TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

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 »

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

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.