Entropology

by Louis Armand

Life is to capital as light is to a blackhole. Yet this apparently irresistible power to “absorb everything” runs up against laws of entropy that cause a blackhole to evaporate & life to propagate & evolve in ever-increasing forms of complexity. In this pivotal study, Louis Armand develops an entropology of capital & its systems of cultural power, asserting the possibility of a critique beyond the gravitational pull of “capitalist realism.” ENTROPOLOGY is a radical re-examination of the major tropes of ideology & their iteration in the poetics of modernity, the avantgarde, media culture, cybernetics & posthumanism. From this constellation, a new critical theory is brought into view—a theory of the immanence of technology to life &, concurrently, of life to technology.

158 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2023

About the author

Louis Armand is a writer and visual artist who has lived in Prague since 1994. He has worked as an editor and publisher, and as a subtitles technician at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and is an editor of VLAK magazine. He is the author of eight novels, including Breakfast at Midnight in 2012, "a perfect modern noir, presenting Kafka's Prague as a bleak, monochrome singularity of darkness, despair and edgy, dry existentialist hardboil" (Richard Marshall, 3:AM), CAIRO (Equus Press, 2014; short listed for the Guardian's Not-the-Booker Prize), and THE COMBINATIONS (Equus Press, 2016). Described as "Robert Pinget does Canetti (in drag in Yugoslavia)," Armand's third novel Clair Obscur was published by Equus in 2011. His previous novel, Menudo (Antigen), was described as "unrelenting, a flying wedge, an encyclopaedia of the wasteland, an uzi assault pumping desolation lead... inspiring!" (Thor Garcia, author of The News Clown).