New Books from INCA Press
May 17, 2018
INCA Press, an independent publisher run by editors Aeron Bergman, Alejandra Salinas, Irena Borić (Maribor, Slovenia) will release two new books July 1: manuel arturo abreu's Incalculable Loss and Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas' Telepathy 传心术.
Incalculable Loss is the debut collection of critical prose from artist and poet manuel arturo abreu. In their own words, the text “orbits the topics of art, race, tech, and feelings,” gathering writing from 2014 to 2018 and presenting a kind of paean to the critical position, which is often maligned as parasitic or paradoxical. With a sense of casual rigor and flippancy, the included texts tackle themes from the problems of theorizing cannibalism, the violence of modernism in art via theft of Black and brown aesthetics, the commodification of identity, and the ways in which Big Data makes all of “us” newly complicit in the death and violence that powers the global system. Originally titled Against Theory — as in both anti-theory and rubbing up on its surface — abreu’s text offers various modes of recalibrating one’s own thinking, showing that if one truly loves knowledge, one must let it go.
About Telepathy: The hyper-competition of neoliberalism is a construction that is sold as a fact of nature, purely a matter of biology, genetics, basic psychology, and particle physics, etc. The priests, cardinals, and popes of advanced neoliberal capitalism credit all human advancements to competition.
Fields such as art, science, and education are antithetical to the goals of neoliberal quantification, gamification, and resulting private appropriation of everything. However, even these fields are forced to comply and compete, to great detriment of the independent goals of these fields, through coerced competition for resources via constant demands for performance metrics. For most of us it is impossible to step outside the legislated competitions of neoliberalism and so individuals must be well adjusted within the system, enabled by realist-conformist postures.
The rhetoric of competition has been cleverly transferred to a general system of governance, and forms relations between people, and between people and their professions. In this way, competition serves both as a discourse of legitimation, and as legal framework of extreme control. It takes armies of technocrats working tirelessly, endlessly, in order to enforce the myth of competition and thus hardly “natural” in the way it is marketed.
INCA Press books are distributed by Motto Berlin; Printed Matter, New York; and Art Metropole, Toronto.