TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

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 »

“The 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 Johnathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Elena Esposito and Elie Ayache, Malik provides a tour de force critique of the… 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 work 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 morning shows on September 11, 2001 minutes before the global media… 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 . . .