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reading list

here is my forever work-in-progress bibliography for all the things i’ve read.

click on the keywords to warp around:

books, cybertexts, essays, interviews, manifestos

books

adler-bolton, beatrice, and artie vierkant, 2022, health communism, verso books

explores how capital wields the concept of health, primarily as a means of demarcating the healthy (fit for work) population from the surplus, “those who fall outside of the normative principles for which state policies are designed, as well as those who are excluded from the attendant entitlements of capital.” adler-bolton and vierkant highlight that it is not any characteristic of the population that makes them inherently vulnerable to becoming surplus (e.g., being disabled, sick, or mentally ill). instead, their vulnerability is constructed through the deliberate diversion of resources away from these communities.

the surplus population then exists for capital as both a threat to the healthy population (of being certified surplus), that is, a means of buttressing capitalist hegemony, and as a source of profit generation. adler-bolton and vierkant call this second function “extractive abandonment” and spend a considerable portion of health communism working through its manifestations in, for example, for-profit prisons and nursing homes, and in the history of the asylum.

the book is remarkably clearsighted in how it unpicks these processes. it provides a vocabulary to account for the way capitalism constructs, extracts from, depends on its surplus populations. beyond the healthy/unhealthy demarcation in this book, it reminded me of gregory sholette’s description of the art world’s vast accumulation of redundant works, and of sofi thanhauser’s description of an export processing zone as an island of stability dependent on the instability of its host country - to name two at random.

there is, in short, so much in this book, on the mechanics of extractive abandonment, its manifestations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the radical movements that opposed them, whose fates were more often than not recuperation and repression.

with capitalism so tightly coupled to health, health communism argues that health is then a critically overlooked vulnerability for capitalism. it is necessary to sever health and capital, for which it is necessary to “both center the surplus populations and also to categorically refute the political, biostatistical, and sociological stratifications that lie at the center of the very construction of the surplus.” adler-bolton and vierkant emphasise this is not to simply “celebrate the surplus,” it is recognising that all of us, healthy or ill, are subject to extraction under capitalism. the book asserts, we are all surplus.

aarseth, espen a., 1997, cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature, johns hopkins university press

ergodic literature: texts in which ‘non-trivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text’. putting the theory aside and at its most basic level, an excellent primer on everything from text adventures to multi-user dungeons.

chapman, robert, 2023, empire of normality: neurodiversity and capitalism, pluto press

provides a history of “normality” as a concept that formed and mutated with changing social structures and hierarchies. robert chapman argues that normality is not an objective measure; rather, it has served to reify emergent or existing hierarchies in ability, social class, gender and race. this book then traces the history of this concept, from adolphe quetelet’s nineteenth century statistical “average man, through francis galton’s development of eugenics, and through the rise of postindustrial capitalism.

if there is a consistent thread through these different historical manifestations of normality, it is the notion that it is possible to define and measure a physical or mental norm for the population, from which individuals may deviate to greater or lesser degress. for the eugenics movement, which also commited to the idea that the species could be improved at the population level, the endpoint was mass sterilisation and murder of people considered inferior. but chapman demonstrates that, even if societies have outwardly disavowed eugenics since the second world war, we are still organised around a “pathology paradigm” that ranks individuals in terms of their mental and physical functioning against a statistical norm.

chapman argues that in the context of twenty-first century capitalism, this paradigm is used in the construction of the neurotypical and neurodivergent populations, alternately for labour exploitation, or as a non-working surplus from which profits may yet be extracted. this parallels (and explicitly cites) the arguments developed in adler-bolton and vierkant’s health communism, and comes to the same conclusion: the interests of the working class and the surplus are the same.

to this end, while the book highlights the recent wins of the neurodiversity movement, it argues that neurodivergent liberation is not possible to achieve within capitalism. accordingly in the final chapter of the book, chapman signposts potential practices for a neurodivergent marxism, including neurodivergent workers organising as neurodivergent workers and the wider organisation of the surplus as surplus alongside the working class (again, mirroring health communism), building on existing practices within health politics and scientific research, and decolonising neurodivesity theory.

easterling, keller, 2014, extrastatecraft: the power of infrastructure space, verso books

“extrastatecraft is the key to power - and resistance - in the twenty-first century.” develops an interesting if abstract vocabulary for thinking about infrastructure and government planning. i didn’t really absorb this one the first time around, but now i’m seeing it referenced in all sorts of smart writing. gotta reread.

grigar, dene, and stuart moulthrop, 2017, traversals: the use of preservation for early electronic writing, mit press.

grigar and moulthrop write about preserving and traversing four foundational electronic texts: uncle roger by judy malloy, uncle buddy’s phantom funhouse by john mcdaid, patchwork girl by shelley jackson and we descend by bill bly.

traversals focuses on the way each work is informed by its technological medium, and the way technological changes subtly alter our experience of the works. this is a critical exercise as year-on-year, changes in software and hardware make older works inaccessible. what happens to the experience of reading uncle roger when judy malloy ports it from a serial novel posted on the well, into a database application programmed in basic, or into a series of linked hypertext pages? this is where the notion of the traversal comes in, an audiovisual demonstration of the work, performed by or otherwise involving its author, using historically appropriate hardware and software.

the traversal also forms the core of grigar and moulthrop’s companion project, pathfinders

harris, malcolm, 2023, palo alto: a history of california, capitalism, and the world, little, brown and company

“maybe we’re more like butterflies, pinned live and wriggling onto history’s collage.”

a history of a university town as both a microcosm of, and gravitational centre for capitalist exploitation. malcolm harrisk moves through two hundred years of white colonisation in the western united states, the foundation of palo alto originally as a horse-breeding estate for railroad baron leland stanford, and its development through stanford university into a reservoir for white supremacy, eugenics, the military-industrial complex and neoliberal economics.

harris focuses on individuals connected with palo alto, but as the quote above suggests, this is not in the form of ‘great man’ history. a central theme is that capitalism is an impersonal force that makes use of the individuals available to it. if it were not leland stanford or frederick terman or bill gates or steve jobs, it suggests, capitalism would have made use of someone else who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

against these figures, the book continually unearths others, forces of resistance “who find ways to tug back, who pit themselves against the way things are and come to personify the system’s self-destructive countertendencies.” against the railroads and cartels military and corporations, the book highlights activists, revolutionaries and unionists, concluding with an account of the indigenous ohlone peoples’ fight for recognition, and a call for stanford to withdraw from its eight-thousand acres of land in palo alto.

isaacson, johanna, 2016, the bull and the ballerina: anarchist utopias in the age of finance, repeater books

really interesting. an overview of anarchist and diy movements over the last half-century, and their complex relationship to capitalism. isaacson sees diy and utopian anarchist practices as being both prefigurative of other possible worlds, and as self-critically mapping out their own limitations as they run up against the dominant logic of capitalism, hence representing the ballerina to wall street’s bull. she nonetheless considers these practices to form a kind of optimistic, expressive negation.

isaacson positions these practices against anti-utopian and capitalist realist narratives like fukuyama’s “end of history” or thatcher’s “there is no alternative.” this is framed as a politics of style and mediation, as a response to discourses of pragmatism and maturity which only serve to foreclose alternative possibilities. the book then traces a line through situationist and countercultural zines, bay-area diy and punk, riot grrl and queercore, and finally into the black bloc and the occupy movement; that is, countercultural movements and scenes that get criticised for refusing to operate in a “mature” register.

there’s lots of rabbit-warrens to go exploring, starting from this book, particularly (for me at least) the overview of punk zine culture in relation to situationism, and the argument that punk is a logic rather than a set of encoded practices, that it has “faked its own death” to evade recuperation and will do so again. the appendices of the book also contain interviews touching on daily life in a squat and participation in occupy oakland.

enrico monacelli, 2023, the great psychic outdoors: adventures in low fidelity, repeater books

a geneaology of lo-fi music! monacelli starts from the position that lo-fi music, in and of itself, is a radical practice. lo-fi is deliberately poor and weird, it lets in sounds that should be filtered out. but against the perception that this makes the music somehow more natural or immediate, monacelli argues that lo-fi is more artificial, in that it involves a conscious analysis and deconstruction of the act of recording. lo-fi is a radical practice, then, because it unearths and puts into question the otherwise hidden conditions and power-structures that shape music construction.

if lo-fi is a radical practice, it is not an uncomplicated means of escape from capitalism. it moves between artists more or less in the music industry like brian wilson, to outsiders like r. stevie moore and daniel johnston, exploring their generally fraught relationships to music production, recognition and recuperation. there are interesting parallels and counterpoints between, for example, r. stevie moore’s expressed desire to be a superstar and make a lot of money, but only on his terms, and daniel johnston’s repudiation of his mtv fame.

and if lo-fi is a radical practice, the book remains neutral on the types of politics to which it can align itself. the chapter on ariel pink in particular sees his music as paranoid, in the sense of existing to reinforce and repeat existing structures of power and production, and makes a connection to his shitty “contrarian” politics. despite this, monacelli makes a clear, partisan case for lo-fi as a form of critique and as a form of engaged escape, as a “pathway to to experience new intensities beyond our contemporary condition” (300).

aside from all this, i’m grateful this book introduced me to r. stevie moore and marine girls.

urban, florian, 2012, tower and slab: histories of global mass housing, routledge

histories of modernist mass housing across chicago, paris, berlin, brasilia, mumbai, moscow and shanghai. een in the cities where mass housing was “successful,” segregation and increasing inequality persist.

cybertexts

microchip espionage at the onset of the computing revolution. jenny, a recent graduate, has moved to the west coast and taken a job as babysitter for the tech executive tom broadthrow. jenny is present on the margins of successive parties held by the broadthrow family and through which an ensemble of characters rotates, including her repellent and possibly dangerous uncle roger.

this is the 1995 hypertext version of the story, considerably changed in format and content from the original unix and basic versions published between 1986-88. no less fascinating and engaging.

described by moulthrop as a “space probe”, a mixture of myst-like landscapes and garbled texts, which become less garbled as you revisit them. as they do, a set of linked narratives about memory and loss emerges, somehow connected to the strange monuments through which you navigate. i love this one, have written about it a lot in all sorts of scattered ways, and have a long-term aspiration to ressurect its eerie landscapes in a series of digital paintings.

those eerie landscapes will not load on a modern browser, but can be downloaded and viewed using the videopanoramas player. they are well worth downloading and looking at.

manifestos

if nature is unjust, change nature! this manifesto argues for the use of, or the appropriation of, technology as a means of facing up to global capitalism, and abolishing the binary gender system.

xenofeminism positions itself against what it calls “admirable, but insufficent struggles bound to fixed localities and fragmented insurrections,” seeing these as unable to move beyond a temporary and defensive posture. instead it seeks to face the demands of global complexity, transitioning across multiple levels of political, material and conceptual organisation.

the manifesto argues for a feminism at ease with computation, capable of repurposing technology and digital platforms to address specifically gendered issues, for example, harrassment and doxxing.

xenofeminism is antinatural and gender abolitionist, not in the sense of eradicating gender, but as a “shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power.” in this respect, it converges with other forms of emancipatory abolitionism towards a common horizon of class abolition.

this is the point where the manifesto really opens up for me, personally. (i might have some bias.) xenofeminism is a politics for alienation in that it is seeking to restore a sense of the world’s volatility and artificiality, to push back against the rubric of gender as a “plural but static constellation of gender identities” that is in some way natural, or given. against this, it evocatively describes transition as an “arduous assertion of freedom against an order that seemed immutable.” i adore this, of course.

things take off from here and the manifesto roams across several arena, both virtual and material: intervention into the built environment, liberating reproductive labour and domestic life through economic reconfiguration, and, what caught my attention, the “articulation of a proactive politics for biotechnical intervention and hormones.” for the last, the manifesto raises the possibility of open-source wetware, an extension of existing diy-hrt and gender hacking practices to parallel movements in the software world.

essays

explores the relationship between the anti-trans movement and extremist conspiracy theories, arguing that “respectable,” liberal gender critical punditry acts as a means to launder extremism into mainstream politics.

long account of the stop cop city protests in atlanta. i found it really worthwhile to read this in conjunction with johanna isaacson’s the bull and the ballerina, which discusses failure as a productive component of diy and anarchist movements. glass provides in this context a first-hand description of the protesters’ motivations, of asymmetrical police brutality, and of the formation of counter-narratives by the city and police to depict the protesters as domestic terrorists.

excellent introduction to electronic literature and its subgenres. hayles also discusses several foundational jumping-off places to explore electronic literature.

discusses stuart moulthrop’s reagan library and its use of monumental space. i read this essay when i was first trying to make games in twine and because i’m obsessed with archives, monuments and ruins i took a lot of influence from, and keep circling back to it.

interviews

conversation between charlie markbreiter and ok fox, that twists off in some really interesting directions, circling around anti-trans politics, the gentrification of meatspace and online culture, and the fandom to nft pipeline. touches on neoluddism at the end, on dropping out, on building community at the local level. ok fox: “i’ll pass the same $20 at the comics fest for the rest of my life, and i am dedicated to making opportunities for others to do the same.”