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/ …
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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."
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