Really Useful Knowledge (2014)
Filed under catalogue | Tags: · art, conceptual art, critical pedagogy, education, knowledge, pedagogy, politics, sociology of art, theory, useful art
“This catalogue investigates the notion of “really useful knowledge” and its origins. In the 1820s and 1830s, working class organisations in the UK introduced this phrase to describe a body of knowledge that encompassed various “unpractical” disciplines such as politics, economics and philosophy, as opposed to the “useful knowledge” proclaimed by business owners who had previously begun to invest more heavily in their companies’ progress through financing workers’ education in “applicable” disciplines like engineering, physics, chemistry and mathematics. The publication presents texts and conversations that analyse these themes, including philosophy, art, politics and technology.”
With contributions by What, How and for Whom/WHW, Marina Garcés, Raqs Media Collective, Luis Camnitzer, Trevor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and Gáspár M. Tamás.
Curated by What, How and for Whom/WHW
Publisher Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MACBA), Barcelona, 2014
ISBN 9788480264990, 8480264993
285+[10] pages
Discussion: Charles Esche, Manuel Borja-Villel (L’Internationale, 2015).
PDF (14 MB)
Comment (0)Kathryn Yusoff: A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropocene, black people, blackness, colonialism, critique, earth, earth system, geology, materiality, politics, race, slavery, theory
“No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. Yusoff initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between black feminist theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.”
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2018
Forerunners series
ISBN 9781517907532, 1517907535
xiv+115 pages
Commentary: McKenzie Wark (Verso Blog, 2019).
Comment (0)Laboria Cuboniks: The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · accelerationism, alienation, automation, cyberfeminism, feminism, gender, manifesto, materialism, nature, neorationalism, politics, technology, theory, women, xenofeminism
“The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealised.
The Xenofeminist Manifesto calls for the scaling up of feminism. Contemporary feminism, it contends, is limited by its predominant investment in local and micropolitical action. What is needed is a feminism capable of systemic intervention. The Xenofeminist Manifesto propose that such a feminism must start from a new universal–one no longer coded as cis, straight, white, and male–with Xenofeminism as its theoretical and technological platform. Drawing on queer and transfeminist theory, as well as philosophical rationalism, against nature and biological essentialism, the feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks instead invest in alienation and the anti-natural, in seizing technology and in embracing the desire for an alien future.
If nature is unjust, change nature!”
Publisher Verso, London, September 2018
Creative Commons BY 4.0 International License
ISBN 9781788731577, 1788731573
95 pages
Commentary: Annie Goh (2018).
Comment (0)