RECOMMENDED READING
NOTES ON EVIL BY STEVEN WARWICK PUBLISHED BY FLOATING OPERA PRESS
What is "evil"? How is it categorized, understood and used? Surveying examples from cinema, music, and politics, Notes on Evil provides observations on the mechanisms by which societies construct enemies in a collective bid to expel their ‘problems’. But does the label of evil help to rid us of social ills? Or does it just lead to superficial purges that distract us from deeper forms of inequity?
Artist and writer Steven Warwick offers a series of notes on the overlapping social architectures that frame our current discourse on good and evil, seeking to chart a path beyond our collective impasse.
CARCERAL CAPITALISM BY JACKIE WANG PUBLISHED BY SEMIOTEXT(E)
Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing.
What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police?
—from Carceral Capitalism
In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.
Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.
THE ADMINISTRATION OF FEAR BY PAUL VIRILIO SEMIOTEXT(E)
A new interview with the philosopher of speed, addressing the ways in which technology is utilized in synchronizing mass emotions.
We are living under the administration of fear: fear has become an environment, an everyday landscape. There was a time when wars, famines, and epidemics were localized and limited by a certain timeframe. Today, it is the world itself that is limited, saturated, and manipulated, the world itself that seizes us and confines us with a stressful claustrophobia. Stock-market crises, undifferentiated terrorism, lightning pandemics, “professional” suicides.... Fear has become the world we live in.
The administration of fear also means that states are tempted to create policies for the orchestration and management of fear. Globalization has progressively eaten away at the traditional prerogatives of states (most notably of the welfare state), and states have to convince citizens that they can ensure their physical safety.
In this new and lengthy interview, Paul Virilio shows us how the “propaganda of progress,” the illuminism of new technologies, provide unexpected vectors for fear in the way that they manufacture frenzy and stupor. For Virilio, the economic catastrophe of 2007 was not the death knell of capitalism, as some have claimed, but just further evidence that capitalism has accelerated into turbo-capitalism, and is accelerating still. With every natural disaster, health scare, and malicious rumor now comes the inevitable “information bomb”—live feeds take over real space, and technology connects life to the immediacy of terror, the ultimate expression of speed. With the nuclear dissuasion of the Cold War behind us, we are faced with a new form of civil dissuasion: a state of fear that allows for the suspension of controversial social situations.
HIGH RISK: AN ANTHOLOGY OF FORBIDDEN WRITINGS EDITED BY AMY SCHOLDER AND IRA SILVERBERG
All those activities, subjects, imaginings that challenge the limits imposed not only by society but by oneself. In an age of reality television that appears to have crossed all boundaries, it would seem that there are fewsubjects that haven’t been broached. Yet, the provocative fiction, poetry and essays in High Risk explore the forbidden zones of illicit sex and obsessive behavior that few people dare. Fired by the conviction that art must be bound only by the limits of the imagination, the writers and artists featured in this collection, including William S. Burroughs, Dorothy Allison, and John Preston, fearlessly take on sadomasochism, prostitution, incest, drug use, bondage, and transsexuality. Uncompromisingly truthful, unusually explicit, and unfailingly adventurous, High Risk is an uncommon literary feat-a daring exploration of that culture of “otherness” that gives us our deepest sense of who we are and what we believe.
BLACK MAGIC: POETRY, SABOTAGE, TARGET STUDY, BLACK ART, 1961-1967 BY LEROI JONES
“Assassin poems, Poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons leaving them dead with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.”.
INTERVIEW WITH SARAH SCHULMAN: TRUE AND FALSE VICTIMS
Issue NO. 107 / September 2017 “Identity Politics Now”
As political views further polarize across the West, and indeed micro-polarize in the subgroups therein, political discussion, rather than becoming more dynamic, seems to have retreated to closed channels segregated along belief lines. In pursuit of opening these conversations to productive debate, it is helpful to identity why we find interparty (let alone interpersonal) conflict so unbearable now. As journalist and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman writes in her recent book, “Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair,” one key factor is the emergence, in Reagan-era USA, of a victim/perpetrator model as the dominant form of state control. Here, Texte zur Kunst speaks with Schulman about the systemic causes of intolerance and the forces underpinning our current state of affairs.
POLICING PUBLIC SEX: QUEER POLITICS AND THE FUTURE OF AIDS ACTIVISM
As some activists have turned to regulation rather than education in the effort to curb the AIDS epidemic, the public culture at the foundation of queer culture has come under attack.
LUCIE TOMANOVA: CANCEL CULTURE, VICTIMHOOD CULTURE AND NARCISSISM: THE MAKING OF GENERATION SNOWFLAKE
The thesis aims to find connections between social phenomena and terms Cancel Culture, Vic- timhood Culture, Generation Snowflake, and the rise of narcissism among young adults and younger individuals in the USA. The thesis explains all the mentioned phenomena and shows how these terms are interconnected with one another. It draws the conclusion that these terms and movements are a manifestation of one another and shows how these phenomena are demonstrated in society. The thesis reacts to the mood of society that suggests that young peo- ple are more sensitive to verbal slights and other kinds of microaggressions.
THERE IS NO SOCIETY? INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITY IN PANDEMIC TIMES
Contributors include: Fahim Amir, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Nika Dubrovsky, Silvia Federici, Srecko Horvat, Eva Illouz, Achille Mbembe & Milo Rau, Robert Pfaller, Renata Salecl, Natascha Strobl and Ece Temelkuran.
“organized hatred is becoming the toxic reality of today’s world”
Leading theorists from Silvia Federici to Eva Illouz address the pandemic’s intensification of neoliberal alienation. The success of “social distancing” as a strategy against the COVID-19 pandemic resonates acutely with neoliberalism’s destruction of the very notion of society itself. This was most famously expressed by Margaret Thatcher’s dictum “there is no society,” which supplies the title of this anthology—with a question mark added. How can we deal with the paradoxical mix of solitude and common experience that the pandemic entails? How can culture and critical discourse even continue when public space has been shut down upon the advice of epidemiologists? Such are the questions tackled by the authors of this anthology—some of today’s leading theorists of capitalist affect and experience.
CLOVE TO THE KNIVES: A MEMOIR ON DISENTIGRATION BY DAVID WOJNAROWICZ
a collection of creative essays — a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the “Fear of Diversity in America.” From the author’s violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation — Close to the Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir. Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives — politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.