The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Paul Virilio

Examines the “aesthetic” in film, in politics, in war, the philosophy of subjectivity and elsewhere. AK

Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 124 pages

Future Primitive and Other Essays

John Zerzan

For Zerzan the “Golden Age” is no myth. Not only did it once exist, it is once more attainable, at least to those willing to take the long trip back—neither to the revolutionary era mourned by the Left, nor to the conservative’s beloved 17th century, nor even to the feudal regimes increasingly favored by post-structuralist academia. With often surprising erudition, Zerzan sketches out a utopian theory of prehistory, comprising elements of “classical” anarchism, Luddite subversion and Green activism, which represents on every level a clean break with all of these established positions. GR

Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 185 pages

Lost Dimension

Paul Virilio

The French urban planner and cultural theorist examines aspects of postmodern society ranging from space travel to time and the physical sciences. AK

Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 150 pages

Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles

Paul Virilio

Pure power and the art of warfare, and revolutionary resistance to it. AK

Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 160 pages

Speed and Politics

Paul Virilio

“The loss of material space leads to the government of nothing but time… The violence of speed has become both the location and the law, the world’s destiny and its destination.”

Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 166 pages

TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontologic Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism

Hakim Bey

“The TAZ is like an uprising which does not directly engage with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can ‘occupy’ these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace. Perhaps certain small TAZs have lasted whole lifetimes because they went unnoticed, like hillbilly enclaves—because they never intersected with the Spectacle, never appeared outside that real life which is invisible to the agents of Simulation.” Also contains the full text of Bey’s influential Chaos and the complete communiqués and flyers of the Association for Ontological Anarchy.

Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 141 pages

In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

Jean Baudrillard

“Baudrillard expounds on his view that the social and the ‘masses’ no longer exist.”

Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 123 pages

Simulations

Jean Baudrillard

“The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction… The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced… the hyperreal, which is entirely in simulation.”

Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 162 pages

¡Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution (December 31, 1993 through June 12, 1994)

The Editorial Collective

After the Ross Perot-led anti-NAFTA debacle in Congress subsided, it looked as though the Trilateral forces of global finance (riding high on the post-Cold War buy-up of Eastern Europe) were smugly on their way to consolidating their grip on yet another chunk of the world’s real estate. In this case, Mexico was to be corralled into our big new “free trade zone” and the whole debate in Congress revolved around whether we Americans wanted them in or not. Yet on January 1, 1994—symbolically the day that NAFTA was to go into effect—the corrupt edifice of the Mexican government (which has been controlled for most of this century by the aptly Orwellian-titled Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI) was thrown off its foundations by the coordinated actions of a then-obscure guerrilla army operating in the remote jungle state of Chiapas near the border of Guatemala.
The Zapatista occupation of four Chiapas towns and the sympathetic shock waves which it generated throughout Mexican society have ushered in a whole new post-Marxist revolutionary era. By rejecting NAFTA and the Mexican government’s heavily financed claims to democracy and embracing Mexico’s revolutionary history (naming themselves after and basing their ideas on Emiliano Zapata), the Zapatistas (or EZLN) were able to call into question the entire world’s headlong march into corporate enslavement. What emerges from the collection of manifestoes, communiqués and interviews newly translated from Spanish that make up this book is that the Zapatistas are a very remarkable guerrilla movement, vastly different from our Oliver Stone-generated Salvador conceptions of a Central American revolution.
The EZLN are in fact of a coalition of indigenous Chiapas Indian tribes for whom Spanish is often a rarely used second language. Where the American media has painted Subcomandante Marcos as the swashbuckling mestizo leader of a humble band of ignorant but obedient indios, his writings and interviews, which make up the bulk of ¡Zapatistas!, suggest instead more of a witty and even poetic press liaison. Rather than waging Maoist revolution from a Pol Pot-style intellectual cabal, the Zapatistas see their actions as part of an overall matrix of economics, politics, and culture which will not be won “by the barrel of a gun” alone. As their mysterious ski-masked spokesman Subcomandante Marcos puts it, “we are not Fidel Schwarzennegger.”
The Zapatistas seem to be alert to the realities of the post-Cold War era as well as the grievous mistakes of Marxist guerrillas of the past. Nor are they falling for the bait of Liberation Theology and domination by the “radical wing” of the Catholic Church despite the brutal poverty and enforced lack of education which they have been stoically enduring. The EZLN seems to be run according to an organically autonomous type of collective system which has allowed these Indians to survive the 500 years since the arrival of the conquistadors with their language and culture intact. ¡Zapatistas! closes with the “Second Declaration From the Lacondona Jungle” of June 10, 1994, in which the EZLN rejects the Federal Government’s peace offer after consulting with their constituent villages, leaving one to believe that more history may well be written in this formerly forgotten corner of Mexico. SS

Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 350 pages
Illustrated

Blood and Volts: Edison, Tesla and the Electric Chair

Th. Metzger

“An ax murderer, two of the most brilliant scientific minds of the century, billions of dollars in profit, precedent-setting legal battles, secrets of life and death—all of these come together in the story of the first electric chair… At the dawn of the 20th century, electricity was thought to be a highly ambiguous force: at once a godlike, creative power and demonic destroyer of life… In the popular imagination, Tesla and Edison were seen as nearly superhuman beings, and their struggle was not only for wealth and power, but to reshape the face of America.”

Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 191 pages
Illustrated