Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (On Alexander Bogdanov and Kim Stanley Robinson)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “‘Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848 (London: Verso, London, 2010), 70. See also Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988). Of course, much of the resonance of this phrase is an artifact of translation: “Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft”: All that stands steams into statements.

Elmar Altvater, The Future of the Market, London: Verso, 1993. Altvater is also useful in showing why the Soviet planning system could not compete against the West, without in the process becoming the latter’s cheerleader. In both cases, the attempt to make labor more “‘efficient” was fossil-fueled.

For a quick review, see Kerry Emmanuel, What We Know About Climate Change (Cambridge, MA: Boston Review Books, 2007), or the poignantly titled “‘Summary for Policymakers” to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 3–32. For some context, see The Global Warming Reader, ed. Bill McKibben (New York: O/R Books), 2011. Naturally, the Carbon Liberation Front was articulated with other (non)social movements, methane liberation, for example. In the last chapter of Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), I use methane as the molecular fulcrum for a critical theory of the totality.

On climate deniers, see Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).

See Andrew Ross, Bird On Fire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), for an excellent case study on “green” politics and consumerism which spatially displaces problems onto the less powerful without solving them.

See John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009); Allan Stoekl’s Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), is particularly effective on the carbon footprint measuring obsession.

This would map both my agreement and disagreement with the “accelerationists.” See #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, eds. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014); e-flux journal 46 (June 2013), at e-flux.com; and Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside, ed. Gean Moreno (Miami, FL: [Name] Books, 2013).

“There is another world, and it is this one,” was a slogan much used in the antiglobalization movement. It probably comes from Paul Éluard, Donner à voir, published in 1939, which can be found in his Oeuvres completes, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 986.

See Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

Here I agree with a point Bernard Stiegler has made: Foucault privileges the study of military and religious practices of power/knowledge, but there are others, and indeed labor movement practices of worker education are a signal omission.

Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience, trans. David G. Rowley (forthcoming), ms, 9–10.

Ibid., 12.

Bogdanov adopted the concept of the basic metaphor from the philologist and Sanskrit scholar Max Müller. See the remarks by Goveli in Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia, eds. John Biggart et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 106.

Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience, ms, 32.

The relation between exchange relations and Greek philosophy was later developed, probably independently, by George Derwent Thomson, Benjamin Farrington, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel.

Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience, ms, 32.

See J. D. Bernal, Science in History, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 575ff.

Cited in K. M. Jensen, Beyond Marx and Mach: Aleksandr Bogdanov’s Philosophy of Living Experience (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978), 47.

See Alexander Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), which uses the work of François Laruelle for a critique of exchange with the other as a general model of philosophical thought.

Karl Marx, “Concerning Feuerbach,” in Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 421. This is the most cited text of Marx or Engels in Bogdanov. See Vadim Sadovsky, “From Empiriomonism to Tektology,” in Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia, eds. Biggart et al., 44.

On the evolution of the concept of substitution in Bogdanov, see Daniela Steila, “From Experience to Organization,” in Aleksandr Bogdanov Revisited, ed. Vesa Oittinen (Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute, 2009), 151ff.

Cited in Jensen, Beyond Marx and Mach, 119.

Cited in ibid., 122.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), 32; on Arkady and Alexander Bogdanov, see Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars (New York: Bantam Books, 1996), 667. For a selection of key critical readings of Robinson’s work as science fiction, see Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable, ed. William Burling (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009).

On Defoe, see Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London: Verso, 2013), 25ff. I am rather bending his excellent formal analysis of Crusoe to my own purposes here.

On over-identification in theory and practice, see Alexei Monroe, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

A. J. Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See the Foreword by Fredric Jameson. See also Robinson, Red Mars, 219; Green Mars (New York: Bantam Books, 1995), 368; Blue Mars, 53. See also Kim Stanley Robinson, The Martians (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), which contains not only chapters omitted from the Mars Trilogy, but intimations of quite different plot lines that could take place through the same literary space of possibility.

On Robinson’s critical relation to the terraforming literature, see Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 355ff.

There is a nod to Brecht in Blue Mars, 611ff. See Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on

Robinson, Green Mars, 376. On science fiction and ecology, see Green Planet: Ecology and Science Fiction,eds.Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 2014).

Robinson, Red Mars, 59–61.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica (New York: Bantam, 2002). On the study of actually existing utopias, see Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso, 2010).

Robinson, Red Mars, 89.

Ibid., 342, emphasis changed. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), assesses the social science that would support this view.

On the critique of sacrifice, see Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel Press, 2001). If the Chevengurians all ate the scapegoat to share the guilt, on this Mars, nobody knows who was really responsible for the death of John Boone, and guilt is free floating and diffused. Both Frank and Maya are widely regarded as the guilty ones. In Bogdanov there is much less emphasis on sacrificing the bourgeoisie than on the affirmative task of organizing labor. Given how one sacrifice led to another in Bolshevik thinking, and in Chevengur, it’s a salient point.

Robinson, Red Mars, 257. See Carl Abbott, “Homesteading on the Extraterrestrial Frontier,” Science Fiction Studies vol. 32 (2005): 240–64, which puts Robinson in the context of science fiction and other writing about homesteading the west.

Robinson, Red Mars, 314.

Ibid., 378.

Ibid., 293.

Ibid., 266, 343.

Ibid., 177–9.

See Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or What It Is To Be a Thing (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

Robinson, Blue Mars, 97. On metaphysical concepts of life, see Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Robinson, Red Mars, 471.

Robinson, Blue Mars, 55.

Robinson, Green Mars, 9, see also 358–9 and Red Mars, 211, 332, 228–9.

Almost a “Deleuzian” one. See Blue Mars, 640.

Robinson, Red Mars, 230.

Ibid., 347.

Ibid., 221. See Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

Robinson, Red Mars, 323, 427.

Robinson, Green Mars, 223. One could read the three volumes, and the three revolutions, as being about David Graeber’s three modes of social organization: hierarchy, exchange, communism, which incidentally could also be mapped onto Bogdanov’s three basic metaphors. See David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011).

Robinson, Red Mars, 465.

Ibid., 395.

Ibid., 403.

Ibid., 457–8.

As in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets), 2006, 9.

One could relate this to Ray Brassier’s invocation of Sellars’s distinction between folk and scientific images of thought, although the differences will also become apparent. See Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience, ms, 6.

Ibid., 12.

See David K. Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002). Bogdanov derives the term “worldview” from Dilthey, although his understanding of their origins and purpose is quite different. Bogdanov is mentioned in Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1955), 331, as a forerunner to the sociology of knowledge, most likely for his organizational theory of worldviews.