Journal #65 - Jimmie Durham - Apocalypsis, or The Dragon in Her Cave
Subscribe
Journal #65
May 2015
Journal #65 - May 2015
Jimmie Durham

Apocalypsis, or The Dragon in Her Cave

Calypso is the leading technology platform for cross-asset trading,

Accounting, processing, and enterprise risk management.

Key words:

Cross asset

Enterprise

Accounting

Trading

Technology

Risk

Management

Certainly

Verbosity

Necessarily hopeful verbosity.

Marco Koch, Luis Varela, Jae Geun Kim, Jung Dae Kim, Francisco Hernández-Nuño, Stephanie Simonds, Carlos Castorena, Claudia Vianna, Joel Elmquist, Yury Morozov, Pasko Rakic, Ingo Bechmann, Michael Cowley, Klara Szigeti-Buck, Marcelo Dietrich, Xiao-Bing Gao, Sabrina Diano & Tamas Horvath

Published an article in which they wrote that,

“Hypothalamic pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) neurons promote satiety. Cannabinoid receptor 1 (CB1R) is critical for the central regulation of food intake. Here we test whether CB1R-controlled feeding in sated mice is paralleled by decreased activity of POMC neurons. We show that chemical promotion of CB1R activity increases feeding, and notably, CB1R activation also promotes neuronal activity of POMC cells. This paradoxical increase in POMC activity was crucial for CB1R-induced feeding, because designer-receptors-exclusively-activated-by-designer-drugs (DREADD)-mediated inhibition of POMC neurons diminishes, whereas DREADD-mediated activation of POMC neurons enhances CB1R-driven feeding. The Pomc gene encodes both the anorexigenic peptide α-melanocyte-stimulating hormone, and the opioid peptide β-endorphin. CB1R activation selectively increases β-endorphin but not α-melanocyte-stimulating hormone release in the hypothalamus, and systemic or hypothalamic administration of the opioid receptor antagonist naloxone blocks acute CB1R-induced feeding. These processes involve mitochondrial adaptations that, when blocked, abolish CB1R-induced cellular responses and feeding. Together, these results uncover a previously unsuspected role of POMC neurons in the promotion of feeding by cannabinoids.”

Key words:

Article

Satiety

Another guy wrote that,

“Seasonal variation in box-office revenue is a statistical illusion:

If you release blockbusters in July and dogs in January,”

“Box-office” is almost certainly a key word there.

It surely may not refer to an office of boxes.

My feelings are indescribable.

Many of my feelings are indescribable.

The physiotherapist asked me to describe my pain on a scale of one to ten,

And if it was sharp, dull or pulsing.

It seems there may be no way

Of moaning eloquently

Yet many man-made musical instruments

Are capable

In the right hands.

Almost everything in the world is light-years away

From us.

But heavy,

Weightlessly insupportably heavy are the years

Passed and many splinters stay too near.

Every grain of sand

Finds its way to our salad bowls.

×

© 2015 e-flux and the author
Journal # 65
Related
Conversations
Share
Download PDF
More
Raqs Media Collective

The Social Commons: Citizens in the Shade, Aliens in the Sun

What whispered confidences and secrets may citizen and alien trade as they make their moves? What new things may be afoot in their wake? In 1762, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau added a conditional “but” after the phrase “man is born free” in The Social Contract, was he implying that there could be hidden costs to birth in the human species?

Coco Fusco

Cuba: The Fading of a Subcontinental Dream

As the revolution and its leaders enter their twilight years, what are the most relevant expressions of transition? How are the relations between the state and culture being reconfigured? Will the polemical and politically volatile divide between culture deemed to be inside or outside the revolution give way to more heterogeneous panorama?
 

Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle

Closing Editorial

Supercommunity is now finished. You won’t get any more texts delivered to your mailbox. We survived. You survived. Looking back, there is just one question lingering: What is the supercommunity? The supercommunity does not propose a new form of togetherness. It does not replace cozy humanist universalism. It knows things will not be better when we come together. Our commonality won’t make up for our differences. We are not united. We don’t even like each other. We are simply stuck...
Raqs Media Collective

A Knot Untied in Two Parts

Negative Negation It is said that one should always begin with the simplest questions. Why did Marx observe that corporations (i.e., stock companies) were the negative negation of capital? Everything that follows is an attempt to address this question. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the...
Antonio Negri

Notes on the Abstract Strike

In the most recent sermons on the inescapable power of capital, we hear increasing praise for the dominance of the algorithm. But what is this algorithm? It is nothing but another machine, born of the cooperation of workers, and one that the boss then places on a level above this same cooperation. The algorithm is, as Marx used to say, a machine that runs where there has been a strike, where there has been resistance or a rupture in the valorization process: a machine produced by the same...
Wietske Maas

The Corruption of the Eye: On Photogenesis and Self-Growing Images

I see with sentient eyes, I feel with a seeing hand. —Goethe, Roman Elegies, 1788 1 sehe mit fühlendem Aug, fühle mit sehender Hand,” translation by the author. Unpublished during Goethe’s life, this quote was first published only in 1914.] 1. The Eye of the Stomach “The skin, like a cloak, covers us all over, the oldest and the most sensitive of our organs, our first medium of communication, and our most efficient of protectors. The whole body is covered by skin. Even the...
McKenzie Wark

The Vectoralist Class

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned.” 1 Of course, much of the resonance of this phrase is an artifact of translation: “Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft”: All that stands steams into statements. Such was Marx’s thrilling phrase for how the commodity form sets the world ablaze, vaporizing old social forms and norms, such that whole ways of life and their corresponding worldviews, one after the other, go up in smoke. Such is the grand historical story of...
Emily Segal

Mercury Retrograde

It is also possible to put Mercury into modern terms. He is the Modulator. Modulation is the principle of impressing information onto what would otherwise be random, meaningless action in the physical world. For example, a pattern imposed upon radio waves converts the waves from being mere noise. 1 When Mercury is in retrograde, the planet Mercury appears to be moving backwards in the sky. This backwards motion is an optical illusion—the planet is not actually reversing its course,...
Giuliana Bruno

Surface Encounters

I say therefore that likenesses or thin shapes Are sent out from the surfaces of things Which we must call as it were their films or bark. —Titus Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura 1 In reflecting upon the nature of things, Lucretius suggests that we consider surfaces as anything but superficial. Yet, despite such consideration in antiquity, there has been a tendency in recent times to denigrate surfaces as just that. But why attach a negative connotation to what is a...
Hassan Khan and Natasha Ginwala

Soaking in the Daily Curses: A Conversation

Natasha Ginwala: I wonder if we could think about corruption as something that already performs immanently in your various roles as an artist, musician, and writer, in the ways that these different approaches become entangled across processes of liveness and improvisation, in music, scripting and building film scenarios, and so forth. Hassan Khan: Of course even the word “corruption” is very broad; there is direct political and financial corruption, there is entropy as a...
Maria Lind

Made to Fit, or The Gathering of the Balloons

Whereas size is set, scale is situational. It is the difference between hegemony and relations, the distinction between being willing and able to see yourself next to others and not being able to. Between aspiring to be king of the hill and wanting to play with those already on the playground. Whereas the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris is big in size, the Venice Biennale is large in scale. One is consolidated and monolithic and the other is scattered and distributed. And yet both suffer...
Marisol de la Cadena

Uncommoning Nature

On June 5, 2009, at dawn, a violent confrontation took place between police forces and a large group of Peruvian citizens declaring themselves as belonging to the Awajun-Wampis indigenous groups. The police’s objective was to break up a blockade at a major highway near the town of Bagua in the Amazonian lowlands of northern Peru. The Awajun-Wampis had taken control of the highway at a place called La Curva del Diablo (Devil’s Curve) as part of a general strike that started on April 9 that...
Susanne von Falkenhausen

Self-Identity is a Bad Visual System

Self-identity is a bad visual system. Theory is passionate fiction. These are two statements that, even or just because of their isolation from their original context, are both open enough to let loose our thoughts, and precise enough to become sharp tools of criticism. The first one is from Donna Haraway’s seminal essay “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988), and the second one is by Teresa de Lauretis in The...
Sher Singh and Shveta Sarda

Of Work Riots, Political Prisoners, and Workers Refusing to Leave the Factory—Translated Through the Pages of Faridabad Workers News (2005–2015)

Since October 27, 2005 workers have walked the streets with placards. When we stand on paths that lead to factories at the start of the morning shift, many stop. We exchange stories, ideas, and glances; the restlessness of management rises . 1 The labyrinthine paper trails of the cloth mill where I, Ram Sagar, worked for thirty years and, like thousands of others, thought myself to have been a worker, have revealed themselves as belonging to seventeen different companies. This...
Guy Mannes-Abbott

Laboring One to Seven (Island of Terror)

One I’m laboring for words of concrete precision. Words for forms of labor that are both textbook early nineteenth century and specific to the early twenty-first century. Ones to honor the bodies and minds generating this “labor power,” and that will also reach my intended targets. 1 Words to break down an individual’s sleep-deprived, debt-formed despair, and so break with a system of exchange driving us to extinction. I’m striving to touch you through screens and borders, to conjure...
Metahaven

Eating Glass: The New Propaganda

Imagine a Louis Vuitton pattern. Now imagine the shapes of the pattern, each of them, slowly curling into question marks. Imagine that pattern being printed across reality. Everything occurring in spacetime becomes a luxury handbag of question marks. There wasn’t enough of a budget to visualize this in After Effects, so you’ll have to use your imagination. The philosopher Jacques Ellul once wrote that “nothing is worse in times of danger than to live in a dream world.” But he added that...
Ilya Budraitskis

The Extraordinary Adventures of Guy Fawkes

For the revolution to happen, everything must be done to prevent it. Cunning of speech art thou! But I am slow To learn of thee, whom I have found my foe. —Sophocles, Oedipus Rex If there has been anything consistent about the extremely eclectic ideology of the post-Soviet Russian state in the past decade, it can be described with one idea: anti-revolution. This is not to be confused with counterrevolution. Counterrevolution, as the term has been used since the...
Sean Dockray and Lawrence Liang

Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries

Foederis aequas Dicamus leges (Let us make fair terms for the compact.) —Virgil’s Aeneid , XI Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. 1 June 30, 2015 Dear Sean, I have been asked by Raqs Media Collective to contribute to a special ongoing issue of e-flux journal that is part of the Venice Biennale. Raqs’s section in the issue rethinks Rousseau’s social contract and the possibility of its being rewritten, as a way of imagining social bonds and...
Denise Ferreira da Silva

Reading Art as Confrontation

“What I can say is that there are different layers of refusal; it begins with this violence I am responsible for in photographs; I find myself in a situation of impossibility, of doing what I have to do with these images. And then there is another layer over this; the context of the art world, the institutional context … I find it very violent to be at this point of the program, I think about [whether] what I am presenting will offend somebody. It is very difficult to exist in this and...
Tom Holert

Blackout City

And then the lights went off. The glistening, glittering, blinking structure turned into a skeleton of blackness, with only a few lights remaining in the picture. On January 8, 2015, at 8:00 p.m., the Eiffel Tower was stripped of its spectacular illumination for six minutes following the orders of the Paris town hall, or someone in the higher ranks of the French nation’s government, who had decided that dimming the lights of the “iconic” monument in the “City of Light” would be an...
Hiwa K

A Few Notes from an Extellectual

My Father’s Color Period “Tonight the film will be broadcast in color.” A rumor spread in 1979 that the state-owned television station would show a film in color despite the fact that most televisions were black and white. Unlike in cities with Arab inhabitants, the majority of the people in the Kurdish area of Iraq still didn’t have color TV sets. So my father decided to cut a sheet of colored cellophane and stick it on the screen of our TV at home. It stayed a whole week...
Naeem Mohaiemen

Traitors, a Mutable Lexicon

In the 1980s, television in Dhaka was a sterile broadcast box. There was one government channel (Bangladesh Television), starting at six in the evening and ending at midnight with a fluttering flag over Tagore’s national anthem. Programming formats were prescribed, and even to sing on one of the variety shows, you had to pass an exam to become a “registered artist.” The nightly English-language program was usually a “remaindered” show on delayed recycling routes ( High Chaparral and The...
Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty

It Takes so Much for a City to Happen

Cities are formally complex, experientially intense, and have logics that are incoherent. They fold spaces, practices, and relationships together to create an enormous, perpetually transforming morph. This morph is characterized by unclear geographies, absurd lives, unstable forms, and the coexistence of sharp contradictions within it. The formulations around grand narratives of globalization, corporate capitalism, neoliberalism, informalization, and so forth; or deficiency-stories of...
Ben Woodard

Less World to be Ourselves: A Note on Postapocalyptic Simplification

While ecological catastrophe weighs as heavy as it ever has on the popular imaginary, it is notable that the majority of postapocalyptic tales do not feature disasters of the ecological variety. 1 In the following I argue that this focus stems from two interconnected problems. The first is that postapocalyptic narratives conflate the concept of a human-centered world and a biologically sustaining Earth. The second problem is a general lack of a concept of futurity, of any sense of a future...
Julieta Aranda and Brian Kuan Wood

Give Back to Your Alma Mater!

ON A DARK STAGE, WE HEAR A DIAL TONE. THE PHONE RINGS A FEW TIMES. THE LIGHTS SLOWLY FADE IN. WE SEE BRIAN ON THE PHONE. AN AUTOMATED SWITCHBOARD PICKS UP. AUTOMATED SWITCHBOARD (a robotic, Siri-like voice) Hello, you have reached the office of the School of the Arts at Coslumbia University. For the head of the department, press 1; for registration information, press 2; for the computer lab, press 3; all other inquiries, press 4. AS BRIAN PRESSES A KEY, THE...
Aleksandr Svyatogor

Our Affirmations

Even when I was publishing articles and lecturing on the radical ideas of immortalism and space travel during the early days of the Revolution, I was distilling them to a few affirmations that, although far from complete, constituted a fairly satisfactory definition of our credo. It seemed particularly important to create an awareness of our ideas in their most basic form, as close as possible in format to slogans, to express our scientific or philosophical ideas in a nutshell and answer a...
Coco Fusco

The Revolution Is Dead—But Long Lives the State!

On the eve of the restoration of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States after a half-century standoff, I paid a visit to the Solidarność Museum in Gdansk. The museum’s permanent exhibition is an encyclopedic display of documents, videos, artifacts, and photographs detailing the rise of the independent trade union in the adjacent shipyard, the repressive response of the Soviet and Polish authorities, and the spread of popular resistance that, we are to understand, led to the...
Rory Rowan

Extinction as Usual?: Geo-Social Futures and Left Optimism

Back to Geo-Social Futures The concept of the Anthropocene, the so-called geological age of man, has become pervasive in recent years, marking one of those rare instances when an idea from the natural sciences gains wider purchase on the popular imagination, as evolution, thermodynamics, and Gaia have before it. Although the concept remains contentious within the Earth sciences—the International Commission on Stratigraphy is debating whether it should be adopted within the scientific...
Arjuna Neuman

Heart of Brightness

Sunshinism is our bright new horizon: the framework, culture, and spiritual practice of homotechnicus—the outcome of our ontological mutations following in the image of thermonuclear weapons. It is a life-giving force but a decoy. As a belief system, it maximizes our smiles like coins; its ritual is based in sun salutations that prostrate the body toward a technological sun a thousand times the size of our own; its framework dissolves all traditions and all religions, simultaneously uniting...
Charles Stankievech

Supercritical Decay

My anarchy obeys subterraneously a law in which I deal occultly with astronomy, mathematics and mechanics. And my hunger is fed by these putrefying beings in decomposition. My rite is a purifier of forces. But malignancy exists in the jungle. I swallow a mouthful of blood that fills me entirely. I hear cymbals and trumpets and tambourines that fill the air with noise and uproar drowning out the silence of the disc of the sun and its marvel. I want a cloak woven from threads of solar gold....
Anton Vidokle

THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION WAS CAUSED BY THE SUN: A PARTIAL SCRIPT FOR A SHORT FILM

A FIELD OF WIND TURBINES. Enormous white propeller blades fill the screen. They are rotating in slow motion and almost silently, except for a soft, rhythmic swish of air. The NARRATOR’s voice has an echo. NARRATOR Make yourself comfortable. Move around if you need to. Like you do when you sleep. It helps to relax. As you begin to feel comfortable Move your attention all the way down to your feet. Imagine your feet starting to feel pleasantly warm. Warm and...
Sophia Al-Maria

TBH IDK FTW

In the spring of 1915 an editorial assistant called Dorothy Parker hung a full-color centerfold of a cadaver above her desk at Vogue . She had pulled it out of an undertaker’s trade rag called Sunnyside . The image was instructive to the novice mortician who might want to learn the best insertion points for embalming fluid, but repulsive to her boss, who soon fired her. She waited at that desk for news of the world to come. Seeds of information flitting via the thrum of telegraph...
Aaron Schuster

You Can’t Ask Everyone to Behave Ethically Just Like That

“You can’t ask everyone to behave ethically just like that,” commented an unrepentant Sepp Blatter during the recent FIFA prosecutions. This phrase is truly a bit of comic genius worthy of Sturges or Lubitsch. Of course, it is intended as a kind of excuse, of the genre, “I can’t possibly monitor everyone; there will always be the law-breaking exceptions,” and so on. But it’s practically a slip; Blatter gives away too much. It is as if he were indignant about the very prospect of demanding...
Oleksiy Radynski

The Arts for the Global Conflict: A 2115 Report

As our civilization is engulfed by the Second Global Conflict, let’s pause for a moment to remember some overlooked episodes from the first decades of the twenty-first century, just before the First Global Conflict (GCI) started nearly a hundred years ago. To understand our current crisis, the violent years leading up to the outbreak of the First Global Conflict need to be scrutinized in a more substantial manner than academics and authors alike have done. Historical science on both...
Jussi Parikka

The Alchemic Digital, The Planetary Elemental

As expressed in panmetallism, metal is coextensive to the whole of matter, and the whole of matter to metallurgy. Even the waters, the grasses and varieties of wood, the animals, are populated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere. Metal is the conductor of all matter. —Deleuze and Guattari 1 If not magical, it’s at least alchemical. The visual rhetoric of corporate computation is no longer merely a world of wizardry, of all sorts of...
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Castroneirics: A Dreamitaph for Fidel (The Exquisite Cadaver)

Dreaming of Fidel. Cubans, though none have yet to admit it, have begun to dream of Fidel. It is a posthumous dream, one that bodes ill. A premonition. A sleepless fear. A final humiliation of the Premier by his fellow countrymen— technically his troops. And there is also the sense that we are doing away with Fidel: the timely nightmare that, by force of nature— and of violence—we Cubans now need a lingering Fidel, half-mummified, hoarse, his skin petrified or...
Showkat Kathjoo

The Memory of a Deluge and the Surface of Water

It rained heavily in the old days. Last year it also rained, heavily. The clouds whispered, then burst, then whispered. They whispered and thundered about the daev , the demons descending from the sky—demons wet with heavy rain. What was it that the demons wished for as they rained? Was it deluge, again? The deluge of September 2014 wreaked havoc in the valley of Kashmir. It besieged the homes of people, drowned the hearts of lovers, stormed the minds of poets, assaulted everything...
Carolyn L. Kane

Plastic Shine: From Prosaic Miracle to Retrograde Sublime

Plastics ... A Way to a Better More Carefree Life. — House Beautiful , 1947 1 Plastic, wrote Roland Barthes circa 1954, is “the first magical substance that consents to be prosaic.” 2 Indeed, the conveniences and major feats of modern culture would cease to exist without it. Found in such diverse objects as toothbrushes, water bottles, doorknobs, chewing gum, cellophane wrap, electronic and computer parts, acrylic paint, vinyl, Formica, and the ubiquitous polyurethane plastic...
Nikolai Fedorov

The Museum, Its Meaning and Mission

The museum is the last remnant of the cult of ancestors; it is a special type of that cult, which while being expelled from religion, as we see with Protestants, is reestablished in the form of museums. The only thing higher than the old tatters preserved in museums is the very dust itself, the very remains of the dead; just as the only thing that would be higher than a museum would be a grave, unless the museum itself does not become a transport of ashes to the city, or a transformation of...
Emre Hüner and Pelin Tan

The Forms of Non-Belonging

I knew that he was going to succeed, for he had time on his side, and that the foundations of the world were going to collapse; he was moved by no precise motivation, but an animal-like obstinacy; I attributed to him the intuitive knowledge and powers of a shaman. —Michel Houellebecq 1 Pelin Tan: An artifact is always related to decay and time; thus it is not only situated in historical time. Just remember our experience of the “arche-fossil” in the geography of Mesopotamia. The...
Franco “Bifo” Berardi

The Message of Francis

“Omnia videre, multa dissimulare, pauca corrigere.” In Habemus papam (the best movie by this director, in my opinion), Nanni Moretti portrays the impotence of human beings facing the immensity of historical suffering. God is nowhere in the movie, and the new elected Pope, played by Michel Piccoli, feels unable to express with words the unimaginable chaos of reality in the absence of God. Moretti’s genius in this case foretold a drama that actually unfolded in the Church of Rome...
Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu

Crimes Without a Scene: Qian Weikang and the New Measurement Group

In the mid 1990s, the Shanghai artist Qian Weikang and the Beijing artist collective New Measurement Group (Chen Shaoping, Gu Denxin, and Wang Luyan) stopped making art. They did not foresee the difficulty we would encounter today in revisiting their work only two decades later. These were artists whose artistic vision and practice were deeply invested in modernizing contemporary art in China soon after 1989 by introducing self-imposed rules into the making of work, as well as with the...
Keti Chukhrov

Why Preserve the Name “Human”?

There are two main motivations for claiming the extinguishing of the human condition. The first one stems from an ethical and evolutionary dismissal of humankind for its atrocities with regard to nature, ecology, society. Anthropocentrism is here considered an obsolete planetary and social paradigm. 1 The second path of claiming a posthumanist or in-humanist condition is actually a Nietzschean overhumanism whose present interpretations and developments are found in contemporary manifestos...
Jonas Staal

Empire and Its Double: The Many Pavilions of the Islamic State

On March 7, 2015, the day e-flux journal no. 63 is published, I receive a text message from my colleague Younes Bouadi. “The e-flux website is hacked,” it reads. Upon opening the site, an Islamic chant fills my room. An image, imitating the font of the Transformers franchise, appears on my screen: “KHILAFAH WILL TRANSFORM THE WORLD.” A logo next to it shows a blue skull eating away at the face of Guy Fawkes, whose mask became the symbol of the hacker group Anonymous after it was...
Uzma Z. Rizvi

Theorizing Deposition: Transitional Stratigraphy, Disruptive Layers, and the Future

If you grow into your own sense of self and body knowing that both space and time are normatively known to be under your control, then certainly all space, all time, and thus all history, archaeology, and heritage is your body’s or no body’s . If we have learned anything from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), it is that even in postured idiocy, the heteronormative white male protagonist might have a chance to control the past. It is that body which seems to be allowed to...
Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Is There Any World to Come?

The problem of the end of the world is always formulated as a separation or divergence, a divorce or orphaning resulting from the disappearance of one pole in the duality of world and inhabitant—the beings whose world it is. In our metaphysical tradition, this being tends to be the “human,” whether called Homo sapiens or Dasein . The disappearance may be due to either physical extinction or one pole’s absorption by the other, which leads to a change in the persisting one. We could...
Kader Attia

The Loop

Ancient peoples left traces of their astronomic observations, the origins of which remain mysterious. It seems impossible that they could have seen or understood certain cosmic phenomena without the technological means we have today. For instance, how could the Dogon people from Mali have observed and built their whole cosmogony around a star, Sirius, which they named Sigui Tolo ? This star is in fact a binary star, made of Sirius A and Sirius B, the two of which appear aligned on the same...
Federico Campagna

After Nihilism, After Technic: Sketches for a New Philosophical Architecture

Even at the end of the Byzantine era, when Constantinople’s crumbling walls were all that was left of the long-gone splendor of the Roman Empire, the inhabitants of the city would still refer to themselves as Romanoi , “the Romans.” Likewise today, as a new era takes the world by storm, much like the Turkish armies did to Byzantium, we continue to refer to ourselves as the willing or unwilling subjects of capitalism. Yet like the faded insignia of a constitutional monarchy, stat rosa...
Anne Anlin Cheng and Tom Holert

Do You See It? Well, It Doesn’t See You!

Tom Holert: A key point in both Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface (2011) and its accompanying essay “Shine: On Race, Glamour, and the Modern” of the same year is what you have poignantly and paradoxically called the “disappearance into appearance,” referencing the particular “shimmering, excessively ornamentalized performance” of Anna May Wong in the 1929 movie Piccadilly . This act of disappearing, this loss of visibility in derealizing hypervisuality, runs against...
Yin-Ju Chen and James T. Hong

The Fruitarian Dilemma: A Dialogue about Kissing Ass, Corruption, and Compromise

This dialogue begins in anger, but ends abruptly in surrender. It is about mundane and trivial issues when compared to the grand scheme of things. It is about the typical slights that happen every day within a local socio-geographical structure. It is about some of the things we only talk about at friendly dinner parties or when drunk in bars. It is based on the solid evidence of rumors, mixed metaphors, gossip, knowing looks, insults, movies, astrology, intoxicants, and guilty confessions....
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Theorems of Life (As an Addendum and Clarification on Monism)

I will not stop attempting to understand what is most important to a conscious being: (1) subjective continuity of life; (2) its limitlessness in either direction; and (3) its bliss. All this, so to speak, is refuted by biological life on Earth. So as not to succumb to this misconception, we need to look at life from the height of space. Here I present only sixteen theorems of life. Matter is considered to be devoid of feeling by the majority of people. We do not agree with this. That is why...
Sarnath Banerjee

The Idle Monologue of an Unconvinced Surveyor

“It seems that nature has at man’s birth fixed the bounds of his virtues and vices.” —François de La Rochefoucauld The idle monologue of an unconvinced surveyor. Certain countries have taken the fight against corruption quite seriously. Jagat Ram, a mid-level official at the Delhi Jal Board (the water commission of Delhi), is amongst those who are directly affected. Bengal’s Derrida, Sukanta Sarkar (alias: Sukantada), who had once suggested minor...
Jon Rich

ISIS and the CIA Vie for the Claim to Divinity

One would be hard-pressed to find evidence for which form of torture is more brutal: immolation or waterboarding. There is little evidence from victims of burning to describe the extent of their pain. Moreover, survivors of immolation generally haven’t experienced drowning in order to decide which is the more violent ending. We have also not seen proof of whether the strategy of self-drowning, in a sea, a river, or a public pool, has been used by Arab Spring protestors, Buddhist Priests, or...
Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.)

On Direct Action: An Address to Cultural Workers

What time is it on the clock of the world? —Grace Lee Boggs We amplify a cry reverberating across the globe. From Istanbul and Sao Paulo to New York and London, the proliferation of direct actions is disrupting business as usual at elite cultural institutions: #BlackLivesMatter at the Museum of Natural History, climate protests at the Tate Modern and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, collective pressure for boycott at Haifa’s Technion, worker solidarity disruptions at the Guggenheim...
Tavi Meraud

Field Guide to Skirmology: Handbook for the Skirmonaut

1. Who is the Skirmonaut? Or a better question: Where is the Skirmonaut? The task of the Skirmonaut is to constantly demarcate itself and delimit its environment, for it is the origin of the ecology of the screen. Its task is to delimit the screen. In so doing, it constantly rediscovers that screening is itself this act of delimitation. The Skirmonaut is the preemptively, or even proleptically, nostalgic creature par excellence. The Skirmonaut is diabolical. It operates...
Steven Shaviro

Arsenic Dreams

In 2010, a group of scientists working for NASA announced a startling discovery. They claimed to have found a strain of microbes, hidden in the depths of Mono Lake in California, that were able to consume arsenic as a replacement for phosphorus. This was a surprise. Phosphorus is one of the basic, necessary building blocks of life alongside carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur. Arsenic, on the other hand, is generally toxic: not just to human beings—for whom it has a long history...
David Hodge and Hamed Yousefi

Provincialism Perfected: Global Contemporary Art and Uneven Development

Looking back on twentieth century modernism from the standpoint of today, it seems that its major aesthetic component was actually provincialism. Across the world, different forms of social and economic modernization emerged, leading artists to develop new practices that broke from tradition to engage with these shifting circumstances. However, the early canonization of “modern art” in Western Europe, followed by the transfer of power to New York towards the middle of the century, meant that...
Liam Gillick

Weapons Grade Pig Work

Aboveboard. I really am honest and open now. More and more. Since being out here. It’s the place. It’s bigger and softer. It’s a better way to work. I’ve employed a bunch of people. Back where I came from the old cynics said, “I don’t think you’re being totally aboveboard with us.” Aces in their places! That’s my only response. When I shout that out these days everyone runs to their station and leverages their core competencies. That’s what I want to achieve. So I can spend some time in my...
Leela Gandhi and Bhrigupati Singh

Botched Enlightenment: A Conversation

Bhrigupati Singh: Leela, I want to discuss a recent event with you because I'm not sure of the horizon from which to consider its significance. The event occurs in your recent book The Common Cause . Like your earlier work, this book makes a world map. Strange figures appear on this map: loinclothed Indian “gymnosophists” in conversation with Greek Cynics, gurus beside minor mutineers. But one doesn’t have to be frugal or rebellious to do philosophy. Kant, as you describe him, becomes...
Aleksandr Bogdanov

Immortality Day

1. One thousand years have passed since the day the genius chemist Fride invented a formula for physiological immunity. Injecting the formula into the bloodstream renewed the body’s tissues and sustained its eternal blossoming youth. The dreams of medieval alchemists, philosophers, poets, and kings had come true. Cities in their previous forms ceased to exist. Thanks to the ease and universal accessibility of air travel, people were no longer limited by distance and settled all...
Jean-Luc Nancy

Oh the Animals of Language

Oh Tiger oh Alligator one another neither friends nor foes cruel indifferent sovereigns meeting by chance not through hunting or the whim of men zoo or domestic fantasy fantastical fantasy face to face in ignorance pure cruel innocents sawing jaws bony frame violent game long indolent torpor skin-deep sleep and sudden awakening as if called by a bugle a signal an alarm a cry a scent a rustle a breeze an insect or snake pulse of prey or threat pulsing death oh...
Adam Kleinman

ARGUS is: An Almost Cock and Bull Story

Part I: The All-Seeing The voice of god speaks; we’re told we’re not ready to see something special. It’s classified. A camera tracks to the right and zooms in on a tarp covering an object. Dr. Yiannis Antoniades, a scientist at BAE Systems, a private multinational defense, security, and aerospace company, interjects: “it is important for the public to know,” but, he goes on, “we are not allowed to expose some of the pieces that make up the sensor, so you get to look at pretty...
Hu Fang

Why We Look at Plants, in a Corrupted World

1. If I could share the agony of someone in a vegetative state, I wouldn’t try to write about it, friends. I would stay silent for my plant person . 1 It’s just that at a certain moment in the interactions between the world and my involuntary nervous system, I enter the plant person’s world, and my nerves gradually overflow the Yŏng Quán (Gushing Spring, Kidney 1), Fēngchí (Wind Pool, Gallbladder 20) and Zhàohăi (Shining Sea, Kidney 6), spilling past the Chéngfú (Hold and...
Gertrude Stein

The Making of Americans

At the turn of the twentieth century, Paris was the center of modernity. Everyone who was interested in modern art and culture wanted to come to Paris, namely Americans, among whom were a couple of my brothers, Leo and Michael. I joined them in 1903. Leo wanted to be an artist, and he rented a space on the ground floor on Rue de Fleurus, then number 27, as his studio. But he soon realized he wouldn’t be an artist, so he decided to collect instead. He had already acquired a number of works by...
DIS

Styles and Customs in the 2020s

Crowdsourced from DIS’s expanded network of collaborators, thinkers, and friends, here are our predictions for the 2020s. 1 The 2020s begin on a high note. 3-D nano-printing pushes the greatest ever museological art displays into the public-private sphere of the living unit. Big art museums no longer expand, they merge with other museums, science centers, and in particular botanical and zoological gardens. The discussion surrounding the De-Extinction of Art reaches new heights when...
Lesley Green

The Changing of the Gods of Reason: Cecil John Rhodes, Karoo Fracking, and the Decolonizing of the Anthropocene

The dry semi-desert that is South Africa’s Karoo began as an ice cap on the supercontinent Pangea, when Euramerica and Gondwana were joined into one large land mass. The Karoo ice cap was kilometers deep and peaked between 359 and 299 million years ago. Planetary temperatures dropped in that period, since the evolution of land plants elsewhere on the planet took up so much CO2 that earth lost its greenhouse roof. 1 Many paleontologists think it was an early form of termites that ended...
Dr. Beatriz Balanta, Benj Gerdes , Jennifer Hayashida, Christopher Myers , Brian Kuan Wood, and Mary Walling Blackburn

Child as Material

Those who never saw La Borde’s shit pit in person, under that open sky, cannot possibly fathom the extraordinary range of colors, shapes, and textures of that human creation. Our fascination, as children, with that giant pool, that huge sea of shit, made us defy all rules. Located at a distance, past the buildings of the sawmill, two basins, staring into the sky, held that astounding content. We climbed onto the narrow stone blocks that surrounded it and walked along carefully, following...
Ernesto Oroza and Gean Moreno

La Ville Souvenir

What would happen if every souvenir shop and stand was invaded by an abstract souvenir, something that everyone, even children, recognize as a malefic mass? And what if this mass all of a sudden was to be acknowledged by a baffled population as a proper sign to identify the city by? What if, magically eliciting little hostility, the souvenir was simply accepted and reproduced, despite the diffuse disgust and pointed fear that it generated in everyone? Imagine hundreds of thousands of malefic...
Matteo Pasquinelli

On Solar Databases and the Exogenesis of Light

The atoms encode. Material elements, they perform as well as signs; they inform each other mutually, elect each other, choose each other, reflect each other, repel each other, like the diamonds in that cave of wonders, like all molecules do, like the codes of the living combine … They encode, we encode; they count, we count; we speak, they speak. Knowledge is thus the ability to listen and to translate the scattered languages of things. They usually speak mathematics. —Michael...
Ala Younis

Men of Bronze, Homes of Concrete

Here Men are made of bronze. Homes are made of concrete. The city is designed as a 1 km circle, with rings of functional structures along the inside of its walls. It was not built before two astrologers advised on the date and time. July 30, 762 at 1:57 p.m. They say it is the revealing of the sky … If people listen to prophets, No catastrophic ordeal sends its loud laughter … And the shabby odious myth rarely could be related …...
Mohammad Salemy

Art After the Machines

This text is brought to you from the intersection of collaboration and hyperstition. What makes this experiment necessary is the severity of the cultural crisis in which art stubbornly refuses to find itself. For art to make sense and to survive the uprooting effects of the escalating cybernetic revolution, it needs to be something other than what it has been. The place to consider the future of art is as much the world of thought as it is the artist’s studio or the gallery. This...
Adrian Lahoud

Nomos and Cosmos

The 1620 frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna depicts a sailing vessel passing through the Straits of Gibraltar between the fabled Pillars of Hercules into the open sea. The vessel is leaving the waters of the Mediterranean for the Atlantic. The scene depicts the moment before the crossing but curiously, rather than being rendered from the point of view of those left on the European shore, the ship approaches a viewer who already stands somewhere in the Atlantic, looking back...
Karl Holmqvist

GORILLAZ GRRLZ

SPICE GRRLZ GORILLAZ GRRLZ SPICE GRRLZ GORILLAZ GRRLZ SPICE GRRLZ GORILLAZ GRRLZ GALERIES GRRLZ SPICE GRRLZ GORILLAZ GRRLZ SPICE GRRLZ GORILLAZ GRRLZ SPICE GRRLZ GORILLAZ GRRLZ GALERIES GRRLZ MY KIND OF GRRLZ SPICE GRRLZ GORILLAZ GRRLZ SPICE GRRLZ GORILLAZ GRRLZ SPICE GRRLZ GORILLAZ GRRLZ SPICE GRRLZ GORILLAZ GRRLZ SPICE GRRLZ GORILLAZ GRRLZ SPICE GRRLZ GORILLAZ...
Jan Verwoert

Torn Together

There is something about the word “corruption” that says so much about what it describes. Corruption. Say it like you were striking a key on a piano to hear the note. Corruption. Corruption. Now try the keys next to it. Interruption. Disruption. Rupture. Rumpus. Rumpere is Latin for tear, split, break. You hear the violence of the act in the sharp “p” and “t” that kill off the “u” right after it resonates. As in shut “up.” R-up-t-ure. R-ap-t-ure does the same. It’s derived from rapere,...
Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.)

Online Digital Artwork and the Status of the “Based-In” Artist

Like any mutually beneficial relationship between organizations, this one began with a proposition. Art Agenda, a subsidiary of e-flux, asked W.A.G.E. to establish compensation standards for the commissioning of online digital artworks, specifically addressing the ethics, codes, and challenges of determining equitable pay. Art Agenda agreed to follow these standards for its recently relaunched Dossier section. e-flux is a for-profit publishing platform and archive, artist project,...
Arseny Zhilyaev

Second Advents: On the Issue of Planning in Contemporary Art

It was the second month since I had been resurrected under the Cradle of Humankind program, and the second week of our orbital revolution around the Earth on a rocket. I was very pleased with myself, as my intuitive guesses had turned out to be extremely close to the truth. I was now flying back and forth around the rocket and almost crying tears of joy, like a child. The puzzled workers tried to ask me how I was feeling, but I just gave them masculine hugs and laughed crazily. I spent hours...
Pedro Neves Marques

Look Above, the Sky is Falling: Humanity Before and After the End of the World

Many Amerindians believe that animals have descended from humans rather than humans from animals. Within these cosmogonies, in the beginning everything was human. Then the world ended and from that cataclysm the many species, forests, rivers, stars, and minerals were formed. This dispersion ended the mythic state of primordial cannibalism, when everything was undifferentiated and thus ate its own kin in order to feed itself. All these entities, regardless of their species or form, remain...
Douglas Coupland

Shiny

In early December of 2012 I was in the middle of a severe seasonal depression, a condition I’m more than familiar with. On December 6 I needed to fly to Stockholm, and I was distressed at the prospect of having to do so while depressed. To be honest, I didn’t think it was even going to be possible. In a last-minute act of desperation, on December 2 I bought a light box for $199 at a local drugstore—150 bright, light blue LEDs arranged in a grid. I plugged it in, looked at it for three...
Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nts

Like their previous film, the Karrabing Film Collective’s second work, Windjarrameru (The Stealing C*nt$), is a piece of improvisational realism . The basic plot is set in the scrub near Darwin, Australia and is easy enough to summarize. A group of four indigenous young men, played by members of the collective, are holed up in a chemically compromised mangrove swamp having been falsely accused of stealing two cartons of beer, while at the edge of the standoff miners are ransacking the...
Benjamin H. Bratton

On Deprofessionalizing Surgery

Overview At the Center for the Future of Surgery at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, medical students learn to operate surgical robots. The surgeon sits at a control station with her eyes focused into a fixed stereoscopic viewer. In each hand she manipulates extremely nimble rotational controllers to guide four robotic arms through the procedure. At the tip of each arm may be a scalpel, scissors, a Bovie cauterizer, a fiberoptic camera or light, or any of...
Ahmet Öğüt

Things Based on Real-Life Events

A sunny day in Berlin. In his apartment on Karl-Marx-Straße, Ahmed is searching for his phone to call Ahmed. The phone is ringing. After a while it is picked up. —Hi Ahmed! I got your number from Ceyda. Remember she introduced us at the People’s Park? You were swamped with the urgent logistical question of people amassing in front of the Our Commons tent. I hope I am not disturbing you now. Is this a good time to talk? —Hello my namesake! Yes, I remember, how can I forget! I...
Luis Camnitzer

Thinking About Art Thinking

One of the problems we face when talking about art education is that we take the term “work of art” for granted. “Work” refers to labor as much as to an object, while “art” means the discipline in which this is performed, although it is also used as a laudatory adjective. In any case this divides people in two groups: those who make the objects, and those who appreciate them. Those who make them are subject to the criteria of meritocracy and the educational system aims to distill the few...
Nina Power

Construction with Steel and Technology

Gustav M. watched as his giant sculpture, a thirty-foot non-reflective steel cube packed with computers, smartphones, and tablets, all a few years old now, was lifted high above the ground, swinging at the end of a crane’s chain. Already, even though Gustav had only packed the cube with equipment less than half a decade ago, and the steel had been of high quality, there was seepage as chemicals leeched out of their obsolescent electronic packets, tiny odd bumps were beginning to appear on...
Jimmie Durham

Apocalypsis, or The Dragon in Her Cave

Calypso is the leading technology platform for cross-asset trading, Accounting, processing, and enterprise risk management. Key words: Cross asset Enterprise Accounting Trading Technology Risk Management Certainly Verbosity...
Julieta Aranda and Ana Teixeira Pinto

Turk, Toaster, Task Rabbit

This is a text about the utopia of a frictionless space defined by perfect reception and its discontents. In the late eighteenth century a chess-playing automaton toured the courts of Europe. Known as the “Mechanical Turk,” the automaton defeated Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin before being exposed as a hoax: hiding in its innards, a human operator was, in fact, moving the chess pieces. In a way, this was a reverse Turing test, predating Turing: a kind of labor in which it is required...
Harun Farocki

On the Documentary

Last day in Johannesburg. On the terrace next to our hotel I take a photo of one of the approximately 15 chairs around a long, fixed table. A chair cushion has been fitted onto a tin bucket. Three wooden bars screwed onto the bucket serve as legs. In order to increase the chair’s stability, the bars have been bent outward. Probably under steam—the same method by which the components of Vienna coffeehouse chairs are bent. The handle has been left on the bucket. This handle is used to pick up...
Boris Groys

Cosmic Anxiety: The Russian Case

During the period of modernity we grew accustomed to an understanding of human beings as determined by the social milieu in which they live, as knots in information networks, as organisms dependent on their environment. In the times of globalization we have learned that we are dependent on everything that happens around the globe—politically, economically, ecologically. But the Earth is not isolated in the cosmos. It depends on the processes that take place in cosmic space—in dark matter,...
Ted Chiang and Allora & Calzadilla

The Great Silence

The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices? We’re a non-human species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for? *** The universe is so vast that intelligent life must surely have arisen many times....
Martha Rosler

The Art of Cooking: A Dialogue Between Julia Child and Craig Claiborne

Julia Child: Craig, my dear, I’ve been thinking. We all know that cooking is an art. But I wonder: How did it get to be one? After all, most of what we think of as art hangs on the wall or sits out in a courtyard ... Craig Claiborne: Well Julia, I know what you mean. Yet obviously there are many kinds of art that don’t do that. Aside from cooking, we have music, the theater, dance— Julia Child : Yes, Craig. But those haven’t any use: I mean, how serious are we about cooking...
Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle

SUPERCOMMUNITY (editorial)

Having no body and no name is a small price to pay for being wild, for being free to move across (some) countries, (some) political boundaries, (some) historical ideologies, and (some) economies. I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. I grew out of something that used to be humanity. Some have compared me to angry crowds in public squares; others compare me to wind and atmosphere, or to software. Some say they have seen me moving through jet-lagged artists and...
Jimmie Durham
There is nothing related.
Conversations - Apocalypsis, or The Dragon in Her Cave
Conversations
Join the Conversation

e-flux conversations is a discussion platform for e-flux readers. Click to start a discussion of the article above.

Start the Conversation
Share - Apocalypsis, or The Dragon in Her Cave
Click to subscribe to e-flux and be the first to receive the latest news on international exhibitions and all e-flux related announcements
Subscribe
Subscribe to e-flux
Be the first to receive the latest news on international exhibitions and all e-flux related announcements.
Subscribe to architecture
Explore the most recent content from e-flux architecture and urbanism
Subscribe to e-flux programs
Keep up-to-date on all upcoming talks, screenings, and exhibitions at e-flux in New York