Sandro Mezzadra, “Deserting the War,” trans. Kelly Mulvaney, transversal texts, March 2022 →.
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2000).
See Paul Raekstad, “Revolutionary Practice and Prefigurative Politics: A Clarification and Defense,” Constellations, no. 25 (2018) →.
Otto Neurath, Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf (Laubsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1928), 19. The declension in the text is “kommender Lebensstimmung.”
Neurath, Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf, 23.
On the genealogy of Lebensform/life-form/form-of-life, see my essay “Habitual Art History,” in In the Maze of Media: Essays on the Pathways of Art after Minimalism, ed. André Rottmann (Transcript, forthcoming 2023).
Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” (1973), in Culture and Materialism (Verso, 2005), 43.
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977), 123.
Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (Verso, 1980), 20.
Williams, Marxism and Literature, 126.
Williams, “Base and Superstructure,” 40.
For this usage, see for instance Selma James, “Sex, Race, and Class” (1974), in Sex, Race, And Class—The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings, 1951–2011 (PM Press, 2012), 97, 100; and Sheila Rowbotham, “The Women’s Movement & Organizing for Socialism” (1979), in Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (Merlin Press, 1979/2013), 181.
James, “Sex, Race, and Class,” 96.
James, “Sex, Race, and Class,” 98, 99, emphasis in original.
For a critique of the notion of the ally, see for instance Laurel Mei-Singh and Davianna Pōmaika‘i McGregor, “To Be Done with Allyship: Towards Oceanic Justice in the Pacific,” The Funambulist, no. 46 (March–April 2023).
More recently, Maurizio Lazzarato has pursued this reading of Tarde. See for instance Lazzarato, “From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life,” trans. Valerie Fournier, Akseli Virtanen and Jussi Vähämäki, Ephemera 4, no. 3 (2004).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2 (1980), trans. Brian Massumi (Bloomsbury, 2013), 255.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 253.
Gabriel Tarde, “Preface to the Second Edition,” The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parsons (Henry Holt, 1903), xiv.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 219, emphasis in original.
Tarde, “Preface to the Second Edition,” Laws of Imitation, xviii.
Gabriel Tarde, “Le Public et la foule” (1898), in L’Opinion et la foule (Félix Alcan, 1901), 48–49, 56–57. Today, as the dialectic of crowds and print publics has given way to one of crowds and networks, parliaments are stormed by mobs organized on Facebook and Telegram. Just like Tarde’s print publics, today’s networks have great criminal potential. Does this becoming-criminal begin when the network materializes as a physical mob, or before?
Denis Staunton, “‘Anger and Hate Easiest Way to Grow on Facebook,’ Says Whistleblower,” Irish Times, October 25, 2021 →.
For the notion of calculated publics, see Tarleton Gillespie, “The Relevance of Algorithms,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo. J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (MIT Press, 2014).
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 20–21.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 22.
Gregory Bateson, “Bali: The Value System of a Steady State” (1949), in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1972).
See Matei Candea, “Revisiting Tarde’s House,” in The Social After Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments (Routledge, 2010), 20n10.
Gregory Bateson, Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View (Cambridge University Press, 1936), 171–197.
Bateson, “Bali,” 113, 115.
Bateson, Naven, 184.
Bateson, Naven, 186.
See the 1958 epilogue in Bateson, Naven.
Rodrigo Nunes, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal (Verso, 2021), 63.
Bateson first developed the concept in the article “Culture Contact and Schismogenesis” in Man, no. 35 (1935), and at book length in Naven.
“Clastres judiciously opposes the verticalizing and centripetal dynamics—differentiation by complementary schismogenesis, as Bateson would say—of the Chibcha, Aruaque and Carib peoples of this zone, to the horizontalizing and centrifugal dynamics—i.e. by symmetrical schismogenesis—which motivates the Tupi-Guarani people, hostile to social stratification.” Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Politique des multiplicités: Pierre Clastres face à l’état (Ed. Dehors, 2019), 88. My translation.
Pierre Clastres, La Société contre l’Etat (Minuit, 1974).
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Allen Lane, 2021), 57, emphasis in original. The motif of schismogenesis also shows up in some previous work by Graeber, such as the “Theses on Kingship” coauthored with Marshall Sahlins, which introduces the line of inquiry pursued in The Dawn of Everything. See Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (Hau Books, n.d. (2017)), 1–22.
Graeber and Wengrow, Dawn of Everything, 27–77.
Graeber and Wengrow, Dawn of Everything, 449–50.
Graeber and Wengrow, Dawn of Everything, 231.
For cautioning remarks about the dangers of disregarding “collective struggle by actual minorities” in favor of “creative minorities yet to come,” see Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2010), 71.
Isabelle Stengers, “Comparison as a Matter of Concern,” in Common Knowledge 17, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 59.
See also Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. Andrew Goffey (Open Humanities Press/Meson Press, 2015), 23–24.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 239.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 64.
John Narayan, “Huey P. Newton’s Intercommunalism: An Unacknowledged Theory of Empire,” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 3 (2019): 1–2. Patterns of misogynist violence in the Black Panther Party must be addressed as part of an overall reassessment of the movement’s strengths and shortcomings.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Harvard University Press, 2009), 336.
Huey P. Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974), Viewpoint Magazine, June 11, 2018 →.
Newton, “Intercommunalism.” An early lecture by Newton on intercommunalism was published in The Black Panther 5, no. 30 (January 23, 1971). The newpaper would soon change its subtitle from Black Community News Service to Intercommunal News Service.
Newton, “Intercommunalism.”
Delio Vásquez avers that “the Oakland chapter ended up in practice functioning as yet another political body, in addition to the FBI and local police, that some local chapters found themselves pitted against.” Vásquez, “Intercommunalism: The Late Theorizations of Huey P. Newton, ‘Chief Theoretician’ of the Black Panther Party,” Viewpoint Magazine, June 11, 2018 →.
Newton, “Intercommunalism.”
See Jared Leighton, “‘All of Us Are Unapprehended Felons’: Gay Liberation, the Black Panther Party, and Intercommunal Efforts Against Police Brutality in the Bay Area,” Journal of Social History 52, no. 3 (2019).
Newton, “Intercommunalism.”
Narayan, “Huey P. Newton’s Intercommunalism,” 15, 18.
Quoted in Narayan, “Huey P. Newton’s Intercommunalism,” 16.
Hardt and Negri read Newton’s anti-identitarianism as “the basis of Paul Gilroy’s efforts to shift the discourse of black politics toward an abolition of race.” Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 336.
Here I am combining elements from statements by both Jameson and Hall in “Interview with Stuart Hall” (1990), in Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism, ed. Ian Buchanan (Duke University Press, 2007), 120. This conversation originally appeared in the September 1990 issue of Marxism Today under the telling title “Clinging to the Fragments.”
Jameson in “Interview with Stuart Hall,” 114. For Jameson’s Williams-derived notion of postmodernism as “cultural dominant,” see Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991), 6.
Hall in “Interview with Stuart Hall,” 116.
See the second and definitive edition of the conference volume edited by Anthony D. King, Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System, 32, 34.
Hall in “Interview with Stuart Hall,” 118.
Hall in “Interview with Stuart Hall,” 118.
Hall, “The Local and the Global,” 34.
This essay is based on a chapter of my forthcoming book States of Divergence. For various reasons, including feedback on early drafts or for productive comments at conferences and symposia, I would like to thank James Clifford, Stewart Martin, and Stevphen Shukaitis.