Molecular Red in Nine Minutes | Public Seminar PUBLIC SEMINAR In the spirit of The New School for Social Research, informing debate about the pressing issues of our times Essays First Drafts Reviews Podcasts Video PS Books Verticals Columns About LETTERS THEORY & PRACTICE Molecular Red in Nine Minutes McKenzie Wark McKenzie Wark — September 29, 2015 0 Professor of Culture and Media in Liberal Studies at The New School for Social Research. Metabolic Rift Bogdanov (Alexander) Chehonadskih (Maria) Haraway (Donna) Platonov (Andrey) Zizek (Slavoj) @PublicSeminar Public Seminar Follow Public Seminar @PublicSeminar · 4h Making History, Making Blintzes, written in the alternating voices of I am grateful to Maria Chehonadskih for her lengthy review of Molecular Red. However, I do Mickey and Dick, is an engaging not think she gives an accurate account of my book. That inattention obscures rather than account of two intertwined and well- clarifies what might otherwise be some interesting points of disagreement. Her review is in no lived lives over more than a half sense comradely. She seems to prefer to score some quick points. I’ll take responding to it as century of left-wing engagement. an opportunity to give a Cliff Notes version of my argument. https://t.co/UIyPPlVjys 1 1 Twitter I am happy to concede that Chehonadskih may indeed have mastery and ownership of the field of Russian letters and that I do not. Although one might pause to wonder what this might mean give that the authors in question here – Bogdanov and Platonov – were dedicated Public Seminar @PublicSeminar · 22h proletarian internationalists. But if Chehonadskih wants to claim the capacity for “more The New School for Social Research attentive reading” that can do better than my “bohemian slang,” then this claim needs to be opened in 1919 as an act of protest. demonstrated rather than merely asserted in authoritative style. Founded in the name of academic freedom, Alvin Johnson, liked to call If one wants to charge me with “inexact use of terms” then one has to use one’s own terms “the continuing education of the more exactly. But Chehonadskih does not do this. In its place we get mere gestures of educated.” https://t.co/9NEgUdhtAX dismissal. It should be clear without too much reading effort that Molecular Red does not 4 10 Twitter exactly begin with the “over-familiar Deleuzian project of ‘becoming minoritarian.’” On the contrary, unlike Deleuze and Guattari, I take ‘becoming molecular’ literally, and ask about the planetary fate of certain basic compounds – such as those of atmospheric carbon. Public Seminar @PublicSeminar · 22h Dick and Mickey taking short sections Carbon does not, in my account, become an “independent and evil force” and it is hardly a more or less alternately, as the “vitalist power.” I begin simply by noting that carbon is in the wrong place. A rather large narrative moves mostly amount of it that used to be buried underground has ended up in the atmosphere. This is the chronologically through their direct sort of thing the natural sciences can quantify quite exactly. This fact of carbon being not experiences of political conflicts and where it once was we might describe, after Marx, as metabolic rift. movement controversies. https://t.co/4ilcQ3y1Ta Marx’s example of metabolic rift was drawn from von Liebig’s studies of soil chemistry, and Twitter was a local displacement: compounds of phosphorous and nitrogen extracted from the soil by agriculture end up being pissed down the drains by urban workers, never to return. This was a Load More... local metabolic rift, and where phosphorous is concerned still a major problem. But the metabolic rift of carbon is a global problem. Public Seminar Page Chehonadskih assimilates this too quickly to the old theme of “cyclical exchange between man and nature.” But these are metaphysical concepts she has interpolated here, and not the place I chose either to begin or end. Chehonadskih has simply not been able to bracket her Public Seminar is live now. 2 hours ago own working assumptions long enough to attend to those actually on the page here. Hence she ends up saying nonsensical things such as “since the theory of the Anthropocene New Fascism: Mass Psychology & assumes the continuation of capitalism.” It isn’t a theory and it assumes no such thing. It’s a Financialization: Second Panel with Nancy place-holder name for an ensemble of facts about what I am choosing to call instead Fraser and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. metabolic rift. The New School for Social Research UCL ThenewSchool How would the fact of metabolic rift – and let’s limit ourselves just to carbon as one example – Video entail a change in priorities for critical though? I’m not talking about the kind that chugs along View on Facebook · Share in the university, although that may be the last place one can actually get such work done. I mean the kind of extra-academic agenda-setting that Marx was able to make. How can we start from the situation before us rather than from the set texts of the curriculum? Public Seminar was live. 4 hours ago Here I thought it useful to turn to Soviet examples, as surely that was a time for taking the situation as the point of departure for thought rather than the text. I found Alexander New Fascism: Mass Psychology & http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/09/molecular-red-in-nine-minutes/[2/21/19, 11:09:33 AM] Molecular Red in Nine Minutes | Public Seminar Bogdanov and Andrey Platonov to be particularly useful, not least because they had already Financialization: First Panel with Julia Ott, thought about metabolic rift in their own fashion. Arjun Appadurai, and Saskia Sassen. @TheNewSchoolforSocialResearch @UCL My main interest in Bogdanov is that he almost got the metabolic rift of carbon right, which is @NewSchool no small feat for anyone in the early twentieth century, long before the apparatus was in place Video to confirm such a hunch scientifically. It seems very clear to me in his novels Red Star and View on Facebook · Share Engineer Menni, and in his Tektology that Bogdanov had a keen sense of how rifts can occur a metabolism on any scale, including the planetary one. Public Seminar At no point do I write that Bogdanov is a “dissident” vis-à-vis Lenin. That is just another of 4 hours ago Chehonadskih’s interpolations. I just find his thinking more interesting for our own times than other, more well known thinkers of that period. One who I think is worth rescuing from certain "Making History, Making Blintzes, written in caricatures and guilt-by-association talk which has characterized his posthumous reception. the alternating voices of Mickey and Dick, is an engaging account of two intertwined and It would seem, once one strips away the distractions, that Chehonadskih’s main disagreement well-lived lives over more than a half century with me is here: “What if Bogdanov was in fact part of bolshevism and Platonov the most of left-wing engagement – more than a intriguing philosopher of dialectical materialism?” Well, of course Bogdanov is part of century, in fact, counting their parents’ lives, bolshevism. He was probably its leading, and certainly most original, thinker from about 1904 which are briefly retold in the early chapters. to 1909, when Lenin attacked him publicly in Materialism and Empirio-criticism. " After which point his intellectual exclusion from Bolshevism begins, and which by his arrest in Love and Hope in the New Left 1923 will become mandatory. If one wants to be a dialectician, one has to grasp how publicseminar.org Bogdanov is both central to bolshevik thought and at the same time anathema to the In the summer of 1974 Dick Flacks, a emerging orthodoxy of “dialectical materialism.” sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, published an article For Bogdanov, “dialectical materialism” just doesn’t make any sense. Chehonadskih simply entitled “Making History vs. Making Life: passes over the central dispute between Bogdanov, on the one side, and Lenin and Dilemmas of an American Left” in the Plekhanov, on the other. There is no first philosophy in Bogdanov. Marxism is not a political quarterly,Working Papers for a philosophy. It is, first and last, the labor point of view. New Society. Long defunct, the publication Working Paper… The labor point of view cannot, in the style of Lukacs, be imputed to that class on its behalf by View on Facebook · Share the party, and on the party’s behalf by its self-appointed philosophers. It has to be organized. The labor point of view is not just a theory or a style but has its own class-specific forms of organization. (In this respect Bogdanov’s is not a ‘standpoint theory,’ and he anticipates in advance Haraway’s critique of such). Subscribe to our Newsletter Unlike Chehonadskih, I don’t see it as a “limitation” that “Bogdanov reduces everything to the Email address: elements of experience and their organization, so that the social and natural world are seen as a combination of these elements.” That’s the very strength and originality of his approach. He asks how knowledge and labor are to be organized, rather than asking, in scholastic fashion, after the correct theory. First Name Nothing could be more remote from “Plekhanov’s determinism of productive forces.” The labor point of view in Bogdanov includes organizational labor, which Plekhanov would consign to Last Name the superstructures. There is a sense in which Bogdanov is a vulgar Marxist, he is if anything a much, much more vulgar one that Plekhanov, in that even philosophy is reduced to a form of labor.