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.

LOUIS ARMAND is the author of Videology, The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde, Event-States: Discourse, Time, Mediality, Literate Technologies, and Technē. Other publications include the collage-hybrid Glitchhead; the novels The Garden, Vampyr, and The Combinations; and the poetry collections East Broadway Rundown and Monument (with John Kinsella). He directs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Charles University, Prague.