Extrapolation, not Acceleration

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, ...
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Extrapolation, not Acceleration

Joseph Needham, the Great Amphibian

Like most people who teach in the humanities, I think that there are ways of understanding the present through the past. We return again and again to certain key authors as touchstones. There are two different ways of going about this, however. One is to take the succession of key authors ...
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Joseph Needham, the Great Amphibian

Heidegger and Geology

A small, handmade green book mysteriously appeared in my New School mail slot, with the intriguing title: The Anthropocene, or “The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.”  Its author is Woodbine, which turns out to be an address in Brooklyn where ...
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Heidegger and Geology

Where Next for Media Theory?

Where next for media theory? I’m thankful to Geert Lovink for his recent provocation on this question. Lovink thinks we have entered a post-Snowden era of media. So called ‘new’ media is dead, just as God is dead. Or, to vary the frame of reference, the ebullient schizo era of ...
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No More Master Thinkers

How often it transpires that the interesting thinkers were monsters. Heidegger was a Nazi. Schmitt was a Nazi. De Man was a collaborator, a thief, a liar and – to cap it off – a bigamist. Or, case of a different kind: Althusser strangled his wife, and was probably none ...
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