Where My Mind Is At

I got this email today, and I think my reply to it might be helpful for you to see where my mind is at. 

Oh, you will also see that the editor is remarking on my non-binary gender identity, so here I am remarking on it officially in my blog. Yes it's true! 

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We're publishing an upcoming gloss on and transformative artwork about Hyperobjects/Hyperobjects and a "stubbornly dogmatic" Marxist response to the same. We'd love to know what pronouns you'd prefer in the piece: your Twitter says "she/him," but we're not sure whether that means people should alternate, pick one and stick to it, or use "she" in subject position and "him" in object position. 

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Hello—that’s great. When I was writing Hyperobjects, I was abstaining a bit from using words like “socialism” (I am a communist) because sometimes people have strange reactions to it. I was instead trying to give people some of what I take to be the socialist structure of feeling (if I can use Raymond Williama’s term—I’ve been theorizing it recently). 

I was at the time taking very seriously Fredric Jameson’s and Slavoj Zizek’s injunctions for us to do some cognitive mapping of the space in which we find ourselves, before we get on with figuring out exactly how to proceed. 

Since there is very little time left now, for all kinds of reasons, I’m being much more up front about socialism, which I take to be the only way to work realistically with what we have going on in the world. It’s a very strong contrast really between continuing the past, not just in terms of continuing neoliberal capitalism, but the fact that capitalism as such is based on the past because it is in essence algorithmic—or basing our world on the future, aka creativity, aka socialism. 

I was a lot more up front about all this in Humankind, my Verso book, and now I’m trying various ways to be even more direct. 

I regard BLM and MeToo as planet scale collective awareness and action, arriving just in time to work with the crises we have at hand. I regard ending white supremacy and patriarchy as foundational to any socialist project. 

If you could please note that I have started a Patreon podcast series in which I am very directly addressing these issues? All donations go to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. See the link below (and please use it in your description of me). 

And you can use “they.” Thank you for asking. 

PS: The other thing I would very much like you to do is to mention the sequel to this book. It’s a free pdf and it’s called Hyposubjects. It was written by me and my friend the anthropologist Dominic Boyer. He’s a Hegelian Marxist and I’m an OOO Marxist so we thought, instead of squabbling, let’s combine forces. 

You can find it here: 

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/hyposubjects/

It’s very short and it’s been getting a lot of attention recently, it just came out last week. I’m cc’ing Dominic as I’m sure he would be interested in what you’re doing here. The age of the hyperobject is the age of the hyposubject—you’ll see.