Publications

In today’s highly coercive and surveilled world, where capital imposes an aggressive “official reality,” the need to imagine other possible worlds is more urgent than ever. This collection gathers perspectives from philosophy, aesthetics, and art to explore how possible worlds are conceptualized and constructed. It addresses the contemporary fear of imagining new futures and the political dynamics necessary for their creation. The relationship between imagination, rationality, and inherited structures is crucial, asking how we envision and build these worlds with the tools and languages available.

If the term ‘Cold World’ describes a world of infinite complexity, algorithmic capital, and the technological sublime, in many ways the dread experienced during the Cold War, when clear oppositions were laid out between nation states, is echoed in the hall of mirrors that is contemporary globalization. In this Cold World, whose repercussions in many ways amplify, relay and replay those of the Cold War, our collective consciousness is being overtaken by a flood of difference, uncertainty, and the dread of the incompatibility of an alien yet constructed world. Technological subjectivation, political malaise, cultural dysphoria, and ecological crisis abound against an experiential and experimental horizon that prompts many to pose, and to stage, in myriad forms, a fundamental question: ‘What will we make of ourselves?’

This issue brings together three lectures on aesthetics delivered by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler in Los Angeles in 2011 with articles by scholars of Stiegler’s work. Aesthetics, understood as the theoretical investigation of sensibility, has been central to Stiegler’s work since the mid-1990s. The lectures featured here explicitly link Stiegler’s interest in sensibility to aesthetic theory proper as well as to art history. In “The Proletarianization of Sensibility,” “Kant, Art, and Time,” and “The Quarrel of the Amateurs,” Stiegler expounds his philosophy of technics and its effects on human sensibility, centering on how the figure of the amateur—who loves what he or she does—must be recovered from beneath the ruins of technical history. The other contributors engage the topics covered in the lectures, including the figure of the amateur, cinema, the digital, and extinction.

How have emancipatory politics, art and architecture, and education been refined by semio-capitalism? What might be the lasting, material ramifications of semio-capitalism on the mind and brain? This book brings together an international array of philosophers, critical theorists, media theorists, art historians, architects, and artists to discuss the state of the mind and the brain under the conditions of cognitive capitalism, in which they have become the new focus of laboring.

Identity is dead. The 21st-century subject is an unstable fiction with no identifiable features or group affiliations. He’s a man without inherent qualities, a post-human ideal. But those who have long been hailed as Other exist in a different relation to this ideal. Unlike those traditionally self-possessed |s, these Others may find themselves split between a yearning to be contemporary and unqualified, and a longing for a continued allegiance to their qualitative, albeit constructed, group identity. With an awareness of this more ambiguous and refined notion of self, Feminaissance approaches questions of femininity and its relation to writing. Topics include: collectivity; feminine écriture; the politics of writing; text and voice; the body as a site of contestation, insurgence and pleasure; race and writing; gender as performance; writing about other women writers; economic inequities; monstrosity; madness; and aesthetics.

The n/Oulipean Analects, eds., Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim, Les Figues Press, 2007.

An alphabetical survey of constrained writing in modern English. Editors Wertheim and Viegener gathered and arranged critical and creative pieces from some of the most prominent and influential constraint-based writers – adding the unknown variable n to the great legacy of Oulipo. The result: an excellent mix of introductory basics for those new to constraint-based writing, blended with in-depth exposition and critique for those already avid readers and writers.

Contributors: Matias Viegener, Charles Berstain, Christian Bok, Eileen Myles, Janet Sternburg, Dennis Cooper, Dodie Bellamy, Christina Rivera-Garza and Jen Hofer, Robert Gluck, Kevin Killian, Kenneth Goldsmith, Shelley Jackson, Madeline Gins and Arakawa, Steven Shaviro, Ben Marcus, Joan Retallack, Christine Wertheim, Jaap Blonk, and Tracie Morris, all of whom contribute writing and writing on writing.

The Publication gathers work presented at the conference Séance: A Two Day Public Meditation on the Condition of Language and Narrative in Contemporary Writing, LA, October 29th and 30th, 2004.