Reading / Feeling centers around the notion of affect, a term that delineates a field where the personal and the political meet through sensory movements between bodies. Affect, as a pre-emotional experience, constitutes the social and economic relationships that make up the fabric of society. Reading / Feeling considers the meaning of affect in theory and artistic practice, with a selection of texts by theoreticians, artists and curators that were read in If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’s reading groups in Amsterdam, Toronto and Sheffield for the past two years, as part of the programme Edition IV—Affect (2010–2012). It also includes three new essays, short statements by reading group members, and artist pages.

Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus (then Soviet Union), and has lived in the USA since 2006. She is the author of FACTORY OF TEARS and COLLECTED BODY (Copper Canyon Press; and for the German language, Surkamp Verlag). Mort is a recipient of Crystal of Vilenica, Burda Poetry Prize for Eastern European authors, Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, and Bess Hokin Prize.

Published by Fivehundred places, founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.

Mary Ruefle is the author of TRANCES OF THE BLAST (Wave Books, 2013), MADNESS, RACK, AND HONEY: COLLECTED LECTURES (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and SELECTED POEMS (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has published ten books of poetry and a book of prose. Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award.

Published by Fivehundred places, founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.

Published to accompany the exhibition Words and Places Etel Adnan, The Ninth Page: Etel Adnan’s Journalism 1972–74 , collects and translates articles written by Adnan during the early 1970s for the Beirut-based francophone newspaper Al-Safa. In addition to the articles, the publication includes a Foreword by Leigh Markopoulos, an introductory essay by Simone Fattal, an interview with Adnan by Jesi Khadivi and Heidi Rabben, and a newly commissioned essay by Andrew Weiner, all responding to Adnanʼs journalism and its fraught sociopolitical context. It also includes a copy of the exhibition guide with writing on the exhibition by Antonia Marsh and on Adnan’s writing by Rebecca Roy.

The articles selected for The Ninth Page challenge preconceptions about Beirut’s political climate in this moment while also offering up a portrait of an entire cosmopolitan, international worldview that is social and cultural as often as it is political. The diverse subjects Adnan covers document the rich cultural scene of Beirut on the brink of civil war, a political cataclysm addressed with great force later in Adnanʼs landmark books Sitt Marie Rose (1978) and The Arab Apocalypse (1980). By focusing on her time as a journalist, The Ninth Page fills a discursive gap in the chronicling of Adnan’s written history, enriching her painting and writing practices. Images of the original newspaper articles are also projected in the exhibition space.

After a short period of “unbearable lightness of being,” the social gravitation begins to be felt again. In his book Joshua Simon describes and analyzes the growing weight of the technical, economic, material basis of our society. The author’s sensibility for today’s Zeitgeist is at the same time entertaining and precise.—Boris Groys

Since the so-called dematerialization of currencies and art practices in the late 1960s and early 1970, we have witnessed a move into what Joshua Simon calls an economy of neomaterialism. With this, several shifts have occurred: the focus of labor has moved from production to consumption, the commodity has become the historical subject, and symbols now behave like materials.

Neomaterialism explores the meaning of the world of commodities, and reintroduces various notions of dialectical materialism into the conversation on the subjectivity and vitalism of things. Here, Simon advocates for the unreadymade, sentimental value, and the promise of the dividual as a means for a vocabulary in this new economy of meaning.

Reflecting on general intellect as labor and the subjugation of an overqualified generation to the neofeudal order of debt finance—with a particular focus on dispossession and rent economy, post-appropriation display strategies and negation, the barricade and capital’s technocratic fascisms—Neomaterialism merges traditions of epic communism with the communism that is already here.

Design by Avi Bohbot.