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 habit first found a home amidst the brilliant and eccentric people hiding out there, writing, and hosting endless parties. Groys found himself 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.