Article archive

The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity Stewart martin Art’s relation to commodification is an unavoidable and entrenched condition for much of the theory, history and practice of art today; so entrenched, in fact, as to have become implicit and assumed for many. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, considerations of this relation have […]

Recent cultural histories have gone to considerable lengths to define an ‘alternative modernity’ for China, going back to the commercial developments of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. [1] As delineated via the complex relationship between dominant Western and ‘other’ versions of modernity, its general form has been indicated by, for example, Dorothy Hodgson, […]

Dossier documenta 12 magazines projectDebaclethe magazines – such as consultation about their presentation at the exhibition, and their modes of participation in the accompanying series of talks – Documenta simply broke the agreement. It had nothing to gain from realizing the project, rather than merely staging its idea. Indeed, the Magazines Project team seemed genuinely […]

The sublime whiff of criticality Radical culture research collective Documenta has always had a political agenda. The first Documenta, organized by Arnold Bode in 1955, was intended to signal to the international art world that the dark days of Nazi philistinism were definitively over: Germany’s demonstrative openness to ‘avant-garde’ art could be taken as a […]

Magazines field, or, the next Documenta should be curated by magazines Patricia Canetti with Leandro de Paula Canal Contemporâneo I attended Documenta 12 on two different occasions: in June, for the show’s opening, and in July, in order to participate with Canal Contemporâneo in the Magazines Project’s Lunch Lectures. Each visit was marked by an […]

The big lie Dario Corbeira and irene montero, Brumaria When Brumaria was invited to take part in the Documenta 12 Magazines Project, in February 2006, we were filled with enthusiasm. We drew up an ambitious project, ‘Art: The Radical Political Imagination’, which, based on post-1968 experiences and recent experiments in counter-hegemonic practices, tried to set […]

Commentary Nasrallah’s reasons Hizbullah and the conflict in Lebanon Nicholas noe‘t errorist organizations like Hizbullah … cannot be deterred’, wrote prominent right-winger and former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens in a recent piece for Haaretz. ‘There is only one option here: these organizations must be defeated.’ Unfortunately, Arens’s logic now appears to be the dominant […]

government and body politic are not only unacceptable as a matter of principle, but would entail harsh, targeted sanctions by the USA. Instead, although President Bush recently signed an Orwellian executive order broadly sanctioning anyone who threatens the ‘stability’ of the current pro-Western Lebanese government, administration officials regularly meet with Israelis, such as cabinet minister […]

Marx and the philosophy of time Peter osborne What is Marx’s contribution to the philosophy of time? Or, to put it another way, what has a temporal reading of Marx’s writings to contribute to the understanding of the philosophical aspects of his thought? How, for example, might it reconfigure the relationship between the historical, analytical […]

Fetal culture Ultrasound imaging and the formation of the human Mahmut mutman and ersan ocak If the medicalization of pregnancy is a defining aspect of modernity, it has reached a new stage with the invention of ultrasound imaging of the human fetus in the womb. The use of ultrasound imaging has become a routine aspect […]

The idea of a ‘politics of sympathy’ has its roots in the classical liberalism of the eighteenth century, represented quintessentially by Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. A best-seller in its time, Smith’s treatise can be read as preparing the ideological ground for the Wealth of Nations, furnishing the economic logic of capital with the […]

Commentary Fear of heights Bolivia’s constituent process Jon Beasley-murray La Paz is the world’s highest capital city, at 3,636 metres above sea level. So it is all the more surprising that to get there, you have to descend: it is located in what the locals call a hueco, a hole or a hollow. When I […]

No doubt we all like to think that we think, and many of us would like to know how it is that we think as we do.* It appears that the question has ceased to be a purely theoretical one. It now seems that more and more of the powers that be [plus en plus […]

Beyond Barthes Rethinking the phenomenology of photography Andrew fisher This article attempts to outline a phenomenology of photography, oriented by the situation of photography in contemporary media culture. Various recent photographic art practices have come to emphasize what may be seen as specifically phenomenological issues of appearance, perception and form. The widespread use of photography […]

Grounding Deleuze Christian kerslake Last year an early series of lectures by the 32-year-old Gilles Deleuze surfaced on Richard Pinhas’s internet archive of Deleuze’s seminars, Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze.* The 42-page document is entitled Qu’est-ce que fonder?, which I shall translate as What is Grounding?, for reasons explained in a moment. It consists of […]

Dossier Art and immaterial labour ‘Art and immaterial labour’… the conjunction is at once innocent and presumptuous. As Adorno suggested, if the general problem with using the word ‘and’ in titles is that it ‘permits everything to be connected with everything else and is thus incapable of hitting the mark’, in some instances it nonetheless […]

Metamorphoses Antonio Negri To begin with, let us try, from a materialist standpoint, to situate historically the concept of plastic and figurative art – in other words, the definition of its historically determinate link, if there is one, to the development and structure of modes of production. Can this be done? Obviously, once we’re obliged to […]

Art, work and politics in disciplinary societies and societies of security Maurizio Lazzarato According to Michel Foucault, for some time we have been leaving disciplinary societies in order to enter into societies of security that, unlike the former, ‘tolerate a whole host of behaviours that are different, varied, or even deviant and antagonistic toward one another’. […]

The materiality of the immaterial Foucault, against the return of idealisms and new vitalisms Judith Revel For some years, philosophical thinking has seemed to revolve around themes and terms whose centrality merits consideration – so much more so, probably, in that this debate has been formulated from positions and questions that are moreover very heterogeneous. I […]

(T)error and poetry Franco Berardi1. The century of the future Ninety-nine years ago Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the first Manifesto of Futurism; the same year, Henry Ford opened his first automobile factory in Detroit. It was the beginning of the century that believed in the future. The Manifesto asserted the aesthetic value of the machine – that is, the ‘external machine’, […]

‘The rush to the intimate’ Counterinsurgency and the cultural turn Derek gregory In the years following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the New Yorker published a series of critical reports by its investigative journalists, notably Seymour Hersh and Jane Meyer, on the conduct of the ‘war on terror’ and the invasion and occupation […]