Knowledge, Spirit, Law: Book 2: The Anti-capitalist Sublime

Knowledge, Spirit, Law: Book 2: The Anti-capitalist Sublime
Author: Gavin Keeney
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2017-12-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1947447343

Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 2: The Anti-capitalist Sublime takes up where Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 1: Radical Scholarship (2015) left off, foremost in terms of a critique of neo-liberal academia and its demotion of the book in favor of various mediatic practices that substitute, arguably, for the one form of critical inquiry that might safeguard speculative intellectual inquiry as long-form and long-term project, especially in relationship to the archive or library (otherwise known as the "public domain"). This ongoing critique of neo-liberal academia is a necessary corrective to processes underway today toward the further marginalization of radical critique, with many of the traditional forms of sustained analysis being replaced by pseudo-empirical studies that abandon themes only presentable in the Arts and Humanities through the "arcanian closure" that the book as long-form inquisition represents (whether as novel, non-fictional critique, or something in-between). As a tomb for thought, this privileging of the shadowy recesses of the book preserves, through the very apparatuses of long- and slow-form scholarship, the premises presented here as indicative of an anti-capitalist project embedded in works that might otherwise shun such a characterization. The perverse capitalist capture of knowledge through mass digitalization is - paradoxically - the negative corollary for the reduction by abstraction of everyday works to a philosophical and moral inquest against Capital. The latter actually constitutes a transversal reduction for works (across works) toward the age-old antithesis to instrumentalized socio-cultural production - Spirit. For similar reasons, the anti-capitalist sublime as presented here is primarily a product of the imaginative, magical-realist regimes of thought in service to "no capital" - to no capitalization of thought. This book seeks to re-establish paradigmatic, a-historical, and universalizing practices in humanistic scholarship associated with speculative inquiry as a form of art, utilizing in passing forms of art and exemplary paradigmatic practices that are also first-order forms of speculative inquiry - suggesting that first-order works in the Arts and Humanities are those works that may "suffer" second-order incorporations without the attendant loss of the impress of sublimity (Spirit).

Works for Works, Book 1

Works for Works, Book 1
Author: Gavin Keeney
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2022-07-25
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1685710328

Works for Works, Book 1: Useless Beauty tackles "legacy" issues of intellectual property rights (IPR) in artistic production and academic scholarship and proposes a category or class of works that has no relation to IPR nor to proprietary regimes of copyright and academic privilege. Keeney's book is a structuralist argument for establishing new forms of artistic scholarship that operate in direct opposition to established norms in both the art world and neoliberal academia, and is also rigorously contextualized within past and present-day arguments for and against patrimonial and paternalistic, avant-garde and normative, forms of censure and conformity across cultural production. Works for Works, Book 1: Useless Beauty privileges an iterative, generative, and aleatory methodology for artistic scholarship, with transmedia proposed as a "tutelary form" of editioning works against the dictates of the art-academic complex. This focus on generativity also invokes the dialectical operations historically associated with past avant-gardes as they have negotiated an elective nihilism as an avenue for exiting established and authorized forms of conceptual and intellectual inquiry in the Arts and Humanities. Gavin Keeney is Director of Agence 'X', founded in New York, New York, in 2007. He completed a research doctorate in Architecture at Deakin University, Australia, in 2014, on the subject of "Visual Agency in Art and Architecture." His publications include Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 1: Radical Scholarship (punctum, 2015), and Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 2: The Anti-capitalist Sublime (punctum, 2017). He has taught and lectured in architecture schools in the US, England, Slovenia, Australia, and India.

Performance Making and the Archive

Performance Making and the Archive
Author: Ashutosh Potdar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2022-11-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000785777

This book investigates theories and practices shaped by a performance’s relationship to the archive. The contributions in the volume examine how the changing nature of performance practices has made it imperative to understand how the archive and archival practices could add to the performance work. They explore a variety of themes, including artistic engagement with the archive in both conceptual and material terms; physical, virtual and digital forms; publicly and privately collected; oral, written and digital ways; or organized and unorganized collections. Finally, the volume examines how archives are modelled on existing structure and the ways in which they can be brought into discourses and practices of performance making through engagement and contestation. A novel approach to performance theory, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of performance studies, media and culture studies, studies of technology and art as also literature and literary criticism.

Geelong's Changing Landscape

Geelong's Changing Landscape
Author: David Jones
Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2019-11-01
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0643103619

Geelong's Changing Landscape offers an insightful investigation of the ecological history of the Geelong and Bellarine Peninsula region. Commencing with the penetrating perspectives of Wadawurrung Elders, chapters explore colonisation and post-World War II industrial development through to the present challenges surrounding the ongoing urbanisation of this region. Expert contributors provide thoughtful analysis of the ecological and cultural characteristics of the landscape, the impact of past actions, and options for ethical future management of the region. This book will be of value to scientists, engineers, land use planners, environmentalists and historians.

Capitalism and Desire

Capitalism and Desire
Author: Todd McGowan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231542216

Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

The Sublime Object of Psychiatry

The Sublime Object of Psychiatry
Author: Angela Woods
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2011-08-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199583951

Schizophrenia has been one of psychiatry's most contested diagnostic categories. The Sublime object of Psychiatry studies representations of schizophrenia across a wide range of disciplines and discourses: biological and phenomenological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, antipsychiatry, and postmodern philosophy.

Brooklyn Buzz

Brooklyn Buzz
Author: Gaia Light
Publisher: Damiani Limited
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9788862082419

Italian-born photographers Alessandro Cosmelli and Gaia Light's Brooklyn Buzz uses the framing device of a bus window frame, and the attendant serendipities of photographing on a moving vehicle, to present an extended photographic portrait of Brooklyn and its inhabitants. Cosmelli and Light have been photographing Brooklyn, their adopted home since 2007, capturing the borough at its most social and vibrant. "The windows work as filters with the outside," they write of this project, "sometimes like enlarging lenses, amplifying, revealing unpredictable details, capturing life as it is in that precise moment, in the streets, at the bus stop, through the windows of a local deli; other times they work more like protective barriers that allow you to deeply penetrate people's lives." Analogous to Frank's The Americans as a European eye on America, Brooklyn Buzz is full of effervescent charm and warmth.

Liquid Life

Liquid Life
Author: Rachel Armstrong
Publisher:
Total Pages: 600
Release: 2019
Genre:
ISBN: 9781950192182

If we lived in a liquid world, the concept of a "machine" would make no sense. Liquid life is metaphor and apparatus that discusses the consequences of thinking, working, and living through liquids. It is an irreducible, paradoxical, parallel, planetary-scale material condition, unevenly distributed spatially, but temporally continuous. It is what remains when logical explanations can no longer account for the experiences that we recognize as part of "being alive."Liquid Life references a third-millennial understanding of matter that seeks to restore the agency of the liquid soul for an ecological era, which has been banished by reductionist, "brute" materialist discourses and mechanical models of life. Offering an alternative worldview of the living realm through a "new materialist" and "liquid" study of matter, Armstrong conjures forth examples of creatures that do not obey mechanistic concepts like predictability, efficiency, and rationality. With the advent of molecular science, an increasingly persuasive ontology of liquid technologies can be identified. Through the lens of lifelike dynamic droplets, the agency for these systems exists at the interfaces between different fields of matter/energy that respond to highly local effects, with no need for a central organizing system.Liquid Life seeks an alternative partnership between humanity and the natural world. It provokes a re-invention of the languages of the living realm to open up alternative spaces for exploration, including contributor Rolf Hughes' "angelology" of language, which explores the transformative invocations of prose poetry, and Simone Ferracina's graphical notations that help shape our concepts of metabolism, upcycling, and designing with fluids. A conceptual and practical toolset for thinking and designing, liquid life reunites us with the irreducible "soul substance" of living things, which will neither be simply "solved," nor go away.