Our Grateful Dead: Stories of Those Left Behind

Electrifying, provocative, and controversial when first published thirty years ago, Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" is even more relevant today, when the divisions that she so eloquently challenges—of human and machine but also of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and location—are increasingly complex. The subsequent "Companion Species Manifesto," which further questions the human-nonhuman disjunction, is no less urgently needed in our time of environmental crisis and profound polarization.

Manifestly Haraway brings together these momentous manifestos to expose the continuity and ramifying force of Haraway's thought, whose significance emerges with engaging immediacy in a sustained conversation between the author and her long-term friend and colleague Cary Wolfe. Reading cyborgs and companion species through and with each other, Haraway and Wolfe join in a wide-ranging exchange on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human-nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.

The conversation ends by revealing the early stages of Haraway's "Chthulucene Manifesto," in tension with the teleologies of the doleful Anthropocene and the exterminationist Capitalocene. Deeply dedicated to a diverse and robust earthly flourishing, Manifestly Haraway promises to reignite needed discussion in and out of the academy about biologies, technologies, histories, and still possible futures.

Donna J. Haraway is distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is also affiliated with the departments of anthropology, feminist studies, environmental studies, and film and digital media. She is an active participant in UCSC's Science and Justice Research Center and the Center for Cultural Studies.

Published 2016

Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity. Until now, trans experience has overwhelmingly been understood in terms of two reductive frameworks: trans people are either “trapped in the wrong body” or they are oppressed by the gender binary. Both accounts misgender large trans constituencies while distorting their experience, and neither can explain the presentation of trans people as make-believers and deceivers or the serious consequences thereof. In Beyond Personhood, Talia Mae Bettcher demonstrates how taking this phenomenon seriously affords a new perspective on trans oppression and trans dysphoria—one involving liminal states of “make-believe” that bear positive possibilities for self-recognition and resistance.

Undergirding this account is Bettcher’s groundbreaking theory of interpersonal spatiality—a theory of intimacy and distance that requires rejection of the philosophical concepts of person, self, and subject. She argues that only interpersonal spatiality theory can successfully explain trans oppression and gender dysphoria, thus creating new possibilities for thinking about connection and relatedness. 

An essential contribution to the burgeoning field of trans philosophy, Beyond Personhood offers an intersectional trans feminism that illuminates transphobic, sexist, heterosexist, and racist oppressions, situating trans oppression and resistance within a much larger decolonial struggle. By refusing to separate theory from its application, Bettcher shows how a philosophy of depth can emerge from the everyday experiences of trans people, pointing the way to a reinvigoration of philosophy.

A poetics for reading the everyday objects that populate a hard drive. 

Bespoke online archives like PennSound and Eclipse host an astounding array of “old media” artifacts, posing a handcrafted counterpoint to the immense databases aggregated by digital titans like Google and Facebook. In The Little Database, Daniel Scott Snelson argues for the significance of these comparatively “small” collections, exploring how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host and how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn.

Examining curated collections such as Textz, UbuWeb, and the Electronic Poetry Center, Snelson explores media-specific works by poets and artists, including William Carlos Williams, Tracie Morris, bill bissett, Nam June Paik, and Vicki Bennett. He develops creative tools and contingent methods for reading cultural data, whether found on the internet or in our own collections of TXT, JPG, MP3, and MOV artifacts, presenting case studies to show how these objects have come to find revised meaning in their digital contexts. Along the way, experimental poetic interludes give readers practical entry points into the creative practice of producing new meanings in any given little database.

Inventive and interdisciplinary, The Little Database grapples with the digitized afterlives of cultural objects, showing how the past is continually reconfigured to shape the present. It invites readers to find playful and personal means for unpacking their own data collections, in the process discovering idiosyncratic ways to explore and connect with digital archives.

Echoing Jean Dubuffet's idea that thought must arise from material in artistic practice, Giuliana Prucca, through this essay, reinterprets a moment in the history of 20th-century art using materials such as stone, sand, earth, and dust. She employs the mineral to illustrate that the creative act would be a trace of the body's disappearance. The loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject objectify themselves in the image. In other words, art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, ultimately leaving nothing but an image.

Drawing from the influential figure of Antonin Artaud, she weaves critical and poetic connections between the texts and works of various artists, writers, and thinkers, ranging from Jean Dubuffet to Jan Fabre and Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein and Gutaï, Joë Bousquet to Camille Bryen and Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard to Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille to Aby Warburg.

The material is not merely a thematic pretext; it is an active and explosive catapult that questions the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated art history. Following Ponge's example, Prucca applies the principles of poetry to criticism, starting from Artaud's material, the most undisciplined of poet-artist-thinkers of the modern era. This results in a critically inventive approach dangerously suited to its object, celebrating an anti-critique. The chosen writing materials, stonepaper for the cover and recycled paper for the pages, is consistent, intending to give the impression of being covered in dust.

The essay disrupts traditional reading habits and shatters the conservatism of art criticism by inhabiting writing space differently, presenting a physically engaging interaction. This is an essay in the literal sense, an experience where form never contradicts content, urging readers to take the risk of thinking deeply and embracing a new rhythm. A complex and challenging design invites them to choose different reading options, ultimately treating criticism as one would poetry.

Giuliana Prucca [Paris | Berlin] is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She is the founder and art director of the publishing house AVARIE, specialising in contemporary art books that explore the relationships between text and image, body and space.

Graphic design, art direction by Vito Raimondi

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

This book stems from the author’s discontents with Lacanian Psychoanalysis, by drawing from psychoanalysts like Félix Guattari and Sándor Ferenczi, as well as authors like Viveiro DeCastro, and Thomas Lamarre, to whom the book is dedicated. 

As Lucas Ferraço Nassif elaborates on the possibility of a multiplicitous Unconscious, or rather, a mass of many Unconscious(es), he attempts here to fold the book itself into the text, to make the organisation of the physical book itself a part of the elaboration. 

This 2nd Edition comes with a few editorial changes, and a slightly different design approach. It is being presented now with a suite of endorsements from a group of exciting writers and researchers, including Persis Bekkering, Thomas Lamarre, and Yuchen Li. Much of the first edition is preserved, and an extra text has been added, written by the editor as a part of the lecture at Ifilnova. There has been a focus on making this book more accessible, so we have reworked the design of this edition in Black & White. 

The Unconscious is Semiotic, not Linguistic, and it only jumps out when you read between the lines. Do you remember, back in 1997, when 600 kids had epileptic shocks whilst watching Television—the Pokémon Shock? This might sound strange at first, but Lucas Ferraço Nassif theorises that, contrary to the claim that this was caused by oscillations of blue and red light alone, it could have been caused by microperceptions and intensities within narrative. As Porygon takes Ash and friends into the digital world, the immanence of unconscious assemblages drags viewers in, too. 

Such is the haptic and imagetic nature of this book. Using several design and editorial strategies, and a particular mode of writing, the author attempts to elaborate on their work on the Unconscious by recreating a similar possibility—where book, language and reader collapse into a composition, an assemblage or a haecceity. Unconsciousness operates as the multiplanar compositions of Japanese Anime do, so this book has been organized accordingly—different texts, different temporalities, different voices—and like the Japanese concept of Ma (negative space), or even like CoreCore, something jumps out of the breaks, the gaps in between the layers, and therein lies, for this book, a departure point for elaborating on not just one, but many, Unconscious(es). 

What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE, Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the economy: the emergence of ‘platform capitalism’.

This book critically examines these new business forms, tracing their genesis from the long downturn of the 1970s to the boom and bust of the 1990s and the aftershocks of the 2008 crisis. It shows how the fundamental foundations of the economy are rapidly being carved up among a small number of monopolistic platforms, and how the platform introduces new tendencies within capitalism that pose significant challenges to any vision of a post-capitalist future. This book will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the most powerful tech companies of our time are transforming the global economy."

Many contemporary philosophers – including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben – ascribe an ethical or political value to anarchy, but none ever called themselves an “anarchist.” It is as if anarchism were unmentionable and had to be concealed, even though its critique of domination and of government is poached by the philosophers.

Stop Thief! calls out the plundering of anarchism by philosophy. It’s a call that is all the more resonant today as the planetary demand for an alternative political realm raises a deafening cry. It also alerts us to a new philosophical awakening. Catherine Malabou proposes to answer the cry by re-elaborating a concept of anarchy articulated around a notion of the “non-governable” far beyond an inciting of disobedience or common critiques of capitalism. Anarchism is the only way out, the only pathway that allows us to question the legitimacy of political domination and thereby wfree up the confidence that we need if we are to survive.