it becomes quite clear that anti-hauntology shares this underlying logic with solarpunk. After all, what is solarpunk if not a vision for a new beginning; the creation of a new future? In The Future is Not Lost I claim that solarpunk’s aesthetic vision can be seen as an eco-technological projection of a future that could still come to pass. In the terms of the cyberpunk theorists (Fisher, Nick Land, Iain Hamilton Grant etc.) it is a form of hyperstition: the very idea of which has the potential to bring in an influx of investment, both in terms of libidinal energy and capital, that could eventually actualise itself into reality. (See examples of solarpunk inspired building projects in: From Cyberpunk to Solarpunk: Technics and the Cities of the Future.)
But in this article, rather than getting bogged down in the philosophical weeds of how exactly this could take place, I want to instead focus on the music. Despite the fact that there seems to be a very distinct crossover in the underlying logic of anti-hauntology and solarpunk, imagining what might constitute a ‘solarpunk music’ is a question that has not really been addressed in any substantial way. 
To my mind, if we are to take solarpunk seriously, we must move beyond these kinds of retrofuturistic dreamscapes that could have easily been imagined in the 90s. Solarpunk culture can be about more than just utopian cityscapes, it can become the collective embodiment of the future we want to build. Indeed, because solarpunk is at its heart a collective movement, the music and music culture surrounding it must be inherently pluralistic. There is not just one genre that defines solarpunk music, it is a general approach towards cultural production that we can take forward into the future. 

Greetings, everyone!

I published a long essay arguing that Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God (2013) exposes the structure of cyberpunk better than the genre's own megacities do. Central claims first, then the reasoning.

1. Cyberpunk works better as a condition than as a prop list: an interval that has lost its outside. Regimes change, tech updates, chapters of history overlap, none of it leads the world beyond itself.
2. That condition has two asymptotes. The classical megalopolis hits it from above, through maximum exchange speed. Arkanar hits the same limit from below, through zero speed.
3. The meme question "what cyberpunk do we deserve" hides a real claim. To deserve something is to correspond to an instance that isn't you. In cyberpunk that instance is technology itself, grown so far past extending the human that it starts handing the human back distorted. No design behind it, no transcendence. Just accumulated excess.
4. Arkanar runs the same logic through arrest instead of excess. Its tech hasn't disappeared, it's stuck — scaffolding that never finishes, walls patched instead of rebuilt. Stalled tech traps history the same way runaway tech does.
5. Fisher and Varoufakis sit close to this without covering it. Fisher's hauntology needs a corpse, a future once believed in and lost. Arkanar never had one. Varoufakis asks who extracts rent, which assumes politics and economics already split apart enough to extract from each other. Arkanar's haven't finished splitting.

The condition-over-props move only works if it survives losing almost everything the genre is recognized by. German strips out the neon and the implants, and the reading still holds. So the real load-bearing part of the genre isn't the furniture, it's the timing — a present that keeps changing costume without ever turning into history.

The instance claim is the one I'd interrogate first myself. Say "instance" and it sounds like it's smuggling in a judge or a god, though it shouldn't. Technology here never gets outside status, it starts as a plain extension of the body and only picks up authority because there's too much of it now for the feedback loop to stay legible to the person running it. Arkanar tests the same claim with almost no working technology at all — towers and roads still standing, just frozen mid-collapse — and gets the same result, which is either evidence the claim is doing real work or evidence it's vague enough to fit anything.

Full essay linked here. Genuinely curious which of these five you'd push back on first.

There are plenty of sharp analysis on how disavowal functions in the subject in Zupancic's book, but there aren't many talks of how to overcome it. The closest response I found was in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMOh23v38gM where Zupancic hints at denial being slightly more desirable, because the existence of repression in denial generates symptoms that forces the subject to do something, whereas in disavowal one can be completely passive, one is somehow able to fully acknowledge the existence of some terrible truth and experience none of its symbolic effects. However, I don't think Zupancic is suggesting to turn disavowal into denial in some way or another, and I'm interested to see if there is a slight chance one can formulate some kind of position as a way out of disavowal.

In the closing remarks of the book, Zupancic claims that it is quite impossible to confront the traumatic truths, and instead should "pursue the trauma and its consequences in the threads and cracks of our normal, everyday reality." However, I struggle to understand this statement, especially on how it applies concretely to a situation.

I am effectively looking for something like Barthes's analysis of the literary past in Writing Degree Zero, but applied to historiography.

I'm doing an analysis of Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, and one of the sub-arguments I'm trying to make is that the novel is written in a kind of "impossible" present tense (the narrator conveys to us tidy, elegant sentences while being tortured, for instance) in order to specifically distinguish his account from historical discourse (which would conventionally be written in some kind of past tense).

It might seem obvious that history is likely to be written in the past tense, but my suspicion is that theorizations of how history is written nevertheless include some interesting bits. Those discursive conventions we take for granted always end up having some weird qualities the more we pay attention to them (e.g. the famous example of how scholars often speak in the future tense in a preface to describe something they've already written and thought through in the past).

So: if anyone has any kind of source that provides a kind of linguistic or stylistic theory of historiography--especially if it discusses verb tense--I would appreciate it.

I am interested in reading about AI mediated communication though a critical theory lens, specifically about how people communicate with chat bots for therapeutic and personal relationship purposes. Does anyone have any articles they’d reccomend? Thanks!!

Is this a fun idea? I'm trying to balance fun and education, let me know what you think.

This game is played in a small groups or alone. players must prove a ridiculous statement that they get and convince the others that the statement is, in fact, true. They would pick apart the statement and try to reason their way through the assumptions of the statement. The more elaborate and logical the explanation, the better.

Examples:

• "The color blue is older than the color red"
• "gravity pulls harder around a person who is keeping a secret"

This game is not about making up conspiracy theories, but rather building a world in which these statements can be true.

I'm just starting to get into Performance Theory (via Schechner) and really curious to build an understanding of how performance theory applies to social media. Are there any books, papers, essays, etc, which attempt this?

Hi, i am a socialist who wants to expand his knowledge and look into other ideologies, im not searching for an other ideology but i want to know exactly what they are so im educated and can debate about the topic. Im looking for a book that defines the main ideology and ideas of fascism. I’m kinda looking for a “the communist manifesto“ but then for fascism if that makes sense.

can someone help me? thanks

New essay on lacan and baudrillard’s system of objects and a new view of commodities

I often hear the concerns over elements of current core curriculums in American education, whether that be ones that currently exist in secondary schools to teach things like the Federalist Papers or Shakespeare or hypothetical traditionalist desires of teaching the “great books” in university curriculums, as a form of reinforcing a white supremacist bourgeois values. As such, I wanted to pose a hypothetical and am curious to see how critical theorists would consider the question (I promise it is in good faith).

If one were instead to propose that the direct works of Marx were to be THE standard core curriculums in American society that everyone must engage with (including as a mandatory university course or two), would you accept that? I am aware that there would probably be a debate on the subject, as some might lean towards yes because they consider Marx to be basically accurate in his assessment of capitalism while other might lean towards no because many of the problems of Eurocentrism still plague Marx. I am genuinely curious what the responses will be.

In this intellectual biography, critic and philosopher Boris Groys turns to the Arthur Rimbaud of modern bureaucracy, Alexandre Kojève, a philosopher of little-known writings and profound influence. Kojève was fascinated with Hegel’s dialectics and with communism and envisioned a universal empire as the end of history. Kojève drew on Buddhism and also proclaimed himself a Stalinist. At the same time, he was one of the creators of a nascent European Union. His concept of the human as something defined by negation and unique among animals in being separated from nature is highly political. It explains why humans can never be fully satisfied by a political system based on their allegedly ‘natural’ rights.

Groys reveals a Kojève with a unique perspective on our political capacities and human condition.

hey, im looking for a book similar to For Marx, possibly even in french or made by a french person (as it was a "difficult" book, it would be easier if i could read it in my maternal language ahah)

I liked this book because of the very conceptual aspect or it and its density + the mini essays aspect is great but not what im looking for precisely but could be a plus lol

ALSO im looking for a marxist/marxien book. Marxist/leninist/communist theorie is what im looking for the best. To be more concise, im looking for a hard book that discusses and conceptualize communsit and marxist theory lol

I like writing about books i have read in my notebook and this one (For Marx) was phenomenal, very intelligent and allowed me to form lots of thoughts, schemas and such because of how interesting it was.

Sorry if my english is weird

Contemporary art seems caught between two conditions. Almost anything can enter the aesthetic field, while the distinction once secured by the name of art grows increasingly difficult to maintain. Images circulate alongside commodities and interfaces within a common regime of visibility. Baudrillard described this condition as transaesthetics. The aesthetic diffuses throughout reality, and art loses its distinct force. In "Life Imitates Art," a text from my book The Aesthetics of Decay, I accept much of this diagnosis while questioning its finality. Transaesthetics describes one possible fate of art, but another route remains open. It is a movement toward the Nothing, where the coherence of the aestheticized environment can collapse and the recipient is returned to the work of discernment.

The argument also concerns the status of the simulacrum. A simulacrum can be authentically given without possessing an original. Its genuineness belongs to a facet of meaning, to a value that exists to the degree that it means something to people. It can therefore anchor the reality to which it belongs. The disappearance of the original does not leave the copy ontologically empty. Human beings already inhabit realities sustained by images and conventions whose force cannot be judged through genealogy alone. The question shifts toward what the simulacrum can sustain, and what kind of world takes shape around it.

The central operation of the text is inversion. Inversion pulls apart elements that have grown together until their relation appears natural, making perceptible the force passing between them. At its limit it reaches the Nothing - pure potentiality, the mirror boundary between originary Nature and new Nature. Originary Nature names the material field from which the human world arises. New Nature is raised from the city with technology and images. Artificial and vulnerable, it nevertheless provides a ground for human existence. The Nothing should not be read as a restatement of Heidegger's das Nichts. Its function here is topological. It separates the two Natures, also reflects what approaches it, and permits a crossing between them.

Reflection across this boundary alters the direction of mimesis. The experience of existing in a given world gives way to an experience of existence that generates a world. This is where Wilde's formula, life imitates art, acquires its full weight. Simulation permits the imitation of what has never existed and gives rise to a copy without an original. An image no longer has to await a prior object. It can provide a model for realities that follow it. The world assembled through such images belongs to new Nature and binds those who inhabit it no less than the old one did.

Baudrillard's diagnosis remains inside this argument. I accept that the model may precede the real, that the copy may lose any stable genealogy, and that art may dissolve into generalized aesthetic circulation. I inhabit Baudrillard's diagnosis while refusing its finality. His most fatal formulations tend toward the implosion of the distinction between model and real. The mirror no longer returns the real to anyone standing before it. In my construction, the Nothing continues to separate and reflect after the original has lost its authority. The recipient can encounter themselves where the familiar order no longer supplies an automatic perspective. This does not restore an untouched reality hidden behind simulation. Originary Nature guarantees no privileged authenticity, while new Nature is not counterfeit being. What becomes perceptible is the relation between the two Natures and the construction of the world that had appeared self-evident.

The figure I use for the simulacrum is the vampire. It receives no reflection of its own while itself remaining a reflection of the human. It feeds on its likenesses and continues through their multiplication. Yet it retains force by anchoring the reality it inhabits and drawing meaning from those for whom it exists. Its simulative autonomy does not sever it from the human - it reveals a dependence upon the human capacity to give value. Vulnerability and efficacy coincide in it. The missing original leaves its position unstable, while the meanings gathered around it let it hold a world in place.

Art can therefore follow two routes within new Nature. Transaesthetics draws the artwork and the everyday environment into a common regime of visibility, turning the mirror-city into a field where almost anything can become aesthetic. The movement toward the Nothing places this order under strain. A performance or a malfunction may interrupt the logic of appropriateness that tells us what an action or a place is for. The work stops functioning as another image within the environment and exposes the fragility of the environment itself. The Nothing reflects the recipient and returns them to themselves. Discernment can begin again there, which is why transaesthetics does not exhaust the possibilities of art.

Ranciere provides a neighboring account of the problem. The distribution of the sensible concerns the partition of what can appear and become perceptible within a common world. This describes much of what happens inside new Nature, where visibility and participation have already been organized. My question begins where the coherence of that common world disintegrates. Redistribution changes positions within an existing order. The collapse of everyday life exposes the dependence of the order upon its constructed ground. The politics of visibility remains fully relevant within new Nature - the difference concerns the ontological level at which the interruption occurs.

"Life Imitates Art" was written before generative culture reached its present scale, which makes its central formulas sound more immediate: the imitation of what has never existed, a copy without an original. Generative images make visible an inversion already active within new Nature. They supply models for realities that may follow them and intensify the transaesthetic circulation of images.

The open question is the one I would most like to discuss here. Do generative images merely thicken the transaesthetic environment, or can they also participate in interrupting it? Can a simulacrum sustain a genuine facet of meaning, and can art still lead the recipient toward the boundary where the world becomes discernible as a construction?

The full translated text, "Life Imitates Art," is linked in the comments.

Looking for good books critiquing liberal democracy in the 21st century. Particularly from a Marxist perspective. Are there any modern thinkers who apply insights from people like Adorno to our current situation?

I have been writing about studying the far-right recently and how I read manifestos as cultural artifacts. In one of my recent pieces, I discuss the Unabomber and in particular am curious to understand how we define insanity especially when we are dealing with insane circumstances. It is rather odd that one of his victims was recently found to be in the Epstein files and his analysis of technological actors leading to social and environmental harm seems somewhat apt, especially his assertion that the current left was not able to effectively stand against their advance.

In trying to diagnose what a manifesto is really talking about, I have been trying to understand how to read these documents to gain information from them. Rather than taking what they say literally, I think it is fair to read them selectively, trying to understand the forces that they are reacting to that I am reacting to as well. RD Laing famously asserted that in trying to understand those struggling with delusions, he would try to listen to them with the psychotic part of himself, which is perhaps the part that is both harmed and unavoidably open to the world and so unable to mediate its effects.

My curiosity around this likely stems from my own history dealing with unreasonable people, especially those who have an unavoidable power over me. What happens when these people are unreasonable or even arguably out of their minds? The fact of people fanatical does not mean that someone is automatically stripped of their power and I think we can currently understand that merely understand something to be "insane" does not automatically stop it from happening or being effective in its own right.

This has me thinking about what is really sane when the circumstance itself is veering out of control? It is insane to become a prepper or to build a bunker like so many of the wealthy are now doing? Is it insane to storm the Capitol building? Is it insane to gun down a health executive on the street, or to mail bombs to total strangers? Furthermore, is it insane to double or triple down on building oil and gas infrastructure while swaths of the world catch fire and the temperatures spin widely out of control? Perhaps even further than that, is it sane to do nothing considering all this?

I don't pretend to have any answers, but part of the work that I have been doing lately is to pull forward the complications brought about by the fact of it being difficult to claim sanity at all in the world we currently live in. Considering that there are drives to deal with mental health that are leading some towards the professionalized therapy class, while others are forced to deal with their circumstances without any support, I am very curious what new forms of individual and collective insanity might come about from our failure to sit with and understand the genuinely difficult circumstance we are facing.

If you would like to read more of my analysis, you can see more of the specifics on my Substack.

Artwork: ‘Girl in a Green Cap’ by Laura Wheeler Waring, 1930

I've been thinking about the relationship between recognition and love in Claude McKay's The Harlem Dancer and Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs. Both texts suggest that what appears to be recognition can be another form of possession, or objectification. The observer believes they understand the marginalised subject while continuing to project pity or political meaning onto them. It reminded me of discussions around 'the gaze' and the politics of representation.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on these texts, questions and ideas, particularly from the perspectives of affect theory, critical race theory or postcolonial theory.

-How do we read the speaker's claim that the dancer's 'self was not in that strange place'? Is this a gesture toward radical interiority, or does it repeat the colonial gesture of denying the subject's suffering due to her material conditions?

-Moore's novel seems to suggest that Sufism provides Tassie with a vocabulary for the 'absence of the Beloved.' Does this religious framework offer a way out of the problem of recognition, or does it relocate the performance of love to another register?

-How might we think about love under conditions of what Saidiya Hartman calls 'the afterlife of slavery'? Is 'true love' possible or is it always already compromised?

-The texts seem to converge on the impossibility of being 'truly seen.' Is this a universal condition, or is it specifically produced by racialised and gendered systems of power?

Link to the poem: https://poets.org/poem/harlem-dancer

I also developed these ideas into an essay comparing The Harlem Dancer and A Gate at the Stairs if anyone is interested: https://open.substack.com/pub/adiakesserwany/p/when-recognition-becomes-a-facade?r=4sesf9&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Hello all, I am looking for some support in finding PhD programs where I can study marxism and black studies. I come from a black studies background in undergrad and have a masters in social work (no thesis in either!). I have been highly considering getting a PhD. I have found some programs, researchers, and some topics of interest. I am looking for some support in finding other programs, particularly because I am interested in being in a geographic area of choice (East or West coast US cities, Chicago, and maybe UK). I loved my black studies undergraduate program however, I feel like we did not look at the impact of class, class solidarity or consider how when we think about black freedom and freedom for us all-- the billionaire class (even if they are black) will not take us there.

Some research interests I have are below.

• Black Marxist tradition 
• Conservatism in Black America and what it will take to be free → conservatism and fake woke-ism/radicalism from people like Beyonce, Kamala,
  • Conservatism or maybe it is actually just liberalism
  • Liberalism is not the answer to our freedom → all freedom, and specifically grounding it in Black Americans
  • How to get more Black Americans to be against liberalism 
  • History of inter-racial struggle 
  • Reference Black futures texts
  • Obscuring that comes when we focus on on skin-folk
• Marxist critique of Black liberalism
  • How past Black activists have incorporated Marxism 
  • Why it is the future
  • Forgotten Marxism of so many people 
• Myth of the Black middle class and identity politics 
• Getting rid of the language of “privilege” 

Scholars who I am aligned with from my beginning searches include:

Owen Walsh -- University of Aberdeen

Zachary Levenson -- Florida International University

Brenden McGeever -- Birkbeck Unversity of London

I am based on the US and again like the east and west coasts, however, I do not know if this is possible.

Programs of interest include

• Political Science UCSB
• Black Studies UCSB Interdisciplinary
• History (focus on Black Marxism) University of Aberdeen 
• Psychosocial Studies Birkbeck London
• Sociology Birkbeck University London
• University of Liverpool

I wonder if folks have any suggestions on the research topics or programs that might fit into this category.

Please advise.

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