If We Can Have Disaster Capitalism, Why Can’t We Have Emergency Marxism?: Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics II

In the first part of 'Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics', I argued that the anti-liberal right have been so successful in using the possibilities created by the new postdigital communication technologies to tap into those affective forces – those drives, desires, fantasies and resentments – that motivate people to become part of a group such as ‘the people’, that they have been able to completely transform the political landscape. 

Nasa maps show falling levels of nitrogen dioxide this year over China

Of course, the left has its own affective-emotional themes and tropes. (When it comes to theory you just have to say words like ‘commons’, ‘collaborative’, ‘Anthropocene’, ‘environment’, ‘material’ or even ‘affect’ at an arts event such as Transmediale to realise this.) Yet whereas the right has succeeded in using affect as a mobilizing political force, the left has been conspicuously bad at turning its representations into actions that are compelling enough to make different people, especially those in the mainstream of society, want to constitute themselves as a group – a ‘we’, an ‘us’ – around issues such as community and the commons. Sure, prior to the coronavirus outbreak a spate of large-scale youthful protests unfolded in places such as Hong Kong, Chile, Ecuador, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Barcelona, orchestrated by ‘the children of the financial crisis of 2008’, as some are calling them. Little of this rebellious energy has fed into a mainstream political change of the kind the populist right have achieved, though. (Research shows that far right parties in Europe have tripled their share of the vote in the last three decades, with one in six choosing them at the polls.) Even the impact of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests, Greta Thunberg and the global wave of Friday school climate strikes have so far been mainly cultural. XR has yet to achieve its goals of getting the U.K. government to tell the truth about the climate emergency, commit to reaching zero net carbon emissions by 2025 and set up a citizens assembly. Nor have the school strikes translated into ‘real action’ from governments, according to Thunberg. In effect they have ‘achieved nothing’, she insists, greenhouse gas emissions having actually risen 4% in the four years since the 2015 Paris accord was signed. (Again, it’s going to be interesting to observe what if anything changes in this respect following Covid-19, given the reports that pollution levels have dropped dramatically in cities such as Bankok, Bejing and Bogotá, thanks to the lack of traffic and closing of industry and airports during lockdown.)

Don’t get me wrong: the left has its memes. Witness the one-time popularity of the ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ chant in the U.K., and the fact terms like ‘gammon’, ‘centrist dad’ and ‘bullshit jobs’ have now entered the language. The pink pussy hats, Handmaid’s Tale-style cloaks and Un Violador en Tu Camino (A Rapist in Your Path) performance piece adopted by various groups of feminist protestors around the world (see below) are also worth mentioning in this context. Still, there’s arguably been no really successful progressive equivalent of the kind of forceful play found on ‘White Boy Internet’ platforms such as 4chan, 8chan and Reddit. (It seems significant that the #MeToo movement has not led to considerable reforms of the law, for instance.) The democratic left has been conspicuously lacking in such politically effective ‘meme magic’.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Generally speaking, the left is less concerned about the kind of extremes of emotion that drive the reactionary right, and more about social justice, hospitality and mutual aid. Besides, societies are so diverse, pluralistic and fragmented these days it’s far easier to unite people around what they are not than around what they are. The protests in Hong Kong, for instance, after initially calling for the withdrawal of an extradition bill introduced by China, were widened to a demand for democratic reform. The demonstrations in Chile, however, started after an increase in metro fares and subsequently took in a broad range of demands for ‘better pensions, education, health, a minimum wage; but also water rights and action on environment degradation’. Meanwhile, those in Tunisia and Algeria were about price and tax rises, and those in Beirut about a tax on users of messaging apps such as WhatsApp. In Barcelona, the protests were different again: there they were about independence for Catalonia from Spain. The problem is, unless these different passions, and the heterogeneous demands and conflicts they give rise to, have a legitimate democratic means of expressing themselves – which is precisely what did not happen in the period of austerity, during which many social groups felt ignored and ‘left behind’ by the city-dwelling liberal elites – there is a danger that a ‘confrontation between essentialist forms of identification or non-negotiable moral values’ will take their place, with all the attendant negative consequences. The latter is what we have seen of late with the rise of populist right-wing political figures and parties in many countries: not just Trump in the U.S. and Johnson in the U.K., but Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen and the National Rally in France, Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement in Italy, along with Matteo Salvini, former deputy prime minister and leader of the far-right League there. Indeed, radical right politicians now lead three of the world’s four largest democracies: the U.S., Brazil and India. They are also at the head of two members of the European Union: Poland and Hungary. The third largest parties in a further two – Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany and Vox in Spain – are also far right. 

Each of these contexts is of course different and needs to be analysed in its specificity. Authoritarian nationalism is certainly combined with neoliberalism in some more than others. We also need to remain alert to the difficulty those of us who are European have with reading any political script other than the one with which we have traditionally translated the world. It’s a trait that often leaves us blind to the need for a new political language and ‘radical transformation of the regime of knowledge’ when it comes to understanding events outside of the ‘Global North’. (I’m placing this term in quotation marks as I’m aware it’s not without its problems.) Nevertheless, I want to take the risk of saying that something of a global trend does seem to be at play here. For these are all parties and politicians that by one means or another are placing liberal democracy under threat, along with its values of truth, civil rights and rule of law. Taken together, what this shows is that the election of Boris Johnson in the U.K. cannot be attributed simply to the shortcomings of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party (e.g. the supposed failure to deal with anti-Semitism, to unite both the left and centre of the party, or to a form a collation with the Lib Dems, Greens and SNP): the phenomenon is larger and more international than that. Could we even go so far as to suggest that those on the nativist right have been successful in utilising communication technologies to transform the political landscape in recent years, ironically, by acting as many on the progressive left say people should: that is by operating as cosmopolitan communities with the shared goal of collectively redistributing knowledge and ideas? While there is not just one form of populist authoritarian response to Covid-19 anymore than there is a just one form of populist authoritarianism, there was nevertheless a period in which Trump, Salvini, Farage and Steve Bannon all seemed to be working to deflect blame for the coronavirus pandemic onto the Chinese government. It’s certainly interesting that, almost in a reverse of the situation with New Labour under Blair and the Conservatives under Cameron, many of these governments are combining right-wing cultural polices with left-wing economic ideas such as nationalisation and welfarism. This is true of Poland’s Law and Justice party, and is increasingly the case with regard to the Johnson government in the U.K.. And that was before Sars-CoV-2 rendered uncontroversial the kind of state interventionism and general veneration of the public sector and welfare that would previously have been condemned as Marxist. 

Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics I: On the Commons and the Crisis of Representative Democracy

('Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics II: If We Can Have Disaster Capitalism, Why Can’t We Have Emergency Marxism?', is available here.)

I'm going to begin with a proposition. In recent years a lot of work in the humanities and social sciences has been taken up with the commons. It’s a fascination that is only likely to increase following the coronavirus pandemic of 2019-2020. Over the next few years attention will understandably be paid to the manner in which communities all over the world spontaneously self-organised to fill the gaps left by the market and the state. They did so by collectively providing those in need with everything from information and accommodation, through hand sanitizer and medical supplies, to emergency childcare, financial aid packages, even company in periods of lockdown and quarantine, be it by telephone or video call.

Put simply, the commons can be understood as non-proprietary shared spaces and resources – both material and immaterial – along with the collective social processes that are necessary for commoners to produce, manage and maintain them and themselves as a community. My proposition, then, is this: if we want to actually create such commons, we need to act, work and think very differently to the ways in which most of us do now. And I include in this ‘us’ many of those who are well-known for writing about community, collectivity and the commons. Here I’m thinking here not just those who address the issue from within the liberal philosophical tradition of Garrett Hardin, Elinor Ostrom and Yochai Benkler. I also have in mind radical theorists such as Isabelle Stengers, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 

How can we do this? How can we work and act differently from the way in which we do at present in order to help create such commons? It is this question that I am going to endeavour to answer in what follows, as it’s one that I together with a number of collaborators have been engaged with for some time.

Like the last group of writers on the commons I mentioned, a lot of those I collaborate with identify as radical theorists. However, we’re theorists who are also exploring ways of reimagining theory and what it means to be a theorist.  We’re doing this by challenging some of the taken-for-granted categories and frameworks concerning what critical theory is considered to be. Specifically, we’re endevouring to move away from the highly individualistic, liberal-humanist model that’s performed by most theorists today, regardless of whether they’re Marxists, post-Marxists, feminists, new materialists, posthumanists or accelerationists. Instead, we’re experimenting with the invention of what can be called – rather teasingly, I’ll admit – ‘anti-bourgeois theory’. This is theory that, in its ‘habits of being’, to borrow a phrase from bell hooks, is: 

1) consistent with the kind of progressive politics many of us in the arts and humanities espouse

It is important to be aware that neoliberalism is not directly opposed to liberalism. It is rather a version of it, as its name suggests, the wider historical tradition of liberalism having provided the discursive framework of modern capitalism. The singularized neoliberal homo oeconomicus is not necessarily always struggling against the liberal-humanist rights and values that the vast majority of theorists continue to adhere to in practice, then. Indeed, while most theorists position themselves as being politically on the left – writing books and articles about the importance of equality, cooperation, redistribution and so on – many end up operating as rampantly competitive, proprietorial individuals. Driven by a goal-fixated instrumentalism, what’s important to them are the number of books published, grants captured, keynote lectures given, followers acquired, or likes and retweets gained. (Elsewhere I’ve associated this behaviour with being a ‘micro-entrepreneur of the self’.)

2)  in tune with the changing political zeitgeist, especially the shift from representative to direct forms of democracy

In the U.K. this shift can be traced at least as far back as the horizontal groundswell against the ‘old politics’ of the liberal and neoliberal establishments that was such a prominent feature of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Today, it can be seen in the decentralised manner in which the Extinction Rebellion movement operates: the refusal of hierarchal organisation in favour of bottom-up ‘affinity groups’.

2019 Extinction Rebellion ‘nurse in’ outside Google’s London HQ

It’s not just a progressive phenomenon, though. The move to more direct forms of democracy is also apparent in the U.K. Brexit party’s rapid rise to a position of political influence under the leadership of Nigel Farage prior to the 2019 general election. In large part this rise was achieved through the adoption of the digitally savvy electoral strategy of the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy, which entered government in 2018, having become the largest individual party in the Italian Parliament. It uses data gathered from the online activity of members to help shape M5S’s direction and policy. So successful was the Brexit party’s adaptation of this electoral strategy that in the run up to the election the ostensibly more mainstream, one-nation Conservative politician Boris Johnson found himself forced to take up many of its more radical right-wing ideas and forms of rhetoric (albeit  in detoxified form on occasion). And this in spite of the fact Farage himself has never won election to Parliament in the seven attempts he’s made over a span of two and a half decades. 

3) a more appropriate mode of engagement for today’s postdigital world than are printed and closed-access books and journal articles 

Arguably we find ourselves in the midst of a fourth great transformation in communications technology. Crudely put, if the first transformation involved the development of speech and language, the second writing, and the third print, the fourth entails the change from analogue to digital that is associated with the emergence of Facebook, Google and Twitter (not to forget Weibo, Baidu and WeChat in China). In fact, it can be said that we are already living in a postdigital era, if we take this term to name ‘a technical condition that… is constituted by the naturalization of pervasive and connected computing processes… in everyday life’, to the extent that ‘digitality is now inextractable from the way we live while its form, functions and effects are no longer necessarily perceptible.’ Historically, such transformations have often been followed by social and political upheaval and unrest, even war. The development of printing was at the heart of the Protestant Reformation in 16^th century Europe, for example, resulting in the breaking of the religious monopoly of the Catholic Church. A key figure was Martin Luther with his Ninety-five Theses. However, although many book historians regard print as having subsequently led to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the development of modern science and democracy, we need to remember that print has its dark side, too. Given the anti-Semitic attack at a synagogue in the East German town of Halle in October 2019, it’s worth recalling that shortly before his death in 1546 Luther published a pamphlet called ‘Warning Against the Jews’. Nor was this a one-off. ‘We are at fault for not slaying them’, Luther proclaimed in an earlier 65,000-word treatise titled ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’. The latter text was exhibited publicly in the 1930s during the Nuremberg Rallies. (So it’s not that the disruption brought about by print is good, while that inflicted by digital media is bad.)

We’re all probably going to be long gone before anyone knows if we’re currently living through a period of change as profound as the Reformation. (Although some have heralded the Sars-CoV-2 outbreak, to give the virus its proper name, as a sign that we are. This is because of the high degree of interconnectivity of global capitalism in terms of travel, trade, tourism, migration, the labour market and supply chains, all of which depend on postdigital information processing. Along with the associated destruction of biodiversity accelerated by the climate emergency and human population growth, such interconnectivity is held as having created the conditions for new, infectious, animal-borne zoonotic diseases such as Sars, bird-flu and Covid-19 to cross over from wildlife to humans as a result of their greater proximity to one another.) Nevertheless, it’s important to make an effort to come to terms with the shift from analog to postdigital – not least for political reasons, as the above examples drawn from German history suggest.

Of course it’s questionable to what extent the traditional political division between left and right (the origins of which can be traced as far back as 1789 and the revolutionary assembly in Paris, where the antiroyalists were physically located on the left side of the chamber) is still applicable. Today the situation is complicated by the fact this division has been overlaid, at the very least, by that between populist nativism and elitist cosmopolitanism. Both the U.K. Conservative party under David Cameron, and the Labour party under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Miliband were socially liberal, for example. Indeed, Cameron has said that the passing of the law enabling same-sex marriage in 2013 by the Conservative-led coalition government was one of his most significant achievements in office. The main difference between the two parties was that the Conservatives were even more economically neoliberal than New Labour. This is why the rejection of significant elements of both in the 2016 European Union referendum as primarily representing the interests of the metropolitan liberal establishment came as such a shock to many commentators. It revealed that the electorate was no longer voting largely out of loyalty to either party on the basis of their class position, with the working-class (and large parts of the Midlands and north) traditionally voting Labour. Instead, people were voting on the basis of whether they were nativist or cosmopolitan too. Actually, what the 2019 general election made clear is that if you’re poor, working class and less educated in England you’re increasingly likely to vote Conservative. 

It’s going to be interesting to see if the public mood changes post-coronavirus. Will the backlash against the liberal establishment continue, or will it be replaced by a newfound respect for scientists and journalists and for institutions such as the NHS and BBC? Retaining the left/right political distinction for the time being, however, we can say that it’s been mainly those on the populist authoritarian right who, to date, have realised the possibilities created by the new communication technologies. It’s as if they’ve read their Gramsci and figured out that if you want to change politics, you need to begin by changing culture. So, to return to an international frame for a moment, the last few years have provided us with examples such as: Donald Trump, who’s been called a Twitter genius and the first meme president of the United States; Jair Bolsonaro, the first president of Brazil elected using the Internet, Google’s YouTube especially, as his main means of communication; and the U.K.’s Vote Leave campaign’s sophisticated exploitation of Facebook data to intervene in the 2016 E.U. Referendum, as revealed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. What the actors behind these developments have done is create a new model of political communication by seizing on the opportunities created by the fourth great transformation in media technology to precipitate the cultural crisis in representative politics. 

Jair Bolsonaro, President of Brazil. He has accused large parts of the media of ‘tricking’ the people over the dangers of the coronavirus, which he has likened to a ‘little flu’

For populist politicians there are two distinct advantages to this new model. The first is that it enables those who don’t already have control of their state media (à la Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland and Viktor Orbán in Hungary) to sidestep the old, established forms of political communication that rely on the major newspapers and influential TV and radio programmes. They are thus able to avoid being held to account by journalists, even when they fabricate, lie, doctor videos and rebrand fake ‘fact-checking’ websites. Consider Boris Johnson’s keeping of his live interview appearances to a minimum during the 2019 U.K. election campaign; and, once in power, the attempt of his government to select which news outlets were allowed to cover it, and boycotting of leading BBC news vehicles such as Newsnight and the Today programme. Until the need to keep the population informed about Covid-19 made such a stance untenable, that is. 

The second advantage is that this new model nonetheless provides populists with a means of overcoming the apparent disconnect between professional politicians and ‘the people’ – the latter being constructed antagonistically as a self-identical and essentialised mass that is prevented from reaching its full potential by an establishment ‘elite’, also homogenised, which of course doesn’t include these populist politicians themselves. The nativist right are able to overcome this disconnect by using the repetition of slogans – most famously ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Take Back Control’ ‘– to link the grievances of a number of different sections of society. These grievances have arisen over a long period, stretching from the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ of 2015, through the 2008 financial crisis, at least as far back as the 9/11 attacks. They include a sense of abandonment and betrayal by elites, resentment against women, Muslims and immigrants, and the general lack of control over their lives felt by many of those living through late-stage capitalism, coupled to an anxiety about the future. By articulating such sentiments with a nationalist pride, populist politicians have been able to create chains of equivalence across those parts of the population that have been adversely affected by the results of neoliberal globalization. In this way the radical right have been able to tap into those affective forces – those drives, desires, fantasies and resentments – that motivate people to become part of a group (such as precisely ‘the people’) and form the basis of collective forms of identification, and so mainstream their ideas. 

Reactionary authoritarians have been aided and abetted in the creation of this new model of political communication by Silicon Valley companies. The latter are aware it’s not logical reasoning and verified evidence and information but extreme displays of emotion that keep audiences hooked, and so drive their profits by maximising attention. Not only have Twitter, Facebook and YouTube rendered indistinct the difference between making carefully thought-out comments on the current issues of the day, and hastily announcing one’s unconsidered feelings about them, they have actively amplified and rewarded expressions of anger, hatred, insecurity and shame. After all, contributions to these platforms don’t have to be true to get a reaction and go viral, just hugely captivating. Being controversial, intrusive, crude, vulgar, moralistic, narcissistic, sentimental, contradictory all works.

Similarly broadcast media often prefer adversarial debates. In the U.K. the BBC regularly invites speakers with explicitly opposing views to discuss a given topic. It does so partly out of an attempt to provide balance (although what it all too frequently ends up delivering is false equivalence, since just because someone is on the opposite side of an argument doesn’t make them qualified to speak about it). But the corporation also opposes contributors in this fashion because reputable professional journalism outlets and other high-quality mainstream sources such as Sky News and the Guardian constitute only a low percentage of where the public receives its information in the era of smartphones and social media. So the issue is not just fake news or Russian interference. It’s also that the mediascape is now highly diverse and disordered. What is needed therefore are combative debates that can cut through the chaos to be heard and get attention. (Piers Morgan’s entire career as a presenter on ITV’s Good Morning Britain has been built precisely on his ability to offer provocative opinions, be they about racism, gender fluidity, Meghan Markle or the response of the U.S. to Covid-19, in contrast to the more nuanced, easy going approach of his co-host, Suzanna Reid.)

All of which goes some way toward explaining the current situation, whereby small numbers of people are able to use communication technologies to move large numbers of others in the direction of nativist forms of populism characterised by an emphasis on authority, group insecurity and an exclusionary nationalist pride. Of course, in a situation of chaos and confusion there’s often a desire for a strong authoritarian leader who can gets things done regardless. Yet the media’s emphasis on hyper-emotionalism plays straight into the hands of the reactionary right, which defines itself negatively against those it considers ‘the other’. Hence the rise in sexism, racism and white supremacism we’ve experienced in recent times, both online and off, together with the presentation of the coronavirus as a ‘wartime’ (Johnson) or ‘invisible enemy’ (Trump), and description of it as the ‘Chinese disease’ (Trump again). (Even a pandemic is seen as national emergency from this perspective, not an international one.) Indeed, those on the anti-liberal right have been so successful in making their ideas acceptable – many produce brilliant viral videos and memes, often containing language and images that are full of humour, irony and ambiguity as well as ‘frightened bitterness’ – that they can be said to have completely transformed the political landscape. As a result, we find ourselves living in a ‘post-truth’ world of ‘alternative facts’, ‘deepfakes’, Holocaust deniers, climate-breakdown deniers, pandemic minimizers and people who are anti-immigration and anti-LGBT rights and (albeit indirectly perhaps) anti-diversity in terms of the biosphere too.  

Locked In The Coronavirus Event

(The following was posted to the Empyre mailing list, in response to Simon Taylor's sharing on the list of 'A World Is Ending' by Levi R. Bryant from the journal Identities - #12 in their Lockdown Theory series)  

Reading this, and other texts written in the last few weeks by Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, Judith Butler and Bruno Latour, I can’t help also thinking about the ‘trap of the event’. In letter to Jean-Paul Sartre of 18 July, 1953, Maurice Merleau-Ponty has this to say about the relation between philosophy, politics, writing and events:

 

I have in no way renounced writing on politics… What I have decided to do since the Korean War is a very different thing. I have decided to refrain from writing on events as they are unfolding. This has to do with reasons that belonged to that period, and also with reasons that are permanent. … I have suggested a number of times that what the journal [Les Temps Modernes] should be doing is not take hasty positions, but rather propose lengthy studies. ... What I had in mind was to act as writers, a type of action that consists in a back and forth between the event and the general line, and which does not simply consist in confronting every event (in imaginary fashion) as though it was decisive, unique and irreparable. This method is much closer to politics than your method of ‘engagement continue’ [continuous engagement] (in the Cartesian sense). Indeed, precisely in that sense, it is more philosophical, because the distance it creates between the event and the judgement one passes on it defuses the trap of the event...

 

Interestingly, Wendy Brown quotes this passage from Merleau-Ponty in her chapter on ‘Moralism as Anti-Politics’ in Politics Out of History. To the ‘trap of the event’ and the ‘terms of “the event”’ she adds the ‘trap of existing discourses’.

Flatten the Curve, Build the Care: A Resource for Organizing Efforts Around Coronavirus

For a resource for organizing efforts around Coronavirus, see 'Flatten the curve, build the care': http://syllabus.pirate.care/topic/coronanotes/

It's part of the Pirate.Care.Syllabus collective project of my colleagues Valeria Graziano, Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, Maddalena Fragnito and others:

https://syllabus.pirate.care

The table of contents for 'Flatten the curve, build the care' reads as follows:

An invitation to join the collective note-taking
Flatten the curve, grow the care
A common health care crisis
A combined crisis of care, work and environment
A crisis of domesticity
Organizing for an alternative future
Sessions
Further reading

How to assist people in home isolation
Through a feminist lens
Kids in quarantine
Those who can't go home: prisoners, refugees and homeless
Conviviality without proximity
Mutual aid for those who have lost work
Coronavirus and the planetary environmental crisis
Tech and Science in the time of COVID-19
Resources and texts on Coronavirus 

Spanish translation of Timothy Morton's Realist Magic from Open Humanities Press (OA)

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of a Spanish translation of Timothy Morton's Realist Magic (an apposite topic perhaps for these difficult times). Like all our books, it is available on an open access basis. This publication is part of our continuing efforts to branch out beyond English-language texts.

The English-language version is also still available. Please see blurbs for both versions below.

Best,

Gary, Sigi and David

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Timothy Morton: Magia realista

Traducción de Román Suárez, Laureano Raló

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/magia-realista/

La ontología-orientada a objetos (OOO) nos ofrece una forma novedosa y sorprendente de pensar la causalidad que toma en consideración los desarrollos de la física que se inician a principios del siglo XX. Para la OOO, la causalidad es estética. En este libro, Timothy Morton explora lo que significa afirmar que algo advenga a la existencia, que persista, y que deje de existir. Tomando ejemplos de la física, la biología, la ecología, el arte, la literatura y la música, Morton pone en evidencia el poder explicativo elegante, aunque contrario a la intuición, de la OOO para explicar cómo opera la causalidad. Traducción a cargo de Laureano Ralón y Román Suárez.

Timothy Morton ocupa la cátedra Rita Shea Guffey de inglés en la Universidad de Rice. Es autor de Ecología oscura: por una lógica de la coexistencia futura (2014), Hiperobjetos: filosofía y ecología tras el fin del mundo (2013), El pensamiento ecológico (2010) y Ecología sin naturaleza (2007), entre otros, además de ochenta artículos sobre filosofía, ecología, literatura, alimentación y música. Escribe con frecuencia en su blog Ecología sin Naturaleza.

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Timothy Morton: Realist Magic

Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), is aesthetic. In this book, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality.

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/realist-magic/

Author Bio

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English at Rice University. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2014), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), The Ecological Thought (2010), Ecology without Nature (2007), seven other books and eighty essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food and music. He blogs regularly at Ecology Without Nature.