This City Does Not Exist

Back in December Mel Jordan and I gave a joint talk called ‘This City Does Not Exist’ at the City, Public Space & Body conference, Institute for Creative and Culture Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths, University of London.

‘The city’ for us (as for this conference) is not something that can be known in advance and thus taken-for-granted. Each city contains a pluriverse of cities. In this sense, the city does not already exist, having been created by architects and planners, say. Such an approach risks limiting responses to the city to critiquing or otherwise tactically engaging with it – as famously with the flaneur, the derive, and the male citizen who psycho-geographically walks through a pre-given urban space. The city, for us, is neither mass nor abstract, formal nor technical. Instead, we see the city as something that has to be invented and called forth in relation to specific contexts and situations: artistically, practically, theoretically.

For anyone interested, Mel and I are in session 11: The Making of Cityness, which is here and below:

But you can now access all of the recorded sessions and presentations of the conference here

Bifurcate: There Is No Alternative Edited by Bernard Stiegler and the Internation Collective

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Bifurcate: There Is No Alternative
Edited by Bernard Stiegler and the Internation Collective

Edited and translated by Daniel Ross

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Bifurcate is available to download for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/bifurcate/

Bifurcating means: reconstituting a political economy that reconnects local knowledge and practices with macroeconomic circulation and rethinks territoriality at its different scales of locality; developing an economy of contribution on the basis of a contributory income no longer tied to employment and once again valuing work as a knowledge activity; overhauling law, and government and corporate accounting, via economic and social experiments, including in laboratory territories, and in relation to cooperative, local market economies formed into networks and linked to international trade; revaluing research from a long-term perspective, independent of the short-term interests of political and economic powers; reorienting digital technology in the service of territories and territorial cooperation.

The collective work that produced this book is based on the claim that today’s destructive development model is reaching its ultimate limits, and that its toxicity, which is increasingly massive, manifest and multidimensional (medical, environmental, mental, epistemological, economic – accumulating pockets of insolvency, which become veritable oceans), is generated above all by the fact that the current industrial economy is based in every sector on an obsolete physical model – a mechanism that ignores the constraints of locality in biology and the entropic tendency in reticulated computational information. In these gravely perilous times, we must bifurcate: there is no alternative.

Editor Bio

Bernard Stiegler is a French philosopher who is director of the Institut de recherche et d’innovation, and a doctor of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He has been a program director at the Collège international de philosophie, senior lecturer at Université de Compiègne, deputy director general of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, director of IRCAM, and director of the Cultural Development Department at the Centre Pompidou. He is also president of Ars Industrialis, an association he founded in 2006, as well as a distinguished professor of the Advanced Studies Institute of Nanjing, and visiting professor of the Academy of the Arts of Hangzhou, as well as a member of the French government’s Conseil national du numérique. Stiegler has published more than thirty books, all of which situate the question of technology as the repressed centre of philosophy, and in particular insofar as it constitutes an artificial, exteriorised memory that undergoes numerous transformations in the course of human existence.

Editor and Translator 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 documentary about Martin Heidegger, 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 Political Anaphylaxis (OHP, 2021), Violent Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and numerous articles and chapters on the work of Bernard Stiegler.

Fabricating Publics and Hacking the Anthropocene: two new open access books from Open Humanities Press

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of two new open access books:

Fabricating Publics: The Dissemination of Culture in the Post-truth Era, edited by Bill Balaskas and Carolina Rito:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/fabricating-publics/

Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene: Archive, edited by Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Susan Reid, Pia van Gelder and Astrida Neimanis:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/feminist-queer-anticolonial-propositions-for-hacking-the-anthropocene/

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Fabricating Publics: The Dissemination of Culture in the Post-truth Era, edited by Bill Balaskas and Carolina Rito

Fabricating Publics explores how cultural practitioners and institutions perceive their role in the post-truth era, by repositioning their work in relation to the notion of the “public”. The book addresses the multiple challenges posed for artists, curators and cultural activists by the conditions of post-factuality: Do cultural institutions have the practical means and the ethical authority to fight against the proliferation of “alternative facts” in politics, as well as within all aspects of our lives? What narratives of dissent are cultural practitioners developing, and how do they choose to communicate them? Could new media technologies still be considered as instruments of democratizing culture, or have they been irrevocably associated with ‘empty’ populism? Do “counter-publics” exist and, if yes, how are they formed? In the end, is “truth” a notion that could be reclaimed through contemporary culture? With contributions by Charlie Gere, Christine Ross, David M. Berry, Emily Rosamond, Forensic Architecture, Gregory Sholette, Mieke Bal, Nat Muller, Ferry Biedermann, Natalie Bookchin, Alexandra Juhasz, Ramon Bloomberg, Santiago Zabala, Steven Henry Madoff, Terry Smith, and UBERMORGEN.

Fabricating Publics is published in our DATA Browser series, which is edited by Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/data-browser/

Editor Bios

Bill Balaskas is an artist, theorist, and educator, whose research is located at the intersection of politics, digital media, and contemporary visual culture. He is an Associate Professor and Director of Research, Business and Innovation at the School of Art and Architecture of Kingston University, London. His work has been widely exhibited in the UK and internationally. He has received awards and grants from the European Investment Bank Institute; Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA); Open Society Foundations; European Cultural Foundation; the Australian National University; and the Association for Art History (UK), amongst others. He is Editor of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (MIT Press), co-editor of Institution as Praxis – New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research (Sternberg Press, 2020), and of Architectures of Education (e-flux Architecture, 2020). Originally trained as an economist, he holds a PhD in Critical Writing in Art and Design from the Royal College of Art, London.

Carolina Rito is Professor of Creative Practice Research, at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities (CAMC), Coventry University, UK, and lead of the Critical Practices research strand. She is a researcher and curator whose work explores ‘the curatorial’ as an investigative practice, expanding practice-based research in the fields of curating, visual cultures, and cultural studies. Rito is Executive Board Member of the Midlands Higher Education & Culture Forum (MHECF); Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History, Universidade NOVA Lisboa; Founding Editor of The Contemporary Journal; and Chair of the Collaborative Research Working Group for the MHECF. Rito is the co-editor of Institution as Praxis – New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research (Sternberg Press, 2020); Architectures of Education (e-flux Architecture, 2020); and editor of the “On Translations” and “Critical Pedagogies” issues (The Contemporary Journal, 2018–2020). From 2017 to 2019, she was Head of Public Programmes and Research at Nottingham Contemporary. She holds a PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge from Goldsmiths, University of London.

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Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene, edited by Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Susan Reid, Pia van Gelder and Astrida Neimanis

If the Anthropocene heralds both a new age of human supremacy and an out-of-control Nature ushering in a premature apocalypse, this living book insists such assumptions must be hacked. Reperforming selections from three live events staged in 2016, 2017 and 2018 in Sydney, Australia, Hacking the Anthropocene offers a series of propositions – argument, augury, poetry, elegy, essay, image, video – that suggest alternative entry points for understanding shifting relationships between humans and nature. Scholars and artists from environmental humanities and related areas of social, political and cultural studies interrogate the assumption of the human “we” as a uniform actor, and offer a timely reminder of the entanglements of race, sexuality, gender, coloniality, class, and species in all of our earthly terraformings. Here, Anthropocene politics are both urgent and playful, and the personal is also planetary.

Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene is an OHP Labs Seedbook:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/labs/seedbooks/

Editor Bios

Jennifer Mae Hamilton lives on unceded Anaiwan Country, and is a researcher, teacher and community organiser. Her interdisciplinary research explores weather, affect and housework, and, with Astrida Neimanis, co-founded COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities. She is a lecturer in English at the University of New England.

Astrida Neimanis is Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan campus on unceded Syilx territory in Kelowna, Canada. She is co-coordindator of COMPOSTING Feminisms (with Jennifer Hamilton), a member of the Weathering Collective, and director of The Feel-ed Lab. She also writes about bodies, water, and weather.

Sue Reid is a creative researcher, artist, writer and lawyer, working and living on Gadigal and Yugambeh lands. She is a member of the Sydney Environment Institute; a researcher with The Seed Box; and a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney—her thesis is titled, ‘Imagining Justice with the Ocean.’

Pia van Gelder is a researcher, historian and artist at the School of Art & Design at the Australian National University. Her work investigates historical and contemporary conceptions of energies and how these shape our relationship with technology, bodies and our environment.

The Interfact by Gabriel Yoran - new open access book from Open Humanities Press

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Interfact: On Structure and Compatibility in Object-Oriented Ontology by Gabriel Yoran

Like all Open Humanities Press books, The Interfact is available to download for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-interfact/

Objects in object-oriented ontology (OOO) are mysterious and inexhaustible entities. But since OOO grants ontological priority to objects, it should have an easy time referring to objects. But this is not the case.

In The Interfact, Yoran researches the question of how OOO refers to an object’s haecceity, its ‘thisness.’ He starts with an investigation into OOO’s eponymous practice, object-oriented programming (OOP) and identifies not just a plethora of parallels, but finds OOP’s concept of interfaces (as structured ways of object confrontation in time) a promising tool to describe both the rift between all objects and their relative stability.

Yoran then extends Harman’s fourfold diagrams to reflect the linkages between fourfolds, revealing that objects necessarily are parts of other objects. This phenomenon, which he calls out-of-phase objects, reveals links to Simondon’s notion of compatibilisation.

Yoran argues that objects are necessarily integrated into a fabric of interconnected fourfolds as well as component-compound relations. This structure solves the problem of object identification, by recognizing the object-fourfolds as overlaps, a mutually stabilizing structure which allows for reproducible object confrontation in time, or facts.

'The complexity of the ideas in this book are challenging to the intellect, just as the argument itself represents a worthy challenge to some well-regarded philosophical positions. One of the most exciting things about this argument is that it takes seriously the ways in which object-oriented programming can inform object-oriented philosophy, and vice-versa, demonstrating significant, practical connections between the two.'

 - Noah Roderick, author of The Being of Analogy

The Interfact is published in our New Metaphysics series, which is edited by Graham, Harman and Bruno Latour:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/new-metaphysics/

Author Bio

Gabriel Yoran received his PhD on Speculative Realism at the European Graduate School. Previously, he studied Social and Economic Communications at the Berlin University of the Arts. He is co-founder of several digital companies (Steady, Steganos, aka-aki) and works at the intersection of computer science and philosophy. He contributed “Applied Metaphysics – Objects in Object-Oriented Ontology and Object-Oriented Programming” to the Interface Critique Journal and “Interface kaputt – Cyborgism and Object-Oriented Philosophy” to the volume Interface Critique, published at Kadmos. For more information on his work see yoran.com

'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea' published in Media Theory

My article 'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea', has been published in the open access journal Media Theory:

http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/126

‘Pluriversal Socialism – The Very Idea’ starts from the position that politics in the West today is typically conducted in liberal humanist terms. This is the case regardless of whether those involved identify as radical democrats, socialists, communists, feminists, Greens, Marxists or anarchists.

Contemporary antihumanist and posthumanist theory is meant to offer something very different to liberal humanism. Media ecology, media archaeology, new materialism and object-oriented philosophy are all positioned as representing a shift away from anthropocentrism and a modernist epistemology based on the separation of human from nonhuman, subject from object, masculine from feminine, culture from nature, living from non-living. Instead, they champion a radically relational approach to the world that is designed to destablise such ontological dualisms. Yet while antihumanist and posthumanist theorists may write about transgressing the boundary that divides the human from the nonhuman, when it comes to their owns ways of being and doing they too often end up operating as bourgeois liberal humanists.

‘Pluriversal Socialism’ continues with my exploration (in texts such as Pirate Philosophy and ‘Anti-Bourgeois Theory’) of how we can not only write non-liberal humanist theory but actually work, act and live as non-liberal humanists too. It does so by drawing on the emphasis that is currently placed by a number of Latin Americanist theorists on pluriversal, ontological, radically relational politics (as distinct from the universal, modernist, counterhegemonic politics of most left thinkers in the Global North). In the process it addresses two important questions that have been raised recently by Arturo Escobar and Boaventura de Sousa Santos respectively: ‘Can we unlearn the liberal individual … in a similar way that we endeavour to unlearn patriarchy, racism and heterosexism?’ And is what we need to do so ‘another theory of revolution’ or a revolution of theory?

‘Pluriversal Socialism’ is the latest addition to the political discussion about how to transition toward a noncapitalist, nonracist, nonheteropatriarchal future between Jeremy Gilbert, Gabriela Méndez Cota and myself. See also:

Gabriela Méndez Cota, 'Pirate Traces': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/114

Jeremy Gilbert, 'Anti-Bourgeois For What?': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/115

Gary Hall, 'Anti-Bourgeois Theory': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/91