Unconscious/Television

While presented as a contiguous work, the book is formed of different essays that have been dissected, recomposed with artificial connective tissue. The result lies somewhere between the rhizomatic continuity of a Body-without-Organs, and the disjointed assemblage of roadkill; either way, the question of where to even begin remains the same. 

These essays each grow out of a particular resentment that developed through years of experience as a working-student of biology, but the task of the book was to transform this into something productive, something that sticks granular propositions into Biology like acupuncture needles. Inherent sexism within Biological research is, after all, not entirely disconnected to Pharmaceutical giants flooding the streets with opiates—and it is simply a writer’s hope that some well positioned words can remind enough people of how its all connected. 

In what could be perceived as a philosophical turn, the importance of talking about science, as much as doing it, is re-entering the popular scientific consciousness, and it is high time, too. What was already getting bad under Biden, became catastrophic under Trump, and the infiltration into public research by private institutions and capitalist enterprises, which this book highlights, is proving dire. The capitalisation of all things bio, whether -yoghurt, -metric data or -logical institutions, is necrotic—MeltdownYourBooks didn’t flinch, they just grabbed the scalpel, dowsed the flesh in ethanol, and asked the question we all forget needs answering: where first, Doc? 

Meltdown Your Books (M.Y.B.), the pen name, was made as a portmanteau of the seminal essay Meltdown by Nick Land, and the landmark film Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets by Shuji Terayama. I chose the name, almost 3 years ago now, to reflect the political and digital black hole I saw hovering at the edge of contemporary media experience, and to present my work without the muddy veneer of personal identity. It has remained, since its inception, an anonymous project in only the loosest terms. The dedicated could always find my real identity, and some have, and so its anonymous character existed primarily as an element of presentation. Its anonymity existed to emphasize its deindividuated character. The things I discuss and emphasize under the M.Y.B. label are not items with definitive characteristics, they are collective experiences. M.Y.B. is something I cherish beyond self.

Mark Fisher taught a generation to hear the future's disappearance in contemporary music, as if the rhythm of the world was synchronised to the periodic flowering of new creative forms. His diagnosis was devastating: stagnation in music was akin to a venous insufficiency, or worse, some kind of nuclear winter that would ward off the spring for endless generations to come. 

Drawing on musicians like SOPHIE, Arca and Iglooghost, Matt Bluemink declares that the future is not lost; it still speaks to us through music. If Fisher’s Hauntology — dwelling on ghosts of the past — is the logic of depression, then Bluemink’s Anti-Hauntology posits a logic of hope where voices from the future continue to guide the development of the present. 

Island-hopping through Stiegler's philosophy of technics, Simondon's theory of individuation, and the spatial imaginaries of cyberpunk and solarpunk, Bluemink builds a theoretical framework equal to the times — one that takes seriously our capacity to, not only diagnose the world, but remake it. In order to create a new future we must re-imagine our relationship with music, with technology, and with culture. The world of tomorrow is a blank canvas; an open book. New beginnings are always possible. 

Matt Bluemink is the founder and editor-in-chief of Blue Labyrinths online magazine. His research is focused on the relationship between the philosophy of technology, media theory and urbanism. He also writes on contemporary music, literature, and digital culture. 

Third edition featuring afterword by Alessandro Sbordoni & several appendices, including a new translation & edit of “Taylor Swift Does Not Exist”. 

This is a monumental and extensive work from someone who is arguably the most well-versed scholar of Baudrillard, Deleuze & Laruelle in the German-speaking world, Achim Szepanski, the original founder of Mille Plateaux, Force Inc Music Works and NON. This book is dedicated to Jean Baudrillard, who would be described by Achim as the most radical and advanced stimmung in Philosophy. Through this comprehensive and devouring analysis of Baudrillard’s work, the author presents a gripping account of their own philosophy; alongside his magnum opus Die Ekstasie der Spekulation, this book, In the Delirium of the Simulation, provides the strongest case for what might be called, in light of his passing, Szepanskism or Szepanskian Economics. 

From Finance, to non-philosophy and radical experimental music, Szepanski is an anomalous and unique theoretician with one hell of a history. 

CONTENTS:

• Metabox of Terms: Simulation, Code, Hyperreality, Fractal, Seduction and Implosion 
• Baudrillard's Maximisation Hypothesis: the System and the Other
• Baudrillard & Marxism: Signs, Production and Money
• Distinguishing the Consumer System (or Shopping Mall) from the Landfill
• Baudrillard & the Financial Simulacrum
• Excursus on Jonathan Beller's World Computer 
• Hyperreality & Artificial Intelligence
• Baudrillard & Quantum Theory
• Afterword: Hyperculture by Alessandro Sbordoni
• Appendix 1: Taylor Swift Does Not Exist
• Appendix 2: Baudrillard: After the Orgy
• Appendix 3: Imagination & Reality: Psychoanalysis vs Baudrillard

The apocalypse as such will not take place, as it is already finished. Today, there is no longer any difference between the end of the world and capitalism itself: from Britney Spears’ Till the World Ends to The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time, from Avenger’s Endgame to Donnie Darko, and all the way down to the internet’s Backrooms, the world never ends but is reproduced again and again according to the semio-logic of capital. 

In contrast with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, Semiotics of the End is a manifesto for the imagination of another relationship with the end. If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as Slavoj Žižek, Fredric Jameson, and Mark Fisher put it, it is only because we have not imagined anything yet. The end is just the beginning.

With an Afterword by Matt Bluemink 

This book proposes a reversal of a common convention within contemporary critical theory, the idea that desire is an entropic, creative and potentially emancipatory force. Against this view, the author figures desire as negentropic, structured around stability, prediction, and calculation. Far from being disrupted by technocapital, this desire finds there a troubling affinity, and is seemingly propelled towards increasingly self-destructive forms. Retrograde Prometheus, part a poetic narrative, and part speculative treatise, seeks to reformulate these categories through which we understand desire, along with all the existential, ethical, and political implications that such a radical change in perspective may entail. 

So much has changed since Anti-Oedipus (or even since Anti-Narcissus!), let alone since the Seminars of Lacan—the amount that has changed since Freud, therefore, is unimaginable. Where is psychoanalysis today, post-internet, post-covid? What has changed for the subject (as well as how we understand the subject) due to these advancements in technology and science, with these changes in how we understand our history and genesis, and with how we understand the relationship between technology, language and worlds?

Retrograde Prometheus tells a story of psychoanalysis today—two decades into the Ontological Turn—and its encounter with computation, advancements in quantum theory, with Exocapitalism, with pluralism, and so on.

To be erotic is to be alive. In this collection of erotic short stories, desire and imagination meet in stairwells, apartments, bars and glances that linger just a little longer. Commissioned for and first published in Extra Extra magazine, these unique stories range from vibrant encounters of mere minutes to hours of simmering tension.

Carefully curated and unapologetic in its imagination, it’s an invitation into a literary space shaped by lust and longing.

One Hundred and six erotic short stories contains erotic stories by Obe Alkema, Karin Amatmoekrim, Mischa Andriessen, Sarah Arnolds, Simone Atangana Bekono, Gerbrand Bakker, Maria Barnas, Leonieke Baerwaldt, Persis Bekkering, Abdelkader Benali, Hannah van Binsbergen, Marion Bloem, Fiep van Bodegom, Daan Borrel, Charlotte van den Broeck, Saskia de Coster, Eelco Couvreur, Daniël Dee, Nikki Dekker, Maxime Garcia Diaz, Don Duyns, Rob van Essen, Edwin Fagel, Mira Feticu, Moya De Feyter, Andy Fierens, Gamal Fouad, Johan Fretz, Steff Geelen, Maureen Ghazal, Arnon Grunberg, Esha Guy Hadjadj, Thomas Heerma van Voss, Mariken Heitman, Tom Hofland, Philip Huff, Auke Hulst, Nicole Kaandorp, Asha Karami, Maite Karssenberg, Mensje van Keulen, Emy Koopman, Falun Ellie Koos, Willemijn Kranendonk, Selin Kuşçu, Rachida Lamrabet, Jordi Lammers, Wietske Leenders, Sandro van der Leeuw, Sun Li, Gilles van der Loo, Hannah Chris Lomans, Alma Mathijsen, Kiriko Mechanicus, Jens Meijen, Lars Meijer, Carmien Michels, Kaweh Modiri, Roelof ten Napel, Richard de Nooy, Joost Oomen, Jamal Ouariachi, Iduna Paalman, Gustaaf Peek, Elvis Peeters, Froukje van der Ploeg, Marja Pruis, Julius Reynders, Hannah Roels, Astrid H. Roemer, Martin Rombouts, Daniël Rovers, Alfred Schaffer, Marijke Schermer, Koen Sels, Vamba Sherif, Frank Siera, Louise Souvagie, Yentl van Stokkum, Florence Tonk, Elfie Tromp, Joost Vandecasteele, Dominique van Varsseveld, Annelies Verbeke, Peter Verhelst, Wytske Versteeg, Daniël Vis, Dirk Vis, Sven Vitse, Maria Vlaar, Marwin Vos, Nadia de Vries, Niña Weijers, Han van Wieringen, Romy Day Winkel, Maartje Wortel, Pete Wu, Kira Wuck, Mia You, and Ivo Victoria

We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.

With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.

Adorno’s Noise is a collection of experimental, poetic, and conceptual essays. Adorno’s Noise takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno’s aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno’s orbit.

“This work by Carla Harryman, startlingly astute, once again proves how necessary an encounter with her writing has become for us today. Her grasp of theoretical and poetic exigencies is unbypassable, and she moves lightly, lifting the prose poem into the amplitude of a new articulation.” — AVITAL RONELL

“Adorno’s ‘noise’ may be nothing more than the consonance of late modern capital talking to itself, but Carla Harryman listens to Adorno listening, and what she hears is a very different sort of dissonance, something Adorno himself may have been deaf to. Listening for a noise that can’t be heard, Harryman attends to the disruption of signal the aesthetic artifact called a corpse at the limit of Adorno’s magisterial eloquence, where thought steps over the body. Atonally faithful to his negativity the afterglow of torment passing through figures of speech while refusing the authority of a masterful dialectic, Harryman makes our unthought horizon “normality is death” audible, presencing a body that can’t be redeemed by aesthetics the bosy wants tobe art and fails at it. From Gender the Status of Dogs to works by Sun Ra, Anais Nin, Robert Smithson, and Kenzaburo Oe, this radically asynthetic writing moves thru polyphonic configuration of word, image and concept. Synthesia? Emotional truth? The intersection between abstraction and narration? Practicing a militant ethic of non-mastery as every one of its sentences sounds like a sensory organ in the process of becoming its own theoretician. Adorno’s Noise reinvents the “essay as form,” but it doesn’t stop short of reinventing thinking.” — ROB HALPERN

Carla Harryman is the author of twenty-four books of poetry, prose, plays, and essays. Harryman is widely acknowledged as an innovator in poetry, prose, and inter-disciplinary performance. An active collaborator, she is one of ten co-authors of The Grand Piano, an Experiment in Collective Autobiography: San Francisco, 1975-1980 (2006-2010). Open Box, a CD of music and spoken text performance created with composer and musician Jon Raskin was released on the Tzadik label in 2012. Her Poets Theater plays and music/text collaborations have been performed nationally and internationally, including at dOCUMENTA 13, where she presented the closing keynote performance Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s “Music and New Music,” a music/text work that folds segments of Adorno’s Noise into her poetic adaptation of Adorno’s lecture. She is the editor of two critical volumes: Non/Narrative, a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory ( 2012) and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (with Avital Ronell and Amy Scholder, Verso, 2006).

Other books by Carla Harryman include the collection of poetry and performance writings published in French and English editions Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin (2017); A Voice to Perform (Split/Level 2020); the epistolary essay, Artifact of Hope (2017); the diptych W—/M— (2013), Gardener of Stars: A Novel (2001), and two volumes of selected writing: Animal Instincts: Prose, Plays, Essays (1989) and There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (1995). Her grants and awards include The Foundation of Contemporary Art, New York, Opera America Next Stage (with Erling Wold), and The Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty in Creative Activity Award from Eastern Michigan University, where she serves on the faculty of an interdisciplinary creative writing program.