Elegant in exposition, vast in implication, this groundbreaking work of ecological philosophy compellingly argues the necessity for restoring humanity's lost connections with the sensuous world. Drawing on disciplines as diverse as phenomenology and sleight-of-hand magic, Abram explains how the processes readers think of as "mental" actually derive from a deeply physical interaction with the rest of nature.

In/somnia explores fissures within words as places where thought enters. Sleepless sleepers, we dream among ever more complex and hallucinatory realitites: `in/tense/in/season'—Rosmarie Waldrop.

Immutable: Designing History explores the banal genre of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a ~5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing — from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed ledgers, like the blockchain. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering a variety of techniques (material, technological, administrative, etc.) of securitization against the entropy of a document's movement through space/time, and the political.

This project is driven by a contrast: design educators tend to teach forms like logos, books, websites, etc., but not passports, money, property deeds, etc., in spite of these being, I contend, design's most profoundly consequential forms.

As an alternative historiography, Immutable gestures both towards anthropologist Laura Nader's call to "study up" (on those in power), and the radical educator Paolo Freire's recognition of the "limit situation" as a generative condition for emancipatory praxis. The book's aim is to orient graphic design towards the vocation of imagining, naming, and remembering beyond the horizons of its role as a managerial, administrative, and colonial instrument that imposes a rationality of vision and accountability upon what is knowable, thinkable and sayable.

Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. He is a graduate of OCADU and the Sandberg Instituut. His research/studio practice explores graphic design's entanglement with capitalism and colonialism/ity through the banal genre of the document. He is also currently developing a typographical project that narrates the oscillating status of Asians between the "model minority" and "yellow peril" as a function of the consolidation of Euro-American settler identity. Chris is an Assistant Professor in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at the Pratt Institute.

What does it mean to acknowledge one’s closeness to, enmeshment in or even kinship with the material world? And what does it mean to question family structures – the way they organise, coerce and make deviant certain lifeforms – and dwell in other possibilities of kin-making?

Not just a jolly rethinking of objects or a polyamorous romp through relationships, The Material Kinship Reader reckons with the extractavist histories of materials and the social relations that frame much of contemporary life.

Spanning fiction and theory, the collection of texts expand the idea of an artist’s book by bringing words into conversation with an aesthetic proposition. Clementine Edwards’ artwork is the visual weft to the book’s written net. From colonial conquest to climate collapse, The Material Kinship Reader tells toxic and tender stories of interdependence among all things sentient and insentient.

Including contributions by Sara Ahmed, Hana Pera Aoake, Roland Barthes, Joannie Baumgärtner, Heather Davis, Kris Dittel, Clementine Edwards, Ama Josephine B. Johnstone, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sophie Lewis, Steven Millhauser, Jena Myung, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Michelle Murphy, Ada M. Patterson, Kim TallBear and Michelle Tea

no more poetry presents HATE POEMS, the the debut anthology by writer Natalie Mariko. 

"I spent a lot of time with HATE POEMS. On planes, on beachfronts, in cars, on top of lovers, inside and outside cafes. In hard moments of the Southern Hemisphere and loud moments on trains in the Northern Hemisphere, and of course I was with the poems in many in between times. What it gave me was the kind of perspective shift reserved for important works of deep spiritual engagement. The book showed me how poetry simply already exists and formed a deeper understanding of the poet as a custodian to awe — a guide through space, absorbing. It is an electric read. It puts my radar on high and beacons me to find poetry. It is a book of poems that invites the reader to observe language within what they already know, and understand how there might be something worth exploring within what you call your every day. Train sounds become harmonic, street chatter becomes hypnotic and vital. The writing is observant. And so it’s bold at times, others timid or hurried, frightened or confident. This book lets many things become poetry. The poet has collected striking moments and sounds and meticulously laboured, deliberated and manoeuvred over their presentation within this book. It arrives at its most maximum, exploding in rhythmic and prosodic pleasures. A collection of motivations and melodies of vibrant transsexualism."

Eleven performance-based projects by Dora García, documented through letters, emails and other elements from the artist's private correspondence with various interpreters of performances, whether they were direct collaborators of simple spectators.

Edited and prefaced by François Piron, Steal This Book, a tribute to Abbie Hoffmann's pamphlet of the same name, is not a definitive attempt at rendering the pieces on which it is based; it calls for a free, active and contradictory reception, that of an open archive. Part epistolary novel, part rough screenplay and part user's manual, Steal This Book proposes a body of discussions, questions without answers and endless ramblings, in place of the critique's or the artist's voice. 

The book has also been presented in exhibitions as a Dora García sculpture meant to be stolen, but it can also be purchased in selected bookstores worldwide.

Contrary to the idea that would have art addressing the greatest possible number of people, Dora García (born in 1965 in Valladolid, lives and works in Barcelona), best known for her performance devices, is interested in what is enacted at the individual scale: in a radically conceptual form, at once accessible and elegant, she elects to transmit oddly coded messages, their ask being to bestir a specific relation with each and every visitor. Dora García is interested in everything that intervenes in the communication between an artist and his/her public: art no longer represents the world, but itself becomes a producer of realities often on the borderline of fiction and make-believe. It urges us to undergo experiences other than ordinary situations, at once simple and hard to grasp. 

Dora García has had solo exhibitions at the MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the SMAK in Gent. She represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and was a part of the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, the Sydney Biennial in 2009, the Biennale de Lyon in 2009 and Documenta 13 in 2012.

Isabelle Graw reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus.

By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships." 
— Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Isabelle Graw has written the Elective Affinities for the twenty-first century, as a feminist novel and a dysfunctional family portrait set in the contemporary art world."
— Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder ofTexte zur Kunst in Berlin.

To Navigate Backward: Resonating with Zapatismo a book-within-a-book, the first of three mouvements (as in a musical composition) is a collection of essays titled When the Roots Start Moving: Chto Delat and Free Home University—investigating predicaments of rootedness and rootlessness and notions of belonging and of displacement across different geographical and epistemological coordinates.

Zapatismo—the insurgent movement of Indigenous peoples from Mexico—emerges as a form of belonging, a home (or a homecoming) for our hopes and political imaginaries, providing a praxis to learn from and with. The contributors of this book, without romanticizing or objectifying the Zapatista struggle toward Autonomy, offer their understanding of the Zapatistas' movement, of their poetics and politics within an Indigenous cosmovision and cosmopolitics, but also in relation with the current global ecological and social crises.

The book extend the research and practice of artistic collective Chto Delat, long since adopting Zapatismo as a lens to self-reflect and emblematically reminding of how the Zapatista imaginary continues to inspire those who are looking for emancipatory tools: through art, language, radical pedagogy and conviviality, as a practice of commoning and collectively reimagining an otherwise.

To Navigate Backward: Resonating with Zapatismo is a small act of reciprocity—in preparation for the Zapatistas' visit to the European continent, a gesture of solidarity with those who, with fierce care, leave their homes to reverse imposed trajectories, to look in the same direction and share a common horizon.

The conversation hosted in this book by Free Home University will continue in the following two mouvements—Between Displacement and Belonging and Motherlands/Mother Earth.

The collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?) was founded in early 2003 in St. Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism. Chto Delat sees itself as an artistic cell and also as a community organizer for a variety of cultural activities intent on politicizing "knowledge production". The activity of collective takes responsibility for a postsocialist condition and actualization of forgetten and repressed potentiality of Soviet past and often works as a politics of commemoration. From its inception, the collective has been publishing an English-Russian newspaper focused on the urgent issues of Russian cultural politics, in dialogue with the international context. In 2013, Chto Delat initiated an educational platform—School of Engaged Art in Petersburg and also provides resources for a space called Rosa's House of Culture.

Free Home University exists at the crossroad of engaged art, experimental pedagogy, and political commitment since 2014. Based in Lecce (Italy), FHU has been carrying out artistic investigations and processes of convivial research, engaging with communities of struggle and practice. Artists, farmers, activists, asylum seekers, scholars, thinkers and doers collectively inform learning spaces, through living, studying, and creating together.

Alternative forms of curatorial and institutional work suitable to our novel conditions, when the relationship between physical and online work must be revised.

In our current era of global pandemic and violent political upheaval, the question must be asked: What is our future and whose voices will announce it? These can only be situated voices, each with its own body and space, formed through dialogue within their own communities and in reaction and resistance to dominant discourses. Museum director, curator, and writer Zdenka Badovinac argues that these situated voices of people, artworks, and exhibitions, rooted in the local, can bring incisive, productive change. The call of these voices, in rethinking art, curation, and institutions, is the subject of this powerful essay.

Zdenka Badovinac is a curator, writer and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. She served as Director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana (1993-2020). In her work, Badovinac highlights the difficult processes of redefining history alongside different avant-garde traditions within contemporary art.

A contemplation on the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy.

This book aims to introduce the history of statistical analysis and a knowledge of sociogenesis—a system of racism amenable to scientific explanation—into machine learning research as an act of impairing the racial ordering of the world. While machine learning—computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning—provides useful insight into racism and racist behavior, a gap is present in the relationship between machine learning, the racial history of scientific explanation, and the Black lived experience. Ramon Amaro explores how the history of data and statistical analysis provide a clear (and often sudden) grasp of the complex relationship between race and machine learning. Amaro juxtaposes a practical analysis of machine learning with a theory of Black alienation in order to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice. In doing so, Amaro offers a continuous contemplation on the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy.

Ramon Amaro is Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South at University College London. His writing, research and practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study, psychopathology, digital culture, and the critique of computation reason.

Wonderflux brings together a group of longtime contributors with graphic artists to collaborate on illustrated essays and develop a new pictorial language around some of the emergent consistencies and overarching issues that defined the first decade of e-flux journal.

In Wonderflux you will find yourself in front of disappearing mirrors held up to curators, critics, and artists; sailing through counterfactual universes; face-to-face with cold-blooded killers, faceless men, weary but buoyant prophets; all the while imbued with stubborn thriving and stubborn refusal to be moved or monetized, and once in a while having earnest conversations with robot(s and) workers.

The authors included here have shaped the varied concerns and urgencies of e-flux journal since 2008. As a theory-driven art journal made up entirely of hypertext and digital images and embraced by academic circles, we sometimes wonder about the artistic and sensual use of text and image. Does the thinking of some of our favorite authors also speak to a place beyond floods of automatic links and references and rectangular photographic portals? To a broader and more applied artistic domain like the imaginative sensibility of illustration, where entire worlds arise from the simple and deliberate placement of lines on paper?

Contributions by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Raqs Media Collective & Freddy Carrasco, Liam Gillick, Elizabeth A. Povinelli & Clara Bessijelle Johansson, Martha Rosler & Josh Neufeld, Reza Negarastani & Keith Tilford, Hu Fang & Mojo Wang, Keller Easterling & Meijia Xu.

J.H. Prynne is Britain's leading late Modernist poet. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry, and nominated for a New Yorker book prize. It was superseded by the 2005 expanded second edition including four later collections only previously available in limited editions, and that in turn by the 2015 third edition including another six. Poems includes his 1969 collection The White Stones - central to his poetics - which was reissued in 2016 by New York Review Books with an introduction by Peter Gizzi.

Mumia Abu Jamal, America’s most famous political prisoner, is internationally known for his radio broadcasts and books emerging “Live from Death Row.” In his youth Mumia Abu-Jamal helped found the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther Party, wrote for the national newspaper, and began his life-long work of exposing the violence of the state as it manifests in entrenched poverty, endemic racism, and unending police brutality. In We Want Freedom, Mumia combines his memories of day-to-day life in the Party with analysis of the history of Black liberation struggles. The result is a vivid and compelling picture of the Black Panther Party and its legacy.

Applying his poetic voice and unsparing critical gaze, Mumia examines one of the most revolutionary and most misrepresented groups in the US. As the calls that Black Lives Matter continue to grow louder, Mumia connects the historic dots in this revised/updated edition, observing that the Panthers had legal observers to monitor the police and demanded the “immediate end to police brutality and the murder of Black people.” By focusing on the men and women who were the Party, as much as on the leadership; by locating the Black Panthers in a struggle centuries old—and in the personal memories of a young man—Mumia Abu-Jamal helps us to understand freedom.

With wicked sarcasm and brilliant agility, Catalyst shreds the surface of all his many subjects—gay relationships, backwater adolescence, and spiraling addiction—and ignites a bonfire of personal honesty. Whether he's writing about a chance sexual encounter at a Goth club or revealing the inner thoughts of young hustlers, Catalyst grinds platitudes into toxic dust with a vivid, whip-smart voice.

"Clint Catalyst has the magical knack for turning the most ethereal of thoughts and feelings into tangible imagery. He creates beauty with an original hybrid of brutality and love that takes my brain to its favorite place." - Anthony Kiedis, Red Hot Chili Peppers

BRAIDS is a 130 pages-long publication that features both visual and written works of 20 young creatives. The desire of BRAIDS is to expand the idea of queerness beyond the borders of identity. The journal exists to host bodies that deny framing and dare to expose the vulnerability of their difference. The publication is thus a woven story of the contemporary globalised queer, insecure but daring, honey-glazed yet continuously aching. 

The first full-scale authorized biography of the pioneering experimental novelist Kathy Acker, one of the most original and controversial figures in 20th-century American literature.

Kathy Acker (1947-1997) was a rare and almost inconceivable thing: a celebrity experimental writer. Twenty-five years after her death, she remains one of the most original, shocking, and controversial artists of her era. The author of visionary, transgressive novels like Blood and Guts in High School; Empire of the Senses; and Pussy, King of Pirates, Acker wrote obsessively about the treachery of love, the limitations of language, and the possibility of revolution. She was notorious for her methods-collaging together texts stolen from other writers with her own diaries, sexual fantasies, and blunt political critiques-as well as her appearance. With her punkish hairstyles, tattoos, and couture outfits she looked like no other writer before or after. Her work was exceptionally prescient, taking up complicated conversations about gender, sex, capitalism, and colonialism that continue today.

Acker's life was as unruly and radical as her writing. Raised in a privileged but oppressive Upper East Side Jewish family, she turned her back on that world as soon as she could, seeking a life of romantic and intellectual adventure that led her to, and through, many of the most thrilling avant-garde and countercultural moments in America: the births of conceptual art and experimental music; the poetry wars of the 60s and 70s; the mainstreaming of hardcore porn; No Wave cinema and New Narrative writing; Riot grrls, biker chicks, cyberpunks. As this definitive biography shows, Acker was not just a singular writer, she was also a titanic cultural force who tied together disparate movements in literature, art, music, theatre, and film.

A feat of literary biography, Eat Your Mind is the first full-scale, authorized life of Acker. Drawing on exclusive interviews with hundreds of Acker's intimates as well as her private journals, correspondence, and early drafts of her work, acclaimed journalist and critic Jason McBride offers a thrilling account and a long overdue reassessment of a misunderstood genius and revolutionary artist.

The world today faces overwhelming ecological and social problems and the concern for material existence on earth is more pressing than ever. Making Matters spells out various roles that visual artists and designers play facing these issues. Collective action is necessary and inevitable.

Collective action often changes the artist’s identity and working habits: from individuality and autonomy to collectivity and collaboration, both locally and globally. These developments have given rise to new kinds of collective art and design practices: artists work together with non-artists, make products for their local environment and take on multiple identities, such as researcher, community activist, computer hacker or business consultant. 

Making Matters looks at art practices across all continents that do not conform to a Western concept of art nor to traditional distinctions between art, design, research and activism—where the boundaries between art, design, research and activism become blurred or are dissolved.

The entries in this vocabulary experiment with concepts and keywords of current art practices that may no longer be recognizable as art.

Editorial committee: Florian Cramer, Anja Groten, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Pia Louwerens, Marie-José Sondeijker, Janneke Wesseling

Contributors:  Aliens in Green, a.pass / Lilia Mestre, Florian Cramer, Display Distribute / Elaine W. Ho, Feral Atlas / Lili Carr & Feifei Zhou Anja Groten, Thalia Hoffman, Jatiwangi art Factory / Bunga Siagian & Ismal Muntaha, Eleni Kamma, Frans-Willem Korsten, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Pia Louwerens, Dani Ploeger, Kate Rich, Femke Snelting, Olu Taiwo, Janneke Wesseling, West / Baruch Gottlieb, West / Akiem Helmling, Z. Blace

The authoritative biography of the 60s countercultural icon who wrote SCUM Manifesto, shot Andy Warhol, and made an unforgettable mark on feminist history.

Breanne Fahs is an associate professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, where she specializes in studying women's sexuality, critical embodiment studies, radical feminism, and political activism. She has a BA in women's studies/gender studies and psychology from Occidental College and a PhD in women's studies and clinical psychology from the University of Michigan. She has published widely in feminist, social science, and humanities journals, as well as the books Performing Sex with SUNY Press (2011) and The Moral Panics of Sexuality (2013). She is the director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group at Arizona State University, and also works as a private practice clinical psychologist specializing in sexuality, couples work, and trauma recovery. 

Originally appearing in 1977 and now in its 11th printing, this classic collection of essays by one of the sharpest minds in American contemporary poetic thought remains Roof's best seller to date. It is a collection with rich insight into Silliman's own monumental poetical work and the writing of his peers, a book which both illuminates the concerns of the era in which it was written and radiates outward with a tremendous scope that continues to bear fruit for the contemporary reader.

In the face of rising authoritarianism and on the heels of urgent struggle, autonomy calls to us. How might we excavate the theory and history of autonomous politics to arrive at new possibilities for radical democracy and the radical imaginary? How can we rethink the ways in which artistic autonomy is theorized and practiced beyond the shrunken horizon of liberal individualism? How might we understand political and artistic autonomies as linked, rather than diametrically opposed? And what role does radical pedagogy have to play in all of this?

Framed by the thought of Cornelius Castoriadis, and engaging with Marxist, Black Radical, and Feminist approaches to liberation, as well as movements such as Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Letters on the Autonomy Projectunderstands autonomy to be the capacity of a society, a community or an individual to modify its form. As Castoriadis argues, the struggle for self-determination requires unlimited questioning of the way things are, but also that we do or make something new in light of this interrogation. Autonomy is thus equally a project for thought, for education, for politics, and for art.

Stylistically, these open letters, addressed inclusively to artists, activists, and academics, are modeled on the philosophical letters of Friedrich Schiller on the one hand and the revolutionary communiqués of the Zapatistas on the other. Performing a kind of writing-as-praxis, they seek to grasp the potential of our moment with reference to historical and contemporary instances of political autonomy, notions of artistic autonomy, and art practices that connect the two. They also look at the possibilities of educating for autonomy, which cannot itself be taught. If we are indeed living in a time of creative struggle to remake the whole of society, then an understanding of the autonomy project – and how theory, pedagogy, activism, and art might contribute to it – is of burning relevance.

Janet Sarbanes is the author of the short story collections Army of One and The Protester Has Been Released. 

In Stéphane Bouquet's The Next Loves, French poetic tradition meets the New York School poets in a unique take on homosexuality, desire, loneliness, and love in an era of global inequality and fundamental precarity. Bouquet's work delicately carves out space for passages from I to you to the collective we.

Translated by Lindsay Turner.

Stéphane Bouquet is the author of several collections of poems and—most recently—a book of essays on poems, La Cité de paroles (2018). He has published books on filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Gus Van Sant, as well as screenplays for feature films, non-fiction films, and short films, and has translated poets including Paul Blackburn, James Schuyler, and Peter Gizzi into French. He's also interested in performance arts and has given workshops for choreographers at the Centre National de la danse in Paris and for actors and stage directors at La Manufacture in Lausanne, Switzerland. Bouquet is a recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, and has been featured in France and internationally at festivals, residencies, and events, including the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair and the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors. He holds an M.A. in economics from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne.

These interrelated meditations explore the nature of the individual spirit and the individual spiritedness of the natural world. As skilled a philosopher as she is a poet, in Sea & Fog, Adnan weaves multiple sonic, theoretical, and syntactic pleasures at once.

Sea and Fog won the 2013 Lambda Book Prize in Poetry and the 2013 California Book Award in Poetry.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 1958-1972. In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (1959-1975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, "an American poet." In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers--first for Al Safa, then for L'Orient le Jour. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into more than ten languages. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books in English, including Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986) The Arab Apocalypse (1989), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry. In 2014, she was awarded one of France's highest cultural honors: l'Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Many of her poems have been put to music by Tania Leon, Henry Treadgill, Gavin Bryars, Zad Moultaka, Annea Lockwood, and Bun Ching Lam. Her paintings have been widely exhibited, including Documenta 13, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, The New Museum, and Museum der Moderne Salzburg. In 2014, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of her work.