Out now: Deserting from the Culture Wars

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London are proud to announce the release of Deserting from the Culture Wars, the second reader in BAK’s BASICS series.

Deserting from the Culture Wars reflects upon and intervenes in our current moment of ever-more polarizing ideological combat, often seen as the return of the “culture wars.” How are these culture wars defined and waged? Engaging in a theater of war that has been delineated by the enemy is a shortcut to defeat. Getting out of the reactive mode that produces little but a series of Pavlovian responses, this book proposes a tactical desertion from the culture wars as they are being waged today—a refusal to play the other side's war games, an unwillingness to be distracted.

The reader connects to BAK’s research strand Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing), a long-term itinerary for generating knowledge about, developing proposals for, and activating tactics of “non-fascist living”: that is, practicing life—and thus modeling a world—decidedly void of fascisms. Moving from critique to propositions, the project attempts to articulate and inhabit methods of de-individualized living and to practice ways in which multiplicity and difference establish relations other than those structured by power and hierarchy.

Deserting from the Culture Wars, edited by Maria Hlavajova and Sven Lütticken, includes contributions by Bini Adamczak, Kader Attia, Rose Hammer, Tom Holert, Geert Lovink, Sven Lütticken, Diana McCarty, Dan McQuillan, Johannes Paul Raether, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Esmee Schoutens, Andreas Siekmann, and Jonas Staal.

This publication is the second volume of BAK’s BASICS series, published in collaboration with MIT Press. The readers in this series probe some of the most urgent challenges of our time, engaging them through theoretically informed and politically driven artistic research and practice. If BAK is conceived as a basis—a base where art and theory meet social action to collectively negotiate the social, political, environmental, and technological conditions in which we live and, more importantly, develop and actualize proposals for being together otherwise—then BASICS is its publishing equivalent.

On the occasion of the reader's publication, BAK organizes a book launch taking place on Friday October 16 from 7-9pm at BAK, Utrecht (Pauwstraat 13a), in the framework of the reopening of the exhibition Tony Cokes: To Live as Equals. Registration required, book your tickets here.

Edited by Maria Hlavajova and Sven Lütticken | Published by BAK, basis actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2020 | Design by Sean van den Steenhoven for Leftloft, Milan | English language | 268 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 9780262539432

The reader Deserting from the Culture Wars can be purchased at BAK or via MIT press.