For the last couple of days, I’ve found my thoughts haunted by McKenzie Wark’s brilliant interview over at Occupy Times. Apart from Wark’s provocative claim that politics doesn’t exist– though perhaps it could come to exist, in a sense analogous to how Meillassoux talk of a “virtual god”? –this passage, in particular, stuck out to me:
…the problem is: how do you occupy an abstraction? Power has become vectoral. It can move money and power anywhere on the planet with unprecedented speeds. You can block a particular site of power, but vectoral power routes around such sites.
The abstraction Wark is talking about is, of course, contemporary capitalism. Contemporary capitalism seems to be characterized by two features: First, it has the characteristic of being everywhere and nowhere. You can’t point to a particular site of contemporary capitalism and say “there it is!”. Rather, it pervades every aspect of contemporary life, while nonetheless being absolutely non-localizable. Contemporary capitalism is an example, I think, of what Tim Morton has in mind by “hyperobjects”. As Morton puts it,
hyperobjects are viscous—they adhere to you no matter how hard to try to pull away, rendering ironic distance obsolete. Now I’ll argue that they are also nonlocal. That is, hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space such that any particular (local) manifestation never reveals the totality of the hyperobject.
When you feel raindrops falling on your head, you are experiencing climate, in some sense. In particular you are experiencing the climate change known as global warming. But you are never directly experiencing global warming as such. Nowhere in the long list of catastrophic weather events—which will increase as global warming takes off—will you find global warming.
In the language of my machine-oriented ontology or onticology, we would say that we only ever encounter local manifestations of hyperobjects, local events or appearances of hyperobjects, and never the hyperobject as such. Hyperobjects as such are purely virtual or withdrawn. They can’t be directly touched. And what’s worse, contrary to Locke’s principle of individuation whereby an individual is individuated by virtue of its location in a particular place and at a particular time, hyperobjects are without a site or place. They are, as Morton says, non-local. This, then, is a central problem, for how do you combat something that is everywhere and nowhere? How do you engage something that is non-local? If an army is over there I can readily target it. If a particular munitions factor is over here, then I can readily target it. But how do we target something that is non-local and that is incorporeal? This is the problem with occupying an abstraction.
read on!
Second, contemporary capitalism is massively redundant. This, I think, is what Wark is getting at when he speaks of contemporary power as “vectoral”. Under what Wark calls “vector power”, we have configurations of power where attacks at one site have very little impact insofar as flows can simply be re-channeled through another set of nodes in the network. Like a hydra, you cut off one head only to have another head appear in its place. The head can never be cut off once and for all because there is no single head.
The crisis of contemporary politics is thus the crisis of the erasure of site. In the age of hyperobjects, we come to dwell in a world where there is no clear site of political antagonism and therefore no real sense of how and where to engage.
Here I’m also inclined to say that we need to be clear about system references in our political theorizing and action. We think a lot about the content of our political theorizing and positions, but I don’t think we think a lot about how our political theories are supposed to actually act in the world. As a result, much contemporary leftist political theory ends up in a performative contradiction. It claims, following Marx, that it’s aim is not to represent the world but to change it, yet it never escapes the burrows of academic journals, conferences, and presses to actually do so. Like the Rat-Man’s obsessional neurosis where his actions in returning the glasses were actually designed to fail, there seems to be a built in tendency in these forms of theorization to unconsciously organize their own failure. And here I can’t resist suggesting that this comes as no surprise given that, in Lacanian terms, the left is the position of the hysteric and as such has “a desire for an unsatisfied desire”. In such circumstances the worst thing consists in getting what you want. We on the left need to traverse our fantasy so as to avoid this sterile and self-defeating repetition; and this entails shifting from the position of political critique (hysterical protest), to political construction– actually envisioning and building alternatives.
So what’s the issue with system-reference? The great autopoietic sociological systems theorist, Niklas Luhmann, makes this point nicely. For Luhmann, there are intra-systemic references and inter-systemic references. Intra-systemic references refer to processes that are strictly for the sake of reproducing or maintaining the system in question. Take the example of a cell. A cell, for-itself, is not for anything beyond itself. The processes that take place within the cell are simply for continuing the existence of the cell across time. While the cell might certainly emit various chemicals and hormones as a result of these processes, from its own intra-systemic perspective, it is not for the sake of affecting these other cells with those hormones. They’re simply by-products. Capitalism or economy is similar. Capitalists talk a good game about benefiting the rest of the world through the technologies they produce, the medicines they create (though usually it’s government and universities that invent these medicines), the jobs they create, etc., but really the sole aim of any corporation is identical to that of a cell: to endure through time or reproduce itself through the production of capital. This production of capital is not for anything and does not refer to anything outside itself. These operations of capital production are intra-systemic. By contrast, inter-systemic operations would refer to something outside the system and its auto-reproduction. They would be for something else.
Luhmann argues that every autopoietic system has this sort of intra-systemic dimension. Autopoietic systems are, above all, organized around maintaining themselves or enduring. This raises serious questions about academic political theory. Academia is an autopoietic system. As an autopoietic system, it aims to endure, reproduce itself, etc. It must engage in operations or procedures from moment to moment to do so. These operations consist in the production of students that eventually become scholars or professors, the writing of articles, the giving of conferences, the production of books and classes, etc. All of these are operations through which the academic system maintains itself across time. The horrifying consequence of this is that the reasons we might give for why we do what we do might (and often) have little to do with what’s actually taking place in system continuance. We say that our articles are designed to demolish capital, inequality, sexism, homophobia, climate disaster, etc., but if we look at how this system actually functions we suspect that the references here are only intra-systemic, that they are only addressing the choir or other academics, that they are only about maintaining that system, and that they never proliferate through the broader world. Indeed, our very style is often a big fuck you to the rest of the world as it requires expert knowledge to be comprehended, thereby insuring that it can have no impact on broader collectives to produce change. Seen in this light, it becomes clear that our talk about changing the world is a sort of alibi, a sort of rationalization, for a very different set of operations that are taking place. Just as the capitalist says he’s trying to benefit the world, the academic tries to say he’s trying to change the world when all he’s really doing is maintaining a particular operationally closed autopoietic system. How to break this closure is a key question for any truly engaged political theory. And part of breaking that closure will entail eating some humble pie. Adam Kotsko wrote a wonderful and hilarious post on the absurdities of some political theorizing and its self-importance today. We’ve failed horribly with university politics and defending the humanities, yet in our holier-than-thou attitudes we call for a direct move to communism. Perhaps we need to reflect a bit on ourselves and our strategies and what political theory should be about.
Setting all this aside, I think there’s a danger in Wark’s claims about abstraction (though I think he’s asking the right sort of question). The danger in treating hyperobjects like capitalism as being everywhere and nowhere is that our ability to act becomes paralyzed. As a materialist, I’m committed to the thesis that everything is ultimately material and requires some sort of material embodiment. If that’s true, it follows that there are points of purchase on every object, even where that object is a hyperobject. This is why, given the current form that power takes or the age of hyperobjects, I believe that forms of theory such as new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and actor-network theory are more important than ever (clearly the Whiteheadians are out as they see everything as internally related, as an organism, and therefore have no way of theorizing change and political engagement; they’re quasi-Hegelian, justifying even the discord in the world as a part of “god’s” selection and harmonization of intensities).
The important thing to remember is that hyperobjects like capitalism are unable to function without a material base. They require highways, shipping routes, trains and railroads, fiber optic cables for communication, and a host of other things besides. Without what Shannon Mattern calls “infrastructure”, it’s impossible for this particular hyperobject exists. Every hyperobject requires its arteries. Information, markets, trade, require the paths along which they travel and capitalism as we know it today would not be possible without its paths. The problem with so much political theory today is that it focuses on the semiosphere in the form of ideologies, discourses, narratives, laws, etc., ignoring the arteries required for the semiosphere to exercise its power. For example, we get OWS standing in front of Wall Street protesting— engaging in a speech act –yet one wonders if speech is an adequate way of addressing the sort of system we exist in. Returning to system’s theory, is the system of capital based on individual decisions of bankers and CEO’s, or does the system itself have its own cognition, it’s own mode of action, that they’re ineluctably trapped in? Isn’t there a sort of humanist prejudice embodied in this form of political engagement? It has value in that it might create larger collectives of people to fight these intelligent aliens that live amongst us (markets, corporations, etc), but it doesn’t address these aliens themselves because it doesn’t even acknowledge their existence.
What we need is a politics adequate to hyperobjects, and that is above all a politics that targets arteries. OOO, new materialism, and actor-network theory are often criticized for being “apolitical” by people who are fascinated with political declarations, who are obsessed with showing that your papers are in order, that you’ve chosen the right team, and that see critique and protest as the real mode of political engagement. But it is not clear what difference these theorists are making and how they are escaping intra-systemic self-reference and auto-reproduction. But the message of these orientations is “to the things themselves!”, “to the assemblages themselves!” “Quit your macho blather about where you stand, and actually map power and how it exercises itself!” And part of this re-orientation of politics, if it exists, consists in rendering deconstruction far more concrete. Deconstruction would no longer show merely the leaks in any system and its diacritical oppositions, it would go to the things themselves. What does that mean? It means that deconstruction would practice onto-cartography or identify the arteries by which capitalism perpetuates itself and find ways to block them. You want to topple the 1% and get their attention? Don’t stand in front of Wall Street and bitch at bankers and brokers, occupy a highway. Hack a satellite and shut down communications. Block a port. Erase data banks, etc. Block the arteries; block the paths that this hyperobject requires to sustain itself. This is the only way you will tilt the hands of power and create bargaining power with government organs of capital and corporations. You have to hit them where they live, in their arteries. Did anyone ever change their diet without being told that they would die? Your critique is an important and indispensable step, but if you really wish to produce change you need to find ways to create heart attacks and aneurysms. Short of that, your activity is just masturbation. But this requires coming to discern where the arteries are and doing a little less critique of cultural artifacts and ideologies. Yet choose your targets carefully. The problem with the Seattle protests was that they chose idiotic targets and simply acted on impotent rage. A window is not an artery. It doesn’t organize a flow of communication and capital. It’s the arteries that you need to locate. I guess this post will get Homeland Security after me.
August 5, 2012 at 12:09 am
Of course, if you are an OOO theorist and *not* anti-capitalist, you can save yourself a headache.
August 5, 2012 at 2:10 am
does being an ooo theorist necessarily mean that you’re anticapitalist as well?
August 5, 2012 at 2:25 am
What is doesn’t entail what ought to be.
August 5, 2012 at 2:52 am
well i’m thinking of your post on the stakes of ooo post–and i’ll quote at length here
“People sometimes suggest that claiming that beings like sharks and tardigrades are real is somehow the foundation of capitalistic violence and exploitation. To me the truth seems to be exactly the reverse. If I treat other beings as nothing but the product or effect of signifiers, lived intentionality, social constructs, concepts, perceptions, etc., I have reduced these other things to me, because I have said that they are nothing more than my constructs. If, by contrast, I recognize that these other things are real, I recognize that they are not just my reflections, then I also recognize that they are autonomous entities in their own right, that they aren’t just “passive matters awaiting inscription”, that they are characterized by alterity, then I also recognize that they have claims of their own, that they are not just stuff of my own for use, that they make claims– even if they don’t make claims like us –and that we must attend to these claims.”
you seem to suggest that a critique of human correlationism necessarily rejects capitalist violence. i’m just wondering if one could use ooo to forward a capitalist agenda.
August 5, 2012 at 3:30 am
No ontology entails a particular politics because ideologies are among the things that are. An ideology can be mistaken about what is, but the ideology is among the things that exist. My own normative commitments don’t support capitalist exploitation, but that’s quite a different question from whether something is or is not. Personally I think the question is rather stupid. Nobody wishes for a wolf to eat their child, but that doesn’t make wolves and such events less real. Is your politics so weak and insecure that you wish your ontology to declare your opposition doesn’t exist? If your opposition doesn’t exist, why ate you bothering with it at all? If it doesn’t exist, if it’s not real, then it can’t do anything and doesn’t affect you at all. It’s like a novelistic fiction… Frightening, but unreal. I genuinely wonder about the minds that come up with questions such as this and why it would occur to them to think that being, existence, has preferences one way or another, given that our existence is entirely contingent. You and I have preferences, existence doesn’t. This is a point so basic and obvious that the question shouldn’t arise at all unless one is deeply confused. Nature has no preference for rabbits over snakes, though rabbits have a preference. Why is that so hard to grasp?
August 5, 2012 at 9:10 am
You can use anything to ‘forward a capitalist agenda’. Deconstruction, anyone? The never ending quest to discover a form of thought that is in itself totally antithetical and resistant to capitalism is a strange and pointless one. It misunderstands what thought is and what it can do.
August 5, 2012 at 9:58 am
Yeah man. Strikes and Sabotage.
August 5, 2012 at 1:38 pm
I am very much on the same wavelength, here. I have made similar comments on the way the establishment around music in Denmark, – conservatories, universities, schools, high schools, etc. – works. Here’s one of my blogposts about it. (In Danish, google translated).
I actually think, that Levi R. Bryant’s point about intra-system’s lethal drive to selfpreservance is a general problem inherent in our interest based way of organising human activities. The way we have organised our collective problem solving activities, – in what we term as organisations, in which we work, the same problems we are theoretically trying to solve, will systematically drown in our effort to keep the organisations afloat.
Relevant reading from my akutsk blog:
Learning from folklore / Reversed colonialism 2.0
August 5, 2012 at 1:49 pm
[…] Wark: How Do You Occupy an Abstraction? 5. August 2012 Reblogged from Larval Subjects .: For the last couple of days, I’ve found my thoughts haunted by McKenzie Wark’s […]
August 5, 2012 at 3:44 pm
When you characterized Capitalism as having “the characteristic of being everywhere and nowhere” I sifted my mind for those echoes where this pattern has resurfaced through many writers remembering the two most interesting:
1) Empedocles: “The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.”; and, 2) Blaise Pascal: ““Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”
It appears in our time that we’re rephrasing this as “Capitalism as hyperobject withdraws within a center whose power is everywhere and whose circumference is a non-local manifestation of infinite domination.”
August 5, 2012 at 4:35 pm
I agree with you, Levi, but under a capitalist system, attacking the material arteries entails attacking property. This is illegal, of course, and often lands the perpetrator on the receiving end (of either a baton or a jail sentence) of the justice system. You question whether immaterial speech is the appropriate response to material power, but fail to acknowledge that speech is the only response that — in some countries, anyway –that doesn’t expose one’s body to harm.
I am sympathetic to more extreme tactics, but I wonder whether it is disingenuous for an armchair (at least in the sense that you’re not out there hacking corporate data banks or hurling your body in front of an oil truck) academic to hold others to such a high, and very dangerous, standard?
August 5, 2012 at 5:46 pm
Luke,
You have to be kidding. It’s the utmost fantasy to believe this is going to be changed by obeying the very laws designed to ensure this system sustains itself. For anything to change there will have to be some civil disobedience.
August 5, 2012 at 6:17 pm
One could say that political protest has in itself become virtual vanishing from the mediasphere into a zero point realm of pure absence. Guy Debord once stated: “We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience.” We could say that politics and even political protest have become commodities co-opted by Capital at the expense of those who have none.
If we see Capitalism as unified hyperobject then the the domain of power possessed within it is greater than any local manifestation or actualization it possesses. Capitalism vanishes and withdraws even as it is manifested within the tentacles of its sensual appendages. It is a power that circulates and recirculates in a mesh of invisible artieries that surface as local manifestations as worldly institutions: banks, governments, Wall-Street, etc.
The idea of applying this to leftward politics that defines both a topological and geometrical critique of the virtual powers of Capitalism, its organization as well as how its power is manifested or actualized locally might help bring about a new form political critique.
August 5, 2012 at 6:20 pm
I’d love to hear what Ken thinks about this post – last I heard he hated all things OOO the way only Ken can hate things. Didn’t he and Harman get into it on Facebook? I heard Harman was thoroughly beaten…
August 5, 2012 at 6:39 pm
Hi George,
I was a part of that discussion and didn’t get the sense that Ken hated OOO, nor that anyone beat anyone else. It seemed to me that Ken was just asking questions about how OOO would deal with this or that. I’ve always found him to be a fairly generous interlocutor even when he’s offering pointed criticisms.
August 5, 2012 at 7:31 pm
the engineering (carpentry if you prefer) problem seems to me not how to come up with a model that matches (accounts for) all of the emerging complexities of hyper-objects (real or imagined) but how to frame situations in such a way that allows us to test what interventions/inventions make enough of a difference to make a difference worth having.
And so perhaps to even move beyond de-constructing to making workable prototypes of alternatives to be adjusted/bricolaged/scrapped as needed.
If we don’t give people something that they can work/gear into that will give them hope, momentum, and new capacities/response-abilities than we are just stripping people bare for its own sake, even leading them to despair.
August 5, 2012 at 7:39 pm
well part of my undergrad experience i’m enjoying is being stupid and deeply confused
August 5, 2012 at 8:00 pm
Apologies for the stridency of my response to your question Thomas. The question you asked is a bit of a straight-jacket. If one says that yes, my ontology acknowledges the *existence* of capitalism, then this claim is translated into the claim that one *supports* or *endorses* capitalism. But an ontological claim is not endorsement. If one says that no, my ontology does not acknowledge the existence of capitalism, then he’s forced into denying something that does, in fact, exist.
An ontology is not a political or ethical philosophy, but a set of claims about what all existing things, good or bad, share in common as beings. In my political philosophy I’m certainly anti-capitalist. An ontology, however, can’t be anti-capitalist because an ontology is not making normative judgments about the things that exist. Likewise, an ontology can’t be *pro* capitalist either. An ontology is just concerned with sheer is-ness and nothing else. Does that make some sense?
August 5, 2012 at 10:47 pm
I wasn’t planning to wade back in, but I feel that I was misinterpreted (or perhaps I was unclear). I certainly was not advocating that things can be changed by “obeying the very laws designed to ensure this system sustains itself,” hence why I stated my sympathies for more extreme tactics.
Still, I find it baffling that you can suggest those “bitching at bankers” should instead be “hacking satellites” and “block[ing] ports” without acknowledging the vast gulf which separates those actions.
I too would like to see more civil — or even uncivil — disobedience (for example, my own research looks in part at the activities of Anonymous), but I would not be so quick to dismiss those unwilling to put their bodies and their freedom on the line in order to perpetrate it.
August 5, 2012 at 10:57 pm
Luke,
I just think it’s hopelessly naive to believe such strategies will produce much change. If what you say about people unwilling to block a highway is true, there’s really not much hope for change and we’d do better to resign ourselves to this world and tending our gardens. There’s never been any change that didn’t involve illegality; not the labor struggles, not civil rights, not suffrage, etc. I’m not sure why you would criticize someone for pointing this out.
August 5, 2012 at 11:37 pm
The whole question is how we’re able to leverage entities like this. Until you hit them where they live– their pocket books –you have no voice, even when you think you’re saying all sorts of things. Their decision making process just isn’t based on that sort of persuasion. So the question is, what strategies can be devised to create leverage? Asking that question and criticizing certain strategies isn’t denigrating people. Nor are illegalities the only possibility. Boycotts sometimes work because they interrupt the capacity of a business to produce an increase in capital from quarter to quarter.
August 5, 2012 at 11:42 pm
Blargh. You do keep putting words in my mouth. I’ve stated AND clarified that I agree with your call for more radical action. I’m not being “naive.”
My concern is perhaps one of tone. There is nothing wrong with claiming different tactics are required. There is something wrong with *dismissing* those who don’t engage in those tactics without examining the implications thereof. To keep with your stated metaphor, you accuse others of merely masturbating without addressing how risky sex can be.
I’m not stupid enough to think that hypocrisy invalidates critique, but I am uneasy asking things of others that I would not ask of myself. When is the last time you hacked into a government database? Have you been assaulted by police officers? Have you spent time in jail for political crimes? I would genuinely like to hear about these events in your life, but if the answer is “never,” then you may wish to rethink your dismissal, or at least admit that you too are just jerking off.
Regardless, I should state for a third time that I enjoyed this post, and thought your critique of the academy was spot-on (I quoted it at length on my personal blog). I just bristled at the one omission I’ve tried to address above.
August 5, 2012 at 11:52 pm
Luke,
That makes more sense. I guess I would be a bit more delicate in my descriptions of such people if I didn’t encounter so much self-righteousness from them. There’s a horizon of other conversations that have been occurring online within which those remarks should be understood. It’s hard to be very patient or diplomatic when you’ve been dressed down by Don Quixote again and again.
August 6, 2012 at 12:41 am
Levi, Might it be better – instead of blocking those arteries or destroying them – to instead try to find ways to redirect them towards more generally beneficial forms of organization? That is, as you’ve said elsewhere, to create something new rather than tearing things down. Destruction, to me, is in some ways like the ontological form of critique – maybe necessary in some cases, but not in itself enough. To me these arteries are potential lines of flight towards the creation of a different kind of system.
August 6, 2012 at 12:45 am
Jeremy,
Sure. Deconstruction is only one dimension of my terratology (what I was before calling “terraism”). There’s also construction. A lot depends on what your aims are.
August 6, 2012 at 1:59 pm
Thanks, Levi. This reminds me a lot of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s work: http://www.communityeconomies.org/Home
August 6, 2012 at 7:05 pm
Fair enough. But I think Ken is mostly into Alexander Bogdanov these days (writing a book or something) – Bogdanov would be the exact opposite of what OOO stands for, i.e. being a Bolshevik he was very political and very human-oriented (trying to bring humans, not objects, to the state of higher social order). As for this perennial “ontology” vs. “politics” issue that you guys discuss here over and over again (it seems), it would be nice if it was that easy – ontology is about things being and does not imply politics of any sort – but somehow it’s not (which is why you have to say it again and again like a mantra for years now). So if Nazis think that races exist and that among those, some are superior and some are inferior, is this not an ontological statement about how things are? If that doesn’t in itself imply a certain political view (I’ll grant you that), then surely such an ontological position is very easily politicized.
August 6, 2012 at 8:18 pm
Make the decidable structures of our age undecidable.
August 6, 2012 at 9:19 pm
I suspect that everyone who reads and contributes to this site — very much including me — and any other online political/philosophical site REGARDLESS OF STRIPE – is a moral monster who eats up disproportionate non-replaceable chunks of the earth at the expense of the planet’s other biological residents and by stealing in effect from about 80% of all other humans. About 1.3 billion live on a dollar a day: talk about a small footprint. Any volunteers here to make that their “standard of living”? Not me. Not my children. Private property is not a joke: it’s a tragedy. Dems got mad at Nader because he said the two main parties were pretty much the same. Well? Which 3 billion – red or blue — of the current campaigns is well spent? We think we do not have to feel bad about our theft and murder because: it’s externalized, and we wave our hands and say “the structure of repression is beyond me but I recycle.” If there is no real “politics” it’s because we are ourselves included in the hegemony of monsters, and it’s time we quit pretending we are part of a meaningful alteration while we collectively add 80000000 per year. Even hypocrisy should have an upper bound. While we brag about science, progress, and growth, our effects clearly mark us as the most malevolent and destructive species the planet has or will ever see. Politically, the net of rationality has never served anything but rationalization and power. Mars anyone?
August 6, 2012 at 11:01 pm
[…] to my recent post on Mckenzie Wark, George makes a great set of observations: As for this perennial “ontology” vs. “politics” issue that you guys discuss here over and […]
August 7, 2012 at 4:43 am
dmf said: “the engineering (carpentry if you prefer) problem seems to me not how to come up with a model that matches (accounts for) all of the emerging complexities of hyper-objects (real or imagined) but how to frame situations in such a way that allows us to test what interventions/inventions make enough of a difference to make a difference worth having.”
cskolnik likes this and adds “The goal of engagement with both restoration projects and initiatives that reduce green house gases may not be to enact some master plan that is likely to succeed, but to struggle in the face of overwhelming challenges and in doing so, achieve a better understanding of our relationship to ecosystems [and develop] the capacity for complex systems thinking. [. . . ] If we accept the adage that we cannot solve today’s problems with the technologies that we used to create them, then homogenous modernist meta-narratives must surely be counted among such dubious technes.”
More coming soon on *Environmental Critique.*
August 7, 2012 at 2:52 pm
[…] P.S. Just in c/o Randy Honold re. Jeff Tangel’s contribution, and call out to another DePaul favorite, Levi Bryant’s “McKenzie Wark: How Do You Occupy an Abstraction?”: https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/mckenzie-wark-how-do-you-occupy-an-abstraction/ […]
August 8, 2012 at 5:58 pm
[…] at Cyborgology, David has written a great post responding to my earlier post on McKenzie Wark. I don’t disagree with anything he says about the pressing political […]
August 9, 2012 at 2:31 pm
[…] at larval subjects, Levi has been posting a series of posts (here and here) that are concerned with capitalism and politics, with a particular emphasis on […]
August 17, 2012 at 11:26 am
Thanks to dan at 29. Amidst all the patter about philosophy, politics and other online themes, very real ontological facts escape all but the most off-hand notice : our numbering, distribution, and activity.
August 23, 2012 at 1:13 pm
It certainly looks as if several objects of global warming are heading to a particular locality in Florida, just as some political objects are also due to be there….
May 1, 2016 at 9:23 pm
Onto-cartography does quite well with anti-capitalist theorizing and practice. I don’t see the problem. An excellent tool indeed