If biopower is the power to make live and let live, then what is geopower? What if the power that lay at the boundary between life and nonlife was becoming more important in the Anthropocene? McKenzie Wark approaches this question through a reading of recent work by Elizabeth Povinelli.
What happens when the Anthropocene meets critical race studies? One answer might be that you get Kathryn Yusoff’s provocative small book A Billion Black Anthropocenes, (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). If geologists are going to name a geological epoch after ‘Anthropos,’ then it might be an idea to put that in contact with one of the deepest critiques of the whole category.
In the centenary of the October revolution, much has been said about it as a moment in history. Here McKenzie Wark inquires as to what becomes of the myth of October, now that we are in the time of the Anthropocene.
In General Intellects,I offer condensed versions of twenty-one leading thinkers across a range of fields. but I did not include figures in anthropology, as I am still working my way through reading in what's going on there. I have been finding some exciting stuff. Elsewhere, I wrote about Anna Tsing and Achille Mbembe and Eduardo Viveros de Castro. Here I offer a critical account of the recent work of Bruno Latour on the occasion of the publication of his lectures Facing Gaia.
Continuing with a series of bonus chapters to General Intellects, McKenzie Wark looks at Yves Citton's work on the ecology of attention. Given the what can only be described as the media shitshow of recent times, an ecology of attention might be a good thing to which to pay some attention.
How can cultural workers respond to climate change? Can the cultural work of responding to climate change be a global conversation? In his latest addition to his General Intellects collection of critical appreciations, McKenzie Wark writes about the novelist Amitav Ghosh's influential lectures on "the great derangement."
