TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The difference between minorities and majorities isn’t their size. A minority may be bigger than a majority. What defines the majority is a model you have to conform to: the average European adult male city-dweller, for example … A minority, on the other hand, has no model, it’s a becoming, a process. One might say… Read More »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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