Sternberg Press / The Antipolitical – serie

On the forms of sabotage, insubordination, and invisible activity that evade the terrain of politics.What gets stranded outside the borders of the political? Inhuman Resources develops an account of sabotage, insubordination, and the invisible activities that undermine the ideas of accountability and identification on which representative politics rely.Drawing from histories of labor, disability, infrastructure, writing, and war, Williams offers  genealogies of the tropes of paralysis and sabotage, which leave behind notions of public citizenship to reveal an “inhuman” agency that hinges on the unexpected friction between humans, materials, machinery, and other non-human life. Yet to detect this and move away from fantasies of clarity and visibility, we need to take cues from political and artistic practices that evade such legibility, and are attuned to what happens off-screen and without recognition.Spanning an ambitious range of subjects—from prison architecture to digital animation, legal history to self-help books, and electrical blackouts to silkworms saturated with toxic dye—Inhuman Resources gathers materials for thinking differently about insurgent activity. This is a theory that does not privilege exodus, pride, or autonomy but instead takes shape inside the very processes, architectures, appearances, and systems it seeks to ruin.

How the transition to fossil fuels entailed an intensification of ongoing processes of racialization.From the eighteenth century onwards, Western science began to tap a large, yet non-renewable, capital store of energy. This transition from agricultural production dependent upon the flow of annual cycles (the sun) to industrial production based on the usage and subsequent depletion of energy stocks (fossil fuels) peaked around 1860. The period that followed roughly coincides with what genocide scholar Dirk Moses has dubbed “the racial century”—that is, the epoch when all political questions were articulated through the language of biology. Entropy and Chronopolitical Allegory considers the question: Why does the transition to fossil fuels entail an intensification of ongoing processes of racialization? Extrapolating the steam engine’s low thermal efficiency into the idea of a universe running out of time, the late nineteenth century mobilized evolutionary theory to counter the dissipative force of entropy. Flowing from this equation between time and energy, the discourse of the early twentieth century is marked by a search for “superman” types—a form of secular seekership that extends from technological to spiritual registers, leading to a conceptualization of technology that is closer to alchemy than mechanics. Against the backdrop of these structuring analogies, Ana Teixeira Pinto looks into the racialized inscriptions of difference energy conversions connote, and how they are mobilized in order to convert monetary value into cultural values.

Coloniality, raciality, and global capitalism from a black feminist “poethical” perspective.

Unpayable Debt examines the relationships among coloniality, raciality, and global capital from a black feminist “poethical” perspective. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler's 1979 sci-fi novel Kindred, in which an African-American writer is transported back in time to the antebellum South to save her owner-ancestor, Unpayable Debt relates the notion of value to coloniality—both economic and ethical. Focusing on the philosophy behind value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes capital as the juridical architecture and ethical grammar of the world. Here, raciality—a symbol of coloniality—justifies deployments of total violence to enable expropriation and land extraction.

This is the first volume in the On the Political series.

On the aesthetic and intellectual affinities between recent art and conspiracy.Written in the wake of the far-right populist turn in Europe, the US, and beyond, What We Do Is Secret addresses aesthetic and intellectual affinities between recent art and conspiracy, proposing a theory of conspiracy that is not primarily concerned with conspiracy theory. This inquiry takes shape across chapters on the politics of post-internet art aesthetics; the sublime and possessive individualism in recent “critical” art; Cady Noland’s security fences, and silkscreens of the Symbionese Liberation Army; and mutuality, secrecy, and improvisation in the work of Ima-Abasi Okon. Larne Abse Gogarty discusses the relationship between culture and contemporary politics, following on from David Lloyd’s proposition that through its compensatory qualities, the aesthetic sphere naturalizes forms of life lived under the rule of property. What kind of art can work against this? Can art exist as a conspiracy capable of corroding that rule?