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utopologist's review against another edition
4.0
These four stars are mostly for the final section on Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, which is a tremendous analysis of its political and theoretical themes. I skimmed over most of the rest (although the first section on Alexander Bogdanov was also fascinating).
utopologist's review
4.0
These four stars are mostly for the final section on Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, which is a tremendous analysis of its political and theoretical themes. I skimmed over most of the rest (although the first section on Alexander Bogdanov was also fascinating).
versfobia's review
3.0
Muy desparejo. Los capítulos sobre Bogdanov y Haraway, muy interesantes; los capítulos sobre Platonov y Robinson, muy malos.
Al fin y al cabo, el problema es que Wark pasa demasiado tiempo discutiendo otrxs autorxs en lugar de avanzar en su síntesis particular de los temas que trabaja. La propuesta del libro es excelente: la reconstrucción de una teoría política a la altura de los desafíos del Antropoceno buceando en la historia olvidada del marxismo. La rehabilitación de Bogdanov como prehistoria del pensamiento contemporáneo es excelente, y la reconstrucción de la ciencia a partir de reensamblar sus elementos epistemológicos constitutivos está muy bien justificada. Uno termina acordando con la mayoría de las tesis del libro: el pasaje de una teoría alta a una baja, el cuestionamiento al realismo especulativo, el "punto de vista del trabajo", etc.
Pero en los capítulos sobre Platonov y Robinson (el 2 y el 4, respectivamente), lo único que hay son extensos resúmenes de libros de ciencia ficción, con muy poco análisis. Preferiría haber leído directamente esos libros, o, mejor aún, no haberlos leído.
Al fin y al cabo, el problema es que Wark pasa demasiado tiempo discutiendo otrxs autorxs en lugar de avanzar en su síntesis particular de los temas que trabaja. La propuesta del libro es excelente: la reconstrucción de una teoría política a la altura de los desafíos del Antropoceno buceando en la historia olvidada del marxismo. La rehabilitación de Bogdanov como prehistoria del pensamiento contemporáneo es excelente, y la reconstrucción de la ciencia a partir de reensamblar sus elementos epistemológicos constitutivos está muy bien justificada. Uno termina acordando con la mayoría de las tesis del libro: el pasaje de una teoría alta a una baja, el cuestionamiento al realismo especulativo, el "punto de vista del trabajo", etc.
Pero en los capítulos sobre Platonov y Robinson (el 2 y el 4, respectivamente), lo único que hay son extensos resúmenes de libros de ciencia ficción, con muy poco análisis. Preferiría haber leído directamente esos libros, o, mejor aún, no haberlos leído.
chalicotherex's review against another edition
2.0
The scientific recognition that collective human labor is causing climate change could well be one of those great discontinuities in perspective such as the heliocentric universe of Copernicus and Galileo, the evolution of species in Darwin and Wallace, and what Althusser rather problematically calls Marx’s opening up of the “continent of history.” In the Anthropocene, some neutral, pre-given planetary nature is no longer available as a fiction of the real. We fucked it up.
A lot going on here. The author looks at the life and works of four very different writers (Bogdanov, Platonov, Donna Haraway and Kim Stanley Robinson) for theories we can use in the anthropocene. I liked how he came up with the term Carbon Liberation Front for the fossil fuel industry, and metabolic rift (an old marxist term) for climate change.
I really want to read Platonov now (his writing method was really cool, and same with his idea for a literature factory), and Bogdanov (or at least his science fiction). I'm still not sure about Haraway. And of course KSR has always been one of my favourites.
Things I underlined:
Powerful interests still deny the existence of the Carbon Liberation Front.12 Those authorities attentive to the evidence of this metabolic rift usually imagine four ways of mitigating its effects. One is that the market will take care of everything. Another proposes that all we need is new technology. A third imagines a social change in which we all become individually accountable for quantifying and limiting our own carbon “footprint.” A fourth is a romantic turn away from the modern, from technology, as if the rift is made whole when a privileged few shop at the farmer’s market for artisanal cheese.13 None of these four solutions seems quite the thing.
In the age of the Carbon Liberation Front, even sunny California can seem like a vision haunted in advance by its own ruins.
The basic metaphor, the one which posits an image of causality, is just a special instance of a broader practice of thought. All philosophies explain the world by metaphorical substitution.51 A great example in which Marx himself participates would be the way metabolism moves between fields, from respiration in mammals to agricultural science to social-historical metabolism. Substitution extends from the experience of either nature or labor as resistance (materialism or idealism). But in either case, progress in knowledge is limited. The result tends to be the thought of activity without matter or of matter without activity. This is the problem which “dialectical materialism” imagines itself to have solved, although it has done so only abstractly.
Here Bogdanov retains a rather authoritarian worldview, but imposed on nature, rather than on a subordinate class. That there can be unintended effects of such interventions on a resistant nature has not quite occurred to him as a concept, even though he intuits it, as shown in the peak energy and climate change problems confronting his Commie Martians in Red Star. Bogdanov has not entirely overcome the authoritarian streak in his own activity. He may not be a Leninist, but he still thinks like a Bolshevik. His thought is marked by the organizational limits of his times. But then, as good Bogdanovites, we know all philosophies are bound to their era and do not touch the eternal. Or as Guy Debord once put it: “Theories are made to die in the war of time.”
Bogdanov did not anticipate deskilling, or the counter-attack via which capital used technology to prevent the accumulation of knowledge by workers in the workplace. He did not anticipate that the ruling class would so effectively co-opt the surpluses of time and information, let alone of life.
Proletkult was a movement with a mission: to change labor, by merging art and work; to change everyday life, by developing the collaborative life within the city and changing gender roles and norms; and to change affect, to create new structures of feeling, to overcome the emotional friction of organizing the labor that in turn organizes nature around its appetites.
Realizing Proletkult’s mission was the aim of a threefold practice:
Creativity—to overturn the fetish of the individual creator; to reveal the role of the unconscious in creation. The newspaper was the model of a collective creativity. One might note that all significant Marxists were also great journalists, and often editors and publishers as well, starting with Marx himself.84
Collectivity—to work in groups and express the sensations of group life. Bogdanov did not however want to submerge singularities. His is rather the community those who have nothing in common.85 His Martians, for example, were far from indistinguishable numbers, and their cooperation is imperfect.
Universalism—to break down the division of labor. This raised the problem of professionalism: should Proletkult have professional artists? When the going gets weird, as it did in the civil war, even as weird a writer as Andrey Platonov could turn pro, although in the end his professional success was meager. Professional specialization remained a conceptual problem for the whole life of the movement.
Proletarian culture is not an end in itself, and in this regard Proletkult is different to most flavors of workerism. It can tend to a certain fetishism of its limited perspective, rather than trying to expand out toward the most general account of the experience of the world. The violent rejection of bourgeois culture is no better than naive atheism. It is not able to put up anything as an alternative. The proletariat need Proletarian culture is not an end in itself, and in this regard Proletkult is different to most flavors of workerism. It can tend to a certain fetishism of its limited perspective, rather than trying to expand out toward the most general account of the experience of the world. The violent rejection of bourgeois culture is no better than naive atheism. It is not able to put up anything as an alternative. The proletariat needs a point of view through which to assimilate the past. Proletarian détournement is not then a matter of picking out the bits that seem “revolutionary.” The proletariat should be self-developing rather than self-mythologizing.86
The word organ, from the Greek via the Latin organum, can mean a tool, but also a part of the body. The seed of Bogdanov’s thought is contained within the metaphorical leap of this primary term. A tool is an external organ of a body; an organ is an internal tool of a body.101 And as to what then defines a body, when its organs can be outside and tools can be inside—that then gets rather interesting. “If several workers work at one machine, then as far as their system of collaboration is concerned, their relation to this machine, which binds them together, is an internal connection of the system, although this is a relation to a spatially external object.”102 What is inside and outside a system can be different to what is inside and outside an object or body. As we shall see, troubling kinds of fetishism can arise out of perceiving the body and not what organizes behind its appearance.
Metaphor is the tektology of the everyday, a movement in language that recognizes the connection and relation of all things, but it has to be subject to verifiable experiment. While more positive about metaphor than Mach, Bogdanov is aware of the possibility that the substitution of ideas from one scale of organization to another that abounds in tektology might be no more than metaphorical.111 Old habits of thought can lead to false analogies. A bee hive is not presided over by a “queen,” for instance. Nevertheless, language arises out of communal labor, and reason arises out of language. Language is where reason works.112 So one of the methods of tektology is to trace metaphor back to the process of its production.
There is a pessimism in Bogdanov that is sometimes lacking in his Proletkult followers. Full organization is not possible, and “there is no absolutely harmonious combination.”120 While organizational forms can be improved with conscious study and practice, they are not perfectible. Red Mars has in the end to face up to extinction (and does so in high-phallic style by sending the “seeds” of its culture off on rockets into space). There’s a note that pervades Bogdanov’s writing where he appears as a detached observer of his own fallibility: “Sometimes it is possible in the same system to observe factually all the transitional steps from the higher organization to the deepest disorganization; as happens, for example, with the gradually unfolding quarrel between close collaborators or between spouses.”121
Marx: “Capitalist production … only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original source of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”129 Bogdanov might add two things to this. First, the undermining of the wealth of the soil is obscured for a time by the undermining of the worker. The depletion of the soil—the Phosphorous Liberation Front—emerges only belatedly as a problem for capitalist organization. The solution came firstly by way of “guano imperialism,” and then through the development of the chemical industry.130 The molecular elements stripped from the soil are replenished from elsewhere, at least for a time, and yet the metabolic rift continues.
By 1924 Bogdanov was conducting experiments in which blood transfusions were simultaneous exchanges between two parties. The idea was that blood was a collective resource of the body, which could in turn be collectivized between bodies. The physiological basis of this was shaky. Nor did Bogdanov know modern scientific method. The lack of control conditions rendered his results meaningless. Yet it appears that he really did help Krasin recover from a case of anemia in 1925.
Bogdanov thought the great task for collective labor was the organizing of the world. That meant finding methods of coordinating across the division of labor other than commodity exchange. What he came up with is a model for a kind of experimental practice where the concepts developed in one labor process can be metaphorically substituted into others, and tested there in practice.
There is an ascetic side to Platonov, much more characteristic of a certain strain of Russian intellectual of his time than of our own. There is a distaste for sexual love in particular, and hence a queasiness about women, whom he takes as tokens of it. But in Happy Moscow he is onto something that still speaks to our time: that the obsession with the couple, and the sexual love mixed with romance that legitimates it, are at best stand-ins and at worst obstacles for shared life. Moscow’s dérives, wandering the city, and her serial trysts, are attempts to find both the uses and the limits of love. Marriage is not the answer. She “began to love just one sly man who kept a tight hold on her, as if she were some inalienable asset.”105
The special virtue of Robinson’s post-Bogdanovite science fiction is that it is no longer about just one worldview, but about the negotiation between worldviews that result from different kinds of labor, scientific, technical, political, and cultural. For perhaps we need a more plural conception of utopian possibility to match the plurality of sensations and the worldviews of the times. Rather than the endless competition between different visions of changing life, the challenge might be rather to organize between them. Here a utopian, or perhaps meta-utopian mode of writing might point the way forward.
Haraway tells two archetypal California stories about food. On arriving in Santa Cruz in 1980, she is plunged into a debate about what to do with the placenta after a “natural” childbirth. Should it be eaten? How should it be cooked? Who should eat it? Can vegans eat human placenta? Maybe vegans ought to be obliged to eat it: not only was no animal killed in its making, one was brought into the world of the living. In the second story, a religious studies professor prepares a meal for the department party, the centerpiece of which is a feral pig he shot with an arrow. Complex debates ensue about ritual, ethics, impossible ecologies, and so on.
Interestingly, some of the new modes of substitution producing both ideology and knowledge might no longer be metaphorical so much as algorithmic.
Commodity fetishism occurs when relations between people take on the features of relations between things.
What kind of critical agency is possible in the world of OncoMouse? Do lab rats belong to the working class? Should battery hens be unionized? Should one have the right to share in the surplus produced by one’s cells, even when those cells are not in one’s body? Consider the case of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American tobacco worker who died of cervical cancer. Cells taken from her body, without her knowledge or consent, were cultured and used in all kinds of research long after her death, from the polio vaccine to AIDS treatments and gene mapping. Those cells proved not only useful for research but profitable for medical business, while her descendants could not even afford health insurance.68 How is one to think the molecular agencies of such a story?
The figure which Haraway famously proposed as a point of view is the cyborg. “Like any important technology, a cyborg is simultaneously a myth and a tool …”73 It is not the labor point of view, as if labor existed independently of the apparatus with which it is entangled. It is not women’s point of view, as if one could speak of it as a universal subjective perspective, existing prior to the social and technical relations in which it meshes. Cyborgs are affinities rather than identities, hybrids of human and other organics, information systems, ergonomic laboring, producing and desiring. Cyborgs are monsters, or rather demonstrations, in the double sense of to show and to warn, of possible worlds. “As monsters, can we demonstrate another order of signification? Cyborgs for earthly survival!” ... In place of the “God-trick” of speaking as if one had access to a portal to the absolute, the cyborg is a kind of ironic myth, a heretical counter-story to the human as pre-given. “Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community.”75 Like the Marxist-feminist critic inside the research university, the cyborg is always an insider and outsider to techno-science, which after all is pretty much the case now for all of us. “I think the way I work is to take my own polluted inheritance—cyborg is one of them—and try to rework it.”
The monstrous omens Haraway detected in the late twentieth century came to pass:
A major social and political danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of color, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance … The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable.84
And so it came to pass, only it came to be called precarity.
The vast panoptic machine Ruskin imagined did not come to pass, even in the era of big data. More data seems always to mean more data resistance.
There are many actually existing, contemporary or historical societies that for Robinson exude hints of utopian possibility: the Mondragon Co-ops, Yugoslav self-management, Red Bologna, the Israeli kibbutz, Sufi nomads, Swiss cantons, Minoan or Hopi matriarchies, Keralan matrilineal land tenure. One of the more surprising is the Antarctic science station. This he experienced first-hand in 1995 on the National Science Foundation’s Artists and Writer’s Program.
A lot going on here. The author looks at the life and works of four very different writers (Bogdanov, Platonov, Donna Haraway and Kim Stanley Robinson) for theories we can use in the anthropocene. I liked how he came up with the term Carbon Liberation Front for the fossil fuel industry, and metabolic rift (an old marxist term) for climate change.
I really want to read Platonov now (his writing method was really cool, and same with his idea for a literature factory), and Bogdanov (or at least his science fiction). I'm still not sure about Haraway. And of course KSR has always been one of my favourites.
Things I underlined:
Realizing Proletkult’s mission was the aim of a threefold practice:
Creativity—to overturn the fetish of the individual creator; to reveal the role of the unconscious in creation. The newspaper was the model of a collective creativity. One might note that all significant Marxists were also great journalists, and often editors and publishers as well, starting with Marx himself.84
Collectivity—to work in groups and express the sensations of group life. Bogdanov did not however want to submerge singularities. His is rather the community those who have nothing in common.85 His Martians, for example, were far from indistinguishable numbers, and their cooperation is imperfect.
Universalism—to break down the division of labor. This raised the problem of professionalism: should Proletkult have professional artists? When the going gets weird, as it did in the civil war, even as weird a writer as Andrey Platonov could turn pro, although in the end his professional success was meager. Professional specialization remained a conceptual problem for the whole life of the movement.
Proletarian culture is not an end in itself, and in this regard Proletkult is different to most flavors of workerism. It can tend to a certain fetishism of its limited perspective, rather than trying to expand out toward the most general account of the experience of the world. The violent rejection of bourgeois culture is no better than naive atheism. It is not able to put up anything as an alternative. The proletariat need Proletarian culture is not an end in itself, and in this regard Proletkult is different to most flavors of workerism. It can tend to a certain fetishism of its limited perspective, rather than trying to expand out toward the most general account of the experience of the world. The violent rejection of bourgeois culture is no better than naive atheism. It is not able to put up anything as an alternative. The proletariat needs a point of view through which to assimilate the past. Proletarian détournement is not then a matter of picking out the bits that seem “revolutionary.” The proletariat should be self-developing rather than self-mythologizing.86
A major social and political danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of color, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance … The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable.84
And so it came to pass, only it came to be called precarity.
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