Mute

In this collection of writings, Howard Slater improvises around what Walter Benjamin could have meant by the phrase 'affective classes'. This 'messianic shard' and its possible implications leads Slater to develop a therapeutic micro-politics by way of a mourning for the Workers' Movement and a grappling with the 'becomings of capital'.

The essay 'Anomie/Bonhomie' is the keystone of this book which also features tributary texts and poems drawn from the past ten years. These supplementary texts approach such themes as exodus, species-being, surrealist precedents, poetic language and the possibilities for collective 'affective' practices to combat capitalism's colonisation of the psyche.

Look at Hazards, Look at Losses developed out of a series of conversations, exchanges and visits between kuda.org, Anthony Iles and Marina Vishmidt over 2015-2017 through which different approaches to common problems of cultural production in early-21st century Europe and its peripheries were debated and conceptually probed. Setting out from Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of ‘the aesthetic relations of production’ these discussions proceeded to explore problems bearing upon organisation in small groups in the field of culture, philosophical idealism and materialism, poetry, error and crisis.

The anthology assembled reflects these concerns through engagement with the writing of others who have helped orientate us through these discussions. The book which is the outcome consists of seven original contributions by poets and theorists which attempt to move toward new political interventions in culture and beyond ‘crisis as a way of life’.

Garments Against Women is a book of mostly lyric prose about the conditions that make literature almost impossible. It holds a life story without a life, a lie spread across low-rent apartment complexes, dreamscapes, and information networks, tangled in chronology, landing in a heap of the future impossible. Available forms—like garments and literature—are made of the materials of history, of the hours of women’s and children’s lives, but they are mostly inadequate to the dimension, motion, and irregularity of what they contain. It’s a book about seeking to find the forms in which to think the thoughts necessary to survival, then about seeking to find the forms necessary to survive survival and survival’s requisite thoughts.