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November 21, 2008
Speculative Realist Cinema and Literature
In line with the recent calls for a speculative realist politics / economics and also in order to momentarily abandon the tradition of writing witless pedantic posts, I am starting to compile a list of movies and books (mostly fiction) which can be used in possible future discussions such as this one. Although, these titles – in their entirety – might not essentially project the philosophy of speculative realism, they can be associated to variations of speculative realist scenarios. The list can also be used for any offshoot projects regarding post-apocalyptic scenarios, Xenoeconomics, Cthulhoid ethics and non-subjective models of complicity. Anyone is more than welcome to add to this list with a few lines (if possible) explaining the reason why it should be added.
Movies (in no particular order):
* Carnival of Souls (escaping from the specter not by mourning or submission to the priority of the living over the dead but by becoming disillusioned about the assumed position of the living in regard to its necessity: that living is already-dead, weird vs. hauntology)
* John Carpenter's The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness
* Michael Haneke's Wolfzeit
* Russian Necrorealist science-fiction esp. Yevgeny Yufit’s speculative evolution trilogy in which human evolution is explained by the blindest and the most vacuous inorganic complicities (Bipedalism, Silver Heads and Killed by Lightening)
Some of the titles from the French cinematic movement stupidly dubbed New French Extremity:
* Bruno Dumont’s After-human trilogy (L'humanité, Twentynine Palms, Flanders): the concept of after-human contra the pseudo-vitalistic posthuman, death of desire, complete eradication of behavioral ration, non-existentialist recourse to the void.
* Leos Carax’s Pola X (connecting Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and its speculative moves regarding the awakening of the inorganic through organic representation to Melville’s post-apocalyptic story Pierre: or The Ambiguities)
* Marina de Van's In my Skin (inevitable unbinding of destrudo caused by external capitalist / consumerist meltdown).
Fiction:
* Thomas Ligotti esp. The Shadow at the Bottom of the World and Crampton
* H.P. Lovecraft
* Thomas Bernhard
* Michel Houellebecq
* Pierre Guyotat (check Schoolboy Error's posts on Guyotat)
* Some of the post-apocalyptic fictions of the Bizarro movement: ex. Extinction Journals by Jeremy Robert Johnson.
Posted by Reza Negarestani at 01:21 PM | Comments (0)
November 17, 2008
BLDG Blog: a lecture on feral cities
For those who happen to be in London on November 26. Geoff Manaugh of the amazing BLDGBLOG together with Antoine Bousquet of Birkbeck College will present a public lecture on 'Battlespace/s: Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare'. Manaugh's lecture will be an analysis on 'cities gone wild'; I encourage people who are interested in BLDGBLOG and Manaugh's fascinating researches regarding war, architecture, science fiction and geopolytics to attend this lecture. Manaugh will also discuss his topics through references to J. G. Ballard, Eyal Weizman's Hollow Land and Cyclonopedia.
"[Colonel] West frequently mentions that the urbanist militia is adept in reprogramming the city as the very object of war, a portal to the end of the pipeline for the Jihadi militia. In the Middle East, urban planning is based on the anticipation of an urbanized war. 'The claustrophobic or anomalous construction of cities such as Karachi, Tehran and Dubai is not merely a symptom of mismanagement or hysteria caused by overabundant oil money,' West notes, 'for such cities think ahead of time when it comes to war. Their construction, connected buildings and overpopulation are premeditations on war. Apart from sporadic examples, architecture in the Middle East is either a hokey imitation of the west or a profusely militarized masonry. Every brick either provokes the jihadi and enlightens his rage or secures his path to the desert.' In the wake of urbanized war, the population itself becomes the steadiest military trench: each civilian in itself a hide-out and a weapons stash for the militia." (Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials)
For more information see here and here.
Posted by Reza Negarestani at 06:52 AM | Comments (0)