James W reviews McKenzie Wark's Capital is Dead. Nearly a year has passed since the publication of McKenzie Wark’s short book Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? More than half of that time has been spent in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis which has impacted the course of history in wa ...
Yeah ok. It seems a lot like the classic case of someone thinking that empiricism is somehow privileged in describing metaphysical truth, failing to realize that it's technological power always comes from its failure to describe the Real. It's clear that she doesn't seem to really understand the material nature of technology and specifically information technology, perhaps due to a lack of personal, practical experience. Some of the points you describe seem solid, like wanting to find a way to peer around "adjective-Capitalism." I think the failure though of most of this cultural theory and focus isn't that it doesn't correctly privilege science or is guilty of meaningful epistemic failures but that it doesn't properly understand the effect of increasingly powerful technology further abstracting productive Capitalism away from the material core. The Situationists wanted the workers in the factories to rise up, but the majority of the French hadn't been laborers experiencing the specific conditions imposed by industrial capitalism in quite some time.
Isn't her focus on vulgar Marxism exactly what your critique of her is? She argues that the cultural theorists don't focus nearly enough on the development of the forces of production (which IIRC according to her argument can't be understand theoretically sans collaborative effort), and how the rapid development of the forces of production have led not further the rationalization of the economic process, but only a furthered its abstraction to new levels, which basically seems to be what you just said.
Yeah, I think that was the reasonable part. But then the explanation she starts into about "the vector" comes across as deeply uninformed. I think it's a failure to adequately understand the nature of contemporary technology, and then elevating it to essential godhood while arguing that no one can argue against the empirical sciences. I agree with the critiques as does the review, but then the whole argument of the book goes right off the rails.
Yeah ok. It seems a lot like the classic case of someone thinking that empiricism is somehow privileged in describing metaphysical truth, failing to realize that it's technological power always comes from its failure to describe the Real. It's clear that she doesn't seem to really understand the material nature of technology and specifically information technology, perhaps due to a lack of personal, practical experience. Some of the points you describe seem solid, like wanting to find a way to peer around "adjective-Capitalism." I think the failure though of most of this cultural theory and focus isn't that it doesn't correctly privilege science or is guilty of meaningful epistemic failures but that it doesn't properly understand the effect of increasingly powerful technology further abstracting productive Capitalism away from the material core. The Situationists wanted the workers in the factories to rise up, but the majority of the French hadn't been laborers experiencing the specific conditions imposed by industrial capitalism in quite some time.
Isn't her focus on vulgar Marxism exactly what your critique of her is? She argues that the cultural theorists don't focus nearly enough on the development of the forces of production (which IIRC according to her argument can't be understand theoretically sans collaborative effort), and how the rapid development of the forces of production have led not further the rationalization of the economic process, but only a furthered its abstraction to new levels, which basically seems to be what you just said.
Yeah, I think that was the reasonable part. But then the explanation she starts into about "the vector" comes across as deeply uninformed. I think it's a failure to adequately understand the nature of contemporary technology, and then elevating it to essential godhood while arguing that no one can argue against the empirical sciences. I agree with the critiques as does the review, but then the whole argument of the book goes right off the rails.