The time of hypersubjects is ending. Their desert-apocalypse-fire-and-death cults aren't going to save them this time. Meanwhile the time of hyposubjects is just beginning. This text is an exercise in chaotic and flimsy thinking that will possibly waste your time. But it is the sincere effort of two reform-minded hypersubjects to decenter themselves and to help nurture hyposubjective humanity. Here are some of the things we say in this book: 1) Hyposubjects are the native species of the Anthropocene and are only just now beginning to discover what they might be and become. 2) Like their hyperobjective environment, hyposubjects are also multiphasic and plural: not-yet, neither here nor there, less than the sum of their parts. They are, in other words, subscendent (moving toward relations) rather than transcendent (rising above relations). They do not pursue or pretend to absolute knowledge or language, let alone power. Instead they play; they care; they adapt; they hurt; they laugh. 3) Hyposubjects are necessarily feminist, colorful, queer, ecological, transhuman, and intrahuman. They do not recognize the rule of androleukoheteropetromodernity and the apex species behavior it epitomizes and reinforces. But they also hold the bliss-horror of extinction fantasies at bay, because hyposubjects' befores, nows, and afters are many. 4) Hyposubjects are squatters and bricoleuses. They inhabit the cracks and hollows. They turn things inside out and work miracles with scraps and remains. They unplug from carbon gridlife; they hack and redistribute its stored energies for their own purposes. 5) Hyposubjects make revolutions where technomodern radars can't glimpse them. They patiently ignore expert advice that they do not or cannot exist. They are skeptical of efforts to summarize them, including everything we have just said.
Dark Botany activates the material and sensorial wonder of plants-their energy, their mysterious allure, their capacities and skills, their independent might. In this Wunderkammer of critical plant studies essays and plant+artworks, the Herbarium emerges as a site of multiple materialities and reflexive forms of counter-narrative. Herbaria specimens come alive as assemblages, telling truths about their dark histories and darker contemporary currents, while reflecting on the complexity of texture, movement, memory, compound structure, chemical emissions and rapid evolution of plants and languages. What one discovers is that herbaria are not static: they are as vital, energetic and enigmatic as the plants in their collections-and as diverse.
With contributions by Giovanni Aloi, Matthew Beach, Tamryn Bennett, Edward Colless, Prudence Gibson, Ryan Gordon, Lisa Gorton, Sigi Jöttkandt, Nick Koenig, Verena Kuni, Anna M. Lawrence, Vanessa Lemm, Rebecca Mayo, Aunty Deirdre Martin, Arina Melkozernova, Elaine Miller, Jacob Morris, Anna Perdibon, Anna Madeleine Raupach, Georgina Reid, Heather Rogers, Betty Russ, Erica Seccombe, Marie Sierra, Christina Stadlbauer, Anna-Sophie Springer, Bart Vandeput, Juliann Vitullo, Anna Westbrook and Maya Martin-Westheimer.
The book 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. 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.
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.
French philosopher Bernard Stiegler began his annual lecture series at Nanjing University in 2016, offering eight lectures per year. The first four years of these lectures are included in this volume and amount to a distillation of the movement of his work in this period as well as an engagement with China at a time when its place in the questions about the global future is becoming increasingly central. This movement and this engagement are in fact conjoined, because since 2014 Stiegler's questions have been increasingly concerned with global problems, that is, with thinking the so-called Anthropocene at a profound level and in relation to the philosophical failure to reckon with the manifold and indeed cosmic consequences of the entropic and thermodynamic revolution. The first year's lectures introduce these questions via Stiegler's concept of automatic society and technological and speculative questions emerging from the work of Heidegger and Marx. The 2017 lectures begin with the decision of Oxford Dictionaries to make post-truth the word of the year, taking this as an opportunity to understand the implications for Heidegger's history of being, history of truth and Gestell, before entering into a lengthy and original consideration of the relationship between Socrates and Plato (and of tragic Greece in general) and its meaning for the history of Western philosophy. The 2018 lectures traverse a path from Foucault's biopower to psychopower to neuropwer, and then to a critique of neuroeconomics, conducted through Stiegler's revision of the Husserlian account of retention to focus on the irreducible connection between human memory and technological memory, culminating in reflections on the significance of neurotechnology in platform capitalism. The 2019 lectures introduce the concept of hyper-matter as necessary for an epistemology that escapes the trap of opposing the material and the ideal, in order to respond to the need for a new critique of the notion of information and technological performativity (of which Moore's law both is and is not an example) in an age when the biosphere has become a technosphere.
Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology is a collection of essays by interdisciplinary scholars and multimedia artists that addresses the contested landscape of drone development and drone use. Offering new ideas and arguments about the technology, logics, and systems with which drones are intertwined, this collection scrutinises how the aesthetics of drones are fundamental to its ethics; how drone aesthetics are impacting the way we relate to one another and to the human and more-than-human worlds; and how drones are altering our relationships to life and death. With contributions by Michele Barker, Antoine Bousquet, Kathryn Brimblecombe-fox, Edgar Gomez Cruz, Joseph DeLappe, Jack Faber, Adam Fish, Caren Kaplan, Amy Gaeta, Sophia Goodfriend, Mitch Goodwin, Anna Munster, Tom Sear, J.D. Schnepf, Yanai Toister, Simon M. Taylor, Madelene Veber.
Self to Self brings together essays on personal identity, autonomy, and moral emotions by the philosopher J. David Velleman. Although the essays were written independently, they are unified by an overarching thesis - that there is no single entity denoted by the self - as well as by themes from Kantian ethics, psychoanalytic theory, social psychology, and Velleman's work in the philosophy of action. Two of the essays were selected by the editors of Philosophers' Annual as being among the ten best papers in their year of publication.
Self to Self will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists, and others who theorize about the self.
Dutch is Beautiful tells the story of the fifty years of Dutch and Flemish Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. It is an account of the efforts to promote Dutch and Flemish culture and language, as well as a description of how the teaching of Dutch language, literature, history and culture can be a tool to look at a world of diverse identities. It also offers a comprehensive overview of the beginnings of a successful program that included Dutch writers-in-residence, visiting Netherlands professors, cultural and educational events, arts, music, films, conferences and publications. Several alumni of the program look back at their college years with appreciation. Articles and essays on history, Anne Frank, and conversations on colonialism discuss critical and educational views on Dutch and Flemish Studies in past, present and future, when diversity, equity and inclusion are important goals and objectives, and public scholarship and academic activism will be a larger part of the curriculum. This book will inform, entertain, stimulate and impress everyone who is interested in the culture of the Low Countries. The title says it all