Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Development, No. 1-4 (2006-2008)

Collapse Vol. IV: Concept Horror
May 2008

Collapse IV features a series of investigations by philosophers, writers and artists into Concept Horror. Contributors address the existential, aesthetic, theological and political dimensions of horror, interrogate its peculiar affinity with philosophical thought, and uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable. This unique volume continues Collapse’s pursuit of indisciplinary miscegenation, the wide-ranging contributions interacting to produce common themes and suggestive connections. In the process a rich and compelling case emerges for the intimate bond between horror and philosophical thought.

Editor: Robin Mackay
Associate Editor: Damian Veal
ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4
403 pages

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Collapse Vol. III: Unknown Deleuze [+ Speculative Realism]
November 2007

Collapse III contains explorations of the work of Gilles Deleuze by pioneering thinkers in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, music and architecture. In addition, we publish in this volume two previously untranslated texts by Deleuze himself, along with a fascinating piece of vintage science fiction from one of his more obscure influences. Finally, as an annex to Collapse Volume II, we also include a full transcription of the conference on ‘Speculative Realism’ held in London in 2007.

The contributors to this volume aim to clarify, from a variety of perspectives, Deleuze’s contribution to philosophy: in what does his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate from other philosophers and how does he transform it? And how can the apparently disparate threads of his work to be ‘integrated’ – what is the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what are the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical concepts ‘signed Deleuze’ converge?

Editor: Robin Mackay
Associate Editor: Dustin McWherter
ISBN 978-0-9553087-2-7
458 pages

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Collapse Vol. II: Speculative Realism
March 2007

Comprising subjects from probability theory to theology, from quantum theory to neuroscience, from astrophysics to necrology, and involving them in unforeseen and productive syntheses, Collapse II features a selection of speculative essays by some of the foremost young philosophers at work today, together with new work from artists and cinéastes, and searching interviews with leading scientists.
Against the tide of institutional balkanisation and specialisation, this volume testifies to a defiant reanimation of the most radical philosophical problematics – the status of the scientific object, metaphysics and its “end”, the prospects for a revival of speculative realism, the possibility of phenomenology, transcendence and the divine, the nature of causation, the necessity of contingency – both through a fresh reappropriation of the philosophical tradition and through an openness to its outside. The breadth of philosophical thought in this volume is matched by the surprising and revealing thematic connections that emerge between the philosophers and scientists who have contributed.

Editor: Robin Mackay
Associate Editor: Damian Veal
ISBN 978-0-9553087-1-2
330 pages

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Collapse Vol. I: Numerical Materialism
September 2006

Collapse I is an unprecedented collection of work by leading practitioners in diverse fields of enquiry. Conceived as a meticulously compiled and compendious miscellany, a grimoire or instruction manual without referent, as a delirious carnival of sobriety, Collapse operates its war against good sense not through romantic flight but through the formal insanity secreted in the depths of the rational (“the rational is not reasonable”).

Collapse aims to force unforeseen conjunctions, singular correspondences, and unnatural cross-fertilisations; to diagram abstract regions as yet unnamed.

The first volume of Collapse investigates the nature and philosophical uses of number through interviews with philosophers scientists and mathematicians, essays on the mathematics of intensity, terrorism, the occult and information theory, and graphical works of multiplicity.

Editor: Robin Mackay
Associate Editors: Ray Brassier, Michael Carr
ISBN 978-0-9553087-0-4
288 pages

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Yve Alain Bois, Rosalind E. Krauss: Formless: A User’s Guide (1996/1997)

“In a work that will become indispensable to anyone seriously interested in modern art, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss convincingly introduce a new constellation of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. Formless constitutes a decisive and dramatic transformation of the study of twentieth-century culture. Although it has been over sixty years since Georges Bataille undertook his philosophical development of the term informe, only in recent years has the idea of the “formless” been deployed in theorizing and reconfiguring the very field of twentieth-century art. This is partly because that field has most often been crudely set up as a battle between form and content, whereas “formless” constitutes a third term that stands outside the opposition of form and content, outside the binary thinking that is itself formal.

In Formless, Bois and Krauss, two of the most influential and respected art historians of our time, present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They map out its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a “job.” The job of Formless is to explore the power of the informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this innovative reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.”

First published as L’Informe: mode d’emploi, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1996.

Publisher Zone Books, 1997
ISBN 0942299434, 9780942299434
304 pages

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PDF (updated on 2013-1-15)

Joanna Demers: Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (2010)

“Contemporary electronic music has splintered into a dizzying assortment of genres and subgenres, communities and subcultures. Given the ideological differences among academic, popular and avant-garde electronic musicians, is it possible to derive an aesthetic theory that accounts for this variety? And is there even a place for aesthetics in twenty-first-century culture?

Listening through the Noise explores genres ranging from techno to electroacoustic music, from glitch to drone music, and from dub to drones, and maintains that culturally and historically informed aesthetic theory is not only possible but indispensable for understanding electronic music. The abilities of electronic music to use preexisting sounds and to create new sounds are widely known. Author Joanna Demers proceeds from this starting point to consider how electronic music is changing the way we listen not only to music, but to sound itself. The common trait among all variants of recent experimental electronic music is a concern with whether sound, in itself, bears meaning. The use in recent works of previously undesirable materials like noise, field recordings, and extremely quiet sounds has contributed to electronic music’s destruction of the “musical frame,” the conventions that used to set apart music from the outside world. In the void created by the disappearance of the musical frame, different philosophies for listening have emerged. Some electronic music genres insist upon the inscrutability and abstraction of sound. Others maintain that sound functions as a sign pointing to concepts or places beyond the work. But all share an approach towards listening that departs fundamentally from the expectations that have governed music listening in the West for the previous five centuries.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2010
ISBN 0195387651, 9780195387650
248 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)