On Fascism, Non-fascism, and Antifa

Natasha Lennard in conversation with James Miller

JM: Since you've written an entire book with the title Essays on a Non-Fascist Life, can you tell me a bit about how you chose that title, and what the term "non-fascist" means to you, in the context of those essays? We both know the appearance of the phrase in the context ...
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How Does Animation Change our Concept of Life and What Kind of Ethics Does it Require?

A Conversation with Media Historian and Theorist Deborah Levitt

Public Seminar (PS): Deborah, in your recently published book The Animatic Apparatus. Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image you claim that animation is the dominant medium of our time and propose the concept of the animatic apparatus as a dispositif, that is, as a kind of organizing mechanics for contemporary culture. Can ...
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How Does Animation Change our Concept of Life and What Kind of Ethics Does it Require?

We Are Swarming, Again.

Thoughts on William Connolly’s new book, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming

‘Swarming’ has a rich and complex history in political and philosophical literatures. That history percolates in political theorist William Connolly’s recent book Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming in which he proposes a ‘Politics of Swarming,’ and even resonates in his writing style. The question of ‘swarming’ intersects ...
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We Are Swarming, Again.

Dividuals and Democratic Data

Are we more than just data points?

ENFJ. Those are the results from the Myers-Briggs personality test I took online. The option to share my results flashed on the screen and, with a click, just my 638 closest Facebook friends were able to see and like my results. At least that is what I thought. Big Data has ...
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Dividuals and Democratic Data

TFW… Gucci Releases a Line of Memes

Could it be the most terrifying news in the world?

Last week, Gucci released a line of “memes.” Their website tells us that “The word ‘meme’ was coined by the British biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 to mean an ‘imitated thing,” and that memes are “the common currency of social media.” The memes feature pictures of Gucci watches, often captioned ...
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TFW… Gucci Releases a Line of Memes

Barbarism or Barbarism?

Timothy Morton proposes an ecology without nature. In Molecular Red I thought it made more sense to think a nature without ecology, as nature is the more capacious and historically variable term, whereas a logos of the oikos – ecology – is precisely what can no longer be said to ...
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All Power to the {Historical} Imagination!

Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History (Duke University Press, 2014) is an astonishing work of synthetic historical theory. Karatani views world history as a history of modes of exchange. He rejects the classical Marxist view of history though as modes of production, to which political, religious and cultural levels ...
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All Power to the {Historical} Imagination!

How I Got Over

Like most people in the arts, for many years I supported my artistic activities, along with the rest of my life, by holding down a day job. Corporate communications and advertising primarily in financial services were not such a bad gig, actually, and, in fact, were what I trained to ...

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How I Got Over

The Drone of Minerva

The one kind of speculative thought that might be of service in the Anthropocene is surely some kind of philosophy of history, and yet within the academy itself it seems the one nobody wants to actually attempt. It is as if the debates at the end of the last century ...
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The Drone of Minerva

Althusserians Anonymous (2)

This post has been revised, here: https://publicseminar.org/2016/02/aa/ The thing about being a recovering Althusserian is that one can’t help remembering the good times. Being on Althusser really does feel great. It makes certain problems disappear. For example, one is no longer trapped in the oppressive reality of Hegelian Marxism, and yet nor does ...
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Althusserians Anonymous (2)

Extrapolation, not Acceleration

We hoped; we waited for the day The state would wither clean away, Expecting the Millennium That theory promised us would come: It didn’t… W. H. Auden, New Year Letter, 1941 It would appear that in the twenty-first century, we should probably relinquish a faith in a force external to capital, even if generated by it, ...
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Extrapolation, not Acceleration