“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, June 14, 2014

Closing the Anthropocentric Barn Door after the Posthuman Horse Has Bolted

I found another example!

I heard that there is now a critique of Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the molecular as a symptom of neoliberal capitalism.

1. Deleuze and Guattari (if alive) would be somewhat surprised to hear that their idea was “recent” as specified by the critique.

2. They would also be somewhat surprised that their idea was the quintessence of neoliberal capitalism.

They would also be quite surprised, I feel, that over forty years after poststructuralism, some people are still waging yesterday's (or is it the day before yesterday's) war, which was precisely a dethroning of “the human” in the name of (lest we forget) actually existing humans and nonhumans.

It's really quite odd. But expected. First speculative realism is ignored, then ridiculed, then people get very very cross, until they don't. It happened online, and now it seems to be happening in academia world.

Or rather in critique world. They sense the danger. Richard Grusin and Jane Bennett and I were just lamenting this sorry state.

Well, I guess yesterday's new idea is today's reactionary one that must, must be replaced by...an idea from the day before yesterday...

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