PhD student writing on Thomas Pynchon and the Posthuman Gothic. Literary & critical theory, aesthetics, ecology. All views are my own, etc. 
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Currently reading: McKenzie Wark "Accelerate in reverse" -- A fascinating look at Marx's fragment on machines and its limits as the founding text for accelerationism.http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/10/accelerate-in-reverse/ …
Three points stand out for me: Firstly, Wark takes aim at the notion that Marx studies an "eternal capital" with an unchanging essence. This form of high theory posits capital as idea, detached from its material presence: shifting content within an eternal form.pic.twitter.com/7MHRop3rFl
As good Spinozists, how can we stand all this talk of essence? "[If] capital is indeed continually mutating and self-modifying, then it has no essence, and ‘appearances’ need to be taken seriously as not mere phenomenal forms but as actual forms in the world."pic.twitter.com/ATwuJZhFz5
Secondly, the limits of the fragment on machines are identified as thus: Marx's as yet incomplete understanding of metabolism. The machine as "a moving power which moves itself" is a myth -- a tantalising image of technological power, but one which hides the source of its power.pic.twitter.com/7nNNy2p6m0
Against the young Marx of the machine fragment stands the later Marx of Capital Vol 3. "[The] Marx of 1858 does not know yet the full contours of what he is groping with." Powering the movements of machines is a grand system of energy transfer: an acceleration of metabolic rifts.pic.twitter.com/w8QjmCIl03
Lastly, returning to the #Accelerate collection, Wark identifies the possibility of social change in the technical rather than political sphere: "Capital calls machinery into existence in the form of fixed capital, but it could take another form [...] tech could be otherwise."pic.twitter.com/Gh7anReO4b
Ultimately, our task is to "work out how different kinds of knowledge of different parts of the metabolism might cooperate, other than via the commodification of knowledge as intellectual property." Only with this knowledge may we design, at last, "a survivable natureculture."
Metabolic rift is a terrific idea & reintroduces negation into the picture. Thanks for posting. Must look at that accelarationist reader too. Zizek does treat capital in ontological terms not as essence but as the limit & the real, which is as difficult an obstacle to change.
Thanks! I'm working through the Accelerate reader and Foster's writing on metabolic rift at the moment, so it was great to find this article linking the two. I'll have to get around to Zizek some day, perhaps when I have got off the Deleuze binge.
Zizek is a horrible reader of Deleuze & Spinoza. He can be a bit misleading with his Hegelian-Lacanian-Marxism. And he changes his mind year to year on fundamental concepts & structures. But his writing makes brilliant connections & thematisations.
hmm interesting, I need to look more into this metabolism stuff. I'm a bit confused on how this disproves the machine system as being "a moving power that moves itself" though or why this couldn't be compatible with his later theory of metabolism
I may have phrased it oddly: I don’t think it necessarily disproves the idea, but shows it to be incomplete. Wark goes into some detail on the shortcomings of the machines fragment, and how these are resolved by developments in ecology, science studies, etc.
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