Some recent-ish publications

Experimental Publishing Compendium

Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers (book series)

How To Be A Pirate: An Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan and Gary Hall by Holger Briel’.

'Experimenting With Copyright Licences' (blogpost for the COPIM project - part of the documentation for the first book coming out of the Combinatorial Books pilot)

Review of Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage' by Matthew Kirschenbaum

Contribution to 'Archipiélago Crítico. ¡Formado está! ¡Naveguémoslo!' (invited talk: in Spanish translation with English subtitles)

'Defund Culture' (journal article)

How to Practise the Culture-led Re-Commoning of Cities (printable poster), Partisan Social Club, adjusted by Gary Hall

'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea' (journal article)

'Writing Against Elitism with A Stubborn Fury' (podcast)

'The Uberfication of the University - with Gary Hall' (podcast)

'"La modernidad fue un "blip" en el sistema": sobre teorías y disrupciones con Gary Hall' ['"Modernity was a "blip" in the system": on theories and disruptions with Gary Hall']' (press interview in Colombia)

'Combinatorial Books - Gathering Flowers', with Janneke Adema and Gabriela Méndez Cota - Part 1; Part 2; Part 3 (blog post)

Open Access

Most of Gary's work is freely available to read and download either here in Media Gifts or in Coventry University's online repositories PURE here, or in Humanities Commons here

Radical Open Access

Radical Open Access Virtual Book Stand

'"Communists of Knowledge"? A case for the implementation of "radical open access" in the humanities and social sciences' (an MA dissertation about the ROAC by Ellie Masterman). 

Wednesday
Mar202024

30-Second Book Review No.2: K Allado-McDowell’s Amor Cringe and Pharmako-AI

30-Second Book Review.

No.2

K Allado-McDowell’s Amor Cringe (Los Angelese: Deluge Books 2022) and Pharmako-AI (London: Ignota Books 2020).

K Allado-McDowell’s pioneering experimental novel Amor Cringe is ‘half traditionally-written and half AI-generated’ (2022), and is published on an all rights reserved basis by Deluge Books.

The same applies to Allado-McDowell’s collection Pharmako-AI, which bills itself as the ‘first book to be co-written with the language AI GPT-3. It is published all rights reserved by Ignota Books, with serif being used to identify those parts written by Allado-McDowell, and serif font the inputs Allado-McDowell gave the model, the rest being written by GPT-3. This ensures the two co-authors – human and machine – remain ontologically distinct. In not being authored primarily by nonhumans, it also ensures both books are copyrightable.

But what if, as Allado-McDowell suggested recently at the Cybernetic Serendipty: Towards AI event in London, art in the 21st century will weave together human and machine intelligences? How will this impact those humanist notions of authorship, attribution and copyright Allado-McDowell seems so anxious to maintain?

 

Thursday
Feb012024

Thousands of Readers, But Who Cares?

YouTube video on why lots of YouTube content creators are suffering burnout and quitting.

Because the idea that the internet allows you to do without gatekeepers is a myth. Today, there are more gatekeepers with more power than ever before. It’s just now they’re the recommendation algorithms of TikTok, YouTube et al. rather than the humans that content creators needed to appeal to in the past: the record label execs, movie industry producers and so forth.

And because you can have 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube. But unless you are capable of making someone money, or winning them some awards, nobody in the creative industries cares.

Are there any lessons here for academics? Especially given so many are burning out and quitting too. 

Should we be so surprised if operating in alternative ways to the legacy industries and institutions does not lead to thriving within them over the longer term? Doing so is only a ‘dead end’, surely, if what we really want is to be taken up and accepted by them on their (money-making, awarding winning) terms.

Which leads to the next question provoked by this video: is the point ultimately to be happy within the current western academic industrial complex as it has been generated by the traditional institutions plus the ‘shiny new creator economy’, or is it to change it?

Both would be nice, of course. But is that realistic? Is it even possible?

 

Wednesday
Jan172024

Authenticity by Bookshelf

Possessing physical copies of books for display on shelves as ‘trophies’ is apparently a thing. It's one of the explanations that's given as to why sales of print books have increased 10-14% in most English-speaking markets over the last few years.

But so, too, it seems is 'bookshelf wealth' - yes, it's big on TikTok. '"Bookshelf wealth" refers to displaying books you've really read', and doing so in a 'loveably messy' way, rather than as color-coordinated props arranged to convey a certain look.

What is bookshelf wealth? Inside the controversial new design trend | The  Independent

It's yet another way of showing you are 'authentic', to be placed alongside all the others at a time when so much art and culture is not just technologically reproduced (cf. Walter Benjamin), but technologically produced.

 

Friday
Jan122024

Surveillance Fashionism

I see we are now being encouraged to digitise our wardrobes in order to track what we wear. Perhaps reducing consumption could be added to the 5 reasons for doing so that are provided here.

Or we could always do what Open Humanities Press decided to do long ago, of course, and decide to just not track at all. (As a small act of opposition to surveillance capitalism, Open Humanities Press refuses to track who, or what, is reading its books and journals.)

I, of course, will this year be mainly wearing Marina Abramovic and Mark Fisher.

Face-lotion

Thursday
Dec072023

New Issue of Culture Machine: Anthropocene Infrapolitics

Culture Machine is proud to announce the publication of its latest volume (vol. 22) on Anthropocene Infrapolitics, guest-edited by Pedro Aguilera-Mellado (Notre Dame), Peter Baker (Stirling) & Gabriela Méndez Cota (IBERO, Mexico City). 

https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/

Below is the table of contents and editorial introduction. We hope you enjoy it!

---

On Anthropocene Infrapolitics, edited by Pedro Aguilera-Mellado, Peter Baker & Gabriela Méndez Cota

https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/

Contents

Contents

editorial

Época sin época y segundo comienzo
Alberto Moreiras

Un planeta transformado
Jan Zalasiewicz et al.

Nula o el lugar
Luz María Bedoya

Molten Praxis: Infrapolitics and the Inner-Outer Earth Juncture
Nigel Clark

La piel de la tierra
Teresa Vilarós

Between Futurology and Extinction: A Transautographic Experiment in Two Turns
Maddalena Cerrato & Peter Baker

Antropoceno y filosofía
Jorge Álvarez Yagüez

Infrapolitical Epimetheia: A Wondrous Machine
Gabriela Méndez Cota

Responsibility Toward the Planetary Nothing: For Infrapolitical Preparation
Rafael Fernández

Interrogación infrapolítica del Antropoceno: a propósito de Amaiur de Aixa de la Cruz
Pedro Aguilera-Mellado

Anthropocene, Infrapolitics, and Epochal Anxiety: Upon Reading Samanta Schweblin’s Kentukis and Distancia de Rescate
Gareth Williams

From Correlation to Corroboration: When the Weather Makes Sense of Death
AJ Baginski

Anthropocene Afterlives, or: Burial Rites for the Twenty-First Century
Adam R. Rosenthal

Plant-Thinking as Infrapolitical Ethics
Daniel Runnels

La justicia y el cambio climático abrupto
Nigel Clark (2011), trad. Irina López Rodríguez y Gabriela Méndez Cota

---

Editorial Introduction
https://culturemachine.net/submissions/vol-22-cfp-anthropocene-infrapolitics/editorial/

Since Paul Crutzen suggested the term in 2000, ‘the Anthropocene’ has become established as a narrative frame for the convergence of numerous discourses and collections of data exploring the reach, as well as the limits, of human agency within inherently dynamic Earth processes. This volume of Culture Machine arrives in the wake of a decade-long acceleration of Humanities discourse on the Anthropocene, the radical implications of which remain, in our view, unthought.

Already in 2016, Cohen, Colebrook and Hillis Miller thought of the Anthropocene as a twilight concept: ‘a form of half-recognition that can only occur in the moment of waning’. They noted that even if the idea of the Anthropocene had fully exposed the fictions of Cartesian Man, its paradoxical effect had been to stir, almost immediately, a production of counter-narratives, most of which failed to question narrative as such. In other words, the boom of the post-human and the non-human, alongside so many political challenges to the universalizing claims of the Anthropocene, most often provided a way of sustaining the human as a problem. By contrast, Cohen, Colebrook and Hillis Miller called on us to ask about the ways in which technical modes of inscription produced ‘the Anthropocene’ as a masculinist delusion of self-erasure and anthropo-political narrativizing.

Almost a decade later, the unrelenting chaos associated with the Anthropocene still calls for intellectual responsibility, but structural difficulty persists in (and beyond) university discourse. If the latter is characterized, in our time, by a political saturation, the structural difficulty concerns finitude as such, the experience of which increasingly converges with technological acceleration and the threat of human extinction. The question insists: is the Anthropocene above all a political question, a question of narrative? Broadly conceived as the absolute difference between life and politics, between being and subjectivity, between writing and narrativizing, infrapolitics gives way to the task of thinking existence in the ‘epoch without epoch’ that is now framed as the Anthropocene. 

More specifically conceived as a second turn of deconstruction, infrapolitical reflection recuperates the Heideggerian problematic of the ontico-ontological difference at the time of the consummation of metaphysics, of the reduction of life –including culture and politics –to calculability, or the principle of general equivalence under the guise of late post-industrial capitalism. Reframed today as an archive of planetary devastation, the Heideggerian concept of Gestell continues to pose a question about the limits of storytelling and the need for, as Weinstein and Colebrook (2017) put it, no less than a decision on the value of existence. As formulated by Alberto Moreiras, infrapolitics is always in every case a commitment to think that decision in terms of an exception to the principle of general equivalence.

Anthropocene Infrapolitics gathers contributions that strive to think the exception, the incalculable, in the Anthropocene. Most of them are based on presentations given at the II International Seminar of Contemporary Thought which took place on 29-30 June 2023 in the Universidade de Vigo, in Galicia, Spain, and was organised by Alberto Moreiras (Texas A&M University), Helena Cortés Gabaudan (Universidade de Vigo), Jorge Álvarez Yagüez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Carmela García González (IES Vigo), Arturo Leyte (Universidade de Vigo), Cristina Moreiras (University of Michigan), Teresa Vilarós (Texas A&M University) and Gareth Williams (University of Michigan). We want to express our sincere gratitude to all of them and to the participants of the Vigo meeting for having accepted our invitation to edit and disseminate their work in Culture Machine with a spirit of radical open access

Even if the meeting was made possible and nurtured by the institutional frameworks of academic scholarship, Anthropocene Infrapolitics does not seek, above all, to make ‘progress’ on ‘knowledge production’ by telling more stories about planetary catastrophe. More fundamentally it seeks to ask, once again, what thinking means, with an openness to the proliferation of singular experiences and working against all attempts to construct a new hegemonic framework for academic work via scientific, economic or cultural knowledge about the human. 

As such, infrapolitics is irreducible to technics, ethics or politics, and we may, at best, regard it as a call for an attunement to somewhere strange and unthematizable. Working at the limits of language, writing, and thought, one of the main questions for infrapolitical reflection is therefore over the form or style that the announcement of the infrapolitical should take, where writing is always understood as the writing of life itself, or perhaps more accurately, as what sub-cedes and sub-sists of life beyond or below its metaphysical capture. In this regard, we give special thanks to Luz María Bedoya for a very special contribution to Anthropocene Infrapolitics, namely, the artwork included in this issue.

Anthropocene Infrapolitics seeks to make space, within the most rigorous scholarship in the theoretical Humanities, for untimely textual inscriptions, or writings that attempt to consciously bear the mark of their own historical or existential circumstances. We would like to acknowledge Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, Jessica Bekerman, Tatjana Gajic, Cristina Moreiras, Benjamín Mayer-Foulkes, Janneke Adema, Fiona Noble, José Luis Villacañas Berlanga, Claire Colebrook, and Ángel Octavio Álvarez Solís, for carefully and enthusiastically taking part in the open peer review alongside the guest-editors and the contributors to this volume. The non-anonymity of peer reviewing was, in this case, a wager and a test for our infrapolitical desire to affirm that another scholarly writing is possible, and that open writing collaborations matter, beyond scientific standards or political convictions, for the task of thinking existence in the Anthropocene.

Selected exchanges from the open peer review process will be edited and published throughout Winter 2023-2024 in Culture Machine’s Interzone, as part of an extended conversation on Anthropocene Infrapolitics.