Visualizzazione post con etichetta McKenzie Wark. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta McKenzie Wark. Mostra tutti i post
lunedì 30 ottobre 2017
lunedì 16 maggio 2016
McKenzie Wark: The Sublime Language of My Century @ Public Seminar, May 14, 2016
The Sublime Language of My Century
(...) Another way to tackle this would be impute some meaning to Marx’s famous remark to the effect that he was not a Marxist. What if what he meant by that is that he was not one of those who simply took a language and a rhetorical form extracted from his texts as a given? He was, to the contrary, the one who had constructed that language with a quite particular purpose in mind: to understand the situation of his times from the labor point of view. So: what if we kept the commitment to understanding, not his times, but ours, from the labor point of view, whatever that might mean now — and bracketed off the rest?
That makes a certain sense to me. I really am puzzled by why we should use blocks of linguistic material from his time again to understand our time. Why use the fashionable philosophy, the popular science, the political tracts, or the technological metaphors of the mid-nineteenth century? When poets or novelists do that, we immediately think its dated and quaint. But somehow we want our great narrative to be about capitalism, even if it is dated and quaint.
Of course different genres of text have a different relationship to tradition and innovation, and at different moments in their development. They aren’t always in synch. And of course there’s generally a culture industry in which the texts get pulped into sameness, and an avant-garde trying to do something else. If you are trying to write an interesting, rather than merely successful, novel or poem, you want to change things at the formal level, rather than ship your wine in the same old bottles. The thing is, where readings and rewritings of Marx are concerned, they seem to me to belong to the culture industry. Its a commonplace now to read Capital as a work of philosophy or an epic novel, but to do so very conservatively. And indeed could there be anything more conservative now that the tradition of continental philosophy? (...)
Read more @ Public Seminar
venerdì 27 febbraio 2015
Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene by McKenzie Wark @ Verso Books, Uk, April 2015
Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene
In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other.
Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the Russian revolution, Wark unearths the work of Alexander Bogdanov—Lenin’s rival—as well as the great Proletkult writer and engineer Andrey Platonov.
The Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for the new organizational challenges of our time. From deep within the Californian military-entertainment complex, Wark retrieves Donna Haraway’s cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian utopia as powerful resources for rethinking and remaking the world that climate change has wrought. Molecular Red proposes an alternative realism, where hope is found in what remains and endures.
Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the Russian revolution, Wark unearths the work of Alexander Bogdanov—Lenin’s rival—as well as the great Proletkult writer and engineer Andrey Platonov.
The Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for the new organizational challenges of our time. From deep within the Californian military-entertainment complex, Wark retrieves Donna Haraway’s cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian utopia as powerful resources for rethinking and remaking the world that climate change has wrought. Molecular Red proposes an alternative realism, where hope is found in what remains and endures.
KKKKK
An unavoidable topic for thinking about the future in the twenty-first century has to be the question of the Anthropocene. Any kind of critical social thought really has to come to terms with the fact that 'nature' is no longer an external or constant given. When the geologists, of all people, start saying that signs of human meddling are showing up even in the rocks, then its time to pay attention. That is why, in Molecular Red (due out this April with Verso) I subtitled the book 'Theory for the Anthropocene'. But not everyone is happy with the term Anthropocene and some of its implications. In my view this is partly a real issue and partly a distraction. In the extract adapted from Molecular Red below I try to briefly map out this problem.
Notes on the Anthropocene
Disparate times call for disparate methods. Let’s just say that this is the end of pre-history, this moment when planetary constraints start really coming to bear on the ever-expanding universe of the commodification of everything. This is the worldview-changing realization that some now call the Anthropocene. Let’s not despair. Some of the greatest accelerations in the life of our species-being have happened in moments of limit, if never before on such a scale.
Notes on the Anthropocene
Disparate times call for disparate methods. Let’s just say that this is the end of pre-history, this moment when planetary constraints start really coming to bear on the ever-expanding universe of the commodification of everything. This is the worldview-changing realization that some now call the Anthropocene. Let’s not despair. Some of the greatest accelerations in the life of our species-being have happened in moments of limit, if never before on such a scale.
The Anthropocene is the name Paul Crutzen and others give to this period of geological time upon which the planet has entered. Crutzen: “About 30-50% of the planet’s land surface is exploited by humans…. More than half of all accessible fresh water is used by mankind. Fisheries remove more than 25% of the primary production un upwelling ocean regions… Energy use has grown 16-fold during the twentieth century… More nitrogen fertilizer is applied in agriculture than is fixed naturally in all terrestrial ecosystems.”
giovedì 26 febbraio 2015
McKenzie Wark and Franco Berardi: (1/2+2/2) Italian Media Theorist & Cultural Agitator “Bifo” w/ McKenzie Wark @ Not an Alternative
(1/2) Italian Media Theorist & Cultural Agitator “Bifo” w/ MacKenzie Wark from Not An Alternative on Vimeo.
(2/2) Italian Media Theorist & Cultural Agitator “Bifo” w/ MacKenzie Wark from Not An Alternative on Vimeo.
Friday February 27th 2015, 1pm-2pm At Institute of Contemporary Art, The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH Culture Now: Franco “Bifo” Berardi will discuss HEROES with Professor Benjamin Noys. For more information and to book: https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/culture-now-franco-bifo-berardi