Skizo-Mails is the first issue of the new book series Doormats published by Errant Bodies Press. Doormats seeks to unfold creative perspectives on what the political can be today: from critical appraisals of economic injustices to experimental research and projects on public life, the series aims for new political subjectivity. Doormats supports experimental writing, rants and poetics, reflections and commentary by international voices.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi (born 1948 in Bologna) is a philosopher, cultural theorist and political and media activist.  During the 1980s he contributed to Semiotexte (NY), Chimeree (Paris), Metropoli (Rome) and Musica 80 (Milan). In the 1990s he published Mutazione e Cyberpunk (Genoa, 1993), and more recently: Felix (London, 2008), The Soul at Work (Semiotexte, 2010) and After the Future (AK Press, 2011).

With a foreword by Franco ”Bifo” Berardi.

In Hito Steyerl’s writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl’s landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image. Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings.

e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle. Design by Jeff Ramsey, cover artwork by Liam Gillick

In his catalogue essay, curator Anthony Huberman explains that the works in this exhibition ‘reflect on what it could mean to contest the regime of the machine’. That is, they question the worship of usefulness in modern scientific civilisation, which is refused or even ridiculed by each piece on show. It’s a strong concept, and potentially extends to how the works are placed in the labyrinthine space of the Secession. If the point is to produce friction, then the disorganisation of Other Mechanisms—the inability of its parts to add up to a coherent whole—is a paradoxical form of success.

Concept: Anthony Huberman. Texts: Jennifer Alexander, Franco Berardi, Benjamin H. Bratton, Gilles Châtelet, Gilles Deleuze, Keller Easterling, Vilém Flusser, Sigfried Gideon, Martin Heidegger, Anthony Huberman, K.G. Hultén, Maurizio Lazzarato, Pamela Lee, Les Levine, Jean-François Lyotard, Robert King Merton, Meredith Meredith, Lewis Mumford, Gerald Raunig, Nishant Shah, Robert Snowden, Joseph Vogl. Images: Zarouhie Abdalian, Lutz Bacher, Nairy Baghramian, Eva Barto, Patricia L. Boyd, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, Jay DeFeo, Trisha Donnelly, Harun Farocki, Howard Fried, Jacob Kassay, Garry Neill Kennedy, Frederick Kiesler, Pope.L, Louise Lawler, Sam Lewitt, Park McArthur, Jean-Luc Moulène, Cameron Rowland, Sturtevant, Danh Vo.