Humphrey Jennings: Pandæmonium, 1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers (1985)

Pandaemonium, 1660-1886 is a book of contemporary observations of the coming, development and impact of the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom, collected by documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings between 1937 and his early death in 1950. His daughter, Mary-Louise Jennings, and a co-founder with Jennings of Mass Observation, Charles Madge, brought his work to publication in 1985. The book takes its title from the first excerpt within it, the section in Book I of Paradise Lost (1660) in which John Milton describes the building of Pandaemonium, the capital city of Hell. (from Wikipedia)

From the New York Times review (1985): “For Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium was a prophetic symbol of industrialism, and it provides not only the title but also the starting point of his attempt to chronicle ‘the imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution.’ This was best done, he thought, by letting those who took part in the process speak for themselves, and Milton’s lines usher in a collection of some 370 texts ranging from the 1660’s to the 1880’s – the testimony of scientists, artists, rich men, poor men and a great throng of miscellaneous witnesses. Between them, these passages (or ‘images,’ as Jennings preferred to call them) are meant to provide a composite picture of how contemporaries experienced the triumph of the machine, how it transformed both their outward circumstances and inner lives.” (Review)

The cover above is from the UK edition.

First published by André Deutsch. London, 1985
Edited by Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge
Publisher The Free Press, New York
First American Edition, 1985
ISBN 0029164702
376 pages
via joandleefe

PDF (30 MB)

Speculations V: Aesthetics in the 21st Century (2014)

“Ever since the turn of the century aesthetics has steadily gained momentum as a central field of study across the disciplines. No longer sidelined, aesthetics has grown in confidence. While this recent development brings with it a return to the work of the canonical authors (most notably Baumgarten and Kant), some contemporary scholars reject the traditional focus on epistemology and theorize aesthetics in its ontological connotations. It is according to this shift that speculative realists have proclaimed aesthetics as “first philosophy” and as speculative in nature. With speculative realism aesthetics no longer necessarily implies human agents. This is in alignment with the general speculative realist framework for thinking all kinds of processes, entities, and objects as free from our allpervasive anthropocentrism which states, always, that everything is “for us.”

This special issue of Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism explores the ramifications of what could be termed the new speculative aesthetics. In doing so, it stages a three-fold encounter: between aesthetics and speculation, between speculative realism and its (possible) precursors, and between speculative realism and art and literature.”

With contributions by Steven Shaviro, Theodor Leiber and Kirsten Voigt Sellars, Matija Jelača, Claire Colebrook, N. Katherine Hayles, Jon Cogburn and Mark Allan Ohm, Miguel Penas López, Graham Harman, Bettina Funcke, Thomas Gokey, Robert Jackson, Roberto Simanowski, Francis Halsall, Magdalena Wisniowska Disegno, and Sjoerd van Tuinen.

Edited by Ridvan Askin, Paul J Ennis, Andreas Hägler, and Philip Schweighauser
Publisher punctum books, Brooklyn, NY, May 2014
Creative Commons License BY-NC-SA
ISBN 0692203168, 9780692203163
ISSN 2327-803X
474 pages

PDF (single PDF, 9 MB, updated on 2016-12-24)
PDFs (individual essays, updated on 2016-12-24)

Charles Alexander (ed.): Talking the Boundless Book: Art, Language, & the Book Arts (1995)

Essays from Art & Language: Re-Reading the Boundless Book, a Minnesota Center for the Book Arts Symposium, 1994: Dick Higgins, Steven Clay, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., Susan Bee, Toshi Ishihara & Linda Reinfeld, Katherine Kuehn, Jo Anne Paschall, Colette Gaiter, Alison Knowles, Byron Clercx, Brad Freeman, Karen Wirth.

Publisher Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Minneapolis, 1995
ISBN 1879832097, 9781879832091
144 pages

PDF (26 MB, no OCR)