Issue 165

Political and intellectual developments don’t emerge in a vacuum. They react to crisis and technological change, but also cause crisis and foment changes necessary to confront them. The invention of the ship, to gloss Paul Virilio, is the invention of the shipwreck, but it is also the condition for new ways of understanding the world before, during, and after the wreck. Furthermore, we should not forget that strange historical motors exist at the farthest possible points from centers of political power and its incumbent gravitational forces and institutions, often confusing or undermining the causal flow of events that structure the way we understand historical and technological development. 

In this issue, Boris Groys is interviewed by Svetlana Baskova in the first in a series of conversations conducted in Russian and translated into English. Here, Groys recalls his childhood and formative years, taking us through his experiences amongst currents of heterodox thinking. He begins with his youth as a sickly child in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns, before diving into the Leningrad underground. Later, he ends up in a seaside Crimean town populated by a multigenerational milieu of Soviet literary figures and artists. In Groys’s occasionally hilarious recollections, it was here that his bare curiosity and voracious reading habits first found a home amidst the brilliant and eccentric people hiding out there, writing, and hosting endless parties. Groys was surrounded by sophisticated survivors of life under Stalin who had found a place to cultivate alternative ways of life against or beyond history. He demonstrates how modes of thinking and living differently come together against dominant historical events, in the margins and on the beach.  

The inability to control expected catastrophes, and our imagination of them, often breeds melancholia; when turbocharged and fed back on itself, fortress-building becomes one of many manic responses to the passing of a liberal order that was never very convincing to begin with. Zooming out onto macro-histories, Henrike Kohpeiß probes the affective dimensions of impending war and ongoing genocide, before also turning to the scale of biography to track how the effects of militarism subtly radicalize psyches and produce new inner worlds. Kohpeiß proposes that war and militarization are sold as a kind of grief work for a political order in the absence of a clear vision of what follows. 

Existing sciences can be easily perverted to serve the aims of the dominant order they might have seemed to upend. Antonia Majaca finds two grammars animating contemporary techno-fascism: counting and clearing. While both were fundamental logics for settler-colonialism from the outset, she describes how they were systematized into theories of energy and sovereignty, respectively, and justified by perverse readings of Darwin. In this way, the dominance of a species is mapped onto the state, and only forms of social organization that prioritize maximum extraction and maximum destruction (and thus maximum surplus) are made to seem like the fittest, obscuring other forms of communal energy exchange that subsist at the margins. 

Even tendencies that try to seek alternate histories may struggle to distinguish themselves from the dominant “terms of order,” as Cedric Robinson framed them. For example, Afrofuturism has provided vivid and visionary projections of the possibility for African or Afrocentric technologies that meet or exceed those of Western development. But for Charles Tonderai Mudede, a core contradiction lies in technology being always already a product of Western capitalism. Without resolving that relationship, the reach of any non-Western technology can only be limited to redecorating the forward march of capital with cultural motifs and flourishes. But perhaps certain strains of Afrofuturist thought have already opened ways past this problem by treating capitalist futurity’s gadget phantasmagoria as hurtling towards waste and obsolescence. And the imagination of actual advancement—technological or otherwise—is already a necessary leap over its inevitable ruin. 

But what other ways of thinking and living together might still be possible as the world continues to end again and again? Might artistic gestures and tools be particularly capable of critically examining the technologies of a techno-fascist AI populism? T. J. Demos suggests that rather than only using art to ironically lampoon the rampant idiocies driving a techno-populist takeover of bodies and minds, a left populism can emerge through compelling aesthetic and political projects. The task, he argues, is to bring such cultural projects into collaboration with social, labor, and political movements already on the frontlines of struggles against technology-enabled genocide, exploitation, and extraction. McKenzie Wark also turns to the history of revolutionary theory in her vigorous, critical engagement with a recent book that tries to take on the “Marx-pilled canon.” In the book—Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo—Wark finds inventive prose and some compelling jabs. However, she also invites the authors (and us) to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Marx’s theory of history as being driven by class struggle, for example, remains paramount if we are not to swallow other pills on offer. 

Lastly, Andreas Petrossiants speaks with Neil Gray about his book Take Over the City: Spatial Composition in Italian Autonomy, which offers a dedicated history of the urban practices and hidden spatial character of operaismo and autonomia. They discuss the book’s key contributions, particularly Gray’s notion of “spatial composition,” a method for reading urban development and political movements from the perspective of class struggle. Squatting movements, mass rent strikes, and “proletarian shopping” across the peninsula throughout the 1970s were not just expressions of popular unrest, but moments in the larger struggle against an emerging neoliberal reorganization of space. Perhaps returning to them can unearth tactics for reappraisal or appropriation in the present. 

 —Editors

Boris Groys in conversation with Svetlana Baskova—They Lived a Cosmic Life
In a way, many of these people were very private. They didn’t think of themselves in terms of career, success, and so on. None of this existed for them; they had been through too much. They cultivated themselves as people who simply lived, who simply took pleasure in life. What I mean is that there were many people in Koktebel who had chosen this kind of extra-historical, anti-historical, alternative way of life, something I was not capable of. And I looked at them with admiration because I myself was not capable of it. All these social and political situations, national and other problems, did not affect them. They were in contact with the sea, with the air, with the sand, with something completely different—they lived a cosmic life. This always fascinated me. It is the real alternative: an extra-historical mode of existence.

Henrike Kohpeiß—When the War Comes: Erosion, Transition, and Manic Melancholia
Beyond the case of Sweden and the Cold War, what is an adequate ethical response, from within the imperial center, to the experience of imperial decline? There is not only one adequate response, and it is not possible to socially prescribe an affective or moral posture, even if we had one in mind. But pondering it is necessary in order to find ways for the current transition to be less violent—no matter how unlikely a nonviolent outcome might seem at the moment.

Antonia Majaca—How Much Fascism in the Maximum Power Principle?
I want to suggest that Sam Altman’s arithmetic, the seizure of Venezuela, and the demand for Greenland all depend upon the same underlying structure, on two ways of ordering the world that operate in tandem. I call them counting and clearing. The former literally takes everything into its energetic accounting, living or inert, bison or bauxite, the child and the server. Energy-as-currency is indifferent to whether the energetic quantity was ever alive; indeed, that indifference is the whole point. Clearing acts on what is already there, which is almost always the living: people, prior use, historical metabolic relations, coral, olive groves. Often, the living is cleared in order to count the matter. While counting presents itself as a given, or as a law of nature, clearing declares a decision and presents itself as an act of sovereignty.

Charles Tonderai Mudede—Neptune Frost and the Final Future of Afrofuturism
We finally knew what we were talking about when reading Octavia Butler, listening to Drexciya, or watching Black Panther. Despite the success of this unification, the definition of Afrofuturism proved over the years to be a loose bag. And a good part of this looseness can be attributed to the fact that the initial codification of Afrofuturism, though highly theoretical, still lacked an adequate theory of technological development, which capitalism does not at all lack. Why has technology progressed so rapidly and so continuously in capitalist culture? Nothing like “better, stronger, faster” exists anywhere else in our historical or archeological records, whether in dirt or in books.

T. J. Demos—Populism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Fascism
Given its pervasive visibility and disproportionate resources, populism appears to be the cultural logic of late fascism. Yet populism is better understood as a contested terrain rather than a settled formation. The question then becomes how this struggle might unfold further within the cultural sphere, and under what conditions might a left populism emerge as a compelling political and aesthetic project.

McKenzie Wark—Lifted AF
Modes of production have always been plural, interlocking, mutually dependent even if arranged in hierarchies of dominance and compliance. The job is to work out how that’s developed and changed since the days of capitalism as an emerging world system—as it was in Marx’s time. What I think Poliks and Trillo are grappling with, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, is a new mode of production. What we call it matters less than to turn language against itself so that language might yield the concepts that make the world seem strange again, and in need of close attention to even begin to understand. 

Neil Gray in conversation with Andreas Petrossiants—Spatial Composition
The concept of spatial composition is developed from the operaist conceptions of class composition and “the tendency,” as well as from Marxist urban theory, particularly the notion of the tendential urbanization of capital. These ideas are described in depth in the first half of the book, providing a theoretical framework for the more historical work in the latter half. Since class composition analysis has not been broadly surveyed in English-language publications, I aimed to provide a relatively comprehensive summary, believing, like Steve Wright, that it is the most important of all the concepts developed within Italian operaismo.