Research image by Ernesto Oroza, Havana, 2003.

• Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

  Editorial—“Structural Violence”

• Sven Lütticken

  Inside Abstraction

  This drives home the point that contemporary capitalism pervades daily life in much more complex ways than it did under classic industrial (Fordist) capitalism, when the conveyor belt and punch-clock still seemed like a violent imposition of abstraction on life. Writing in the 1940s, Adorno and Horkheimer could still think of abstraction only as a liquidation of concrete objects; now it is obvious that abstraction does not so much liquidate as liquefy and transform the concrete from within.

• Jon Rich

  Facebook: A Court of Ignorant, Cruel Judges

  It’s very possible that advancements in telecommunications caused the acceleration towards indiscriminate destruction. Since its beginning, the Syrian revolution has succeeded in creating unparalleled imagery that has taken everyone by surprise. The activists have led demonstrations against the regime knowing full well that they would be killed by the regime’s soldiers. They carry their mobile cameras to film their own deaths or those of their comrades.

• Bilal Khbeiz

  In Praise of Books: When Authorities Close a Prison, They Foil a Revolution!

  The reader is the de facto authority for being nameless and ignorant. Unlike the writer, who builds a reputation out of the fragile adoration of fans, a reader could lay to waste to an entire empire in the blink of an eye!

• Hito Steyerl

  Missing People: Entanglement, Superposition, and Exhumation as Sites of Indeterminacy

  How can we understand its conflicting desires: to want and to dread the truth at the same time? The urge to both move on and keep hope alive? Perhaps the state of missing speaks of a paradoxical superposition that cannot be understood with the conceptual tools of Euclidian physics, human biology, or Aristotelian logic. Perhaps it reaches out to an impossible coexistence of life and death. Both are materially interlaced in limbo—as long as no observer opens the “box” of indeterminacy. Which is, in many cases, a grave.

• Eyal Weizman

  665: The Least of All Possible Evils

  Sometimes the principle is presented as the optimal result of a general field of calculations that seeks to compare, measure, and evaluate different bad consequences in relation to necessary acts, and then to minimize those bad consequences. Both aspects of the principle are understood as taking place within a closed system in which those posing the dilemma, the options available for choice, the factors to be calculated, and the very parameters of calculation are unchallenged.

• Pelin Tan

  Breaking the Social Contract

  And it is secularists who insist that God has no role in the political realm, that we cannot appeal to God. This is usually based on some progressivist idea of history, which is also religious. Secularism takes over the providential narrative of Christianity, changes some key elements, and comes up with the idea that liberal democracy is the completion of history. The idea is that one is either on the right side of history or the wrong side of history—as Obama has said.

• Metahaven

  Captives of the Cloud: Part II

  The space of flows is absolutely not smooth. It looks like a data center, and the coal plant that powers it. It looks like Julian Assange’s room in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. It looks like the Principality of Sealand. It looks like Sabu’s social housing unit on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The landing from the digital onto the material is hard; it comes with a cruelty and intensity we haven’t even begun to properly understand.

• Cuauhtémoc Medina

  A History of Infinity and Some Fresh Catastrophes: On Raqs Media Collective’s The Capital of Accumulation

  It is this spirit that retains the capacity to animate the kind of enquiry needed today in order to overcome the gloom of post-Marxist theory: an openness to the miscegenation of illuminations and facts, rebellion and receptivity, stories and theories. This is where, in fact, the true legacy of Rosa Luxemburg lies waiting for its inheritors. And so the interrogation of the accumulation of defeat and rebellion can begin afresh.