Joshua Clover

Bio: Joshua Clover is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Ecotone. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 10 citations.

Can Dialectics Break BRICS

Abstract: The currency of communism confronts us with two not-yetsynchronous sequences. One is “The Idea of Communism.” This eponymous sequence began well before the conference at Birkbeck Institute and the following “Pocket Communism” texts from Verso. A committed band of thinkers have labored to preserve communist thought in the anglophone and western european world during communism’s version of what modernism named “the vortex” — a disorienting break in historical tradition following the collapse of the communist bloc. If this preservation has occurred largely within the various formalizations available to philosophy and political theory, this can be understood as an artifact of its own conditions, developing in a period largely lacking avowedly anti-capitalist antagonism within the Anglo-European sphere.

Defining the Anthropocene

Abstract: Time is divided by geologists according to marked shifts in Earth's state. Recent global environmental changes suggest that Earth may have entered a new human-dominated geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Here we review the historical genesis of the idea and assess anthropogenic signatures in the geological record against the formal requirements for the recognition of a new epoch. The evidence suggests that of the various proposed dates two do appear to conform to the criteria to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene: 1610 and 1964. The formal establishment of an Anthropocene Epoch would mark a fundamental change in the relationship between humans and the Earth system.

‘Theories are made only to die in the war of time’: Guy Debord and the Situationist International as strategic thinkers

Abstract: The Situationist International (SI) has been one of the main reference points during the past 40 or more years within social movement organizing, cultural studies, social theory and philosophy. While the SI has been understood in many ways as inheritors and elaborators of an unorthodox Marxist politics drawing heavily from the history of the avant-garde, relatively little attention has been paid to the specifically strategic dimension of their thought and practice. This is surprising, especially in Debord's case, given how much his work also draws from the history of military strategy. This paper will particularly examine the strategic aspects of Debord and the SI's thought and politics and how they rethink the nature of strategy through collective forms of aesthetic–political practice.

Automatic Subjects: Gendered Labour and Abstract Life

Abstract: Critical analysis of the biotechnological reproduction of biological life increasingly emphasises the role of value-producing labour in biotechnologically reproductive processes, while also arguing that Marx’s use of the terms ‘labour’ and ‘value’ is inadequate to the critical scrutiny of these processes. Focusing especially on the reformulation of the value-labour relation in recent work in this area by Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, this paper both critiques this reformulation and questions the explanatory efficacy of the category ‘labour’ in this context. Emphasising the contemporary global expansion of capital relative to value-producing labour – specifically, the expansion of fictitious capital and debt on the one hand, and of global surplus populations on the other – it argues that this reformulation misrepresents the mediated capacities of capital as the immediate capacities of labour. This reformulation, moreover, is indicative of broader tendencies in the contemporary theorisation of labour, tendencies exemplified by autonomist Marxism.

Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds: Literary Study and Marxist-Feminism

Abstract: This chapter argues that Marxist-feminist methods informed by new readings of Marx that first emerged in Germany in the 1960s can provide capacious and flexible critical tools for feminist analysis. Drawing in particular on the concept of real abstraction, I demonstrate an approach to Marxist-feminist literary study that avoids structuralist and economistic understandings of cultural production, as well as the simplistic notions of false consciousness and ideology critique that inflect much twentieth-century Marxist literary criticism. Rather, Marx’s critique of value as a social form that operates “behind our backs,” as a set of impersonal compulsions that push forward independent of thought, can help us to better understand the dialectics of aesthetic experience – exemplified here in my reading of feminized poetry – as an important mode of sense-perception attuned to (or even able to “theorize”) the dynamic and contradictory reproduction of gender and its mediation by capital.