Ray Brassier

A remarkably clear explication of the tenets of Object-Oriented Philosophy and an acute critique of the movement's ramifications for philosophy today.How does the patience and rigour of philosophical explanation fare when confronted with an irrepressible desire to commune with the object and to escape the subjective perplexities of reference, meaning, and sense?Moving beyond the hype and the inflated claims made for "Object-Oriented" thought, Peter Wolfendale considers its emergence in the light of the intertwined legacies of twentieth-century analytic and Continental traditions.Both a remarkably clear explication of the tenets of OOP and an acute critique of the movement's ramifications for philosophy today, Object-Oriented Philosophy is a major engagement with one of the most prevalent trends in recent philosophy.

An argument that by amplifying alienation in performance, we can shift the emphasis from the sonic to the social.Works in sound studies continue to seek out sound "itself"--but, today, when the aesthetic can claim no autonomy and the agency of both artist and audience is socially constituted, why not explore the social mediation already present within our experience of the sonorous? In this work, artist, musician, performer, and theorist Mattin sets out an understanding of alienation as a constitutive part of subjectivity and as an enabling condition for exploring social dissonance--the discrepancy between our individual narcissism and our social capacity.Mattin's theoretical investigation is intertwined with documentation of a concrete experiment in the form of an instructional score (performed at documenta 14, 2017, in Athens and Kassel) which explores these conceptual connotations in practice, as players use members of the audience as instruments, who then hear themselves and reflect on their own conception and self-presentation. Social Dissonance claims that, by amplifying alienation in performance and participation in order to understand how we are constructed through various forms of mediation, we can shift the emphasis from the sonic to the social, and in doing so, discover for ourselves that social dissonance is the territory within which we already find ourselves, the condition we inhabit.

Capitalism is the fatal power driving ecocide and genocide. It bewitches us into accepting it as our fate, promising freedom for all while enslaving the many for the benefit of the few. Breaking this fatal spell requires recognizing capitalism as the work of human hands. Fate is never simply what befalls us; it is the consequence of what we have done. This is why it can be undone. Communism is not a series of historical failures to be condemned, or a future promise in which we should invest our faith. It is simply the abolition of fate, the movement through which we undo the illusion of necessity.