Sunday, August 19, 2018

Imaginary But For Real: On Blackkklansman



Blackkklansman has come under criticism for twisting its true story into the shape of a cop film, warping any criticism of the structural violence of racism beyond recognition in the process. As Joshua Clover writes, "It is a police film the way Get Out is a horror film, adopting genre conventions to think through a particular set of problems about blackness." Except whereas Get Out uses horror to drive home the horrors of race, Blackkklansman would seem to defuse any critical force it might have in the morality and politics of the cop film.

Thursday, August 09, 2018

Conscious Organs: Toward an Anthropology of Labor Power

Presented in Rome in May 2018
Conference Draft 

Buried in the back of Volume Three of Capital, Marx puts forward a thesis of determination that is different from the familiar assertion of a base. As In Volume Marx writes, 

It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of production to the immediate producers—a relationship whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power—in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of the state in each case.