« February 2008 | Main | May 2008 »
April 28, 2008
Other Publications
Two long-awaited and Collapse-related publications have recently been spotted in actual material form at last, and seem to be available on Amazon UK if not yet US:
- Ray Brassier's English translation of Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude (Amazon UK); and
- Collapse editor Robin Mackay's translation of Alain Badiou's Number and Numbers (Amazon UK).
April 23, 2008
Collapse Volume IV: 'Concept Horror'
We are delighted to announce that Collapse Volume IV will be published May 2008 and is now available for advance purchase online.
Contributors to this volume include: Kristen Alvanson, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Michel Houellebecq, Oleg Kulik, Thomas Ligotti, Quentin Meillassoux, China Miéville, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Rafani, Steven Shearer, George Sieg, Eugene Thacker, Keith Tilford, Todosch, James Trafford.
Collapse IV, published as a limited edition of 1000 copies, features a series of investigations by philosophers, writers and artists into Concept Horror. Contributors address the existential, aesthetic, theological and political dimensions of horror, interrogate its peculiar affinity with philosophical thought, and uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable. This unique volume continues Collapse's pursuit of indisciplinary miscegenation, the wide-ranging contributions interacting to produce common themes and suggestive connections. In the process a rich and compelling case emerges for the intimate bond between horror and philosophical thought.
George Sieg's Infinite Regress into Self-Referential Horror demonstrates the simultaneously cognitive, existential and political nature of Horror, through a conceptual investigation of the primacy of victimhood for the affect of horror, tracing its origins to the Zoroastrian concept of Druj.
In The Shadow of a Puppet-Dance, James Trafford tracks weird fiction writer Thomas Ligotti's anticipation of the radical thesis of neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger's book Being No-One: namely, that 'nobody ever was or had a self'.
In Thomas Ligotti's own contribution to the volume, Thinking Horror (an extract from his forthcoming non-fiction work The Conspiracy Against the Human Race), he takes up the work of obscure Norwegian philosopher Peter Zapffe, among others, to take an unflinching journey into the depths of pessimistic thought.
As a counterpoint to Ligotti's deflation of human hubris, Oleg Kulik, the internationally-acclaimed Ukrainian contemporary artist known for his disturbing investigations into the borders between life and death, human and animal, contributes his photographic series Memento Mori: Dead Monkeys.
Eugene Thacker's Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror gives a detailed and penetrating account of the 'teratological noosphere', discussing the way in which a certain horror has perenially accompanied the concept of 'life', from Aristotle to Lovecraft.
Novelist Michel Houellebecq is well-known for his evocation of the horror that dwells within the banalities of contemporary life. His poems, of which a selection are translated into English here for the first time, distil his powerful vision into translucid moments of dread.
Jake and Dinos Chapman, the notorious Brothers Grim of the British artworld contribute a set of drawings created exclusively for Collapse. The cartoon-horror of I Can See continues their investigations into the connection between laughter and horror through the programmatic impoverishment of the aesthetic.
In the third of a 'trilogy' of essays published in Collapse, Spectral Dilemma, Quentin Meillassoux reveals some of the ethical consequences of his deduction of the 'necessity of contingency', through an examination of the problem of 'infinite mourning' for the dead.
Kristen Alvanson's photographs, at once repellent and fascinating, of preserved specimens of deformed and mutated animals and humans, are accompanied by a text which discusses Paré's sixteenth-century treatise which makes of taxonomy itself something monstrous, as demonstrated in Alvanson's diagrammatic presentation of the Arbor Deformia.
German artist Todosch's meticulous drawings seem to depict varieties of heterogenous slime in the process either of disintegration or coagulation, making them a perfect companion to Iain Hamilton Grant's Being and Slime. This untimely excavation of nineteenth-century naturephilosopher Lorenz Oken - according to whom the generation of the universe from a 'primal zero' corresponds to its coagulation from a 'primaeval mucus' - puts an entirely new slant on Badiou's notion of 'founding on the void'.
Benjamin Noys meditates on Lovecraft and the real, revealing that the most abyssal of Horrors is Horror Temporis.
In The Corpse Bride:Thinking with Nigredo, Reza Negarestani shows how Aristotle and Plotinus both unlock and dissimulate the ontological mechanism expressed by an unspeakable form of Etruscan torture.
Canadian artist Steven Shearer contributes a new series of his Poems - striking graphical pieces created through a manipulation of the nihilistic and extreme titles and lyrics of death-metal bands.
China Miéville, better known for his bestselling weird fiction novels, writes on M.R.James and the Quantum Vampire, interrogating the dyad of the weird and the hauntological, and introducing us to a new fearsome creature from his arsenal ... behold the Skulltopus!
Czech art collective Rafani present their cycle Czech Forest, an adaptation of folk-tale imagery which presents a very modern tale of warcrime and revenge from the end of WWII.
Graham Harman returns to Collapse with On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl. In a polemical defence of 'weird realism', Harman demonstrates that philosophical thought has more in common with weird and horror fiction than it might like to admit.
Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo, Keith Tilford's series of images, deftly disintegrated objects with more than a hint of 'pulp', anticipate and shadow Harman's invocation of the weird inner life of objects.
Collapse Volume IV // Ed. R. Mackay // May 2008 // 406pp // Limited Edition 1000 copies // ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4 // £9.99
April 13, 2008
Collapse IV available for advance purchase
Collapse IV is now available for advance purchase here.
Contents will be as per the previous post.*
As with previous volumes, Collapse Volume IV is being published as a limited edition of 1000 copies, and we anticipate a high demand, so make sure to secure your copy early.
If all goes to plan, publication date should be the first week of May.
As always, we would be grateful to any readers able to download the flyer for Collapse IV and post it somewhere conspicuous.
[* cover image still and exact page count to be finalised - all shall be revealed soon...]
April 01, 2008
Website Update
Most of the site has been updated today. Please check back soon for final information and ordering for Collapse Volume IV. Please note that subscription prices may rise after publication of Vol. IV since no return to the slim size of Vols I and II is in sight!
There are now some Notes for Contributors (see link above) - apologies for those who emailed us in the past and got no response!
Similar apologies for those who have kindly sent books to Urbanomic: Although of course we do appreciate them, Collapse does not publish book reviews. However, look out for a 'Books Received' post on the site soon.
Urbanomic is planning a new book series for 2009 - details as soon as they are finalised.
Interview: "A Pre-Emptive Salon des Refusés"
Cult Iranian theorist and Collapse contributor Reza Negarestani interviews editor Robin Mackay
Why create a new philosophy journal?
The shortcoming of academic journals is that they tend towards extremely cautious articles, taking tiny, circumspect steps in a very narrow field of study. This tends to breed a sort of resigned attitude amongst those working in philosophy that they're not really doing philosophy, they're doing secondary commentary. Which cuts them off from people outside that world who nevertheless already are thinking philosophically and want to access what's going on in contemporary thought.
Then on the other hand you have publications that try to straddle the fashion or style press and trendy intellectualism; they present a simplified version of whatever happens to be the 'latest theory', applied to popular culture (the deconstruction of candy-wrappers, etc.) Here you get a thrill of radicality, the excitement of what philosophy could be, but it's kind of empty, vapid, it's ultimately intellectually unsatisfying.
It's an unfortunate dichotomy: philosophy-as-academic-discipline, or a trendy hybrid that claims to 'go beyond traditional philosophy'. But why can't philosophy be both rigorous and radical, both conceptually incisive and thrilling? The trouble is, a lot of the people who are producing such work find it difficult to be published by either camp. They don't particularly want either to make their work vapidly 'relevant' or to submit themselves to a year-long academic peer review process that 'irons out' anything remotely speculative.
Add to this that the major publishers haven't even made it into the last century yet: their processes are incredibly slow and laboured, considering that anyone can write, typeset and print a book on their PC at home now.
So that was part of the programme for Collapse: to publish pieces that otherwise just wouldn't find a home. It was conceived as a sort of pre-emptive 'salon des refusés' for people I knew who were doing exciting philosophical work that they, and I, knew was unlikely to appear in any 'proper' philosophy journal except on condition that it was stripped of everything that made it challenging and exciting - and even then, only to be seen by a very narrow readership, as part of a sort of professional chore.
Pieces of writing that represent thought in progress, that show that you can still do philosophy without it being just a desultory shuffling of references and meek baby steps forwards. A part of this is to bring in people from the sciences and the arts, to 'nourish' philosophy from outside. Because part of the malaise of professional philosophy is that it tends to become very self-enclosed, rather autistic. Imagine an alien arriving on earth after World War Four has destroyed all life, finding some digital archive: surely they'll look at the scientists who are talking about superstrings, about cell ontology, about dark matter, or artists who are investigating the nature of objecthood, of representation, of space and time, and they'll say 'ah, these are the philosophers ... as for these other people, endlessly poring over Hegel and Kant, well they must have been some strange order of monks or something ...'. What's needed is some fresh air from outside the academic philosophy community; but at the same time it's important to affirm, and to demonstrate, that philosophy itself is still living, and - if you look in the right places - as compelling as philosophy ought to be.
In future I would like to bring in more and more people from other disciplines - for example in Collapse Volume IV, which will be on Concept-Horror, we'll be including work by [US and UK Weird fiction authors] Thomas Ligotti and China Miéville, [Ukrainian contemporary artist] Oleg Kulik, [UK artists] Jake and Dinos Chapman, [French Novelist] Michel Houellebecq, and other writers and artists, alongside philosophers. It's not a matter of bringing in someone to talk about the 'philosophy of science' or 'of art' or to apply some other philosopher's system to their work, but rather to show how within their practices they spontaneously develop their own ontologies, their own philosophical propositions, and their own ways of looking at the world, at ideas, and at objects. Collapse Vol. I featured mathematics, theology, numerology, computer science and more ... In Vol.II we had contributions from neuroscientists, astrophysicists, filmmakers and artists as well as philosophers. Vol. III, although centred around a particular philosopher [Gilles Deleuze] contains contributions from sound-artists Haswell & Hecker, Iranian architect Mehrdad Iravanian, and even a 'contribution' from a 19th-Century Science fiction writer [J.H.Rosny]...!
Does Collapse represent your individual vision?
I'm doing research in philosophy, attached to a UK university, and I'm lucky enough to come into contact with some extremely smart people, and to feel that I'm listening in on some key debates in contemporary philosophy. But Collapse has no direct institutional links or obligations, it's got no responsibilities to any agency. Therefore you could say that Collapse is a product of my own vision. But various other people have been and are indispensable to the process, even though I've also had to stick to my guns and ignore a lot of 'sound advice' in order to produce it (you should include book reviews, you should have an editorial committee, you should get such-and-such a respected academic involved, don't make it too eclectic, make sure all the articles are all on the same level, etc.) As I say in the introduction to Vol. I, I saw it all along more as being a strange collection - a compendium or a 'necronomicon' - where each reader would buy it to read one or two of the pieces, but become interested in the others, so it would produce a kind of connectivity that you'll never get with the strictly themed, niche-marketed collections that major publishers, by financial necessity, have to deal in. That vision of 'stealth connectivity' was central. Also I tried to reproduce something like the sensation one has as a child when presented with a book that is so thick and full of words and diagrams and pictures that it exerts a sort of sublime fascination, becomes a kind of occult object: a book of spells or a giant instruction book which has lost its referent.
Do non-specialists have any hope of understanding Collapse?
Well, in line with what I just said, what is necessary, I think, is that every reader finds themselves 'stretched' in some sense or another, or in multiple senses - The greatest disaster would be if a reader found only what they expected. Then it would be time to give up! But it is important (even if we haven't perfected this art yet) that there's a variety of material, not all high-level incomprehensible jargon. Each volume includes materials that any reasonably intelligent reader could pick up and read - not 'dumbed-down' or simplified features, but challenging and intriguing, accessible but otherworldly, enticing to the outsider who perhaps doesn't quite understand but feels a kind of compelling fascination. That compelling fascination and that not-quite-understanding are constitutive of the practice of philosophy, as far as I'm concerned, that feeling is philosophy-in-progress-as-emotion. This is a good reason for including interviews: Collapse Vol. I has an interview with a mathematician, Vol. II with an astrophysicist, and Vol. III has a complete transcription of a wide-ranging discussion between four important young philosophers, which kind of demystifies what goes on in philosophy - a sort of informal, 'live philosophy'. The interview form seems to me to be hugely undervalued. Most interviews we read today are so shamefully superficial. A huge amount of work went into the interviews you read in Collapse, they were real collaborations and labours of love for all parties involved.
A lot of thought seems to have gone into the look of Collapse.
Although I can't call myself an artist, I approached the project in that spirit, starting with an obscure idea of something that didn't exist and that I wanted to create, (as authors say, 'you write the book you want to read'). And then letting it slowly develop, all the time thinking of the whole product: design, content, type-style, who will be interested in it, how they might react, even the way it will be packaged and sent out, everything. It goes so far that each of the 1000 copies is numbered by hand, for instance! So it's a conceptual-aesthetic-commercial object, a sort of manifesto but also an experiment, a text but also an thing, still in the process of being invented.
With a journal that's put together by a committee, and peer-reviewed, and edited, designed, printed and distributed by different parties, I don't think this can ever happen. It's like a camera without a lens, you produce something, but it's unfocused, generic. It's not that I think my point of view is special - anyone could (and should!) do the same, make their own publication - but I believe the sheer fact that everything goes through an individual provides a focus which makes Collapse singular, it gives it character and coherence. Models for this would be periodicals like Verve, Minotaur, Documents, Acephale, etc. Obviously, one wouldn't want it to be personal, totally idiosyncratic - but the feedback I've had from readers shows that they do 'get it', and that they appreciate the care that's been put into it. In fact perhaps this personal process of selection and arrangement, this thoughtfulness in creating a very particular thing and having the commitment to materialise it, is rarer and thus more appreciated in the 'digital age'.
What has been involved in the process of editing Collapse?
The website for Collapse existed for almost a year before the journal finally appeared, and the idea had been developing for at least a year before that. This process is fascinating to me: having a vague idea, giving it a name, talking to people about it, and its suddenly beginning to seem like a real entity, which then starts to surprise you. Some people involved with books affect disinterest in these material or commercial elements of the process, but I'm fascinated by them. The best thing is, after all the work put into the first volume, the subsequent volumes have come together almost spontaneously, through other people being excited by the possibilities, getting in touch, and sending me their contributions. So in the end it becomes a collective process: after reading Vol. I, contributors selected themselves on the basis of understanding what the 'vision' is and how it might adapt to include them - and so the vision continues and evolves.
Does Collapse represent the vanguard of a new movement in philosophy, and if so how influential do you think it is?
Collapse isn't advocating any particular philosophical position; you could say it was more about attitude. Those philosophers who contributed under the rubric of 'Speculative Realism', in Collapse volumes II and III, for instance, come from different philosophical traditions, have different aims, and use
different conceptual tools. There are points of convergence, but the really important thing is that they all believe that philosophy itself is still alive, and need not be subordinated to politics, aesthetics, or whatever else. And I'm sure there are plenty of young students of philosophy to whom that will come as a real breath of fresh air. But as far as I know Collapse doesn't exert any great influence within philosophy yet!
A first few books are beginning to come out now which reference Collapse, and I really believe that some of the articles we've published so far will become essentials in the future. But what's also rewarding is that people are inspired by the ideas and that leads to other productions - the piece by [sound artists] Haswell & Hecker in Collapse Vol. III came about because Florian Hecker composed a piece called 'Dark Energy', after reading the interview with theoretical cosmologist Roberto Trotta in Collapse Vol. II - fantastic! The artist Helen Johnson included a copy of Collapse in a painting recently. [UK Artist] Jake and Dinos Chapman are working on etchings inspired by contributions for Vol. IV, which will then be included along with them in that volume! These sort of transversal connections are the most exciting for me. But certainly I believe that thinkers we have featured such as Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, and Graham Harman are the most interesting and most promising philosophers of this generation. And their fate, at least in the anglo-american world, depends to a certain extent upon transforming the institutional context, within which original thinkers are increasingly embattled and under pressure to conform, to 'identify' themselves through a set of preset conceptual co-ordinates, and to publish continually. I hope that introducing para-academic channels of communication like Collapse is a part of the solution, letting people know where to look, highlighting the exceptions to the rules. But a more radical transformation is necessary in the long run. I'd hope for Collapse to inspire a new generation of philosophers able to think outside affiliations to this or that philosopher or school, ready to employ resources from music, the sciences, the arts, unafraid to make bold forays into the outer edges of speculation, and ready to devise new ways for thought to survive whether inside or outside the university. Philosophy needs to realise that it can stop policing itself so tightly, stop demanding mediocrity, without everything falling apart: thinking isn't the enemy...!
How is Collapse disseminated, since you have no institutional support or commercial distribution?
Well, first of all, through the web, of course - in that way, despite being a defiantly physical product, Collapse is totally rooted in the virtual world. Blogs have been a great aid in getting word about. But I'm pretty confident that if you really put some love and care into something, if you maintain its integrity and its singularity, then the people who need to know will find out somehow, and absolutely everything that's happened so far has proved this to be the case - the Collapse tentacles reach all sorts of unexpected places, and are always surprising me with what they bring back! But practically, it does help us immensely if people spread the word by mentioning Collapse on their blog, and download the posters and flyers from the website and post them up wherever they are. Reviews are hard to come by since most journals refuse to review other journals, even though that's just a terminological matter - Collapse is really more like a book series than a conventional journal. So essentially it's a conspiracy, that we ask each reader to join - help spread the virus. Collapse is something that's born purely of passion, there's no cynical aspect to it at all, and readers connect with that, and want to help it survive and flourish.
