Dear friends,
The summer days are blistering, but the discourse is hotter. In search of titles to fill out your August reading list? Look no further than our discounted summer book bundle. This features three popular titles from our e-flux Books series: Wonderflux: A Decade of e-flux journal (2023), Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s Routes/Worlds (2022), and The Internet Does Not Exist (2015).
Wonderflux compiles a small group of longtime contributors to e-flux journal who, on the occasion of the journal’s tenth birthday, wrote short texts that artists illustrated and set to graphic format. Since 2008, the authors included in this volume have continued to shape varied concerns and urgencies of e-flux journal into certain consistencies and overarching emergent issues. This extravaganza of a graphic journal features texts and illustrations by Liam Gillick, Reza Negarestani and Keith Tilford, Keller Easterling and Meijia Xu, Hu Fang and Mojo Wang, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Andrew Alexander, Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Clara Bessijelle Johansson, Raqs Media Collective and Freddy Carrasco, and Martha Rosler and Josh Neufeld.
Routes/Worlds, which combines a selection of essays Elizabeth A. Povinelli has been writing for the journal since 2011, might be read in terms of its remarkable perseverance in rearticulating large-scale systems of power and affect, even as—or precisely because—those systems stage increasingly novel forms of neglect. Today, it only becomes clearer that struggles to survive day-to-day challenges are most often struggles against sedimented raw deals whose disastrous logic needs to be traced over large expanses of space and time to become perceptible. In this constant struggle, Povinelli provides weapons as well as inspiration.
Our 2015 reader The Internet Does Not Exist posits, as its title suggests, that the internet now remains only as a blur, a cloud, a friend, a deadline, a redirect, or a 404. If it ever existed, we couldn’t see it. Because it has no shape. It has no face, just this name that describes everything and nothing at the same time. Yet we are still trying to climb onboard, to get inside, to be part of the network, to get in on the language game, to show up on searches, to appear to exist. But we will never get inside of something that isn’t there. All this time we’ve been bemoaning the death of any critical outside position, we should have taken a good look at information networks. Just try to get in. You can’t. Networks are all edges, as Bruno Latour points out. We thought there were windows but actually it’s made of mirrors. And in the meantime we are being faced with more and more—not just information, but the world itself. And a very particular world that has already become part of our consciousness. And it wants something. It doesn’t only want to harvest our eyeballs, our attention, our responses, and our feelings. It also wants to condition our minds and bodies to absorb all the richness of the planet’s knowledge. Featuring texts by Hito Steyerl, Keller Easterling, Bruno Latour, Ursula K. Heise, Gean Moreno, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Diedrich Diederichsen, Rasmus Fleischer, Jon Rich, Geert Lovink, Brian Kuan Wood with Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julian Assange, Metahaven, Benjamin Bratton, and Patricia MacCormack.
We look forward to reading with you!