The Eight Technologies of Otherness

The Eight Technologies of Otherness is a bold and provocative re-thinking of identities, politics, philosophy, ethics, and cultural practices themselves, a book which journeys amongst and through the very unholy groundings of corrupted surfaces, shot through with strange time, space, matter and speed. Here old essentialism and binary divides collapse under the weight of a new and impatient necessity, which is itself nothing more nor less than the various everyday strategies and technologies of making meaning ‘stick’. But Reader, Beware! As Sue Golding asks in her Word of Warning what would happen to the so-called ‘postmodern’ if we were to stop sterilizing the wounds? If we were to take seriously political freedom, cultural revolution, fear, disease, trash, flesh, multiple ethics, homelessness, rthythm, violence, virtual bodies, computing sciences, boredom, anger, light, experimentation, art - and all the myriad joys and fears that come from a refusal to be comforted by the easy, neat, and clean? The short answer: we would be playing with fire. The longer answer, in all its tactile rawness, spins out in the eight technologies: curiosity, noise, cruelty, appetite, skin, nomadism, contamination, and dwelling. These technologies stand in a way, ‘on their own’; and yet are not fully resolved in and of themselves. But why only eight technologies? And why these eight, in particular? The thirty-three artists, philosophers, filmmakers, writers, photographers, political militants, and ‘pulp-theory’ practitioners whose work (or life) has contributed to the re-thinking of ‘otherness’ to which this book bears witness throw out a few clues. We might wish to say: the unbearable lightness of necessity, suspense, horror…