Spring 2010

The MIT Press

NOTEInformation in this file is accurate at paper catalog publication time and is subject to change without notice. For the most up-to-date information available on our titles, please consult the individual book pages on our website, which may be found at http://mitpress.mit.edu; journal information may be found at http://www.mitpressjournals.org. Book entries in this document are linked to their corresponding website pages by their International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs). Journal links are identified at the bottom of each entry.

CONTENTSarchitecture 22-23, 41 art 2, 8, 12-21, 37-38, 40-41, 43, 67 art history 35 bioethics 81 biography 2 cognitive science 48, 74-77 computational biology 50, 80 computer science 42, 45-46, 68, computer-human interaction 67 cultural studies 31, 44 current affairs 3, 25-26, 34, 42 economics 26-28, 33, 46-47, 60education 42, 66 environment 7, 9-11, 48, 59-60 fiction 32 game studies 5, 44 history 3, 39 history of science 36, 51, 55, 56-57 history of technology 24, 39, 50, 50-51, 55 linguistics 69-72 mathematics 65 memoir 40 music 44, 82 neuroscience 49, 76-79 new media 8, 43-44, 67 philosophy 30, 48-49, 54, 69, 72-74, 82 political science, politics 10, 26-29, 33-34, 43, 49, 59-60, 62 public policy 52-53, 60 robotics 69 race studies 42, 53 science 6, 24, 40, 58, 65, 72 science, technology, and society 54 sociology 5, 54, 57, 75 technology 3-4, 7, 42-43, 52 urban studies 1, 50, 55 vision science 80 Afterall Books 37-38 Semiotext(e) 29-33 Zone Books 34-36

Front cover, inside front cover, and back cover art: from Reinventing the Automobile by William J. Mitchell, Christopher E. Borroni-Bird, and Lawrence D. Burns.

urban studies/transportation

REINVENTING THE AUTOMOBILEPersonal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century William J. Mitchell, Christopher E. Borroni-Bird, and Lawrence D. BurnsThis book provides a long-overdue vision for a new automobile era. The cars we drive today follow the same underlying design principles as the Model Ts of a hundred years ago and the tail-finned sedans of fifty years ago. In the twenty-first century, cars are still made for twentieth-century purposes. Theyre well suited for conveying multiple passengers over long distances at high speeds, but inefficient for providing personal mobility within cities where most of the worlds people now live. In this pathbreaking book, William Mitchell and two industry experts reimagine the automobile, describing vehicles of the near future that are green, smart, connected, and fun to drive. They roll out four big ideas that will make this both feasible and timely. First, we must transform the DNA of the automobile, basing it on electricdrive and wireless communication rather than on petroleum, the internal combustion engine, and stand-alone operation. This allows vehicles to become lighter, cleaner, and smart enough to avoid crashes and traffic jams. Second, automobiles will be linked by a Mobility Internet that allows them to collect and share data on traffic conditions, intelligently coordinates their movements, and keeps drivers connected to their social networks. Third, automobiles must be recharged through a convenient, cost-effective infrastructure that is integrated with smart electric grids and makes increasing use of renewable energy sources. Finally, dynamically priced markets for electricity, road space, parking space, and shared-use vehicles must be introduced to provide optimum management of urban mobility and energy systems. The fundamental reinvention of the automobile wont be easy, but it is an urgent necessity to make urban mobility more convenient and sustainable, to make cities more livable, and to help bring the automobile industry out of crisis.William J. Mitchell is the Alexander W. Dreyfoos, Jr., Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences and directs the Smart Cities research group at MITs Media Lab. He is the author of many books, including The Worlds Greatest Architect (2008) and Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City (2005), both published by the MIT Press. Christopher E. Borroni-Bird is Director of Advanced Vehicle Concepts at General Motors, where Lawrence D. Burns was Vice President of Research and Development before his retirement. How to leave behind our unwieldy, gas-guzzling, carbon dioxideemitting vehicles for cars that are green, smart, connected, and fun.

March 8 x 8, 240 pp. 102 illus., color throughout $21.95T/16.95 cloth 978-0-262-01382-6

FOUR BIG IDEAS THAT COULD TRANSFORM THE AUTOMOBILE Base the underlying design principles on electric-drive and wireless communications rather than the internal combustion engine and stand-alone operation Develop the Mobility Internet for sharing traffic and travel data Integrate electric-drive vehicles with smart electric grids that use clean, renewable energy sources Establish dynamically priced markets for electricity, road space, parking space, and shared-use vehicles

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1

art/biography

WHEN MARINA ABRAMOVIC DIESA Biography James WestcottThe extraordinary life and death-defying work of one of the most important and pioneering performance artists in contemporary art.

March 7 x 9, 326 pp. 100 illus. $27.95T/19.95 cloth 978-0-262-23262-3

Marina Abramovi , the legendary performance artist, is legendary for a reason. c She has spent four decades making traumatic and transcendent artworks using her own body as a material, breaking through the boundaries of the acceptable in visual art. In the early 1970s alone, she lost consciousness while lying in the center of a burning five-pointed star (symbol of the communism of her native Yugoslavia), took pills to induce hyperactivity and then catatonia, and remained determinedly passive as an audience member pushed a loaded gun to her neck. When Marina Abramovi c Dies examines the extraordinary life and deathdefying work of one of contemporary arts most important and pioneering performance artists. It chronicles the artists formative and until now undocumented years in Yugoslavia and looks closely at Abramovi s partnership with c the German artist Ulay one of the twentieth centurys great examples of the fusion of artistic and private life. In their final performance, Abramovi c and Ulay walked toward each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China until, after ninety days, they met in the middle and said goodbye. In one of many performances of the renewed solo career that followed, Abramovi famously lived in a New York gallery for twelve days without eating c or speaking, nourished only by eye contact with the audience. It was here, in 2002, that author James Westcott first encountered Abramovi, beginning an c exceptionally close collaboration of biographer and subject. For When Marina Abramovi c Dies, Westcott draws on his personal observations of Abramovi , his c unprecedented access to her archive, and hundreds of hours of interviews with the artist and the people closest to her. The result is a unique and vivid portrait of the charismatic self-proclaimed grandmother of performance art.James Westcott has written on art, architecture, and politics for numerous publications including the Guardian and the Village Voice, and was editor of artreview.com. He now writes and edits for AMO, the think tank and publishing unit of Rem Koolhaass Office for Metropolitan Architecture, in Rotterdam.

This book honors the legendary career of a fierce and fearless performer, and at the same time celebrates the warm, generous human being she is and the many myths and fables that have accumulated around her (not a few the result of her own self-deprecating sense of humor). Robert Wilson

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2

history/current affairs

WHY AMERICA IS NOT A NEW ROMEVaclav SmilAmericas postCold War strategic dominance and its pre-recession affluence inspired pundits to make celebratory comparisons to ancient Rome at its most powerful. Now, with America no longer perceived as invulnerable, engaged in protracted fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, comparisons are to the bloated, decadent, ineffectual later Empire. In Why America Is Not a New Rome, Vaclav Smil looks at these comparisons in detail, going deeper than the facile analogy-making of talk shows and glossy magazine articles. He finds profound differences. On the surface, the vision of America as the new Rome has resonance. There are obvious, intriguing parallels and amusing even disconcerting similarities. The America-Rome analogy deserves a closer look, and this is what Smil, a scientist and a lifelong student of Roman history, offers. He does this by focusing on several fundamental concerns: the very meaning of empire; the actual extent and nature of Roman and American power; the role of knowledge and innovation in the two states and the importance of machines and energy sources; and demographic and economic basics population dynamics, illness, death, wealth, and misery. America is not a latter-day Rome, Smil finds, and we need to understand this in order to look ahead without the burden of counterproductive analogies. Superficial similarities do not imply long-term political, demographic, or economic outcomes identical to Romes.Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba and the author of many books, including Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years (2008), Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems (2007), and Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties (2005) all published by the MIT Press. He was awarded the 2007 Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award for excellence in writing and editing in the population sciences. An investigation of the America-Rome analogy that goes deeper than the facile comparisons made on talk shows and in glossy magazine articles.

March 7 x 9, 232 pp. 57 illus. $24.95T/18.95 cloth 978-0-262-19593-5

Also available GLOBAL CATASTROPHES AND TRENDS The Next Fifty Years Vaclav Smil 2008, 978-0-262-19586-7 $29.95T/22.95 cloth ENERGY IN NATURE AND SOCIETY General Energetics of Complex Systems Vaclav Smil 2007, 978-0-262-69356-1 $34.00S/25.95 paper ENERGY AT THE CROSSROADS Global Perspectives and Uncertainties Vaclav Smil 2005, 978-0-262-69324-0 $19.95T/14.95 paper

Repetition by pundits and literary commentators in the mass media has entrenched in peoples minds the notion that America is a new Rome. Smils book, tightly argued and rigorously documented, is a concise and persuasive scientific demolition of the Rome-America parallel, totally deflating the usefulness of the analogy as a tool of historical analysis. Why America Is Not a New Rome is a much-needed corrective. Paul Demeny, Distinguished Scholar, Population Council, New York

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3

U.S. history/technology

WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUTBlackouts whether they result from network failure or human error, offer snapshots of electricitys increasingly central role in American society. March 5 3/8 x 8, 304 pp. 26 illus. $27.95T/20.95 cloth 978-0-262-01374-1

A History of Blackouts in America David E. NyeWhere were you when the lights went out? At home during a thunderstorm? Preparing for air attack in World War II? In the Northeast in 1965, when the power failed from Toronto to the East coast? In New York City during a similar but more frightening blackout in 1977? In California when rolling blackouts hit in 2000? In 2003, when a cascading power failure left fifty million people in Canada and in the northeastern United States without electricity? We often remember vividly our time in the dark. In When the Lights Went Out, David Nye views power outages in America from 1935 to the present not simply as technical failures but variously as military tactic, social disruption, crisis in the networked city, outcome of political and economic decisions, sudden encounter with sublimity, and memories enshrined in photographs. Our electrically lit-up life is so natural to us that when the lights go off, the darkness seems abnormal. Nye looks at Americas development of its electrical grid, which made largescale power failures possible; military blackouts before and during the Second World War (The silence was the big surprise of the blackout, the darkness discounted, wrote Harold Ross in the New Yorker in 1942); New York Citys contrasting 1965 and 1977 blackout experiences (the first characterized by cooperation, the second by looting and disorder); the growth in consumer demand that led to rolling blackouts made worse by energy traders market manipulations; blackouts caused by terrorist attacks and sabotage; and, finally, the greenout (exemplified by the new tradition of Earth Hour), the voluntary reduction organized by environmental organizations. Blackouts, writes Nye, are breaks in the flow of social time that reveal much about the trajectory of American history. Each time one occurs, Americans confront their essential condition not as isolated individuals, but as a community that increasingly binds itself together with electrical wires and signals.David E. Nye is Professor of American History at the University of Southern Denmark. The winner of the 2005 Leonardo da Vinci Medal of the Society for the History of Technology, he is the author of Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890-1930 (1985), Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 18801940 (1990), American Technological Sublime (1994), Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (1997), America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (2003), and Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (2006), all published by the MIT Press.

Also available TECHNOLOGY MATTERS Questions to Live With David E. Nye 2007, 978-0-262-64067-1 $15.95T/11.95 paper AMERICA AS SECOND CREATION Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings David E. Nye 2004, 978-0-262-64059-6 $21.00T/15.95 paper

Meticulously researched and engagingly written, When the Lights Went Out is part history and part cautionary tale. David Nye illumines his subject with such insight and skill that a reader won't ever be able to flip on an electrical switch without thinking of this book and its consequential message. Robert Schmuhl, Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Chair in American Studies and Journalism, University of Notre Dame

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4

game studies/sociology

THE WARCRAFT CIVILIZATIONSocial Science in a Virtual World William Sims BainbridgeWorld of Warcraft is more than a game. There is no ultimate goal, no winning hand, no princess to be rescued. WoW contains more than 5,000 possible quests, games within the game, and encompasses hundreds of separate parallel realms (computer servers, each of which can handle 4,000 players simultaneously). WoW is an immersive virtual world in which characters must cope in a dangerous environment, assume identities, struggle to understand and communicate, learn to use technology, and compete for dwindling resources. Beyond the fantasy and science fiction details, as many have noticed, its not entirely unlike todays world. In The Warcraft Civilization, sociologist William Sims Bainbridge goes further than this, arguing that WoW can be seen not only as an allegory of today but also as a virtual prototype of tomorrow, of a real human future in which tribe-like groups will engage in combat over declining natural resources, build temporary alliances on the basis of mutual self-interest, and seek a set of values that transcend the need for war. Bainbridge explored the complex Warcraft universe firsthand, spending more than 2,300 hours there, deploying twenty-two characters of all ten races, all ten classes, and numerous professions. Each chapter begins with one characters narrative, then goes on to explore a major social issue such as religion, learning, cooperation, economy, or identity through the lens of that characters experience. What makes WoW an especially good place to look for insights about Western civilization, Bainbridge says, is that it bridges past and future. Founded on Western cultural tradition, it is aimed toward the virtual worlds we could create in times to come.William Sims Bainbridge is a prolific and influential sociologist who has worked in both academia and government, currently as Director of the Human-Centered Computing program at the National Science Foundation. He is the author of many books, including Nanoconvergence, Across the Secular Abyss, and God from the Machine: Artificial Intelligence Models of Religious Cognition. An exploration of the popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft as a virtual prototype of the real human future.

March 7 x 9, 256 pp. 32 illus. $27.95T/20.95 cloth 978-0-262-01370-3

Also available DIGITAL CULTURE, PLAY, AND IDENTITY A World of Warcraft Reader edited by Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg 2008, 978-0-262-03370-1 $31.95T/18.95 cloth

World of Warcraft will eventually be recognized as a signature artistic, technological, and sociological achievement of our time. Bainbridge provides the best analysis to date of the way WoW and similar new media forms, with their millions and millions of users, are reshaping central aspects of our culture: groups, religion, economy, education, and more. Edward Castronova, Professor of Telecommunications, Indiana University, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games

5

science

IN PRAISE OF SCIENCEA virtuoso introduction to the field of science, the most democratic of human endeavors.

Curiosity, Understanding, and Progress Sander BaisIn this engaging, lyrical book, physicist Sander Bais shows how science can liberate us from our cultural straitjacket of prejudice and intolerance. Were living in a time in which technology is taken for granted, yet belief in such standard scientific facts as evolution is actually decreasing. How is it possible for cell phones and Creationism to coexist? Science fundamental, fact-based knowledge, not the latest technological gadget can give us the global and local perspectives we need to make the world a better place. Bais argues that turning points in the history of science have been accompanied by similar milestones in social change, deeply affecting our view of nature, our perception of the human condition, and our understanding of the universe and our place in it. After a lively description of how curiosity trumps prejudice and pseudoscience in matters ranging from lightning rods to the transmission of HIV, Bais considers what drives science and scientists, a quest that culminates in that miraculous mixture of creativity and ingenuity found in the greatest scientists. He describes what he calls the circle of science the microcosm and the macrocosm as mirror images and demonstrates unity in a dazzling sequence of topics, including the hierarchy of structures, the forces of nature, cosmological evolution, and the challenge of complexity. Finally, Bais takes on the obstacles science encounters in a world dominated by short-term political and economic interests. Science, he says, needs to get its message out. Drawing on sources that range from Charles Darwin and Karl Popper to Herbert Marcuse and Richard Feynman, with In Praise of Science, Bais does just that.Sander Bais is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Amsterdam and External Faculty Member of the Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of The Equations: Icons of Knowledge and Very Special Relativity: An Illustrated Guide.

March 7 1/2 x 6 3/4, 192 pp. 40 color illus., 14 black & white illus. $24.95T/18.95 cloth 978-0-262-01435-9 Copubished with Amsterdam University Press, the Netherlands Not for sale in the Netherlands

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6

environment/technology

GREENING THROUGH I TInformation Technology for Environmental Sustainability Bill TomlinsonEnvironmental issues often span long periods of time, far-flung areas, and labyrinthine layers of complexity. In Greening through IT, Bill Tomlinson investigates how the tools and techniques of information technology (IT) can help us tackle environmental problems at such vast scales. Tomlinson describes theoretical, technological, and social aspects of a growing interdisciplinary approach to sustainability, Green IT, offering both a human-centered framework for understanding Green IT systems and specific examples and case studies of Green IT in action. Tomlinson contrasts the broad ranges of time, space, and complexity against which environmental concerns play out to the relatively narrow horizons of human understanding: its hard for us to grasp thousand-year projections of global climatic disruption or our stake in melting icecaps thousands of miles away. IT can bridge the gap between human scales of understanding and environmental scales. Tomlinson offers many examples of efforts toward sustainability supported by IT from fishermen in India who eliminated waste by coordinating their activities with mobile phones to the installation of smart meters that optimize electricity use in California households and offers three detailed studies of specific research projects that he and his colleagues have undertaken: EcoRaft, an interactive museum exhibit to help children learn principles of restoration ecology; Trackulous, a set of web-based tools with which people can chart their own environmental behavior; and GreenScanner, an online system that provides access to environmental-impact reports about consumer products. Taken together, these examples illustrate the significant environmental benefits that innovations in information technology can enable.Bill Tomlinson is Associate Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and a Researcher at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. How the tools of information technology can support environmental sustainability by tackling problems that span broad scales of time, space, and complexity.

May 7 x 9, 216 pp. 19 illus. $24.95T/18.95 cloth 978-0-262-01393-2

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7

art/new media

GREEN LIGHTHow humans aesthetic perceptions have shaped other life forms, from racehorses to ornamental plants.

Toward an Art of Evolution George GessertHumans have bred plants and animals with an eye to aesthetics for centuries: flowers are selected for colorful blossoms or luxuriant foliage; racehorses are bred for the elegance of their frames. Hybridized plants were first exhibited as fine art in 1936, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed Edward Steichens hybrid delphiniums. Since then, bio art has become a genre; artists work with a variety of living things, including plants, animals, bacteria, slime molds, and fungi. Many commentators have addressed the social and political concerns raised by making art out of living material. In Green Light, however, George Gessert examines the role that aesthetic perception has played in bio art and other interventions in evolution. Gessert looks at a variety of life forms that humans have helped shape, focusing on plants the most widely domesticated form of life and the one that has been crucial to his own work as an artist. We learn about Ongadori chickens, bred to have tail feathers up to more than thirty feet long; pleasure gardens of the Aztecs, cultivated for intoxicating fragrance; Darwins relationship to the arts; the rise and fall of eugenics; the aesthetic standards promoted by national plant societies; a daffodil that looks like a rose; and praise for weeds and wildflowers. Gessert surveys recent bio art and its accompanying philosophical problems, the slow art of plant breeding, and how to create new life that takes into account what we know about ecology, aesthetics, and ourselves.George Gessert is an artist whose work focuses on the overlap between art and genetics. His exhibits often involve plants he has hybridized or documentation of breeding projects. His writings have appeared in Leonardo, Art Papers, Design Issues, Massachusetts Review, Hortus, Best American Essays 2007, Pushcart Prize XXX, and other publications.

April 7 x 9, 192 pp. 30 illus. $24.95T/18.95 cloth 978-0-262-01414-4 A Leonardo Book

8

photography/environment

CLIMATE REFUGEESCollectif Argos introduction by Hubert Reeves preface by Jean JouzelOur job is to tell stories we have heard and to bear witness to what we have seen. The science was already there when we started in 2004, but we wanted to emphasize the human dimension, especially for those most vulnerable. Guy-Pierre Chomette, Collectif Argos We have all seen photographs of neighborhoods wrecked and abandoned after a hurricane, of dry, cracked terrain that was once fertile farmland, of islands wiped out by a tsunami. But what happens to the people who live in these areas? According to the United Nations, some 150 million people will become climate refugees by 2050. The journalists and photographers of Collectif Argos have spent four years seeking out the first wave of people displaced by the consequences of climate change. Using the massive 2,500-page report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as their guide, these photographers and writers pinpointed nine locales around the world in which global warming has had a measureable impact. In Climate Refugees, they take us to these places from the dust bowl that was once Lake Chad to the melting permafrost in Alaska offering a first-hand look in words and photographs at the devastating effects of rising global temperatures on the daily lives of ordinary people. Climate Refugees shows us damage wrought to homes and livelihoods by rapid warming near the Arctic; rising sea levels that threaten the island nations of Tuvulu, the Maldives, and Halligen; farmers displaced by the deserts advance in Chad and China; floods that wash away life in Bangladesh; and Hurricane Katrina evacuees in shelters far away from their New Orleans neighborhoods. Added to the devastating environmental effect of climate change is the immeasurable and irretrievable loss of ethnic and cultural diversity that occurs when vulnerable local cultures disperse. It is this often forgotten and tragic consequence of global warming that Collectif Argos painstakingly documents.Created in 2001, Collectif Argos brings together ten journalists photographers and writers who share a commitment to documenting the changes taking place in the world ecological, economic, political, and cultural, subtle or spectacular, global or local. Heartbreaking stories and pictures document the phenomenon of populations displaced by climate changehomes, neighborhoods, livelihoods, and cultures lost.

April 7 x 9 1/2, 349 pp. 171 color illus. $29.95T/22.95 paper 978-0-262-51439-2

COLLECTIF ARGOSGuy-Pierre Chomette Guillaume Collanges Hlne David Jrmine Derigny Cdric Faimali Donatien Garnier Elonore Henry de Frahan Aude Raux Laurent Weyl Jacques Windenberger

top left: New Orleans, Louisiana bottom left: Lonbaoshan, China Photographs by Collectif Argos. From Planet Refugees.

9

environment/political science

LIVING THROUGH THE END OF NATUREHow environmentalism can reinvent itself in a postnature age: a proposal for navigating between naive naturalism and technological arrogance.

The Future of American Environmentalism Paul WapnerEnvironmentalists have always worked to protect the wildness of nature but now must find a new direction. We have so tamed, colonized, and contaminated the natural world that safeguarding it from humans is no longer an option. Humanitys imprint is everywhere; efforts to preserve nature require extensive human intervention. At the same time, we are repeatedly told that there is no such thing as nature itself only our own conceptions of it. One persons endangered species is anothers dinner or source of income. In Living Through the End of Nature, Paul Wapner probes the meaning of environmentalism in a post-nature age. Wapner argues that the end of nature represents not environmentalisms death knell but an opportunity to build a more effective political movement. He outlines the polarized positions of environmentalists, who strive to live in harmony with nature, and their opponents, who seek mastery over nature. Wapner argues that, without nature, neither of these two outlooks the dream of naturalism or the dream of mastery can be sustained today. Neither is appropriate for addressing such problems as biodiversity loss and climate change; we can neither go back to a preindustrial Elysium nor forward to a technological utopia. Instead, he proposes a third way that takes seriously the breached boundary between humans and nature and charts a co-evolutionary path in which environmentalists exploit the tension between naturalism and mastery to build a more sustainable, ecologically vibrant, and socially just world. Beautifully written and thoughtfully argued, Living Through the End of Nature provides a powerful vision for environmentalisms future.Paul Wapner is Associate Professor and Director of the Global Environmental Politics Program in the School of International Service at American University. He is the author of Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics, winner of the 1997 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for the best book on international environmental affairs.

March 5 3/8 x 8, 184 pp. $21.95T/16.95 cloth 978-0-262-01415-1

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10

environment

TREADING SOFTLYPaths to Ecological Order Thomas PrincenWe are living beyond our means, running up debts both economic and ecological, consuming the planets resources at rates not remotely sustainable. But its hard to imagine a different way. How can we live without cheap goods and easy credit? How can we consume without consuming the systems that suport life? How can we live well and live within our means? In Treading Softly, Thomas Princen helps us imagine an alternative. We need, he says, a new normal, a new ecological order that is actually economical with resources, that embraces limits, that sees sustainable living not as a lifestyle but as a long-term relationship with the planet, a connection to fresh, free-flowing water, fertile soil, and healthy food. That economies must grow is a fundamental belief among economists, politicians, and journalists. But it is rampant material growth that has brought us to this precipice. Princen argues that it is time to build an economy that is grounded in the way natural systems work; that operates as if we have just the right amount of resources rather than endless frontiers. The goal is to live well by living well within the capacities of those resources. Societys material foundations would be grounded in the biophysical, its practices based on satisfying work, self-reliance, and restraint rather than the purchasing of goods. Princen doesnt offer a quick fix theres no list of easy ways to save the planet to hang on the refrigerator. He gives us instead a positive, realistic sense of the possible, with an abundance of examples, concepts, and tools for imagining, then realizing, how to live within our biophysical means.Thomas Princen is Associate Professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy at the University of Michigans School of Natural Resources and Environment. He is the author of The Logic of Sufficiency (2005) and the coeditor of Confronting Consumption (2002), both published by the MIT Press and both winners of the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for best book on international environmental affairs. How to imagine and then realize an ecological order based on living within our biophysical means.

March 5 3/8 x 8, 224 pp. $22.95T/16.95 cloth 978-0-262-01417-5

Also available THE LOGIC OF SUFFICIENCY Thomas Princen 2005, 978-0-262-66190-4 $32.00S/23.95 paper CONFRONTING CONSUMPTION edited by Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca 2002, 978-0-262-66128-7 $34.00S/25.95 paper

This is an eloquent and impassioned book. It is clearly written, lacks confounding academic artifice, and conveys a message that is simultaneously simple and profound. Maurice J. Cohen, New Jersey Institute of Technology

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11

art

PSYCHEDELICThe history of an aesthetic sensibility that began with Op Art and album covers; with many stunning color images.

Optical and Visionary Art since the 1960s edited by David S. RubinThis eye-popping book offers a visual history of the psychedelic sensibility. In pop culture, that sensibility is associated with lava lamps, album covers, and teashades, but it first manifested itself in the extreme colors and kaleidoscopic compositions of 1960s Op Artists. The psychedelic sensibility didnt die at the end of the 1960s; Psychedelic traces it through the day-glo colors of painters Peter Saul, Alex Grey, and Kenny Scharf, the pill and hemp leaf paintings of Fred Tomaselli, the intensified palettes of Douglas Bourgeois and Sharon Ellis, and mixed-media and new media works by younger artists in the new millennium. Although the term psychedelic was coined to describe hallucinatory experiences produced by drugs used psychotherapeutically, the story these images tell is about the influence of psychedelic culture on the art world not necessarily the influence of drugs. As contemporary art evolved into a diverse and pluralistic discipline, the psychedelic evolved into a language of color and light. In Psychedelic, more than seventy-five vivid color images chart this development, exploring the art chronologically, from early Op Art through recent work using digital technology. The book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the San Antonio Museum of Art, includes three essays that set the works in historical and cultural context.David S. Rubin is The Brown Foundation Curator of Contemporary Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art.

April 7 1/2 x 12, 140 pp. 78 color illus. $29.95T/22.95 cloth 978-0-262-01404-5 Copublished with the San Antonio Museum of Art

EXHIBITIONSan Antonio Museum of Art San Antonio, Texas March 13August 1, 2010 Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester Rochester, New York October 23, 2010January 2, 2011 Telfair Museum of Art Savannah, Georgia March 2May, 2011

top: Isaac Abrams, Cosmoerotica, 1968. Oil on canvas, 48 x 72. Courtesy of the artist. bottom left: Hean Moreno, Untitled, 2004. Mixed media collage, Courtesy of Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art, Cleveland. bottom right: Victor Vasarely, Tekers-MC, 1981. 92 1/2 x 79 1/2. Collection of Michle-Catherine Vasarely.

ARTISTS INCLUDEIsaac Abrams, Albert Alvarez, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Chio Aoshima, Kamrooz Aram, Jeremy Blake, Richie Budd, Gordon Cheung, Judy Chicago, George Cisneros, James Cobb, Steve DiBenedetto, Carole Feuerman, Jack Goldstein, Alex Grey, Peter Halley, Al Held, Mark Hogensen, Constance Lowe, Erik Parker, Ed Paschke, Lari Pittman, Ray Rapp, Deborah Remington, Bridget Riley, Susie Rosmarin, Alex Rubio, Sterling Ruby, Julian Stanczak, Jennifer Steinkamp, Frank Stella, Philip Taaffe, Barbara Takenaga, Fred Tomaselli, Victor Vasarely, Michael Velliquette, Andy Warhol, Robert Williams

ESSAYS BYDavid S. Rubin, Robert C. Morgan, Daniel Pinchbeck

12

art

ED RUSCHAS LOS ANGELESAlexandra SchwartzEd Ruscha was born in Nebraska and raised in Oklahoma, but he belongs to Los Angeles in a way that few other artists do. Since the 1960s, Ruschas iconic images of the cityscape and culture of Los Angeles freeway gas stations, parking lots, palm trees, motels, swimming pools, and billboards have both reflected and shaped popular perceptions of Hollywood and the city that surrounds it. In Ed Ruschas Los Angeles, Alexandra Schwartz views Ruschas groundbreaking early work as a window onto the radically shifting cultural and political landscape in which it was produced. Schwartz examines Ruschas diverse body of work, including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, books, and films, and discusses his relationship with other artists including John Altoon, Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston, and Dennis Hopper, all of them associated with the famous Ferus Gallery with whom he sparked the movement known as West Coast pop. She also explores his links to the mainstream film industry, then evolving into the experimental New Hollywood of the late 1960s and early 1970s; his association with emerging discourse on L.A. architecture and urbanism; and his participation in the politics of the L.A. art world, where his presentation and self-marketing reflected contemporary attitudes toward gender, race, and class. Despite Ruschas fame, this is the first comprehensive critical consideration of his art, and the first to consider it in the context of L.A.s tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. It shows how Ruscha, borrowing from and critiquing the methods and myths of Hollywood, forged a new paradigm of the artist as a popular culture scribe a soothsayer for the entertainment age.Alexandra Schwartz is the editor of a collection of Ed Ruschas writings, Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages (MIT Press, 2002) and the coeditor of Individuals: Women Artists in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art. The first critical examination of the groundbreaking work of the artist who exemplifies West Coast cool.

April 4 1/4 x 7, 336 pp. 74 illus. $29.95T/22.95 cloth 978-0-262-01364-2

Also available LEAVE ANY INFORMATION AT THE SIGNAL Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages Ed Ruscha edited by Alexandra Schwartz 2004, 978-0-262-68152-0 $27.95T/20.95 paper

Ed Ruschas brilliant work of the 1960s has finally been located in relation to Los Angeles, the city from which it grew. . . . Tracing Ruscha's relationships with figures like Dennis Hopper, Denise Scott Brown, Walter Hopps, and Wallace Berman, Schwartz recovers an interlocking set of hip, little-known subcultures. Important, engaging, and eminently readable, with a light touch befitting its elusive, deadpan subject. Harry Cooper, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Art

13

art

SITUATION AESTHETICSThe first book-length study of this influential artists work, focusing on the participatory role of the human subject rather than the art object.

The Work of Michael Asher Kirsi PeltomkiMichael Asher doesnt make typical installations. Instead, he extracts his art from the institutions in which it is shown, culling it from collections, histories, or museums own walls. Since the late 1960s, Asher has been creating situations that have not only taught us about the conditions and contexts of contemporary art, but have worked to define it. In Situation Aesthetics, Kirsi Peltomki examines Ashers practice by analyzing the social situations that the artist constructs in his work for viewers, participants, and institutional representatives (including gallery directors, curators, and other museum staff members). Drawing on art criticism, the reports of viewers and participants in Ashers projects, and the artists own archives, Peltomki offers a comprehensive account of Ashers work over the past four decades. Because of the intensely site-specific nature of Ashers work, as well as the artists refusal to reconstruct past works or mount retrospectives, many of the projects Peltomki discusses are described here for the first time. Ashers work has commonly been associated with minimalism, conceptual art, and, most frequently, institutional critique. Peltomki takes a different perspective, focusing on the works social dimension. Because Ashers installations typically address the given context the situation of their exhibition directly and exclusively, they cease to exist after the exhibitions end, leaving behind few material traces. By emphasizing the social and psychological sites of art rather than the production of autonomous art objects, Peltomki argues, Asher constructs experientially complex situations that profoundly affect those who encounter them, bringing about both personal and institutional transformation.Kirsi Peltomki is Assistant Professor of Art History at Oregon State University.

March 7 x 9, 256 pp. 48 illus. $27.95T/20.95 cloth 978-0-262-01368-0

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art

RICHARD HAMILTONedited by Hal Foster with Alexander BaconStill little-known in the United States, Richard Hamilton is a key figure in twentieth-century art. An original member of the legendary Independent Group in London in the 1950s, Hamilton organized or participated in groundbreaking exhibitions associated with the group in particular This Is Tomorrow (1956), for which his celebrated collage Just what is it that makes todays homes so different, so appealing?, crystallizing the postwar world of consumer capitalism, was made. With his colleagues in the Independent Group, Hamilton promoted the artistic investigation of popular culture, undertaking this analysis in paintings, prints, and texts, thus setting the stage for Pop art indeed, he is often called the intellectual father of Pop. At the same time, Hamilton was crucial to the postwar reception of Marcel Duchamp, transcribing his notes for The Large Glass and producing a reconstruction of this epochal piece for the first Duchamp retrospective in Britain, in 1966. Over the years Hamilton has continued to develop his work, in a variety of media, on subjects ranging from the Rolling Stones to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, from new commodities and technologies to the oldest genres in Western painting. True to the mission of the October Files series, this volume collects the most telling essays on Hamilton (including several hard-to-find texts by the artist), spanning the entire range of his extraordinary career.Hal Foster is Townsend Martin 17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the author of Compulsive Beauty (1993), The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (1996), and Prosthetic Gods (2004), all published by the MIT Press, and other books. Alexander Bacon is a PhD candidate at Princeton University. Essays and articles about Richard Hamilton, the intellectual father of Pop art.

March 6 x 9, 184 pp. 51 illus. $17.95T/13.95 paper 978-0-262-51372-2 $35.00S/25.95 cloth 978-0-262-01381-9 October Files

Also available in this series GERHARD RICHTER edited by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh 2009, 978-0-262-51312-8 $17.95T/13.95 paper GABRIEL OROZCO edited by Yve-Alain Bois 2009, 978-0-262-51301-2 $18.95T/14.95 paper

CONTENTSMichael Craig-Martin Richard Hamilton in Conversation with Michael Craig-Martin (1990) David Mellor The Pleasures and Sorrows of Modernity (1992) Greil Marcus The Vortex of Gracious Living (2007) Hal Foster Notes on the First Pop Age (2003) Richard Hamilton Urbane Image (1962/82) Stephen Bann Exteriors/Landscapes (1990) Richard Hamilton An Inside View (1990) Mark Francis Grand New Artificer (1988) Sarat Maharaj A Liquid Elemental Scattering: Marcel Duchamp and Richard Hamilton (1992) Richard Hamilton Products (2003) Richard Hamilton Concept/Technology>Artwork (1989) Hal Foster Citizen Hamilton (2008)

15

art

HALL OF MIRRORSA sustained study of Lichtensteins pop oeuvre, offering new readings of such canonical works as Look Mickey and Happy Tears.

Roy Lichtenstein and the Face of Painting in the 1960s Graham BaderIn Hall of Mirrors, Graham Bader traces the development of Roy Lichtensteins art into, through, and beyond his classic pop oeuvre of the 1960s. Bader charts the trajectory of Lichtensteins practice from his student days in the late 1940s to his mirror paintings of the 1970s, offering new readings of such canonical paintings as Look Mickey and Girl with Ball as well as examinations of lesser-known works across a range of media. Baders analysis goes beyond the standard critical view of pop as a reaction to the high-culture pieties of abstract expressionism. Instead, Bader sees Lichtensteins work as motivated by the forces of unoriginal originality Lichtensteins discovery that he could make art by borrowing from other images and disembodied bodies his use of flattened and schematic forms to reinvigorate figurative painting. For example, Bader argues that 1961s Look Mickey, Lichtensteins inaugural pop work, established a template for the tension between embodiment and disembodiment that animates much of his 1960s work: between an evacuation of sensory experience, on the one hand, and a repeated focus on emphatic bodily acts (squeezing, kissing, crying, etc.) on the other. A similar dialectical friction exists between Lichtensteins process and product: consistently hand-painted canvases that increasingly feign the look of industrial production. Hall of Mirrors moves chronologically, beginning with Lichtensteins studies at Ohio State University and late-50s moves toward pop, through his seminal canvases of the early 1960s, to his late-60s experiments across sculpture, painting, installation, and film. The book ends with an examination of Lichtensteins Mirror paintings of 196972. These little-discussed works, Bader argues, exemplify Lichtensteins late-60s shift of focus to the embodied experience of his own viewers and thus culminate and conclude his practice of the decade.Graham Bader is Mellon Assistant Professor of Art History at Rice University. He is the editor of the October Files volume Roy Lichtenstein (MIT Press, 2009).

March 7 x 9, 296 pp. 84 illus. $29.95T/22.95 cloth 978-0-262-02647-5 An October Book

Also available ROY LICHTENSTEIN edited by Graham Bader 2009, 978-0-262-51231-2 $17.95T/13.95 paper October Files

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art

PERPETUAL INVENTORYRosalind E. KraussThe job of an art critic is to take perpetual inventory, constantly revising her ideas about the direction of contemporary art and the significance of the work she writes about. In these essays, which span three decades of assessment and reassessment, Rosalind Krauss considers what she has come to call the postmedium condition the abandonment by contemporary art of the modernist emphasis on the medium as the source of artistic significance. Jean-Franois Lyotard argued that the postmodern condition is characterized by the end of a master narrative, and Krauss sees in the postmedium condition of contemporary art a similar farewell to coherence. The master narrative of contemporary art ended when conceptual art and other contemporary practices jettisoned the specific medium in order to juxtapose image and written text in the same work. For Krauss, this spells the end of serious art, and she devotes much of Perpetual Inventory to wrest[ling] new media to the mat of specificity. Krauss also writes about artists who are reinventing the medium, artists who persevere in the service of a nontraditional medium strange new apparatuses often adopted from commercial culture among them Ed Ruscha, Christian Marclay, William Kentridge, and James Coleman. Krausss essays work against the grain of the received ideas of contemporary criticism; she considers the postmedium condition a monstrous myth. With Perpetual Inventory, she offers an alternative view.Rosalind E. Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University and an editor and cofounder of October magazine, is the author of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), The Optical Unconscious (1993), The Picasso Papers (1999), and Bachelors (1999), all published by the MIT Press, and coauthor (with Yve-Alain Bois) of Formless: A Users Guide (Zone Books, 1997). In essays that span three decades, one of contemporary arts most esteemed critics celebrates artists who have persevered in the service of a medium.

March 7 x 9, 336 pp. 47 illus. $29.95T/22.95 cloth 978-0-262-01380-2 An October Book

Also available THE ORIGINALITY OF THE AVANT-GARDE AND OTHER MODERNIST MYTHS Rosalind E. Krauss 1986, 978-0-262-61046-9 $34.00T/25.95 paper THE OPTICAL UNCONSCIOUS Rosalind E. Krauss 1994, 978-0-262-61105-3 $34.00T/25.95 paper THE PICASSO PAPERS Rosalind E. Krauss 1999, 978-0-262-61142-8 $23.00T Not for sale in the United Kingdom or Commonwealth countries except Canada BACHELORS Rosalind E. Krauss 2000, 978-0-262-61165-7 $24.00T/12.95 paper

17

art/museum studies

CURATING CONSCIOUSNESSHow prominent curator and author James Johnson Sweeney cast the modern museum as a secular temple of art.

Mysticism and the Modern Museum Marcia BrennanArtists have often taken rational, material existence as a starting point for engagement with metaphysics and mysticism, with the paradoxes of visibility and invisibility. But no book until now has consistently traced these compelling themes in modernist curatorial practices. In Curating Consciousness, Marcia Brennan gives voice to this unacknowledged story by focusing on one of its main protagonists, James Johnson Sweeney (1900 1986). As a colleague of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1940s and director of the Guggenheim Museum in the 1950s and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in the 1960s, Sweeney provocatively engaged motifs of mysticism in order to cast the modern museum as a secular temple of art. Sweeney believed that artworks could engender visionary perspectives and induce alternative modes of consciousness in their viewers; his career can be seen as an exercise in curating modernist consciousness itself. Brennan describes how these motifs informed Sweeneys curatorial and textual engagements with specific artists and projects, including Marcel Duchamps intricately androgynous constructions, Alberto Burris images of hermetic alchemy and blood miracles, Pierre Soulagess creative transmutations of sacred stones into gestural abstract paintings, Jean Tinguelys apocalyptic yet playful kinetic experiments, and Eduardo Chillidas translations of theology and philosophy into sculpted fields of sparkling light.Marcia Brennan is Associate Professor of Art History at Rice University. She is the author of Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (2002) and Modernisms Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (2006), both published by the MIT Press.

March 7 x 9, 304 pp. 8 color plates, 60 black & white illus. $29.95T/22.95 cloth 978-0-262-01378-9

Also available PAINTING GENDER, CONSTRUCTING THEORY The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics Marcia Brennan 2002, 978-0-262-52336-3 $28.00T/20.95 paper MODERNISMS MASCULINE SUBJECTS Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction Marcia Brennan 2006, 978-0-262-52468-1 $14.95T/11.95 paper

18

art/new media/museum studies

RETHINKING CURATINGArt after New Media Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook foreword by Steve DietzAs curator Steve Dietz has observed, new media art is like contemporary art but different. New media art involves interactivity, networks, and computation and is often about process rather than objects. New media artworks, difficult to classify according to the traditional art museum categories determined by medium, geography, and chronology, present the curator with novel challenges involving interpretation, exhibition, and dissemination. This book views these challenges as opportunities to rethink curatorial practice. It helps curators of new media art develop a set of flexible tools for working in this fast-moving field, and it offers useful lessons from curators and artists for those working in such other areas of art as distributive and participatory systems. Rethinking Curating explores the characteristics distinctive to new media art, including its immateriality and its questioning of time and space, and relates them to such contemporary art forms as video art, conceptual art, socially engaged art, and performance art. The authors, both of whom have extensive experience as curators, offer numerous examples of artworks and exhibitions to illustrate how the roles of curators and audiences can be redefined in light of new media arts characteristics. They discuss modes of curating, from the familiar default mode of the museum, through parallels with publishing, broadcasting, festivals, and labs, to more recent hybrid ways of working online and off, including collaboration and social networking. Rethinking Curating offers curators a route through the hype around platforms and autonomous zones by following the lead of current artists practice.Beryl Graham, an educator, artist, arts organizer, and curator, is currently Professor of New Media Art at the University of Sunderland and coeditor of the CRUMB (Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss) Web site. Sarah Cook, a research fellow and cofounder of CRUMB, has curated exhibitions of new media art internationally. Redefining curatorial practice for those working with new kinds of art.

March 7 x 9, 368 pp. 68 illus. $34.95T/25.95 cloth 978-0-262-01388-8 A Leonardo Book

Also available in this series WHITE HEAT COLD LOGIC British Computer Art 19601980 edited by Paul Brown, Charlie Gere, Nicholas Lambert, and Catherine Mason 2008, 978-0-262-02653-6 $44.95T/33.95 cloth TACTICAL BIOPOLITICS Art, Activism, and Technoscience edited by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip 2008, 978-0-262-04249-9 $40.00S/29.95 cloth

An intelligent, well-informed, and creative analysis which will be immensely valuable for the better understanding of this fast-changing field. Sandy Nairne, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London

19

art

CHANCEedited by Margaret IversenWhy chance remains a key strategy in artists investigations into the contemporary world.

March 6 x 8 1/2, 240 pp. $24.95T paper 978-0-262-51392-0 Documents of Contemporary Art series Copublished with Whitechapel Gallery, London Not for sale in the United Kingdom or Europe

The chance situation or random event whether as a strategy or as a subject of investigation has been central to many artists practices across a multiplicity of forms, including expressionism, automatism, the readymade, collage, surrealist and conceptual photography, fluxus event scores, film, audio and video, performance, and participatory artworks. But why a century after Dada and Surrealisms first systematic enquiries does chance remain a key strategy in artists investigations into the contemporary world? The writings in this anthology examine the gap between intention and outcome, showing it to be crucial to the meaning of chance in art. The book provides a new critical context for chance procedures in art since 1900 and aims to answer such questions as why artists deliberately set up such a gap in their practice; what new possibilities this suggests; and why the viewer finds the art so engaging.Margaret Iversen is Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. Her books include Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory and Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes.

Also available in this series SITUATION edited by Claire Doherty 2009, 978-0-262-51305-0 $24.95T paper UTOPIAS edited by Richard Noble 2009, 978-0-262-64069-5 $24.95T paper BEAUTY edited by Dave Beech 2009, 978-0-262-51238-1 $24.95T paper APPROPRIATION edited by David Evans 2009, 978-0-262-55070-3 $24.95T paper COLOUR edited by David Batchelor 2008, 978-0-262-52481-0 $24.95T paper THE EVERYDAY edited by Stephen Johnstone 2008, 978-0-262-60074-3 $24.95T paper THE ARTISTS JOKE edited by Jennifer Higgie 2007, 978-0-262-58274-2 $24.95T paper

ARTISTS SURVEYED INCLUDEVito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Francis Als, William Anastasi, John Baldessari, Walead Beshty, Mark Boyle, George Brecht, Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Marcel Duchamp, Brian Eno, Fischli & Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Huang Yong Ping, Douglas Huebler, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Jiri Kovanda, Jorge Macchi, Christian Marclay, Cildo Meireles, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, Cornelia Parker, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Daniel Spoerri, Wolfgang Tillmans, Keith Tyson, Jennifer West, Ceryth Wyn Evans, La Monte Young

WRITERS INCLUDEPaul Auster, Jacquelynn Baas, Georges Bataille, Daniel Birnbaum, Claire Bishop, Guy Brett, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Stanley Cavell, Lynne Cooke, Fei Dawei, Gilles Deleuze, Anna Dezeuze, Russell Ferguson, Branden W. Joseph, Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Lacan, Susan Laxton, Sarat Maharaj, Midori Matsui, John Miller, Alexandra Munroe, Gabriel Prez Barreiro, Jasia Reichardt, Julia Robinson, Eric L. Santner, Sarah Valdez, Katharina Vossenkuhl

20

art

THE SUBLIMEedited by Simon MorleyIn the contemporary world, where technology, spectacle, and excess seem to eclipse nature, the individual, and society, what might be the characteristics of a contemporary sublime? If there is any consensus, it is in the idea that the sublime represents a testing of limits to the point at which fixities begin to fragment. This anthology examines how contemporary artists and theorists explore ideas of the sublime, in relation to the unpresentable, transcendence, terror, nature, technology, the uncanny, and altered states. Providing a philosophical and cultural context for discourse around the sublime in recent art, the book surveys the diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the term as it has evolved from the writings of Longinus, Burke, and Kant to present-day writers and artists. The sublime underlies the nobility of Classicism, the awe of Romantic nature, and the terror of the Gothic. In the last half-century, the sublime has haunted postwar abstraction, returned from the repression of theoretical formalism, and has become a key term in critical discussions of human otherness and posthuman realms of nature and technology.Simon Morley is a British artist and art historian who has contributed to international art journals including Art Monthly, Untitled, Contemporary Visual Art, Tate Etc. and Tema Celeste. A Lecturer in Painting at Winchester School of Art, England, he is the author of Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art. The continuing relevance and constant reinvention of the sublime the transcendent, the awe-inspiring, the unpresentable in art and culture since 1945.

March 6 x 8 1/2, 240 pp. $24.95T paper 978-0-262-51391-3 Documents of Contemporary Art series Copublished with Whitechapel Gallery, London Not for sale in the United Kingdom or Europe

Also available in this series THE GOTHIC edited by Gilda Williams 2007, 978-0-262-73186-7 $24.95T paper THE CINEMATIC edited by David Campany 2007, 978-0-262-53288-4 $24.95T paper DESIGN AND ART edited by Alex Coles 2007, 978-0-262-53289-1 $24.95T paper PARTICIPATION edited by Claire Bishop 2006, 978-0-262-52464-3 $24.95T paper THE ARCHIVE edited by Charles Merewether 2006, 978-0-262-63338-3 $24.95T paper

ARTISTS SURVEYED INCLUDEMarina Abramovi , Joseph Beuys, Tacita Dean, Walter De Maria, A K Dolven, Olafur Eliasson, c Andreas Gursky, Jitka Hanzlov, Gary Hill, Susan Hiller, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor, Mike Kelley, Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Richard Long, Barnett Newman, Tony Oursler, Cornelia Parker, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo, Lorna Simpson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fred Tomaselli, James Turrell, Luc Tuymans, Bill Viola, Zhang Huan

WRITERS INCLUDEMarco Belpoliti, John Berger, Paul Crowther, Jacques Derrida, Okwui Enwezor, Jean Fisher, Barbara Claire Freeman, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Doreet LeVitte-Harten, Eleanor Hartney, Lynn M. Herbert, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Lee Joon, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Thomas McEvilley, Vijay Mishra, David Morgan, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancire, Gene Ray, Robert Rosenblum, Philip Shaw, Paul Virilio, Marina Warner, Thomas Weiskel, Slavoj iek

21

architectureBACK IN PRINT

A SCIENTIFIC AUTOBIOGRAPHYAvailable again, a lyrical memoir by one of the major figures of postmodernist architecture; with drawings of architectural projects prepared especially for the book.

Aldo Rossi translated by Lawrence Venuti postscript by Vincent ScullyThis revealing memoir by Aldo Rossi (19371997), one of the most visible and controversial figures ever on the international architecture scene, intermingles discussions of Rossis architectural projects including the major literary and artistic influences on his work with his personal history. Drawn from notebooks Rossi kept beginning in 1971, these ruminations and reflections range from his obsession with theater to his concept of architecture as ritual. The book originally appeared as one of the landmark titles in the MIT Presss Oppositions Books series, but has been out of print for many years. This newly issued paperback reprint includes illustrations photographs, evocative images, and a set of drawings of Rossis major architectural projects prepared particularly for this publication selected by the author himself to augment the text.Aldo Rossi was an Italian architect and architecture theorist and the author of The Architecture of the City (MIT Press, 1984) and other books. He was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1990.

March 8 3/4 x 10, 128 pp. 35 illus. $19.95T/14.95 paper 978-0-262-51438-5 Oppositions Books series

Also available THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CITY Aldo Rossi 1984, 978-0-262-68043-1 $29.00T/21.95 paper

As nostalgia has swept the architectural community in recent years, one of the most Proustian design sensibilities to emerge has been that of Italian architect Aldo Rossi. The enfant terrible of Italys 1960s Tendenza group, which fulminated against the modern movement, Rossi published influential polemics and kept an equally eloquent personal record in the form of notebooks, which MIT has published as the handsome A Scientific Autobiography. . . . His own reminiscences convents and castles, the emotional pull of holy statuary, Melvilles dramatics, an adolescents fear of death, a young artists ways with life fill his lyrical, erudite notebooks. Portfolio A document of architectural imagination rather than a merely autobiographical or abstractly theoretical text. . . . Rossi allows his thoughts to roam freely from childhood memories to philosophical observations about architecture tout court. . . . His own projects attempt, and his writings explain, the creation of a magic triangle whose sides are symbolic of life, death, and illusion. Kurt Forster, architectural historian

22

architecture

PERSPECTA 42The Real The Yale Architectural Journal edited by Matthew Roman and Tal SchoriIt is often suggested that architecture is more real than the other arts, more grounded and definitive. Yet even the most fundamental and concrete elements of architecture are often designed to conceal. This issue of Perspecta the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America embraces the paradoxical nature of the real, presenting it as a lens that magnifies the strategies and tactics of architecture, past, present, and future. How does architecture create real effects, change our built environment, and respond to crises? What are the tricks and trompe loeils of contemporary practice? Amid fake Europes, shape-shifting materials, and underwater asylums, Perspecta 42 navigates architectures disciplinary boundaries to locate the real in the most unlikely of places. The real has been central to our understanding of architecture for the last hundred years, even if the discussion has been couched in other terms. While architecture anxiously situates itself between building and discourse, it never fully capitulates to either side. Through historical inquiry, theoretical writing, and contemporary projects, Perspecta 42 asserts that now, more than ever, architecture is in search of the real. The issue revolves around three encounters with the real. First, the physical: texts, projects, and conversations that relate to issues of material properties and our bodily surroundings thoughts on such topics as sensory environments, smart materials, and the floor as a landscape of logistics. Second, authenticity: explorations of representation and hybrid realities, including the digital and the surreal. And, finally, institutional failures and man-made or natural crises: considerations of war, the current economic calamity, and racial politics.Matthew Roman and Tal Schori are practicing designers and graduates of the Yale School of Architecture. Amid the tricks and trompe loeils of contemporary practices, architecture is now, more than ever, in pursuit of the real.

April 9 x 12, 176 pp. 100 color illus., 100 black & white illus. $25.00T/18.95 paper 978-0-262-51393-7

CONTRIBUTORSMichelle Addington, Lucia Allais, Alejandro Aravena, Mario Ballesteros, BIG, Andrew Blauvelt, Keller Easterling, Olafur Eliasson and Kurt Forster, Hal Foster, Lorens Holm, Jiang Jun, L.E.FT., Armin Linke, Metahaven, Spyros Papapetros, Emmanuel Petit, Antoine Picon, Bill Rankin, Damon Rich, Francois Roche, Matthew Stadler, Albena Yaneva, Yoon+Howeler, Andrew Zago, Mirko Zardini

23

history of technology/science

A VAST MACHINEThe science behind global warming, and its history: how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere, to measure it, to trace its past, and to model its future.

Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming Paul N. EdwardsGlobal warming skeptics often fall back on the argument that the scientific case for global warming is all model predictions, nothing but simulation; they warn us that we need to wait for real data, sound science. In A Vast Machine, Paul Edwards has news for these doubters: without models, there are no data. Today, no collection of signals or observations even from satellites, which can see the whole planet with a single instrument becomes global in time and space without passing through a series of data models. Everything we know about the worlds climate we know through models. Edwards offers an engaging and innovative history of how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere to measure it, trace its past, and model its future. Edwards argues that all our knowledge about climate change comes from three kinds of computer models: simulation models of weather and climate; reanalysis models, which recreate climate history from historical weather data; and data models, used to combine and adjust measurements from many different sources. Meteorology creates knowledge through an infrastructure (weather stations and other data platforms) that covers the whole world, making global data. This infrastructure generates information so vast in quantity and so diverse in quality and form that it can be understood only by computer analysis making data global. Edwards describes the science behind the scientific consensus on climate change, arguing that over the years data and models have converged to create a stable, reliable, and trustworthy basis for the reality of global warming.Paul N. Edwards is Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1996) and a coeditor (with Clark Miller) of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (2001), both published by the MIT Press.

April 6 x 9, 528 pp. 74 illus. $32.95T/24.95 cloth 978-0-262-01392-5

Also available THE CLOSED WORLD Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America Paul N. Edwards 1997, 978-0-262-55028-4 $24.95T/18.95 paper CHANGING THE ATMOSPHERE Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance edited by Clark Miller and Paul N. Edwards 2001, 978-0-262-63219-5 $32.00S/23.95 paper

24

current affairs/health care

HEALTH CARE TURNING POINTWhy Single Payer Won't Work Roger M. BattistellaThe battle over health care reform has reached a turning point. We can try to fashion new policies based on old ideas or we can acknowledge todays demographic and economic realities. In Health Care Turning Point, health policy expert Roger Battistella argues that the conventional wisdom that dominates health policy debates is out of date. Battistella takes on popular misconceptions about the advantages of single-payer plans, the role of the market, and other health policy issues and outlines a pragmatic new approach. Few would disagree that the current system is broken. Employer-supplied health insurance no longer works; it imposes a heavy burden on American companies when they compete against international firms and creates insecurity and instability for American workers. But, Battistella asserts provocatively, a government takeover of health insurance patterned after Medicare and Medicaid wont work either. With a battered economy and an aging population, the country simply cant afford it. Battistella argues that contrary to popular belief, single-payer coverage will not lower health spending but would encourage overconsumption and drive costs up. The most efficient and affordable way to reform health care, Battistella contends, is for consumers to take ownership of it. If consumers were responsible for buying their own health insurance (as they are for buying their own car and home insurance), he argues, theyd look for value and demand greater price and quality transparency from providers. Health insurance would be more like other forms of insurance and focus on major expenses, with routine care paid for out of pocket. The economic shibboleth that the principles of market competition dont apply to health care is nonsense, Battistella says. We wont achieve real health care reform until policy makers adjust to this reality and adopt a more pragmatic view.Roger M. Battistella is Emeritus Professor of Health Policy and Management in the Sloan Graduate Program in Health Administration at Cornell University. An expert debunks popular misconceptions about health policy, including the merits of single-payer plans, and offers an alternative.

March 6 x 9, 160 pp. $21.95T/16.95 cloth 978-0-262-01407-6

HEALTH CARE TURNING POINTS MYTHS ABOUT HEALTH CARE REFORM Health care is a social good that should be free to all. Single-payer coverage lowers health spending and eliminates social and economic health disparities. Prevention generates big savings. More health spending will stimulate the economy and have a positive effect on health status and longevity. Canada provides a desirable blueprint for U.S. health reform. The principles of market competition arent applicable to health care.

25

current affairs/political science

economics/policy

RULE OF LAW, MISRULE OF MENElaine ScarryThis book is a passionate call for citizen action to uphold the rule of law when government does not. Arguing that post-9/11 legislation and foreign policy severed the executive branch from the will of the people, Elaine Scarry offers a fierce defense of the peoples role as guarantor of our democracy. She begins with the groundswell of local resistance to the 2001 Patriot Act, when hundreds of towns, cities, and counties passed resolutions refusing compliance with the information-gathering the act demanded, showing that citizens can take action against laws that undermine the rights of citizens and noncitizens alike. Scarry, once described in the New York Times Sunday Magazine as known for her unflinching investigations of war, torture, and pain, then turns to the conduct of the Iraqi occupation, arguing that the Bush administration led the country onto treacherous moral terrain, violating the Geneva Conventions and the armed forces own most fundamental standards. She warns of the damage done to democracy when military personnel must choose between their own codes of warfare and the illegal orders of their civilian superiors. If our military leaders uphold the rule of law when civilian leaders do not, might we come to prefer them? Finally, reviewing what we know now about the Bush administrations crimes, Scarry insists that prosecution whether local, national, or international is essential to restoring the rule of law, and she shows how a brave town in Vermont has taken up the challenge. Throughout the book, Scarry finds hope in moments where citizens withheld their consent to grievous crimes, finding creative ways to stand by their patriotism.Elaine Scarry is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. She is the author of The Body in Pain, On Beauty and Being Just, and Who Defended the Country? April 4 1/2 x 7, 240 pp. $14.95T/11.95 cloth 978-0-262-01427-4 A Boston Review Book

TAKING ECONOMICS SERIOUSLYDean BakerThere is nothing wrong with economics, Dean Baker contends, but economists routinely ignore their own principles when it comes to economic policy. What would policy look like if we took basic principles of mainstream economics seriously and applied them consistently? In the debate over regulation, for example, Baker one of the few economists who predicted the meltdown of fall 2008 points out that ideological blinders have obscured the fact there is no free market to protect. Modern markets are highly regulated, although intrusive regulations such as copyright and patents are rarely viewed as regulatory devices. If we admit the extent to which the economy is and will be regulated, we have many more options in designing policy and deciding who benefits from it. On health care reform, Baker complains that economists ignore another basic idea: marginal cost pricing. Unlike all other industries, medical services are priced extraordinarily high, far above the cost of production, yet that discrepancy is rarely addressed in the debate about health care reform. What if we applied marginal cost pricing making doctors wages competitive and charging less for prescription drugs and tests such as MRIs? Taking Economics Seriously offers an alternative Econ 101. It introduces economic principles and thinks through what we might gain if we free ourselves from ideological blinders and get back to basics in the most troubled parts of our economy.Dean Baker, Codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., is author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy and The Conservative Nanny State. He also writes a popular blog on economic reporting, Beat the Press, for The American Prospect. April 4 1/2 x 7, 136 pp. $14.95T/11.95 cloth 978-0-262-01418-2 A Boston Review Book

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978-0-262-04236-9 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

978-0-262-13473-6 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

978-0-262-04239-0 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

978-0-262-02615-4 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

978-0-262-19567-6 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

978-0-262-05089-0 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

978-0-262-07295-3 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

978-0-262-02644-4 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

978-0-262-12311-2 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

978-0-262-07303-5 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

978-0-262-01288-1 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

978-0-262-01289-8 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

978-0-262-01359-8 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

978-0-262-01360-4 $14.95T/11.95 cloth

Boston Review Books are accessible, short books that take ideas seriously. They are animated by hope, committed to equality, and convinced that the imagination eludes political categories. The editors aim to establish a public space in which people can loosen the hold of conventional preconceptions and start to reason together across the lines others are so busily drawing.

27

economics/political science

THE VIOLENCE OF FINANCIAL CAPITALISMChristian Marazzi translated by Kristina LebedevaAn innovative analysis of financialization in the context of postfordist cognitive capitalism.

January 4 1/2 x 7, 112 pp. $12.95T/9.95 paper 978-1-58435-083-5 Intervention series Distributed for Semiotext(e)

Also available from Semotext(e) CAPITAL AND LANGUAGE From the New Economy to the War Economy Christian Marazzi 2008, 978-1-58435-067-5 $14.95T/11.95

This first English-language edition of Christian Marazzis most recent book, The Violence of Financial Capitalism makes a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis available to a new audience of readers. Marazzi, a leading figure in the European postfordist movement, first takes a broad look at the nature of the crisis and then provides the theoretical tools necessary to comprehend capitalism today, offering an innovative analysis of financialization in the context of postfordist cognitive capitalism. He argues that the processes of financialization are not simply irregularities between the traditional categories of wages, rent, and profit, but rather a new type of accumulation adapted to the processes of social and cognitive production today. The financial crisis, he contends, is a fundamental component of contemporary accumulation and not a classic lack of economic growth. Marazzi shows that individual debt and the management of financial markets are actually techniques for governing the transformations of immaterial labor, general intellect, and social cooperation. The financial crisis has radically undermined the very concept of unilateral and multilateral economico-political hegemony, and Marazzi discusses efforts toward a new geo-monetary order that have emerged around the globe in response. Offering a radically new understanding of the current stage of international economics as well as crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form, The Violence of Financial Capitalism is a valuable addition to the contemporary arsenal of postfordist thought. This expanded edition includes a new appendix for comprehending the esoteric neolanguage of financial capitalism a glossary of Words in Crisis, from AAA to toxic asset.Christian Marazzi is Professor and Director of Socio-Economic Research at the Scuola Universitaria della Svizzera Italiana. He is the author of Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy (Semiotext(e), 2008).

At last, a fresh interpretation of the global economic crisis that vehemently departs from traditional academic canons in order to assert a new kind of economic and political thought. Antonio Negri

Semiotext(e)s Intervention series offers polemical texts by intellectual agitators. Short, engaged, and highly focused manifestos, essays, and critiques, these palm-sized salvos address a variety of political and cultural topics but share a passion for provocation, and allow for more immediate excursions in Semiotext(e)s ongoing mission of intellectual activism.

28

political science

INTRODUCTION TO CIVIL WARTiqqun translated by Alexander R. Galloway and Jason SmithSociety no longer exists, at least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There is only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which THEY hold together the scattered tatters of the global biopolitical fabric, through which THEY prevent its violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this desolation, the supreme manager of a process of listless implosion. from Introduction to Civil War Society is not in crisis, society is at an end. The things we used to take for granted have all been vaporized. Politics was one of these things, a Greek invention that condenses around an equation: to hold a position means to take sides, and to take sides means to unleash civil war. Civil war, position, sides these were all one word in the Greek: stasis. If the history of the modern state in all its forms absolute, liberal, welfare has been the continuous attempt to ward off this stasis, the great novelty of contemporary imperial power is its embrace of civil war as a technique of governance and disorder as a means of maintaining control. Where the modern state was founded on the institution of the law and its constellation of divisions, exclusions, and repressions, imperial power has replaced them with a network of norms and apparatuses that conspire in the production of the biopolitical citizens of Empire. In their first book available in English, Tiqqun explores the possibility of a new practice of communism, finding a foundation for an ontology of the common in the politics of friendship and the free play of forms-of-life. They see the ruins of society as the ideal setting for the construction of the community to come. In other words: the situation is excellent. Now is not the time to lose courage.Tiqqun is a French collective of authors and activists formed in 1999. The group published two journal volumes in 1999 and 2001 (in which the collective author The Invisible Committee first appeared), as well as the books Thorie du Bloom and Thorie de la jeune fille. Activists explore the possibility that a new practice of communism may emerge from the end of society as we know it.

January 4 1/2 x 7, 160 pp. $12.95T/9.95 paper 978-1-58435-086-6 Intervention series Distributed for Semiotext(e)

Also available from Semotext(e) THE COMING INSURRECTION The Invisible Committee 2009, 978-1-58435-080-4 $12.95T/9.95 paper

29

philosophy

A THOUSAND MACHINESThe machine as a social movement of todays precariatthose whose labor and lives are precarious.

A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement Gerald Raunig translated by Aileen DeriegIn this concise philosophy of the machine, Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Flix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance from the role of bicycles in Flann OBriens fiction to Vittorio de Sicas Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marxs Fragment on Machines to the deus ex machina of Greek drama Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives.Gerald Raunig is a philosopher and art theorist who lives in Vienna. He is the author of Art and Revolution (Semiotext(e), 2007).

March 4 1/2 x 7, 128 pp. $12.95T/9.95 paper 978-1-58435-085-9 Intervention series Distributed for Semiotext(e)

Also available from Semotext(e) ART AND REVOLUTION Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century Gerald Raunig 2007, 978-1-58435-046-0 $17.95T/13.95 paper

It is to Gerald Raunigs great credit that his essay reintroduces the concept of the machine as defined by Deleuze and Guattari; he examines it against the background of Marxist tradition, which has been articulated most innovatively in post-operaism. His work shows the possible intersections and continuities, but also points to discontinuities between these two theories which have evolved at markedly different periods. Maurizio Lazzarato

30

cultural studies/queer theory

THE SCREWBALL ASSESGuy Hocquenghem translated by Noura WedellAlone in his forest dwelling, an ogre had spent years building machines to force his visitors to make love to one another: machines with pulleys, chains, clocks, collars, leather leggings, metal breastplates, oscillatory, pendular, or rotating dildos. One day, some adolescents who had lost their way, seven or eight brothers, entered the ogres house From The Screwball Asses Our asshole is revolutionary. Guy Hocquenghem Workers of the world, masturbate! Front Homosexuel dAction Revolutionnaire slogan First published anonymously in Flix Guattaris Recherches in the notorious 1973 issue on homosexuality (seized and destroyed by the French government), The Screwball Asses remains a dramatic treatise on erotic desire. In this classic underground text, queer theorist and post-68 provocateur Guy Hocquenghem takes on the militant delusions of the gay liberation movement. Hocquenghem, founder and leader of the Front Homosexuel dAction Revolutionnaire, vivisects not only the stifled mores of bourgeois capitalism but the phallocratic concessions of so-called homophiles, and, ultimately, the very act of speaking desire (and non-desire). Rejecting any pure theory of homosexuality that claims its otherness as a morphology of revolution, he contends that the ruling classes have invented homosexuality as a sexual ghetto, splitting and mutilating desire in the process. It is only when non-desire and the desire of desire are enacted simultaneously through speech and body that homosexuality can finally be sublimated under the true act of making love. There are thousands of sexes on earth, according to Hocquenghem, but only one sexual desire. Available in English for the first time, The Screwball Asses is a revelatory disquisition, earning Hocquenghem his rightful place among the minoritarian elite of Gilles Deleuze, Jean Genet, and Tony Duvert.Guy Hocquenghem (19461988), essayist and activist, is often considered the father of Queer theory. He was the author of Homosexual Desire (1972) and LAmour en relief (1982). The Screwball Asses is his first work available from Semiotext(e). A founder of Queer theory contends that the ruling classes have invented homosexuality as a sexual ghetto, splitting and mutilating desire in the process.

January 4 1/2 x 7, 88 pp. $12.95T/9.95 paper 978-1-58435-081-1 Intervention series Distributed for Semiotext(e)

Also available from Semiotext(e) CHAOSOPHY Texts and Interviews 19721977 New Edition Flix Guattari 2008, 978-1-58435-060-6 $17.95T/13.95 paper GOOD SEX ILLUSTRATED Tony Duvert translated by Bruce Benderson 2007, 978-1-58435-043-9 $14.95T/11.95 paper

31

fiction

COMAPierre Guyotat translated by Noura WedellA poetic exploration of trauma and renewal from the last avant-garde visionary of the twentieth century.

April 6 x 9, 192 pp. 1 color illus, 8 black & white illus. $17.95T/13.95 paper 978-1-58435-089-7 Native Agents series Distributed for Semiotext(e)

Long ago, in childhood, when Summer reverberates and feels and throbs all over, it begins to circumscribe my body along with my self, and my body gives it shape in turn: the joy of living, of experiencing, of already foreseeing dismembers it, this entire body explodes, neurons rush toward what attracts them, zones of sensation break off almost in blocks that come to rest at the four corners of the landscape, at the four corners of Creation. from Coma The novelist and playwright Pierre Guyotat has been called the last great avantgarde visionary of the twentieth century, and the near-cult status of his work because of its extreme linguistic innovation and its provocative violence has made him one of the most influential of French writers today. He has been hailed as the true literary heir to Lautramont and Arthur Rimbaud, and his inhuman works have been mentioned in the same breath as those by Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud. Winner of the 2006 prix Dcembre, Coma is the deeply moving, vivid portrayal of the artistic and spiritual crisis that wracked Guyotat in the 1980s when he reached the physical limits of his search for a new language, entered a mental clinic, and fell into a coma brought on by self-imposed starvation. A poetic, cruelly lucid account, Coma links Guyotats illness and loss of subjectivity to a broader concern for the slow, progressive regeneration of humanity. Written in what the author himself has called a normalized writing, this book visits a lifetime of moments that have in common the force of amazement, brilliance, and a flash of life. Grounded in experiences from the authors childhood and his familys role in the French Resistance, Coma is a tale of initiation that provides an invaluable key to interpreting Guyotats work, past and future.Pierre Guyotat (born in 1940) has been a source of French literary scandal since the 1967 publication of Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers. The French government banned his novel Eden Eden Eden from being publicized, advertised on post