Over the past few years there has been a marked use of the first-person singular in a broad range of cultural practices, including contemporary art, literature, and criticism. Although it goes by any number of names—autobiography, autofiction, confession, epistle, memoir, personal essay—which each have a specific history and structure, its increased use in our current moment suggests a common impulse and points to a novel conception of the author that is represented in the work of Moyra Davey, Chris Kraus, and Maggie Nelson.

Tied to the body, the word “massage” in the mid-1960s was also associated with media, as well as the idea of mass manipulation. Framed through the work of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan and the artist Claes Oldenburg, this essay considers the intersections between media theory and body and performance art.

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.