'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea' published in Media Theory

My article 'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea', has been published in the open access journal Media Theory:

http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/126

‘Pluriversal Socialism – The Very Idea’ starts from the position that politics in the West today is typically conducted in liberal humanist terms. This is the case regardless of whether those involved identify as radical democrats, socialists, communists, feminists, Greens, Marxists or anarchists.

Contemporary antihumanist and posthumanist theory is meant to offer something very different to liberal humanism. Media ecology, media archaeology, new materialism and object-oriented philosophy are all positioned as representing a shift away from anthropocentrism and a modernist epistemology based on the separation of human from nonhuman, subject from object, masculine from feminine, culture from nature, living from non-living. Instead, they champion a radically relational approach to the world that is designed to destablise such ontological dualisms. Yet while antihumanist and posthumanist theorists may write about transgressing the boundary that divides the human from the nonhuman, when it comes to their owns ways of being and doing they too often end up operating as bourgeois liberal humanists.

‘Pluriversal Socialism’ continues with my exploration (in texts such as Pirate Philosophy and ‘Anti-Bourgeois Theory’) of how we can not only write non-liberal humanist theory but actually work, act and live as non-liberal humanists too. It does so by drawing on the emphasis that is currently placed by a number of Latin Americanist theorists on pluriversal, ontological, radically relational politics (as distinct from the universal, modernist, counterhegemonic politics of most left thinkers in the Global North). In the process it addresses two important questions that have been raised recently by Arturo Escobar and Boaventura de Sousa Santos respectively: ‘Can we unlearn the liberal individual … in a similar way that we endeavour to unlearn patriarchy, racism and heterosexism?’ And is what we need to do so ‘another theory of revolution’ or a revolution of theory?

‘Pluriversal Socialism’ is the latest addition to the political discussion about how to transition toward a noncapitalist, nonracist, nonheteropatriarchal future between Jeremy Gilbert, Gabriela Méndez Cota and myself. See also:

Gabriela Méndez Cota, 'Pirate Traces': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/114

Jeremy Gilbert, 'Anti-Bourgeois For What?': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/115

Gary Hall, 'Anti-Bourgeois Theory': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/91

Machine Intelligences, new edition of Culture Machine – available open access

Culture Machine 20 (2021): Machine Intelligences, guest-edited by Peter Jakobsson, Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt

https://culturemachine.net/vol-20-machine-intelligences/

Culture Machine is part of Open Humanities Press and the Radical Open Access Collective

Vol 20: Machine Intelligences, guest-edited by Peter Jakobsson, Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt

From the editors’ introduction

The aim of this special issue is to advance new critical perspectives on machine intelligence. Although the current hype surrounding artificial intelligence has been countered by several critical interventions, there is still a long way to go in order to produce a shift in the mainstream discourse concerning these technologies. The AI-hype has support from resourceful and well-connected actors within industry and politics. Within the art world and popular culture, AI appears to be a more ambiguous phenomena, associated with both blessings and grave dangers. Nevertheless, its development is all too often portrayed as though it is inevitable and that the path it will take is already set. The impulse behind this special issue is to deepen and diversify the interrogation of this seemingly inevitable development and to get a look behind the shiny surfaces of these supposedly new technologies. This special issue thus offers historical perspectives, conceptual re-thinking and situated analyses of the technical realities and the social and cultural implications of machine intelligence, in its many different forms and manifestations, with the hope that this will provide opportunities to intervene in and change the course of our technological futures….

Contents 

Machine Intelligences – An Introduction – The Editors

The Mountain in the Machine: Optimization and the Landscapes of Machine Learning – Sam P. Kellogg

Generative Adversarial Copy Machines –Martin Zeilinger

Optimal Brain Damage: Theorizing the Nervous Present – Johannes Bruder & Orit Halpern

In Other Words: Smart Compose and the Consequences of Writing in the Age of AI – Crystal Chokshi

What Personalisation Can Do for You! or, How to Do Racial Discrimination Without ‘Race’ – Thao Phan & Scott Wark

Intelligent Borders? Securitizing Smartphones in the European Border Regime – Michelle Pfeifer

‘A Game That is Not a Game’: The Sublime Limit of Human Intelligence and AI Through Go – Kwasu Tembo

Whose Singularity? Artificial Intelligence as a Mechanism of Corporate Sovereignty
– Andrew Davis

Theseus in the Epistemic Labyrinth: Critical Histories of Data and the Apparent Weight of Color
– Evan Donahue

Artificially Shared Kinesthetic Intelligence – Lisa Müller-Trede

We Have Always Been Artificially Intelligent: An Interview with Joanna Zylinska
– Claudio Celis and Pablo Ortuzar Kunstmann

 Playful Machine Learning: An Interaction Designer’s Journey into Neural Networks – Andreas Refsgaard

Filosofía pirata y trabajo editorial / Pirate Philosophy and Editorial Work

An e-book of essays on pirate philosophy, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota in Mexico, has just come out:

Filosofía pirata y trabajo editorial (Pirate Phiosophy and Editorial Work)

It's partly influenced by, and engaging with, my work on Pirate Philosophy, and a lecture I gave for Gabriela at her institution in Mexico city, Universidad Iberoamericana, in September 2019: 'Liberalism Must Be Defeated: On the Obsolescence of Bourgeois Theory in the Anthropocene'. (A Spanish translation of my lecture is available here.)

But - as is indicated by the 'related posts' section at the bottom of the page - Filosofía pirata y trabajo editorial/ Pirate Philosophy and Editorial Work is also influenced by the work of my Centre for Postdigital Cultures colleagues Janneke Adema and Rebekka Kiesewetter on radical open access, feminism and piracy. 

The Postdigital City for Post-Pandemic Times - free online conference

Registration is now open for next week’s The Postdigital City for Post-Pandemic Times conference.

Attendance is free and all are welcome, but please register here: 

https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/about-us/research-events/2021/the-postdigital-city/

The conference webpage is here:

https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures/cpc-2021-conference/

'La modernidad fue un "blip" en el sistema'

This interview with me, '"La modernidad fue un "blip" en el sistema": sobre teorías y disrupciones con Gary Hall' ['"Modernity was a "blip" in the system": on theories and disruptions with Gary Hall'] has just appeared in the Colombian weekly magazine Semana. It was conducted by Alejandro Pérez Echeverry when I visitied Bogotá to give a keynote at Dispositivos institucionales, universitarios, editoriales, 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, Centro Cultural Gabriel García Márquez, late January, early February, 2020. 

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'At the end of 2020, before the covid-19 and misery led us to awaken as a society to the point of dignity and resistance, Gary Hall passed through Colombia. He did it within the framework of the seminar 'Cátedra 9 Viento - Critical Imagination'. Before his lecture “Contemporary Editorial Devices”, Hall spoke with us.

As he makes clear in this interview, it is many things, he prefers it that way. He avoids the title of "expert" that many avidly seek and is not afraid to say that he plays something else, that he does not seek to be a "brand." For this reason, even though a photo was taken for this article, he does not include one or in his own biography.

In this talk, Hall talks about devices of disruption in universities, in the publishing field and in the media, also of finding hope in community movements and in their crusade to regain their self-determination over the interests of multinationals. Hall exposes the hypocrisies of the media system and also hits hard on the educational system of his country and an elite that believes they know what the public "needs" to know. He reviews Shakespeare and the impacts of Gutenberg's invention, talks about Michel Foucault, the impact of photography on art, Napster, Spotify, Netflix and Facebook....'

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The full interview is available in Spanish here. (Put the following url into Google Chrome and it'll provide an English translation for you: https://www.semana.com/cultura/articulo/la-modernidad-fue-un-blip-en-el-sistema-sobre-teorias-y-disrupciones-con-gary-hall/202105/)