Published to accompany exhibition held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 22/5 - 26/8 1996.

Bringing together the depth insights of eastern & western traditions, this book places the topic of the self in a new context.

This book is meant to be used as a guide to help you realize what already exists within. It will shed Light where darkness may reside. It will assist you in revealing and awakening the wisdom and knowledge that you already possess in your soul. After all, wisdom cannot be taught; it can only be attained through the medium of knowledge and experience if transmuted correctly. You cannot learn wisdom; you may only reveal it. The following ideas and concepts are not meant to give you conclusions and answers about how the universe works; rather, they are meant to simply open your doors of thought for you to explore further and perceive the world in your own unique way. What will follow is a life in which you have complete control, a higher level of consciousness, and a stronger connection to your inner true self. Take your time and read each sentence carefully. Consider reading some chapters more than once, perhaps even multiple times. Allow your soul to digest the information it is receiving and the wisdom it is revealing. Where you take it is up to you!

The Role of Nomadic Culture in the Evolution of Non-Western Power Politics Central Asia, a vast region extending from eastern Russia and across Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, Mongolia, and western China, has its own tradition of foreign policy rooted in the ancient nomadic culture of many of its peoples as well as the region's distinctive geography. From the thundering hooves of Mongol or Cossack cavalry across the steppes to the clanking of tanks on parade in Moscow or Beijing, elements of this system still cast a shadow on the region at the heart of Earth's largest continent. By tracing the evolution of Central Asian warfare and diplomacy through a series of historical examples, ranging from the ancient Xiongnu people and medieval Mongol Empire to the fall of the Soviet Union, historian Christopher Mott argues that the original system of informal relationships, indirect rule, and rapid military movement did not entirely fade from the region with the eclipse of the nomadic powers during the Middle Ages. In fact, many states like China, Iran, and Russia had already been influenced by nomadic people, and in so doing adapted their own diplomatic and military policies accordingly. The Formless Empire: A Short History of Diplomacy and Warfare in Central Asia is an engaging study of the nature of non-Western imperialism and great-power strategy. In addition, the book demonstrates that regional histories can show us the variety of political possibilities in the past and how they were adapted to changing circumstances--a point made even more important by the rapid changes facing global security and new forms of empire building. "Christopher Mott's extremely erudite and wide-ranging examination of the history of Central Asia shows us that we have been far too narrow-minded and Eurocentric in thinking about power and how the global system changes historically. Given the current interest in 'caliphates' we need to reflect on the history of the areas of the world that dance to a different historical drum than we do in the West." --Andrew John Williams, author of France, Britain, and the United States in the Twentieth Century

To Be Formless means to become something without a form. It's to live a life without limits, without validation from others, and become fearless. Too often, we lived in a world where we're boxed in and blocked off. We block ourselves of our full potential because of fear within, and fear of what others may think about us. We live in a world where people are too afraid to step out of their comfort zones and become the person they're designed to be. We instead, live life through illusions and filters to block the true essence of who we are. We rather live life seeking validation and acceptance of others to feel self-fulfilled. In the end, we're all human, we have flaws, we suffer, we strive, and we live. You matter through it all. Don't change who you are because you don't know who you can become until you stretch out and reach the sky.

Boring Formless Nonsense intervenes in an aesthetics of failure that has largely been delimited by the visual arts and its avant-garde legacies. It focuses on contemporary experimental composition in which failure rubs elbows with the categories of chance, noise, and obscurity. In these works we hear failure anew. We hear boredom, formlessness, and nonsense in a way that gives new purchase to aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions that falter in their negative capability. Reshaping current debates on failure as an aesthetic category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a duplicitous concept that traffics in paradox and sustains the conditions for magical thinking and hyperstition. Framing recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art, Priest explores how the affective and formal elements of post-Cagean music couples with contemporary culture's themes of depression, distraction, and disinformation to create an esoteric reality composed of counterfactuals and pseudonymous beings. Ambitious in content and experimental in its approach, Boring Formless Nonsense will challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music.

Formless Formation is an experimental project conceived and co-authored by two performance theorists working in critical aesthetics and political thought. The book is an insurgent revolt, walking side by side with plural and planetary anticolonial forces organizing against debt, expropriative extractive capital, environmental catastrophe, and the militarized policing of people and borders. It is in direct conversation with all Indigenous, Black, Brown, ecological, queer, diasporic movements and struggles against capitalist predatory formations across time and space. Through shared resonances across differing aesthetic life-worlds and solidarities that bypass the nation-state, Ruiz and Vourloumis bring to the forefront performative and aesthetic practices and methods that address current and future social organizing.

What makes a work of literature readable? This book asks that question of one of the classics of Japanese literature, the Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) by Kenko (1283-1352), a collection of brief, fragmentary reflections on a number of subjects. In Japanese literary history the work is classified as one of the first collections of zuihitsu, or informal essay. This first extended critical treatment of Tsurezuregusa goes back to its author and his time to rebuild the discursive world of the early fourteenth century and to examine such matters as whether genre labels assist reading or obscure significant comparisons and contexts. The book presents compelling arguments against considering Tsurezuregusa as an example of zuihitsu; instead, the text is treated as a deliberate, controlled effort by Kenko to force the reader to confront the impermanent and contingent nature of existence through experiencing the text. The book develops this view by studying the collaborative strategies operating between writers and readers in medieval Japan, the intellectual intent and devices of Kenko's text, and the many kinds of writing on which it draws. We learn how a text with a commitment to shaping responses to the world is simultaneously dedicated to exploding the reader's identification with the presumably unchanging facts of existence. The aesthetics of impermanence (mujo), central to medieval Japanese thinking, emerges not only as what writing is about but also as a means to demonstrate and to encourage the enactment of aesthetics by readers. Thus, a work that seems formless, to have little structure, is shown to be so in the interest of form, that is, of conveying a clear meaning to its audience. Or, to express it with a more Buddhist inflection amenable to Kenko, although the form that we can perceive is contingent on conditions and is hence formless, the fact of form continues to matter absolutely. Both literature and the nature of existence are readable because of the interplay of provisional and absolute truths, of the writer's and the reader's approaches to texts.

Discusses and translates important compositions by famous Nirguni poets--poets dedicated to the worship of a formless God.