#Accelerate; The Accelerationist Reader I (Session 2)

Hello everyone. I welcome you all to the second session of Accelerate the Accelerationist Reader Seminar from our new book program. Tonight we have Diane Bauer as our guest who will discuss with us her work in relationship to both the volume but also the concept of acceleration as well as Ross Wolfe who will be presenting on marks and the students of the class who are going to be either presenting

or possibly or hopefully participating in the discussion with the rest of us. Hello, Diane. Also a few little notes about the class. You know last time I asked everyone to turn their microphones off because I really, the purpose of that was to get everyone comfortable with the system. But we should really be able to kind of like comfortably, don't wait for me to say turn your microphone on and join the conversation. You can do, for those of us who are in the room, you should be able to do it at your ease and feel comfortable to turn your video on and sort of like join the conversation or interrupt if you have to say something.

The kind of rule that we sort of like follow here is that if somebody says something, the The person who is talking will usually stop and give the person to interject because sometimes it's important to interject in the moment and say it otherwise if you don't do it in the moment then it's going to be too late. So yeah, so having said that I would like to start by pointing to what are we here to do today. The sort of like work we're doing today has to do with the second part of the volume. The first part of the book we were sort of like the anticipation part we kind of like followed last week.

This week we're entering the part of the book which is called Ferment. And we're not going to cover it all because the Ferment part is kind of like longer. And actually, we're going to actually go also back a little bit to the anticipation part with both Ross and with Ivan because they're going to do presentations on Marx and Veblen from the first part of the book. But tonight we'll be covering the Firestone piece. We're going to skip Komet, which is next week, and the Deleuze and Guattari and the Leotard one. And then we're going to do Lipovsky and Ballard, J.G. Ballard piece. And each one of them will be presented by...I'm going to do the Firestone and then students will do...I think I said who's going to do what, I'm not going to repeat.

So just to begin this part, I would like to read the Firestone quote from the first page of the book. It says, just as the merging of the divided sexual, racial, and economic classes is a precondition for sexual, social, or economic revolution, respectively, so the merging of the aesthetic with the technological culture is a precondition of a cultural revolution. So it seems like this, after the anticipation in the second part of the book, we're getting close to what Robin and the other co-editor of the book, Armin, identify on the page 11 of the book. I'm just going to read directly from the book. The second section belongs

predominantly to a moment in modern French philosophy that sought to integrate a theoretical analysis of political economy with an understanding of the social construction of human desire. Galvanized by the still uncomprehended events of May 68 and driven to a wholesale rejection of the stagnant cataracts of orthodox party politics, these thinkers of the Marx-Freud synthesis suggests that the emancipation from capitalism besought not through the dialectic but by way of the polymorphous perversion set free by the capitalist machine itself. So this sort of like kind of encapsulates the theme of today's class and perhaps next

Monday when Jason will take over and our guest will be Nick Cernicek. So to start, I would like to go back to Diane and if you guys give me a second, I would like to read Diane Bauer's biography for you. Diane is an artist and Diane happened to be collaborating with the publishers of the volume to create the four header sections in the book that are black and white. One of them is on top of my Facebook page which basically sort of like bookmarks the

four sections and uses the text from the four sections. So the first one, if you pay attention, it says anticipation and the second one, so on and so forth till the end. Right Diane? You may want to take your microphone on because we're going to be talking to each other. I think I'm on, yeah. Excellent. So here we go. That's Diane for you. I had your biography right in front of me, but for some reason, so I'm going to read Diane's biography. Diane Bowers studied art and architecture at Cooper Union and Goldsmith College. Her work deploys a language of visual force across disciplines, including drawing, sculpture, printing, printmaking, installation, architecture, and video.

Bauer's work has been exhibited in institutions, art galleries, and other non-traditional gathering places internationally since the early 1990s, notably at the ICA, Vilma Gold, the showroom, the drawing room, all in London, as well as Desta Foundation and Banke Museum in Athens. And recently she has taught at several institutions including the Cooper Union and Cornell University APP in New York and Goldsmith College and the University of the Arts in London previous to that. So Diane, I would like to kind of pass on the mic to you a little bit to basically tell

us a little bit about how did you become interested in acceleration because as you know the manifesto is not that old and how did you become familiar with the group of people who are around Urbanomic and around Nick and Alex and how did you first of all meet them and how did you also become interested in their work? Well I've known Norman for a while, several years I guess at this point sort of from London and from being in the UK I was in London for 10 years and then Berlin for four so in a I know most of my professional life was on that side at the Atlantic, and I knew Robin from there. And I suppose in the last year had seen some of Nick's writing, Nick Senecek's writing, and started to get really interested in that.

I've known Ray Brazier's writing for a while. So there was a lot of people in the book that I was interested in. I heard that Armin and Robin were putting this volume together, so I just got in touch with Robin saying, you know, do you want pictures? Because that's, you know, I'm very much interested in this stuff and I'd be really interested in making some contribution, you know, if you think it would be suitable. So we sort of started working together to think about what would be suitable. And I, you know, he gave me the four heading titles and the four sections. and the text that he had at that point, this was in the early spring, I guess,

so he didn't have all the text, yes, but he sent me what he had, and I had a read through a lot of it, and the images, we tried out a few things, or I tried out a few things, and we talked about them, that how do you make pictures of this stuff, because you want to be careful that it doesn't end up looking like futurist stuff. I mean, I think because it was loosely broken down chronologically, that there's a temptation to go and to have images from each period, which in the end, there kind of is an image from each period of sorts. How do you characterize that? Because I want to know for you what

connects the picture to the period that the text is from, For example, I mean I think he's, I suppose I should have bookmarked this, but it's, for example the first one is from I think a patent for telegraph cable I believe. Oh yeah, that's right. The second one is from, is that second one is from MENT, I should have had this out. The second one is from 2001, a screenshot from 2001, the film. That's what it's from? Yeah, it's from the inside of hell. That's the second one, right? Yeah.

The third one is a Levias Woods drawing. And then the last one is... What you mean is that it's based on a Levias Woods drawing, right? No, it's straight up appropriated. This one, right? That's the third one, right? Yeah. So I mean, I say based on or appropriated. Basically the way I work is that I... There's one layer that is... is the cover by Patricia Reed, doubled. So that is directly appropriated. One layer is the names of all the contributors to that section. a sort of font that I kind of made up a bit, you know,

and then one layer is the image, and then one layer is the title of the section. So it's these four layers that sort of exist in one same space, and, you know, you can read all of them if you spend enough time with it, you know what you're looking for, I guess. So, I mean, the idea with Robin and what we sort of worked out through... That's the fourth one, right? Yeah. And tell us what is in the background of the fourth one? That is, it's just called, let me see, I'll put it up here. No, I don't. It's a neutrino event from a, it's not from CERN, I don't think. Off the top of my head, I don't remember. But it's from, actually it might be from CERN.

It's from a particle accelerator. It's a computer simulation of a neutrino event. So, I mean, the images were taken loosely from various points in history that loosely correspond to where the texts, when the texts were written in each section. I mean, there's some, it's not so strict because it's not so strictly laid out in the book either. But what I worked at with Robin is that you can't, I mean, I didn't want to have sort of something that looked very futurist because that has a whole other political connotations. connotations when you see an image that sort of looks like a futurist image and that has associations that we you know pointedly did not want to solidify because I think it was a concern that people see something like accelerationism

and that's an association that might immediately come to mind but it's a very different political project so trying to work out what you what sort of image you can use was worked out for Robin. I have a difficult question I'm I'm going to leave it for my second question. But then the easiest question will be to talk about, besides personally knowing the crowd from the time you lived in London and Berlin, what drew you to the ideas of Acceleration? And what made you think that this is sort of like somehow will work with your already existing practice that spans at least 10 years prior to this, if not even longer? Well, I do think the stuff that has been around for me for a long time, for example,

I did a show a few years ago that was looking at the libertarianism and left anarchism and sort of looking at these two forms as very proximate and neither of which was particularly desirable. So I think when I read the manifesto, it sort of seemed to crystallize something that had been around for me, but I hadn't seen articulated so clearly previously. Like what parts of it? Like what elements of the manifesto? I suppose the first thing that comes to mind with that would be the fact that I've been

doing this project by looking at the left and the right. My sympathies were, or anarchism and libertarianism I suppose to be clear, my sympathies were more to the anarchist side but at the same time it still just felt like this is totally not viable and I can't really espouse this as a way forward. It just feels like fantasy and it feels like a place of people that already have a place of privilege exercising a rhetoric that allows a certain level of self-righteous self-satisfaction.

So my frustration with that I suppose is why this laying out of a more viable project was so exciting. Now, I know we've had several conversations about this whole thing because we also like I don't know if people know or not, we're involved with a philosophical, theoretical, artistic project called Fixing the Future and we host conversations. It's me, Diane, Keith Tilford, Joshua Johnson and Diane's partner, Suhail Malik. We are closer than even the new center is to some of the concept of accelerationism. So we've had several

conversations as part of what we're trying to figure out with Fiction the Future. So there's a sense among us who are kind of interested in these ideas that a lot of us come from the arts, right? And we come from the art world or come from working in the arts. I mean I'm the curator, you're an artist. And it seems like that it provides, at the same time it provides simultaneously a kind of like a rigorous critique of the existing art world, at the same time that it opens up sort of like amazing possibilities for where to go with that critique. So it's sort of like, so unlike other critiques of the art world, which always seems to be

still stuck into not providing a way out of it, it seems like Acceleration is able to both do the critique and provide not dreamy, utopian, get out of the art world and do it on your own, but provide some form of, and also not just a political critique, but a philosophical solution to some of the problems of the art world, which actually in this section of the book we're going to get closer to, especially with Firestone piece and other pieces in which actually directly art is implicated in the writing. I know about how we're like the excitement so just like to throw it back at you you feel the same because I know we've had this conversation but this is a great moment because this is this new set of theory let you want to call them lens or tools or whatever you want to call it is providing this kind of opportunity

So how do you see it working, especially since I think what you did with the book is kind of like itself a way of sort of like downgrading the claims of art to like be autonomous and independent from knowledge and from philosophy or theory or from real world. But at the same time, make it kind of like work with it. The way you work with, the way we work with Robin in the book and the way some of your other projects that I've known about are sort of like about, like you're not shy of text, you're not shy of didactic statements being used in your artwork, you're not shy of your work being not indeterminate in the way to use Sohail's language, right? So you're into deterministic, like putting some form of like thing there

that could be perceived as deterministic. You're not afraid of that. You don't want to create vagueness. And this project, like your pieces are like, basically you're saying like that's okay, my art is just like opens up a section in a book and I'm the artist and it's art still but it functions as part of this book. I mean I think something that I'm constantly trying to get to is to be clearer, to be more and while maintaining a level of complexity and I'm by no means I'm one of these people that sort of thinks failure is like so that I don't celebrate failure but I'm also a realist and

And I do feel like in my process of making work is a constant process of kind of correcting it. Like, it's never quite clear enough. It's never quite explicit enough. And it's never quite complicated enough. And I suppose that that's kind of what keeps me going. you know I mean like the thing with the project I mentioned before about looking at the the libertarian and the anarchists but libertarian right and anarchist left and their proximity was where I ended up getting to by the end of that was like well actually they're just they're just very close it's just very similar and that's not that complicated of a problem and that's sort

of just where I end up and then things within that like you know realizing it's not exactly the same and there are differences but it's the proximity is very is very evident um i guess i just i wanted a more complicated problem so like and and the work previous to that i was interested in violence so there's lots of violence and powers there's lots of representations of violence taken some from our history and others and people would look at it in terms of our history and i'm just not interested in our history so i really think that's no longer available to me So it's a constant process of making work, figuring out something for myself, understanding how it's read and then adjusting it to what I'm actually interested in. Now I'm going to play a little bit of that video if I can.

Okay. I'm going to share my screen and if Tony can put us on the...this is the one, right? At the moment there's three up there. Yeah, I'm going to go back and play it. Yeah. I think so. That should be it. It's the first one, right? No, it's the one that's up. If you just hit play, I got it. Yeah, there you go. So tell us a little bit because you know this, oh actually it changed, right? No, that's not it. Yeah, no, no, totally, totally. I got it. I should have just played play. So your involvement with the book project also included doing some form of titling for the launch of the book in London, right?

And this video was shown at the book launch in London, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean that sort of came together quite quickly. Like it was also in part, you know, working with the space that had it, you know, they said that they had the facilities to show videos. I was like, okay, I've done videos before with Amanda Beach. I had never done one on my own and had this idea to do it. It's a silent video, so it was done during the... They had sort of a DJ, I guess. So it was just sort of a running thing. It takes lots of text from the book, mashes it up with each other and some things that

I've injected and bits from Blade Runner and bits from Network I believe. So there's, I mean when I say bits I mean appropriated text. There's no actual, it's all text, the whole thing. There's no line. Now, you were telling me that you work mostly in PowerPoint video, right? is like done in PowerPoint, right? Right, yeah. Right? It's lovely to know that they're done with PowerPoint. No, I mean, like one of the great ironies of finding myself really involved with this very techno-friendly crew is that I'm a complete useless tech, actually. Acceleration is not really about going fast.

So like being interested politically in technology doesn't mean you know all the aspects of the But the difficult question I wanted to ask you... It's not playing as far as I can see, by the way. Oh, it's not playing? I can't see it anyway, so I don't know. It's full screen. You can't full screen it. We can't see it. Oh, I wish you told me because I would have... Okay, there it is. Yeah, go. Go. All right. So basically, what I was going to ask you is that, you know, we were discussing the Firestone piece, and so like, which I'm going to get a little bit more deeper into in my presentation about the problematic of like the... Mo, can I just interrupt you for a second? Yes. This is, it's a bit funny showing it because it's actually much slower than...

Than in real life? Well, you know what we're going to do? We're going to post a link on the page so people can see it. But I just wanted to run in the background if you don't mind. Yeah, okay, fine. And maybe Tony can go between this and you when you're answering my question for the recording of the video. But my question has to do with, so basically a few of the women who are involved with the text in the book being like Firestone, Patricia Reid who did a piece and also did the cover and you are on the artistic side, right? And then that kind of like is reflected also in Firestone text, kind of like this gendering

of like women are on the art side and men are on the scientific side, right? So how did that feel that like even though I know that you have a little bit of a problem. How does it feel? It's ridiculous. But it ended up, like the book ended up kind of like repeating that or like a little bit at least, right? Well, I don't think Luciano's piece is like that. So it's not exclusive. Luciana's piece is like media theory, right? Straightforward media theory. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I have nothing really to say to that. It's, yeah, that does seem to be the case, and it's a bummer. It's really, I think it's...

I mean, I think as... As this, as sort of, I don't know what to call it. I mean, like, as more people become interested in this, there will be more women. I mean, I don't think it's, it sort of gets shit for being very, like, male, white thing. I don't really know that that's the case. The fact that a few of the women that are in the book are involved in art, I mean, I don't know, I don't feel like I can answer to that. I feel like you'd have to ask Robin and Armin. I mean, it is my field. I am female.

I just don't really have anything to say about that. That's a typical sort of critique, isn't it? Any sort of critique nowadays, you can say, oh, you're just white males ranting away. but you wouldn't in any ways want to form an idea of someone's opinion just due to sort of the color of the skin or whatever identitarian background they have, wouldn't it? So if you would be saying, oh, look, we've got all these women in, it would be ridiculous. Just as, hey, look, we've got all these non-Westerners in, just tends to be like that, but, you know. I mean, I'm not making a critique that it's a will. No, I just think you are.

I'm not making a critique because my critique, probably if there's a critique, will be towards like the approach or the epistemology of Firestone herself, but her text is from 1970s and she's somehow involved in like second wave feminism and those critiques have already been made second wave feminism right and then thankfully the text is not so much about feminism or about her idea of feminism but like she just takes what she's done in terms of like applying a form of Marxian dialectics to gender and then she kinda brings it and applies it to her ideas of scientific and aesthetic model right but so the critique is there but I was just like I was just interested that like book the book kind of like you can say that like the book kinda like a little bit

like repeated that that's all but I think it's irrelevant myself because I think I think like you said other people are are involved in the in the project or in the movement or whatever that are not all men and are serious philosophers you know like the names that come to my mind I think also there are women involved in stuff that would be very that whose work would would align with with some of the things in this, you know, that aren't in this, that don't necessarily need to be in this, that wouldn't necessarily, that may or may not know anything about it, but the work is consistent with it. And it's just, they're not in the book, but their project is aligned. I mean, you know, I've been researching, as you know, Mo Keller Easterling,

who, I mean, I think some of the stuff she's involved with, for example, would fit in. fit in and I don't know if you stick architecture in the art or the science that's maybe a longer debate too. It's one of those melting spots of the two right? But also let's think of all the male artists that are sort of like or males who are interested in art and are also interested in accelerationism starting with like Sohail, you know myself, Joshua, Keith, you know there's a ton of them. Sohail, I don't know if you call him an artist but I'm just going to say. No, but he's involved with, he teaches curatorial courses, and he's somehow still involved with the question of contemporary art. And we're all interested in it, so it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, the opposite of it is not true.

But anyways, so, you know, like, if anybody has any questions for Diane, maybe you guys want to, like, turn your microphones on. And, I mean, Yvonne did a little bit of talking, but like if you guys want to talk to Diane, go ahead and ask her questions. Yvonne Yvonne I'll be here as well. So if you want to just start on the Firestone, I'm happy to… Yvonne Yeah, we can go to Firestone too, but I thought before I start the Firestone, maybe people want to say something. Okay, so I guess maybe we should start with Firestone. to follow the format that we sort of like, hey, somebody wants to say something? No.

Okay. I just wanted to ask a quickie. Go ahead, go ahead. Just really curious why you don't care about art history. There's just other things that are much more interesting to me. I mean, I wouldn't disavow it as a field, field, there's just other things that I find much more exciting, like science actually. Yeah, like what, sorry? Like science, I mean, not to put too much of a point on it right in the midst of this conversation, I mean, I don't know, it's just not, it doesn't really excite me. I mean, I don't object to it, it's just not really. I mean, sorry, would you

I don't want to belabor this too much but like, are you just not interested in art history as a field or are you like not interested in art from the past? Good question I just I'm disingenuous to say I'm not interested in art because it is sort of what I base my life around but I I find other things much more exciting, generally speaking. Right. I don't look at that much art, and I don't – and when I do, I usually get frustrated. Right. So I try not to, actually, more than try to, because it does my head in a lot. I mean, there's great stuff.

Don't get me wrong. Like, I've seen stuff that gets me excited, and it reminds me, like, why I got into this in the first place. Yeah. You know, so not to say that, you know, I'm sure there's great stuff out there, but I feel like there's this whole list of stuff that one can look into while being a human on the planet for this short duration. And I don't know, art is not at the top of my list. I mean, there's some great stuff, I don't deny it, but there's other stuff that I find more exciting, I suppose. Well, I may be able to come to your rescue here. To me, and I'm not speaking for her. I'm not speaking for her. I'm very much interested in art, and I'm very much interested in art history.

But I think the problem is the dominant philosophy of history in art history, which is actually happened to be still, even after like all these years of the loose, especially post-cinema, because that's where he gets into this type of history in his crystal image. but also recent stuff that I've been thinking independently and also sort of like the philosophy of history that's being put forth in the book. We talked about it a little bit earlier, but then Reza Nagarestani is also kind of working on some form of like has been part of his project to talk about what is history. And the problem that our history inherits from the discipline of history, the philosophical problem, is that history is sort of like,

Okay, we're no longer looking at history like the early moderns did, in which history was sort of like a form of antique that's under the earth, and you bring this piece of antique out from the earth, and you clean it up, and you varnish it, and then you put it on a shelf, and you go like, look, I'll give you the past. Okay, we're over that type of history. At least since the late 19th century, early 20th century, and post 20th century, not post 20th century, but basically I'm talking about Heidegger and Benjamin, their idea of history is much more like history is a study of the past or the present, right?

You can see that in the figure of Angelus Novus and all that kind of way of looking art history, which is sort of like the needs of the present will go to the past and pick up instances of the past and then bring it to the present and interpret them according to what's happening right now. And that is to me the problem because there's no room for the future in it. So art history lacks future and that's why I'm not interested in art history because it's never seen as a source of future, as a place where you can look for future in it. And this is something that we talked about a little bit last week, right, or last class. That's what precisely Robin and Armen have done in the book, which is like going back and look in Marx and look in Veblen for the future, which is sort of like acceleration and beyond.

So if art history also sort of reforms itself and become open up to the idea of like where is the place of future in the past, I will become again interested in art history. I mean, I think one of my problems with it is the tendency that it has... It's become so much about subjectivity, I suppose. I mean, like, I think I was, you know, while we were waiting to come on, I was reading this article about the legality of asteroid mining, and, like, that seems amazing. Like, that's really interesting, you know what I mean? And I don't, I mean, I think some people find, like, larger truths in looking at other individuals' subjectivities.

For me, I get very impatient with it, actually, because I feel like there's bigger things that I want to spend my time in my head in, you know. And if that helps. Cool. I liked both of those responses. Thank you. I'm going to sort of like begin talking about Firestone. I don't know if you guys have the book or not, but like the text begins on page 111, which is very interesting. 111. I don't want to again delay that. I just wanted to. No, no, no.

Go ahead. I just thought like nobody's saying anything. anything? I was trying to copy paste the text and Kerem is acting up. But there's John Lindblom posted back in July a really interesting article he wrote and speaking of this concept you were saying Diane about subjectivity and he mentions a really good Ray Brzezier article how contemporary critical theory concentrates on the transformative So talking about the importance of cognitive science and the way we're actually able to now objectify humans scientifically, I thought that was pretty fascinating.

So the subjectivity is nice. Can I make you go back? Because it went all... Right when you were saying something important it went off. Okay, I'll try and copy paste as well the little quote. It's a small one. What he's mentioning is... I really wish I knew why Chrome is acting up with copy pasting because it's... I know, it's... And I thought it's a virus. But it's not a virus. Everybody has it, right? Yeah, everyone's having it. He's saying pretty much that sort of maybe, I guess he's talking back to sort of Frankfurt School and stuff, and this importance on the notion of aesthetics and the subjective encounter with aesthetics is it's sort of this magical thing that happens and transforms humans. And he says actually, well, wait a minute, with our knowledge now of neuroscience, cognitive science, all of these things, we're able to more hack humanity. So what used to seem these sort of mystical notions of the human and the subject, its

encounter with the subjective, now can actually be properly scientifically deconstructed. So he speaks of any sort of new or critical theory, and I'm guessing by extension Art has to sort of, rather than recoiling in horror at the subjectification of human existence, it should be a reviewing of our commitments, which will only be achieved through a reconsideration of the intricate relationship between the social, the cultural, the personal, and the neurobiological. I thought that was pretty... So I quite like that's why your interest is in science, because that's where a lot of real novelty is coming from, as opposed to more sort of quaint, almost... Here we go. But he's going to come back.

Almost, I'm vitalist. Is it blocking again? There's a there's a problem with your your speed varies and then at some point you kind of like going to like a little bit of like a pause but you know So we can you can where where was that where did you um? Copy and paste is working the only way to get copy and paste to work is by closing and reopening my browser, but I will um Posted to with with with more positive Safari or something posted to the classroom somewhere on top of the announcements or something but on the Facebook chat perhaps um yes yeah I'll absolutely Yvonne is Igor something like yeah right okay so can we can we start we're

actually totally on time the way our schedule today so everything's gonna be all right. So yeah, so I'm going to start my presentation on Sholemat Firestone, the two modes of cultural history. And to begin with, I would like to do just a brief biography. She was born in 1945 and passed away 2012, only two years ago, August 28th. She was a The Canadian born feminist, she was a figure for radical feminism, a well-known figure of second wave feminism and the book from which the text is drawn is called The Dialectic

of Sex which was published in 1970. The book has been called like a very important book for breaking so many grounds and most Most of the book has to do with her feminist theory, but this section of the book she tries to extract and apply some of her theorization to the question of aesthetic and technology or science. Now, if we remember from last week, Marx contended that, I'm quoting directly, free time, which is both idle time and time for higher activity has naturally transformed its possessors into

a different subject. And he then interests, then Marx goes on to say that this process is then both discipline as regards the human being in the process of becoming and at the same time practice. science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists, the accumulated knowledge of society. So Firestone also refocuses the lens of Marxian dialectics, already used by her as a second wave feminist, or the issue of sexist, on the contradictions between aesthetics and

technology or the old Greek categories of poesis and technique. To quote Robin McKay from the page 18 of the book, so I'm now going to the page 18, the position is set out in exemplary fashion by radical feminist activist and theoretician Sholemite Firestone. Beyond Fedorov's arguably short-sighted dismissal of the aesthetic response to the world as a squandering of energy that could be directed into the technological achievement of real transcendence, Firestone insists that the separation of those two modes of realizing the conceivable in the possible is

an artifact of the same constraints as class barriers and sex dualism. She envisages an anti-cultural revolution that would fuse them, meaning fuse technology and art, arguing that the body of scientific discovery, the new productive modes, must finally outgrow the empirical capitalistic mode of using them. So in a way, we're back to that jailbreak and the prison metaphor I used last week, that there's something inside capitalism that can go beyond it, and it has to break out of this prison. In Firestone's call for the Cultural Revolution, the question is no longer, as in Fedorov,

that of replacing imaginary transcendence with a practical project of transcendence, but of erasing the separation between imaginary vision and practical action. And then there's one more paragraph on page 19, but I'm not going to read that anymore. You guys can follow that up because that's sort of like the editor's summary of Firestone's piece in the book. But for Firestone, the idealistic comes naturally before the scientific. So she kind of like sets up this dialectic, right, between these two sides of culture, side being the idealistic side which actually tries to imagine a new world and then the

scientific side which will then try to impose parts of this idealism back into the world and transform the world or create a new world. And this is sort of like her dichotomy or her bifurcation. And this, what she does there between the aesthetic and scientific mode, as we said yesterday, a necessary function of modeling. So this is how I tend to agree with her. As far as it's a model, it's okay, right? But the minute you want to think of it as like an established reality out in the real world, then the model becomes a barrier to actually sort of like going further with the model. But as a model, I guess, it's okay. And then one thing she

she says clearly is that idealism of aesthetics is at the base, kind of like the base and superstructure of Marxism. So for her idealism is at the base, comes first, and proceeds by suggesting that science progress always follows the artistic imagination. This process also has a kind of echoing within it that for me relate to the Wilfred Sellars notions of the scientific and manifest image of the world. Sellers characterizes the manifest image as the framework in terms of which man comes to be aware of himself as man in the world. That's from philosophy of science. I posted it on the classroom. It's a two-piece

lecture that he provided in, I think it predates Firestones, I think it's in 1960s. But it is more broadly the framework in terms of which we ordinary observe and explain our world. That's like the manifest image. The fundamental distinction within the manifest image are humans and objects, subjects and objects basically. In the manifest image, think and do things for reasons. In the manifest image, humans are very different from objects. Science, however, by constantly proposing new kinds of entities between humans and things, placing other things in between them, kind of mixes up the categories. Slowly constructs a

new framework on the basis that claims to be a complete description and explanation of the world and its processes regardless of the object and subject categories. So the scientific image grows out of and in terms of method is prior, is not prior, sorry, in terms of method comes after the manifest image which provides the initial framework in which science is nurtured. But for sellers the scientific image presents itself as a rival image to the manifest image. So scientific image is sort of like a, it contradicts the, it contradicts it. From its point of view, from his point of view, the manifest image on which the science rests is an inadequate but useful luckliness of a reality which first finds its adequate

in principle luckliness in the scientific image. So it's sort of like, it's sort of like the whole thing about particular and universal that is part of the conversation of rational, irrationalism and acceleration, which is local is needed but it's insufficient. Particular is very important for the establishment of universal but the particular is insufficient in terms of explaining the universal. Again, I'm not saying they're the same thing but I'm just saying these things kind of like relate to each other. So for sellers the manifest image is a correlationally phenomenal real. But science, basically what I mean by that is that the manifest image depends on how humans view it and understand it because it involves humans much more directly.

But science reveals things as they are. But despite what Sellers calls the primacy of the scientific image because he clearly put the scientific image at the base in a way. So like flips around, in my opinion, I could be wrong. Firestone's thinking that creativity and aesthetic are the important thing. They agree together that artistic one comes first. But then for Firestone, there's something essential about the artistic one that we have to sort of like, that science has lost. And we have to somehow marry them again to get back together again. So let's call the primacy. Sorry. So for sellers, art becomes, aesthetic becomes important because all these discoveries and

all these complex understanding needs to be trickled down to the masses or somehow brought back to the community or to the world. And that's when art becomes useful again because it creates the language or the processes for which values or you know ethics and politics can be drawn out of scientific discoveries and brought back to the society and used at a sort of like general level. So now to say a few words about where I stand in relation to these similar models by Firestone and sellers, in my opinion, first of all, what lacks kind of like almost in both of these understanding is that each field, whether, and I'm going by Firestone's distinction,

right, each field being sort of like the artistic and scientific or technological or poetic, within its own working needs the other one to succeed. So in other words, if you want to produce good art, say good painting or a good photograph, you need a level of scientific knowledge about the medium in which you work without which your work may not be received as art. And if so, only and accidentally or maybe even politically. Somebody just decides that it's good art but it's not really good art. So you need a level of scientific understanding of the technique of the medium you're using for you to actually be able to do even do the work that Sellers talks about, or the kind of like essential work that Firestone talks about.

Same with science, which in proceeding from hypothesis to theory and then to establish scientific facts, the scientist needs a level of artistic creativity in thought and in handling of the information in order to be successful. This creativity has to be present both at the level of thought and the level of the creation of scientific media or scientific representations, models. Again, or what we call data visualization, whatever else you would like to call it. So what I'm trying to say is that at the level of presentation, even to your peers as scientists, you're back to needing artistic mastery, because you need to be able to present these,

whether it's in performative mastery where you're presenting the scientific information in a talk, in a conference, or is it in writing, or in persuasion to images, or like putting together large complex data sets and presenting it, you're back to the question of the artistic and aesthetic. So this is why each one of these two, even within its own realm, depends on the other one. and it has to be accounted for. So,

there's also like a few things that I'd like to point out that I that I want to like talk about in terms of my disagreements with the text but also like a few historical stuff but before we we get to that I would like to talk about an art historian from late 19th century Aloha Regal and I put a document by Regal on the student page and if you if you read that it will be I don't know if you guys would like to open it or not but it's basically on the on the class and I'm going to open it from my desktop and just point to it because it's

kind of interesting in terms of what we're talking about both in terms of Firestone and cellars. The first page of it, he says, this is from the book called The Historical Grammar of Visual Arts. He says, the human hands fashion works from lifeless matter according to the same formal principles as nature does. All human art production is therefore at heart nothing other than a contest with nature. The sense of delight with which work of art fills us is commensurate with its human maker's capacity to bring a clear and convincing expression the respective formal laws of nature, natural creation. In other words, it is the recognition of the work of art's correspondence to the work

of nature, to which it refers, that the source of all purely aesthetic pleasure lies. The history of art is the history of the creative human being's victories as he competes with nature. So, Regal, and it goes on, and I mean, this book is not available as PDF. I actually made this PDF particularly with some underlinings to be able to share with you guys. And it's sort of like, to me, Regal writing in 19th century is a little bit more nuanced in a way he understands the relationship between nature as it is and then humans' desire to replicate it or compete with it and show that he understands it through the work of art

or its work of technology. Because for me, as someone who's been involved in art, I don't really think you can make ontological distinction between technology and art. So having said that, and pointing to Regal, I also wanted to talk about a couple of places in a book where Firestone brings about her historical narrative about Renaissance and all that. the name Arabic is mentioned there, but really there isn't much said except like a very like kind of lip service acknowledgement that like Arabs were somehow involved.

But the reason the Arab in the whole picture for me her bringing of the Arabs in the picture is a little bit skewed. And the reason I'm saying it is not because of my own cultural specificity or my identity, because I think the relationship between both art and science as well as culture and power in the height of what we understand sort of in the Muslim world as Baghdad Renaissance, which actually happened prior to European Renaissance, gives us a clue as to what might be going on in our time. So if I want to like open up a little bit this like role of Arab scientists in sort are passing on this knowledge to Europeans, which actually kind of get not mentioned in

Firestone's piece, is because drawing from the history of the Arab world from that time, the ruling powers had much more liberal understanding of how things work. So the Khalifacy in Baghdad would sponsor, would fund artistic projects and scientific projects. And people would work together, and they wouldn't be persecuted for their beliefs and for sort of like translating Greek work into Arabic or writing commentaries about it, even though it sort of changed the nature of philosophy of Islam or heavily influenced it. this was seen as a form of state knowledge needed for running a large empire.

And when this knowledge was brought into Europe as we know it, it was brought into Europe illegally because Christianity would not tolerate it. So people secretly brought these texts, the Greek texts, and translated them to European languages, but also the commentaries that came with it, which helped establish or reopen the idea of the glory of the European glory prior to Christianity. And the reason I said this relates to today is because the kind of proximity that knowledge and art kept with power for a long while,

it kind of corrupted it. And so the decline of science and art in the Arab world had a lot to do with the corruption of scientists and artists who became so close to the political power that they forgot their compass, their ethical compass of where this project was heading. And I think to me that is very important to talk about the support of art and science that we receive in the Western world and its consequences, its political consequences. And to me it's very important to kind of like open this up and a lot more research needs to get done about what happened in Baghdad Renaissance prior to the European Renaissance and what we can learn from it for today and how the seeds of a future might be actually

in that past to be discussed. So that's one thing I wanted to bring up. And then the other thing obviously, two other things briefly because we have other presentations as well, are a firestone relationship with modern art. And modern art, which includes architecture, to me is problematic because she wholesale rejects it. And she goes on and on about berating modern art and calling it sort of clueless. And at the same time that she kind of calls the science heartless and scientists with male attributes and author theory and all that, she dismisses modern art. And to me, it's kind of unfair because actually the period of time to which she refers to

is when art was doing something relevant. And in fact, modern art and abstraction played a major role in helping scientists figure out how to present complex data, basically the idea of abstraction. So like visual abstraction, I'm not even talking about philosophical abstraction, was very crucial in architecture, in product design, graphic design, and you know what I mean, the surface of this world was basically informed by the work that these artists were doing. I mean, you can look at the works of people like the geometric abstraction of late 50s and early 60s. They all, in a way, they all kind of like imagine a world in which computers

will be making these geometric shapes without human hand and these artists without even use of calculators because calculators were very expensive back then and not many people could buy or own calculators. Would like spend hours, come up with these large geometric shapes on canvas and paint them carefully. And to me, these paintings all have the seeds of a future to come, which is sort of like computer graphics. And very, very same type of relationship between aesthetics and technology that Firestone sort of like talks about. It's already there for us to see. And there's a lot more, and we probably can't get into it because other people want to do presentations. But I think she's being a little bit unfair to modern art and also to modern architecture because she particularly has an attack on

Bauhaus. I think Ross said something interesting before we started live broadcast about the overall sort of like hate for Bauhaus architecture that was going on in the late 60s, early 70s and I tried to relate that to sort of like maybe Jane Jacobs like criticism of modern architecture and how modern architecture was bought by corporate interests. Ross, are you there? You want to say something? Ross Duganian, Sure. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the antipathy towards...can you hear me, first of all? Ross Duganian, Yes, perfect. Ross Duganian, Okay. A lot of the antipathy towards modern architecture and modern art in the 60s and 70s stemmed from

a kind of disillusionment with the abandoned radical project that it emerged from, it by then almost established itself as a new orthodoxy and then bought into almost the kind of enlightened capitalism of high corporate modernism. The Seagrams building in New York is exemplary of this. So you get somebody like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was the third rector of Bauhaus in Germany, who designed the monument for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnik, 30 years later designing the swankiest monument to high corporate capitalism in the Seeklunds

buildings. So there was a sense of inversion and an idea that this kind of abstraction was unable to grasp the kind of uneven rough particularities, the gradients of life. And it had all these like connotations of like alienation and, you know, disruption of sort of organically existing urban life. So, I mean, Firestone's, Firestone's polemic against modern art and architecture was not too unusual for the time. And really, I mean, yeah, Jane Jacobs is one. Tom Wolfe wrote from Bauhaus to Our House,

which is a polemic against modern architecture. in 73. So I mean these you know, these all were converging around the same time. Yeah, but you know I completely agree with what you present here but like she's doing a sort of like analysis which more has to do with epistemology than the politics, the actual politics of it, right? And therefore, she, and also calling Bauhaus's experiment like a bunch of easel like failed experiment. It's historically not true because even if you go by what you said, modernism was able to successfully melt with some form of scientific understanding

if not like capitalism and finance, right? So it wasn't that isolated and like, you know, it wasn't that isolated or bohemian the way she kind of presents how artists were. So actually, it was involved with something larger than art and it was melted into something, especially Bauhaus. So for me, I was like, I had to bring that up. The other thing, of course, and I think maybe Diane wants to talk about that with me, is the whole issue of talking about artistic side of culture being feminine and then technological and scientific side of it being male and her vision of her evolution being how these two will get closer and we get to some form of epistemological androgyny in which there's

no difference between art and science. As she closes her piece, I have this quote from the text to read, the last page, when When the male technological mode cannot last produce in actuality what the female aesthetic mode had envisioned, we shall have eliminated the need for either. And this is sort of like peppered all over the book, this sort of like the use of the male and female as a metaphor for the differences between the aesthetic and scientific. And yeah, so, Diane, would you like to say something?

That shit makes my skin crawl. I don't know, I actually don't have that much to say other than I have a really hard time reading the rest of the text because I have such a hard time getting past that vitalist stance that sort of gets laid out at the beginning. I read everything else in it in that light, and I just... I really, like, I cannot take that. I cannot accept it. It just seems completely, like, wrong-headed to me that I'm conservative in the worst way.

But, I mean, I think you've made a lot of really good points points about the text that I think are worth thinking about if one can get past this sort of finalist, you know, stuff. Metaphor. Hmm? I'm saying that in this part of her text, it's a metaphor. In other parts of her book, it's not a metaphor, it's real. But here, it's used as a metaphor to explain the relationship between science and art, right? so it's a little bit like distance and I can kind of like not freak out so much because it's just a metaphor the other parts of the book might come across as more so like more annoying my own book I'm talking about I'm not talking about the Accelerate Reader sure

I mean I don't really have that much to say about it I'm not I'm by no means an expert on Firestone I I yeah I don't have that much to say about her writing. I mean, I think the Sellers thing is interesting around it. I don't think she was aware of Sellers. The Sellers thing, like, it actually made it even more objectionable. It made it even worse. You know, because it's like, then that sort of makes the male unknowable and the truth, like the real truth, and the female just like this paltry human, sort of, will understand as much as we can within the limits of our biology. It just makes the whole thing even

harder to stomach. I don't really disagree with it, but it makes me even more... To give her credit, there are nuanced versions of it that appear once in a while. Like in page 128 she says, culture develops not only out of the underlying economic dialectic, but also out of the deeper sex dialectic, where she doesn't really get into defining this dialectic, right? And I can kind of handle that, like, okay, yeah, culture can be argued that something that develops out of this. But another thing before we finish, because I think, like, I want to, like, maybe open up five minutes and then go to the other presentation, is she, like, and this is like her hate on

art, right? She goes, like, with 127. That merging of the aesthetic with the technological mode will gradually suffocate pure high art together. I can just see her wanting to kill Greenberg or something. I don't know. What is the figure that she has in mind when she wants the pure high art to be suffocated? I kept thinking, okay, if this is about the melting, so who will be on the scientific side being suffocated? If this merging is going to suffocate high art, then somebody from the scientific side has to also get sacrificed. who would that be? Would that be like a physicist? Would that be the mathematician? Or like, I don't know. But she doesn't say that. She doesn't say that about the scientist, even though the scientist is the male side, right? So she wants the pure high art to be suffocated, but she doesn't equally says somebody from the other side. So I thought

that's kind of interesting. She really has a hate on art. Do you have some condemnation of it in that? I can't, I didn't mark it, but I do seem to remember some condemnation of... Yeah, she talks about the male personality of scientists being authoritarian and dry and stuff like that. Like socially retarded. Yeah, socially retarded. But she has a lot to say about the emotional artist and all these other feminine activities. I feel like there's probably a lot of stuff in Firestone that is worth really investigating and I am probably not the person to do that. But anyways, to be able to catch up with the rest of the presentation, do we want to sort of like move on? Do you guys have questions? Do you want to talk about the Firestone piece or that's enough?

Yeah, I just wanted to say to lend some credence to that idea. I think that the idea of the great scientists from the 70s has sort of been assumed by the great technologists of the 90s and 2000s. So I think in a way that has happened. I mean, we don't worship science as a society anymore. It's, you know, we don't have a Carl Sagan, and, you know, Bill Nye was for kids, you know? So, like... So we have, like, people like you who make social media and Elo and all that, right? Those are the scientists of today. Yeah, you know, Zuckerberg. No, I mean, but for real, Larry Page is the scientist of now, or Peter Thiel, for God's

sake. Yeah, it's like science, if it can't be summed up in a TED Talk these days, doesn't hold the same appeal. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson's remake of the Cosmos is just on a few notches intellectually lower than Carl Sagan's original was. Everything needs to fit. I hate TED Talks because everything needs to fit into this. hey guys, let me show you this nifty call up, whereas the real work of science is immensely complex over long periods of time. So yeah, I agree. We've got the Silicon Valley adoration now. Yeah, I mean, we can take issue with that, but ultimately, I mean, technology is in a certain sense a merger of science and art. And so it's sort of like, that's just what it is.

And I think in a lot of ways the designer has a lot more cultural capital than the artist in our society. I'm glad you said that because that was part of one of my notes. I was going to say that the art is involved in this fusion has happened. It's just that we don't want to acknowledge the type of work that's getting done in interface design or other aspects of data structuring by artists and we don't consider that art so we just still continue with the idea that technology and art are separated. But it's like they're really not because great artists are working in these companies

like developing things that are very aesthetic for the work that these technologists are doing. Right? So now, also to all of you, I have a lot of LO leftovers. If any of you wants to sign up to LO, just give me your email, and I'll send you an invitation. How many of you already have LO? Today was the LO day, right? Like, everybody got their LO today. It was crazy. Since the beginning. Yeah, I got an invite. Yeah, I haven't signed up yet. For what it's worth, I think it's completely uninteresting. Yeah, totally. Actually I felt like it's not adding anything, it's just like an interface, right? And they say they use the word curated, they say it's a curated social media and I was

like oh no, curated. But of course I had to go get my, and actually to tell you the truth I got like few of them. I got the Accelerate because I was like okay no one, I don't think Robin's up yet so I'm just going to get it. So I got the Accelerate, I got Database, I got Mohammed. I was like what? No one's got Mohammed, so I got Mohammed. And I got Brooklyn. Yeah, so I'm Brooklyn too. So I have one that is just Brooklyn. And I ran out of emails because you have to like invite you an email and then log into that email and then create it. And I was like, I probably got one for every active email of mine and then I got tired. But anyway, send me your emails and I'm more than happy to. Ross, it is a new social media platform. But really, I didn't see it doing anything new except some very cool, flat, black and

white non-color interface. It's really like an interface, right? To illustrate Morgan's point. Anyways, so it's 8 o'clock and I think we should move on with the next presentation. We have Ross, Ivan, we have four of them. So they're going to be a little bit like hectic and faster, but I'm sure you guys appreciate it. Diane, you're welcome to stay with us if you want, but if you can, that will be okay too. I will stay as long as I can. I might have to excuse myself at some point. No problem. Okay, Ross, go ahead. Okay, so the presentation, the material that I'm presenting on

is the fragment on machines by Karl Marx. It appears as part of a series of notebooks later assembled, discovered only in the 1930s, as a kind of rough draft for what later became capital. It's called colloquially by its German name, the Grundrisse, or groundwork. In it he's talking about, I mean basically he's, you know, it kind of picks up in the middle of his presentation of, you know, the various steps that led up to industrial production.

It's kind of interesting as somebody who's read Capital and sees the way that he operates with the categories there in a much more concrete way, to see him kind of abstractly lay it out, the sort of conceptual framework of it in the Grundrisse. In many ways, one can think of the Grundrisse and each of its parts, including the fragment on machines, as a kind of roadmap or plan, conceptual plan for what later becomes capital. So it has all of the concepts worked out in this very high level of abstraction in more Hegelian languages.

I'm sure you recognized reading it. So what he's talking about for the most part is this category of fixed capital, which is what an economist named David Ricardo classical bourgeois economist in the early 19th century, had really first theorized as the sort of, you know, the quintessential part of this new industrial phase of capitalism. This was distinct from what was analyzed in the 17th century as cooperation and competition between different workers working in the same workshop, and then the kind of detailed division

of labor, the Adam Smith pin factory of the 18th century, where the labor process was subdivided into these very, very small, simple tasks, and then, you know, made more efficient by this means of extreme skill in this one very narrow activity. What machinery does, and one of the things that he does to distinguish it from what he refers to as a means of labor, he talks about it as a means of production. So the means of labor.

What is it, you know, he's trying to trace out, what is it that separates a machine in this modern sense, a large-scale machine from a simple tool in the sort of pre-modern, pre-capitalist sense? Whereas, like, you know, you think of a hammer, an implement, is something that's wielded by, you know, the laborer. It's a means of labor that the worker can more or less control or adapt to any set of environments as a kind of constant instrument. What he talks about with large-scale machinery is a set of automation whereby a sort of mechanism

in a sort of fixed state, adapts the worker to it rather than the worker using the tool, you know, as is, you know, according to his win. So there's a kind of reversal, and this is like part of the Hegelian framework that much of the Grun-Risa works in. Whereas with the pre-modern tool living labor wielded, yeah, Veblen must have been reading Marx, certainly. I think that was a joke. Whereas the...huh? Can you guys hear me okay?

Yeah, yes. Okay, cool. So, you know, what he's trying to talk about, and he quotes this guy Ur. I mean, I don't have the Accelerate reader, so I'm going from the Grundrisse text. I'm assuming it's the same translation by Martin Nikolaus. but he quotes this guy Orr who, you know, kind of really, at the same kind of conceptual level of abstraction, traces out what separates this from Adam Smith's pin factory, where the decisive element is workers working under one roof,

but divided between many different tasks. what he what Orr you know says is that you know it's no longer that the workers are working you know just under the same roof but are all part of one sort of integral mechanism where everything it says factory this is right above where this section begins factory signifies the cooperation of several classes of workers, adults and non-adults, watching attentively and deciduously over a system of productive mechanisms continually kept in action by a central force.

It excludes any workshop whose mechanism does not form a continuous system or which does not depend on a single source of power. So... Now, I just want to interject, if you don't mind. Mm-hmm. To me, the freshness of the text, I mean, the freshness of the text is not because of what it actually describes, because we already know about factory, and we already know about that. But how this is sort of like almost like a, like I hate to use the word, and I'm not going to use it. It's, I'm going to use it. It's prophetic about the sort of like what Negri and, you know what I mean, B4 and all those people called the production of intellectual labor on their network computers.

So when he's talking about the machine, you go like, oh, so workshop is like a little calculator in the 60s where you would just pick it up and you calculate a few things with it and it would help you calculate and put it down in a post to say something like 24 hour connectedness to your wireless network today in which everyone is sucked into the machine and now we're the extension of a machine rather than the machine being sort of like R2 and this is totally also go back to like what Stiegler discusses in Technique and Time as sort of like the technological condition and to me that is the freshness. The freshness of it has a lot to do with that, that these texts can be easily read as a sort of like a pre-emission about today.

Yeah, I mean what I would say is there are several categories and distinctions that he's working with. sort of foundational one for capital and for the Grundrisse, even though in this section it seems to be more focused on fixed versus circulating capital, the foundational one is constant versus variable capital. Constant capital is basically just the sum of non-human inputs to labor. So it's the accumulated dead labor of the past, labor that has already been spent in past production processes to which then more labor is added through by the living workforce.

Within that sort of constant capital, there's a further subdivision of what Ricardo described as fixed labor, or fixed capital, the machinery, the large scale machinery, and then circulating capital. So he talks about the raw material as what goes in and is expended in the production process. It's consumed immediately in being transformed into whatever commodity it is that's being produced. What fixed capital is is what's not completely consumed. Obviously machines break down and you know the way that the value is, the way that machines add value

to commodities is by the sum total of labor invested in the production of that machine then being gradually shed through each successive process. I'm still going with my metaphor as you explain this right, I'm still going with how can we use this for today's production of today's immaterial production and I keep thinking of raw material being sort of like possibly being the data and then the fixed capital being the algorithmic and hardware sort of like infrastructure of larger companies. I can't run those algorithms. I don't own them.

types of data processes are not available to me as a consumer. I can't even search all my comments on Facebook, right? But those are fixed properties of Facebook that they invested in. And they break down too once in a while, but then they're there to work. And then us kind of like putting in the raw data material into it. And you know, I'm using this because basically I'm on the accelerationist track of trying to sort of like say that that yes, telecomputation is a jail or a prison, but the possibility of breaking out of it, just like how Marx talks about the factory, exists in it. And of course, again, there's also the parallel here between the Deleuze's PostScript Run Control Society, right?

The movement from the factory to the internet, which is like accounted for in Deleuze's text. But go ahead. I just wanted to like, because I wanted to like just bring it to today. I'm going to interrupt, sorry. Yeah, I mean, just to briefly deal with this, I mean, I personally view the distinction between material and immaterial labor as spurious. And incidentally, you know, the guy who coined the term immaterial labor, Maurizio Lazzarato, I believe, repudiated his own initial hypothesis about immaterial labor. So, I mean, the guy who coined, you know, the concept himself no longer believes that, you know.

Yes, I completely agree with you. Correct. That's why I'm bringing it up. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, the other thing is that, I mean, obviously today we have a, you know, when we think about Marxism and about the industrial proletariat, We have this vision of a kind of factory worker working at like a steel mill or one of these very old school 19th century heavy industry jobs. Really, I mean, what makes the value that, the kind of abstract value that Marx is talking about, the sort of sum total of labor processes, you know, congeal homogenous labor time. What makes it so distinct is that it's not measured according to sort of physical units.

So it's not tethered to this kind of... It's not measured calorically. It's not measured in terms of the calories expended in... It's not physical in that sense. So, I mean, in a way, the immaterial labor concept is superfluous because, I mean, the concept of value, the value that's being generated already in Marx is, you know, it manifests through material processes, but it's, you know, it really is not tethered, you know, to the physical exertion of the workers. In any case, the kind of interesting things that are going on here, So there's the fixed labor of accumulated dead labor of the past,

which then acts as a kind of prison for living labor. It sort of makes, it transforms the workers into mere appendages of the machine rather than the tool, the pre-machine tool, as a sort of extension or appendage of the worker. What he talks about is the sort of, and this is what gets kind of interesting in terms of like a sort of futuristic application of the ideas that Marx is talking about. He talks about the knowledge, the sort of general intellect or knowledge that goes into the manufacture of these machines, the production of them, as being alienated from the workers.

So, you know, whereas, you know, skilled laborers in pre-capitalist times knew their tools very intimately, usually, the complexity of the machines grows to such an extent that the ordinary workers in the factory, you know, They sort of push a mechanism, and they have a knowledge of how to operate it at an immediate level, but if the machine breaks down, they don't necessarily know how to fix it. So this general knowledge gets alienated from labor and into part of capital. It becomes, it's potentially a kind of birthright of humanity insofar as capital is the product of accumulated labor.

But it's alienated from that. So, I mean, it's this sort of reservoir of, you know, potential use. use, should machines ever be emancipated from their utility towards valorizing preexisting value such that it could potentially be used to produce for the needs of society. I mean this is the, and this is what I would say is like the kind of broader dialectic at work, that which potentially emancipates us, you know, liberates us, presently enslaves us. So, you know, the very tools, the very mechanisms that, you know, could potentially tomorrow,

you know, form the foundation or the material framework for, you know, a socialized society, a kind of post-capitalist society in which commodity production no longer dominates all of human activities, these very tools are what today, you know, we are subjugated to them. So, you know, one of Marx's common formulations is that capitalism is that mode of production where the past dominates the present rather than the present dominates the past. the reason I'm interjecting is because we want to like probably like Diane says that he's very sorry and he's going to go but

there's some notes on the side and then it just jumped up and then I started reading like Morgan and I thought why Diane is changing subjects so fast but I guess this is Morgan now but what I was going to ask you but let's leave that for the discussion at the end because we have to go through some of the some of the presentations. Yvonne, are you ready to go? Yvonne Yes, yes, I'm ready. Okay, go ahead. Thank you, Ross. I'm going to turn my video on. Oh, thanks, Ross. That was really cool, yeah. And Vavelance is a lot of the same stuff as well. If my video, I'm going to turn my video on. If it's skipping, let me know. I'll switch it off. So at least you can hear the audio. So yeah, Vavelance is a lot of...

There we go. You may want to turn it off because your video off is better. Okay can you hear me better now? Yes, better now, yes. Yes. Okay excellent. Just a really brief, Veblen is considered the father of a sort of a form of heterodox economics which is very useful from sort of turn of the century and it does seem though that either he was reading Marx or he was picking over his shoulder because he says

exactly the same thing about a lot of things but then he does have different conclusions which can be refreshing, so it's a new critique, a new take on this critique of capital. And what he says again is, I won't go over this too much because Marx is the same in Grand Ressier, is he essentially says there is a tipping point when the worker, we go from the simple tools to very complex interconnected machines ...processes which demand a great deal of... ...specialized precision.

So, and that's when this shifting of power occurs where it's rather than the worker wielding a hammer, it is the worker involved in an enormously interconnected, you could say, proto-globalization, globalized environment where his process is so tightly linked to other processes and requires a very exacting form of precision, that's when that shift changes and it's actually the machines that begin to dominate. Crazy, you know, machine coupling, but it did make me think of Deleuze when I was reading Deliz and Qatari's machines and desires and assemblages.

So that's the distinction for him. And then what happens is this forcing of the setting of pace, of quantitative precision starts to change the worker. This is what Veblen identifies as a big worker. And since its turn of the century, he actually does mention it's sort of, it's more the highly specialized engineer or chemist or we could say today technologist worker, but he keeps going on about mechanical worker. And he's .

And he becomes better. I don't want to talk over him, but it's kind of like. Those are posts. And he says. Just one sec, Ivan. Can I interject? I just want to say that, like, even without the video, you get a lot of interruption in what you're saying. Go for it. Yeah, absolutely. So I don't know what would be the best way to proceed because there's a certain level of proximity to your source of internet is almost like prerequisite for this connection to work. So I don't know where you are. Do you want to like get yourself closer to your modem or there's a way for you to accommodate this because this is going to, like not only people who are live here are not going to be able to enjoy it fully but also the recording would just be terrible.

I'm sorry. No, don't worry, don't worry. We're just going to have to figure out a way. What do you guys, what everybody feels? We could use, I mean one thing we could do is we could use, you can call in by phone if you want to do that and I'm sure that'll be crystal clear. But I guess you're in Vancouver, right? No, he's in Australia. Yeah. I think we're getting a little bit of lag but I don't think we're losing words. It seems like there's a big shift in words, but the sentences seem to be like coherent to me. Okay, then maybe we should, how does everybody feel? Should we continue on? I was getting one. Try it. Try it.

Let's see. Let's see. Because I thought that we were missing too much. Sorry, Tony. Go ahead. Oh, no, it's worse. No, it's worse. So, yeah, the... Well, we just... It's jitter. We just have to somehow think of something for the next two classes with you, and I'm going to be in touch with you. I'm going to be in touch with you with Tony to try to figure out a way to make this work. But why don't we go to the next presentation for now and see hopefully you, maybe you can

tell us and tell us how is it going in terms of like reception. So maybe we can come back to you. Sean, do you want to take over? I can try to. I don't know. I guess I'll just start with the Lubavetsky piece. Yes. So I can try and go to that reading on my screen if people can see that. I haven't used the screen function before so do you see... Do I do entire screen? Do you see this here? No, the window you chose. Yeah, now we see that window. Okay, so the piece is called Decline of...

Oh, no, sorry, that's not it. It's the one on repetition here. So does everybody have this? Yes, we all have it. I think we have it. Yeah. Okay, yeah, the power of repetition. So I guess a little bit of background on the author. I'm a little unprepared here, but he is a French intellectual who apparently is no longer a Marxist, technically speaking. Most of his books are written in French. He is a person who believes that individualism is both a really toxic aspect of contemporary society but also one of the only liberating possibilities for it.

But this piece is definitely one about the liberation of time outside of the wage relation, or at least I certainly read it that way. Sorry, someone interjecting. Go ahead. Hey, Sean. Can you make the text bigger? I'll try here. Yeah. I'll try here. Is that any better? Is that better?

Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, it's really good. That's good. Okay. I'll just bring it up. It's a short piece. There's only really five pages. So he is somebody who really embraces the idea of repetition, and he thinks that we we need to basically start conceiving of repetition and ritual and take comfort in ideas like that and not see them as exclusive to capital. Because he thinks it's only really in repetition that spontaneous ideas emerge. And so he calls for this thing called the constant revolution, And I think if we go right down here where he says a paradox, it is in a second chance occurrence that necessity arrives when the constellations of, we could just say, discursive

bodies find themselves blocked, stabilized, when repetition replaces unpredictable movements of attraction and repulsion. So I think he's talking about how we need to keep many aspects of repetition because that's where new ideas seem to actually emerge. And then I guess he's saying that he doesn't want to get rid of systems of automation. And this sort of goes back to what Ross is saying. It's that which enslaves us sort of ends up freeing us. And on the second page, he begins to talk about that a little bit better over here, where he goes, so that power is found ready-made in its entirety in the sphere of affects or thoughts

if everybody can see that yeah, okay so it is with repetition it is already the subject that is for how would the identity and unity of the ego be possible without such stable configurations configurations. So he sort of wants to keep all of those kinds of things, but thinks that we can separate it from capitalism and sort of trying to make time our own, but he's not really all that specific about it. And then if we go to, this is I think page,

we're still on page two here. So, yeah, this is what he basically sees as the problem of current forms of repetition. Like I guess if you've seen the kind of like system of highways and where you're forced into systems of automation that are not actually your own, where he says that the reactions of modern time are no ones, that they belong to no one. They render our identities invisible. And I think he sees that as the main problem. But he also sees an obsession with presentism

as a big problem with capitalist subjectivity, where people really only notice the present moment, and that's the element of contemporary repetition that he sees as really dangerous to people's lives because they aren't rendering a future for themselves, they're only focused in the present moment. And that's where they blur the lines between what is capital and what is regular life and they don't really see them as distinct from each other and I think he wants to help pull those hairs apart a little bit better. I can't see if anyone is trying to type or interject here so I'm just going to pause for a second. I would like to, do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions? Yeah, yeah. So I was hoping to be able to sort of like talk about the part about the time of the

capital which on the book is page 229, right? The time of the capital. Yeah, so funny I'm seeing myself like in three different places. Oh, that's really neat. Yeah, it's called the time of the capital, right? It's a section in the text. Yeah, so then that's the third page. I'll pull that up right here. Yeah, so because I was like with him and this is where I sort of like began sort of like developing some form of like critique of what he's talking about. And then I was wondering, what do you think about his idea that, like, you know, he says, the banker may wager on the future, make a credit of time because he depends upon the

renewal of the present. On the capital of time necessary for the entrepreneur in order to assure the reimbursement in time and for the creator to believe in it. That part is fine. And this is what sort of like refreshing. But then he says, in the next paragraph, he says, capitalism, this system that has promoted experimentation to the rank of a systemic principle of its functioning, is attached to no structure in particular, is fundamentally disinterested in the nature of whatever codes are in place. All combinations in a generalized indifference may be assumed. advocacies become possible on the sole condition of being regulated space in time. So for me, I was just like, okay, this is a little bit contradictory because if you want

to say that capitalism is a system that has no, attached to no structure, then you are developing a structure which is a temporal structure for capitalism. And maybe even Jason can chime in because Jason knows a lot about time and capital. But if you're going to say that, then get into it and tell us a little bit more. And if you don't, then why are you even going there? That was my beef. And I thought I should ask you. Yeah, I mean, I see that as a little bit of a 180, too. but if you go to that, if we re-go to that paragraph a second,

I have to turn this back on. So if we re-go to that, he says, it is permanently disinterested in the nature of whatever codes are in place. I think he's saying that capitalism has the primacy of being able to, like capitalism is dictating all of time in the world right now, so that in that sense time is exclusive to capitalism right now but it's not the only thing that's exclusive. Does that make sense? Sure. But you're right. It does seem like he's saying there's no aspect of capitalism except time. All it really takes is time.

There's nothing else in it. I think that's a little bit weird. I'm going to put something on the screen. I'm going to put this thing on the screen now and I'm going to ask people to engage with it. This is from the book I posted yesterday. sort of like the Nizan and Bichler book, right? So I'm going to put this formulation and I want to see that like this is the problem with like theory. It's like if you're going to talk about capitalism, it's good to know. Actually get a little bit into the

science of capital because that's the only way where you can substantiate. So you're You see in the window, right? On the top you get this formula basically. This is Nitzan and Bichler's formula for how capital does exactly what Lipovitsky says it does. So there is this formula at least as a proposal, as a hypothesis. And if you look at it, P here is the price of the stock, the stock price. Which they also like look at and they think that this is also the same for capitalization, which is sort of like the other way of saying interest. So you could put K or P, right? And then E-E-P-S is estimated price of the stock price, right?

And then R is risk. So basically the way the price works, the way the future works is that risk has to get factoring for the price to be predicted, for the future to be set, right? So you have the E E P S divided by R, right? And then the complicated version of it is like, okay, so this estimate, how does this estimate are arrived at, right? This estimate is arrived at, basically the H there is hype. And hype basically is kind of like capitalist hegemony, culture, the way financial market hype a certain stock, hype a certain product. So basically the estimated price of the stock is times hype divided by risk which is R, right?

And then that Greek element which I don't know how to pronounce its name, that element he calls it in the paragraph, he calls it like the risk coefficient which means when the risk coefficient which is the confidence of the market or the confidence of the capitalists or the confidence of the people who are involved, right? So if the confidence is one, then risk gets just divided by the risk, the risk taken, right? And then when the confidence goes low, that risk, the Greek symbol becomes more than one. And then what ends up happening is that any little bit of coefficient in that confidence right, then increases the risk. When the risk goes up, the price comes down, right? It's the price of the future. So really, we do have a, at least by these two political economies, a way of saying that

this is, and they argue that this formula is the base, if you want to come up with a basic formula of how capitalism deals with the future, here it's in front of you. And I mean, you can see the page number of the book too, and I uploaded the book. So for a further discussion of it, I would just send you to the book. And it's a really fascinating part where they describe all these elements involved, like like hype, risk, are well described. So I found that kind of like a good complement to Lipovitsky's, the idea of time. Anyway, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I don't really, unless Jason is going to say something. No, please go ahead. The thing that I don't really understand about the essay, or at least it's not addressed

in this section of it is basically how to re-render repetition and time out of the existing system. So, I mean, that just isn't there. What about the last page? Yeah, on the last page, that's kind of where his whole argument is. So I'll pull that up. Yeah, the last page, I thought that's where he kind of gets clear about what he means. Yeah. Basically, to me, it means that we need our own hype machine. We need our own hegemony. We don't, we don't be afraid of hype, don't be afraid of like repeating, repeating and repetition because we need our own repetition machine if we're going to get anywhere, which is something you actually said in the beginning, right? Yeah, something like that.

So I, to me the crux of the argument I think was right over here. It says, so that all there is for us to do, to hope for, is to cut short the reign of powers in their repression and to do so endlessly, since the combat against powers has no end. It's not much, yet it's enormous, such as the meaning of permanent revolution, which we now identify with the multiple movements of acceleration and their desire for saving of time." But then, yeah, I don't know. I mean, then again here he's just saying we need to take so much refuge and repetition I don't really understand his fixation on that. I mean, maybe it's just too brief of a piece.

But something that is really interesting about the earlier portions of the essay is when he is talking about value, because it's usually where value is disguised in a wage relationship that profit is extracted. So he thinks time is really the most valuable component because that's where time is always used to take labor value out of things. Does that make sense? Yes, I would like to see if others would like to discuss it or chime in. I'll pull up page four here. Can you still see this? Yeah, we're seeing your screen.

So whatever you see, we're seeing. Okay, yeah. It seems to us, therefore, illegitimate to say of the subject of powers that all their is reducible to the maintenance of the most elementary rule, the last word of capital. Equitable, exchange, equivalence, you know, time is equivalent to this, blank is equivalent to that, I mean, but it's mostly, okay, so he says that the law of value represents the very repression of the system and needs and no other or the others, cops, etc., are only lemmas or reciprocals of the fundamental theorem of application. An economist reduction that ignores the fact that taken and blocked, these powers do not only function as guard dogs of capital as obstacles to its processes of accelerated expansion.

Doesn't that echo something out of the Marxist text about like how capitalism tries to be fixated on the price of labor, whereas there's much more going on and then obsession with the price of labor is what's going to stop us from going beyond capitalism? To me it Right, but then Marx doesn't seem to me at least to have a way out of that because he's in some kind of, there's always a labor value. There's always a market price of labor. And that market price is so indebted to time in the Marxist system. Who actually seems to escape that is Ricardo because Ricardo doesn't have that fixation with time in determining the market value of labor.

but perhaps it's because he believes more in the literary value and I put well I was I was only referring to the marks we read yes the two days ago not the marks that we know out of like canon of Marxism because if we go with the canon you're right but I think echoes of this were could be could be heard in gruneris and the fragments on the machines which is to me sort of like a surprising nice piece to read for this class and just generally but yeah so So anybody else wants to bring up points? I would interject, but I was mostly focused on Ballard for today.

But I definitely want to read this closer now. Anybody else? He talks about Lyotard too and I don't really know about the interaction that this piece has with Lyotard. He talks about him here on the last page. Right over here. Laura, do you like to say something? I actually had a pretty basic question, I think, which is my main concern perhaps with the whole accelerationist project and with contemporary Marxist critique, I think. I'm

not an expert in Marxism, I have to say. I've read The Fragment of the Machine, I've read But it seems to me that especially in contemporary Marxist critique that there is an idea of capitalism, of power, this monster, this fate of complete, something that we cannot really go beyond, we cannot escape from, but we can only accept and perhaps try to confront. So I don't know, I guess my main question is kind of is there another way to try and formulate a critique of the present in looking at the future but doing without like Marx? I don't know, I don't even know if it's a question or it's just like, I don't know,

way of, I don't know, I guess that is my main concern with, yeah, the acceleration is real. Why is starting from Marx? Why is taking his parameters and his analysis of capitalism, sure, it's very spot on. Well the thing is, you've got to, okay, now I think I'm getting where you're coming from. I don't think, you know, that was my gut reaction. My gut reaction when the book came out was this sort of like disappointment of why start with Marx. And then I was kind of like, I had the same feeling because I don't necessarily consider myself a Marxist. Now, probably like people here will get like upset like Ross and everybody, but I don't consider myself a Marxist.

And I was having the same question. But after reading the particular piece of Marx that they picked for the book, and then thinking about sort of like, you know, Marx gives us the problem, though. But it doesn't really provide us with the right clue even maybe to the answer. But he gives us the problem. And he's imprisoned in a 19th century epistemology. And that's why he can't really point to the solution, let alone giving us the solution, right? But at the same time, the reason to begin with Marx is also political, I think. Political in terms of anthropologically political, which means because of Nick Land's legacy and the importance of speculative realism and Nick Land to the whole project, if you don't start with Marx, you will immediately be written off by Marxists

as a right-wing, neoliberal thing that's trying to sell out, right? So when you start with Marx, you kind of like anthropologically within the contemporary intellectual world, you kind of sort of like put yourself to the left of Marx by saying like, here's your Marx and we find it insufficient. So then by default, you kind of fall to the left of Marx or more progressive than Marx. So that's how I kind of came to sort of like understand the relationship between accelerationism and Marxism and also the fact that the book kind of begins with Marx. So I don't know if I was able to answer the question or not, but to me this is how I kind of got over my own initial disappointment as to why Marx was involved. I guess, yeah, thank you.

I guess it is, yeah, it's really a great answer. Although I still think that if this project really wants to be so groundbreaking, it really wants to break with the whole like political and philosophical tradition and with, I don't know, trying to solve perhaps the problems of the left that we have today which is kind of incapable to formulate, right, like a concrete response, answer to the present. I kind of have the feeling, I don't know, like, there seems to me really that there is this big wall that Marxism always leaves, like, I don't know, in front of. And yeah,

it is true what Ivan was saying, it is too important. But on the other side, I don't know, I also think that perhaps, right, because we have a different technological and scientists like , perhaps we should look at, I don't know, different ways, and again, I think I don't know, perhaps taking neoliberalism a bit more seriously, also for the political consequences that it brought. So, I don't know, I guess this is just my main problem with that. And again, it's very hard to break with it, because most of the philosophical tradition of the past 50 or 100 years, the critical tradition is grounded on Marx, anyway,

like post-structure isn't a little bit of a time and all that. But again, I don't know. I'm a little bit, I don't know. It leaves me always with this bit of discontent. Well, this is why it was important for me to post the Nitzan and Bichler book, Capitalist Power, and kind of like bring the formula. I totally encourage you and other classmates to, and, you know, Piketty, I read Piketty's book this summer, and I actually quite, quite, I have the PDF copy of it, and I might just post it up. for people to read actually. If you guys don't have the PDF, I have the PDF of Prickety's. But basically we're looking forward to Nick and Alex to develop more towards a new political economy for accelerationism. But meanwhile people

like me and Sohail Malik and others have shown interest in Nitzan and Bishler's model because it completely rejects a lot of tenets of Marxism, or classic Marxism and breaks from it. And breaks from it not back towards neoliberalism or some form of reconciliation with capitalism, but breaks to something even more contemporary and radical. So part of my personal project is somehow bring them into conversation with acceleration. These two economists who have no room for cultural risk or cultural Marxists or they have no room for theory because they deal I show you that model. They deal with numbers and the book is packed So like their data visualization, basically what gives them strength is their model of

dealing with data and then through dealing with data they reject some tenets of Marxism. Most of them, important tenets of Marxism, they reject. So anyways, I think Morgan is getting ready to contact. And somebody is echoing, so I don't know who it is. I think it must be Ivan. It's Morgan. It's Morgan. It's Morgan. It's Morgan. to say something. No, you can say something, but you're echoing. Okay. So, you're turning about him a little bit down. Or, like, put your headphones on. Actually, if other people's mute... I have my audio off. He's not actually... He's not actually echoing. It only echoes when other people talk. So, if everybody else turns off their mics

and Morgan talks, we should be fine. Okay. Go ahead, Morgan. Cool. I just wanted to ask maybe from someone who knows having even less context I don't understand why theory doesn't seem to pay any attention to economics since Marx there's like 100 years of economic theory since then it's sort of baffling to me why everything would be grounded in Marxism which is sort of like clearly useful. It sort of points at an interesting... I mean, it sort of sets a political problem, but since then there's just so much more

material to work with that it would seem strange that no one else ever said anything relevant since then. I mean, at least no one else did... Everything that happened in the field of economics is not useful for economic analysis, at least in the book or context. But I'm not sure that there's a good answer to that. I mean, I think it's really that has more to do with the fact that theory is a very sort of like romantic discipline. Do you have any specific thinkers in mind? Like, I mean, anyone. Like if you go to Wikipedia for economics.

Because we're kind of like running out of time. I mean, we have just enough for your presentation and for some conversation about it. So do you want to also cut into your presentation, please? JOHN MUELLER, Me? Yes. Yes. Let's do it. I'm going to try this presentation thing. Okay, so this is a really short text. I'll just talk about J.G. Ballard for a bit. He's born in 1930, grew up in Shanghai, post-war Shanghai, witnessed many atrocities and was an internment camp for some period of time, and then I believe moved to Britain at some

point. He is sort of part of the new wave science fiction, so sort of post H.G. Wells, and originally Manny wrote kind of hard sci-fi and then transitioned into kind of dystopian psychological sci-fi. And then he's most famous for two later texts. He wrote one of them being Crash, which has turned into a plain movie recently, which was about a man who photoshies his car crashes and causes him to happen. and then also, oh shoot, what's the name?

Cronenberg, Cronenberg? No, no, the Empire of the Sun is the other one, which is sort of a straightforward World War II novel. Okay, so this text is sort of like a, it's kind of all over the place. It makes some predictions which are false, or which didn't come to be true. And it's sort of a, I believe that comes out of a context, which is the 60s and 70s, in which science fiction was becoming an actual field of literature, rather than sort of like entertainment literature.

And so the kind of existing literature establishment had a very low opinion of it, and I think it was sort of not taken seriously by public intellectuals. So I imagine that this text is sort of like one of the kind of early attempts of science fiction authors to sort of like secure some credibility for their work. So let's just dive in. I mean, so he sort of like hyperbolically claims that everything is becoming science fiction, and that science fiction is more important than fiction written in the last hundred years, which is true and not true.

I mean, I think that what's important—I think it's more interesting to read this text bearing in mind the kind of dialectic between art and science that—well, I'm forgetting names like crazy here. Firestone brings up. So science fiction is certainly incredibly relevant for science, which is perhaps more relevant for the actual constitution of the world. Though, I mean, it's pretty clear that since this time, though science fiction as a field of writing is probably more influential than it was, it's not that much more influential. I mean, like, if you look at the top-selling books list, there are almost a number of science fiction books on it. The majority of films are not science fiction films, and science fiction is still kind of

tacky in all media. Maybe you could argue that there's quite a bit of sci-fi in games, but that's about it. He has this sort of hyperbolic condemnation of normal writing from the preceding hundred years. If you don't mind... If you don't mind... Yeah. Actually, this is going to be hard to interject because of the echo. Would you mind muting for just a minute so I can just say something? Could I ask something? Morgan, you say you have your speakers. Are they quiet or are they really loud?

Wait, the echo is not me. The echo is coming from the remote end, from you. You can hear it all. So it means your microphone and your speakers are having a feedback. So try turning your speakers down. I'll put my headphones on. Yeah, headphones should fix it. How's the echo going? Perfect. No more echo. Great. If you have echo cancellation settings in your microphone settings, you should use them. If you don't, headphones are the best way. Okay.

Sorry. Oh, did you want to say something? Yeah, I just wanted to raise the question of, I mean, I'm not sure that he's saying in this text that science fiction will be the only relevant thing per se, or whether he's maybe saying, because there's this quote, for example, where he says, science fiction is likely to be the only form of literature which will cross the gap. this is where I see this rhetoric of only, the only form of literature which will cross the gap between the dying narrative fiction of the present and the cassette and videotape fictions of the near future. And with that, I was kind of thinking, I mean, I was trying to think, like, what would he mean by that? Because obviously, as you were just saying, there's all kinds of other genres have also made that transition.

but what is specific to science fiction specifically that you don't necessarily get at least especially of his kind because he was kind of a I mean he was a very special kind of science fiction writer in which he explicitly said that he's not writing about spaceships he's not talking about the far future or anything like that he's talking about kind of the immediate future and is there, you know, why specifically would he say at this point, do you think, I'm just curious, that science fiction would be uniquely suited to the transition away from the printed page and over to cassette and videotape?

Do you have any ideas about that? Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I couldn't quite understand what he meant by that statement. So you're interpreting it to mean that science fiction as a genre outside of literature, but as a project, will make the transition to new media. He says it's the only one. He actually uses the word only. And it's this very grandiose claim. Yeah, I guess we can maybe talk about it through an example, which is that... Actually, Jason, can you read it? Do you have the text? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me read it real quick. So he says, above all, science fiction is likely to be, okay, I guess he qualifies it, is likely to be the only form of literature which will cross the gap between the dying narrative fiction of the present

and the cassette and videotape fictions of the near future. Right, so it's this one. Morgan, are you there? Sorry? If you want, I can say a little more about what I was thinking. Oh, I had a good thought about that, which is that I think you can make an analogy to NetArt, and I guess what would now be called post-InternetArt. I don't think you can say that that happened obviously in film or even in video games, which sort of are kind of more fantastical.

But certainly the art that's endemic to the Internet seems to be predominantly about technology or about the Internet or about its own medium. So I think maybe there's some... I mean, it kind of makes sense to claim that as... that new media will need to itself talk about new media, because as it's being introduced, it will be the most important thing that's happening to speak about. But, yeah, I still think that's a little bit hyperbole. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. Because I was thinking about, you know, I mean, it's basically a forum content question.

And the content of science fiction, and especially his specific version of it, which is really concerned with the immediate future. And, I mean, to go back to what was being said earlier, what Muhammad was saying about why he doesn't like art history, that it's all about is this sort of angeles novus kind of attention to how the past kind of crops up again in the present. Well, with science fiction, what you're dealing with is the future cropping up in the present. And even like tomorrow, like even potentially five minutes from now or something like that. And so his specific way of doing this, the way that he deals with content, I think, like if you read in Crash, I mean, it's really kind of suggesting the emergence of a kind of cyborg eroticism in a way.

And, you know, you could see that as being kind of a precursor to kind of how people live now and the way that technology plays such a major role in sexuality. but yeah I guess the thing that I was just thinking is is that you know as as the technological form is constantly shifting if the central question of the content is the impact of ever evolving and changing technological forms you know maybe you could say it is it is uniquely situated for that but then on the other hand he also I guess later on Ballard also rejected the whole label of science fiction and he said that it's become it's kind of been recuperated

in a way but this is him like you were saying this is him at the beginning and trying to make a claim for kind of dystopian science fiction Yeah I find it quite interesting that the things that he's talking about seem to have largely started happening much more so in the past five years it seems that there's dramatically more art and fiction about technology and society than previously. And it's sort of less, it's much more, much less fantastical, much more realistic. You know, I was going to ask you that, like, maybe you're being a little bit unfair to cinema because, and also maybe, like, when you said, like, oh, you know, science fiction science fiction films, like two of like, two like really important films both for like,

for cinema, for science fiction, for a lot of like good theory have been Terminator and the very big classic which is Blade Runner. Blade Runner. Star Wars. You know, and I mean the Star Wars is like, I don't know, I don't really, well, yeah, kind of like Star Wars too because Star Wars is really about globalization. Star Wars is like... I thought you were going to say 2001. No, Star Wars is like Osama Bin Laden. You know, it's like Osama Bin Laden in space. But yeah, it's sort of like the dark figure of like, you know. What was that one about the train that just came out? Snowpiercer. Snowpiercer.

I haven't seen that one yet. But also, like you said, like film has not really been transformed by all this. And I also wanted to remind those, let's think of movies like Amores Paris or Time Code, which is actually almost 15 years old. Both of them are. They're from late 1990s or early 2000s. Or think of practices of people like Kiarostami, the Iranian filmmaker with close-up, where in which fiction and fiction and real kind of like melt into each other to a point that you can't tell what's going on.

Or his other film which debuted last year in New York and actually presented a paper on it and a little PowerPoint presentation or my presentation at NYU is sort of like on my academia in which clearly he uses sort of like the medium of cinema to talk about the coming of televisual paradigm and maybe even computational algorithmic paradigm and also again uses a historical narrative of the Iranian revolution to sort of talk about the future of the revolution. So yeah, I think there are like brief examples that cinema also does what Ballard claims in the text. I'm not going to contradict you but I just want to like provide some examples.

Yeah, and I would just say I feel like the incidence of those has increased dramatically in the past five years. It's like everywhere now, whereas previously it was sort of like a...I feel like cinema kind of tracked the science fiction from kind of like the hard operatic sci-fi to more dystopian through cyberpunk to like the current sci-fi as present, like sort of tracking that curve but like delayed by 30 years. And that's kind of a very Ballardian kind of approach, I mean, with like Minority Report and this, you know, where it's not about spaceships and Star Wars, but it's about like, you know, new technologies combining with an increasingly kind of authoritarian state and capitalism and creating a very different society, but one that you can easily recognize in how things already are.

I kind of like how Minority Report is at the same time kind of retarded. because of the way it kind of like, the way it imagines the future, it's so limited by the imagination of the writer of the story in terms of where technology is going to be. And you know what I mean? Like, the use of literal, literal imagery as a source of like prediction of the future, how future is constructed. And like the way the whole plot works, it's kind of like cute. It's not really like, it doesn't really bear like the markings of the really great science fiction. but in his limitations is very cute and very telling about like the pre-internet time, which kind of like ended in the 90s. And the way, I mean, like the whole idea of like predicting crime,

I mean that kind of thing can be done through, I mean is being done through algorithmic things. No, totally, but it's not being done in the way that the film... Right, right, I know, I know. I know, they have these mystical psychics who... But the film has all the time the movie was made, there was enough knowledge of where we're going available to these people to develop it differently, but they developed an enchanting model of these humans on drugs who kind of happen to hold on to these type of abilities, right? Right. It's not algorithmic. It's still based on geniusness and sageness of a human. Right. Right. Which is totally at odds with Ballard, actually. I mean, one of the things that really

struck me, and I'm curious what you think of this, Morgan, was the emphasis on depersonalization. Yeah. Because at the end where he's talking about what's unique, one thing that is kind of unique to science fiction, or he's trying to make the case, is that science fiction is, you know, there are no great authors, you know, really. I mean, not like on the level of like Bruce or something like that. And that it's kind of a more egalitarian, horizontalist type of genre. Yeah, I thought that was an interesting claim. For one, because it doesn't seem to be so true now. I mean, I don't know when I think of science fiction, the greats of science

fiction come immediately to mind. But it's kind of an interesting, I thought it was interesting and that kind of predicted what would happen in the science fiction equivalent in music, which would be dance music, you know, since acid, through techno, which sort of had that property long afterwards to a huge extent, you know, through, like, the white label culture and media culture where the artist is not even represented in any way to the audience. Yeah, and when I was looking him up a little bit, I saw that I guess he's actually been a major influence on a lot of music. And I mean, like his novel, Atrocity, Exhibition, obviously, not obviously,

but if people like Joy Division, you probably know that, that one of their albums is named after it. I guess he was pretty influential in that. But one of the things that it really made me think of, this idea at the very end where he says, the anonymity of the majority of 20th century writers of science fiction is the anonymity of modern technology. No more great names stand out than in the design of consumer durables, or for that matter, Rimes Cathedral. And it kind of made me think also, in addition to techno and electronic music, kind of the punk ethos that, I mean, because the very last word in this is write, you know, so he's basically calling on the reader to become a science fiction author too. And that really reminds me of the kind

of punk ethos which was basically every fan in a band and every band member also a fan. That kind of participatory idea. But also, to give some credit to Morgan, he never thought about like Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg, right? What do you mean? Well, they're like brand names, and they're from the world of technology. Oh yeah, I was just going to respond that I think that this sort of like depersonalization aspect of technology is sort of I mean I get where he's

coming from that like through production of objects that objects become sort of authorless because there's so many of them and they're made by large impersonal corporations etc like that certain dynamic that continues to play out But then again, maybe not. I mean, like, when you go to Ikea, every piece of furniture is designed by a designer, and you can look at their name. And now, you know, post-90s, the Internet has become much, you know, sort of congregated again around identity and authorship. So in a way, he predicted the 90s, but not our time. Right. It's like MySpace but not Facebook, because with MySpace, you could have anonymous identities. is with Facebook.

You're like, they're trying to force everybody to have their real names and this and that. Well, I mean, or email or BBS or... I read a piece today that, like, a lot of queer members of Facebook are emigrating to Elo because Elo allows anonymity because you can set any username you want and not use your name. He's called the gay exodus to Elo. The gay exodus out of Facebook to Elo. But I think ELO is paying for these type of pieces to be written. And another thing that, I mean, it's kind of related, but it's not related, but I have to say it, is that there was a major piece shared on Facebook today about how ELO is not, doesn't respect the privacy of their members very well. And within six hours of it, they responded with a major privacy concern campaign.

And everyone who signed up got an email about how ELO is going to fix that. So it's like the speed is like amazing. Anyways, now that we're coming to the end, I want to see if Sean and Laura have much, do you want to add something to the conversation here? Because we don't have a, I mean, we started like at 8.45, at 6.45, so we're totally out of time. but it's okay to go a few minutes ahead, especially since I want to talk about assignments and ask to see if people have caught up or written or are they planning to write or not. It's good to do the coursework. So I just wanted to bring that up at the end as well. I would

totally encourage you guys to write and pay stuff up. I just wanted to say before we close that something I've been trying to kind of track recently is just how influential science fiction is in technology. And I mean, so far from what I've seen, it's just like incredibly influential. Almost every person who works and technology, who are up reading science fiction, and it's like the primary inspiration for so many things. It's kind of incredible. It kind of wraps it up with Firestone, right? Because that's Firestone's point. And that's almost Salor's point too, about the relationship between manifest image and

scientific image. Scientific image arises out of the manifest image. Yeah, and then even more so, it seems that the time horizon of sci-fi is compressing as we move forward to like up until William Gibson, who's basically writing about the present, things are actually happening in the present in such a way that it sounds like the future, but actually it's now. And so like, yeah, I felt like the firstness, it was like sort of like understanding the dynamics of what Pollard wanted to talk about. But I'd love to hear something a little bit more contemporary and sophisticated on the topic. Well, the worst example of this would be the Her movie, right? because with the Her movie, you get the movie talking about like two years ago when Siri was first released, right?

And I'm like, why are we making a movie about something that we already like, what is so, I did not feel anything sort of like with all the awards that the movie received and all the press that it got. For me, it was like the worst science fiction appointment of last year was Her movie. I enjoyed it, but it was already retrofuturistic. It was like the future as imagined by people living in Williamsburg in 2005. Okay, you know guys, isn't that amazing that they fixed the problem that even as

Tony crashed and left the Hangout which happens to be on the fixed capital of Google, somewhere on their infrastructure, continued on and did not go down because... I don't know how that happened. In a lot of cases when the computer that hosts the Hangout crashes, the whole broadcast ends. And that actually happened during the Incredible Machine Conference where we lost it because Jason's computer crashed, right? But now it's like they've done something to it and once you host it, it kind of like leaves your machine. You have nothing to do with it. You can go and come back. So this is great. Well, I'm going to copy the text on the side and put it on the announcement because there's

a lot of good information on it. And if we don't have a lot more to say, I think maybe it's time to kind of wrap it up. And please, each presentation gets a post on the announcements and then people can keep chatting about these things underneath the announcements so then relevant comments can go underneath. And I'm going to leave comments for you guys' presentations on the proper thing and encourage everyone to also leave comments. If you're looking for written comments about what I think of your presentation, you'll be able to find it there. And yeah, so basically, are we ready to say goodbye? Anybody wants to say something? Any kind of like remarks at the end?

I just wanted to maybe comment more on the possibility of talking about a kind of political economy of accelerationism, at least something that was like a slight inadequacy of the Lepovetsky essay, is that if he's trying to encourage us to conceive of some way of preparing time forward in a way that is not under the ownership of managers, he should probably have some kind of system for talking about how one would have an industrial society that employs managers in a different kind of way, in a new kind of way that uses people's land and resources and things for their own benefit.

And that just isn't in there. And sometimes you'll notice that about kitsch Marxism and about Marx in general is that there's not a whole lot about supervision of the performance of workers or how work is organized and how financial arrangements are made and stuff like that. And I think if you were to have, like, a good political economy of accelerationism, you would have to account for that kind of uncomfortable fact, but an important one in the list. I think there's a lot of practical experimentation along those lines happening in the kind of Bay Area startup world at the moment. I don't know, I mean, it's not explicitly radical, but, like, I'm applying for a job right now at a company that operates as a holacracy, so there are no explicit managers.

Everyone has sort of, like, there's sort of, like, they're, like, circles that have different responsibilities and are kind of overlapping, and there's sort of like a pretty baroque like computer representation of what kind of authorities different people have. And like another example from another part of the world would be liquid democracy in the end. The sort of... From the... The early Stuart Brand Google idealism, I like that, yeah. Sorry? Sorry? The pre-Stuart Brand kind of idealism of technocracy. That's cool. I'd like to know more about that. Yeah. Global idealism? What's like pre... Yeah, you're talking about like late cybernetics inspired Bay Area, horizontalism.

Before Wired Magazine, yeah. Well, I know that Nick and Alex are working on something, but I think they're like keeping their cards close to their chest until they're ready to somehow come out and present us with something. But at the same time, I think these are really important questions. You're totally right, Sean, and that's really always my thing. Like if a rigorous set of ideas like this does not have its political economy covered, it'll turn into an aesthetic movement or it just turns into like, you know…

It does seem to go directly back to Marx primarily. It goes primarily back to Marx, but it needs to account for not only today but the future. I'm trying to also voice what Laura was saying, because I'm on the same page, almost. But I actually tried to do a little search to figure out who the main political economists were that Nick is citing. A lot of them were like David Harvey. But these are all past works, you've got to understand. Since the manifesto, the only thing we're going to have is the Folk Politics book, book, which is actually not, I think it's changed title to Inventing the Future or like, or no it's called Constructing the Future or a name like that is a, it's like a future

oriented title. And then that book probably has something in it and then other stuff to come. Also like to point to like the divergence between Marx and accelerationism could be seen as much as you write that he cites these people, there are signs that he also comes from other places. If you look at the other works he's done, like that essay called, about medieval ideas of time and economy. I have a copy of it, I'll try to like post it, find it and post it. Especially with ideas of time, because I just remember that one of the main critiques of Marx's view on time in general that a lot of the economists after him had was...

I guess Marx always was arguing that goods are basically worth the amount of labor time bestowed in them, right? But then if that's true, then something like a good that's made by a really slow worker is worth as much as one made by an extremely fast worker. Yeah, I've used that quote. So I'd like to look at that. That quote of Marx I put in the beginning of a catalog that I've never published for a show I did. And the show was called Picturing Intuition. And it was all about time. And I used that Marx quote that you just brought on the cover of, on the first page of the catalog. Oh, yeah? Oh, that's cool. And also underneath it I quoted Boy George.

It says, time won't give me time. It's from the song. It's like a Culture Club song. It's a Marx and Boy George quote together on the catalog. Anyway, so can we say, should we say goodbye? Oh, do you want to talk about these assignments at all or no? Well, yeah, they're basically like, they're like, we talked about it last week, but I don't mind talking about it again. They're basically write-ups that you write, not necessarily thinking of it as a small part of a larger piece, but we would like them to be in a way that if we work on them with you, they will end up being a cohesive essay, especially in relation to what you

will be contributing to the second part of the course that's offered at the end of this season, if any of you take also the second part, which we read the second part of the book. you write hopefully will accumulate towards something larger and as we read them and mark them and go over them you guys will be able to sort of like take our feedback and then work on them and then get things ready. But the way to make sure that it's done is to start writing now because if you accumulate all to the end of the course then you have like thousands of words to write. But basically and the idea would be to like begin writing about the same thing you presented because you've already done some research on it and have some opinion and then we go from there. And then we'll be in touch with you, me and Jason, and work with you on these texts as

soon as you post them. So then we can get some comments going and we would actually help the students that are in class, like, rigorously help to edit and rigorously comment so they can be, like, publish-ready. And we would do as much as time allows us. We will help the audit students also do the same. But of course our focus mostly will be first on the students that are enrolled for credit and for that type of work. So, but there's going to be time that we can dedicate to your contributions. Don't be dissuaded from contributing. Please write because all of this will end up on a new center blog or some form of website anyways because we're into research and we're into practicing what we research and all of

this to us is both research and practice. Okay. Yeah, but especially like you guys who are paid members, like paid enrolled students of the course, we would totally expect you to write in order for us to evaluate you. I'm going to copy these last few words by Morgan for the classroom page. We lost the classroom by the way last week because I deleted it by mistake. And then we lost everything and the conversation was also lost last week so we lost last week's conversation. We're not going to lose this week's conversation. Anyways. So we... But that isn't... There's an assignment due...

We have the assignment two at 6 o'clock today. But because of all the complications, it's okay to sort of like, if you work on both of them and have them ready for Monday when we meet, that gives you all these days to kind of work on it. And then the last assignment, I also added five, six days for the other two. I'm going to go fix the dates a little bit so it reflects what I'm talking about right now. But yeah, it says the one that's due, the one that you were supposed to do yesterday was due today and the one that's for today will be due Monday but basically both of them will be due Monday next week. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay, thank you. And it was a great class. I think it was a great class.