Stefano Harney, Fred Moten: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013–) [EN, DE, ES, FR]
Filed under book | Tags: · black people, blackness, commons, debt, politics, theory
“In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.”
Introduction by Jack Halberstam
Publisher Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe, 2013
Open access
ISBN 9781570272677, 1570272670
165 pages
Reviews: onderwijs filosofie (2015, NL), Kris Cohen (open set, 2016), Lisa M. Corrigan (Philosophy & Rhetoric, 2019).
Commentary: David Wallace (New Yorker, 2018).
Interviews with authors: Transversal (2016, EN/DE), Cristina Rivera Garza, Marta Malo, and Juan Pablo Anaya (New Inquiry, 2018), Millenials Are Killing Capitalism (2020, podcast, part 2).
Publisher (EN)
Publisher (DE)
Publisher (ES)
WorldCat (EN)
The Undercommons (English, 2013, PDF)
Die Undercommons (German, trans. Birgit Mennel und Gerald Raunig, 2016, EPUB)
Los Abajocomunes: planear fugitivo y estudio negro (Spanish, trans. Cristina Rivera Garza, Marta Malo and Juan Pablo Anaya, Cooperativa Cráter Invertido and La Campechana Mental, 2017, EPUB) (added on 2019-6-5)
Les sous-communs (French, 2022, added on 2022-1-11)
Erich Hörl, James Burton (eds.): General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (2017)
Filed under book | Tags: · affect, anthropocene, biopolitics, capitalism, cybernetics, ecology, general ecology, life, nature, philosophy, systems theory, theory
“Ecology has become one of the most urgent and lively fields in both the humanities and sciences. In a dramatic widening of scope beyond its original concern with the coexistence of living organisms within a natural environment, it is now recognized that there are ecologies of mind, information, sensation, perception, power, participation, media, behavior, belonging, values, the social, the political… a thousand ecologies. This proliferation is not simply a metaphorical extension of the figurative potential of natural ecology: rather, it reflects the thoroughgoing imbrication of natural and technological elements in the constitution of the contemporary environments we inhabit, the rise of a cybernetic natural state, with its corresponding mode of power. Hence this ecology of ecologies initiates and demands that we go beyond the specificity of any particular ecology: a general thinking of ecology which may also constitute an ecological transformation of thought itself is required.
In this ambitious and radical new volume of writings, some of the most exciting contemporary thinkers in the field take on the task of revealing and theorizing the extent of the ecologization of existence as the effect of our contemporary sociotechnological condition: together, they bring out the complexity and urgency of the challenge of ecological thought-one we cannot avoid if we want to ask and indeed have a chance of affecting what forms of life, agency, modes of existence, human or otherwise, will participate-and how-in this planet’s future.”
With texts by Erich Hörl, Luciana Parisi, Frédéric Neyrat, Bernard Stiegler, Didier Debaise, Jussi Parikka, Bruce Clarke, Cary Wolfe, David Wills, James Burton, Elena Esposito, Timothy Morton, Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova, and Brian Massumi.
Publisher Bloomsbury Academic, London/New York, 2017
ISBN 9781350014695, 1350014699
xv+384 pages
Dennis Tenen: Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (2017)
Filed under book | Tags: · book, computation, human-computer interaction, language, literary theory, literature, media, media theory, poetics, software, text, theory, translation
“This book challenges the ways we read, write, store, and retrieve information in the digital age. Computers—from electronic books to smart phones—play an active role in our social lives. Our technological choices thus entail theoretical and political commitments. Dennis Tenen takes up today’s strange enmeshing of humans, texts, and machines to argue that our most ingrained intuitions about texts are profoundly alienated from the physical contexts of their intellectual production. Drawing on a range of primary sources from both literary theory and software engineering, he makes a case for a more transparent practice of human–computer interaction. Plain Text is thus a rallying call, a frame of mind as much as a file format. It reminds us, ultimately, that our devices also encode specific modes of governance and control that must remain available to interpretation.”
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2017
ISBN 9781503601802, 1503601803
x+268 pages
Reviews: N. Katherine Hayles (Critical Inquiry, 2017), Jan Baetens (Leonardo, 2017), James Edward Draney (LARB, 2017), Maisie Ridgway (Textual Practice, 2018).
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