Though Marx was an admirer of Darwin, he wrote: “It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and the Malthusian struggle for existence.” Marx to Engels, June 18, 1862, in Selected Correspondence, ed. S.W. Ryazanskaya, trans. I. Lasker (Moscow: Progess, 1965), 128. Quoted in David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso, 2010), 191.
Unless you are God, who doesn’t depend on anything or anyone.
Tom Holert, “Ships in Doubt and the Totality of Possible Events,” e-flux journal, no. 101 (June 2019) →.
And not just any threat, but a virus—a nonhuman force that overwhelms all of humanity like films in the 1990s when, apparently struggling for planetary-scale adversaries following the Cold War and Fukuyama’s declaration at having arrived at a universally satisfied state of being, Hollywood looked to weather events, ecological aberrations, alien invasions, and that sort of wild or sublime outside for ambient horror. I remember that many of these films carried a sense of desperation in the way they conjured apocalyptic threats that seemed to come mainly from having too much time on one’s hands, not unlike the way people sealed off in the virtual worlds and Truman Show bubbles of wealthy neighborhoods are haunted by visions of rapists, burglars, or minorities appearing as if from their own guilty conscience to ruin a way of life they suspect conceals a hidden violence already. Today, just such an ambient violence has merged with human bodies and human lifeworlds to assert its own universalism in the negative.
Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), 204.
Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (Routledge, 2002), 87: “The price of human life, which is to say, of anthropo-theological life, the price of what ought to remain safe (heilig, sacred, safe and sound, unscathed, immune), as the absolute price, the price of what ought to inspire respect, modesty, reticence, this price is priceless. It corresponds to what Kant calls the dignity (Würdigkeit) of the end in itself, of the rational finite being, of absolute value beyond all comparative market price (Marktpreis). This dignity of life can only subsist beyond the present living being. Whence, transcendence, fetishism and spectrality; whence, the religiosity of religion. This excess above and beyond the living, whose life only has absolute value by being worth more than life, more than itself—this, in short, is what opens the space of death that is linked to the automaton (exemplarily “phallic”), to technics, the machine, the prosthesis: in a word, to the dimensions of auto-immune and self-sacrificial supplementarity, to this death-drive that is silently at work in every community, every auto-eo-immunity, constituting it as such in its iterability, its heritage, its spectral tradition.”
Bruno Latour even compiled a questionnaire: →.
“The new industries only became important with the change from the tool to machine and from workshop to factory. This involved the transformation of the working middle classes into a toiling proletariat and at the same time transformed the wholesaler into the factory owner. This process involved the disappearance of the lower middle class and the emergence of a society in which workers and capitalists were sharply differentiated. But this process of social change was not confined to industry in the narrow sense of the term. It occurred also in craft work and even in commerce. Former masters and apprentices were replaced by large capitalists and workers. … Craftsmanship was now replaced by factory production. … The result was that the small master could no longer compete with the big factories and so sank to the position of a mere worker.” Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chaloner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 24.
See, for example, Yuk Hui, “On Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Relation between Technology and Nature in the Anthropocene,” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 21, no. 2–3 (2017): 1–23.
Yuk Hui, “Introduction: A Psychedelic Becoming,” in Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019), §2, “Invisible Nature, Visible Mind.”
Unless you are a Buddhist or Benjamin Button, of course.
Hui, Recursivity and Contingency: “Life also exhibits such complexity, since it expects the unexpected, and in every encounter it attempts to turn the unexpected into an event that can contribute to its singularity.”
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015), 28.
Middle English enforme, informe, “give form or shape to,” also “form the mind of, teach,” from Old French enfourmer, from Latin informare, “shape, fashion, describe,” from in- “into” + forma “a form.”
Hui, Recursivity and Contingency.
Vladan Joler and Matteo Pasquinelli recently published their Nooscope modeling the limits of artificial intelligence (“how it works and how it fails” through “the broad spectrum of errors, limitations, approximations, biases, faults, fallacies and vulnerabilities that are native” not to “a monolithic paradigm of rationality but a spurious architecture made of adapting techniques and tricks”), →
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “After the Last Man: Images and Ethics of Becoming Otherwise,” e-flux journal, no. 35 (May 2012) →: “But if the dominant image of this theory of desire and democracy begins as a horizon, it ends as something very different. If liberal democracy is the horizon of desire already inscribed in the fight for recognition (the orientation and end of human becoming, and thus the end of history itself), then when liberal democracy has been universally achieved, human historical becoming collapses into a satisfied human state of being. The horizon then becomes what I will call a surround, a form of enclosure without a wall or gate. The surround is without an opening. It is an infinity of homogeneous space and time. It is an ‘everywhere at the same time’ and a ‘nowhere else.’ One can go here or there in the surround but it really makes no difference because there are no meaningful distinctions left to orient oneself—to determine where one goes or what one believes or holds true.”
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 149–81.
From a talk by Goldin+Senneby at School of Visual Arts’ MA Curatorial Practice November 2018. All following quotations by them are from the same lecture. See also the wonderful 2017 documentary The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire on Britain’s transition from a territorial empire to a financial one (where financial presence replaced bodily presence) as a broker for money laundering. Key in this is the special status of the City of London, designed from its inception as an exceptional and extra-political accounting shell game: →.
See Yuk Hui’s essay “One Hundred Years of Crisis,” e-flux journal, no. 108 (April 2020) →.
Jacques Derrida, “The Pharmakon,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (University of Chicago Press, 1981), 101–2: “The immortality and perfection of a living being would consist in its having no relation at all with any outside. That is the case with God (cf. Republic II, 38 lb-c). God has no allergies. Health and virtue (hugieia kai aretē), which are often associated in speaking of the body and, analogously, of the soul (cf. Gorgias, 479b), always proceed from within. The pharmakon is that which, always springing up from without, acting like the outside itself, will never have any definable virtue of its own. But how can this supplementary parasite be excluded by maintaining the boundary, or, let us say, the triangle?”
Which has been completely rewritten from zero, so we might say that this essay is named after their exhibition!
Maria Lind, “What Is Wrong with My Nose: From Gogol and Freud to Goldin+Senneby (via Haraway),” e-flux journal, no. 108 (April 2020) →.
Paul B. Preciado, “Learning from the Virus,” Artforum (May–June 2020) →. “We must go from a forced mutation to a chosen mutation. We must operate a critical reappropriation of biopolitical techniques and their pharmacopornographic devices. First, it is imperative to modify the relationship between our bodies and biovigilant machines of biocontrol: They are not only communication devices. We must learn collectively to alter them. We must also learn to de-alienate ourselves. Governments are calling for confinement and telecommuting. We know they are calling for de-collectivization and telecontrol. Let us use the time and strength of confinement to study the tradition of struggle and resistance among racial and sexual minority cultures that have helped us survive until now. Let us turn off our cell phones, let us disconnect from the internet. Let us stage a big blackout against the satellites observing us, and let us consider the coming revolution together.”
Ed Cohen, “Self, Not-Self, Not Not-Self But Not Self, or The Knotty Paradoxes of ‘Autoimmunity’: A Genealogical Rumination,” Parallax 23 no. 1, p. 29. →
Ibid., p. 32.
Ibid., p. 32 (Emphasis in original).
Ibid., p. 32.
See also Sophia Roosth, Synthetic: How Life Got Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)
Consider the seemingly endless stories of patriarchs who dutifully protect their families while also creating a combustible model trainset world made of their own fears and lies, from Breaking Bad to the Godfather trilogy to The Sopranos, to name just a few. I remember years ago reading Slavoj Žižek describing Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful as a “reverse of the decline of paternal authority,” which seems to suggest that celebrating the patriarch as an empty sign leads to a far worse kind of strongman. “Why Is the Truth Monstrous?” in The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000), 75.