Mute Magazine Graphic Design

Introduction by Adrian Shaughnessy. Text by Simon Worthington, Damian Jaques, Pauline van Mourik Broekman.

Quarterly, critical and cheap, "Mute" is a jumble of all that's still grunting in the inter-finessing hyper-barrios of culture, politics, and technology 2.0.

As capitalism yawns towards apocalypse "Mute Magazine" matches it issue by issue with a sustained critique of everything existing.

This issue contains works by Thomas Campbell and Dmitry Vorobyev, John Cunningham, Harry Halpin, Stewart Martin, Benedict Seymour, and Simon Yuill, with commissioned artwork by Theo Michael, John Russell, and Plastique Fantastique.

No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.” An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.

INTERIOR DESIGN. Interior design has undergone a quiet but profound revolution in the last decade, as home-owners have become more aware of international influences and more prepared to experiment, to break out of the prescribed moulds of style. Many different parts of the world - in particular India, China, and Japan - have evolved their own unique styles of modernism, much of it rooted in the traditional principles of their particular regions, and this has helped to liberate the way we now think about dwelling space, its organisation and furnishing. Drawing on a wide range of modern design from many countries, this unique, rich sourcebook takes an elemental approach to the design of a home.

The struggle to protect the so-called Knowledge Commons against the current regime of IP enclosures is gathering momentum. Referencing the shared popular ownership of common lands in the pre-capitalist era, today's knowledge commoners want to build a resource, a life source, of intellectual wealth to sustain people living under informatic capitalism.

Since the advent of multiculturalism in the 1970s, the redefinition of race in cultural terms has gone hand in hand with an official discourse of respect for cultural difference and diversity. Today, in the wake of 9/11, the rhetoric of tolerance is visibly breaking down. As state policy shifts from the celebration of difference to an anxious call for assimilation, the racial other (whether citizen or immigrant) is under renewed pressure to integrate herself into society. In this issue of Mute, contributors read the crisis of multiculturalism - political, scientific and social - as both a neoliberal offensive and a challenge to rethink the relationship between particular identities and universal rights, evolutionary science and biopower. Texts by: George Caffentzis, Matthew Hyland, Daniel Jewesbury, Marek Kohn, Eric Krebbers, Hari Kunzru, Melancholic Troglodytes, Angela Mitropoulos, Luciana Parisi, Benedict Seymour