News from the Collective

Los Angeles, September 6, 2025

Dear Geert —

I’ve been writing “The Present Crisis” letters not only to explain what the America looks like from the inside to those outside its borders, but also to sketch new taxonomies for US citizens to have a mental map for how to move forward. Yet, as the attacks on, well, everything accelerate exponentially, the ability to maintain critical distance diminishes. Writing this from Los Angeles, a deep blue city in a deep blue state, much of the first hundred days’ damage done by the Trump administration felt somewhat distant. So much was centered on Washington itself, and the most blistering punishments of higher education were happening to the east coast Ivy League institutions, Columbia and Harvard in particular.

As I wrote a few months ago, my vantage point was of a storm moving toward me rather than a report from inside the maelstrom. That was then, before ICE agents started raiding LA’s home store parking lots, grabbing day laborers, abducting the fruiteras who sell freshly cut melon and pineapple from pushcarts at the side of the road, and arresting students outside high schools in East LA. That was before ICE agents created clout-chasing calvary photo-ops raiding Macarthur Park on horseback, and massing to intimidate Gavin Newsom, the state’s Democratic governor, when he was giving a speech at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo (an institution built specifically to commemorate the last time the US government interned what it classified as internal enemies during World War II). And when the people of Los Angeles rose up against this vast overreach, the Trump administration sent in the National Guard and the Marines, a warning to the rest of the country—the blue parts, at least– that they were next. As I write this. Washington, DC has National Guard troops that the Trump administration imported from six red states, four of them former members of the Confederacy. Next up in this reversal-of-fortune cos-replay of the Civil War are Chicago and New York.

It’s not just cities under attack and threatened with occupation. It’s also the intellectual and economic drivers in those cities, namely the universities. This conflict has manifested in multiple ways, but the most serious and significant is the attack on science. Science, based as it is in evidence, experimentation and iteration, all in search of a facticity that can in turn be challenged and improved, serves as an alternate source of power and knowledge to authoritarian rule. This is true in Russia, it’s true in Hungary, it’s true in China. It’s why those countries’ rulers ruthlessly control their science and university faculties. Now it’s manifestly happening in the US, under a mandate that Donald Trump feels deeply, no matter that he won the 2024 election by a mere one and a half percentage of the popular vote. His mandate springs, as I’ve written earlier, from the feels. He and his MAGA followers literally rather than metaphorically feel he has a mandate from God, that it was divine will that saved him from two assassination attempts during the 2024 campaign, two impeachments in his first term, one serious bout of COVID, and an ongoing, exercise-free regime heavy on fast food burgers and Diet Cokes.

Various agendas—personal, ideological, political —intersect in the attack on science. There’s Trump’s own characterological aversion to anyone who claims to know anything more than he does (no American president has ever publicly claimed to be a “smart person” more than Trump). Add in an abiding push/pull towards elite education from someone who touts his and his family’s, and even his appointees’ Ivy league credentials while loathing the culture and traditions of those same institutions. Moving beyond the personal, there was a detailed plan developed during the 2020-2024 MAGA interregnum (aka the Biden administration) called Project 2025 that was explicit in its desire to destroy higher education as an incubator of “wokeness” and in the process “expose schools to greater market forces” (as if the neo-liberal turn the academy took decades ago hadn’t done this already). And so, we come to J.D. Vance, graduate of a top-ranked public university as well as a Yale Law school alumnus, who parlayed his version of couch-fucking populism into his lick-spittle Vice-Presidency. In a speech back in 2021, he was explicit about the politics he wanted to pursue with his boss and the radical dismantlers of Trump 2.0. He titled his speech, “The Universities are the Enemy,” and so we have been treated since inauguration day.

For three-quarters of a century, the federal government and universities worked in tandem, the government funding basic research and supplying monies for grants and loans to build American science into a dominant global behemoth. Yet this interrelationship left universities open to attack, and shamefully defenseless against an administration that simply does not care what happens to basic science, medical research, and non-commercial inquiry. As much as the Trump administration hates Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and classes in critical race theory (CRT), there just wasn’t enough money flowing to them to hurt universities by turning down the spigot. But federal support through an array of alphabet agencies like the NSF (National Science Foundation) and the NIH (National Institutes of Health), not to mention the big D departments like DOD, DOE and DOA (the departments of Defense, Energy and Agriculture), offered a hundred billion dollar lever Archimedes would envy to punish universities for… well, anything MAGA feels like.

So it was that first they came for the Ivies about “antisemitism” (all justifications will be in quotation marks because even the Trump administration doesn’t believe in them) with funding withheld in the range of 2.2 billion for Harvard and 400 million for Columbia; then for “transwomen in sports” with 175 million at the University of Pennsylvania; and in a non-Ivy move, 800 million from John Hopkins because of “waste, fraud, and abuse” in their administration of foreign aid research and programs. The Baltimore-based university was targeted in the first days of Elon Musk’s aborted yet disastrous DOGE initiative (it’s been less than eight months, but down the memory hole goes the fact that the richest man in the world made the globe’s poorest, sickest children his first target when he and his minions in the Department of Government Efficiency went after the United States Agency for International Development).

These were the clouds I was watching gather during the first hundred days of the Trump administration. On the two hundredth day, the storm hit my institution full force, with a one billion dollar fine imposed for “antisemitism” at UCLA.  For those of us on the Left Coast, and especially we who have a connection to the statewide University of California (ten campuses from Berkeley in the north to San Diego in the south), it’s been disheartening to see how little the national media has covered our extinction-level threat versus that of our private peers on the east coast. Human networks still matter a lot, apparently. The fundamental difference between settlements with a school like Columbia and Brown and the continued extortion of the UCs (“affirmative action” is the pretext for new investigations into UCLA, Berkeley and UC Irvine) is that it will be public rather than private money for the payoffs. In a blue state like ours, with a governor who has positioned himself as the most vocal political opponent of the administration, there’s no surety as we head back to campus after the quiet of summer.

These are the things I “feel” the most acutely right now, but each day brings worse and weirder news. This administration has set the stage for a global catastrophe set off by its trade economic policies; it plans to transfer one trillion dollars from the poor and middle class to the rich via Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill act; and it flouts international law from the Middle East where we support ethnic cleansing, to South America where we summarily kill foreign nationals in international waters because we accuse them of “drug dealing” (which in the United States is not and never has been a capital offense, much less one administered without a trial). There are even semantic assaults, like rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War. The glee with which all this chaos is embraced by between one third and one half of the American electorate demands a neologism that combines terrifying and depressing, “depressifying” or “terripressing,” perhaps.

Back in the 1990s, a comedian named Paula Poundstone popularized the phrase, “this is why we can’t have nice things.” The internet picked this up and trended it as way to point out (decades before the term itself was coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022) the enshittification of stuff they liked or liked to do online. Lately though, the “this is why we can’t have nice things” phrase has taken on a distinct racial and class dimension, especially since the reckonings brought on in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The Movement for Black Lives, better known by its earlier acronym BLM, the public protests they helped to organize, and the associated social disorder that was contemporaneous (though nowhere near as prevalent within the mass social movement as right-wing media made it out to be), brought about a revulsion against the idea of people of color and their allies having access to public space to express their concerns, anguish, and hope. For many non-urbanites, a core MAGA constituency, the vast percentage of peaceful BLM actions were entirely outweighed by the violence that accompanied a few of them. Watching videos of isolated conflict and property crimes looped over and over again was for the Fox News-consuming elders a replay of the summers of rage inaugurated in Watts in 1965, and for overly-online rightest youth they were visible proof of the race wars prophesied on the 4- & 8- Chan boards they shit-posted to.

The ”nice things” we couldn’t have were now those consumer goods locked up in certain “urban” drugstores, a visible sign of the “American carnage” that Trump invoked in his suburban-revival-show-cum-rallies throughout the 2024 campaign. Trump has a visceral “feel” for big cities that is frozen in amber in the period that he first emerged as a public figure. To hear him prattle on about the chaotic dystopia of America’s metropoles is like sitting in a Times Square movie theater in 1980 watching previews for exploitation flicks like Death Wish, Maniac, and C.H.U.D. (the last of which stood for the Cannibalistic Human Underground Dwellers who lived with the also mythical albino alligators in the sewers beneath New York’s streets).

In other words, for Trump, New York will forever be a city in which he rides in a Lincoln Town car through filth-strewn streets next to a cab driven by Travis Bickle, that most deranged Gothamite portrayed by Robert de Niro and put to celluloid by Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver. Trump’s cities are never the places that urbanist Jane Jacobs discusses where the wondrous and the strange are forever in conversation, gifts that “by its nature the metropolis provides [that] otherwise could be given only by traveling.” No, America’s cities are “lawless” “hellholes” where “bloodthirsty criminals” and “animals,” many of them “illegals,” create “killing fields.” In mid-August he ran down a list: “You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore.” Not noted but always dog-whistled was that the mayors of every one of these cities is Black.

Getting back to white people, Trump tells us that even his “friends” in Beverly Hills have to leave their automobiles unlocked because they are terrified that criminals will shatter the windshields to steal their car stereos. That stereo comment is the tell, because with con men there’s always a tell. Car stereos were discrete pieces of equipment in the 70s and 80s and were easy to steal and sell. In 2025, sound systems are fully integrated into luxury vehicles, and what other kinds of cars would his friends in Beverly Hill have?

This pseudo-apocalypse is yet another obsession of Trump’s that harkens back to the NYC subway systems of his youth, even if he never rode them. The president of the United States is trapped in a ‘70s and ‘80s fantasyland of white retribution against Black and brown people. If Donald Trump has a soul—a proposition that even he seems uncertain of—part of it belongs to a man named Bernie Goetz, another outer-borough white guy who achieved his own measure of fame, or infamy, for imposing his will on urban space.

Bernard Goetz, was born in Queens to a German-American father a year after Donald Trump was born in Queens to a German-American father. Bernie was no nepo baby, though, putting himself through NYU’s engineering program and then founding a small electronics business that he ran out of his apartment. In 1981, after being mugged for the second time, Goetz purchased a handgun that he carried on the streets and in the subway, even though he had been denied a city permit that would have allowed him to do so legally. In 1984, he was on the #2 subway line that runs between Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. Goetz was approached by four young Black men from the Bronx, one of whom said he wanted five dollars from the seated Manhattanite. At that, Goetz shot all four, three of whom were carrying screwdrivers. He shot one of them, Darrell Cabey, a second time, after saying, “You seem to be all right, here’s another.” The second bullet went through Cabey’s spine, severing it and leaving him a paraplegic. Goetz exited the train and fled to another state, returning a week later to turn himself in. At that point, and throughout the criminal and civil trials that followed, he claimed the shootings were in self-defense. The New York Daily News set up a tip line after the shooting to get information, but the paper’s staff was astonished that most of the calls offered support and sympathy for Goetze. The paper wrote: “It did not seem to matter to the callers that the blond man with the nickel-plated .38 had left one of his four victims with no feeling below the waist, no control over his bladder and bowels, no hope of ever walking again… To them the gunman was not a criminal but the living fulfillment of a fantasy.”

It took decades, but Donald Trump has bested his fellow blond Queens doppelganger, and the fantasy of old men’s revenge is more powerful now that they are both approaching eighty years of age than it was back when they were young. We’ve seen these fantasies of physically powerful old men pop up all over American culture in the past decade, a sign of an aging population that refuses to give up control. It’s not just an entrenched gerontocracy, it’s one that fools via — and is in turn fooled itself by — an imaginary. How does this imaginary manifest in the world? In the AI slop-driven MAGA memes of Donald Trump as a ripped Rambo flexing astride a tank, or an NFT of “SuperTrump” with 8-pack abs and a cape. All this based on a man who believes that the human body is akin to a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depletes. 

Yet this waddling golfer and his meme troops are only following Hollywood, which finds it harder to fashion new action stars than to retread aging ones, at times to the point of hilarity. Nicholas Cage, in a seemingly never-ending attempt to pay down back tax bills, makes movie after movie in which he beats up younger and stronger opponents for two straight hours. See The Old Way (2023), The Surfer (2024), and most delirious of all, and with the least believable tile, The Retirement Plan (2024). Yet in his early sixties, Cage is a veritable tyro in comparison to septuagenarian Liam Neeson, who parlayed the revenge fantasies of the Taken franchise (2008 to infinity) into frozen landscapes in Cold Pursuit (2019) and The Ice Road (2021) and Ice Road: Vengeance (2025)); on planes in Non-Stop (2014) and trains in Commuter (2018); and even into the dementia clinic, with the far more believable premise of an aging assassin in Memory (2022). At least Cage and Neeson have an air of humor and a sort of working man’s shrug to their performances: of course they will take a paycheck for pretending to outfight jacked opponents decades their junior in hand-to-hand combat. It’s not called acting for nothing. Denzel Washington is yet another seventy-year old, Oscar-winning actor who has yet to meet a Russian gangster (the Equalizer franchise, 2014-also apparently to infinity) or ex-con rapper (in Spike Lee’s insufferable Highest 2 Lowest, a 2025 remake of Kurasawa’s sublime 1963 film, High and Low) who can slow him down even a step.

Trump feels popular impulses more than he understands them, but regardless he’ll act on either. So it is that while to most of the entertainment industry it seemed odd at best and out-of-touch to demented at worst when Trump wanted “Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!” he appointed actors Jon Voight (aged eighty-six) Mel Gibson (sixty-nine) and Syvester Stallone (seventy-nine) to be his “Hollywood Ambassadors.” All three were vocal Trump supporters in 2024, all three still play action roles, with Stallone having a literal franchise of aging beefcake in The Expendables (four films so far). Trump has already selected Stallone—who called Trump our “second George Washington” during a visit to Mar-a-Lago—for Kennedy Center Honors, another sign of the President’s ‘80s pop culture fixation. More salient here is that the three actors have a combined age of two hundred and thirty four.

Yet even in MAGA world, facts assert themselves. In 2024, just days after Trump won both the electoral college and the popular vote, the old guys of America who had voted for him picked yet another champion in their fight against youth, in a match-up between icons representing two generations of Trump supporters.

In this corner, the 58-year-old, one-time heavyweight champion of the world, a true student of the art even if he did bite off Evander Hollyfield’s ear, a long-time friend of the President, who’d defended him against the rape charges that sent the former champ to prison. Ladies and gentlemen, “Iron” Mike Tyson.

 And in this corner, a 27-year old top Youtuber-turned fighter who understood that the exhausted sport of boxing, on the ropes itself against mixed martial arts (MMA for short), could be taken over by someone who knew more about monetizing eyeballs than what combinations Primo Carnero threw against Max Baer in 1934. Ladies and gentlemen, Jake “El Gallo” Paul.

When Netflix featured the Tyson/ Paul fight, it attracted the largest audience in the history of streamed sports. The fans were firmly in the OG’s corner, laying almost seventy percent of the bets on Tyson. I have to think that lots of those punters gambling with such abandon were the very same audience of the aforementioned aging action stars, but this time looking to see the payback for real. Yet the sportsbooks had Paul as the strong favorite, at -205 (meaning you’d have to bet that amount of dollars to get a hundred more back in winnings). Perhaps it had something to do with the thirty-one year youth advantage Paul had over Tyson, who hadn’t fought in two decades. Yet, in the end, the old man did not triumph, his retirement plan did not include victory, and Tyson was shown to be an expendable part of Paul’s rise.

Right now, it sometimes seems like the best we can hope for is the return of the real. That a gimmicky fight like this resulted in the continued upward trajectory of a figure as obnoxious as Jake Paul (El Gallo – the rooster, seriously?) is lamentable but at least it follows the laws of physics and precepts of medical science. It was stupid, but at least the outcome was honest. It wasn’t a nice thing, but in this crisis period, it was a thing we could have. Heaven help us.

By Leonardo Foletto and Rafael Bresciani for BaixaCultura

In July 2025, the Italian-born, London-based Alessandro Sbordoni was in Brazil for the launch of Semiótica do Fim: Capitalismo e Apocalipse (first version published as INC  Network Notions #1: Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse), published by SobInfluencia. The book, as we’ve already commented in our presentation text, is a collection of thirteen essays that investigate how the end of the world has become just another sign of semio-capitalism. The thesis – if we can call it that in a text so open to provocations and different readings – is that the end of the world is “just another sign” of semio-capitalism: the apocalypse, as traditionally conceived, will not occur because it is already in permanent course. There is no longer any difference between the end of the world and capitalism itself: both reproduce incessantly according to the semiotic logic of capital, says Sbordoni. His book, then, presents itself as a manifesto that invites us to think about what “end” means today.

On July 17, 2025, one day before the book’s first launch at the head office of SobInfluencia publishing house in downtown São Paulo, we spoke with Alessandro in an Amazonian restaurant inside the gallery. For BaixaCultura, Leonardo Foletto and Rafael Bresciani, with participation from Rodrigo Côrrea, editor and designer at SobInfluencia. Between Cupuaçú amigo (the local version of the “Caju Amigo” drink) and Tacacás (the famous Amazonian “soup” with jambu and tucupi), the conversation ranged from Semiotics of the End to the relationship between high and low culture, anti-hauntology, digital magazines as spaces for intellectual encounter, underground culture, technology, and contemporary theory. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

BaixaCultura: To begin with: how did the idea for the book come about? In what context was it produced? And tell us a bit more about your writing journey.

Alessandro: Around 2020, I read And: Phenomenology of the End by Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Reading it, I found the approach to capital and capitalism very intriguing, something that stayed in my head for a while. I had just written another book about something completely different, but I knew I wanted to do something like that. A few months later, I wrote an essay, which is the first in the book, with a different subtitle, but the main title was “Semiotics of the End.” I didn’t know what would come of it; it was about boredom and the end of the world. I published it on Blue Labyrinths and, a few months later, I published another essay, again with the same title and a different subtitle; then the third essay followed, and so on. Thus, everything started coming together. Obviously, the title “Semiotics of the End” is a reference to “Phenomenology of the End”, and I thought I would do something similar.

The book developed organically. Little by little, I started realizing that I wanted to mix the idea of semio-capitalism as a way to analyze, criticize, and go beyond the idea of capitalist realism in Mark Fisher, which is the core of the book.

Leonardo: Are you a philosopher?

Alessandro: There’s a quote by Guy Debord, who says: “I’m not a philosopher, I’m a strategist.” I’m not a philosopher; maybe, I’m a strategist or I would consider mysel as a theorist, at least. Philosophy carries all this Western cultural baggage with which I do not want to identify myself. I would rather see myself as a theorist, which also brings with it certain problems, such as: I’m not searching for the truth in what I write. I see it more as a political or cultural endeavor, if you prefer, but never searching for truth or knowledge. All that stuff is nonsense…

BaixaCultura: I’d like to ask about Blue Labyrinths and Charta Sporca, two digital magazines that you are engaged in.

Alessandro: I started publishing the first excerpts of the book Semiotics of the End, which were then gathered with other essays inside the book. With Blue Labyrinths, it all started when I read the anti-hauntology essays by the magazine’s founder, Matt Bleumink, which I wanted to expand and, eventually, formed the last chapter of the book. After publishing a few essays on Blue Labyrinths, Matt and I became good friends, and then, little by little, I started playing a role on the editorial board of Blue Labyrinths together with another person.

That’s the story of Blue Labyrinths. For Charta Sporca, I really wanted to publish and do something with them. I first discovered them when I was still in Italy, and I always appreciated the mix of politics, literature, and philosophy, all together.

BaixaCultura: In Blue Labyrinths: what kind of contributions are you looking for? And how does the magazine position itself within the current landscape of cultural and philosophical publications?

Alessandro: It’s quite simple. We accept any submission that we deem interesting for us. If you read the description, it says something very general: “An online magazine focusing on philosophy, culture, and a collection of interesting ideas.” And those two words, “interesting ideas,” are the main part because all magazines and publishers tend to admit that they focus on one thing, maybe because it’s easier or because people have limited understanding. We often publish things that stretch a bit, and we even published some things that we tend to disagree with to a certain extent, even on a political level. Nothing too crazy, of course – I would never publish a fascist piece, that’s for sure. But there have been disagreements, and that’s interesting. For example, it’s been a very good policy because we’ve attracted all those writers who don’t know where else to publish, because all the other magazines are very specific, and if you don’t fit, screw it. So, it was very interesting. And it wasn’t my concept; it was Matt, the founder, who always had this mindset, and I always liked that. I think I was attracted to it because also in my writing I do this: I try to bring in many different things altogether at the same time.

BaixaCultura: And so, why magazines? What do you like about digital magazines?

Alessandro: I personally see them as a kind of cultural gym (in the etymological sense of the term). It’s almost like a testing ground or, if you want, a training in the military sense. It’s like a training for a theory to then really do something important. But no, I just see it as something contingent. Publishers are also contingent. In an ideal world, you would just come together. It’s always a compromise.

BaixaCultura: About Charta Sporca, to me, it appears to engage with contemporary Italian theory and culture, including your own work and figures like Mark Fisher and Deleuze. How does editing this magazine inform your own theoretical development? And what role do you see intellectual and digital magazines playing today, especially in your case? Italian intellectual history has a huge history of magazines, with Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaia, and A/Traverso, for example, in the 1960s and 1970s.

Alessandro: For me, the answer is straightforward. Imagine the magazine was a space with which you interact. You go there often and you see what people are doing. And what comes out of it is not just a theory or an idea. Yes, you read interesting pieces, and they may spark something – but that’s never the main and most important thing. The most important thing is that you get to meet the people and you create relationships, as we are doing right now. This is something crucial that I’ve realized in the past few years: the most interesting thing about writing is not writing, it’s getting to meet the people. It’s being part of a “community,” for lack of a better word – even though I never liked the word “community” because it almost demands to be defined. They are encounters. Encounters with the people that you meet do inform your theory, but it’s also contingent, in a sense. Theory is secondary to the reality of meeting someone. So, these magazines are a potentiality for new encounters.

BaixaCultura: And why magazine sites and not, for example, social networks?

Alessandro: Well, because there is a certain autonomy in the magazine. This goes back to what I was saying about those “interesting ideas.” You just welcome everyone in. I’m just happy to meet anyone who has something interesting to say, especially if they disagree. It’s okay.

BaixaCultura: Going back to the book. I read here that your book opens with the provocative statement that “the end of the world is just another sign of semio-capitalism.” Can you explain what led you to this conclusion and how you develop the concept of semio-capitalism as distinct from traditions of capital critique, like in Bifo’s books, for example? If there are differences or not.

Alessandro: There are differences, definitely. I always take all these ideas as starting points. In this sense, I’m not trying to develop the concept of semio-capitalism, but I find it an interesting ground. What happened was that, at some point, the difference between materiality and immateriality, between a culture based on production and actual commodities – the dichotomy between production and reproduction, in the terms I put it – has been abolished. The world has become more ephemeral and immaterial: it’s just a structure of signs. The interesting thing is that capitalism has been able to link itself to the reproduction of signs and reproduce itself through signs, regardless of what the signs mean. This could have been a problem in the past. For example, capitalism entering a radical discourse and making a profit out of it, this could have been a contradiction in the Marxist sense. I think now the discourse has been flattened, since anything can be turned into capital; anything can be a way to reproduce capital. The most extreme form of this is that the end of the world, which would be, logically speaking, the end of capitalism, is just its continuation. Because capitalism feeds off the reproduction even of its own end. Which I thought was an interesting starting point because of the intrinsic irony. I don’t think there is any contradiction, but there is a strong irony and a strong feeling that it should be the starting point for something. And I’m trying to find a way to open up to this new beginning, but I think we have to really think outside the box, because everything that is inside the box is capital.

BaixaCultura: You state that the apocalypse, as such, will not occur because it has already finished. This seems to challenge both religious and secular narratives of ending. How do you situate this claim in relation to the ecological and social crises we are experiencing? And how can we think about other relations with the ending, but how to begin?

Alessandro: There is, again, a sad joke about the climate catastrophe and the endless end of capitalism. As the catastrophe goes on, it reproduces more and more capital, and because it reproduces more and more capital, it will go on faster and faster. And, paradoxically, the few images that we now have, for example, the wildfires happening across the world, are going to increase because capital is going to increase, and capital is these images. Therefore, as capital increases, the end of the world approaches. I don’t see, following this line of reasoning, an end to capital. But as we start relating to culture in a different way and begin to see that these images are nothing but capital, that reproduction is the problem of what they represent, that will be an old way of thinking. The problem is that, if the end of the world is approaching, we are still producing content and we are still producing in a capitalist way. So, on the one hand, a solution could be to find new ways of production, but we’ve entered a new paradigm, which I dub re-production. Many of the different modes of production-reproduction have been neutralized.

So, the only thing that is left to do is to rethink where we are right now. And this is something that Geert Lovink refers to in Extinction Internet: we have to look into the abyss in order to overcome it. It’s also about looking into how this makes us feel. Paradoxically, I talk about this in terms of boredom rather than anxiety, because we are sick and tired of it. It’s been fifty or sixty years of apocalyptic predictions that didn’t come into being, because capital, as I said before, keeps reproducing itself. But if you start from here, and we in a way reshape, repurpose the concept of end and beginning in a metaphysical way – and this is why we’re also talking about philosophy. So, if we rethink what it means to be at the end of the world, as well as what it means that the end and the beginning always coexist. Once we understand this, then this opens up new ways and, in a simple word, a new imaginary.

BaixaCultura: I did a reflection, following this idea of end and beginning. We usually think about human progress as landmarks of success. When things happen positively, we landmark them. And one of these examples is when, on a personal level, we introduce ourselves as professionals, we use a Curriculum Vitae, which means the things we’ve done in life, the good landmarks of our lives. But I once heard a psychologist, who was a trauma psychologist, and who advocated the idea of a Curriculum Mortis, which is the idea that, when we acknowledge the landmarks of failure, we are able to overcome those failures. So, is this view something we can rely on in this Anthropocene, late capitalism moment? Using a Curriculum Mortis of human history as a way to approach this moment.

Alessandro: I see. There was an interesting article recently published in an Italian magazine by an author named Christian Damato, who talks about the fact that failure has been reintegrated into the discourse of success within a corporate ideology. And I think it’s a very bleak statement, yet I believe that merely inverting the problem doesn’t solve it, because in my way of thinking, it’s a question of structures. Just reverting the structure is not creating a new structure, but it may be a means to a new structure. So, even emphasizing failure could potentially be a way to something, but it’s not enough.

Regarding the question of progress, I would argue that progress only exists according to a certain set of criteria established by a culture. In fact, the idea of progress in the West has been heavily criticized (for example, by Jacques Derrida). You always find a steady progress if you just decide on the right parameters to assess it. The solution to this problem is changing the rules of the question. There is no way of answering the question if it’s assessed only according to the criteria of the problem itself. So, you need to figure out what the metaphysical assumptions are that you need to subvert, and we can do this. Maybe we become cynical about it. But I still think I believe in something that Tiqqun once said in the opening essay of their first issue: politics is metaphysics, and a new politics demands a new metaphysics; we shouldn’t be ashamed of doing metaphysics just because the ideas of some Nazi metaphysician became very influential.

BaixaCultura: In dialogue with this question, you sometimes position your work in contrast with Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism and propose a manifesto for the imagination of another relationship with the end. How does your concept of anti-hauntology, I suppose, differ from his? And what does this other relationship look like in practice?

Alessandro: The original idea of anti-hauntology was developed by Matt Bluemink even before I met him. So, it’s only later that I continued what he did, obviously, again taking it as a starting ground and then building in my own direction. And we have had some disagreements on how the concepts could be applied. Regarding the difference between hauntology and anti-hauntology, this has been discussed in the debate between Matt Bluemink and Matt Colquhoun, which happened when Matt Bluemink published the first essay. Matt Colquhoun replied, and then there was a back-and-forth that happened in 2021. Matt Colquhoun criticized the idea of making this distinction between hauntology and anti-hauntology because it itself is “hauntological.” And I think that this is a very, let’s say, unfair criticism.

This criticism could be called a post-structuralist critique, that every opposition cannot be clearly established as an opposition, because every concept contains within itself its negation, and so on. This is precisely a problem that we’re going to try to overcome. What I tried to do in my book was to impose it, even doing some violence against the violence of a system which is required, and leaving philosophy behind to enter theory. You have to argue for something which you know cannot be proven to be true, but you’re trying to actualize it. There is a potentiality for the new, and you’re trying to actualize it in reality.

And then, in practice, what happens – and this is the summary of Matt Bluemink’s argument – is that you are instilling hope through culture: yes, the new can still happen, and the new, in fact, has already happened; you just need to create the metaphysical assumptions for it. There is nothing… There is something I say in the first chapter, where I say: “Today, nothing is possible because nothing is impossible.” So, this can also be reverted. I’m not saying that you create everything out of thin air, but you do change subjectivities out of thin air.

So, the practical application is very, very similar to art. I always compare it with aesthetics. Art changes reality, but it doesn’t actually change reality. It changes your worldview and opens up new possibilities. Yet, nothing is changing; everything is changing. Because the problem is a problem of subjectivity. It’s not a problem of materiality. If we think it’s a problem of materiality, it’s only because it’s a problem of subjectivity that makes us think it’s a material problem. The material problem can be overcome; it’s that we, as a collective, have lost control over reality.

BaixaCultura: Guattari, in 1993, in his book “Caosmosis,” speaks of aesthetics as a way to re-signify subjectivity in the face of sociopolitical issues. I quote him: “One cannot conceive of an international discipline in this domain without bringing a solution to the problems of world hunger and hyperinflation in the third world.” “The only acceptable finality in human activities is the production of a subjectivity that enriches the mode of continuity and its relations with the world.” So, he’s trying to say that aesthetics creates influence in this common worldview that becomes material.

My question was about another topic: the internet and digital technologies. So, do you think that the current contamination of the internet and digital technologies in our notion of aesthetics and the relationship between this and the sociopolitical fabric is a way to recreate, re-signify this channel, this worldview of the contemporary? Is art a way to achieve these changes?

Alessandro: I always think that subjectivity, to a certain extent, can be seen as an end in itself. The question is not: What kind of world do we want? Rather, what kind of future we want? In other words, we should think about subjectivity as the means to an end. But we don’t know yet, because we are not yet at the beginning. And this is something, by the way, that Baudrillard does and is criticized for it, because he never envisions how we could overcome capital or a solution. But the solution is subjectivity. Not that a new subjectivity arises and the world is immediately changed, but that the problem is a problem of potentiality. Once the potentiality is available, everything can unfold or not.

But I also think that, especially philosophy, has a certain arrogance of trying to shape the world, and this is part of the problem. Because this is what science does, what the State does, and I don’t want to engage with that. Therefore, it seems that I remain abstract, but I think in the most material sense, which is from the standpoint of subjectivity. And so, everything you said, I agree with it. In a way, perhaps the criticism is that what I’m saying is very simple. If you look at art, it’s not that art changes anything, but it makes people look at the world in a different way. It shapes the problem, and shaping the problem is part of the solution.

BaixaCultura: Yes, this was from 1993, you said before, right? It’s been forty years that have been discussing this – and it’s never-ending. Is there a way out?

Alessandro: I think the most important thing that changed is how we can activate new subjectivities faster and on a much broader scale, on a global scale. I always think about what I do in these terms: in terms of the number of outputs that I can reach all at once and how they can be immediately altered; also, how this is also dangerous for the system and can more easily produce a change, and also can more easily prevent it. This is what has changed in the last thirty years – one of the most important things, at least, that has changed.

BaixaCultura: You talk about culture, music, art. Your analysis spans from Britney Spears to K-pop and the internet. How do you connect diverse cultural objects and, in your opinion, what do they reveal about our contemporary moments?

Alessandro: I’m very interested in the connection between what in the English-speaking world we call high-brow culture and low-brow culture. And how, especially in the Anglosphere, this connection is often severed, and there is a divide between them. So there is a divide between Heidegger and Britney Spears. But I’m interested in Britney Spears, and I often think about her in a maybe hyper-intellectual way. But I don’t think that, in reality, the two things are distinct because of the structure of semio-capital. Everything is on the market at the same time, and these old-fashioned and even, let’s say, distinctions between high culture and low culture are being abolished. And I think they are being abolished by what I would refer to as “trash culture.”

If in the 19th and 20th centuries, kitsch tried to bridge the gap between working-class culture and middle-class culture, now we have trash culture. The internet, in particular, has been the technology of trash. And trash, by definition, is what destroys the distinction between the high and the low, the good and the bad, and so on… Personally, I find that reestablishing this connection, which I think is still quite, how can I say, open to various “assemblages”, is a fertile ground for new forms of imagination. Here, imagination is something I would define specifically as the reconstruction of connections between subjectivities and culture. So, I’m talking specifically about all the questions. By making a joke about Kanye West and Hegel, let’s say, you can find new ways of remaking the assemblage that makes culture and find new expressions of subjectivities. I’m being very optimistic about it. But I think it is still something that remains open for theorization and politicization.

BaixaCultura: We also wanted to ask you about the different perspectives of Mark Fisher’s generation and your generation. The perception of the end or the simulation of the apocalypse. Is it different for us? Is it interesting or is it a simulation?

Alessandro: There is a quote by Grafton Tanner, who is perhaps part of a younger generation of writers, who writes that in the 2010s, Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds thought that there was a crisis of imagining the past and imagining the future. This was happening in the 2010s, but now the crisis is of imagining the present. So, I think it has become all-encompassing, and the crisis of imagination, which was somehow still partial at the time of Mark Fisher, has become widespread, and many of his affirmations have become even stronger.

But what has changed is that people can no longer ignore this. And it’s still very relevant that Mark Fisher is still the most well-known philosopher of the last twenty years. But, at the same time, I also think that the new generation – and yes, I perhaps include myself in this box – is starting to understand that the rules have been changed by the problem. I personally think that the question is about reinventing imagination, which seems like something very ambitious. But I also see that in the use of technology, which each generation is affecting, they are creating new relationships between themselves and culture and, therefore, creating new imaginaries. Which doesn’t mean new realities, new futures, new worldviews, but new practices. Also, the speed at which this is happening is increasing.

And I think that, after Mark Fisher’s death in 2017, it started accelerating beyond the control of what could have been old-fashioned late capitalism. We now live in too-late capitalism. This also means that temporality is shrinking, and immediacy is increasingly taking the lead in the relationship with capital. And this is somehow beneficial. So, even if you think about what artificial intelligence is really used for, it’s to make transactions faster. This is the main application: finding ways to make the economy run even faster than it currently is. But this is also affecting our relationship with technology, and it’s drifting away from old-fashioned biopolitical control, I think, to a certain extent, because the number of relationships, nodes, and circuits is just increasing now. Also, the potentialities are increasing. And, in general, I would say I’m more optimistic, and I don’t see much of this optimism, but I predict that it will keep increasing.

BaixaCultura: Do you have any relations with the accelerationists, Nick Land, or other thinkers of that sort? There is an article about him in Blue Labyrinths.

Alessandro: Yes, Nick Land is a strange one. I’m interested in him, let’s say, as much as someone can be interested in the Devil. Which means, the Devil really is an important cultural argument in what could have been ideal in the Middle Ages, and Nick Land is the Devil in capitalism. There is something very interesting for me in the shift that has happened in thought between the writings of Nick Land’s first phase and the second phase, in which he leaned more and more towards the right and new directions, new reactionary movements, and so on. And by studying that, I’m starting to realize that what I’ve been defining as subjectivity also brings with it a certain ethics – ethics, which is a word you never find in Semiotics of the End. But Nick Land is definitely someone who doesn’t think in terms of ethics or morals, because he thinks of capital as an anonymous inorganic agency. On the contrary, the human being as in ethical and biological “fiction” produced by capital.

But he doesn’t think – not even for one moment – that this could be part, quote unquote, of ideology, although a more correct word here would be paradigm. Anyway, he sees capital as metaphysics, but metaphysics is a paradigm, even in the scientific connotation of the term. So, it’s a paradigm shift; it’s a metaphysical revolution in the world. When the Sun is no longer at the center of the universe, the world is completely different, but nothing has really changed; when capital is no longer at the center of our relationships, everything is the same, but everything is different. So, Nick Land never considers the possibility – and I criticize him for not taking the semiotic level seriously, which means that the semiotic level is manipulable, but it can be constructed differently. So, I’m interested in it, but I think his point of view is short-sighted.

BaixaCultura: So you’re not a Satanist? If he’s the Devil…

Alessandro: I’m more like a theorist of Satanism.

BaixaCultura: Another author, Andrea Colamedici, the author behind Hypnocracy. He seems to believe that we are in a moment of fragmentation of our online presence into so many layers of online and offline presence and everything else… And he kind of points in the direction that we must learn to coexist in all those layers, like a living presence here, but also a living presence on the social network or in the WhatsApp group or in the avatar, and in all these spheres of relations.

So, how do you conceptualize fragmentation as a way to thrive in this moment of uncertainty? In the book, he tries to sell the idea that we must know that we are everywhere at the same time? For example, when he talks about it, he brings up the idea of real simulation. Today, it’s all simulated and it’s all real at the same time: this is real and your avatar is real and your Instagram is real – everything is real and, yet, is a simulation at the same time. But we cannot lose ourselves.

Alessandro: I see. I think it’s fascinating, but the scale at which these assumptions are made is a scale that, politically, is not very operational. There are different scales. So, on a microscopic scale, on the mineral scale – let’s take a computer as an example. A computer has various scales. So, on the microscopic scale, there is light passing through the cables, and on the scale of the particle, there is no politics. There’s very little you could do beyond theories about what light is and quantum physics, and so on; it’s very difficult to make a meaningful change at that level. On a higher level, there’s more or less what you’re talking about: a level of the social habitus that you assume in the interaction with the computer; this is the social scale. And I think that, although it’s a very real scale, it’s not very operational. Now, between the light on the optic fiber and the social habitus, there is a relationship. What mediates this relationship is capital, because it is capital that is paying for the cables that connect the lights; by means of it, you can see yourself on the computer and try to learn from it. Here, I’m interested in what I call the medium, according to my own interpretation: it’s about what is happening in between. Surely, what is happening in between it is very real, yet it is also what reproduces the simulation.

So, perhaps here I invert the rules: in your immediate circumstances, you can reconceptualize your relationship, and interact with the computer in a different way, and even change the type of optical fibers you use, affecting the relationship by acting from the highest level to the lowest, and viceversa. In my Semiotics of the End, I often do this kind of jump from the heights. In the chapter on information theory of the book – “Overdrive and meaning” – one of the central chapters of the book, I write about the structure of information, which is a very abstract theory, but as a political element. But there’s nothing intrinsically political in the bits of information. There’s something political only in the relationship. But if you focus just on one level…

To summarize, we could say that the interscalar element is very political, and I try to act on it. But if you only think on one scale, it can be complex. To add another thing, there is a trend in media theory, which is interesting to discuss, the pure materiality of the resources being used. For example, Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford talks about the resources, the materiality of mapping the world and so on. But she conceptualizes it as something intra-scalar. What I find interesting is the interscalar element, where she also writes about what the software is doing; she tries to connect everything, but talking from only one level. And there’s a series of actions that can be very local, while the global happens between the scales. So, that could be something I realized after writing a book, and again, you won’t find the word “scale,” but this is what happens with books: you retrospectively come up with good ideas that you didn’t write.

BaixaCultura: So, you kind of think that this vision is “tricking the machine,” isn’t it?

Alessandro: The solution must be in the relationship. But if you think about the pure materiality, and it seems that social aid is a materiality, like gestures and practices, and these things can be changed, but not on a very individual and minimal local level, I think. So, it’s just not the best way to go, I think. Living in Italy and coming from abroad, it’s been about eleven years now that I’ve been here. I have the impression that Italian culture creates a different materiality for underground culture. I’m not sure if that’s the right word. Let me follow what I wrote. Living in Italy gives me the impression that a lot of what is created in different realities in the different Italian cities remains, because there’s a kind of resistance to the system and to systematization. It’s as if the underground resists becoming mainstream for a long time. If you go to Bologna, you see shops that have been selling comics for forty years and don’t want to grow. So, you have a culture of scenes spread all over the country, and people still do them and don’t want to publish them.

BaixaCultura: So, as an Italian who has lived or lives abroad, do you see this in the same way? And if so, how does Charta engage with this dimension of non-institutionalized knowledge that keeps emerging all over Italy? Does it or not? A big advantage for you and for Charta Sporca.

Alessandro: Yes, that’s definitely part of it. And more in general about Italy, I think the question is about the economy of bodies. The capitalist economy is not a default of the economy: think for example, about an old town in Italy, for example, Trieste or Bologna. But as you approach the metropolis, even Milan, and as you go up and go to Paris, then the economy of bodies and the actual economy start to merge into each other. There’s a certain degree of hypnosis going on there.

And I think it can only be resisted as long as – it’s hard, only as long as, I’m not sure if that’s the only reason – but only as long as people are not born inside it. It’s very difficult to step back from the metropolis if that’s the only reality you’ve seen. In the same way as we go to a forest and we were not born in the forest, but we look at the forest as if the trees were made for furniture. We don’t look at the forest in a natural way. So, our view is really shaped by the artificial environment of the city, and we cannot see nature as nature. In the same way, if the metropolitan subject sees time, relationships are already in such a way that is an aberration for the city, as a form of life outside the city.

The French collective Tiqqun has a very interesting, very radical distinction between life outside the metropolis, and he says that the metropolis is unsalvageable. There’s nothing left to save from the metropolis. If anything, you should only convince the people in the metropolis to get away from it and never come back. There is no way of changing capital and the capitalist, but you can allow people to see that there is a way out, if they want it.

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 37 Universal Prostitution & the Crisis of Labor This episode is a conversation with Jaleh Mansoor on the themes of her new book Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory. In this provocative work, Mansoor offers a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction and a rethinking of Marxist aesthetics. Drawing on Marx’s […]

Distance, therefore, preserves a European austerity in recorded musical practices, and electroacoustic practice is no exception; it is perhaps even responsible for reinvigorating a colonial posterity in contemporary music as so many examples in this book follow this pattern–Danielle Shlomit Sofer, Sex Sounds, 14. 

Sex Sounds: Vectors of Difference in Electronic Music (MIT Press, 2022) by Danielle Shlomit Sofer brings a complex analysis for contemporary de-colonial, queer and feminist readers. This book did its best to sustain an argument diving into eleven case studies and strongly problematising the Western white cis gaze. Sofer offers readers a new perspective in both the history of music and the decolonisation of that history. 

In a moment when discussions of consent, censorship, pleasure, and surveillance are reshaping how we think about media, Sofer asks: What does sex sound like, and why does it matter? Their analysis cuts across high art and popular culture, from avant-garde compositions to pop music to porn, revealing how sonic expressions of sex are never neutral—they’re deeply entangled in gendered, racialized, and heteronormative structures. In doing so, Sex Sounds resonates with broader critical work on listening as a political act, aligning with ongoing conversations in sound studies about the ethics of hearing and the politics of voice, noise, and silence

The main focus of Sex Sounds is the historical loop of sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s. Sofer writes from the perspective of a mixed-race, nonbinary Jewish scholar specializing in music theory and musicology. They argue that the way the Western world teaches music history involves hegemonic narratives. In other words,  the author’s impetus is to highlight the construction of mythological figures such as Pierre Schaeffer in France and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany who represent the canon of the Eurocentric music phenomena. 

Sex Sounds specifically follows the concept of  “Electrosexual Music,” defined by Sofer as electroacoustic Sound and Music interacting with sex and eroticism as socialized aesthetics. The issue of representation in music is a key research focus navigating questions such as: “How does music present sex acts and who enacts them? ” as well as: “how does a composer represent sexuality? How does a performer convey sexuality? And how does a listener interpret sexuality?” (xxiv & xxix). Moreover, Sofer traces: “the threats of representation, namely exploitation and objectification” (xxxvii) as the result of white male privilege and the historical harm and violence this means (xiix & 271).

By exploring answers to these questions, Sofer successfully exposes how electroacoustic sexuality has historically operated as a constant presence in many music genres, as well as proving that music and sound did not begin in Europe nor belongs only to the Anglo-European provincial cosmos.  Sex Sounds gives visibility to peripheral voices ignored by the Eurocentric canon, arguing for a new history of music where countries such as Egypt, Ghana, South Africa, Chile, Japan or Korea are central.  

Sofer further vivisects the meaning of sexual sounds as not only Eurocentric and colonial but patriarchal and sexist. What is the history behind sex sounds in the electroacoustic music field? Can we find liberation in sex sounds or have they only reproduced dominance? Which role do sex sounds play in the territories of otherness and racial representation? Are there examples where minoritized people have reclaimed their voice? Sex is part of our humanity. But how do sex sounds dehumanize female subjects? These are more of the fundamental questions Sofer responds to in this study. 

I aim, first and foremost, to show that electrosexual music is far representative a collection than the typically presented electroacoustic figures -supposedly disinterested, disembodied, and largely white cis men from Europe and North America –Sofer, Sex Sounds,(xvi). 

The time frame of the study ranges from 1950 until 2012, analysing four case studies. Sofer divides the book in two parts: Part I: “Electroacoustics of the Feminized Voice” and Part II: “Electrosexual Disturbance.” The first part contextualizes “electrosexual” music within the dominant cis white racial frame. The main argument is to demonstrate how many canonic electroacoustic works in the history of Western sound have sustained an ongoing dominance as a historical habit locating the male gaze at the center as well as instrumentalizing the ‘feminized voice’ as mere object of desire without personification and recognition as fundamental actor in the compositions. Under such a premise, Sofer vivisects sound works such as “Erotica” by the father of Musique Concretè Pierre Schaffer and Pierre Henry (1950-1951), Luc Ferrari’s “les danses organiques” (1973) and Robert Normandeu’s “Jeu de Langues” (2009), among other pieces. 

Luc Ferrrari’s work from 1973 is one of many examples in which Sofer makes evident the question of consent, since the women’s voices he includes were used in his work without their knowledge, a pattern of objectivation that mirrors structures of patriarchal domination. Sofer “defines and interrogates the assumed norms of electroacoustic sexual expression in works that represent women’s presumed sexual experience via masculinist heterosexual tropes, even when composed by women” (xivii-xiviii). Sofer emphasises the existence of  “distance” as a gendered trope in which women’s audible sexual pleasure is presented as “evidence” in the form of sexualized and racialized intramusical tropes. Philosophically speaking, this phenomena, Sofer argues, goes back to Friedrich Nietzsche and his understanding of the “women’s curious silence” (xxvii). In other words, a woman can be curious but must remain silent and in the shadows.  

This is the case in Schaeffer and Henry’s “Erotica” (1950-1951), one of the earliest colonial impetus to electrosexual music in which female voices are both present and erased, present in the recording but erased as subjects of sonic agency, since the composers did not credit the woman behind the voice recordings. She has no name nor authorship, but her sexualized voice is the main element in the composition. This paradox shows the issue of prioritising the ‘Western’ white European cis male gaze. This gaze uses women’s sexuality as a commerce where only the composer benefits from this use. This exposes the problem of labor and exploitation within electroacoustic practice historically dominated by white men. 

“Erotica” stands out for its sensual tension, abstract eroticism, and experimental use of the body as both subject and instrument. This work belongs to the hegemonic narrative of electroacoustic music with the use of sex sounds as aesthetic objects that insinuate erotic arousal as a construct of the male gaze. 

Through examples like “Erotica” Sofer strongly questions the exclusion of women as active agents of aesthetic sonic creation since: “electroacoustic spaces have long excluded women’s contributions as equal creators to men, who are more typically touted as composers and therefore compensated with prestige in the form of academic positions or board dominations” (xxxix). This book considers: “the threats of representation, namely exploitation and objectification” (xxxvii). Here we navigate the questions of how something is presented, by whom, and with which profit or intention. In other words, how sounds: “are created, for what purposes, and in turn, how sounds are interpreted and understood” (xxxiii).These are problems rooted in both patriarchy and capitalism. 

This book is a strong contribution to decolonize the history of music as we know it, although the citations here could be richer, including studies by Rachel McCarthy (“Marking the ‘Unmarked’ Space: Gendered Vocal Construction in Female Electronic Artists” 2014),  Tara Rodgers (“Tinkering with Cultural Memory: Gender and the Politics of Synthesizer Historiography” 2015), and the work of Louise Marshall and Holly Ingleton, who used intersectional feminist frameworks to analyze the work of marginalized composers (including women of color) and the curatorial practices that shape electronic music history. Also, not to forget: Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1988).

Embed from Getty Images

Musical artist Sylvester

I argue that, although many composers of color work in electronic music, the search term ‘electroacoustic’ remains exclusionary because of who declares themselves as an advocate of this music, and not necessarily in how their music is made–Sofer, Sex Sounds, (xiv).

After a deep dive into the genealogy of the patriarchal practices in electroacoustic music understood as electrosexual works (hence: “Sex is only re-presented in music p. xxix), Sofer moves to the territory of feminist contra-narratives. In the second part of their study, Sofer offers sonic practices and concrete examples that: “break the electroacoustic mold either by consciously objecting to its narrow constraints or by emerging from, building on, and, in a sense, competing with a completely different historical trajectory” (xlvi). Contra-narratives from the racialized periphery and underground landscapes appear in this book as case studies to hold the argument and expand the homocentric and patriarchal telos found even in the sonic archives as well as the Western theoretical corpus. These ‘Others’ reclaim their voices going a step further and gaining recognition. 

After examining examples of racialisation and objectification, Sofer selects some case studies from 1975 to 2013 in the second chapter of this section titled: “Electrosexual Disturbance.”  In this section, Sofer also points to new forms of exclusion and instrumentalisation via “racial othering,” specifically in the context of popular music such as Disco where we find an emphasis on the feminized voice. Disco, as a genre rooted in Black, queer, and marginalized communities, inherently grappled with racial and gendered dynamics. Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” (1975) exemplifies this tension.

The track’s erotic vocal performance (23 simulated orgasms over 16 minutes) became emblematic of the hypersexualization of Black women in popular music. Summer’s persona as the “first lady of love” reinforced stereotypes of Black female sexuality as inherently exotic or excessive, a trope traced to racist and sexist historical narratives. Simultaneously, disco provided a space for liberation: Black and LGBTQ+ artists like Summer, Sylvester, and Gloria Gaynor used the genre to assert agency over their identities and bodies, challenging mainstream exclusion. The tropes of sex and race are a paradoxical combination bringing both oppression as well as liberation. 

Sofer argues that Summers was commercially recognized but her figure as a composer was destroyed, creating consequently a hierarchy of labor. She was acknowledged for her amazing sexualized voice and performance on stage, but not recognized as a musician or equal to music producers. Here we see the practice of epistemological discrimination and extreme racial sexualisation. On the positive side, Summer became the Black Queen idol for gay liberation. Nevertheless, she remained as the sexualized and racial voice of the seventies.    

Sofer also presents the case of ex-sex worker, sex-educator and radical ecosex-activist Annie Sprinkle collaborating in a post-porn art video with the legendary Texan and lesbian composer Pauline Oliveros. For Sprinkle and Oliveros, Sofer offers a different phenomena at work, since both queer-women/Lesbian-women collaborated from the point of feminist independence and sexual liberation coming together for educational purposes.

Sluts & Goddesses (1992) is a porn film with an Oliveros soundtrack, produced by radical women– with only women–in a self-determined frame. The movie offers an example of collaboration moving from avantgarde sound composition expertise to trashy whoring and interracial lesbian power. This example was rare, but inspiring for the coming generations.  Two lesbian Titans united for electrosexual disturbance from the feminist gaze, Sprinkle and Oliveros were a duo that broke silence.

This book revisits the acousmatic in its electronic manifestations to examine and interrogate sexual and sexualized assumptions underwriting electroacoustic musical philosophies.–Sofer, Sex Sounds, (xxi)

Sofer’s Sex Sounds enters into a vital and still-emerging conversation about how sound—particularly sonic expressions of sex and eroticism—shapes, disrupts, and reinscribes power. At a time when sonic studies increasingly reckon with embodiment, affect, and intimacy, Sofer brings a feminist and queer critique to the center of how we listen to, interpret, and culturally regulate the sounds of sex. Their book invites us to reconsider not only what we hear in erotic audio, but how we’ve been taught—socially, politically, morally—to hear it.

This book doesn’t just fill a gap—it pushes the field toward a more nuanced, bodily-aware mode of scholarship. For SO! readers, Sex Sounds offers both a provocation and a methodology: it challenges us to hear differently, to ask how power works not only through what is seen or said, but through what is moaned, whispered, muffled, or made to be heard too loudly.

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Featured Image: “Stamen,” by Flickr User Sharonolk, CC BY 2.0

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Verónica Mota Galindo is an interdisciplinary researcher based in Berlin, where they study philosophy at the Freie Universität. Their work goes beyond the academic sphere, blending sound art, critical epistemology, and community engagement to make complex philosophical ideas accessible to broader audiences. As a dedicated educator and sound artist, Mota Galindo bridges the gap between academic research and lived material experience, inviting others to explore the transformative power of critical thought and creative expression. Committed to bringing philosophy to life outside traditional boundaries, they inspire new ways of thinking aimed at emancipation of the human and non-human for collective survival.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:

Into the Woods: A Brief History of Wood Paneling on Synthesizers*–Tara Rodgers

Ritual, Noise, and the Cut-up: The Art of Tara Transitory—Justyna Stasiowska 

SO! Reads: Zeynep Bulut’s Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin –Enikő Deptuch Vághy 

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Rhumsiki est une revue scientifique pluridisciplinaire publiée par la Faculté des Arts, Lettres et Sciences Humaines et Sociales (FALSH) de l’Université de Maroua, au Cameroun. À l’image du site emblématique dont elle porte le nom – symbole de richesse culturelle, d’altérité et de confluence entre traditions et modernité – la revue Rhumsiki entend être un carrefour intellectuel ouvert à la diversité des regards, des disciplines et des problématiques qui traversent les sociétés humaines.

Elle accueille des contributions originales en sciences humaines et sociales, notamment en histoire, géographie, sociologie, anthropologie, psychologie, lettres, langues, arts, philosophie, sciences de l’éducation, science politique, et domaines connexes. Les articles proposés peuvent prendre la forme de recherches empiriques, d’analyses théoriques, de notes de lecture critiques ou encore de réflexions méthodologiques.

Rhumsiki se donne pour ambition de valoriser les travaux portant sur l’Afrique en général, et le Sahel en particulier, tout en s’ouvrant à des perspectives comparées et globales. La revue s’adresse aux chercheur·euse·s, enseignant·e·s, doctorant·e·s, professionnel·le·s du développement et à tous ceux et celles qui s’intéressent à la compréhension fine des dynamiques sociales, culturelles, politiques et économiques du monde contemporain.

Liste des contributeurs et contributrices : DOLLO MANDANDI, Éric Achille NKO’O BEKONO, Gilbert Willy TIO BABENA, GONDEU LADIBA, Jean-Marie DATOUANG DJOUSSOU, Joseph BOMDA, Mahamat MEY MAHAMAT, Mbiah Anny Flore TCHOUTA, Rachel ASTA MÉRÉ, Remy DZOU TSANGA, Théophile KALBE YAMO, WARAYANSSA MAWOUNE et ZAKINET DANGBET.

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Revue de la Faculté des Arts, Lettres et Sciences Humaines de l’Université de Maroua

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Ce numéro spécial, issu des Grands programmes de recherche de la Faculté des Arts, Lettres et Sciences Humaines de l’Université de Maroua, interroge la complexité des frontières à l’Extrême-Nord du Cameroun, région sahélienne marquée par le terrorisme islamiste et des dynamiques transfrontalières multiformes. Réunies sous le thème « Regards pluriels sur la frontière à l’Extrême-Nord du Cameroun », les contributions explorent les représentations, les usages et les tensions qui structurent ces marges. Au-delà des tracés administratifs, les frontières apparaissent comme des zones de contact, d’échanges, de conflits et de résilience. Elles révèlent des ambivalences profondes, à la fois héritées de la colonisation et réactualisées par les crises sécuritaires, de Boko Haram à la grande criminalité transfrontalière. Ces études, nourries de perspectives plurielles, offrent des clés pour comprendre comment ces marges influencent la vie des populations et les circulations dans le bassin du Lac Tchad. Malgré la violence et l’instabilité, les personnes, les biens et les plantes continuent à circuler entre le Cameroun, le Nigeria et le Tchad, rappelant le caractère mouvant et négocié de la frontière. En définitive, ce numéro propose une lecture nuancée de la frontière comme fait social total : imposée et contestée, fragile et persistante, violente et vitale.

Liste des contributeurs et contributrices : Aimé Raoul SUMO TAYO, Crépin WOWÉ, GIGLA GARAKCHEME, Gilbert Willy TIO BABENA, HAMADOU, Jean GORMO, Jean-Marie DATOUANG DJOUSSOU, Jeremie DIYE, Joël MBRING, Joseph WOUDAMMIKÉ, MAHAMAT ABBA OUSMAN, NDJIDDA ALI, OUSMANOU ABDOU, Paul Basile Odilon NYET, Samuel KAMOUGNANA et WARAYANSSA MAWOUNE.

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1. Porosité des frontières, afflux des réfugié·e·s nigérian·e·s, des déplacé·e·s internes/retourné·e·s et la lutte contre la poliomyélite dans la région de l’Extrême-Nord Cameroun (2013-2019)
Joseph WOUDAMMIKÉ

8. L’idée de frontière chez les peuples des monts Mandara du Nord-Cameroun
Samuel KAMOUGNANA

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 35 Return to the 36 Enclosures It’s summer and we’re feeling a bit lazy… so rather than record something new, for this episode we’re presenting a recording of a seminar discussion between Stefano Harney & Stevphen Shukaitis that occurred this May in London. It was part of an event organized by […]