by Christian Montag, with Kenneth L. Davis

Animal Emotions: How They Drive Human Behavior gives a concise overview of ancient mammalian emotions deeply rooted in the human brain. Jaak Panksepp, a world-renowned neuroscientist, dedicated his life career to the study of mammalian emotions and he carved out seven distinct emotional systems he called seeking, lust, care, and play (positive emotions), and fear, anger, and sadness (negative emotions), all exerting a tremendous influence on human behavior.

Christian Montag, a neuroscientist and psychologist, and a long-time collaborator of Jaak Panksepp, revisits together with Kenneth L. Davis, one of Jaak’s PhD students, Panksepp’s theories and provides the reader with new insights into the nature of emotions and their role as survival tools, both for animals and for humans. They also raise new questions about the background of the research field Jaak Panksepp coined “Affective Neuroscience.” How are personality and psychopathology linked to animal emotions? Do animals feel the same way as we do? What are our emotional needs in a digital society, and what is key to a happy life?

by Gila Ashtor

Aural History is an anti-memoir memoir of encountering devastating grief that uses experimental storytelling to recreate the winding, fractured path of loss and transformation.

Written by a thirty-something psychotherapist and queer theorist, Aural History is structured as a sequence of three sections that each use different narrative styles to represent a distinctive stage in the protagonist’s evolving relationship to trauma. Aural History explores how a cascade of self-dissolving losses crisscrosses a girl’s coming of age.

Through lyric prose, the first section follows a precocious tomboy whose fierce attachment to her father forces her, when he dies and she is twelve years old, to run the family bakery business, raise a delinquent younger brother, and take care of a destructive, volatile mother.

In part two, scenes narrated in the third person illustrate a high-achieving high school student who is articulate and in control except for bouts of sudden and inchoate attractions, the first of which is to her severe and coaxing English teacher.

The third story tells of her relation with a riveting, world-famous professor, interspersed with a tragic-comic series of dialogues between the protagonist and a cast of diverse psychotherapists as she, now twenty-five years old and living in New York City, undertakes an odyssey to understand why true self-knowledge remains elusive and her real feelings, choked and incomplete.

In what Phillip Lopate calls “an amazing document,” Aural History pushes the narrative conventions of memoir to capture a story the genre of memoir usually struggles to tell: that you can lose yourself, and have no way to know it.

Edited by Prudence Gibson, Baylee Brits

Contributors: Andrew Belletty, Tamryn Bennett, Baylee Brits, Justin Clemens, Paul Dawson, Lisa Dowdall, Luke Fischer, Monica Gagliano, Prudence Gibson, Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Lucas Ihlein, Tessa Laird, Michael Marder, Stephen Muecke, Dalia Nassar, Susie Pratt, Ben Woodard

Covert Plants contributes to newly emerging discourses on the implications of vegetal life for the arts and culture. This stretches to changes in our perception of ‘nature’ and to the adapting roles of botany, evolutionary ecology, and environmental aesthetics in the humanities. Its editors and contributors seek various expressions of vegetal life rather than the mere representation of such, and they proceed from the conviction that a rigorous approach to thinking with and through vegetal life must be interdisciplinary. At a time when urgent calls for restorative care and reparative action have been sounded for the environment, this essay volume presents a range of academic and creative perspectives, from evolutionary biology to literary theory, philosophy to poetry, which respond to the perplexing problems and paradoxes of vegetal thinking.

Representations of vegetal life often include plant analogies and plant imagery. These representations have at times obscured the diversity of plant behavior and experience. Covert Plants probes the implications of vegetal life for thought and how new plant science is changing our perception of the vegetal — around us and in us. How can we think, speak, and write about plant life without falling into human-nature dyads, or without tumbling into reductive theoretical notions about the always complex relations between cognition and action, identity and value, subject and object?

A full view of this shifting perspective requires a ‘stereoscopic’ lens through which to view plants, but also simultaneously to alter our human-centered viewpoint. Plants are no longer the passive object of contemplation, but are increasingly resembling ‘subjects,’ ‘stakeholders,’ or ‘actors.’ As such, the plant now makes unprecedented demands upon the nature of contemplation itself. Moreover, the aesthetic, political, and legal implications of new knowledge regarding plants’ ability to communicate, sense, and learn require intensive, cross-disciplinary investigation. By doing this, we can intervene into current attitudes to climate change and sustainability, and hopefully revise, for the better, human philosophies, ethics, and aesthetics that touch upon plant life.

by Laurence A. Rickels

Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 1: Between a Crypt and a Datemark addresses both the style or genre of fantasy and the mental faculty, long the hot property of philosophical ethics. Freud passed it along in his 1907 essay on the poetics of daydreaming when he addressed omnipotent wish fantasy as the source and resource of the aspirations and resolutions of art, which, however, the artwork can never look back at or acknowledge. By grounding his genre in the one fantasy that is true, the Gospel, J.R.R. Tolkien obviated and made obvious the ethical mandate of fantasy’s restraining order.

With George Lucas’s Star Wars we entered the borderlands of the fantasy and science fiction genres, a zone resulting from and staggering a contest, which Tolkien inaugurated in the 1930s. The history of this contested borderland marks changes that arose in expectation of what the new media held in store, changes realized (but outside the box of what had been projected) upon the arrival of the unanticipated digital relation, which at last seemed to award the fantasy genre the contest prize.

Freud’s notion of the Zeitmarke (datemark), the indelible impress of the present moment that triggered the daydream that denies it, already introduced the import of fantasy’s historicization. Science fiction won a second prize that keeps it in the running. No longer bound to projecting the future, the former calling which in light of digitization it flunked, science fiction becomes allegorical and reading in the ruins of its failed predictions illuminates all the date marks and crypts hiding out in the borderlands it traverses with fantasy. To motivate the import of an evolving science fiction genre, Critique of Fantasy makes Gotthard Günther’s reflections in the 1950s on American science fiction – as heralding a new metaphysics and a new planetary going on interstellar civilization – a mainstay of its cultural anthropology with B-genres.

by Ryan Dewey

Hack The Experience will reframe your perspective on how your audience engages your work. This will happen as you learn how to control attention through spatial and time-based techniques that you can harness as you build immersive installations or as you think about how to best arrange your work in an exhibition. You’ll learn things about the senses and how they interface with attention so that you can build in visceral forms of interactivity, engage people’s empathetic responses, and frame their moods. This book is a dense bouillon-cube of techniques that you can adapt and apply to your personal practice, and it’s a book that will walk you step-by-step through skill sets from ethnography, cognitive science, and multi-modal metaphors.

The core argument of this book is that art is a form of cognitive engineering and that the physical environment (or objects in the physical environment) can be shaped to maximize emotional and sensory experience. Many types of art will benefit from this handbook (because cognition is pervasive in our experience of art), but it is particularly relevant to immersive experiential works such as installations, participatory/interactive environments, performance art, curatorial practice, architecture and landscape architecture, complex durational works, and works requiring new models of documentation. These types of work benefit from the empirical findings of cognitive science because intentionally leveraging basic human cognition in artworks can give participants new ways of seeing the world that are cognitively relevant. This leveraging process provides a new layer in the construction of conceptually grounded works.

by Lajos Brons

Any social and political arrangement depends on acceptance. If a substantial part of a people does not accept the authority of its rulers, then those can only remain in power by means of force, and even that use of force needs to be accepted to be effective. Gramsci called this acceptance of the socio-political status quo “hegemony.” Every stable state relies primarily on hegemony as a source of control. Hegemony works through the dissemination of values and beliefs that create acceptance and that serve the interests of the state and/or the ruling elite (the “hegemones”). Hegemony is most efficient if it remains invisible. A key hegemonic belief is the idea that there is no alternative to the current socio-political status quo or that the way things are is “natural.” The current hegemony – that is, the set of values and beliefs that bolster the current socio-political status quo – is a hegemony of psychopathy: it promotes “cultural psychopathy” and destroys empathy and compassion, thus threatening everything that makes us human.

The hegemony of psychopathy is responsible for massive human suffering. It must be fought and replaced with a counter-hegemonic set of values and beliefs that promote compassion and care. Fighting hegemony requires fighting the “pillars” that support it. Most important among these are the mass media and culture industry, and mainstream economics. The former is responsible for a continuous stream of hegemonic propaganda; the latter – among others – for providing a pseudo-scientific justification for the false belief that there is no alternative. The Hegemony of Psychopathy concludes with some considerations on tactics and strategy in the struggle against the hegemony of psychopathy, but does not – and cannot – offer any concrete advice.

by Maia Dolphin-Krute

An epidemic is a feeling set within time as much as it is a matter of statistics and epidemiology: it is the feeling of many of us in the same desperate place at the same desperate time. Opioid epidemic thus names a present moment — at once historic and historical — centered on the substance of opioids as much as it names the urgency of all of us who are currently in proximity to these substances. What is the relationship between these historic and historical moments, the present moment, the history of pharmacological capitalism, and a set of repeated neurological activities, as well as human loss and desire, that has fueled the exponential rise in the rates of opioid use and abuse between 2000-2018?

Opioids: Addiction, Narrative, Freedom is an auto-ethnography written from deep within—biologically within—this opioid epidemic. Tracing opioids around and through the bodies, governmental, and medical structures they are moving and being moved through, Opioids is an examination of what it means to live within an environment saturated with a substance of deep economic, political, neuroscientific, and pharmacological implications. From exploring media coverage of the epidemic and emerging medical narratives of addiction to detailing the legal inscription of differences between “pain patients” and people addicted to drugs, Opioids consistently asks: what is it like to live within an epidemic? What forms of freedom become possible when continually modulated by our physical experiences of the material proximities of an epidemic?

How do you live with something for a long time?

by Maia Dolphin-Krute

Memoirs about being sick are popular and everywhere and only ever contribute to pop narratives of illness as a single event or heroic struggle or journey. Visceral: Essays on Illness as Metaphor is not that. Visceral, to the extent that it is a memoir, is a record not of illness but of the research project being sick became. While rooted firmly in critical disability and queer practices, the use of personal narratives opens these approaches up to new ways of writing the body—ultimately a body that is at once theoretical and unavoidably physical. A body where everything is visceral, so theory must be too.

From the gothic networks of healthcare bureaucracy and hospital philanthropy to the proliferation of wellness media, off-label usage of drugs, and running off to live a life with, these essays move fluidly through theoretical and physical anger, curiosity and surprise. Arguing for disability rights that attend to the theoretical as much as the physical, this is Illness Not As Metaphor, Being Sick and Time, and The Body in Actual Pain as one.

A sick body of text that is—and is not—in direct correspondence to an actual sick body, Visceral is an unrelenting examination of chronic illness that turns towards the theoretical only to find itself in the realms of the biological and autobiographical: because how much theory can a body take?