hyposubjects: on becoming human, by Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer - new book from Open Humanities Press

Announcing the publication of hyposubjects: on becoming human, by Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, hyposubjects is available for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/hyposubjects/

The time of hypersubjects is ending. Their desert-apocalypse-fire-and-death cults aren’t going to save them this time. Meanwhile the time of hyposubjects is just beginning. This text is an exercise in chaotic and flimsy thinking that will possibly waste your time. But it is the sincere effort of two reform-minded hypersubjects to decenter themselves and to help nurture hyposubjective humanity. Here are some of the things we say in this book: 1) Hyposubjects are the native species of the Anthropocene and are only just now beginning to discover what they might be and become. 2) Like their hyperobjective environment, hyposubjects are also multiphasic and plural: not-yet, neither here nor there, less than the sum of their parts. They are, in other words, subscendent (moving toward relations) rather than transcendent (rising above relations). They do not pursue or pretend to absolute knowledge or language, let alone power. Instead they play; they care; they adapt; they hurt; they laugh. 3) Hyposubjects are necessarily feminist, colorful, queer, ecological, transhuman, and intrahuman. They do not recognize the rule of androleukoheteropetromodernity and the apex species behavior it epitomizes and reinforces. But they also hold the bliss-horror of extinction fantasies at bay, because hyposubjects’ befores, nows, and afters are many. 4) Hyposubjects are squatters and bricoleuses. They inhabit the cracks and hollows. They turn things inside out and work miracles with scraps and remains. They unplug from carbon gridlife; they hack and redistribute its stored energies for their own purposes. 5) Hyposubjects make revolutions where technomodern radars can’t glimpse them. They patiently ignore expert advice that they do not or cannot exist. They are skeptical of efforts to summarize them, including everything we have just said.

hyposubjects is published in our Critical Climate Chaos: Irreversibility series, which is edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/ccc2-irreversibility/

Author Bios

Dominic Boyer is a writer, media maker and anthropologist. He currently teaches at Rice University where he also served as Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (2013-2019). His most recent book is Energopolitics (Duke UP, 2019), which is part of a collaborative duograph, “Wind and Power in the Anthropocene,” with Cymene Howe, which studies the politics of wind power development in Southern Mexico. With Howe, he also helped make a documentary film about Iceland’s first major glacier (Okjökull) lost to climate change, Not Ok: a little movie about a small glacier at the end of the world (2018). In August 2019, together with Icelandic collaborators, Boyer installed a memorial to Okjökull’s passing, an event that attracted media attention from around the world. He is pursuing anthropological research with floodies in Houston, Texas, and on electric futures across the world. And he is developing a TV series, Petropolis, about relations and reckonings in Houston TX.

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. They are the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014, Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. They blog regularly at Ecology Without Nature.

Can We Unlearn Liberal Individualism? - book launch for A Stubborn Fury, 25 March via Zoom

Can We Unlearn Liberal Individualism Like We Can Unlearn Racism and Sexism? Join us for this ‘In-conversation’, where Gary Hall and Carolina Rito address this question while discussing Hall's latest book, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain.

Thurs 25 March 2021, 7.00pm (GMT), free online event, via Zoom

Go here to register:

https://www.eventsforce.net/cugroup/177/regist

Other questions that will be addressed during the event include: 

·      How come so much writing in England is realist, humanist and anti-intellectual?
·      Is all great literature pirated?
·      Why are Oxbridge-educated journalists obsessed with protecting ‘ordinary’ people from difficult language?
·      What do we need most – another theory of revolution or a revolution of theory?
·      Is everyone writing their memoirs today or does it just seem like it?
·      And why is Gary so mean to Tom McCarthy?

Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps Towards a Metacosmics - new book from Open Humanities Press

Announcing the publication of Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps Towards a Metacosmics by Daniel Ross.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis is available for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/psychopolitical-anaphylaxis/

The great acceleration that has become known as the Anthropocene has brought with it destructive consequences that threaten to give rise to a dangerous and potentially explosive convergent reaching of limits, not just climatically or biospherically, but psychosocially. This convergence demands a new kind of thinking and a reconsideration of fundamental philosophical, political and economic theory in light especially of the age of computational capitalism, in order to prevent this convergence from becoming absolutely catastrophic. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler argued that the basis for such a reconsideration must be, in a very general way, the thought of entropy. Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis examines, draws on, and dialogues with Stiegler’s work, and aims to take steps towards this new kind of thinking. Borrowing also from Georges Canguilhem and Peter Sloterdijk, among others, it argues as well for an immunological perspective that sees psychopolitical convulsions as a kind of anaphylactic shock that threatens to prove fatal. The paradox that must ultimately be confronted in the Anthropocene conceived as an Entropocene is the contradiction between the urgent need for a global emergency procedure and the equally necessary task of finding the time to carefully rethink our way beyond this anaphylaxis. The task of thinking today must be to inhabit this paradox and make it the basis of a new dynamic. 

Author bio

Daniel Ross has translated numerous books by Bernard Stiegler, including most recently Nanjing Lectures 2016-2019 (Open Humanities Press) and The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (Polity Press). With David Barison, he is the co-director of the award-winning philosophical documentary, The Ister, which premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was the recipient of the Prix du Groupement National des Cinémas de Recherche (GNCR) and the Prix de l’AQCC at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Montreal (2004). He is the author of Violent Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and many articles and book chapters on the work of Bernard Stiegler.

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies - new open access book from Open Humanities Press

We are delighted to announce the publication of Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies by Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Aesthetic Programming is available for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/aesthetic-programming/ 

Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: how power differentials are implicit in code in terms of binary logic, hierarchies, naming of the attributes, and how particular worldviews are reinforced and perpetuated through computation. Using p5.js, it introduces and demonstrates the reflexive practice of aesthetic programming, engaging with learning to program as a way to understand and question existing technological objects and paradigms, and to explore the potential for reprogramming wider eco-socio-technical systems. The book itself follows this approach, and is offered as a computational object open to modification and reversioning. 

Web: http://aesthetic-programming.net 

Repository: https://gitlab.com/aesthetic-programming/book  

‘Instructive, imaginative and accessible, this is an introduction to programming like no other. Aesthetic Programming opens up the thinking in software in a vivid, critical and creative manner; it is a book full of procedural pleasures and witty algorithms that also poses a remarkable set of questions about contemporary digital life.’ 

   - Matthew Fuller, Professor of Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London 

‘Skilfully moving across the instructional, the pedagogic, and the critical, Aesthetic Programming makes an expansive contribution to computational thinking. Engaging with programming from a practice-based approach, this illuminating text demonstrates how critical aesthetics can transform programming. Recipe book, code library, poetic manual, convivial instructional, and primer to computing imaginaries all assemble into this compelling and indispensable addition to software studies.’ 

   - Jennifer Gabrys, Chair in Media, Culture and Environment, University of Cambridge 

Author Bios 

Geoff Cox likes not to think of himself as an old white man from a parochial island but is clearly in denial. Thankfully other aspects of his identity are more ambiguous and fluid. Research interests lie broadly across the fields of software studies, contemporary art practice, cultural theory, and image politics, reflected in his academic position as Associate Professor and co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University, UK, and Adjunct Associate Professor, Aarhus University, DK. 

Winnie Soon was born and raised in Hong Kong, increasingly aware of, and confronting, identity politics regarding its colonial legacy and postcolonial authoritarianism. As an artist-coder-researcher, she/they is interested in queering the intersections of technical and artistic practices as a feminist praxis, with works appearing in museums, galleries, festivals, distributed networks, papers and books. Researching in the areas of software studies and computational practices, she/they is currently Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark.

My new book - A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain

My new book, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain, has just come out in Open Humanities Press' Media : Art : Write : Now series, edited by Joanna Zylinska. 

The abstract for the book is below. But it's my attempt to explain why I do some of the things I do. It’s also even angrier than usual if you can imagine such a thing. (It is what it says on the tin in that respect.) But then there's a lot to be angry about at the moment.

Another way of thinking about it would be as an unauthorized sequel to Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism?, especially its infamous chapter 14, with its critique of Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan et al.

A Stubborn Fury is available open access, no copyright. So please feel free to share.  

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Gary Hall, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain
London: Open Humanities Press, 2021
Series: Media : Art : Write : Now

E-version freely available on an open access, no copyright basis:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-stubborn-fury/

Also available in paperback

Abstract

Two fifths of Britain’s leading people were educated privately: that’s five times the amount as in the population as a whole, with almost a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. Eight private schools send more pupils to Oxbridge than the remaining 2894 state schools combined, making modern Britain one of the most unequal places in Europe.

In A Stubborn Fury, Gary Hall offers a powerful and provocative look at the consequences of this inequality for English culture in particular. Focusing on the novel and the memoir, he investigates, in terms that are as insightful as they are irreverent, why so much literature in England is uncritically realist, humanist and anti-intellectual. Hall does so by playfully rewriting two of the most acclaimed contributions to these media genres of recent times. One is that of England’s foremost avant-garde novelist Tom McCarthy - especially the importance he attaches to European modernism and antihumanist theory. The other is that of the celebrated French memoirists Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis and their attempt to reinvent the antihumanist philosophical tradition by producing a theory that speaks about class and intersectionality, yet generates the excitement of a Kendrick Lamar concert. Experimentally ‘pirating’ McCarthy, Eribon and Louis, A Stubborn Fury addresses that most urgent of questions: what can be done about English literary culture’s addiction to the worldview of privileged, middle-class white men to the exclusion of more radically inventive writing, including that of working-class, BAME and LGBTQIAP+ authors? 

Contents

Preface: Stay Elite

Part I: Go to Settings (feat. Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis)

1. On Class and Culture in Elitist Britain
2. Bourgeois Theory
3. Memoirs, Memoirs, Memoirs

Part II : HOW LITERATURE WORKS © Tom McCarthy

4. This is All Pirated
5. Good and Bad Remixes, or The Importance of Having the Right Software
6. Who Speaks, Who Gets to Experiment and What Remains
7. ‘He Wants to Be Authentic, Is All’: Literature as Technological Prosthesis
8. Media Art and the Melancholy Impasse of the Anglo-American Novel

9. Conclusion: A Stubborn Fury

‘When Gary Hall, if he is indeed the author of this book, speaks, he listens, and in listening he writes and in writing he remixes. He, or whatever version of authorship he betrays, shows us how writing works: intuitively, intellectually and intensively. The end result is always illumination.’

Mark Amerika, Professor of Art and Art History, University of Colorado

‘Hall gives a stark account of how the English novel has emerged as a key technology for the reproduction of class inequality in Britain, and its seemingly inextricable connectedness to liberal humanism, anti-intellectualism and, worst of all, Oxbridge.’

Isabel Waidner, author of We Are Made of Diamond Stuff and co-founder of Queers Read This.