In these interviews dating from 1998, Châtelet amplifies the major themes of To Live and Think Like Pigs, discusses his method of dramatisation and the crucial importance of style; and touches on subjects from dialectics to dope smoking, from Yoplait to slavery, along the way introducing some of the book’s key concepts: cybercattle, the average man, the tapeworm-citizen, and of course the pitiful couple Cyber-Gideon and Turbo-Bécassine.

The older paradigm for photojournalists was to simply record events, with the hope—and frequently the expectation—that people and their governments would be moved to respond to the injustices pictured, as witnessed by the impact of certain images during the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. Given evolving media and political climates, however, including the billions of images now available online from all kinds of sources, the purpose and effectiveness of media, in particular of visual journalism, has been called into question. Bending the Frame, by author and critic Fred Ritchin, addresses the new and emerging potentials for visual media ...

Ann Laura Stoler and I begin this conversation by introducing the political context lexicon that she co-curates and edits. We then discuss the work she had done around the colonial management of sexuality and reproduction. The existence of the métis (mix-blooded) child in the colony renders more complex the binary distinction between colon citizens and colonial subjects. Biology is nevertheless not merely the only site of recognition for the colonial administration, behavior is also extremely important in the access to citizenship. We examine how space, whether corridor or school, is built to accommodate the administrated behavior of the colony. Finally, Ann gives us a preview ...

“At the heart of this book is a simple and profound proposition: to ‘do’ architecture is to immerse oneself in a conflictual process of material production—participation is not a productive encounter of multiple practitioners and stakeholders, but a set of conflicts, negotiations, maneuvers, and swindles between and within a multiplicity of agents, human and nonhuman alike—equally including architects, clients, financiers, and builders, say, but also silicon, plastic, concrete, each with its conflicting aims and different material means to achieve them. Every building is thus the materialization of such encounter. So, despite the hubris of the field, none of the parties ...

“It has been through all the phases of decline and is now thoroughly blighted. Subversive racial elements predominate; dilapidation and squalor are everywhere in evidence. It is a slum area and one of the city’s melting pots. There is a slum clearance project under consideration but no definite steps have as yet been taken. It is assigned the lowest of ‘low red’ grade.” Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, Residential Security Map. Location: Bunker Hill Security Grade: 4th Area No.: D37 Date: 2/27/39

Rahel Süß discusses citizens’ assembly, democracy and provocation, and spaces deliberate democracy necessitates.

Globalization, technology, and politics have altered the definition and expectations of citizenship and the right to place. Dimensions of Citizenship documents contributions from the seven firms selected to represent the United States in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. This paperback volume profiles and illustrates each of the US Pavilion contributions and contextualizes them in terms of scale. Drawing inspiration from the Eames’ Power of Ten, Dimensions of Citizenship will provide a view of belonging across seven stages starting with the individual (Citizen), then the collective (Civic, Region, Nation), and expanding to include all phases of contemporary society, real and projected (Globe, ...

A number of alternate, informal approaches to art and economy that arose in the Berlin of the 90s created a great deal of space and potential for rethinking relations between people, as well as possible roles for art in society. Today, however, much of this hope has since been obscured by the commercial activity and dysfunctional official art institutions most visible in the city’s art scene, and though many of the ways of living and working that were formulated in the 90s are still in practice today (not just in Berlin), many of their proponents acknowledge a feeling that the ...

When Paul Chan and Sven Lütticken proposed to gather a series of “reports” on the (mostly) recent rise of right-wing, populist movements for e-flux journal, it was immediately apparent that the urgency and complexity of the topic required its own special issue. As protests erupt throughout Europe in opposition to austerity measures being pushed through by right-wing governments and EU fiscal bodies, we are also now witnessing a phenomenon spreading throughout the Northern Hemisphere in which some of the most brazen hardline racist rhetoric emerges not only from politicians, but from the general populace as well. What is going on? ...

Beyond performative resistance and melancholic complicity with the existing order, a crucial strategy emerged in the 1980s from a collective of artists in Yugoslavia who used complicity as its most lethal weapon. Inke Arns and Slavoj Žižek have respectively described the activities of NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) and its sub-groupings (the band Laibach and the artist collective IRWIN, and Scipion Našice Sisters Theatre, among others) variously in terms of over-identification or subversive affirmation, as performing the “hidden reverse” of state ideology. From Laibach’s nationalism in drag to the issuing of a passport for an imagined “NSK state,” NSK is perhaps ...

What if history actually did end with the fall of communism and the end of the cold war, as Fukuyama claimed, and we are now enjoying some kind paradise of liberal democracy with no better political framework to strive towards? Or, what if a recognition of exploitation and social inequities actually is leading to a massive workers’ revolution that will reclaim the means of production and lead to a more equal distribution of resources and power—whether Marxist, democratic, or otherwise? Indeed, we are unsure whether we are still inside of an idea of progressive social emancipation and human self-realization that defined the modern era, ...

Early in the new century, it is already clear that the vanguards of the last one were less a singular, sequential telos than a symptomatic cycle. Movements like impressionism, abstraction, conceptualism, or symbolism are more like weather patterns that recur under certain circumstances than historical exceptions never to be repeated. There are everyday sprinkles of impressionism which relate to a Monet in the same way that the average rainstorm relates to a hurricane. In “Towards the New Realism,” Boris Groys examines the revival of what is still the most suggestive and polyamorous of these commitments, the pursuit of the real. ...