Here Comes Trouble: An Inquiry Into Art, Magic & Madness as Deviant Knowledge

by Alex Head

Imagine the infinitely tiny size of an atom. Focus on the size of this microscopic particle in relation to your own human body. Now scale up to the size of the planets, galaxies, to the solar system as a whole. The weight of your body exists between these vastly different scales.

Here Comes Trouble, An Inquiry into Art, Magic and Madness as Deviant Knowledge, is not about thermodynamics, negative feedback or refrigerators. Neither have I written a book about geology, black holes or migration, yet each of these material systems offer insights into the slippery topic of deviancy.

So what is deviancy? What forms does it take historically and what, as it were, does it do?

Distributed globally by Public Knowledge Books (as of March 2024)

Fourth, revised edition: 2025

Previous distribution to: Salon für Kunstbuch, Wien (AT), BATT Coop, Paris (FR), After8, Paris (FR), Giselle’s Books, Marseille (FR), bruno, Venice (IT), Stampa, Basel (CH), PUNCH, Bucharest (RO), Skylight, Los Angeles (USA), McNally Jackson, New York (USA), Mast Books, New York (USA), 2 Bridges, New York (USA), Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University (USA), Shakespear and Sons (Czech Republic), Housmans Bookshop (UK), ICA Bookstore (UK), Whitechapel Books (UK), Donlon (UK), Pages of Hackney London (UK), and Hopscotch Reading Room (DE), Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (DE), bbooks (DE), Walter König (DE), Pro qm (DE), Do You Read Me?! (DE), Zabriski (DE), She Said (DE), Arnolfini (UK), Bookhaus (UK), South London Gallery (UK)

Paperback

Published January 1, 2016

About the author

Alex Head’s work explores the impact of culture on our interior worlds. He translates bodies of research into public events, drawing and print, and is interested in working with non-hierarchical networks of artists, researchers and citizens.

Out in May 2025: 1001 Accurate Memories - From traumatic memory culture to learning with bodies - On Plural Studio (2025)

Distribution by Public Knowlege Books, Antenne Books

Image: Fabrizio Dal Vera

Reviews

[Artur Moreira · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alex Head was able to create some very clever analogies between science and all sorts of topics like history, sociology and more for the most part of the book but rapidly falls into, what I would consider, a overly politicised and biased left wing speech that he tried to mask as something else. Some transparency in the beginning of the book would go a long way.

Would consider this a 2,5 maximum but surely an interesting read nonetheless. It is, at least, food for thought.

[Neal Alexander · Rating 2 out of 5]

Half-baked culture-theoretic analogies padded out with snatches of memoir and paragraph-length quotes from Michel Foucault and Silvia Federici.

[Daedric · Rating 1 out of 5]

Quite superficial, sounded cool but all elements of theory or art felt very underwhelming

[Alex Head · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although the work is an analysis of the what the capitalist system puts human bodies through, readers will miss the point if they dwell on the work's politics. The critique of capital increases in the book as it develops because the analysis progresses with the dubious progress of that market form. Trouble... however, is intended a spatial model first and foremost, as the graphic content demonstrates. It is a manual for understanding the calcification of the urban sphere. It's central premis of the increasing calcification of humanities lived experience, is born out by current events, see, for example the covid 19 lockdowns. And if the socio-legal event of deviancy can only be read through a critique of patriarchal colonial capitalism, this simply reflects the authors experience and observations. One has to assume then, that those unaffected by such systems simply do not read the work from that perspective. That the human mind rails against the ongoing crystalisation of the urban (and political) sphere is also borne out by the artificial creation of new forms of 'deviant' and 'deviant knowledge' post covid 19 pandemic. Yes, the book is a little oblique in places (it was my M.A thesis ffsk), and the author acknowledges this in publishing the After Trouble critique in the third edition. It nonetheless serves as a map for the world we increasingly inhabit. One line reviews are not taken seriously by anyone.