Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian (eds.), #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (2014)

“Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.

#Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.

On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own ‘Prometheanism’, and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century.

At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #Accelerate activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment and capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of ‘reasonable’ contemporary political alternatives.”

Publisher Urbanomic, Falmouth, with Merve, Berlin, 2014
ISBN 9780957529557
536 pages

Reviews: Malcolm Harris (New Inquiry), J.J. Charlesworth (Art Review), Simon O’Sullivan (Mute), Alex Andrews (Review31), Orlando Read (Frieze).
Commentaries: McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar), David Cunningham (Radical Philosophy).

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Donna Haraway: Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989)

“Haraway’s discussions of how scientists have perceived the sexual nature of female primates opens a new chapter in feminist theory, raising unsettling questions about models of the family and of heterosexuality in primate research.”

This “large book may be read from start to finish as a chronological and thematic survey of twentieth-century primatology. … But each chapter is simultaneously history of science, cultural studies, feminist exploration, and engaged intervention into the constitutions of love and knowledge in the disciplined crafting of the Primate Order. … My placing this account of primatology within SF–the narratives of speculative fiction and scientific fact–is an invitation for the readers of Primate Visions–historians, culture critics, feminists, anthropologists, biologists, anti-racists, and nature lovers–to remap the borderlands between nature and culture.” (from the Introduction)

Publisher Routledge, 1989
ISBN 0415902940, 9780415902946
ix+486 pages

Reviews: George E. Marcus (Science 1990), Alison Jolly and Margaretta Jolly (New Scientist 1990), Robin Dunbar (NY Times 1990), Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz (Discourse 1990), Anne Fausto-Sterling (J Hist Biology 1990), Susan Cachel (Am J Primatology 1990), Meredith F. Small (Am J Physical Anthropology 1990), Sarah Franklin (J Hist Sexuality 1990), Matt Cartmill (Int J Primatology 1991), M. Lynn Byrd (H-Ideas 2001).

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Bogumiła Suwara (ed.): {(staré a nové) rozhrania /*interfejsy*/ [literatúry]} (2014) [SK, CZ]

Collected papers by Slovak, Czech and Polish theorists on the theme of interfaces in electronic literature and (post)digital culture. With English abstracts.

“Kolektívna monografia je príspevkom do vedeckého diskurzu na prieniku literárnej teórie, estetiky, kulturológie a mediálnych štúdií. Prostredníctvom štúdií teoretičiek a teoretikov zo Slovenska, Českej republiky a Poľska upozorňuje na problematiku interfejsov v elektronickej literatúre a (post)digitálnej kultúre. Texty prinášajú nový pohľad na vývojové trendy umenia vrátane literatúry s prihliadnutím na súčasné metódy výskumu a najnovšie teoretické poznatky v danej oblasti.”

With texts by Andrzej Adamski, Krištof Anetta, Joanna Ciesielska, Zuzana Husárová, Jana Kostincová, Kateřina Piorecká, Karel Piorecký, Mariusz Pisarski, and Bogumila Suwara.

Publisher SAP & Ústav svetovej literatúry SAV, Bratislava, 2014
ISBN 9788089607303
239 pages

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