TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Is #AltWoke? #AltWoke is: The Catalytic Left. Post-Landian Left-Accelerationism. Team Reza Negarestani. ‘The Dark Insurrection.’ Direct action hacktivism. Free market socialism. Apocalyptic communism. Intersectional xenofeminism. Environmentally conscientious nihilism. Libidinal Marxism. Platform stacktivism. IoT urban policy. High post-post-structuralism. The Corporate Undercommons. Gratuitous neologism and nomenclature trolling. Lifestyle branding as political ideology & vice versa. AltWoke™:… Read More »

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

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

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

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

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

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 »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The joy of time travel isn’t to see how the world or people will look at a very distant point in time, but to find that there some concepts, pictures, artifacts, lifehacks, etc, that derive exclusively from one’s own era. Yet, what’s found is actually brought by the time traveler himself in order to save today’s artifacts and circumstances from decay, or — even better — from critique and close scrutiny . . . the time traveler becomes a smuggler: in order to stop something from being questioned, he smuggles it into the distant future, since no one is yet there to have any doubts about the many issues, ideas and controversies of our highly nontransparent age. It appears therefore, as though the real achievement of the future — its comparative advantage — is the absence of doubts, cognitive disorders, paradoxes and dissonances. There are no double binds in the future! In the future everybody cares for art and artists and we don’t even need to ask ‘why?’ . . . In the future, such questions, as well as many others, no longer exist . . .

Day 56: Jason Adams responds to Jussi Parikka, “The Alchemic Digital, The Planetary Elemental” “. . . it is the planetary computational accoutrement to the economic proper that ensures the just-in-time acquirability of the needed elements, such as the practice of High Frequency Trading (HFT) requires the development of software and hardware through which nanosecond-level… Read More »

Mohammad Salemy outlines some of the main criticisms of Accelerationism today and shares “a few insights (and perhaps critiques) in order to judge this intellectual movement from within its ranks [while providing] constructive insights on how to move forward from here”

. . . what to make of objects whose properties and relations are magical, decidedly unreal? Philosophy constitutes itself in opposition to magic; realism and rationality are understood to be incompatible with the inexplicable, unpredictable nature of wish-granting boxes, immortal apples who long for death, and other supernatural phenomena. While OOO and SR point towards a universe in which everything exists, the objects in these stories press further, insisting upon their own agency, centrality and unknowability. They are magic objects; they constitute miniature universes in which the tragedies and commonplaces of the “real” are constantly displaced by the possibility of unexpected transformation . . . [magic objects] offer an escape from the codified, knowable real, but one grounded in the reality of tangible things and the relations between them. They are magic not because of some illusionistic quality—that they are not, or something more than, what they seem—but because they possess supernatural abilities, affective and material capabilities literally beyond nature.

In order to respond to Carolyn L. Kane’s well researched history of plastic, I am expanding on the ontology of this synthetic substance and am highlighting the traces of its alien existence in various fields of knowledge by putting together a selection of images as well as introductory paragraphs from 12 wikipedia pages to reveal the extent of plastic’s penetration into our world.

What is left of Fedorov’s program after its patristic cast is demolished? Arguably, the core insights of cosmism survive intact, only cleared of obfuscation. These are: the intuition that science and technology will enable us to direct our own evolution; the recognition that this enablement is itself a feature of the machinery of the universe; and the conviction that this activity should be both the subject and object of our species’ self-education. Fedorov both expands the Museum to encompass all the data of the world, and shrinks it to the size of the individual soul. The cosmist imperative, its cosmopolitan scope, results from this enlistment of human beings by the universe, to consolidate it as a whole through their observation and participation. Human history encodes cosmic history . . . Fedorov’s incipient cosmism, too, expresses both a local and a global trajectory, the rupture of Christian particularism by a scientific universalism that it had, in part, presaged. The role of the Museum in Fedorov’s essay becomes less strained when liberated from the convolution of filial veneration, and its status as an instrument of cultural unification becomes more compelling.

An exquisite cadaver, Fidel ossified in his undead flesh, clings to and haunts dreams, a specter haunting the Caribbean, not the Marxian spectre of Communism, rather an Inquiet Spirit, walking age upon age – not unlike that monarchial exquisite corpse of England, Elizabeth and her cadaverous Prince-Consort, undead, vampires haunting the living from the age of the past century. Fidel, the end of an age, the last of the revolutionaries, takes a last undead glance over Havana as he dreams his failed revolution into the silence of the grave not yet opened to receive him, a ghastly mouth awaiting his final oneiric emission, los sueños de 26 Julio, no sería realidad; the dreams of the 26th of July will not be realized.

How can we think of something we never before thought? How can we feel it? What is the feeling of it? Actually, this was [the] question when we began trying to understand form in the time of cosmos. I think an artifact, or the form of an artifact is always somewhat unknown because it also carries a potential.

. . . while Kant and Hegel are narrated as embracing the “inhumanness within humanness”, ACC/SR/OOO is said to posit alienation as something that must be endured beyond the human entirely, since the human is incapable of encountering the alien from within the human, as remains possible in Kant and Hegel. . .Such a claim seems a strange one . . . Does Chukhrov mean to say, rather, that for ACC/SR/OOO, the noumenal is inaccessible to the phenomenal subject, which must rely instead, upon reason, mathematics, carbon-dating, and other abstractions? . . . The fact that Reza Negerastani’s concept of the “inhuman”, for instance, supports neither Chukhrov’s rhetorical choice nor the distinction it is attached to, would seem to deepen the stakes of answering these queries properly.

. . .how is it possible for human beings to be both embodied and distributed at the same time. . .? How is it that they report on the experience of an emergent whole larger than that sum of the individuals involved? More to the point, to generalize the implications of my thought experiment: in light of the reference to the term “solidarity,” how can one get individuals to spontaneously behave in accord with the best interests of all, without coercion?

If the XXI century has shown us anything, it is that it has been a very fractured one. The same can be also said about the Islamic State, which is composed by independent hubs, each one an ensemble manifested through a virtual platform and without any objective but the spread of acts of extreme violence, and a message of hate at its most elementary level . . . having wanted to destroy any resemblance of what they are against, they show themselves as the ultimate example of the object in their destructive hands. The only point they might be proving therefore is that subjectivity has ceased to exist so that, basically, we can easily conclude that they are condemning themselves.

What does it mean to leave an art world? . . . It speaks to a specific relationship to history and historicization, but also to a self-conscious positioning within an avant-garde that reveals the horizons of its possibilities, the limits of transgression and the boundaries of a community’s expectations. The myriad departures and renunciations that mark Qian Weikang and the New Measurement Group’s careers as individuals and as a group sketch not only the bounds of China’s mainstream art world but also the parameters of its avant-garde . . . their refusal of the self-conscious forms of being a contemporary artist within a domestic avant-garde, an increasingly marketized cultural sphere and, finally, within a global transnational environment demonstrates a persistent resistance to instrumentality and the collective and social life it sustains.

Its mechanistic protocols of control, exploitation, and expansion catalyzed by industrialization, the geopolitical incursions of highly-toxic Western masculinity have everywhere produced pockets of keen awareness of this masculinity’s illegitimacy and inadequacy. The virtual potential for various forms of liberatory politics to have purchase on the real is increased when these pockets gain depth, density, rationale, and kinesis. It is clear that the dual emergence of telecomputation and the Carbon Liberation Front has given the left project accidental access to the privileged space of End-Game Fantasy . . . and participation in what Uzma Z. Rizvi calls “the speculative fiction of time.

Can we truly embrace the great lesson of ecology, namely, that we are part of a complex array of vulnerable systems, without sparking another reboot in our imaginary cosmogonies? Is representation partly to blame for presenting the world as a digital rendering (everything in it is discreet and divided) instead of a tableaux formed by a multiplicity of topological surfaces that overlap and alter our perception?

The game is to overturn the Pythagorean conception of the string, its harmonics and their respective relations with the series of natural numbers. Under this hegemony, the sound object is conceived of in terms of, or as a number, which in turn becomes the condition for physical structures of the body, initiating sound-action from the executive neurological capacity alone . . . These dynamics, when set into motion, exceed all models founded on transverse vibrations of the string and suggest resonant capacities and emergent properties in the manner of a complex physical system. In practice, the game of Harmonic Criticality is an entrainment with the instrument as object on a neurophysiological level which can be extended to the biochemical and mineral substrates.

The art world shows how the engine of capitalism rather than running on notions of production and labor, or the concept of supply and demand, is actually fueled by capitalization, or how much one is prepared, or rather has been prepared, to pay the price today in order to receive a profit tomorrow. What guarantees future profits in the financial markets as well as the art world is not the logical algorithm of growth but the social power that can be systematically mobilized in both environments to enforce today’s prices and to guarantee a higher return in the future.

Allure, a lure for feeling: shine is a performative operation in which the felt aesthetics of refraction and diffraction reorganize relationality in a radiant choreography of thrown shimmers. Glittering in suspension between revelation and occlusion, between subject and object, between becoming-commodity and its radical disavowal, performances of shine shine light on ways that the derealization of hypervisuality—through embodying the opaque, ornamental, opalescent, obfuscatory—complicate, or even deracinate traditional discourses of visibility in what has come to be known (and often disdained) as conventional “identity” politics . . . Both Holert and Cheng continuously gesture toward a conception of shine beyond its Marxo-Freudian elaboration as “the lure of commodity or sexual fetishism”: a shine, in fact, “that resists precisely the concept of commodification.” This project resonates productively for me . . .

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

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

Suhail Malik’s “The Ontology of Finance: Price, Power, and the Arkhéderivative” from Urbanomic’s Collapse VIII and is now available online.

‘Fiction’ is in the air, and it has been for a while. We are all thinking about how plots and narratives are constructed, how convincing stories are told—whether legal, racial, financial, sexual—but what about character:

–as a moral quantity?
–as a narrative agitant?
–as a constructed practice?

If corruption is a process, character is a practice.

Is there not a corresponding danger inherent in the affirmationist discourses around new materialism? If we can locate a symbiosis between new materialism and animation do they not both point to a similar regression to ontological platitudes about internal intensities and oscillating spirits? Does the new materialism end up saying much the same thing as the hit song from The Lego Movie, another recent animated blockbuster: ‘Everything is Awesome!’’

Olivia Leiter responds with a diagram, produced as an algorithmic procedure in order for users to personally cope with the ramifications of sociopolitical corruption.

. . . [f]rom Feuerbach to Rich, we see the utilization of the Spectacle as the means of ensuring a governable population (whose individuals are recruited to die on behalf of the State) and ensuring a specific vision of the future for global politics.[2] What marks this competition as one for ‘divinity’ is not simply the struggle between a ‘secular’ West and a caliphate vying for global dominance – both facts which are nothing but surface effects and require no analysis whatsoever. As Feuerbach notes, even if religion disappears there can remain various substitutes that fulfill its function . . . these spectacular forms of governance are essentially religious because they require populations to be held in states of fear or hope – fear of some divine retribution/damnation, or the hope of a ‘democracy to come’ once the true enemy of the West has been exterminated through a strategy of ‘infinite justice.’

In considering art, culture and workers of every field, it seems that the craving for ‘New Relational Modes’ can be heard from every corner, yet, if one includes colonial history, the Ottoman Empire and the making of the new states mentioned in the text, the formation of the Western world and its relation and imposition of its provincial relational modes (including art), one thing that is easily avoided are the non-Arab Muslim cultures of the same region, and their historic relational modes that pass through the art-highway. What makes us close our eyes to the position of art for Urdu, Persian and Turkish speakers?

Meraud advances a persuasive cartography of the contemporary generic. But for all the polymorphous animism of its rhetoric, the screen remains stubbornly tethered to the device. Yet the Skirmonaut never was beholden to the Californian ideology. The most skillful of their number have always concealed their compulsive piracy under cover of dead media. Painting remains the ultimate scrim, as every good investor knows; neo-formalism the definitive study in purloined iridescence.

While the scientific world never underwent a Kuhnian paradigm shift, it still demonstrated its willingness to doing so, had the evidence proved conclusive. And while science does not simply reveal truths waiting to be discovered, but instead engages things and processes that remain indifferent to our assumptions – at least, until we engage them – we should not read Whitehead or Peirce as asserting that only non-rational negotiations with non-human entities yield results . . . Might it be the case that reason has yet to be considered as itself a material or real process, one in which there is no rationality aside from the invocation of potential yet also material or real reasons?

The Supercommunity Agency, a formal moniker for the millions of intricately networked, constantly mutating social constellations that composed the Government of Earth, transmitted its deliberations over a period of a few months, finally drafting a conclusive decision: humanity would mobilize itself towards the TOTALwork, the voluntary commitment to see through the extinction of the human species altogether. Everyone was to renounce biological reproduction – no more new generations, no more strife against the future, no more investment of desire to find itself better fulfilled in those to come. The species would die out together . . . A concession was made within the Supercommunity: for those who longed for a child, a new birth would be accompanied by the enforced sacrifice of the parents. Soon, even those children who grew up into the Supercommunity once the TOTALwork was well underway would no longer know that it was even possible to reproduce. Sterilization procedures had greatly helped. Sex was just that, sex. Work was creativity, without the anxiety of accumulation and inheritance.

While the genres of the past have been exhausted by the revolutions of modernity, the particular practices and functions of our theoretical knowledge provide normative criteria for judging the intent of artistic gestures. An art which takes seriously the constructive application of its role as a cognitive mediator, and responds to the specific content of the special sciences, may no longer speak to the debased average man, but it might join the chorus of that anonymous anyone who is a vector of liberation.

How would the post-humans of the future cope with immortality and unlimited leisure time? Or access to interplanetary travel? While techno-scientific innovations would be indispensable for achieving these ambitious aims, and the dismantling of the myth of the given not only makes such ambitions possible but demands their realization, it is pure fantasy to imagine that the psychopathologies that haunt the present would not continue to manifest themselves in other guises, even in a post-scarcity and post-mortality future . . . Even if the myth of the given is fully dismantled, and scientific nihilism is taken to its final conclusions, with the human fully ‘hacked’ and programmable as the biological machine that it is, the question still remains as to what we ought to do with this amplified power of self-transformation.

Anche had learned early in her education to not accept fate, that *if nature is unjust, change nature*. She had done this with her formula, saving humanity from the pain of decay, but now, in her inclination to find a solution to the suicide epidemic, she could no longer tell if she was looking to change nature again out of a search for justice, or out of sentimentality and a personal sense of loss.

There seems to be quite a lot of reverence for indifferent necessity, for the animals and gods that ‘live outside the languages that name them.’ Can we see here the philosopher peeking out from beneath the poet’s ill-fitting tunic? Or are Nancy’s stanzas so many stages on which the philosopher performs a tragic-comic drama in which he comes to terms with the fact that he must part ways with both animals and gods, reconciling himself to the fact that he, like the poet, must make do with a language that, though it is estranged from truth—or perhaps because it is estranged from truth—might still furnish a life…

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

See, but don’t be seen, [Tobias] thought, drifting off to sleep while devising half-conscious plans for repurposing technologies such that, rather than surveilling, they could be used as an even more powerful mode of communication.

Plants precede us, and they will continue on after we’ve passed. This is not a denial of the destruction that humans have wrought on the planet, but rather, a speculation of what may come after the Anthropocene. The Otolith Group’s Radiant (2012), presented at dOCUMENTA (13), examines the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The evacuated villages testify to the presence of radiation—toxic to humans but seemingly ignored by plants, which grow unfettered in our absence. They play the long game, one in which neither tortoise nor hare have a chance.

Mohammad Salemy tells us a story of “a group of men and women . . . meeting to discuss the future. . . [A] gathering of a variety of odd characters [Alfred McCormack, Abby Aldrich, Clement Greenberg, John Foster Dulles, David Rockefeller, George Orwell, Alfred Barr, William Stephenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, James Connan, and William Phillips discuss] the charged intersection of art, money, literature, geopolitics, and counterintelligence.”