Baudrillard (Jean) Archives

Feature

Libidinal Ecology: Sex and the Anthropocene (I)

January 26, 2016 • by Dominic Pettman

In 2013, reports starting circulating in the media that the global best-seller 50 Shades of Grey was beginning to outstay its welcome as a cultural artifact. In the UK alone, it sold 5.3 million copies to that point, even before the film based on the story was released. A large percentage of ...

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Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

June 6, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Where Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri were born in the 30s, Berardi (1948) belongs with Paolo Virno (1952) and Silvia Federici (1942) to a second wave of Italian Marxist thinkers who grew out of the workerist current that struck out on its own path, diverging from the official Gramscian postures of the ...

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#Theory21c (part 2)

March 13, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

It is quite scandalous how much theory-talk still retails metaphors based on 19^th century worldviews. As if what we can know about the world had not undergone several revolutions since. Hence if one were to look for a #Theory21c it would have to start with people who at least engage with ...

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Virno and History

February 23, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

He could have been talking about something that goes by many names in Paolo Virno’s Déjà Vu and the End of History, (Verso Futures, 2015). Sometimes Virno calls it potential, or the virtual, or memory, or faculty, or disposition, or even labor-power. This unquenchable fire is for Virno the source ...

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Cognitive Capitalism

February 19, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

The second is able to think more historically. For example the regulation school came up with a convincing portrait of what it called the Fordist regime of regulation. In this version capitalism has stages, each of which are qualitatively different. But it tends to be troubled by the current stage, ...

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#Theory21c (part 1)

February 17, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

That agenda seems to me to have at least three major features. The first is the anthropocene. One can no longer bracket off nature from the social, and construct a theory exclusively on the terrain of the social. The second is the role of information in both production and reproduction. ...

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The Drone of Minerva

November 5, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

The one kind of speculative thought that might be of service in the Anthropocene is surely some kind of philosophy of history, and yet within the academy itself it seems the one nobody wants to actually attempt. It is as if the debates at the end of the last century ...

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Utopian Realism

October 28, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

I once asked Jean Baudrillard for his impressions of his tour of the colleges of America. “Boring,” he said, “like any realized utopia.” This was a provocation on several levels. In the cold war, realized utopia mean Soviet terror, not American prosperity. And of course Baudrillard was as aware as Jameson ...

Theory & Practice

Extrapolation, not Acceleration

September 29, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

We hoped; we waited for the day The state would wither clean away, Expecting the Millennium That theory promised us would come: It didn’t… W. H. Auden, New Year Letter, 1941 It would appear that in the twenty-first century, we should probably relinquish a faith in a force external to capital, even if generated by it, ...

Theory & Practice

Four Cheers for Vulgar Marxism!!!!

April 25, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

If you want to show that your version of Marxism is better than somebody else’s, the quickest way to do so is to call the other version vulgar. One’s own version is nuanced, sophisticated, subtle, erudite, philosophically rich – all the things the vulgar is not. Or so it has ...