Allan Sekula: Fish Story (1995/2002)

The Fish Story project focuses on the quest for centers of maritime power past and present and the political interest in the change in the economic infrastructure of industrial ports yielded by late-capitalist rule in its phase of multinational and global expansion. This is the third project of the American photographer and historian Allan Sekula (b. 1951) in his cycle on the imaginary and real geography of the advanced capitalist world.

Working on the assumption that photography remains inevitably tied to ideological and real historical factors, Allan Sekula is continuing the tradition of critical realism. However, far from confining himself to illuminating the subject solely with photographic means, Sekula has been integrating the written word in his creative work since the Seventies. Consequently, Fish Story has been conceived from the outset as a book and as an exhibition. The photographs shown in this publication illustrate working conditions on highly industrialized container ships and in ports, while the texts yield insights masked by the visual, photographic information. The resultant montage of images and texts encourages dialogue with the viewer.

With a text by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.

First published in 1995
Second edition, 2002
Publisher Richter Verlag, Dusseldorf
ISBN 3933807689
206 pages

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Nick Land: Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (2011)

Fanged Noumena brings together the writings of Nick Land for the first time. During the 1990s Land’s unique philosophical work, variously described as ‘rabid nihilism’, ‘mad black deleuzianism’ and ‘cybergothic’, developed perhaps the only rigorous and culturally-engaged escape route out of the malaise of ‘continental philosophy’ – a route which was implacably blocked by the academy. However, Land’s work has continued to exert an influence, both through the British ‘speculative realist’ philosophers who studied with him, and through the many cultural producers – artists, musicians, filmmakers, bloggers – who have been invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision.

Beginning with Land’s early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume then collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s – long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print) – in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids.

Fanged Noumena allows a dizzying perspective on the entire trajectory of this provocative and influential thinker’s work, and will introduce his unique voice to a new generation of readers.

Edited by Robin Mackay, Ray Brassier
Publisher Urbanomic, Falmouth/UK; with Sequence Press, New York, 2011
Second edition, 2012
ISBN 095530878X, 9780955308789
667 pages

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Internationale situationniste n°1-12 (1958-1969) [French]

L’Internationale situationniste produit ses travaux théoriques dans sa revue Internationale situationniste. La revue fut également rédigée par Guy Debord, Mohamed Dahou, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Maurice Wyckaert, Constant, Asger Jorn, Helmut Sturm, Attila Kotanyi, Jørgen Nash, Uwe Lausen, Raoul Vaneigem, Michèle Bernstein, Jeppesen Victor Martin, Jan Stijbosch, Alexander Trocchi, Théo Frey, Mustapha Khayati, Donald Nicholson-Smith, René Riesel, René Viénet, etc. 12 numéros furent publiés entre 1958 et 1969. Cette revue était un terrain d’expérimentation discursif et également un moyen de propagande.

Bulletin central édité par les sections de l’international situationniste
Director: G.-E. Debord
Rédaction: Paris
via La Bibliotheque Fantastique

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Numéro 1, Juin 1958, 32 pp.
Numéro 2, Décembre 1958, 36 pp.
Numéro 3, Décembre 1959, 40 pp.
Numéro 4, Juin 1960, 40 pp.
Numéro 5, Décembre 1960, 52 pp.
Numéro 6, Août 1961, 44 pp.
Numéro 7, Avril 1962, 56 pp.
Numéro 8, Janvier 1963, 68 pp.
Numéro 9, Août 1964, 48 pp.
Numéro 10, Mars 1966, 84 pp.
Numéro 11, Octobre 1967, 72 pp.
Numéro 12, Septembre 1969, 116 pp.
View online (museumjorn.dk)

Maurizio Lazzarato: The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (2011/2012) [French/English]

Debt—both public debt and private debt—has become a major concern of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx’s lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies.

Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is also a technique of “public safety” through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the “entrepreneurs” of our lives, of our “human capital.” In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured.

How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of debt.

French edition: La Fabrique de l’homme endetté. Essai sur la condition néolibérale
Publisher Éditions Amsterdam, 2011
125 pages

English edition
Translated by Joshua David Jordan
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2012
Volume 13 of Intervention Series
ISBN 1584351152, 9781584351153
199 pages

review (Nikolay Karkov, Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy)

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Furball 0: On Wikileaks, Bitcoin, Copyleft: Three Critiques of Hacktivism (2013)

“While most expressions of hacktivism lack this revolutionary vigour expressed in one of the later communiques by now infamous hacking collective AntiSec, hacktivism is widely appreciated for its radical potential. Wikileaks and hacking crews are considered by some as anarchist special forces striking blows against the forces of domination. Bitcoin is regarded as a practical approach to break the power of capital. Free software is thought of as a model for future production beyond capitalism. We disagree.

This booklet collects our writings on activism in the digital realm produced over the last few years. In our piece on Wikileaks — which first appeared in Kittens #1 — we critique Wikileaks’ appreciation of the bourgeois-democratic state which persecutes it. The article on Bitcoin — which previously appeared in Mute Magazine Vol. 3, No. 3 — deals with the political economy of the digital currency and critiques the Libertarian ideology driving it. Finally, our piece on free software and other digital commons — which has not previously been published — portrays how ‘copyleft’ software licences are still expressions of appreciation for the social conditions we are forced to live under.

All three pieces critique both the fallacies inherent in the reasoning behind these projects as well as left-wing hopes attached to them. As such, it might strike the reader as arrogant sneering from the sidelines. However, this is not the intent of this work. We hold that the project of transforming the existing social conditions must start from a correct understanding of these conditions to avoid reproducing them. In this spirit, this booklet is an invitation to critique.” (from the Foreword)

Publisher The Wine & Cheese Appreciation Society of Greater London, London, January 2013
46 pages
via Marcell, via Anthony

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Transversal journal 01/13: The Languages of the Banlieues (2013) [EN, DE, FR, Arabic]

“The crises within cognitive capitalism and cognitive labor are mirrored in the reproduction and exacerbation of global divisions of labor and the emergence of new forms of exploitation as part of a regime of flexible capital accumulation. While drastic austerity measures and heightened control mechanisms lead to a radical transformation of the welfare state on the one hand, new networks of communication, struggle and alternative forms of knowledge emerge on the other.

This issue of transversal attempts to review some of the general assumptions of a theory of cognitive capitalism and to unsettle the very notions of knowledge and its production, discussing the conditions of its capture, its “re-invention” and its capacity for creating worlds. The individual essays follow the lines of a (post-)colonial historicity and a feminist and geopolitical critique of capitalist valorization, thereby questioning the materiality of knowledge and its production in relation to resources and bodies, as well as how art and knowledge production are interwoven with political struggles.” (Editorial)

With contributions by Anne Querrien, Marc Hatzfeld, Amina Bensalah/Myriam Suchet, Boris Seguin, Sonia Chikh (Les engraineurs), Abdoulah Bensaid (Musik à Venir), Françoise Dibotto Soppi.

Editors: Lina Dokuzović, Therese Kaufmann, Raimund Minichbauer, Radostina Patulova
Publisher eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna/Linz
Copyleft
ISSN 1811 – 1696

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Previous issue

Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy journal, No. 2: Materialism, No. 3: Realism (2011-2012)

“This issue arose out of a series of reflections on the contemporary meaning of realism in the representational strategies of the design disciplines. Realism, in this context, departs from the nineteenth century preoccupation with presenting environments and subjects typically excluded from pictorial representation. Today, while the ‘realistic’ is favoured and celebrated in student and professional renderings, it seems closer to a contemporary naturalism, at times verging on mannerism: for instance, impossibly lit buildings at dusk, exaggerated perspectives which amplify the speed toward a vanishing point, or, at its most intense, landscapes populated by ghostly figures simultaneously performing every possible cliché of ‘leisure’. While the ‘realistic’ is a recurring theme within both design education and professions, there seems to be a lack of realism. This issue attempts to set up a conversation between both terms by bringing together a series of reflections and practices hinged on both contemporary and historical usages of realism, situating conflict­ng accounts of its meaning side by side.” (from the Editorial Note)

Issue 3: Realism
Summer 2012
Issue Editors: Adrian Blackwell, Adam Bobbette
42 pages

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“Materialism continues the commitment of our first two issues on Property and Service to examine foundational yet overlooked concepts in architecture and landscape architecture. In our estimation, these disciplines are haunted by materialism. We see its specular presence invoked in design research’s emphasis on large-scale flows and sites of material production, in the renewed focus on ‘performance’ and the rehabilitation of functionalism, in the centrality of ‘material’ as an expressive layer of tectonics, and through the import of non-human actors into discussions about spatial design. Each of the above invokes matter as its base.” (from the Editorial Note)

Issue 2: Materialism
Winter 2011
Issue Editors: Adam Bobbette, Jane Hutton
Publisher Scapegoat Publications, Toronto
40 pages

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