Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory (Thinking Literature)

This unorthodox account of 1960s Black thought rigorously details the field’s debts to German critical theory and explores a forgotten tradition of Black singularity.\nPhenomenal Blackness examines the changing interdisciplinary investments of key mid-century Black writers and thinkers, including the growing interest in German philosophy and critical theory. Mark Christian Thompson analyzes this shift in intellectual focus across the post-war decades, placing Black Power thought in a philosophical context.\nPrior to the 1960s, sociologically oriented thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois had understood Blackness as a singular set of socio-historical characteristics. In contrast, writers such as Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Angela Y. Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X were drawn to notions of an African essence, an ontology of Black being. With these perspectives, literary language came to be seen as the primary social expression of Blackness. For this new way of thinking, the works of philosophers such as Adorno, Habermas, and Marcuse were a vital resource, allowing for continued cultural-materialist analysis while accommodating the hermeneutical aspects of Black religious thought. Thompson argues that these efforts to reimagine Black singularity led to a phenomenological understanding of Blackness—a “Black aesthetic dimension” wherein aspirational models for Black liberation might emerge.

Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (TRIOS)

Literature & Fiction

Wark, McKenzie

THACKER, EUGENE

Galloway, Alexander R.

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Always connect—that is the imperative of today’s media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself—those messages that state: “There will be no more messages”? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media and mediation on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is integral to communication itself—instances they call excommunication.  In three linked essays, Excommunication pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today—mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway’s classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Charting a trajectory of examples from H. P. Lovecraft to Meister Eckhart, Thacker explores those instances when one communicates or connects with the inaccessible, dubbing such modes of mediation “haunted” or “weird” to underscore their inaccessibility. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. He posits a critical theory that celebrates heresy and that is distinct from those that now venerate Saint Paul. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, Excommunication offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition.

Always connect—that is the imperative of today’s media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself—those messages that state: “There will be no more messages”? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media and mediation on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is integral to communication itself—instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, Excommunication pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today—mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway’s classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Charting a trajectory of examples from H. P. Lovecraft to Meister Eckhart, Thacker explores those instances when one communicates or connects with the inaccessible, dubbing such modes of mediation “haunted” or “weird” to underscore their inaccessibility. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. He posits a critical theory that celebrates heresy and that is distinct from those that now venerate Saint Paul. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, Excommunication offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition.

"The author’s capacity to grasp and interpret these [world media] events is astounding, and her ability to provide insights into a world where unbounded information is circling the earth with the speed of light is startling." ―Choice
"... a wide-ranging, quirky and dextrous mix of description, theory and analysis, that documents the perils of the global telecommunications network... " ―Times Literary Supplement
"... this is a stimulating, even moving, book, dense with ideas and with many quotable lines." ―The New Statesman
"Wark is one of the most original and interesting cultural critics writing today." ―Lawrence Grossberg
McKenzie Wark writes about the experience of everyday life under the impact of increasingly global media vectors. We no longer have roots, we have aerials. We no longer have origins, we have terminals.

Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events (Arts and Politics of the Everyday)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Indiana University Press

"The author's capacity to grasp and interpret these [world media] events is astounding, and her ability to provide insights into a world where unbounded information is circling the earth with the speed of light is startling." -- Choice"... a wide-ranging, quirky and dextrous mix of description, theory and analysis, that documents the perils of the global telecommunications network... " -- Times Literary Supplement"... this is a stimulating, even moving, book, dense with ideas and with many quotable lines." -- The New Statesman"Wark is one of the most original and interesting cultural critics writing today." -- Lawrence GrossbergMcKenzie Wark writes about the experience of everyday life under the impact of increasingly global media vectors. We no longer have roots, we have aerials. We no longer have origins, we have terminals.

Virtual Geography: Living With Global Media Events (Arts and Politics of the Everyday)

Indiana Univ. Pr

Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place in March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. At once a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book’s own theory of creativity – “a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created – original inauthenticity” – this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies. The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone.
CONTENTS: Robin Mackay, “A Brief History of Geotrauma” – McKenzie Wark, “An Inhuman Fiction of Forces” – Benjamin H. Bratton, “Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia” – Alisa Andrasek, “Dustism” – Zach Blas, “Queerness, Openness” – Melanie Doherty, “Non-Oedipal Networks and the Inorganic Unconscious” – Anthony Sciscione, “Symptomatic Horror: Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space’” – Kate Marshall, “Cyclonopedia as Novel (a meditation on complicity as inauthenticity)” – Alexander R. Galloway, “What is a Hermeneutic Light?” – Eugene Thacker, “Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans” – Nicola Masciandaro, “Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness” – Dan Mellamphy &amp; Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, “Phileas Fogg, or the Cyclonic Passepartout: On the Alchemical Elements of War” – Ben Woodard, “The Untimely (and Unshapely) Decomposition of Onto-Epistemological Solidity: Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia as Metaphysics” – Ed Keller, “. . .Or, Speaking with the Alien, a Refrain. . .” – Lionel Maunz, “Receipt of Malice” – Öykü Tekten, “Symposium Photographs” – Reza Negarestani, “Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone”

Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium

Keller, Ed

Bratton, Benjamin H.

Doherty, Melanie

Negarestani, Reza

Mackay, Robin

Andrasek, Alisa

Blas, Zach

Sciscione, Anthony

Philosophy

Punctum Books

Listen to a short interview with McKenzie WarkHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron &amp; Crane
Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field--where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all. 
Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society. The book depicts a world becoming an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona. In place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer. As all previous such personae had their breviaries and manuals, Gamer Theory seeks to offer guidance for thinking within this new character. Neither a strategy guide nor a cheat sheet for improving one's score or skills, the book is instead a primer in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, recast as an imperfect copy of the game.

Gamer Theory

Computers & Technology

Games & Strategy Guides

Harvard University Press

Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class

The telegraph, telephone, and television, not to mention the Internet and mobile telephony, are all forms of communication that move information faster than the speed at which objects move. Both labor and capital and armies and commodities once moved at the same speed as the information organizing them. Over the last two centuries, social space has developed a strange folded quality, where physical space comes more and more to be doubled by a space of the movement of information. Telesthesia, or perception at a distance, comes increasingly to characterize how we see and hear and know the world. How does the evolution of different communication forms affect how we can perceive and act? How can the underlying infrastructure of communication forms be detected in the events of everyday life? These are the central questions animating this book. McKenzie Wark first explores relations between metropolitan and peripheral cultures – or postcolonial relations – with close attention to the texture of events that can happen when perception is mediated. He then examines what were once called postmodern experiences, and how relations of communication create new kinds of class relations and experiences of everyday life, from 9/11 to Occupy Wall Street.

Polity

The telegraph, telephone, and television, not to mention the Internet and mobile telephony, are all forms of communication that move information faster than the speed at which objects move. Both labor and capital and armies and commodities once moved at the same speed as the information organizing them. Over the last two centuries, social space has developed a strange folded quality, where physical space comes more and more to be doubled by a space of the movement of information. Telesthesia, or perception at a distance, comes increasingly to characterize how we see and hear and know the world. How does the evolution of different communication forms affect how we can perceive and act? How can the underlying infrastructure of communication forms be detected in the events of everyday life? These are the central questions animating this book. McKenzie Wark first explores relations between metropolitan and peripheral cultures – or postcolonial relations – with close attention to the texture of events that can happen when perception is mediated. He then examines what were once called postmodern experiences, and how relations of communication create new kinds of class relations and experiences of everyday life, from 9/11 to Occupy Wall Street.

Networking & Cloud Computing

How artists have examined the legacies of American-led military engagement in Iraq
The 1991 Gulf War marked the start of a lengthy period of American-led military involvement in Iraq that led to more than a decade of sanctions, the 2003 Iraq War, and ongoing repercussions throughout the region. Though the Iraq War officially ended in 2011, artists have continued to examine these conflicts and their impacts. Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011 charts the effects of these wars on cultural production in Iraq and throughout its diasporas, as well as responses to the wars in the West, revealing how this period was defined by unsettling intersections of spectacularized violence and new imperialisms. The exhibition features more than 80 artists and collectives, including Afifa Aleiby, Dia al-Azzawi, Thuraya al-Baqsami, Paul Chan, Harun Farocki, Guerrilla Girls, Thomas Hirschhorn, Hiwa K, Hanaa Malallah, Monira Al Qadiri, Nuha al-Radi and Ala Younis. This catalog features newly commissioned essays by Zainab Bahrani, Rijin Sahakian, Nada Shabout and McKenzie Wark alongside texts by exhibition co-curators Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib. Excerpts from period journals by artist Nuha Al-Radi and anonymous blogger Riverbend detail life in Iraq over two decades of war, sanctions and occupation. Reprinted essays from Jean Baudrillard and Serge Daney provide additional context, delving into the effects of the conflict upon media and visual culture.

Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011

BAUDRILLARD, Jean

Riverbend

Eleey, Peter

Bahrani, Zainab

Daney, Serge

Al-Radi, Nuha

Sahakian, Rijin

Shabout, Nada

Katrib, Ruba

Arts & Photography

MoMA PS1

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