March 17, 2015

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There’s only bricolage. This is attested to in all dimensions of nature. The species that manage to survive are products worthy of Frankenstein, cobbled together on the platforms of previous species, as well as sequences of DNA that were exchanged from species to species by viruses. Their parts never quite work together as we can see in the case of human child birth and the appendix. The grape of the wine is a product not simply of DNA or a master-plan, but of other plants growing in the environment, weather conditions, soil nutrients, water contents, insects, and so on. Grape genes of identical genetic stock nonetheless differ significantly from one another from year to year. The brain is a plastic system with neurons that link to one another as a function of thought, experience, encounters, nutrients, and many other things besides.

Why should thought and theory be any different? Your fidelity to a particular thinker as a scholar, your commentary and scholarship? That was the result of countless encounters you had with the work of other thinkers and scholars, your experiences, snippets of things you heard and saw, a text here and there, and so on. You thought you were getting at the truth of Heidegger? Maybe. It’s more likely that you cobbled together odds and ends in your garage as a result of what was available. Your deductive rigor from a single premise according to the laws of logic? The same. You were just Frankenstein sewing together parts of bodies in your lab. That work that describes itself as “rigorous” is not the absence of the sloppiness of the bricoleuer, but rather a failure to recognize the soil within which it grew. It is the grape that says “I, an I alone, in contrast to all other grapes, am the grape that completely grew and defined myself!”

But this is always a lie, even for the mathematician. There’s always an aleatory multiplicity that rumbles beneath any Apollinian order. There is no being, no thought, no theory that isn’t cobbled together from the materials one finds in her garage...(more)

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Pawel Pierściński

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Death(s) in Venice:
Bodies and the Discourse of Pollution From Thomas Mann to Porto Marghera
Serenella Iovino

This discourse is part of my current book project. Titled Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation, the book attempts to collect the “material stories” of some particularly dense places in Italy as segments of the vast ecological and ecocultural horizon of this country. The idea is that, in this (local) scenery of (global) crisis, literature and critical practices enact forms of ecologi-cal resistance and cultural liberation.

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The White Review March 2015

Climate Science As Sensory Infrastructure
Mckenzie wark

WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE, that planetary tempo in which all the metabolic rhythms of the world start dancing to crazy new tunes. Sure, you can join the Heideggerians and blame western metaphysics for all this. You could put it down to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history. Or, perhaps it is time to find some new characters to talk about, and new objects of thought. Maybe critical writing could get its head out of the cloudy superstructures and think again about this base and vulgar world.

The problem with the traditional humanist disdain for science and technology is that it is now a line of thought pursued most vigorously again by reactionaries and fascists. If you want to accept the reality of climate change, that most awkward rift in the planet’s metabolism, then that means accepting the science on which it is based. Accepting the science, it turns out, means relying on a particular kind of infrastructure that produces it.

Perhaps it is time then to turn to a kind of critical theory that was particularly interested in infrastructures, in technologies, and in sciences. For example: let’s talk about Alexander Bogdanov. ...(more)

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Rethinking the Biopolitical Turn
From the Thanatopolitical to the Geneapolitical Paradigm
Video of Chiara Bottici's General Seminar Lecture

Bottici ranged broadly, moving between ancient and contemporary usages and practices. She provocatively proposed that politics as a set of practices, and not as a science, is a modern creation. She maintained, further, that biopolitics has been conceived in death and speculates what would happen if it was imagined in the terms of birth. She proposes, as I understood her, a radical feminist account of the biopolitical, very specifically beyond Foucault and those who have been informed by his path breaking work. The discussion following her elegantly presented lecture was very much in the tradition of the General Seminar: critical, passionate, informed by history and interdisciplinary. In the new tradition of Public Seminar, it simultaneously addressed pressing contemporary problems and enduring problems of the human condition.

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Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1
Claire Colebrook
open humanities press

Death of the PostHuman undertakes a series of critical encounters with the legacy of what had come to be known as 'theory,' and its contemporary supposedly post-human aftermath. There can be no redemptive post-human future in which the myopia and anthropocentrism of the species finds an exit and manages to emerge with ecology and life. At the same time, what has come to be known as the human - despite its normative intensity - can provide neither foundation nor critical lever in the Anthropocene epoch. Death of the PostHuman argues for a twenty-first century deconstruction of ecological and seemingly post-human futures.

Sex After Life: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 2
Claire Colebrook

Sex After Life aims to consider the various ways in which the concept of life has provided normative and moralizing ballast for queer, feminist and critical theories. Arguing against a notion of the queer as counter-normative, Sex After Life appeals to the concept of life as a philosophical problem. Life is neither a material ground nor a generative principle, but can nevertheless offer itself for new forms of problem formation that exceed the all too human logics of survival.

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Pawel Pierściński

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I’m Very Into You – Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark
reviewed by Hestia Peppe
full stop

I’m Very Into You archives and offers up an email exchange taking place over some two weeks in 1995 between the writer Kathy Acker and media theorist McKenzie Wark. Their exchange constitutes a negotiation of the emotional, political, textual, digital, and physical territories that lie between the two of them following a three-night stand in Sydney. The first fragile emails are sent from the depth of “compound hangovers” and in Acker’s case, jetlag. From what follows emerges an ever-surprising epistolary interrogation of the possibility and recognition of the “radical difference” between one and other.
Publishing an email exchange brings about various important confusions — or to borrow a phrase from Wark — “slippages” — which Acker, with her notorious love of puns, picks up. This idea runs through I’m Very Into You, back and forth between them; a point of known unknown which is returned to again and again.

...(more)

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