Can We Unlearn Liberal Individualism? - book launch for A Stubborn Fury, 25 March via Zoom

Can We Unlearn Liberal Individualism Like We Can Unlearn Racism and Sexism? Join us for this ‘In-conversation’, where Gary Hall and Carolina Rito address this question while discussing Hall's latest book, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain.

Thurs 25 March 2021, 7.00pm (GMT), free online event, via Zoom

Go here to register:

https://www.eventsforce.net/cugroup/177/regist

Other questions that will be addressed during the event include: 

·      How come so much writing in England is realist, humanist and anti-intellectual?
·      Is all great literature pirated?
·      Why are Oxbridge-educated journalists obsessed with protecting ‘ordinary’ people from difficult language?
·      What do we need most – another theory of revolution or a revolution of theory?
·      Is everyone writing their memoirs today or does it just seem like it?
·      And why is Gary so mean to Tom McCarthy?

Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps Towards a Metacosmics - new book from Open Humanities Press

Announcing the publication of Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps Towards a Metacosmics by Daniel Ross.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis is available for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/psychopolitical-anaphylaxis/

The great acceleration that has become known as the Anthropocene has brought with it destructive consequences that threaten to give rise to a dangerous and potentially explosive convergent reaching of limits, not just climatically or biospherically, but psychosocially. This convergence demands a new kind of thinking and a reconsideration of fundamental philosophical, political and economic theory in light especially of the age of computational capitalism, in order to prevent this convergence from becoming absolutely catastrophic. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler argued that the basis for such a reconsideration must be, in a very general way, the thought of entropy. Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis examines, draws on, and dialogues with Stiegler’s work, and aims to take steps towards this new kind of thinking. Borrowing also from Georges Canguilhem and Peter Sloterdijk, among others, it argues as well for an immunological perspective that sees psychopolitical convulsions as a kind of anaphylactic shock that threatens to prove fatal. The paradox that must ultimately be confronted in the Anthropocene conceived as an Entropocene is the contradiction between the urgent need for a global emergency procedure and the equally necessary task of finding the time to carefully rethink our way beyond this anaphylaxis. The task of thinking today must be to inhabit this paradox and make it the basis of a new dynamic. 

Author bio

Daniel Ross has translated numerous books by Bernard Stiegler, including most recently Nanjing Lectures 2016-2019 (Open Humanities Press) and The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (Polity Press). With David Barison, he is the co-director of the award-winning philosophical documentary, The Ister, which premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was the recipient of the Prix du Groupement National des Cinémas de Recherche (GNCR) and the Prix de l’AQCC at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Montreal (2004). He is the author of Violent Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and many articles and book chapters on the work of Bernard Stiegler.

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies - new open access book from Open Humanities Press

We are delighted to announce the publication of Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies by Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Aesthetic Programming is available for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/aesthetic-programming/ 

Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: how power differentials are implicit in code in terms of binary logic, hierarchies, naming of the attributes, and how particular worldviews are reinforced and perpetuated through computation. Using p5.js, it introduces and demonstrates the reflexive practice of aesthetic programming, engaging with learning to program as a way to understand and question existing technological objects and paradigms, and to explore the potential for reprogramming wider eco-socio-technical systems. The book itself follows this approach, and is offered as a computational object open to modification and reversioning. 

Web: http://aesthetic-programming.net 

Repository: https://gitlab.com/aesthetic-programming/book  

‘Instructive, imaginative and accessible, this is an introduction to programming like no other. Aesthetic Programming opens up the thinking in software in a vivid, critical and creative manner; it is a book full of procedural pleasures and witty algorithms that also poses a remarkable set of questions about contemporary digital life.’ 

   - Matthew Fuller, Professor of Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London 

‘Skilfully moving across the instructional, the pedagogic, and the critical, Aesthetic Programming makes an expansive contribution to computational thinking. Engaging with programming from a practice-based approach, this illuminating text demonstrates how critical aesthetics can transform programming. Recipe book, code library, poetic manual, convivial instructional, and primer to computing imaginaries all assemble into this compelling and indispensable addition to software studies.’ 

   - Jennifer Gabrys, Chair in Media, Culture and Environment, University of Cambridge 

Author Bios 

Geoff Cox likes not to think of himself as an old white man from a parochial island but is clearly in denial. Thankfully other aspects of his identity are more ambiguous and fluid. Research interests lie broadly across the fields of software studies, contemporary art practice, cultural theory, and image politics, reflected in his academic position as Associate Professor and co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University, UK, and Adjunct Associate Professor, Aarhus University, DK. 

Winnie Soon was born and raised in Hong Kong, increasingly aware of, and confronting, identity politics regarding its colonial legacy and postcolonial authoritarianism. As an artist-coder-researcher, she/they is interested in queering the intersections of technical and artistic practices as a feminist praxis, with works appearing in museums, galleries, festivals, distributed networks, papers and books. Researching in the areas of software studies and computational practices, she/they is currently Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark.

My new book - A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain

My new book, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain, has just come out in Open Humanities Press' Media : Art : Write : Now series, edited by Joanna Zylinska. 

The abstract for the book is below. But it's my attempt to explain why I do some of the things I do. It’s also even angrier than usual if you can imagine such a thing. (It is what it says on the tin in that respect.) But then there's a lot to be angry about at the moment.

Another way of thinking about it would be as an unauthorized sequel to Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism?, especially its infamous chapter 14, with its critique of Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan et al.

A Stubborn Fury is available open access, no copyright. So please feel free to share.  

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Gary Hall, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain
London: Open Humanities Press, 2021
Series: Media : Art : Write : Now

E-version freely available on an open access, no copyright basis:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-stubborn-fury/

Also available in paperback

Abstract

Two fifths of Britain’s leading people were educated privately: that’s five times the amount as in the population as a whole, with almost a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. Eight private schools send more pupils to Oxbridge than the remaining 2894 state schools combined, making modern Britain one of the most unequal places in Europe.

In A Stubborn Fury, Gary Hall offers a powerful and provocative look at the consequences of this inequality for English culture in particular. Focusing on the novel and the memoir, he investigates, in terms that are as insightful as they are irreverent, why so much literature in England is uncritically realist, humanist and anti-intellectual. Hall does so by playfully rewriting two of the most acclaimed contributions to these media genres of recent times. One is that of England’s foremost avant-garde novelist Tom McCarthy - especially the importance he attaches to European modernism and antihumanist theory. The other is that of the celebrated French memoirists Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis and their attempt to reinvent the antihumanist philosophical tradition by producing a theory that speaks about class and intersectionality, yet generates the excitement of a Kendrick Lamar concert. Experimentally ‘pirating’ McCarthy, Eribon and Louis, A Stubborn Fury addresses that most urgent of questions: what can be done about English literary culture’s addiction to the worldview of privileged, middle-class white men to the exclusion of more radically inventive writing, including that of working-class, BAME and LGBTQIAP+ authors? 

Contents

Preface: Stay Elite

Part I: Go to Settings (feat. Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis)

1. On Class and Culture in Elitist Britain
2. Bourgeois Theory
3. Memoirs, Memoirs, Memoirs

Part II : HOW LITERATURE WORKS © Tom McCarthy

4. This is All Pirated
5. Good and Bad Remixes, or The Importance of Having the Right Software
6. Who Speaks, Who Gets to Experiment and What Remains
7. ‘He Wants to Be Authentic, Is All’: Literature as Technological Prosthesis
8. Media Art and the Melancholy Impasse of the Anglo-American Novel

9. Conclusion: A Stubborn Fury

‘When Gary Hall, if he is indeed the author of this book, speaks, he listens, and in listening he writes and in writing he remixes. He, or whatever version of authorship he betrays, shows us how writing works: intuitively, intellectually and intensively. The end result is always illumination.’

Mark Amerika, Professor of Art and Art History, University of Colorado

‘Hall gives a stark account of how the English novel has emerged as a key technology for the reproduction of class inequality in Britain, and its seemingly inextricable connectedness to liberal humanism, anti-intellectualism and, worst of all, Oxbridge.’

Isabel Waidner, author of We Are Made of Diamond Stuff and co-founder of Queers Read This. 

Dehumanising the Mind

This is the abstract for a talk I am due to give as part of the 'Inhumanities' seminars Open Humanities Press is curating for the Australasian Post-Humanities series.

In an essay called ‘The Meta-Crisis of Liberalism’, which Open Humanities Press (OHP) published in 2017, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst argue that, while the struggle between left and right that has dominated Western politics for the past half-century has been presented as a relationship of opposing positions, they are actually two faces of the same liberalism. I would go a step further to argue that actually most politics in the West today is conducted in liberal humanist terms. In my ongoing work I also explore traces of liberal humanism within the posthumanities – as evidenced by the field’s continuing adherence to concepts such as the individualistic proprietorial human author, the real name, the fixed and finished book, originality, creativity and copyright. Of the two books I’ve written recently for OHP’s MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series, the first, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain, provides a critique of the bourgeois liberal humanism that dominates so much of contemporary literature and culture. The second, Masked Media, describes some of the alternative, ‘inhumanist’ ways of being a critical theorist that my collaborators and I have been exploring with projects such as OHP, Living Books About Life and the Radical Open Access Collective. The rationale behind these projects is to show how our bourgeois liberal humanist modes of being and doing as theorists can be reinvented to help produce a more socially just future. For unless we can learn not just to write posthumanist theory but actually work, act and think in terms of the posthumanities, we risk perpetuating the kind of unjust and unequal culture with which many of us are all too familiar. It’s a culture dominated by the liberal humanist worldview of healthy, privileged, middle-class white men, to the exclusion of more radically inventive thought, including that of feminist, working-class, LGBTQIAP+, Black and Global Majority writers. Hence the title of my talk, which is a play on Decolonising the Mind, a book published in 1986 by our OHP colleague Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. 

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Gary Hall, Dehumanising the Mind

And here is the slightly longer (and stroppier) first draft, complete with references.

In an essay called ‘The Meta-Crisis of Liberalism’ that Open Humanities Press published in 2017, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst argue that, while the struggle between left and right that has dominated Western politics for the past half-century has been presented as a relationship of opposing positions, they are actually two faces of the same liberalism.(1) I would go a step further to argue that actually most politics in the West today is conducted in liberal humanist terms. And this is the case regardless of whether those involved identify as liberals, socialists, conservatives, libertarians, feminists, Greens, Marxists or anarchists. Something similar can be said about the relation of the posthumanities to the humanities. Posthumanists may write about transgressing the boundary that separates the human from the nonhuman, be it animal, insect, technology, plant life, water, air, the planet or the cosmos. Yet when it comes to how they themselves work and act these critical theorists remain liberal humanists. Evidence their continuing adherence to concepts and values inherited from the humanities, such as the individualistic proprietorial human author, the real name, the long-form argument, the fixed and finished book, originality, creativity and copyright. In this respect all the references in their work to objects, materials and media technologies is just non-human filler designed to make their liberal humanist ways of being and doing appear otherwise.

Of the two books I’ve written recently for OHP’s MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series, the first, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain, the first, provides a critique of the bourgeois liberal humanism that dominates so much of contemporary literature and culture, including antihumanist theory and what Rosi Braidotti calls ‘posthuman Humanities studies’.(2) The second, Masked Media, describes some of the alternative, ‘inhumanist’ ways of being a critical theorist my collaborators and have been  exploring with projects such as OHP, Living Books About Life and the Radical Open Access Collective.

In this talk for the Australasian Post-Humanities seminar series I want to develop this critique of both the humanities and posthumanities as different aspects of the same bourgeois liberal humanism by referring to three recently published texts: Reni Eddo- Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Zadie Smith’s Intimations and Bernadine Evaristo’s Goldsmiths Prize Lecture, ‘The Longform Patriarchs, and their Accomplices’.(3) For the answer to the question of why my collaborators and I want not only to write posthumanist theory but actually work, act and think in terms of the posthumanities is quite simple. It’s about showing how our ways of being and doing can be reinvented to help produce a more socially just future. Unless we can learn to do so, we risk perpetuating the kind of unjust and unequal culture with which many of us are all too familiar. It’s a culture dominated by the liberal humanist worldview of healthy, privileged, middle-class white men, to the exclusion of more radically inventive thought, including that of feminist, working-class, LGBTQIAP+, Black and Global Majority writers. Hence the title of my talk, which is a play on Decolonising the Mind, a book published in 1986 by our OHP colleague Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In it Ngũgĩ explains why he regards the translation between African languages such as Ibo and Yoruba as the ‘foundation of a genuinely African novel’, rather than anything written in English, French or Portuguese, the languages of the European colonisers. (4)

References

(1) John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, ‘The Meta-Crisis of Liberalism’, in Michael Marder and Patricia Viera, eds, The Philosophical Salon: Speculations, Reflections, Interventions (London: Open Humanities Press, 2017): http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-philosophical-salon/.

(2) Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (London: Polity, 2013) 157.

 

(3) Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays (London: Penguin, 2020); Bernadine Evaristo, ‘The Longform Patriarchs, and their Accomplices’, New Statesman, October 1, 2020: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2020/10/bernardine-evaristo-goldsmiths-lecture-longform-patriarchs. After the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests that occurred around the world following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, Eddo-Lodge became the first black Briton ever to top both the non-fiction paperback and overall UK book charts during this period, while Bernadine Evaristo became the first woman of colour to top that for paperback fiction with her novel, Girl, Woman, Other (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019).

(4) Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (London: Heinemann Educational, 1986) 84.