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Since at least the nineteenth century seriality and serialization have been among the most important formal and narrative strategies for popular media cultures and their negotiations with the radical changes brought on by industrialization and new communication technologies. Nothing less is at stake in popular seriality than the material and spatiotemporal ordering of the phenomenal world, with far-reaching political consequences. However, in an age of computation, predictive algorithms, and “personalized” media, the parameters of serialization are massively transformed. And because media forms and social formations are tightly intertwined, this transformation—or the shift from an “old” to a “new” form of seriality—brings with it crucial changes and uncertainties with respect to subjective and collective existence going forward. Centrally at stake in the new seriality is a set of techniques and technologies that aim to predictively “typify” subjects and preformat them vis-à-vis normative and statistically correlated categories of gender and race, among others. This article lays the groundwork for thinking seriality as a sociotechnics of typification, the scope and power of which is greatly expanded by algorithmic media.

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This essay examines how Stanisław Lem mobilizes the genre of science fiction to portray regional Central European concerns as structural conditions of semiperiphery. The essay centers on Lem’s interest in illegibility, which defines him as a novelist and a critic, showing how his argument against the US monopoly within the genre of science fiction is reflected in his novels. Focusing on Lem’s paralleling of female masochism and epistemological critique, the essay reads Solaris as a novel invested in inspecting the interrelatedness of systems of oppression.

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This essay theorizes an addiction to ecological anxiety that is characteristic of cultural reactions to climate change and made especially palpable in a time of pandemic. Borrowing from J. M. Coetzee’s identification in Franz Kafka of an epistemology of ever-evolving crisis, the essay surveys the growing corpus of scholarship on the Anthropocene, and, in particular, of quarantine writing, to examine the viral nature of first-person accounts of the ecocatastrophic, revealing a perpetual subjunctivity resistant to the ontological prioritization of the actual over the virtual. While such symptomatic thinking might seem to fulfill a psychologically inoculative function against impending catastrophe, the essay contends that it ultimately becomes a kind of autoimmune disorder: a prophetically self-fulfilling panic that makes it increasingly difficult to fathom, let alone to take action against, our current ecological and political crises.

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This article critically compares two recent approaches to the problem of aesthetic autonomy: Dave Beech’s Art and Value and Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy. By recentering the differences between these critics’ works around Marx’s categories of subsumption, it evaluates the fraught relationship between labor and aesthetics, economy and form, art and the market. Although Beech provides a persuasive account of art’s “economic exceptionalism,” his focus on the qualitative irreducibility of artistic labor risks losing sight of what is socially unique about aesthetic production. Likewise, and inversely, while Brown’s original account of art’s internal overcoming of the commodity-form provides a generative way to rethink aesthetics in modernism’s wake, it rests on a periodizing claim for the total domination of the capitalist market that equivocates on whether artistic labor can truly be “really subsumed” under capital. The article concludes by pondering the political dimension to these theories of autonomy, which mirror in important ways debates within communization circles over subsumption, programmatism, and the aesthetics of revolution.

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On April 17, 2023, Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev—both of whom were forced to flee Russia to avoid arrest for their open opposition to Russia’s war against Ukraine—sat down with anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to discuss the war, its origins, and its implications. How, in retrospect, might we trace a red thread from the authoritarian neoliberalism of the early Putin era to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and its pronounced dictatorial turn? What does this new form of Russian authoritarianism at home imply for the rest of the world? How useful are existing concepts from Marxism and critical theory—imperialism, Bonapartism, fascism, ideology—for understanding the situation both locally and globally?

What follows is a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for readability.

ALEXEI YURCHAK: The first question I would like to address to both of you. You have written and spoken about the radical transformation of the political system in Russia...

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The Francophone writer Habib Tengour, born in Mostaganem, Algeria, in 1947, likes to say that he lives “between Constantine and Paris.” Indeed, although Tengour writes in French, his French gives expression to the liminal space that exists around and between the literary and cultural traditions of France and Algeria. His poetry is equally likely to invoke The Odyssey as it is the muʿallaqāt of pre-Islamic Arabia, and his writings brim not only with the voices of other Maghrebi writers, like the Algerians Kateb Yacine and Mohammed Dib, but with the giants of French letters, like André Breton, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire; German Romantics like Friedrich Hölderlin; medieval Sufi poets like Ibn ʿArabi; and on and on and on. Over almost fifty years, having published more than fifteen works of poetry, essays, and drama, Tengour has built a house of literature whose windows and doors are open wide to...

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A review of Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), and Françoise Vergès, A Feminist Theory of Violence: A Decolonial Perspective, translated by Melissa Thackway (London: Pluto, 2022).

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