Re: McKenzie Wark: Birth of Thanaticism
On the Thanaticism discussion -- I ran across this excerpt from an interview with Langdon Winner: Q: You have also been critical of the term Anthropocene, the idea that we are living in a new epoch where human activities define ecosystems. It’s an idea that could shape development planning over the next few decades. Why do you think we need to be wary? LW: It’s the idea that you can name geological epochs according to some identifiable characteristic. The people who proposed the Anthropocene say humanity is responsible for the significant changes of the past centuries and changes in the future. But naming this geological period after humanity is kind of deterministic — “this is what humans have done”. And it is self-exulting — “look at our grand role in the history of the cosmos”. But if you look at what is being projected, a better name might be Thanatopocene, after Thanatos, the Greek personification of death. It appears that instead of a grand exultation and transcendence of humanity, we are at a death spiral. So why exult ourselves with concepts like Anthropocene? I find its self-congratulatory power fantasy highly suspicious, at the very point where we ought to be looking at the good evidence that challenges the way of life that’s been built up over the last three centuries. Full interview at http://tinyurl.com/nuw6qjy -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: McKenzie Wark: Birth of Thanaticism
On 17/10/15 21:42, Lorenzo Tripodi wrote: > Great piece. Agree with most of the content. > Still I am not convinced of the term thanaticism - despite the nice assonance > with Thatcherism. > > Forces of capital are all but aiming at death. > They want to live. > ???They live??? . it is (most likely) meant as a reference to "the others" that capital kills. You know, like trees dying from acid rain, bees from pesticidal showers and so on. At any rate, that's how others tended to use the term in the past (before this unreferenced plagiat). /m PS: Don't animate the forces of capital - that was surely one of the messages in that piece? - let them wallow in their deathness. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: McKenzie Wark: Birth of Thanaticism
Great piece. Agree with most of the content. Still I am not convinced of the term thanaticism - despite the nice assonance with Thatcherism. Forces of capital are all but aiming at death. They want to live. ???They live??? Capital is autonomously developing as a new form life. Money understand itself as living being. As every dominant living form, it eats and destroys subordinate species - what human species is becoming??? But it has no death drive. This does not mean that its infinite stupidity together with its immense algorithmic power could not annihilate it, altogether with its human vectors??? lorenzo > On 17 Oct 2015, at 11:30, Alex Foti wrote: > > blown away by this piece. i usually favor the term fossil capitalism, > because similarly to mandel-jameson's late capitalism somehow hopes to > consign it to a primitive past. <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: McKenzie Wark: Birth of Thanaticism
On 17/10/15 06:36, nettime's_trial_balloon wrote: >I awoke from a dream with the notion that it might make more sense to >call it thanatism, after Thanatos, son of Nyx (night) and >Erebos(darkness), twin of Hypnos (sleep), as Homer and Hesiod seem more >or less to agree. I awoke from a dream with the notion that it might make more sense to call it thanatism, after . Peter Linebaugh's "thanatocracy" in "The London Hanged" (1991) or Suzanne Brøgger's "Deliver Us From Love" (1976) or elsewhere: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:thanatocracy Morphogenetic dreaming? /m # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: McKenzie Wark: Birth of Thanaticism
blown away by this piece. i usually favor the term fossil capitalism, because similarly to mandel-jameson's late capitalism somehow hopes to consign it to a primitive past. in my mind (since 'inside out' a pop metaphor) two people fight for audience in the assembly of the self, the rational progressive who thinks that if we get done with neoliberalism we can recombine social production, market production, government production in a climate-neutral and fairer, empowering way (for instance, for all BP's nefariousness, there's major investment out of fossil and into solar), and the 1999-2011 insurrectionary black hoodie, who hates the state and the corporation in her/his bones and only returns fully human when congregating with similarly riot-prone, post-civilizational anonymous anarchists, steampunkers, genderbenders, guerrilla garderners, u catch the drift. btw are you reading POSTCAPITALISM by mason? like in klein, there's usually a subtle conflation between overthrowing neoliberalism (which we haven't yet managed to do, although the hegemony of elites is no longer there thanks to 2008 and 2011) and outlasting capitalism. Politically, i think today there's a popular majority in advanced capitalism to shelve neoliberal austerity cum financialization and end thanaticist subsidies to Big Carbon. I mean if old glories like sanders and corbyn can be standard-bearers of social populism in the heartlands of market conservatism, then there's hope for socioecoqueer political change all over the place, no matter the superstructures of $/[EU] banking and international monetary arrangements. However, civilizationally, it's not hard to be struck by the bleakness of our predicament as the human species. Just before reading this article by mckenzie wark, by coincidence i read on new scientist this truly review of thackara by Bruce Sterling (which stands as an essay in its own right): ARE WE WORTHY? Before 2008, "next economy" books were a dime a dozen. They've been thin on the ground lately, but John Thackara has just published one of a decidedly different bent. An incessant traveller, thoughtful listener and the former "symposiarch" of the legendary Doors of Perception events of the 1990s, Thackara is a beloved figure in sustainable-design circles. A guru of labs and think tanks worldwide, he is painfully aware of the crises facing the world in 2015. Most new-economics gurus would crassly motivate their readers to get rich quick online. By contrast, in How to Thrive in the Next Economy, Thackara tackles our planet's most basic survival topics -- preserving soil from erosion, supplying clean water and keeping people sheltered, fed, healthy and mobile. There's a light dusting of digital here, but for the most part, the author sternly confronts every major environmental issue that has worsened in his lifetime. As Earth's situation gets more perilous, we don't wise up and reform, we just embrace our myths ever more tightly. So Thackara sees little promise in political solutions. Likewise, private enterprise cannot do much because it is laced into a fatal straitjacket of optimising return on investment, even if that means levelling forests and blackening skies. As Earth's situation gets more perilous, we don't reform, we just embrace our myths more tightly" Thackara's inconvenient mathematics expose our planet's decline, but despite his ill-concealed dread he stoutly refuses to "head for the hills with a truckload of guns and peanut butter". That prospect obviously tempts him, but a guru should not become a doomsayer and abandon the world. Somehow, humans must "thrive", although by Thackara's reckoning, thrive means surviving with about 5 per cent of the energy and resources most Westerners avidly consume. It's hard to talk rich, heavily armed people into sacrificing 95 per cent of everything they have grabbed, but Thackara thinks that it is necessary, physically possible and a praiseworthy moral effort. His book is full of examples of people who already manage such a pared-down life: Lagos kiosk traders, Indian jugaad tinkerers, Central American cooperative farmers, Danish bike sharers and the like. These marginal, sociable groups seem obscure and humble, mostly because they tend to avoid the focused, malignant attention of governments and markets. So, argues Thackara, if these ingenious refuseniks haven't been methodically crushed by our dominant, ill-conceived legal and financial systems, others might indeed thrive, or at least do better by copying their thrifty ways. In my own wanderings, I have also encountered under-the-radar activist groups, such as Brazilian Gambiologia tech-art hackers and Serbian pirate street-marketeers. So I share Thackara's awareness that "material pover
Re: McKenzie Wark: Birth of Thanaticism
Well, 20 years after the Californian Ideology, at least we have three good concpets: -thanaticism -the inhumanities -the antisocial sciences Like a good cyber-communist, I'm just gonna put 'em in my bag and use 'em. thanks, BH On 10/16/2015 11:36 PM, nettime's_trial_balloon wrote: < http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/birth-of-thanaticism/ > Birth of Thanaticism McKenzie Wark -- April 3, 2014 I don't know why we still call it capitalism. It seems to be some sort of failure or blockage of the poetic function of critical thought. <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
McKenzie Wark: Birth of Thanaticism
< http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/birth-of-thanaticism/ > Birth of Thanaticism McKenzie Wark -- April 3, 2014 I don't know why we still call it capitalism. It seems to be some sort of failure or blockage of the poetic function of critical thought. Even its adherents have no problem calling it capitalism any more. Its critics seem to be reduced to adding modifiers to it: postfordist, neoliberal, or the rather charmingly optimistic `late' capitalism. A bittersweet term, that one, as capitalism seems destined to outlive us all. I awoke from a dream with the notion that it might make more sense to call it thanatism, after Thanatos, son of Nyx (night) and Erebos(darkness), twin of Hypnos (sleep), as Homer and Hesiod seem more or less to agree. I tried thanatism out on twitter, where Jennifer Mills wrote: "yeah, I think we have something more enthusiastically suicidal. Thanaticism?" That seems like a handy word. Thanaticism: like a fanaticism, a gleeful, overly enthusiastic will to death. The slight echo of Thatcherism is useful also. Thanaticism: a social order which subordinates the production of use values to the production of exchange value, to the point that the production of exchange value threatens to extinguish the conditions of existence of use value. That might do as a first approximation. Bill McKibben has suggested that climate scientists should go on strike. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 2013 report recently. It basically says what the last one said, with a bit more evidence, more detail, and worse projections. And still nothing much seems to be happening to stop Thanaticism. Why issue another report? It is not the science, it's the political science that's failed. Or maybe the political economy. In the same week, BP quietly signaled their intention to fully exploit the carbon deposits which it owns the rights. A large part of the value of the company, after all, is the value of those rights. To not dig or suck or frack carbon out of the ground for fuel would be suicide for the company, and yet to turn it all into fuel and have that fuel burned, releasing the carbon into the air, puts the climate into a truly dangerous zone. But that can't stand in the way of the production of exchange value. Exchange value has to unreel its own inner logic to the end: to mass extinction. The tail that is capital is wagging the dog that is earth. Perhaps its no accident that the privatization of space appears on the horizon as an investment opportunity at just this moment when earth is going to the dogs. The ruling class must know it is presiding over the depletion of the earth. So they are dreaming of space-hotels. They want to not be touched by this, but to still have excellent views. It makes perfect sense that in these times agencies like the NSA are basically spying on everybody. The ruling class must know that they are the enemies now of our entire species. They are traitors to our species being. So not surprisingly they are panicky and paranoid. They imagine we're all out to get them. And so the state becomes an agent of generalized surveillance and armed force for the defense of property. The role of the state is no longer managing biopower. It cares less and less about the wellbeing of populations. Life is a threat to capital and has to be treated as such. The role of the state is not to manage biopower but to manage thanopower. From whom is the maintenance of life to be withdrawn first? Which populations should fester and die off? First, those of no use as labor or consumers, and who have ceased already to be physically and mentally fit for the armed forces. Much of these populations can no longer vote. They may shortly loose food stamps and other biopolitical support regimes. Only those willing and able to defend death to the death will have a right to live. And that's just in the over-developed world. Hundreds of millions now live in danger of rising seas, desertification and other metabolic rifts. Everyone knows this: those populations are henceforth to be treated as expendable. Everybody knows things can't go on as they are. Its obvious. Nobody likes to think about it too much. We all like our distractions. We'll all take the click-bait. But really, everybody knows. There's a good living to be made in the service of death, however. Any hint of an excuse for thanaticism as a way of life is heaped with Niagras of praise. We no longer have public intellectuals; we have public idiots. Anybody with a story or a `game-changing' idea can have some screen time, so long as it either deflects attention from thanaticism, or better - justifies it. Even the best of this era's public idiots come off like used car salesmen. It is not a gre
