Skip to main content

Jay Murphy

Followers

162

Following

204

Mentions

1

Public Views

Jay Murphy is author of New Media and the Artaud Effect (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and Artaud's Metamorphosis (Pavement Books, 2016), and a writer whose screenplays participated in the invitation-only 2014 Episodic Story Labs Sundance Institute competition and was a finalist in 2011 and 2006 for the Sundance Screenwriting Labs; they include Vesco, based on the bestselling book by Arthur Herzog. He has contributed to CTheory, Art Journal, Deleuze Studies, Parallax, Culture Machine, MAP, Frieze, Parkett, Contemporary, Metropolis, Art in America, World Art, Afterimage, Third Text, and other journals and was a correspondent for Contemporanea. His essays have appeared in The Progressive, In These Times, and other forums. His interactive, collaborative Internet projects have been featured in the Sundance Film Festival. He edited the book anthology For Palestine (1993), described by the The Sunday Times of London as a "powerful mixture of statistics, literature and journalism...Considered reactions to Operation Desert Storm are provocative and revealing;" poet-pundit Peter Lamborn Wilson opined that it suggested what an "ideal intifada" might look like; and his work with artist Carolee Schneemann led to her 2002 MIT Press collection. He was editor and publisher of the alternative journal Red Bass that garnered a Project Censored nomination and that Fr. Daniel Berrigan at one time claimed “redeems whatever is salvageable in Florida.” His Red Bass interviews with figures such as John Cage, William Burroughs, Emile de Antonio, Edward Said and Kathy Acker were all anthologized and republished. Among his current projects is assembling a creative nonfiction book and web project culled from different time capsules and stories from the Middle East called Baraya. In 2008 he curated gallery exhibitions in New York and Edinburgh (the latter a weekend preview selection in The Guardian); in 2009 he organised the film festival “Cruel Weather” for venues in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, and in 2011 co-organised “Breaking Point” for Aberdeen and Dundee. He also curated the series “First Person” of seven filmmakers for Inverleith House and Filmhouse Cinema, Edinburgh (12 November, 2011 – 22 January, 2012) and completed his doctorate in Modern Thought at University of Aberdeen in December 2011. Recently he has contributed essays to monographs on poet/translator Clayton Eshleman (2013) and new media artist Grégory Chatonsky (2011). He organized the exhibition and film programme “Intelligence Report” that opened 3 October, 2014 at Peacock Visual Arts and Belmont Filmhouse, Aberdeen. His web site is found at www.thing.net/~soulcity.

less

Jonathan Everett Haynes

David Brancaleone

Limerick Institute of Technology

Birkbeck College, University of London

University of West London

Stergios Clincher

Cyprus University of Technology

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

jean-marc Leveratto

University of Lorraine

Laurent Jullier

Université de Lorraine

Irmgard Emmelhainz

InterestsView All (43)

Uploads

Papers by Jay Murphy

Book Review: Serge Daney, The Cinema House & the World, the Cahiers du cinema years, 1962-1981

Third Text, 2023

Artaud's Final Testaments: On Three Recent Books from Infinity Land Press

Los Angeles Review of Books , 2023

Did you know LARB is a readersupported nonprofit? LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part ... more Did you know LARB is a readersupported nonprofit? LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. We could not do this work without the support of our readers and members. If you enjoyed this article, please consider joining as a member or making a one-time donation today. Thank you! GIVE TODAY! → AT THE END of his life, the inveterate surrealist Antonin Artaud returned to his notion of a transformative "Theater of Cruelty." In February 1948, a month before

Select Publications

"Yanomami, spirit of the forest" & the signs of the times = "Yanomami, l'esprit de la forêt" und die Zeichen der Zeit

Parkett, Sep 1, 2003

Review: The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene, by Patricia MacCormack

Afterimage, 2021

but in a radically different vein that usually emphasizes ruthless criticism of still existing my... more but in a radically different vein that usually emphasizes ruthless criticism of still existing mythologies, François Laruelle reinterrogates the resources of ancient Gnosticism. The term "Anthropocene" is itself a kind of instantly obsolescent resort to the mythic. 1 MacCormack's tone is interchangeably personal, activist, academic. This may be key to the many contradictions of this book, which is steeped in Continental philosophy while extending it into chiliastic conclusions that hardly follow from many of her sources. MacCormack wagers "the inconsistent tone will help tap into the volatile rhythms of activism" and acknowledges her position "demands absolutes" while "also being deeply antagonistic to essentialist or generalizing claims. Yet, ultimately, the final claim is absolute and generalizing" (34). This is part and parcel of "a suspension of the need for consistency. .. including the demand for consistent human logic" (34). There have been a series of recent works examining or advocating antinatalism, willing or midwiving human extinction as a solution to the onrushing climate catastrophe-by Lee Edelman, Claire Colebrook, David Benatar, and Penelope Deutscher, among others. Some sort of unwilling human extinction may well be more in the offing, given the most recent climate prognoses, 2 and one would be foolish indeed to underestimate the epochal transition that moves under the sign of climate change. MacCormack's very adamancy for human autoextinction, however, reinforces such false either/or choices of human withdrawal or collapse, illustrating perhaps despite herself that her manifesto only confirms "the impossibility of thinking revolution" (13). MacCormack argues for a sweeping voluntarism, that of human refusal of reproduction, despite, or because of, the failure of far lesser and easier voluntarisms. MacCormack's position is that this is not "giving up," but is rather the ultimate ethical gesture of relinquishing the residual transcendent qualities and speciesism of the human, which continue to haunt even the most generous posthuman discourses. MacCormack is more successful at demonstrating the discursive limits of much Continental and posthuman discourse in relation to the nonhuman and the animal than she is in her prescriptions. She is in large part reliant on Serres's recommendation of extending the "natural contract" to the rest of the sentient world, and Serres's insistence to "step aside," in order to provide the "grace" so that "to dance is only to make room, to think is only to step aside and make room, give up one's place" (qtd. 46). MacCormack writes that any affirmation of the life of the nonhuman "can only come" from Serres's "stepping aside," or Luce

The Artaud Effect

Ctheory, 2015

Artaud has served as a flash point in the past coalescing in various avant-garde artistic and the... more Artaud has served as a flash point in the past coalescing in various avant-garde artistic and theoretical explorations--for American artists around David Tudor and John Cage at Black Mountain College in the 1950s, in the political and environmental poetics of a wing of the Beat Generation, the invention of Butoh in Japan in 1959, or for French thinkers reconsidering the relation of language and materiality after 1968--and Artaud has the possibility of offering such a substrate again. The exhibitions of Artaud's drawings which opened in Paris in 1987 and New York in 1996 were landmark events, but the first decade-and-a-half of the 21st century has seen a remarkable series of museum retrospectives that show Artaud's enormous output-drawings, writings, films (as actor and scenarist)--in their "surprising coherence" and "globality." [2] Far from merely the tragic poète maudit who, in Michel Foucault's estimation, represented a "madness [that] is prec...

Book Review: The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure by Patricia Ticineto Clough

Afterimage, 2019

Philippe Grandrieux: sonic cinema

Studies in European Cinema, 2020

Review: Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology, edited by Clemens Apprich, Josephine Berry Slater, Anthony Iles, and Oliver Lerone Schultz

Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, 2014

Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (2014), of mediation refused or withdrawn... more Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (2014), of mediation refused or withdrawn or beyond reach, hence Thacker's "dark media"-London's Mute magazine partnered with the experimental media and net labs of the Centre for Digital Cultures of Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany, to produce Provocative Alloys, issuing from the two-year life of the Post-Media Lab in Lüneburg. This taking into accounts of the current predicament of "post-media" has many inspirations, in its project of what Howard Slater, one of its essayists, characterizes as "auto-theoretization," ranging from Pierre Bourdieu to the influential formularizations of Peter Weibel; the primary one, however, is that of the late theorist, critical psychoanalyst, and activist Félix Guattari. Guattari's vision of "post-media" could be sweeping and all too optimistic, registering "a mutation in subjectivity that perhaps surpasses the invention of writing, or the printing press, in importance" (qtd. 134). At the same time, based on only tentative developments (such as use of the French videotext system then connected by Minitel, the national telephone service), Guattari could often be precise in his prophecies on proto-network culture and the internet, the growth in biotechnology, or the semiotic dynamics of globalization-phenomena now fully blown decades later. Guattari could also despair of a future without mass media stupefaction, but, as Gary Genosko writes in his contribution, "Guattari still believed in the future" (19). The advantage in taking off from Guattari, among this jockeying of media (where "new media" is utilized alongside or in conjunction with "old" or obsolescing media), or even locales (essays reflect media initiatives in Brazil and Colombia, and the move to "techno-ecology" practices in Latvia and Estonia) of thriving truly interdisciplinary autonomous or semi-autonomous milieus of experimentation (ranging from Zagreb's MaMa Zagreb and Ljubljana's Ljudmila to London's Backspace), is Guattari's insistence on the power relations inherent in any development, technology, or enunciation-that these are political issues and hence open to change and alteration. While Guattari would insist there were no guarantees of liberatory subjectivization, his friend and to some extent follower, the theorist-activist Franco "Bifo" Berardi, was not wrong in saying "collective agents of rhizomatic

Getting Under the Skin: Antonin Artaud's Media

Art Journal, 2016

The surrealist artist and writer Antonin Artaud, who died on March 4, 1948, remains in a troublin... more

More of What It Is: Catching Up with Chris Marker

Afterimage, Sep 1, 2005

Uncommon grounds: new media and critical practices in North Africa and the Middle East

Transnational Cinemas, 2015

The young and restless in Habana

Third Text, 1992

The young and restless in Havana revisited

Third Text, 1994

The intifadah and the work of Palestinian artists

Third Text, 1990

"Jim Campbell x 3" Afterimage 42 n. 3 (November/December 2014): 25-6

Review of Jim Campbell: Rhythms of Perception, Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria (March 21 - Ju... more Review of Jim Campbell: Rhythms of Perception, Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria (March 21 - June 15, 2014); Jim Campbell, Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York (March 7 - April 19, 2014); Alonzo King LINES Ballet's Constellation, with mezzo-soprano Maya Lahyani and electronic artist Jim Campbell, The Joyce Theater, New York (March 18-23, 2014)

"Mel Chin" Frieze 166 (October 2014)

Review of "Mel Chin: Rematch" New Orleans Museum of Art

"'The Target Moves': Jay Murphy Reflects on the Photography of William S. Burroughs" MAP (June 2014)

"Eshleman's Caves"

from "Clayton Eshleman/The Whole Art," Ed. Stuart Kendall (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2014)

"Bifo's Guattari: A Double Subjectivation" Parallax 19 n. 2 (April 2013): 98-101

Review of Franco Berardi (Bifo), "Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography"... more

Book Review: Serge Daney, The Cinema House & the World, the Cahiers du cinema years, 1962-1981

Third Text, 2023

Artaud's Final Testaments: On Three Recent Books from Infinity Land Press

Los Angeles Review of Books , 2023

Did you know LARB is a readersupported nonprofit? LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part ... more Did you know LARB is a readersupported nonprofit? LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. We could not do this work without the support of our readers and members. If you enjoyed this article, please consider joining as a member or making a one-time donation today. Thank you! GIVE TODAY! → AT THE END of his life, the inveterate surrealist Antonin Artaud returned to his notion of a transformative "Theater of Cruelty." In February 1948, a month before

Select Publications

"Yanomami, spirit of the forest" & the signs of the times = "Yanomami, l'esprit de la forêt" und die Zeichen der Zeit

Parkett, Sep 1, 2003

Review: The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene, by Patricia MacCormack

Afterimage, 2021

but in a radically different vein that usually emphasizes ruthless criticism of still existing my... more but in a radically different vein that usually emphasizes ruthless criticism of still existing mythologies, François Laruelle reinterrogates the resources of ancient Gnosticism. The term "Anthropocene" is itself a kind of instantly obsolescent resort to the mythic. 1 MacCormack's tone is interchangeably personal, activist, academic. This may be key to the many contradictions of this book, which is steeped in Continental philosophy while extending it into chiliastic conclusions that hardly follow from many of her sources. MacCormack wagers "the inconsistent tone will help tap into the volatile rhythms of activism" and acknowledges her position "demands absolutes" while "also being deeply antagonistic to essentialist or generalizing claims. Yet, ultimately, the final claim is absolute and generalizing" (34). This is part and parcel of "a suspension of the need for consistency. .. including the demand for consistent human logic" (34). There have been a series of recent works examining or advocating antinatalism, willing or midwiving human extinction as a solution to the onrushing climate catastrophe-by Lee Edelman, Claire Colebrook, David Benatar, and Penelope Deutscher, among others. Some sort of unwilling human extinction may well be more in the offing, given the most recent climate prognoses, 2 and one would be foolish indeed to underestimate the epochal transition that moves under the sign of climate change. MacCormack's very adamancy for human autoextinction, however, reinforces such false either/or choices of human withdrawal or collapse, illustrating perhaps despite herself that her manifesto only confirms "the impossibility of thinking revolution" (13). MacCormack argues for a sweeping voluntarism, that of human refusal of reproduction, despite, or because of, the failure of far lesser and easier voluntarisms. MacCormack's position is that this is not "giving up," but is rather the ultimate ethical gesture of relinquishing the residual transcendent qualities and speciesism of the human, which continue to haunt even the most generous posthuman discourses. MacCormack is more successful at demonstrating the discursive limits of much Continental and posthuman discourse in relation to the nonhuman and the animal than she is in her prescriptions. She is in large part reliant on Serres's recommendation of extending the "natural contract" to the rest of the sentient world, and Serres's insistence to "step aside," in order to provide the "grace" so that "to dance is only to make room, to think is only to step aside and make room, give up one's place" (qtd. 46). MacCormack writes that any affirmation of the life of the nonhuman "can only come" from Serres's "stepping aside," or Luce

The Artaud Effect

Ctheory, 2015

Artaud has served as a flash point in the past coalescing in various avant-garde artistic and the... more Artaud has served as a flash point in the past coalescing in various avant-garde artistic and theoretical explorations--for American artists around David Tudor and John Cage at Black Mountain College in the 1950s, in the political and environmental poetics of a wing of the Beat Generation, the invention of Butoh in Japan in 1959, or for French thinkers reconsidering the relation of language and materiality after 1968--and Artaud has the possibility of offering such a substrate again. The exhibitions of Artaud's drawings which opened in Paris in 1987 and New York in 1996 were landmark events, but the first decade-and-a-half of the 21st century has seen a remarkable series of museum retrospectives that show Artaud's enormous output-drawings, writings, films (as actor and scenarist)--in their "surprising coherence" and "globality." [2] Far from merely the tragic poète maudit who, in Michel Foucault's estimation, represented a "madness [that] is prec...

Book Review: The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure by Patricia Ticineto Clough

Afterimage, 2019

Philippe Grandrieux: sonic cinema

Studies in European Cinema, 2020

Review: Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology, edited by Clemens Apprich, Josephine Berry Slater, Anthony Iles, and Oliver Lerone Schultz

Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, 2014

Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (2014), of mediation refused or withdrawn... more Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (2014), of mediation refused or withdrawn or beyond reach, hence Thacker's "dark media"-London's Mute magazine partnered with the experimental media and net labs of the Centre for Digital Cultures of Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany, to produce Provocative Alloys, issuing from the two-year life of the Post-Media Lab in Lüneburg. This taking into accounts of the current predicament of "post-media" has many inspirations, in its project of what Howard Slater, one of its essayists, characterizes as "auto-theoretization," ranging from Pierre Bourdieu to the influential formularizations of Peter Weibel; the primary one, however, is that of the late theorist, critical psychoanalyst, and activist Félix Guattari. Guattari's vision of "post-media" could be sweeping and all too optimistic, registering "a mutation in subjectivity that perhaps surpasses the invention of writing, or the printing press, in importance" (qtd. 134). At the same time, based on only tentative developments (such as use of the French videotext system then connected by Minitel, the national telephone service), Guattari could often be precise in his prophecies on proto-network culture and the internet, the growth in biotechnology, or the semiotic dynamics of globalization-phenomena now fully blown decades later. Guattari could also despair of a future without mass media stupefaction, but, as Gary Genosko writes in his contribution, "Guattari still believed in the future" (19). The advantage in taking off from Guattari, among this jockeying of media (where "new media" is utilized alongside or in conjunction with "old" or obsolescing media), or even locales (essays reflect media initiatives in Brazil and Colombia, and the move to "techno-ecology" practices in Latvia and Estonia) of thriving truly interdisciplinary autonomous or semi-autonomous milieus of experimentation (ranging from Zagreb's MaMa Zagreb and Ljubljana's Ljudmila to London's Backspace), is Guattari's insistence on the power relations inherent in any development, technology, or enunciation-that these are political issues and hence open to change and alteration. While Guattari would insist there were no guarantees of liberatory subjectivization, his friend and to some extent follower, the theorist-activist Franco "Bifo" Berardi, was not wrong in saying "collective agents of rhizomatic

Getting Under the Skin: Antonin Artaud's Media

Art Journal, 2016

The surrealist artist and writer Antonin Artaud, who died on March 4, 1948, remains in a troublin... more

More of What It Is: Catching Up with Chris Marker

Afterimage, Sep 1, 2005

Uncommon grounds: new media and critical practices in North Africa and the Middle East

Transnational Cinemas, 2015

The young and restless in Habana

Third Text, 1992

The young and restless in Havana revisited

Third Text, 1994

The intifadah and the work of Palestinian artists

Third Text, 1990

"Jim Campbell x 3" Afterimage 42 n. 3 (November/December 2014): 25-6

Review of Jim Campbell: Rhythms of Perception, Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria (March 21 - Ju... more Review of Jim Campbell: Rhythms of Perception, Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria (March 21 - June 15, 2014); Jim Campbell, Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York (March 7 - April 19, 2014); Alonzo King LINES Ballet's Constellation, with mezzo-soprano Maya Lahyani and electronic artist Jim Campbell, The Joyce Theater, New York (March 18-23, 2014)

"Mel Chin" Frieze 166 (October 2014)

Review of "Mel Chin: Rematch" New Orleans Museum of Art

"'The Target Moves': Jay Murphy Reflects on the Photography of William S. Burroughs" MAP (June 2014)

"Eshleman's Caves"

from "Clayton Eshleman/The Whole Art," Ed. Stuart Kendall (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2014)

"Bifo's Guattari: A Double Subjectivation" Parallax 19 n. 2 (April 2013): 98-101

Review of Franco Berardi (Bifo), "Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography"... more