bam! so it's actually a sociological theory and not a phenomenal one?ideas · 03 sepanton vidokle, the pool is already therereview · 12 augstefan paulus, non-becomingreview · 09 augalenka zupančič, what if the interregnum is the regnum?study · 11 julliving furniture: beyond poeticsreview · 10 juljane bennett, influx & effluxprose · 05 juljesteringreview · 04 julireland & kronic, cute accelerationismdiscourse · 30 junglykon & gonçalves, metalogosreview · 22 junthe algorithm and the antichrist
click to read
seven registers · every piece on the site is one of theseshane denson — post-cinematic bodies
reading·08 sep 2026read the file →featured
marek poliks & roberto alonso trillo, exocapitalism
apparently, empire is the horrible feudal slow sludge that levels your parking lot, whereas capitalism is the genius abstractive vehicle that stratifies only the germs it can see as volatile, creating value in labor?02 / featured file02 jun 2025 — counteranne dufourmantelle, in praise of risk
risk is everywhere, we are simply not present in it, not that we have somehow swallowed risk ontologically and managed to securitize everything.03 / featured file30 jun 2026 — ideaschor pharn lee, the architectures of intelligence and garden empires
pharn lee argues that water is exchanged for intelligence tokens in these premises, but i’d argue metis is more about being allowed to experience the world-interior of capital.index
soft affiliation only — nothing here is a partnershipby author
full index →icon 24
master canon · agamben, žižek, fisher, bratton→person 37
flusser, noys, arni, likavcan→avatar 19
simulacrum · garton, de llis, thotti, land→three kinds of author, one index. favoritism still applies
by publisher
full index →punctum books
forge · □ · cc by-nc-sa 4.0→open humanities press
crypt · ◎ · cc, scholar-led · 2→hyperspekulation
forge · ◎ · open journal · 1→specifically choosing copyleft publishers for this box so that i don’t get sued
catalogues
institutional programme →publisher catalogues
the first full theory catalogue in the world. every press worth reading, indexed by imprint, series and year — and revised like very rarely because i'm lazy.
criticism
institutional programme →yearly review programme
a plan that doesn't usually work out02 / presscatalogue systempublisher catalogues
the first full theory catalogue in the world03 / indexevaluative archivewriting rankings
apparently producing results that look quantifiable04 / boardcomparative recordtheorist leaderboards
why is this guy better than that guy?05 / methodcritical protocolreview method & guide
like "stirner's critics" but with less hype06 / guaranteeeditorial standardquality guarantee
what publication and criticism commit toseal
seals are very wonderful because they show you exactly how a text behaves without needing to even look at it. they're still in their early phase, and i oddly slap my rating on top of them, but eventually you can learn based off the color and distribution pattern what type of text it is. obviously there aren't a lot of variations, but just enough to count. learning by shapes is easy too, for example this greenspan text is like a bird that's missing a leg, large wings but not a lot of horizontal shape, because it's referenced and framed well but hardly connects throughout its chapters.
- 01
- score — honestly very rarely directly argued, largely qualitative social signaling; the verdict word sits under it.
- 02
- form — one of ten shapes that try to map how the text behaves, drawn as the seal. a new seal is generated every time there's a difference in the exact metrics.
- 03
- axes — five margins, fixed by form, an attempt at a new structuralism (i will explain more in the gamble in representation).
- 04
- account — basically, what is it + how long did it take me to read and review + how did i feel?
- 05
- facts — justified is short for "is this justified to exist in this form as philosophically significant?" and the usual answer is no.
- justified
- no
- form
- ≋ oscillation · arranging voice
- failure
- inflation · high
- standard
- ↑ mcluhan · ↓ yuk hui
- scale
- 85,000 → 4,798 · 18:1
countertrace
as you complete the text from zero to a hundred percent, you can literally see how far i stray away from it or how close i come to it. whats especially important are distortions, because they also signify parodies or intentional subversions of a point, which is the whole reason the counter thing exists separately from just being categorized as ideas or whatever.
dufourmantelle →locator folio
its pretty simple, a full circle is a mark, which is a reset point or decisive area. an empty circle is a branch, which is just the normal argument extending. a revision is a star symbol. simply look at the symbols and go from there. they're all connected and chaptered, because notes refer to the real text. notes are best read with the text next to you, seriously, they're written with the text next to me.
horace →scaffold
reconstructions, hinges and extensions are all written down. a reading is most successful when it has a lot of reconstructions and only a few extensions, but there's an ideal mark. its like a ladder, it goes down to capture periods in the text itself. there's probably so many more variations here than in the axes, but they're not as iconic. they look great when colored though, and like everything else you can use the buttons to turn off reconstructions and hinges if you want to simply know if there's anything constructive in my reading outside of the actual exegesis.
sanbonmatsu →- beams
- 12
- ladder
- 11 reconstruct · 6 hinge · 7 extend
- entry
- pity wagering
turn sign
the discourse sigil is fixed, but i am planning to draw variations where branches actually extend depending on how far the argument is developing. but what's more interesting is if the thread is open or closed. it can only close if who i'm commenting to ever responds and i decide that their response should exist as it is rather than responding again. eventually the sigil should reflect developed states.
metalogos →- prompt
- hidden messages as patterned coincidence
- turn
- coincidence → physical signification
- thread
- open
intervention trace
the ideas sigils are by far the most developed. there are actually a variety of versions it can have, all of which i will now sort of fail to explain
arni →- intervention
- transposition · projection
- operation
- maternal influence → engineered emanation
- yield
- biphasic reproductive regime
- pressure
- maternal unity ↔ institutional control
- departure
- substantial
review
someone else’s argument, taken apart. or rather, judged, truly judged. but more importantly, truly encountered. that is what makes craft necessary, devotion. and also, bastardization. lots of both.
- derrick jensen — endgame vol. one
- srećko horvat — the radicality of love
- adam greenfield — lifehouse: taking care of ourselves in a world on fire
- eugene thacker — tentacles longer than night
- marek poliks & roberto alonso trillo — exocapitalism
- anna greenspan — china and the wireless undertow
- claire colebrook — sex after life: essays on extinction, vol. two
- lukas likavcan — intro to comparative planetology
- bernardo esquinca — the secret life of insects and other stories
- stefan paulus — non-becoming: echoes and fractals of un-becoming
- alenka zupančič — what if the interregnum is the regnum?
- giorgio cesarale & matteo pasquinelli — the algorithm and the antichrist
- tony chamas — genealogy of wokeism
- s. prasad — crossing the rubicon
- anna longo — post-neoliberalism & the rise of brand subjectivity
- nikolay smirnov — elements of immanentism in russia
- zach gibson — a new look at rabelais and his world
- georges didi-huberman — the potential not to
- maks valenčič — psychotic accelerationism
- charles mudede — will ai remember the days of slavery?
- james de llis — progress is a life worm
- thotti — play cow
- tung-hui hu — after exhaustion, a door
- hamed mohavedi — new normativity and the normativity of the new in adorno
- lukas likavcan — the governance of habitability
- laura tripaldi — substrates unbound
- eugénie desmedt — wholesale! assembly-line fiction
- skvortsova & nakhshunov — paradoxes of homosexual desire in the third reich
- mr. burns collective — ten theses on revolutionary possibility
- jane bennett — influx & efflux: writing up with walt whitman
- amy ireland & maya b. kronic — cute accelerationism
- ajay singh chaudhary — the exhausted of the earth, the extractive circuit
- gabriel yoran — the interfact, genesis and integration
- frank kermode — pleasure & change: the aesthetics of canon
- steven shaviro — fluid futures, speculative time
- ulrike bergermann — property: colonial histories
notes
to an extent, being unfair about a dead sacred text is the necessary responsibility of criticism at large. to generate unrelated thoughts about a text, that's what notes are really all about. the difference between marking and noting is that there is no point of noting if your notes look like more of what the text already says.
reading
closer to working through a text than judging it. a lot of it is still positioning, but the theoretical or critical tradition has a messier job than positioning a text, and that is arriving at the point where reading it actually matters. this question can only be answered through a reading, not through reading on its own.
writings
the only register here not pointed at somebody else. unfortunately, still pointed at everything. but you're in luck, there are ways to reading a text without needing to know its references, and they are now menu options!
ideas
the healthiest, most wise, most pristine, most natural series. everything orients around a central axis, how can we take what somebody else did, and do something truly new with it? there is nothing more freeing than that. it is truly a time for that one golden philosophy.
- anton vidokle — the pool is already there
- larry wolff — paolina's innocence: casanova's girls
- owen hatherley — militant modernism
- eugene thacker — data made flesh
- james stout — against the state: myanmar
- caroline arni — of human born: fetal lives
- yvette granata — after the machine child: the electra basilisk
- chor pharn lee — the architectures of intelligence and garden empires
- benjamin bratton — the myth of blurope
- vincent garton — automaticity and the mystery of the state
- iris carver — the telos project
- bernes, o'brien, petrossian — inquiry on the future of revolution
- maurizio lazzarato — why war?
discourse
or in other words, allowing yourself to speak on top of every other guy, no matter what they think they're on top of. the character of thoughts beats the generation of thought itself, and this wisdom is carried over into every sequential inference. that's what our tradition is built on.
- phoebus glykon & luís gonçalves — metalogos
- mark fisher — the labour of simulation
- anne-françoise schmid — on contemporary objects
- eyal weizman — forensic temporality
- eivind rossaak — more than an image
- shane brighton — tragic witnessing
- stepan kment — programming worlds
- mckenzie wark — players
- james der derian — virtuous war
- antoine bousquet — wargames
counter
written against the object rather than about it. parodying the voice and character of a writing brings it closer not just to a reader experience but to the fundamental meaningful encounter.
- emma lieber — impossible professions
- jan grue — that obscure object of embodiment
- roman khimei & yarema malashchuk — pedagogies of war
- nick land — fanged noumena
- xia jia — the ai story is not done
- jonathan griffin — jacqueline humphries
- robin mackay — simulation, exercise, operations
- giorgio agamben — profanations
- anne dufourmantelle — in praise of risk
- klaus theweleit — male fantasies