Make Kith Not Kin!

On Donna Haraway

When my daughter was little, we played a game on the way to her preschool called Count the Dog Poo. It was a game about counting, as you would play with any child, but also a game for a little New Yorker, to teach her to watch where she steps. ...
Read More
Make Kith Not Kin!

Just Do It

On Stiegler and LaBeouf in the neganthropocene

One way of understanding Shia LaBeouf’s “Just Do It” motivational video is as a translation of Bernard Stiegler’s recent work about “escaping the anthropocene.” And vice versa. Reading Stiegler’s essays and watching LaBeouf’s video are essentially the same experience: one feels exhilarated, thrilled, excited (as if one might ...

Read More
Just Do It

Barbarism or Barbarism?

Timothy Morton proposes an ecology without nature. In Molecular Red I thought it made more sense to think a nature without ecology, as nature is the more capacious and historically variable term, whereas a logos of the oikos – ecology – is precisely what can no longer be said to ...
Read More
Placeholder

From OOO to P(OO)

I have been reading the work of Timothy Morton with pleasure for many years now. Originally a scholar of English romantic poetry, I find his work reads best as poetry, or perhaps a poetics, as a singular Mortonian vision of the world – or in this case, a vision of ...
Read More
From OOO to P(OO)

Theory for the Anthropocene

Roy Scranton, Stephanie Wakefield, and McKenzie Wark participated in a lecture on the Anthropocene. Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in -- the Anthropocene -- demands an intensive rethinking of ...
Read More
Theory for the Anthropocene

Anthropocene Denial Bingo

“We’re fucked. The only question is how soon and how badly.” (16) This is the refreshingly candid way Roy Scranton starts his small, intense book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (City Lights Books, 2015). For Scranton, the first and last job of critical thought is to interrupt habits of ...
Read More
Anthropocene Denial Bingo

Climate & Colonialism

It is possible that the climate wars have already started. The ‘aridity line’ is usually considered to be 200mm of annual rainfall. Below that, you have desert. One could draw lines on a map of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia that mark the boundary between desert and conventionally ...
Read More
Climate & Colonialism

The Capitalocene

On Jason Moore

Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso 2015) is an important book, in that it brings together the immense resources of world systems theory, critical geography and a certain strain of ‘green’ Marxism. Even though it refuses such terms, it does ...
Read More
Placeholder

Zizek and me

It is illuminating to have comrade Zizek write about one’s work. I think his comments on Molecular Red highlight two paths among which theory can choose to move at the moment: the high road of philosophy, or the low road of something else, as yet unknown. It is less about the wrong or right ...
Read More
Placeholder