Book: Luke Bennett and Katja Hock, Scree

 

 

In the tail end of 2013, Luke Bennett and Katja Hock released their collaborative effort Scree, currently available for download from Bennett's blog. Launching from an enquiry into an ordinary house brick sheltered in his garage, the pursuit to take it "back to the place of its birth" carry Bennett to peculiar wasteland places layered together in an accumulating escarpment: landfill, abandoned skiers' dry slope, forgotten gas works, ghost town and more.

"When I started out on this project I thought I'd be writing about the absence of the excavated matter, but the more I have searched for and peered into these 'holes' the more I have realised that what has happened here is the moving around of matter - across local space, across form and through time. Nothing has disappeared, it has just changed state or location."

Written in a self-identified psychogeographic style, Bennet and Hock's piece reads like a memoir replete with haunting images of space and memory. It includes, in the last handful of pages, a back-and-forth Q&A-style dialogue between Bennett and Hock ruminating on their different styles of approach to the project. The "'coffee-table' art book" can be downloaded as a pdf from here.

Book: Jonathan Kemp, The Penetrated Male

Jonathan Kemp's new book The Penetrated Male, published through open-access outfit Punctum Books, takes a discursive tour through key texts of early twentieth century literature to locate and unpack the lurking concept of the penetrated male body filling their pages.

From Daniel Paul Schreber through to James Joyce, The Penetrated Male assembles an argument which pushes against the binary reduction of the penetrated male with the feminine and its consequent threat of its erasure. Kemp draws together the threads of this incomprehensibility and inarticulability, outlining the struggle and the tantalising/terrifying failure of the logic of language to circumscribe the rupture posed by the penetrated male body. What he also finds in this pursuit is "a profoundly productive aspect of discourse, generating ways of opening up the male body":

"The penetrated male body ... is capable of not only exposing the gendered structuration of language, but of destroying the entire structure and using the pieces to build something else entirely: a form of representation more grounded in the shifting realities of flux and sensations, more geared towards registering the intensities of material bodies."

The Penetrated Male is available for free download from the Punctum Books website. You may also want to take some time to browse their catalogue of books, and journals published (not to mention their associated titles), many of which are open-access or print-on-demand if required in hard-copy.

Book: Jean-Paul Martinon, The End of Man

Jean-Paul Martinon teams up with Punctum Books for this eloquent and  personal (or "bio-graphical", as suggested by the author) offering, The End of Man, just published this month. Discursively probing at the black box of "masculinity", Martinon reinscribes the term with corporeal possibilities, refusing to wear the divides of man-woman, male-female, masculine-feminine, virile-effeminate.

 

With nods to Levinas, Derrida, Nancy, and a plenitude of current queer materialist scholars, Martinon weaves between discussions such as those of the mandates of language, the male body's eschatological existence, and contingent relations between gendered bodies. And all the while he choreographs an elegant dance over, between and around the threads of masculine failure.

"But hush, this male body is slowly stirring, turning over, progressively regaining consciousness ... the need for mastery steadily clenching ‘its’ grip. This slow turn reveals his many sides, angular, hairy, robust, smelly, warm, delicate, graceful. An abyss in every crevice, a mass at every turn, this male body can reach neither a plenitude of meaning nor a truly stable referent. His language, like his body, betrays him at every turn: never quite masculine, ever more virile/effeminate, never enough feminine."

The End of Man is available from Punctum Books as an open-access ebook downloadable for free or in print for a small fee. We are also fortunate to have Jean-Paul Martinon's response to Catherine Malabou at our recent BiM event archived on our site (available for streaming on the player to the right or from our recordings page).

 

Book: Carl Cederström & Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working

 
Dead Man Working by Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming is a new addition to the Zer0 Books series of long, "intellectual without being academic" essays on contemporary culture attempting to bring intellectual critique back to the public. Published in May 2012, this almost pocket-sized book offers an absorbing jeremiad on the economies of labour, time and selves within the all-consuming stricture of work-as-life.

Dead Man Working postulates that a neoliberal biopolitical management of the worker now occupies the corpse of captialism, which insists that not merely our bodies and time but the whole of our lives are organised and structured by the single operative mode of work. Cederström and Fleming's discursive examination cycles from call centre sweatshop to brothel special services and banker suicides (casually via Gilles Deleuze, The Smiths, Andy Warhol and many others) to expose a bleak world of inescapable labour and industry wherein not even death offers an effective exit strategy. 

"If work was once primarily regulated by bureaucracy through depersonalization then today we witness the emergence of a new regime of control which we call biocracy, in which life itself is an essential 'human resource' to be exploited ... Work is now presented as the Siamese twin to life, as the sphere in which life can most fully thrive." (14)

Those curious about Dead Man Working may also find Ivor Southwood's tract, Non-Stop Inertia (another Zer0 Books publication), which offers a complementary analysis of contemporary labour conditions and precarious life, worth a perusal.

Book: Michel Serres, Malfeasance

At the beginning of 2011, Stanford University Press published a new addition to the slowly growing body of translated work by Michel Serres - Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution?, translated by Anne Marie Feenberg-Dibon.

Bearing strong resonances with earlier texts such as The Parasite and Rome: The Book of Foundations, the pamphlet-length Malfeasance marks his turn towards contemporary considerations of the confluence between ecology (particularly the human production/act of pollution) and property. Serres' irreverent remodelling of ecocriticism involves his signature pirouettes back and forward in time and smooth segues between themes of religion, advertising, waste, tenancy, etymology and innumerable others.  

Malfeasance demands a reassessment of our proprietary claims and the processes which mark ownership of body, space and soul. While often scathing in his critique, Serres pulls his tract back from the brink of wholesale negativity by proposing (ambiguously) utopian possibilities of freedom in the contradistinguished notions of tenancy, dispossession and "dis-appropriation".

"...pollution comes from measurable residues of the work and transformations related to energy, but fundamentally it emanates from our will to appropriate, our desire to conquer and expand the space of our properties."

A four-page excerpt and the table of contents are available from the first chapter of the text are available from the Stanford University Press website.

Book: Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds

As proponents of queer theory increasingly suggest varying approaches to and trajectories for queer critique, from vitalism and affective studies to non-futurity and lateral movements, Elizabeth Freeman adds a thought-provoking new text into the mix with Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, published by Duke University Press in 2010 as part of the Perverse Modernities series edited by Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe.

Analysing a selection of North American independent films and performance artists, and novels The Lover by Bertha Harris, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Freeman seeks to re-interrogate the narratives of time which condition and "bind up" knowledge of the normative body. Being out of the synchronised beat of social time, corporeal anachronism and expressing a bricolage of identifiable times upon the body opens the possibility of a queer chronopolitics. Freeman accesses this potential through "erotohistoriographical" analysis, tracing the knots and tangles of historical time in the examination of erotics and their accompanying bodily acts, and exploring the ways in which these erotics might deny, frustrate or introduce other unstable temporal encodings upon the knowledges working on/as the body.

"Bodies, then, are not only mediated by signs; they come to 'matter' through kinetic and sensory forms of normativity, modes of belonging that make themselves felt as a barely acknowledged relief to those who fit in, while the experience [of] not fitting in often feels both like having the wrong body and like living in a different time zone. ... [U]nbinding time and/from history means recognizing how erotic relations and the bodily acts that sustain them gum up the works of the normative structures we call family and nation, gender, race, class, and sexual identity, by changing tempos, by remixing memory and desire, by recapturing excess."

Blog: BibliOdyssey

BibliOdyssey, a blog curated by Paul K (a.k.a. pecay), features a marvellous, extensive and ecclectic scanned aggregation of "visual materia obscura" including  illustration, diagrams, maps, prints and bookart. Archived at BibliOdyssey in no particular chronological order but tagged under general categories and fully searchable, are illuminations from medieval monster encyclopaedias, zoological and anatomical engravings from the nineteenth century, fifteenth-century alchemical illustrations, Modernist posters, and various other downloadable pictures with no noticeable connection other than that they are curious and/or obscure.

Since its inception in 2005, this blog has garnered widespread popularity as a respository for high-quality digitised imagery, producing (somewhat contrarily) its own textual artefact - the book BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet, published by Fuel in 2007.

In an interview with Elatia Harris at 3 Quarks Daily, Pauk K explains his process in this online archiving adventure:

"the democracy you see on the blog is really a product of combing through all the relevant material and saving what I find attractive. I have an acreage - print art - and I try to be assiduous in plowing all its constituent parts. You may well describe it as attempting to assess the visual scope of culture but that's not essentially where I come from. I'm looking for the outlandish, the intriguing, the bizarre, the beautiful, the breathtaking ..."

Book: Saitō Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl

After a somewhat protracted hiatus and recovery period, we are happy to be back in the digital flesh with the newly translated book by Saitō Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl. Published in English this year with the University of Minnesota Press, Saitō's original Japanese text released in 2000 was pivotal in shaping the decade of scholarship to come on otaku culture.

The significance of the book as a genealogy of the eroticised fighting girl theme in East Asian media, and particularly Japanese animation, may now be seen as somewhat dated given the rapid expansion of the convention, the growing tendency towards intertextual and parodic play within (and without) the anime medium and the increasingly experimental blending of genre, type and character. However, Saitō's final analysis of the economy of sexual desire involved in the Japanese otaku-animated character relationship - set against the backdrop of a furiously evolving motif of the beautiful fighting girl and interwoven with his strangely self-revealing analysis of the outsider art of Henry Darger - climaxes in an almost cinematic manner. Identifying a Japanese environment oversaturated with media codes to the detriment of depth and multiplicity of meaning, Saitō non-critically positions otaku sexuality as a powerful adaptive strategy for negotiating the realities of an informationalised world.

"For us who live this fantasy of an informationalized everyday, there is nothing at all surprising about the existence of something like a fiction more real than reality ... When our desire comes into contact with these spaces, it comes naturally to us to boot up the beautiful fighting girls. I am trying to read into this process an unintended inversion of desire. Why is it that we are so captivated by these phallic girls who will never exist in actuality? Are they not a strategy for resisting the informationalization of society, in other words, the flattening fictionalization of the entire world?"

Book: Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia

In this short but sweet scrutiny of labour management structures in Britain published by Zero Books in 2011, Ivor Southwood's semi-autobiographical critique pulls what could have been a standard macroscopic analysis of employment systems, production pressures and precarious work into an intimate, microscopic commentary on the production of a world of precarious workers.

Sometimes diatribe but constantly engrossing, the text maps an insidious culture of workstyle transience extending into the level of lifestyle organisation. Through the plethora of fascinating analyses on such experiences as the precariousness of temp work, jobseeking as a career, and technologies which insist upon obligatory availability, Southwood compiles these and the production of their corresponding anxieties as evidence in exposing a society's cultish obsession with perpetuating a disconcerting but nonetheless normalised state of "non-stop inertia".

"Beneath the veneer of lifestyle choices, in reality most people cannot afford to accept or reject particular jobs according to their own ethical preferences or pursue outside interests which are not strictly 'goal-oriented'. ... Such preoccupations divert attention away from wider abstract social or political concerns and onto a continual anxious self-surveillance. This constant precariousness and restless mobility, compounded by a dependence upon relentlessly updating market-driven technology and scrolling CGI of digital media, together suggest a sort of cultural stagflation, a population revving up without getting anywhere. The result is a kind of frenetic inactivity: we are caught in a cycle of non-stop inertia." (11)

Book: Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter

This relatively new 2010 publication (Duke University Press) sees Jane Bennett critically extend the work of her earlier book, The Enchantments of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethics (2001) into the interrogation of “thing-power” through the formation of a vital materialist perspective.

Bennett's anecdotal style finds a fitting model to poetically introduce the strange intimacy of her subject matter while simultaneously understating the ambitious trajectory of her text, which seeks to displace so many entrenched discourses surrounding issues such as the ontology of objects and matter, consumption, environmental politics and democracy.

Following, as Bennett herself identifies, “in the tradition of Democritus-Epicurus-Spinoza-Diderot-Deleuze” (xiii) (most especially Deleuze), Vibrant Matter segues from a meditation on the vitality of an ordinary gathering of items by a storm-drain grate - a work glove, oak pollen, a dead rat, a plastic bottle cap, a stick - to an ultimate consideration of the possibilities of forming a different kind of ethics premised on assemblages comprising of both human and non-human affective relations, and a different kind of agency which takes into account the powerful actant capabilities of "inanimate" matter.

"The aim is to articulate the elusive idea of a materiality that is itself heterogeneous, itself a differential of intensities, itself a life. In this strange, vital materialism, there is no point of pure stillness, no indivisible atom that is not itself aquiver with virtual force." (57)

Book: Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex

Within the title to Luciana Parisi's 2004 release, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-Technology and the Mutations of Desire, lies the promise of an intricate complex of (non)human relations which involves, inter alia, the virtual, the molecular and the social. Published as part of the Continuum series, Transversals: New Directions in Philosophy, its appearance upon the scene of critical and cultural theory signals and reflects the turn towards the centrality of the body. With a philosophical inquiry founded as much in the bacterial work of Lynn Margulis as it is in Deleuze and Guattari, her text offers a flexible schematic towards a different, relational conception of bodies, sex, femininity and desire - that is, a mapping of abstract sex.

In an extensive online interview with Matthew Fuller which is both complementary and an extension of the concepts investigated in Abstract Sex, Parisi provides multiple entry points into her text. Amongst them, this snippet:

"Abstract Sex addresses human stratification on three levels. The biophysical, the biocultural and the biodigital amalgamation of layers composing a constellation of bodies within bodies, each grappled within the previous and the next formation - a sort of positive feedback upon each other cutting across specific time scales. ... Abstract Sex points to a singular process of collision of strata undergoing the biodigital reengineering of life that forces us to engage with what we take a body, gender, and thus politics to be. For Abstract Sex to face - rather than remain dismissive of - the collision of strata implies a cut from the running flow of life demanding taking a line of flight towards destratification - a felt experience of change on a nature-culture continuum."

Book: Markus Hallensleben (ed.), Performative Body Spaces: Corporeal Topographies in Literature, Theatre, Dance, and the Visual Arts

The tail end of last year brought us a new contribution in the Critical Studies series published by Rodopi, Performative Body Spaces: Corporeal Topographies in Literature, Theatre, Dance, and the Visual Arts edited by Markus Hallensleben and available on IngentaConnect.

Containing fourteen case studies analysing diverse cultural fields and geographies, each loosely fits into one of four overarching foci: the body as racial and political space; the body as gendered and cultural space; the body as private and public space; and the body as research subject and artistic space. This collection finds its point of access at the crossroads between the turn towards materiality within theory and the viceral articulations of corporeal performance.

"By focusing on the intersection of body and space, all contributions aim to bridge the gap between art practices and theories of performativity. The innovative impulse of this approach lies in the belief that there is no distinction between performing, discussing, and theorizing the human body, and thus fosters a unique transdisciplinary and international collaboration around the theme performative body spaces."

Book: Patricia MacCormack, Cinesexuality

It seems as if the pivotal role of the screen image cannot be emphasised enough in the disruption and regeneration of the body concept - especially in an entertainment climate which heralds concepts like the mesmerising mastery of the body beautiful/grotesque (for instance, the recently released Black Swan or the absolutely brilliant Taxidermia) and the terrifyingly compelling living/dead body (un)recognisable (the thematic umbrella under which nearly every zombie-horror flick finds itself at some point), not to mention the first [born-again] generation of visual three-dimensional technology that has redirected the image to literally caress the viewer's skin.

Thus it is that Patricia MacCormack's Cinesexuality (Ashgate, 2008) offers its own particular translation of the image experience and the transformative potential of the viscerally visual. And, in a play of affects between and around all this relation to the image and the spectating self, MacCormack finds desire, pleasure, love.

As she states in an introductory interview with Eye for Film:

"...in a way I wanted to write a love poem to cinema, while also addressing crucial philosophical issues of gender and ethics which emphasise why spectatorship is not only challenging but important as an act of philosophy, activism and desire. I also, like most others, found I loved certain actors/actresses, then realized it was what cinema did to their faces, then what cinema does to everything, so objects in space (nouns) moving in time (acts, narrative) were less important than saturation of colour, timbre and rhythm of sound, gesture, the twitch of a muscle, and so on. These things cannot be good/bad, beautiful/ugly, they resist binaries and evaluations and so potentially our pleasure is contagious to the extent that, put simply, we resist binarising pleasure, objects and so forth outside of spectatorship."