In a recent issue of E-Flux, Gean Moreno has written on many of the same themes I have touched upon in the past, developing his ideas by way of the rather elegant analogy of nano-technology’s ‘grey goo’. His Notes on the Inorganic, part 1: Accelerations, considers capital in light of a Landian reading, regarding it [...]
If it is now a machinic capitalism whose artificial cognition rules our world — its amphetaminic diachronism melting all to air and lava-like, re-sedimenting the crust — we must ask what is this unconscious from which everything is pulled, molten, to the surface? The phenomenal being of this alien mind, whose transcendental conditions must be vastly different than ours produces more information hours than attention can ever repay.
Accelerationism is the notion that rather than halting the onslaught of capital, it best to exacerbate its processes to bring forth its inner contradictions, and thereby hasten its destruction. As a radical act, the genesis of this idea stretches back to Marx and continues through Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, and Nick Land’s cybertechnics.
The museum is a factory, tightly contained and maintained by the managerial class, safely autonomous, and drunk on the trickle of wealth that flows down the legs of the one percenters. The mill town, of course, no longer need reside in a single place, but now steadily circulates through the international borders that capital has carefully burrowed through sovereignties. One might, of course, miss the runway lights that will taxi you safely into your next destination, but then you may be mistaken for a terrorist.
In Huysman’s A rebours, the decadent aesthete Des Esseintes, after dallying in an interest in paper and wax flowers, decides to push his sensual experiment further, and purchases a variety of live flora which are perversely chosen for their artificial appearance. Des Esseintes watches with satisfaction as a scabrous decoupage of blossoms and leafy things is unloaded onto his doorstep [...]
Dinged is a curated selection of existing texts and images that are freely disseminated, arranged and designed in multiple formats, and available online. This project stems from the intersection of several interests, but most notably, the use of media as a site and the agency of things.
There is an essential schism that runs through the history of aesthetics that begins with the enlightenment and continues into contemporaneity. Both Adorno and Bourriaud confront this break in their work, but differ considerably in their diagnosis and confrontation of the aporia. Adorno is famously noted for his pessimism, while Bourriaud has often been described [...]
In a short story by Philip K Dick an eager young repair man shows up at the door of a baffled entrepreneur attempting to fix an object that doesn’t yet exist. The entrepreneur, realizing the potential of gaining a foothold in a lucrative future industry, coaxes the repair man to reveal this invention which will [...]
© 2012 Joshua Johnson