Barbarism or Barbarism?

Timothy Morton proposes an ecology without nature. In Molecular Red I thought it made more sense to think a nature without ecology, as nature is the more capacious and historically variable term, whereas a logos of the oikos – ecology – is precisely what can no longer be said to ...
Read More
Placeholder

All Power to the {Historical} Imagination!

Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History (Duke University Press, 2014) is an astonishing work of synthetic historical theory. Karatani views world history as a history of modes of exchange. He rejects the classical Marxist view of history though as modes of production, to which political, religious and cultural levels ...
Read More
All Power to the {Historical} Imagination!

How I Got Over

Like most people in the arts, for many years I supported my artistic activities, along with the rest of my life, by holding down a day job. Corporate communications and advertising primarily in financial services were not such a bad gig, actually, and, in fact, were what I trained to ...

Read More
How I Got Over

The Drone of Minerva

The one kind of speculative thought that might be of service in the Anthropocene is surely some kind of philosophy of history, and yet within the academy itself it seems the one nobody wants to actually attempt. It is as if the debates at the end of the last century ...
Read More
The Drone of Minerva

Althusserians Anonymous (2)

This post has been revised, here: https://publicseminar.org/2016/02/aa/ The thing about being a recovering Althusserian is that one can’t help remembering the good times. Being on Althusser really does feel great. It makes certain problems disappear. For example, one is no longer trapped in the oppressive reality of Hegelian Marxism, and yet nor does ...
Read More
Althusserians Anonymous (2)

Extrapolation, not Acceleration

We hoped; we waited for the day The state would wither clean away, Expecting the Millennium That theory promised us would come: It didn’t… W. H. Auden, New Year Letter, 1941 It would appear that in the twenty-first century, we should probably relinquish a faith in a force external to capital, even if generated by it, ...
Read More
Extrapolation, not Acceleration

Accelerationism

There’s a lively debate going on about ‘accelerationism’. As Reza Negarastani has suggested, it might be a way in which big picture speculative thought about historical circumstances has returned after the decline of Marxism. It began with the somewhat hallucinated texts of Nick Land, which saw capitalism as a sort ...
Read More
Placeholder