What is a Shelter?

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

De-Epistemization of Manifest Reality: A Teratology of Philosophy

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

The Beast Beneath

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

Noise = X and Transcendental Decoherence

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

Analytical vs Ontological: Gilbert Ryle & the Question of Behaviorism

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

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

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

Insurrection vs. Extinction: Excerpt from the Book of Games

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

Philosophy, Memes & the Outside

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

On Meillassoux’s Critique of Vitalist Subjectalism

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

Period: Stop the Stigma

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

Where Does the Power Go?

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

14 DAY ROMANCE WITH CORANTINE

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

Deleuzian Pessimism

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

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

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

Organising Attention: Art Practice as Building Preservation

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

Skeletal Frameworks Against Abject Rot

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

On ‘Cause’ and Laws: Grounding Laws in Counterfactuals

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

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

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

Kernelled Connections: Perceptron as Diagram

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

Art & the Suspension of Subjectivity

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

Political Geography of COVID-19 Pandemic

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

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

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

Constructing the Infrastructure of Future

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

Reserve Death Army

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

Along the Liquid Path

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

The Sacred Meme Magic

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

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

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

Anti Imperialism as an Intellectual Trap

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

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

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

Reconfiguring Populism:
On Recent Upheavals in Ecuador

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

A Brief Prehistory of AI & Computation

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

Cryptophasia & the Question of Database

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

For a New Terminology of Violence

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

Geneology of a Conflation

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

The Multitude & Its Discontents

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

Money Changes Everything

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

The Generic Unmasked:
Reproducibility & Profanation

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

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

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

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

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

A Ceded Interfile: Future-Oriented
Social & Cognitive Design

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

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The Stirner Affair

Against Normative Morality  If amoralists are gathered in the history of philosophy, the initial catalog features two figures: Stirner and Nietzsche. The former appeared first, which has led to speculative claims of plagiarism by the latter. However, it is more appropriate to place Stirner among the individualists and hedonists, both before and during his time,… Read More »

The Problem of the Nature of Thought

Paulin Hountondji, the Beninese author who died in February and taught philosophy at the National University of Benin, was clearly aware of the magnitude and impact of politician Kwame Nkrumah, since, as he recalls in his autobiography The Struggle for Meaning, his presentation in Paris on the Ghanaian leader’s 1964 book Consciencism caused headlines for… Read More »

I Am A Philosopher

Last year—two years ago?—Cássia Siqueira tweeted: “Better Call Saul S06E07.” I was mystified, but didn’t ask her what it was about. I’d never watched the TV show. But anything Cássia wrote, wherever she wrote it, however cryptic, deserved investigation. So I watched the whole show, knowing I was looking for the meaning of her tweet.… Read More »

Good Times

This piece, initiated and commissioned by Marten Spangberg, is part of a larger project called “When The Museum is Closed” at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva.   All ideas are bad ideas. They are bad not insofar as they are impractical, useless, or lacking in any such respect. They are bad in that… Read More »

The Human Centipede: A View From the Art World*

In time for the opening of Art Basel on June 13 and the release of Eduarda Neves’s Minor Bestiary next month as a more recent critique of contemporary art, we are publishing Reza Negarestani’s “The Human Centipede: A View From The Artworld.” Only delivered once in lecture format at e-flux, New York, in November 2013,… Read More »

Other Endings

Found in the Hyperstition archives, “Other Endings” is the never-published preface to Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia by Nick land, the controversial former Instructor of philosophy at The New Centre which in light of the author’s recent public declaration of his faith in Allah and Islam becomes more than just a premonition but an essential part of… Read More »

Also Reality and the Weight of Conjunctions

Determinant meaning within the English language exists by virtue of the glue that is conjunctions. Sticky little words like “but” and “also” join together, compartmentalize, and disjoint our speech, thoughts, social structure, and reality, in the mathematics of meaning. Even the American legal system depends upon conjunctions like “either/or” and the contrasts they create. Both… Read More »

Letter to the Washed Away

Dear Lee, I texted you earlier today about how Ava went missing during the fires. I’m going up the coast to look for her in a yacht I’ve stolen that belongs to friends of my parents who are away in the Austrian Alps until Christmas. Did you know that the term “yacht” comes from the… Read More »

Interpretation Contra Structural Reading

This article is an extension of “The Narcissist-Image,” departing from Fares Chalabi’s presentation in “Deleuzian Aesthetics.”  Much of Chalabi’s Deleuzian Aesthetics is based on a critique of interpretation, which for Chalabi, is a procedure for reading art where “this means that, and that means this,” that something like the color black points to a feeling… Read More »

Kunstwollen* Minus the Human (Painting in the Age of Machinic Will to Art)

1 Imagine describing the series of Jeff Perrott’s paintings New Construction (Pharmakon, Subject, Natural, Denatural, Door, Sublime, Red Interior, and Cosmic) to an AI or a blind person. How would you start? By listing which elements come first, and how the layers of lines in each painting are ordered? Describing an artwork is deconstructing or… Read More »

Ruangrupa: Contemporary Art or Friendship Industry?*

In the past two decades, more than in the past hundred years, authoritarian regimes have risen to power globally. Today, fascist parties are occupying seats in many countries’ governments, such as in the Israeli Knesset, the Dutch Tweede Kamer, the American Congress, and the German Bundestag. Meanwhile, the collective memory of European fascism and its… Read More »

Call the Bronze Age… they forgot their pictograms!

“In the preceding chapter we discussed the development of technoeconomic organization and the establishment of social machinery closely connected with the evolution of techniques. Here I propose to consider the evolution of a fact that emerged together with Homo sapiens in the development of anthropoids: the capacity to express thought in material symbols. (…) As… Read More »

Interferential Axiology: Excess & Disruption

What is tragic about choice is no longer fundamental if choice is no longer what establishes communication between an independent city and an independent individual as substances. —Gilbert Simondon1   Excess and disruption are different modes of systemic interferences, providing differing sets of axiological implications. This essay seeks to explore their tragic interface in the… Read More »

Here & Elsewhere, at War, & Into the Future

The Middle East continues to painfully be a primary site for the blood-drenched transformations of our planetary geopolitical system. However, about ten years ago and during another Israeli operation in Gaza, an uncanny timeliness opened an unexpected connection between global contemporary art and geopolitics in August 2014 when, following the escalation of Israel’s Gaza operations,… Read More »

Zionism Reconsidered

The seminal essay below by Hannah Arendt, spanning 15,000 words was first published in the Menorah Journal in October 1944. This work was inspired by the meeting of the World Zionist Organization’s American section in Atlantic City. This congress was notable for its assertive call for a Jewish state covering the entire territory of Palestine,… Read More »

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 »

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.

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 »

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 »