Dear followers, new and old, this blog is very very dead. I will not be deleting it for my own reasons, but I can't understand how people are still hitting "follow" when I've written all over the popup and my page that I'm not using it.
I am more than happy for any of you to follow my new blog if you want to.
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anonymous asked: What are your required reading suggestions?
I accidentally posted this a couple of days ago instead of just saving it, so now it’s done. I started working on an answer to this a little while ago, and it will be the last post I make on this blog. For a lot of reasons, I can no longer justify updating it anymore. I feel very strongly that it’s reached an end. I do have a new blog that I will be using from now on, and the link is on the left. I plan on using it a little differently (hopefully more mutuals rather than just followers, definitely more Aaliyah songs).
Since this question isn’t specific, I was a little overwhelmed trying to think of how to answer it as completely as possible, though I suppose this is the kind of question I should’ve started to think about anyway. So this is long, probably not totally exhaustive, and sorted by category of the things that I generally choose to read about so you can pick and choose based on what you’re into. PDFs are included for ones I could find (mostly from Monoskop, which is a fantastic resource). On top of this, I have a bunch of specialised essays about bioart/ethics and prosthetics that I didn’t end up sorting through. But anyway, thank you for asking. Have fun, friends.
Traditional art theory:
Umberto Eco, On Ugliness (this is a favourite of mine, it is in the form of a response to Eco’s History of Beauty, investigating “the voyeuristic impulse behind our attraction to the gruesome and the horrible.” Some people admittedly find this book unsettling. I could easily put this under monster theory, but it deals specifically with visual arts and culture. It’s really fantastic if this is your thing.)
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (the seminal work on Bacon and a nod to my love affair with Deleuze, of course, how could I not include this.)
Jean-François Lyotard, Miscellaneous Texts I: Aesthetics and Theory of Art (I could only find an English PDF through my university library, so the link won’t work here.)
Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (Panofsky can be a little dry sometimes, but this one is pretty good.)
Digital/new media:
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Canadian theorist boost)
Hito Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen (someone recommended this to me a couple of years ago and I fell in love with it. I particularly enjoy “In Defense of the Poor Image”)
Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images
Cybernetics:
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Postman (history of technology/cybernetics, lit crit, culture studies; arguably one of the most important books of my life)
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (the seminal text on cybernetics)
Mark Hansen & WJT Mitchell, Critical Terms for Media Studies (divided into sections of Aesthetics, Society, and Technology, dealing with subjects of art, body, memory, biomedia, materiality, law, networks, and more.)
Mark Hansen & Bruce Clarke, Emergence and Embodiment (this is better than anything I could say about it: “In response to the apparent dissolution of boundaries at work in the contemporary technosciences of emergence, neocybernetics observes that cognitive systems are operationally bounded, semi-autonomous entities coupled with their environments and other systems. Second-order systems theory stresses the recursive complexities of observation, mediation, and communication.”)
Tiqqun, This is Not a Program (the biopolitical subject and omnipresent Empire; forms of pacification, surveillance, sedative, authority)
Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near (Texts on transhumanism and futurological perspectives on artificial intelligence)
John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life
Misc. philosophy:
Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (I really love this book, and it is pretty important. I find it has always been very useful to me no matter what, as it encompasses a lot of the things I gravitate towards theoretically. Postmodern theory, sex politics, economics, semiotics, desire, it’s all here.)
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (The Masterpiece. Really, I would read anything by Deleuze and Guattari you can get your hands on, including Kafka)
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess (I know people are sometimes conflicted about Bataille, but I like to read him, and some of the texts in this book have helped me work through certain ideas in a new way that I didn’t expect. They are all quite short. Recommended if you are into the visceral, death, eroticism. There is also a bit of economic theory.)
Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition (I’m gonna put this here, say that it’s important and great, and then say: really just read everything Deleuze has ever written, and I won’t mention him again to save space/time.)
Plato, The Symposium
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Monster theory:
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (the source of theory on abjection)
Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
Donna Hardaway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (boundaries between evolutionary/technological/biological narratives; notably: “A Cyborg Manifesto”)
Tyson E. Lewis, “Monsters and the Law of Separation: From Critique to Revolution in Marxism’s Bestiary”
Allen S. Weiss, “Ten Theses on Monsters and Monstrosity”
Everything by H.P. Lovecraft
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
Sci-fi:
Just about everything by Philip K. Dick, but if you are new to his work, start with this: “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot and anything in the Robot series
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris and His Master’s Voice
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, The Roadside Picnic
Other critical theory:
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (a history of thought, “archaeology of human sciences,” woven through art, lit, economics and natural sciences. A really under-appreciated work.)
Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (power structures, surveillance, the good stuff.)
Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self (a collection of essays and lectures dealing with self-presentation/understanding/regulation and the distance between the authority of the individual and liberal democracies.)
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am and “Différance”
General literature:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago I, II (Russian, depressing, long as hell, but really good if you’re into that sort of thing. Also recommended: Cancer Ward)
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (“A carnivalesque romp through the dark ages of Stalin’s Moscow,” to quote the back of my copy)
Albert Camus, The Plague (I love this book with my whole heart)
bell hooks, All About Love (I feel very strongly that everyone should read this book. It should be required in schools. It's really great and important.)
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
László Krasznahorkai, Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance
This is a suicide prevention hotline for trans folks, by trans folks. I’m REALLY concerned about “suicide contagion” after the tragic death of Leelah Alcorn, so please reblog this as vigorously as you can.
it makes me so disgusted how people in america are so quick to make fun of someones foreign accent without realizing that multilingualism is an unremarkable necessity of everyday life for the majority of the world’s population and that being monolingual and ignorant is a lot more embarrassing than any accent ever will be
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Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Anya is LIVE right now
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White men make up approximately 36% of the population, but commit 75% of mass shootings. What would be called terrorism by any other skin tone is suddenly some mysterious unnamed disease. We as a society are perfectly happy to further stigmatize mentally ill people, who are far more likely to be victims of violence than commit violence, in the service of protecting white supremacy and male entitlement.
The “Mental Illness” We Refuse To Name: White Male Entitlement | Constituative Outsider
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this is my second or third favorite von stuck painting. guide: this is a depiction of the Erinyes (Furies) waiting down a dark, flooded alleyway to ambush a man who has just finished stabbing another man to death. they are going to haunt his whole shit
"Using two stereo cameras, a constantly moving three-dimensional image of the viewer is created, allowing them to see themselves from unusual angles. This image is combined with snapshots of the space the installation is in, as well as unexpected visible distortions caused by the stereo process. This confronts the viewer with the limitations of our own perception."