Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering

by Brian Holmes

We've been waiting for this one for a long time - Brian Holmes is one of the smartest folks writing today about problems of global capital, cultures of resistance, and the traps of recuperation.  We'd stop short of calling him a rising theory superstar, not because his work isn't tremendously important, increasingly influential, and challengingly original, but because he tends to eschew the normal pitfalls of high theory and its theorists - he's committed to a very non-academic ethos of horizontalism and collaboration - for instance in the Continental Drift seminars at NYC's 16 beaver space  or his essay on North Carolina's "Research Triangle".  We've also been impressed by his willingness to experiment with new strategies - for instance his participation in the seminal conceptual mapping practices at Universite Tangente and Bureau d'Etudes.  He's also something of a poststructuralist Rodney Livingstone (translator into English of much of the work of the early-20th century German critical theory), having translated works by Jean-Luc Nancy, Felix Guattari, Chris Marker, and more.

Here's what Brian himself has to say about the collection:

These insurgent essays describe, prolong and critique some of the cultural and artistic projects that arose with the worldwide wave of protests around the turn of the millennium, against what the global South calls neoliberalism. Dissent and the refusal of a programmed existence continually return to the streets; but they also unfold in the imagination. Complex discourses and elaborate fictions weave their way through images, gestures and hilarious scenarios, hovering at the edges of reality and searching for whoever will give them voice. Museums, cinemas, books and theaters are temporary abodes for such things, and authors are only a convenience. But none of the wilder spirits ever really disappears. Time leaches away the graffiti of revolt, and the cynicism of power lays a new coat of paint. Still the collective phantoms return.

This book is dedicated to the artists who dreamed it up between them, and to the activists who wrote it out in the streets.

Table of contents

01. Cartography of Excess
02. Unleashing the Collective Phantoms
03. Drifting through the Grid
04. Warhol in the Rising Sun
05. Maps for the Outside
06. The Revenge of the Concept
07. Liar’s Poker
08. Policy of Truth
09. Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society
10. A Rising Tide of Contradiction
11. Signals, Statistics & Social Experiments
12. S–77CCR
13. Three Proposals for a Real Democracy
14. Emancipation
15. Reverse Imagineering
16. Transparency & Exodus