Some recent-ish publications

Experimental Publishing Compendium

Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers (book series)

How To Be A Pirate: An Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan and Gary Hall by Holger Briel’.

'Experimenting With Copyright Licences' (blogpost for the COPIM project - part of the documentation for the first book coming out of the Combinatorial Books pilot)

Review of Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage' by Matthew Kirschenbaum

Contribution to 'Archipiélago Crítico. ¡Formado está! ¡Naveguémoslo!' (invited talk: in Spanish translation with English subtitles)

'Defund Culture' (journal article)

How to Practise the Culture-led Re-Commoning of Cities (printable poster), Partisan Social Club, adjusted by Gary Hall

'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea' (journal article)

'Writing Against Elitism with A Stubborn Fury' (podcast)

'The Uberfication of the University - with Gary Hall' (podcast)

'"La modernidad fue un "blip" en el sistema": sobre teorías y disrupciones con Gary Hall' ['"Modernity was a "blip" in the system": on theories and disruptions with Gary Hall']' (press interview in Colombia)

'Combinatorial Books - Gathering Flowers', with Janneke Adema and Gabriela Méndez Cota - Part 1; Part 2; Part 3 (blog post)

Open Access

Most of Gary's work is freely available to read and download either here in Media Gifts or in Coventry University's online repositories PURE here, or in Humanities Commons here

Radical Open Access

Radical Open Access Virtual Book Stand

'"Communists of Knowledge"? A case for the implementation of "radical open access" in the humanities and social sciences' (an MA dissertation about the ROAC by Ellie Masterman). 

« The Interfact by Gabriel Yoran - new open access book from Open Humanities Press | Main | Machine Intelligences, new edition of Culture Machine – available open access »
Monday
Sep272021

'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea' published in Media Theory

My article 'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea', has been published in the open access journal Media Theory:

http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/126

 

‘Pluriversal Socialism – The Very Idea’ starts from the position that politics in the West today is typically conducted in liberal humanist terms. This is the case regardless of whether those involved identify as radical democrats, socialists, communists, feminists, Greens, Marxists or anarchists.

Contemporary antihumanist and posthumanist theory is meant to offer something very different to liberal humanism. Media ecology, media archaeology, new materialism and object-oriented philosophy are all positioned as representing a shift away from anthropocentrism and a modernist epistemology based on the separation of human from nonhuman, subject from object, masculine from feminine, culture from nature, living from non-living. Instead, they champion a radically relational approach to the world that is designed to destablise such ontological dualisms. Yet while antihumanist and posthumanist theorists may write about transgressing the boundary that divides the human from the nonhuman, when it comes to their owns ways of being and doing they too often end up operating as bourgeois liberal humanists.

‘Pluriversal Socialism’ continues with my exploration (in texts such as Pirate Philosophy and ‘Anti-Bourgeois Theory’) of how we can not only write non-liberal humanist theory but actually work, act and live as non-liberal humanists too. It does so by drawing on the emphasis that is currently placed by a number of Latin Americanist theorists on pluriversal, ontological, radically relational politics (as distinct from the universal, modernist, counterhegemonic politics of most left thinkers in the Global North). In the process it addresses two important questions that have been raised recently by Arturo Escobar and Boaventura de Sousa Santos respectively: ‘Can we unlearn the liberal individual … in a similar way that we endeavour to unlearn patriarchy, racism and heterosexism?’ And is what we need to do so ‘another theory of revolution’ or a revolution of theory?

 

‘Pluriversal Socialism’ is the latest addition to the political discussion about how to transition toward a noncapitalist, nonracist, nonheteropatriarchal future between Jeremy Gilbert, Gabriela Méndez Cota and myself. See also:

Gabriela Méndez Cota, 'Pirate Traces': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/114

Jeremy Gilbert, 'Anti-Bourgeois For What?': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/115

Gary Hall, 'Anti-Bourgeois Theory': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/91