Fibreculture Journal 17: Unnatural Ecologies (2011)

Media ecology has always resonated with discussions of digital and networked media. Perhaps this is because the discipline of media ecology has always been so open to transdisciplinary work. The pioneers of media ecology set off very early on the road to transdiscplinary critique that is a key focus for the Fibreculture Journal. Indeed, media ecological critique is often critique in the best sense: the exploration of the limits, not just the errors of thinking, the immersion of thought in real events and practices, and the creation of new ideas appropriate to the present and future of media. All in all, from Innis and McLuhan on, media ecology has provided a generative engine within media thinking and practice. Indeed it has been exemplary thinking as practice.

Yet the leading scholars writing for the Unnatural Ecologies issue do not perform media ecology as we have known it. At times the articles argue with more “traditional” media ecology. Sometimes, they arrive at a new media ecology, having travelled other trajectories that those of traditional media ecology. They are rewriting media ecology, exploring its limits from inside and outside. In the process the Fibreculture Journal believes this issue makes a crucial contribution to thinking about all media from the perspective of digital and networked media. In thinking through the unnatural ecologies that contemporary media make increasingly obvious, the issue challenges us to rethink not only what media are, or what they do, but what they might have been, and what they have done.

Articles:
Michael Goddard: Towards an Archaeology of Media Ecologies: ‘Media Ecology’, Political Subjectivation and Free Radios
Olga Goriunova: Autocreativity and Organisational Aesthetics in Art Platforms
Jussi Parikka: Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions, and Foldings
Matteo Pasquinelli: Four Regimes of Entropy: For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media Theory
Matthew Fuller: Faulty Theory
Phoebe Moore: Subjectivity in the Ecologies of P2P Production

Issue edited by Michael Goddard and Jussi Parikka
Publisher: Fibreculture Publications/The Open Humanities Press, Sydney, Australia, April 2011
ISSN: 1449 – 1443

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Félix Guattari: Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977, new ed. (2008)

“Chaosophy is an introduction to Félix Guattari’s groundbreaking theories of “schizo-analysis”: a process meant to replace Freudian interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality. Unlike Freud, who utilized neuroses as his working model, Guattari adopted the model of schizophrenia—which he believed to be an extreme mental state induced by the capitalist system itself, and one that enforces neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. Guattari’s post-Marxist vision of capitalism provides a new definition not only of mental illness, but also of the micropolitical means for its subversion.

Chaosophy includes Guattari’s writings and interviews on the cinema (such as ‘Cinema Fou’ and ‘The Poor Man’s Couch’), a group of texts on his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze (including the appendix to the second edition of Anti-Oedipus, not available in the English edition), and his texts on homosexuality (including his “Letter to the Tribunal” addressing the French government’s censorship of the special gay issue of Recherches he edited, which earned him a fine for publishing “a detailed exposition of depravity and sexual deviations… the libidinous exhibition of a minority of perverts”). This expanded edition features a new introduction by François Dosse (author of a new biography of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), along with a range of added essays—including ‘The Plane of Consistency,’ ‘Machinic Propositions,’ ‘Gangs in New York,’ and ‘Three Billion Perverts on the Stand’—nearly doubling the contents of the original edition.”

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer
Introduction by François Dosse
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2008
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584350601, 9781584350606
300 pages

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Bruno Gullì: Earthly Plenitudes. A Study on Sovereignty and Labor (2010)

A fierce critique of productivity and sovereignty in the world of labor and everyday life, Bruno Gullì’s Earthly Plenitudes asks: can labor exist without sovereignty and without capitalism? He introduces the concept of dignity of individuation to prompt a rethinking of categories of political ontology. Dignity of individuation stresses the notion that the dignity of each and any individual being lies in its being individuated as such; dignity is the irreducible and most essential character of any being. Singularity is a more universal quality.

Gullì first reviews approaches to sovereignty by philosophers as varied as Gottfried Leibniz and Georges Bataille, and then looks at concrete examples where the alliance of sovereignty and capital cracks under the potency of living labor. He examines contingent academic labor as an example of the super-exploitation of labor, which has become a global phenomenon, and as such, a clear threat to the sovereign logic of capital. Gullì also looks at disability to assert that a new measure of humanity can only be found outside the schemes of sovereignty, productivity, efficiency, and independence, through care and caring for others, in solidarity and interdependence.

Publisher: Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2010
ISBN 978-1-59213-979-8
200 pages

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