. Wokeism can mean different things to different people, with many people throwing the term around as a pejorative in highly inconsistent ways. However, many… Read More »

Paratypology: Towards a Scrap Theory of Form

1. To Sort I find myself at a furniture factory, in the seaming department, surrounded by the pneumatic humming of sewing machines. All around me, industrious hands are swift in joining odd parcels of hide, textiles and other soft surfaces according to flat templates. Although the individual steps they carry out are familiar to me,… Read More »

Socialism after Socialism, A Response to Conrad Hamilton

In the spirit of dialogue, I am responding to the observations in Conrad Hamilton’s recent expansive review of my book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. I will be concentrating on Hamilton’s three main claims, that there is a gap between the form and content of socvialism, invoking Marxist theories of struggle before coming down… Read More »

Biennialese Blues: Review of Whitney Biennial 2026

ARTISTS: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Kelly Akashi, Kamrooz Aram, Ash Arder, Teresa Baker, Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Zach Blas, Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien, Leo Castañeda, CFGNY, Nanibah Chacon, Maia Chao, Joshua Citarella, Mo Costello, Taína H. Cruz, Carmen de Monteflores, Ali Eyal, Andrea Fraser, Mariah Garnett, Ignacio Gatica, Jonathan González, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Kainoa Gruspe,… Read More »

No View from Nowhere: On Discourse, Différance & Functorial Semantics of Micro-Communities

This essay argues that natural language semantics admits no global orientation—no ‘view from nowhere’—but only local positions within psychoanalytically and sociologically embedded discourse communities. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of différance, I demonstrate that meaning is constitutively deferred across the differential play of signs, precluding any meta-linguistic standpoint from which all local meanings could be adjudicated.… Read More »

Liberalism Is Dead, Long Live Liberalism!

Matthew McManus’ The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism is a powerful attempt to merge two disparate traditions, parlaying reformist compromise into a coherent political program. It also rests on the assumption that socialism is inherently illiberal, an assumption that deserves to be questioned. While often hailed as the single-minded son of America, perhaps the best… Read More »

Luxury Activism: Art, Fashion & Capital

[This text was previously published by the author in Portuguese on Contemporânea Magazine — Ed.] I don’t want to work with fashion. Beauty must be preserved from capitalism. Fashion favours the escape into personal, private, selected, chosen space, as a form of false self-determination. Fashion reflects the fear of losing’ identity. — Thomas Hirschhorn The purposelessness… Read More »

The Questions Concerning the Ethics of AI

With recent articles in &&& concerning the status of what is or is not Marxism, I took it upon myself to write a piece that I consider firmly placed in that tradition. I am not being paid by the CIA, I promise. Furthermore, despite appearances, my article is not an article in the “ethics of… Read More »

The Best Ever Art Basel Review that Qatar Money Can Buy

During the Art Basel Qatar’s VIP preview of Sweat Variant’s durational performance My Tongue is a Blade on February 4, two special seats up in front of the stage stayed empty for a while.  Empty with intent.  People hovered, looked, and reconsidered occupying them in their head at the last minute like they were about… Read More »

SUPPORT THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION 2026!

SIGN THE STATEMENT HERE The past several weeks have borne witness to a bloodbath in Iran amidst images of systematic massacre and horrific abuses of power by the Iranian government against its own people. As a united front, we stand together to uphold the following convictions: 1- That the Islamic Republic of Iran must come… Read More »

Rhetoric vs Reality: Iranian Regime Is an Imperialist Project Preventing a Free Palestine!

Since its founding, the Islamic Republic of Iran has cultivated legitimacy by embedding itself within global progressive movements—particularly those oriented around anti-imperialism and racial justice. Rhetoric, repeated, obscures reality: the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) is an imperialist project that will not enable a free Palestine. The IRI is built on an expansionist doctrine resembling… Read More »

On State Collapse & Democide in Iran

1. Middle Eastern Islamisms and Islamists are reorganizing in a post-jihadi/takfiri Muslim/Arab world within their national boundaries. First of all, the Taliban’s path back to Afghanistan was facilitated by the USA. Afghan Islamists were swift in adopting a more Afghanistan-focused vision and dismantling any public state capacity, especially in social and women’s affairs, built under… Read More »

How Was This Monster Born? Contemplations on the Ontology of the Iranian Islamic Republic

By Asal Mansouri and Borna Dehghani, writing from Tehran How can survival turn into something shameful? How does breathing itself become a burden – one that a person no longer dares to carry, a weight that grows heavier by the moment, with no path of escape left open? What took place across Iran in January… Read More »

The Human Centipede II: Qatar & the Broker’s Cut

If my first The Human Centipede: A View From the Art World (2013) traced the art world as a closed alimentary circuit, this sequel begins where that circuit was sublimated into brokerage as a state-form with unmistakable political aspirations.[1] The same logic is now in the open for everyone to witness, wearing the grimace of… Read More »

الغای زیر ساخت‌های شیعه اسلام در ایران 

ENGLISH VERSION در لحظه‌ای که این سطور نوشته می‌شود، ایران با زخمی باز زنده است. جامعهٔ ایران یکی از تاریک‌ترین مقاطع تاریخ معاصر خود را از سر می‌گذراند. ده‌ها هزار نفر در خیابان‌ها کشتار شده‌اند؛ معترضانِ زخمی توسط نیروهای امنیتی از بیمارستان‌ها ربوده می‌شوند؛ و اعدام‌ها در زندان‌ها به شکلی صنعتی ادامه دارد. خانواده‌ها آیین‌های… Read More »

Abolition of Infrastructural Shia Islam in Iran

FARSI VERSION As I write this, Iran is an open wound. Iranians are living through one of the darkest moments of their country’s contemporary history. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands have been massacred in the streets; wounded protesters are being removed from hospitals by security forces, and executions are taking place on an industrial scale… Read More »

ایران، بزرگترین دردسر: دربارهٔ سکوتِ مزمنِ بخشی از چپِ معاصر

با چیزی آغاز می‌کنم که در نگاه اول شبیه یک حاشیه‌روی است، یک خاطرهٔ قدیمیِ تلویزیونی که زمانی لبخند روی صورتِ ما می‌آورد. اما همین خاطره، مدلِ فشرده‌ای از یک واکنشِ سیاسی است که مدام در ایران تکرار می‌شود. وقتی جوان‌تر بودم، سریالی بود به نام «روزی روزگاری». یک پدیده شد و واقعاً هم عالی… Read More »

Regarding the Erasure of Iranian Uprising

The most recent state crackdown on Iranian protesters stands among the most violent suppressions of public dissent in Iran’s modern history. Protesters have been killed, blinded, and mass-arrested. As the state imposed a sweeping information blackout and advanced claims blaming foreign agents for the violence, this brutality has nonetheless been met with a striking absence… Read More »

Why Critical Theory Isn’t Marxism & Why Western Vs. Eastern Marxism is an Illusory Dichotomy?

I have almost finished Gabriel Rockhill’s “Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?” (Monthly Review Press, 2025) amidst the uproar among the so-called progressive left academia and publishing. Rockhill has said the quiet truth out loud: the so-called critical theory has in fact nothing to do with Marxism. Its path has been paved by former… Read More »

Applied Collapse in Venezuela

The recent decapitation of the Venezuelan regime by the US military is part of a longer history of induced collapse: from Iraq to Afghanistan to Palestine, the techniques of empire have been wielded to destroy societies. But behind the Maduro extradition may be a kind of new American weakness.As you know, Nicolás Maduro and his… Read More »

Hard Habit to Break: On Political Readings of Art & Marxist Citationalism

I want to talk about a habit in contemporary art writing that I keep running into, especially in Marxist-inflected theory, where interpretation is substituted with citation and judgment is treated as an embarrassment. The pattern is familiar: the artwork becomes an occasion to rehearse a framework, the framework becomes a moral sorting machine, and the… Read More »

Computational Contemplation of
Burg of Babel

To watch a one-minute version of the film, please click here. Burg of Babel (2017-2024) is built on a very simple but unusual structure. On the screen, instead of one large moving image, the viewers see a grid made up of twenty-five rectangles, five across and five down, each playing the same 25-minute film, with… Read More »