Join us next month, Dec 17th at @woodbine.nyc from 5-7, for the second to last discussion in our ATP series! Given the structure of the book, no prior experience is necessary. 

For the meeting please read chapter 13 apparatus of capture & chapter 14 the smooth and the striated.

If you have any questions please reach out via Instagram. Hope to see you there!

🎼 🐺 🪨🎙️🧭🦋🥚😶📚🎣🚊

A Thousand Plateaus Pt. 6

A four-week-long series led by Alexa 🪄

Tuesdays from 630-830 in Ridgewood. Starts October 3rd. Limited space so send a DM if you’re interested in joining 🫦

Inner Experience

hosting a lil reading series with @machinesseekingconnections this summer - we’ll read these 4 books by contemporary german philosopher byung-chul han over 6 weeks. these are short (50-100 pages) critiques of technology, media, and capitalism. starts 8/15, will meet in the lower east side. 

Byung-Chul Han Series

6 weeks. Starts April 11th. 630-830 every Tuesday in Ridgewood. Limited space. Send a DM if you’re interested 🫦

Anti-Oedipus

New series starts March 8th! We’re discussing subcultures every Wednesday from 630-830 in Ridgewood.

The readings in the series will cover things like deterritorializing and reterritorializing the world, our consumerist subjectivity, cultural appropriation, identity modification & fluidity, the supremacy of the image, the role of material conditions, temporality, instability, networks, the construction of collective affiliations and meaning.

Limited space. Send a DM if you want to attend. 4 weeks. $40 deposit. $10 back every session you attend. NOTAFLOF.

Subcultures Series

New series starts January 10th! We're discussing The Question Concerning Technology & Other Essays every Tuesday from 615-815 in Ridgewood.

“The Question Concerning Technology is one of the very best critiques of modernity I have ever read. The first paragraph establishes the essay's objective: to investigate technology in order to prepare us for a "free relationship" to it. The problem for Heidegger is not so much the existence of technology or the forms it takes, but rather our orientation to technology. How does my existence as a human being find itself revealed in finding out the essence of technology? Questioning in this is a mode of thinking; it is what makes us special, what makes the Dasein special. Heidegger's assertion that "the essence of technology is by no means anything technological" allows him to move his discussion of technology out of the domain of technological "experts." This attempt to "open up" the conversation is at once a democratic gesture and a strategy to shift the discussion to philosophy, to ontology specifically; where he is an expert.

Heidegger does not understand technology as a technological apparatus, but as a way of understanding the world. Our usual conception of technology is one of an exterior system, an entity separate from us; we think about it only in terms of its anthropomorphic utility. Heidegger rejects the separation between object and subject; he believes that our very being is entwined with technology. He sets out to dispel the “neutrality” of technology, since it has literally changed the trajectory of entire societies. Technology is much more than just an instrument to serve humankind; and while this definition is correct, it is limiting; it conceals our way to the truth. Technology is a way of revealing, of introducing meaning where there was incoherence, it organises and structures. It sways our Being as a way of understanding the world, as a way of exposing more.” - Ipsa, GoodReads review

The Question Concerning Technology

New series starts January 10th! We're discussing Queer Phenomenology every Tuesday from 615-815 in Ridgewood.

“In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.”

Send a DM if you want to attend. 4 weeks. $40 deposit. $10 back every session you attend.

Queer Phenomenology

New series starts October 11th! We’re discussing Difference & Repetition every Tuesday from 645-845. Send a DM if you want to attend. $60 deposit. $10 back every session you attend.

Difference & Repetition

Come out to @woodbine.nyc on Sunday August 28th to discuss Byung-Chul Han’s book The Disappearance of Rituals: A Typology of the Present. Discussion starts at 5:30! 🖤 stick around afterwards for their Sunday dinner 😛

“Untrammelled neoliberalism and the inexorable force of production have produced a 21st century crisis of community: a narcissistic cult of authenticity and mass turning-inward are among the pathologies engendered by it. We are individuals afloat in an atomised society, where the loss of the symbolic structures inherent in ritual behaviour has led to overdependence on the contingent to steer identity.

Avoiding saccharine nostalgia for the rituals of the past, Han provides a genealogy of their disappearance as a means of diagnosing the pathologies of the present. He juxtaposes a community without communication – where the intensity of togetherness in silent recognition provides structure and meaning – to today’s communication without community, which does away with collective feelings and leaves individuals exposed to exploitation and manipulation by neoliberal psycho-politics. The community that is invoked everywhere today is an atrophied and commoditized community that lacks the symbolic power to bind people together. For Han, it is only the mutual praxis of recognition borne by the ritualistic sharing of the symbolic between members of a community which creates the footholds of objectivity allowing us to make sense of time.

This new book by one of the most creative cultural theorists writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.”

The Disappearance of Rituals

A new series Intro to Bataille starts in a month (Sept 6th)

"One of the few philosophers in history to actually center the concept of transgression ... Georges Bataille would however go on to develop some of the most unsettling even disturbing ideas in the history of philosophy. His philosophical project would focus in on concepts of sacrifice, violence, the erotic as a kind limit experience, excess, and transgression all built on an ontology built on ancient gnosticism in which the base of all Being in a sense was itself a violent destabilization of metaphysics itself. His work would go on to form the foundation for everything from philosophical deconstructionism to the metaphysical erotic torture of the demonic cenobites of the Hellraiser franchise. I dare say there is perhaps no more sinister philosophy in history than that of Georges Bataille." - Georges Bataille - Sacrifice, the Accursed Share and the Gnosticism of Base Materialism

4 weeks, Tuesday nights 6:30 - 8:30. 10 spots. $40 deposit — $10 returned per session attended. DM if you’re interested 🖤

Intro to Bataille

A new series introducing dialectics starts in a month (July 26th)

“Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.”

6 weeks, Tuesday nights 6:30 - 8:30. Clinton Hill near the G. 10 spots. $80 deposit — $10 returned per session attended. DM if you’re interested 🖤

An Introduction to Dialectics

Join us this June for our doomer series! Inspired by the doomer meme, this series will explore the idea that there is a collective sense of doom & attempt to outline its origins, implications, and future.

Discussions are on Wednesday nights from 630 - 830 at Fort Greene Park. Send a DM for more info ✨

Doomer Series

Join us Sunday May 1st at 4 for a discussion about forms of life.

Instead of a book we’ll be reading three essays.

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat (1923)

The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence (1982)

Geontologies: The Concept and Its Territories (2017)

Forms of Life

A four week series introducing Freud starts in two weeks (March 30th).

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”

4 weeks, Wednesday nights 7-9. Clinton Hill near the G. 10 spots. $80 deposit — $20 returned per session attended. DM if you’re interested.

If you can’t put down a deposit but want to come just send a DM & we’ll figure something out.

Also if you want to put together a series let’s talk!

Intro to Freud

In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems.

While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers—and the planet—it’s worse. The new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. So how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyze this new world, but ways to change it. Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control—and contest—it.

Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?

Countersexual Manifesto is an outrageous yet rigorous work of trans theory, a performative literary text, and an insistent call to action. Seeking to overthrow all constraints on what can be done with and to the body, Paul B. Preciado offers a provocative challenge to even the most radical claims about gender, sexuality, and desire.

Preciado lays out mock constitutional principles for a countersexual revolution that will recognize genitalia as technological objects and offers step-by-step illustrated instructions for dismantling the heterocentric social contract. He calls theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and Haraway to task for not going nearly far enough in their attempts to deconstruct the naturalization of normative identities and behaviors. Preciado’s claim that the dildo precedes the penis―that artifice, not nature, comes first in the history of sexuality―forms the basis of his demand for new practices of sexual emancipation. He calls for a world of sexual plasticity and fabrication, of bio-printers and “dildonics,” and he invokes countersexuality’s roots in the history of sex toys, pornography, and drag in order to rupture the supposedly biological foundations of the heterocentric regime. His claims are extreme, but supported through meticulous readings of philosophy and theory, as well as popular culture. The Manifesto is now available in English translation for its twentieth anniversary, with a new introduction by Preciado. Countersexual Manifesto will disrupt feminism and queer theory and scandalize us all with its hyperbolic but deadly serious defiance of everything we’ve been told about sex.

Countersexual Manifesto

Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable.

Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.

This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.  

Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.

 Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But this provocative essay proposes counter models too, presenting a wealth of ideas and surprising alternatives at every turn.

Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

Why think? Not, according to Gilles Deleuze, in order to be clever, but because thinking transforms life. Why read literature? Not for pure entertainment, Deleuze tells us, but because literature can recreate the boundaries of life. With his emphasis on creation, the future and the enhancement of life, along with his crusade against 'common sense', Deleuze offers some of the most liberating, exhilarating ideas in twentieth-century thought. This book offers a way in to Deleuzean thought through such topics as:

Written with literature students in mind, this is the ideal guide for students wishing to think differently about life and literature and in this way to create their own new readings of literary texts.

Gilles Deleuze

Why has there been such an explosion of discussion about sex in the West since the 17th century? Here, one of France's greatest intellectuals explores the evolving social, economic, and political forces that have shaped our attitudes toward sex. In a book that is at once controversial and seductive, Michel Foucault describes how we are in the process of making a science of sex which is devoted to the analysis of desire, rather than the increase of pleasure.

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1

Gilles Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control" contrasts the disciplinary societies described by Michel Foucault with the emerging forms of control in the late 20th century. While disciplinary societies operated through institutions (schools, factories, prisons), control societies function through continuous modulation and flexible networks. Technologies and digital codes replace enclosed structures, resulting in a more fluid but pervasive form of control. For Deleuze, this new paradigm is characterized by ceaseless change, where individuals become "dividuals" - data sets to be monitored and regulated. The shift indicates a transformation in how power operates, moving towards decentralized yet omnipresent mechanisms of surveillance and normalization.

Postscript on the Societies of Control

Industrial Society and Its Future, generally known as the Unabomber Manifesto, is a 1995 anti-technology essay by Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber". The manifesto contends that the Industrial Revolution began a harmful process of natural destruction brought about by technology, while forcing humans to adapt to machinery, creating a sociopolitical order that suppresses human freedom and potential. The 35,000-word manifesto formed the ideological foundation of Kaczynski's 1978-1995 mail bomb campaign, designed to protect wilderness by hastening the collapse of industrial society. 

Industrial Society and Its Future: Unabomber Manifesto

An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History is a book by the philosopher Stephen Houlgate in which the author provides an introduction to the philosophy of Hegel.

An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History

An early text from Tiqqun that views cybernetics as a fable of late capitalism, and offers tools for the resistance.

The cybernetician's mission is to combat the general entropy that threatens living beings, machines, societies—that is, to create the experimental conditions for a continuous revitalization, to constantly restore the integrity of the whole.

This early Tiqqun text has lost none of its pertinence. The Cybernetic Hypothesis presents a genealogy of our “technical” present that doesn't point out the political and ethical dilemmas embedded in it as if they were puzzles to be solved, but rather unmasks an enemy force to be engaged and defeated. Cybernetics in this context is the teknê of threat reduction, which unfortunately has required the reduction of a disturbing humanity to packets of manageable information. Not so easily done. Not smooth. A matter of civil war, in fact. According to the authors, cybernetics is the latest master fable, welcomed at a certain crisis juncture in late capitalism. And now the interesting question is: Has the guest in the house become the master of the house?

The “cybernetic hypothesis” is strategic. Readers of this little book are not likely to be naive. They may be already looking, at least in their heads, for a weapon, for a counter-strategy. Tiqqun here imagines an unbearable disturbance to a System that can take only so much: only so much desertion, only so much destituent gesture, only so much guerilla attack, only so much wickedness and joy.

The Cybernetic Hypothesis

Using a range of ‘case studies’ from Critical Theory to Candy Crush, ‘Gangnam Style’ to Game of Thrones and Football Manager to Hieronymus Bosch, this book argues that we need to rethink our enjoyment. Inspired by psychoanalysis, the book offers a new way of thinking about how we talk about what we enjoy and how we enjoy what we talk about.

 Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism

After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The audiobook analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work, and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also shows that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.

Capitalist Realism

In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation. For the first time, medical knowledge took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that could be mapped. Disease became subject to new rules of classification. And doctors begin to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible.

In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the true heir to Nietzsche charts this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge. As in his classic Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault shows how much what we think of as pure science owes to social and cultural attitude—in this case, to the climate of the French Revolution. Brilliant, provocative, and omnivorously learned, his book sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death.

The Birth of the Clinic

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.

Machines Seeking Connections

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