Three Poems

…the black lead of his carpenter’s pencil has been pressed into the paper with tremendous force, far exceeding the demands of the form or the requirements of the shading in that precinct of the image…

Issue #10: Affect, Effect, Bertolt Brecht

In nonsite’s tenth issue, we revisit the work of Bertolt Brecht and assess its relevance for today.

Issue Print Test

In metadata, set “print-issue” to the issue you want to print and it will put the whole thing into one giant post. The format needs to be finessed to make it print out like a full issue, but it is getting there! To do: add the issue description as an option… Why isn’t the issue […]

Neoliberal Art History

Putting aside the one-dimensional account of artworks as “reifications”—“mediums lead to objects, and thus reification”—it would take only a moment’s reflection to see that the distribution of wealth in the “era of art,” at precisely the moment Joselit’s “reframing, capturing, reiterating, and documenting” paradigm first emerged (a set of procedures exemplified for him by the work of Sherrie Levine) was also the moment at which the US economy began its most aggressive turn away from equality.

Issue #9: The Labor Issue

Nonsite’s 9th issue focuses on working conditions in higher education. Edited by Victoria H.F. Scott.

Issue #9: The Labor Issue

Nonsite’s 9th issue focuses on working conditions in higher education. Edited by Victoria H.F. Scott.

Going Back to Class: Why We Need to Make University Free, and How We Can Do It

Far from spelling the end of neoliberalism, the economic crisis now marching into its fifth year has intensified it, proof that this increasingly dystopian order will not collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Its fate depends, above all, on the balance of class forces in this country, and tilting that in our favor requires diligent organization and capacity building.

Academic Labor, the Aesthetics of Management, and the Promise of Autonomous Work

An insistence on autonomy, here, is not about continuing to valorize the self as a site of all meaning and value. The opposite is true. Autonomization is a fundamentally social process. It is a matter of vigorously and loudly arguing for the necessary existence of modes of inquiry, styles of life, and ways of organizing creative and scholarly activity that reveal the limitations of the neoliberal market as an arbiter of what is valuable to know and do.

Bartleby’s Occupation: “Passive Resistance” Then and Now

For, when the neoliberal state has been absorbed by the market, how is it possible to resist it? Or, to put the question in a simpler form, how does one “resist” the market (essentially, the question posed by “Bartleby”)? Neoliberalism, of course, has no interest in answering this question; its account of political resistance is not resistance to the market, but resistance in the market. In other words, resistance itself essentially becomes privatized, as political principles find their primary expression in market preferences.

Todd Cronan and Simon Critchley, “The Ontology of Photographic Seeing”

Video of Todd Cronan and Simon Critchley in conversation at The Photographic Universe II.