Stevphen Shukaitis: Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life (2009)

“All power to the imagination? Over the past forty years to invoke the imagination as a basis for radical politics has become a cliché: a rhetorical utilization of ideas already in circulation, invoking the mythic unfolding of this self-institutionalizing process. But what exactly is radical imagination? Drawing from autonomist politics, class composition analysis, and avant-garde arts, Imaginal Machines explores the emergence, functioning, and constant breakdown of the embodied forms of radical imagination.

What does it mean to invoke the power of the imagination when it seems that the imagination has already seized power through the power of the spectacle? Does any subversive potentiality remain? Perhaps it is only honest to think in terms of a temporally-bounded subversive power. It might be that imaginal machines only work by breaking down. That is, their functioning is only possible, paradoxically, by their malfunctioning. By reopening the question of recuperation, the inevitable drive to integrate the power of social insurgency back into the working of capital and the state, we create possibilities for a politics continually reconstituted against and through the dynamics of recuperation: to keep open an antagonism without closure.”

Publisher Minor Compositions, London/NYC/Port Watson, 2009
ISBN 1570272085, 9781570272080
255 pages

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Brian Holmes: Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art & Politics in a Networked Era (2003)

“Networks redefine urban and social borders and can be interpreted in many ways according to the chosen perspective, a limited territory or the entire globe, revealing at the same time the potential and the limits of their actions. This collection of essays, which features a solid political approach intertwined with art, pushes the limits of the critique of the mobility as defined by human beings and the reconfiguration of urban space, analyzing the powers and desired contained in it. A hyperlinking of transnational forces of opposition are invited to play a strategic game coordinating their efforts for imagining future alternative and sustainable realities, through a media struggle which uses the same propaganda tools of capitalism. The collaboration with the art collective Bureau D’Etudes and the resulting maps of power produced by them are nodal, but the core of these essays are the instruments of analysis offered, which elaborate new expressions to effectively decode our contemporary world.”

Publisher Arkzin Communications / What, How and for Whom, Paris/Zagreb, 2003
Broadcasting series, 3
ISBN 9536542838, 9789536542833
294 pages

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Chris Kraus, Sylvère Lotringer (eds.): Hatred of Capitalism: A Reader (2001)

“Compiled in 2001 to commemorate the passing of an era, Hatred of Capitalism brings together highlights of Semiotext(e)’s most beloved and prescient works. Founded by French theorist and critic Sylvère Lotringer as a scholarly journal in 1974, Semiotext(e) quickly took on the mission of melding French theory with the American art world and punk underground. Its Foreign Agents, Native Agents, Active Agents and Double Agents imprints have brought together thinkers and writers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Assata Shakur, Bob Flanagan, Paul Virillio, Kate Millet, Jean Baudrillard, Michelle Tea, William S. Burroughs, Eileen Myles, Ulrike Meinhof, and Fanny Howe. In Hatred of Capitalism, editors Kraus and Lotringer bring these people together in the same volume for the first time.”

Assistant editors: Shannon Durbin and Tessa Laird
Publisher Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2001
Double Agents series
ISBN 1584350121, 9781584350125
421 pages

Review: Brian Dillon (Mute, 2002).
Interview with editor (Leo Edelstein, Log, 2001).

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