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Alexander Bogdanov: Workings of the World

LENIN’S RIVAL

There is a magnificent photograph of the famous writer and Bolshevik sympathizer Maxim Gorky watching Alexander Bogdanov play chess with Lenin. It is 1908 and Lenin is visiting Gorky and his houseguest Bogdanov at Gorky’s villa on the island of Capri. Bogdanov won that match, and according to Gorky, Lenin was not a good sport about it.¹ Gorky’s attempt to reconcile Lenin and Bogdanov, the leading lights of the party, did not go well. Borrowing a line from Hamlet, Gorky accused Lenin of trying to play people like flutes. And yet of these three once-famous people, it is Lenin who is best remembered.

In the larger game between them, Lenin checked Bogdanov’s designs on how to organize the theoretical, scientific, and practical stratagems of the workers’ movement—and did so more than once. We rarely remember much about those whom the grand masters beat in the heat. Even though, when the masters are defeated in their turn, there might be something to glean from the faded tactics of the losers. Now that Lenin’s world too is listed in columns of the defeated, perhaps we can pick through the strategies of his opponents and find things of value; now that it’s time to build the world again, again.

Our species-being is as builders of worlds. This is the central proposition of all of Bogdanov’s thought. Let’s not concern ourselves just yet with what the boundaries of the “human” might be. It’s a category endlessly caught up in differences and similarities with the categories of the animal, the angelic or the machinic.² Let’s just think of us, for now, as Darwin might, as a population. And while we now know that all our writings may well be “read” by the machines of the security agencies, I will assume that the human is a population to which you, dear reader, most likely belong, and whose collective well-being is something you might care for. Bogdanov, who knew some Darwin, had more interest in the life of this species-being than in its definition.

Bogdanov’s version of social democracy was always more about the self-organization of workers than about building a party to seize the state.³ It was always more attuned to the struggle in and against nature to organize a way of life. Nature is of course an elusive category, prone to slippage between the material and the divine, between substance and essence.⁴ As Bogdanov was well aware, different kinds of social organization produce wildly different images of it. Nature is for the moment then a category without a content. It means simply that which labor encounters.

Born in the industrial town of Tula in 1873, son of a school inspector, Bogdanov was educated at boarding school. Bogdanov: “Experience of the malicious and obtuse authorities there taught me to hate rulers and deny all authority. I was awarded a gold medal on completion of my studies.”⁵ He was first arrested in 1894, and arrested and exiled several times thereafter. Exile to Vologda in 1901 only furthered his political education, among the thriving dissident community there. Here he wrote one of the earliest and most widely used handbooks on Marxist economics.⁶

Nicolai Berdyaev: “He was a remarkable man, extremely sincere and utterly devoted to his ideas; but he had a rather narrow mind, and constantly engaged in finicky and sterile sophistry”⁷—including in disputes with Berdyaev, who was then retreating from Marxism, in which Bogdanov probably bested him with his sophisticated version of the same. In Vologda he met several other internal exiles whom he later recruited into the Bolshevik faction of Russian Social Democracy, including the future Commissar of Enlightenment Anatole Lunacharsky, and the co-translators of Marx’s Capital. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1899.

Back in Russia, he became Lenin’s front man, and a Bolshevik representative on the St. Petersburg Soviet in the 1905 revolution. The legendary Bolshevik bank robber Kamo offers a colorful portrait of Bogdanov the revolutionary: “Krasin introduced me to a great man. Together they run the military-technical center for the Bolsheviks. You must understand that this man knows everything. He writes scholarly books, he makes bombs and dynamite. He also treats patients, you know, as a doctor.”⁸

During the 1905 revolution Bogdanov was arrested again. In prison, he completed his first major philosophical work, Empirio-monism, and on his release sent Lenin a copy. In his Finland retreat, Lenin composed a long letter to Bogdanov on it. Bogdanov returned the letter, writing that in the interests of maintaining their political unity, he would pretend never to have read it. His alignment with Lenin disintegrated by 1907.

Three things were at stake.⁹ First, Bogdanov opposed Lenin’s rightward tack after the failure of the 1905 revolution. Lenin wanted the Bolsheviks to participate in elections, while Bogdanov wanted to keep the party underground and continue revolutionary work, and many in the party agreed with him.

Second, there was apparently also some squabbling over party funds. Bogdanov and the Bolshevik engineer Leonid Krasin had control over money raised through “expropriations”—bank robberies. It is hard to imagine Lenin having much tolerance for political or intellectual independence, but for both to then be combined with financial independence must have been particularly galling.

Third, the two men were never in agreement on philosophical matters. Lenin hewed closer to the “dialectical materialist” orthodoxy of George Plekhanov, who was aggressively opposed to the theoretical innovations starting to emanate from Bogdanov and his circle. Plekhanov once even wrote a polemic addressed to “Mr. Bogdanov”—as he refused to consider the author of such heresies a comrade.¹⁰ Lenin and Bogdanov maintained unity within the Bolsheviks so long as they were agreed on tactics. When that unity broke down, the philosophical dispute came out in the open.

Bogdanov led the left-wing of the Bolsheviks against Lenin from 1907 to 1911. Lenin’s position was a difficult one. Bogdanov may have had more support than Lenin among the Bolsheviks in exile, and most certainly among those still in Russia, which may be why Lenin attacked him on philosophical rather than political grounds. He took aim at Bogdanov’s Empirio-monism.

Published in three volumes from 1904 to 1906, Empirio-monism addresses the impact on Marxist thought of the new physics, and the “spontaneous” philosophy that sprang from it, of Ernst Mach and others. For Mach, a scientific theory is just the most economical way of describing sensory experience. He withdrew the warrant for metaphysical speculation about what is real, beyond what can be said about what is observed. Bogdanov found in Mach a useful line of retreat from the would-be materialism of Engels and Plekhanov, which had raised the scientific theories of their time—only some of which would prove enduring—into metaphysical “laws.”¹¹

At a time of increasing repression within Russia and political crisis within the party, it rather puzzled militants that Lenin in exile was spending his time in libraries researching philosophical questions. The result of these labors was Lenin’s lengthy polemic against Bogdanov and other “Machists,” Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909). Gorky thought this tract had “the sound of a hooligan,” but it did the job.¹²

Being “philosophical” rather than political may have helped the book evade censorship. It certainly checked the influence not just of Bogdanov’s theoretical innovations but also of his political line. Lenin secured his expulsion from the Bolsheviks, and—whether intentionally or not—set the dismal precedent of trials of doctrinal orthodoxy, as if correct action on any and every issue required the correct “line” in philosophy.

Whether Bogdanov’s political tactics would have been better than Lenin’s need not concern us, but his theoretical tactics certainly had—and continue to have—merit, even if they diverged from the first principles of so-called “dialectical materialism.” But then, as Gilles Deleuze once noted, the first principles in a philosophy are less interesting than the second or third principles.¹³ Even with third principles, there’s no end to the fruitless argument to be had.

Of more interest might be the kinds of practices of knowledge that can be built on a particular theoretical configuration. Stuart Hall: “Theory is always a detour on the way to something more important.”¹⁴ It is the contention of Molecular Red that Bogdanov offers, even today, a base on which to build a practice of knowledge for the era of the Carbon Liberation Front. Bogdanov retreated from the sterile attempts to construct a materialist metaphysics and took his stand on a realist approach to sensation itself, opening a path for thinking about the practice of knowledge as organized sensation. Such pragmatism seems timely again.

Alienated from Lenin on political, practical, and theoretical matters, Bogdanov, Gorky, and Lunacharsky formed their own faction. They ran two party schools in Capri in 1909 and Bologna in 1910, funded by Gorky’s earnings as a celebrated writer and perhaps some expropriation funds Bogdanov still controlled. The Capri gathering was the moment when an intellectually open Bolshevism existed, if only for a brief moment.¹⁵

The Capri school didn’t last. The students were arrested on their return to Russia; Bogdanov and Gorky fell out; Lenin patched up his relations with Gorky, while Lunacharsky drifted back under Lenin’s spell. Alienated from his party, by 1909 Bogdanov considered suicide. He gave up politics in 1911 to concentrate on literary and scientific work. At odds with both Lenin and Gorky, with the Bolsheviks in disarray, Bogdanov watched from afar the long, slow counter-revolution that unfolded in Russia. It was in these difficult circumstances for the revolution, for the party, and for Bogdanov personally that he wrote, of all things, a utopia.

RED MARS

“Well, you should write a novel for the workers,” says Lenin to Bogdanov, “on how the predatory capitalists have despoiled the Earth and wasted all its oil, iron, lumber and coal. That would be a very useful book, Mister Machist!”¹⁶ Or so Gorky recalled, or thought he recalled, from Lenin’s visit to Capri. Much to Lenin’s annoyance, Bogdanov’s novel was rather more original and sensational than that.

The utopian fable Red Star (1908) and its prequel, the vampire story The Engineer Menni (1913), are didactic tracts that popularized Bogdanov’s ideas about labor, nature and revolution. Both are set on Mars. Older and further from the sun, Martian life is less energetic than on Earth, less violent in its struggles, and more advanced.¹⁷ The two books, taken together, are thought-experiments conducted in a parallel planet. Certain variables are missing—Mars lacks competing states—but in its essentials, pre-revolution Mars is not unlike where twenty-first-century Earth actually ended up after the victory of the Carbon Liberation Front.

In Engineer Menni, what drives the story is the tension between a vast, state-directed development project and the interests of finance capital. Martian capitalism is on the brink of crisis. Markets must expand, but there’s nowhere left to grow. Menni the engineer proposes a canal-building project as the solution, a project so vast it will lead to whole new planetary spatial form. It will even alter the climate.

A delicate political compromise puts a state-run agency in charge, but this does not appease financial interests. Meanwhile, the workers are angry about the casualty rate that ensues from a particularly difficult stretch of terrain. Finance seizes on this as an opportunity to privatize the whole project. Their alternate route for the canal is through earthquake country. While the work is easier and there’s a quick profit to be made, in the long run it will endanger whole populations along the shaky new route. The logic of accumulating capital, with its own special reality, dominates that of labor struggling in and against nature to build and maintain a habitable world.

But Netti’s agenda is far more ambitious: “What must we do so that we ourselves can know and see, and not just constantly believe? Or is that impossible? Is it always going to be like it is now? And if it is impossible, then what is the use of living and struggling if we are to remain slaves?”¹⁸ The worst form of slavery is believing instead of knowing, of taking on faith what hasn’t been derived from the careful testing of what is sensed.¹⁹ The goal is not just to throw off the vampire squid of finance capital, but to organize again the whole of labor and knowledge.

Red Star takes place after Engineer Menni, on socialist Mars. Gender equality prevails, if still patterned on a masculine norm. The Martians enjoy a liberated sexuality, free from repressive morality if not from emotional complexity. It is a vision rather like that of Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai. Martian medicine is of course advanced. They practice blood transfusion as a restorative therapy.²⁰ Bogdanov here has an uncanny intimation of posthuman techniques via which the tissues of the human body will pass transversally from body to body.²¹ It is a field to which he will even contribute himself in the last stage of his own life.

On Mars, labor has become fully socialized. The human narrator can barely perceive what labor has become for the more advanced Martians: “To the outsider the threads connecting the delicate brains of the men with the indestructible organs of the machines were subtle and invisible.”²² Bogdanov’s tract constructs a utopia of near-frictionless, computer-coordinated labor, to bracket off the class struggle of our own Earth, and show how it masks another struggle, between labor and nature. It is perhaps the earliest vision of a kind of cyber-communism as a new mode of production based on a more efficient and effective mode of information than the market.²³

Bogdanov’s utopia is not a Platonist stasis. The struggle in and against nature continues. As a Martian explains to the gob-smacked human visitor: “Happy? Peaceful? Where did you get that impression? True, peace reigns among men, but there cannot be peace with the natural elements.”²⁴ Like H. G. Wells before him, Bogdanov grasped the significance of Darwin for utopian writing, which could no longer posit ideal states beyond the horizon of historical time. The utopian after Darwin had to be more of a storm-tossed ship than an eternal city on the hill.

For the Martians, the canal-building project came at a terrible price: “Only seventy years ago, when our coal reserves were exhausted and the transition to hydroelectric power was still far from complete, we were forced to destroy a considerable portion of our forests in order to give us time to redesign our machines. This disfigured the planet and worsened the climate for decades.”²⁵

That clearing forests could have a local effect on climate was understood at the time.²⁶ The doctor in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1897) gets in a whole speech about it. Bogdanov grasps the molecular relation between clearing and burning forests, changing the atmosphere and hence changing the climate, although of course he imagines the Martian climate to be essentially the same as the Earth’s. What is not clear is whether Bogdanov was starting to grasp the global implications.

In their search for new sources of energy, the Martians’ choice is to get it from Earth or from Venus. The former is technically easier, but involves the destruction of human life. Even socialist Mars contemplates extermination when it is running out of energy while trying to mitigate climate change. Fortunately their organizational culture is richer than that, and the option is not pursued. For Bogdanov, violence is a logical choice at lower levels of organization, but not at higher ones—a theme that will reappear in Robinson, and in Platonov in a far more desperate form.

The Martians are interested not just in science and technology but also in a new kind of art: the tragedy of the totality. Bogdanov: “The struggle between classes, groups and individuals precludes both the idea of the whole and the happiness and suffering implied by the notion.”²⁷ The exploitation of class by class is one of the fetishes to be overcome in the struggle to organize the totality of human effort, in and against a world that resists the labors of our species-being. But there is no end to this more basic story, this natural history without end. Bogdanov uses the utopian literary form to write from the point of view of labor, but not limited to the labor point of view as capital limits and contains it. The happiness and suffering of the whole is at the heart of Bogdanov’s whole teaching.

Labor has to aspire, through art and science, to the tragedy of the totality.²⁸ Red Star aims not just to equip the labor movement with some intimation of its goals, but to suggest that labor’s struggle is in its origin and ends not fundamentally against the ruling class, but is rather the quest to find and found a totality within which to cultivate the surplus of life. Is that not still the great task of labor?

The systematic thought of forms and environments “was excluded from the minds of the old classes by the divisibility of their existence and the separateness and one-sidedness of their experience.”²⁹ But this view of the joy and suffering of the totality is something toward which even the proletariat has to work. It has to overcome its own fetishes and understand not just its own activities but the totality of activities from the labor point of view. This was the project for which Bogdanov would later construct his tektology, which has the singular merit of finding a unique form for such an inquiry, even if the fate of that writing was decades of oblivion, thanks to Lenin and his successors.

It is notable that in Red Star, Bogdanov already has inklings of the workings of the Carbon Liberation Front and its relation to climate. He anticipates the possibility of Martian (and hence of human) generated climate change at a time when the theoretical possibility was starting to occur to climate scientists, even though the infrastructure did not exist yet for measuring or computing climate models.³⁰ The Martians of Red Star already possess a global knowledge concord, frictionless data gathering, and computational power that Earthly climate science would finally acquire by the late twentieth century. With that infrastructure in place, the Martians found then what humans have found only now—that collective labor transforms nature at the level of the totality.

In parallel to the writing of his utopia and its prequel, Bogdanov undertook two other important literary tasks. He was the general editor of the translation into Russian of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital, which appeared between 1907 and 1910.³¹ These would become standard translations in the Soviet Union—even if Bogdanov’s name was removed from them. Soviet dogma would later ritually accuse Bogdanov of “idealist” heresies, but the fact is he knew his Marx better than most, and traces of Marx’s metabolic thinking, especially from the third volume of Capital, show up in Bogdanov’s thought.

Bogdanov also set to work redacting his empirio-monist philosophy into a compact volume. The result, The Philosophy of Living Experience, came out in 1913, around the same time as Engineer Menni. Bogdanov had by then given up on exile politics and returned to Moscow. In his more philosophical writings he would flesh out what was only implied in the science fiction novels: the worker and engineer alliance, the labor point of view, the neither dialectical nor materialist Marxism, and the qualified optimism about the task of revolution. And this is why it is important: given that we may still need some sort of revolution to head off the Carbon Liberation Front, these ideas may help us to equip ourselves with some other elements of Bogdanov’s program.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIVING EXPERIENCE

The Philosophy of Living Experience sketches the program with which Bogdanov could move forward, out of philosophy into a new practice of knowledge.³² Within philosophy, Bogdanov’s thought is a species of monism, which holds that there is only one substance. But this is for him a point of departure from philosophy, since it has no special method for knowing it. The Philosophy of Living Experience is a step toward a tektology, a new way of organizing knowledge, and a new practice of culture, called proletkult. These are still key steps toward the practice of a molecular red knowledge of the kind we need today.

Bogdanov is not really trying to write philosophy so much as to hack it, to repurpose it for something other than the making of more philosophy. Philosophy is no longer an end in itself, but a kind of raw material for the design and organizing, not quite of what Foucault called discourses of power/knowledge, but more of practices of laboring/knowing.³³ The projected audience for this writing is not philosophers so much as the organic intellectuals of the working class, exactly the kind of people Bogdanov’s activities as an educator-activist had always addressed. Having clearly read his Nietzsche, Bogdanov’s decision is that if one is to philosophize with a hammer, then this is best done, not with professional philosophers, but with professional hammerers.

Bogdanov’s practice is a détournement of philosophy for other purposes. Détournement, a term developed by the Situationists, refers to the practice of taking all of past culture and knowledge to be a commons, as always and already belonging to all of us.³⁴ If the Marxist tradition is a critique of bourgeois property, then property in knowledge is also an object of critique. It turns out Bogdanov had his own critique of bourgeois property in knowledge, and indeed some distinctive practices of détournement.

Bogdanov is not interested in what is unique to any given subjectivity, which is likely to be based on only very specific kinds of activity in the world. His interest is in two kinds of collective knowing: folk knowledge and scientific knowledge.³⁵ Both are in their own ways verified and corrected by forms of collective praxis. Take for example the folk knowledge embedded in proverbs. “Many hands make light work” is a condensation of the experience of collective labor, as is “too many cooks spoil the broth.” Folk knowledge from a given stage of the development of organized labor about the capacities and limits of cooperation is embedded in the tension between these two incompatible proverbs.

Whatever their limitations, such proverbs might hold more organizational thought than certain kinds of formal philosophy. Professional philosophers have over time become detached from other kinds of labor and from everyday life. Philosophy becomes just the study of thought, and forgets its real subject, which is the entirety of human experience. To the extent that philosophy has responded to other kinds of activity, whether of labor or science, it has been by trying to subsume them or even legislate what is proper for them. A critical theory can become hypocritical theory if it attempts to dominate other forms of knowing from other modes of collective experience.

As great a work as Marx’s Capital is, it is not the work of an individual author, but the product of collective experience. The author is the codifier of the social activity of a class:

Marx utilized a huge amount of material that was gathered before him by both learned and practical people. He applied perfected methods of treatment, which were also partly created and partly prepared by the efforts of innumerable investigators. And he unified and tied together all the ideas that express the direction of the entire development of contemporary society. In a word, we have a conscious and systematic verification of the ideas of all existent collective experience, consciously and systematically organized according to collectively elaborated methods.³⁶

Or, in short, the achievement understood under the rubric of “Marx” is not that of an individual genius, but of a collective process—a “science,” broadly understood.

A science is that which comprehends the whole of a given domain of collective experience as fully as is possible within the social organization and technical apparatus of its time. The scientific point of view is that which corresponds to the highest level of development of an era. There are no universal or eternal forms. Bogdanov: “There can be no absolute and eternal philosophical truth.”³⁷ Universals are projections beyond the limit of a given experience into a worldview, which may be expressed in literature or philosophy or religion.³⁸ This is not, however, a species of relativism. Some worldviews are more general than others. And while regression is possible, successful worldviews are usually more and more general, grasping more and more of a totality. A worldview overshoots the science of its time, and may either lead it or mislead it.

Science, philosophy, and everyday experience ought to converge as the proletariat grows. Bogdanov: “When a powerful class, to which history has entrusted new, grandiose tasks, steps into the arena of history, then a new philosophy also inevitably emerges.”³⁹ Marx’s work is a step in this direction, but only a step. Proletarian class experience calls for the integration of forms of specialized knowledge, just as it integrates tasks in the labor process. More and more of life can then be subject to scientific scrutiny. The task of today’s thought is to integrate the knowledge of sciences and social sciences that expresses the whole of the experience of the progressive class forces of the moment.

Bogdanov: “The philosophy of a class is the highest form of its collective consciousness.”⁴⁰ As such, bourgeois philosophy has served the bourgeoisie well, but the role of philosophy in class struggle is not understood by that class. It wanted to universalize its own experience. But philosophies cannot be universal. They are situated. The philosophy of one class will not make sense to a class with a different experience of its actions in the world. Just as the bourgeoisie sponsored a revolution in thought that corresponds to its new forms of social practice, so too organized labor must reorganize thought as well as practice.

The basic metaphor is the naming of relations in nature after social relations.⁴¹ It can be found “at work” in the theory of causality, the centerpiece of any worldview. Authoritarian causality had its uses: it allowed the ordering of experience, and reinforced authoritarian cooperation in production. Worldviews that assume authoritarian causes when none were observed usually invoke invisible spirit authorities as causes. Horatio obeys Hamlet; Hamlet obeys his father’s ghost. Matter is subordinated to spirit. Thus the slave model of social relations became a whole ontology of what is and ever could be.

Bogdanov makes the striking argument that religion was the scientific worldview of its time. The old holy books are veritable encyclopedias, somewhat arbitrarily arranged, on how to organize farming, crafts, sexuality or aged-care. This was a valid form of knowledge so long as an authoritarian organization of labor prevailed. But as technique and organization changed, “religious thinking lost touch with the system of labor, acquired an ‘unearthly’ character, and became a special realm of faith.”⁴² There was a detachment of authority from direct production. Religion then becomes an objective account of a partial world.

Bogdanov thinks it no accident that the philosophical world-views that partially displaced religion and authoritarian causation arose where mercantile exchange relations were prevalent—among the Greeks.⁴³ Extended exchange relations suggest another causal model, abstract causality. Buyers and sellers in the marketplace come to realize that there is a force operating independently of their will, but operating in the abstract, as a system of relations, rather than acting as a particular cause of a particular event.

This is an advance on authoritarian causation, but it will in turn reveal its limitations in the light of more advanced forms of social organization:

in exchange relations economic necessity—external to people and foreign to them—determines both their actions and the objective results of those actions. The nature and origin of economic necessity will remain unknown to people because they find themselves struggling with other commodity producers in the marketplace, and they cannot see the social collaboration which is hidden beneath this struggle. Society as a laboring whole exists outside the boundaries of their thought; each producer can only see his separate, partial business. Thus producers are unable to understand the force of the social relation which hangs over them. They do not see the living economic connection of people and instead conceive of it as necessity—only empty, naked, abstract necessity without any concrete social content. This is how economic causality appears to the commodity producer.⁴⁴

Nevertheless, philosophy remained a mix of authoritarian and abstract causal models. Within this mix, abstract causality was the progressive development. It posited an infinite set of cause-effect sequences governed by a necessity at once both logical and natural. Yet this causality remains abstract. It is often posited metaphorically as a law, as if nature itself was a judge banging a gavel.

Each successive worldview formalizes the experience of the class to which that experience belongs. Bogdanov’s empirio-monism is based on the experience of labor, and points beyond the limits of exchange society. One of his more interesting arguments is that both idealist and materialist philosophies fall short of the labor point of view, as both approach the world as an object of contemplation. Idealism takes the organization of social relations as its model for thought, while materialism tries to bypass social relations and take the relations of the natural world as its object of contemplation.

Materialism at least has the advantage of being closer to labor as praxis, as living activity, and to be destabilized by the periodic developments of new natural scientific knowledge and new labor processes. The problem with materialism is that it tends toward purely abstract accounts of nature. It makes matter primary being, but as a thing apart.

Twenty-first-century materialisms are no different in this regard. Slavoj Žižek: “Materialism has nothing to do with the assertion of the inert density of matter; it is, on the contrary, a position which accepts the ultimate Void of reality—the consequence of its central thesis on the primordial multiplicity is that there is no ‘substantial reality’, that the only ‘substance’ of the multiplicity is Void.”⁴⁵ Here are all the old vices. Here is authoritarian causation, in the form of a first principle, outside of labor, the everyday, or scientific investigation, not to be further questioned, a principle of which now philosophers rather than priests have some special knowledge.

Rather than such a contemplative materialism, Bogdanov, like Marx, wants an active one, an account based on the social production of human existence. Bogdanov: “Nature is what people call the endlessly unfolding field of their labor-experience.”⁴⁶ Nature is the arena of labor. Neither labor nor nature can be conceived as concepts without the other. They are historically co-produced concepts.

The being of nature is not something a philosophy can dogmatically claim to know. It is not void, or matter; it is whatever appears as resistance in labor. Bogdanov changes the object of theory from nature in the abstract to the practices in which it is encountered and known: “The system of experience is the system of labor, all of its contents lie within the limits of the collective practice of mankind.”

Take thermodynamics as an example. Industrialization runs on carbon. Demand for carbon in the form of coal meant that miners dug deeper and deeper. Pumping water out of deep mines becomes an acute problem, and so the first application of steam power was for pumping water out of mines. Out of the practical problem of designing steam-driven pumps arises the abstract principles of thermodynamics as a science.⁴⁷ Thermodynamic models of causation then become the basic metaphor for thinking about causation in general, extended by substitution to explain all sorts of things.

There are at least two levels of labor activity: the technical and the organizational. Both have to overcome resistance. Technical labor has to overcome the recalcitrance of matter itself. Organizational labor has to overcome the emotional truculence of the human components of a laboring apparatus. Its means of motivation is ideology, which for Bogdanov has a positive character, as a means of threading people together around their tasks. What the idealist thinker unwittingly discovers is the labor-nature of our species-being—ideology as organization and the resistance to it—a not insignificant field of experience, but a partial one.

Before Marx, neither materialists nor idealists oriented thought within labor. The materialists thought the ideal an attribute of abstract matter; the idealists thought matter an attribute of an abstract ideal. Both suffer from a kind of abstract fetishism, or the positing of absolute concepts that are essences outside of human experience and that are its cause. Bogdanov: “An idea which is objectively the result of past social activity and which is the tool of the latter, is presented as something independent, cut off from it.”⁴⁸ This abstract fetishism arises from exchange society. Causation moves away from particular authorities, from lords and The Lord, but still posits a universal principle of command.

This is why Bogdanov takes his distance even from materialist philosophy before Marx, for it still posits an abstract causation: matter determines thought, but in an abstract way. Whether as “matter” or “void,” a basic metaphor is raised to a universal principle by mere contemplation, rather than thought through social labor’s encounters with it. The revival in the twenty-first century of philosophies of speculative objects or vitalist matter is not a particularly progressive moment in Bogdanovite terms.

The labor point of view has to reject ontologies of abstract exchange with nature.⁴⁹ Labor finds itself in and against nature. Labor is always firstly in nature, subsumed within a totality greater than itself. Labor is secondly against nature. It comes into being through an effort to bend resisting nature to its purposes. Its intuitive understanding of causality comes not from exchange value but from use value. Labor experiments with nature, finding new uses for it. Its understanding of nature is historical, always evolving, reticent about erecting an abstract causality over the unknown.

The labor point of view is a monism, yet one of plural, active processes. Nature is what labor grasps in the encounter, and grasps in a way specific to a given situation. Marx: “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialisms … is that the thing, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.”⁵⁰

The basic metaphor, the one which posits an image of causality, is just a special instance of a broader practice of thought. All philosophies explain the world by metaphorical substitution.⁵¹ A great example in which Marx himself participates would be the way metabolism moves between fields, from respiration in mammals to agricultural science to social-historical metabolism. Substitution extends from the experience of either nature or labor as resistance (materialism or idealism). But in either case, progress in knowledge is limited. The result tends to be the thought of activity without matter or of matter without activity. This is the problem which “dialectical materialism” imagines itself to have solved, although it has done so only abstractly.

Materialism is concerned with a larger portion of experience and is hence more progressive and more general, but it still falls short of the labor point of view. Materialist thought evolves as the material base evolves. For Bogdanov, the history of materialism is the history of philosophy, for materialism in philosophy is a kind of labor unconscious.

How can thought get outside of its cloistered world, into the great outdoors? The dogmatic philosophers who preceded Kant had no trouble erecting various metaphysics of the absolute. Kant brought thought back to its conditions of possibility as thought, and barred the way to a direct knowledge of the thing-in-itself. Philosophy would no longer pronounce on what is, but rather on the limits to what can be known about what is. What can be known is what correlates with what a subject can know.

The limit to what a subject can know is henceforth the proper jurisdiction of philosophy. Kant put paid to philosophy’s claims to a knowledge of the absolute, but in so doing substituted the image of philosophy as judge of the conditions of thinking scientifically at all. As such, philosophy trapped only an image of the labor specific to science, one caught in the correlation of the object of thought with the subject that thinks it, or some other dualism like it.

Actual sciences, little by little, began working through an apparatus capable of registering sensations that extended far beyond the scale and scope of the human. Science became not just a way of objectively recording what the subject senses, but of recording also what a subject could never sense: scales way below the molecular or above the solar system; times faster even than thought, or epochs billions of years before the perceiving subject—before this only life we know—existed.⁵²

Bogdanov rightly saw Mach as pointing to a way out of Kant’s legislative edicts. Mach and the empirio-critics fused the object and subject of knowledge into one substance—sensation. Quentin Meillassoux: “They acknowledged correlationism’s discovery of a fundamental constraint—viz., that we only have access to the for-us, not the in-itself—but instead of concluding from this that the in-itself is unknowable, they concluded that the correlation is the only veritable in-itself.”⁵³ It remained only for Bogdanov to connect sensation back to labor, to the experience of the collective and historical task of its production. This is the passage from the empirio-criticism of Mach to the empirio-monism of Bogdanov.

Empirio-monism will emerge as a synthesis of the philosophies of Marx and Mach, which Bogdanov takes to be the advanced forms of the point of view respectively of industrial labor and scientific labor. Or, in twenty-first-century terms, workers and hackers, where the latter includes all kinds of non-routine scientific, technical and intellectual labor, whose object is not determined in advance as it is in industrial labor.⁵⁴

In Bogdanov’s reading, the central category in Mach and his empirio-critical school is sensation, but not as individual sensation. Sensation is an undecidable assemblage of sense impressions and material forms. Bogdanov: “The empirio-critics strove to overcome the duality of things and psychical facts, to advance philosophical thought towards realism, towards living experience, from which it has been separated.”⁵⁵ The only material with which knowledge works is sensation, and the goal of knowledge is finding an orientation within that experience.

All elements of experience are continuous with each other. The empirio-critic begins with the critical method of breaking experience up into elements, with the goal of describing integrated wholes. The basic metaphor of causality is functional dependency: this happens and then that happens. Bogdanov reads this basic metaphor in Mach as a materialist causality, but of a still rather abstract kind.

For Mach, knowledge describes experience and orders it, but it doesn’t intend to change it. This worldview expresses the role of technical and scientific labor, particularly in the new research institutes of the time, and the emerging organizational role of the intellectual in production.⁵⁶ It is a world of intellectual workers, detached from that social labor with direct experience of the resistance of nature. Theirs is a fetishistic abstraction—an imagining of the resistance of nature in formal terms only, like in a lab experiment.

The scientist’s experience of labor relations was still an authoritarian one. Hence the persistence of dualities of thought, of forms of idealism, and of the tendency to see the world as subordinate to abstract schemes. Mach’s thought is still that of his class, although not in a simple way. It is partly limited to causal models drawn from the exchange relations of advanced capitalism. It is also partly drawn from the authoritarian habits in relation to that labor which works more directly on resistant nature in the laboratory.⁵⁷

The kind of dialectical materialism in which Lenin so devoutly believed was not for Bogdanov a particularly plausible alternative to these sorts of spontaneous philosophy of the scientific and technical workers. The dialectic is an idealist residue within an otherwise active and materialist theory. Marx’s dialectic was unreal and still abstract, imposed from without, falling short of a metaphor which could substitute for any and every experience of process. The dialectic is not a universal method, as Hegel and Marx still maintained. It is only a cognitive model taken from human organizational experience, and from a narrow realm of experience at that.

Bogdanov: “Idealism by its nature does not know real, sensuous activity.”⁵⁸ German idealism came up with an active process, but it is an explanation which substitutes the logic of ideas for living practices. With Hegel it at least rose to the level of systematizing this zone of experience. Feuerbach tried to turn philosophy away from the self-developing idea to the self-development of the species-being of man in and against resisting nature.⁵⁹ But Feuerbach retreats to the petit-bourgeois scale of the family and affective life. He gets beyond individualism—even the individualism writ large of Hegel—but does not get to collective labor. He does not make the transit from molar to molecular perceptions of experience that comes with the labor point of view.

Labor as social activity, in and against nature, is what is central to Marx, not an abstract concept of material nature. He grasped that matter and activity are not just correlates but aspects of the same—monistic—process. He moves beyond Hegel’s ideal contradictions to concrete forces at work. But his dialectic was still idealist. There is a limit to explaining the world through struggles of opposites, which substitute the form of linguistic relations for all other relations.⁶⁰

While sympathetic to Joseph Dietzgen, the worker-philosopher, Bogdanov did not think it progress to retreat from Marx’s engagement with Hegel to Spinoza, which resulted in an even more abstract and contentless monism. Dietzgen was, however, the source for Bogdanov’s idea that there could be specifically proletarian class-forms of thought, or proletkult.⁶¹ Dietzgen’s achievement, like Marx’s, is neither the dialectic nor materialism, but the labor point of view.

Bogdanov saved his critical attention for the so-called dialectical materialism of Lenin and Plekhanov, where “man and his consciousness are posited as the passive product of external matter. This is that reflective relationship which was characteristic of all old materialisms and against which Marx asserted himself. Matter is an object of human activity …”⁶² The dogmatic insistence on the causal priority of matter as thing-in-itself places matter outside of experience. It becomes an article of faith. An authoritarian causal first principle—that the world is made of matter—is simply asserted.

This is contrary to the scientific worldview and practice, where a knowledge of matter is to be produced by experiment with an apparatus rather than through contemplation alone. Such scientific methods are not really explained by the dialectic. The problem with dialectical materialism is that it doesn’t criticize the dialectic in the light of labor and scientific experience. The dialectic describes only a part of the organizational whole, the molar struggle for authority of rival ideas for organizing labor. It does not necessarily also explain labor’s experience in and against nature.

Bogdanov: “Elements of the dialectic may be found almost everywhere, but life and movement are not exhausted by them. Philosophy must, consequently, conceive of its task in the broadest and most general form: to research the bonds of the world process in order to discover all possible ways and means of organization. Such is the basic notion of Empirio-monism.”⁶³ It is a low theory of the discovery and communication of potential forms of organization between different experiences in a comradely way.

The labor point of view calls for a thought which embodies its ambitions. Bogdanov: “Dialectical materialism was the first attempt to formulate the working-class point of view on life and the world.”⁶⁴ But not the last. Strikingly, the labor point of view implies a new understanding of causality. The apparatuses of both modern science and machine production generate new experiences of causation. As in modern chemistry, labor can interrupt and divert causal sequences. Matter is not a thing-in-itself beyond experience, but a placeholder for the not-yet-experienced.

Bogdanov’s example is the concept of energy, which is neither substance nor idea but whose discovery emerges out of the practical relationship of the labor apparatus to a nature which resists it. Energy is not in coal or oil, but an outcome of an activity of labor on these materials. Bogdanov: “Labor causality gives man a program and a plan for the conquest of the world: to dominate phenomena, things, step by step so as to receive some from others and by means of some to dominate others.”⁶⁵

Here Bogdanov retains a rather authoritarian worldview, but imposed on nature, rather than on a subordinate class. That there can be unintended effects of such interventions on a resistant nature has not quite occurred to him as a concept, even though he intuits it, as shown in the peak energy and climate change problems confronting his Commie Martians in Red Star. Bogdanov has not entirely overcome the authoritarian streak in his own activity. He may not be a Leninist, but he still thinks like a Bolshevik. His thought is marked by the organizational limits of his times. But then, as good Bogdanovites, we know all philosophies are bound to their era and do not touch the eternal. Or as Guy Debord once put it: “Theories are made to die in the war of time.”⁶⁶

TOWARD A COMRADELY POETICS OF KNOWLEDGE AND LABOR

While rejecting Bogdanov’s residual attachment to an authoritarian relation of collective labor to nature, his practices of organization still have something to recommend them, and are worth a little further elaboration. The elements of experience have to be not only efficiently named but also combined in new ways with a view to new or better labor processes. This is the seed of Bogdanov’s idea of a practice of tektology. Neither a theory or a science, tektology is a practice which generalizes the act of substitution by which one thing is understood metaphorically via another.⁶⁷ It is a practice of making worldviews.

Rather than unconsciously using metaphors borrowed from authoritarian or exchange relations, the wager of tektology is that it might be possible to construct a kind of low theory whose purpose is to experimentally apply understandings of one process to other quite different processes to see if they can be grasped as analogous. It is a kind of détournement that works “sideways,” from field to field, rather than from past to present.

What appears objective is the product not of thought alone but of the social labor apparatus of all kinds. Bogdanov insists that no “reality” limits social labor in advance, as limits are discovered in practice. Here he is expunging residues of the Gods, even from within materialism. A really consistent “materialism” cannot claim to speak of the nature of the world in advance of practices in and against it. Bogdanov: “the practical organization of labor effort precedes the mental organization of the elements of experience and produces it.”⁶⁸

As we shall see later, an example is the evolution of climate science. It has three elements: predicting the weather, modeling the climate, and the physics of how both weather and climate work. It took many decades to bring all three together. Gathering timely weather data from disparate locations and altitudes requires a huge, global apparatus. Crunching that data with an accurate model of the physics takes a vast amount of computational power. Data, communication, and computational resistances impeded the study of climate until the late twentieth century. At the base of our contemporary knowledge of climate, and climate change, is an evolution from discrete fields and technologies to a global climate knowledge infrastructure, requiring coordinated global labors, or in Bogdanov’s terms, a kind of tektology.⁶⁹

While our worldview is always partial and limited, bound by the labor practices of our time, some perspectives are better than others. Some correspond to more advanced, in the sense of more general, forms of labor activity. In Bogdanov’s time, it appeared as if the industrial working class was the avant-garde of organizational practice. In our own time, Kim Stanley Robinson suggests that the scientific, technical and creative work of hackers occupies such a position. The Bogdanovite challenge is to think from the point of view of the most advanced, general and complex forms of social activity.

So too the conceptual product of any particular encounter with resistant nature belongs to all, and can inform the invention of yet more kinds of organization through an experimental practice of substitution. Substitution is part of an experimental process for finding out which discoveries and inventions of labor can be generalized. The concept of fluid dynamics, which proved so useful for engineering A-bombs, is also at work in climate science, not to mention other fields of application. Bogdanov: “Substitution in general strives to replace lesser contents with greater, permitting more combinations in consciousness such that the material for processing will be richer, and, at the same time, to replace complexes more simple and strictly organized with less structured, less organized complexes such that the resistance to the processing activity will be less.”⁷⁰

Labor causality and substitution are two versions of the same proposition. No substitution is forbidden in advance. Each production of a causal series by labor points to other possible causal series. Bogdanov, who was not a particularly poetic writer, nevertheless advocates a poetics of knowledge formation. This will become his tektology, which is at heart a poetics of the experimental substitution of one relation for another which in turn has to be tested in practice. Not all substitutions will work. For instance, there is a limit to how much metabolism will explain about agricultural chemistry or the totality of collective labor.

Empirio-monism is a worldview that frees our species-being from external a priori forms. Philosophy codifies present reality and no other. It metaphorically substitutes a class interest and experience toward the world.⁷¹ Philosophy is scientific when based on collective experience. From the labor point of view, philosophy is not of especial interest as a high theory, a specialized domain which produces knowledge of the world through the systematic production of relations within language. Rather, it can become a low theory, whose task is to extract from particular labor processes those diagrams of form and relation that might have experimental application elsewhere.

Or rather, this low theory is what replaces philosophy now that its Gods—authoritarian and abstract causality—are passing from the objective reality of the world as labor makes and remakes it. Philosophy is not the form of knowledge with which we need ultimately be concerned. It’s a step toward something else. Bogdanov: “No effort of thought can gather and organize the parts of a shattered body into a living whole. Philosophy cannot work miracles.”⁷² The detour of critical theory through philosophy can come to an end, not because the problems of philosophy have been “solved,” but because in the Anthropocene labor and science have other problems. Not the least of which is the challenge of the Carbon Liberation Front.

The form of knowledge that the present requires is determined by forms of social labor and the kinds of resistance it encounters. Automation requires knowledge beyond immediate experience. Bogdanov thought that as automation advanced, all workers would become more like engineers, and also more like artists—like the Martians in Red Star. In the Bogdanovian future, workers cease to be workers, organizers of their particular labor alone, but become co-creators of the whole of social organization. The science and poetics of organization become the tools for changing the world, superseding philosophy.

Bogdanov did not anticipate deskilling, or the counter-attack via which capital used technology to prevent the accumulation of knowledge by workers in the workplace.⁷³ He did not anticipate that the ruling class would so effectively co-opt the surpluses of time and information, let alone of life. Bogdanov’s thought appears limited to his time in at least three respects.

First, it is limited by the furthest advances of industrial labor of the science of the time. Second, Bogdanov expunged authoritarian relations within proletarian knowledge and labor practice, but not between labor and nature. Third, tektology clearly implies the dissolution of philosophy as the system-building of the master thinker into a low theory that is collectively and collaboratively produced, and yet Bogdanov cannot quite stop himself from engaging in a system-building that overshoots the limits of his own core principles. Still, he makes a great case for empirio-monism as the last necessary philosophy, and tektology as the beginning of something else.

For labor to becoming self-organizing is for labor to acquire not just a knowledge of technical labor but also to take over the functions of organizational labor from the bourgeoisie. Labor has to acquire its own practices of coordination on larger and larger scales. The Russian revolutions of 1917 directly posed the problem of just how much of the social formation organized labor could claim to manage, and how. Before a tektology of organizing the material world can apply, a proletkult has to emerge within which workers acquire for themselves the confidence to organize the world.

In the era of the Carbon Liberation Front, tektology prefigures a pressing need to coordinate the social labor of confronting metabolic rift. Proletkult prefigures the no less pressing need to elaborate a new folk knowledge of cooperative labor’s abilities, limits, and challenges.

RED HAMLET: FROM SHAKESPEARE TO MARX

Something is rotten in the October Revolution. Bogdanov was not alone in this suspicion. It was shared by many of the Russian and European left.⁷⁴ Bogdanov worked both in and against the new Soviet state. His critique of the course of events was uncannily accurate, even though his actions were, in the end, futile. His biographer calls him Red Hamlet, and like Hamlet, he had to glide through the superstructures of a new world with rotten roots, speaking in riddles, while the old mole labored away below, undermining it.⁷⁵

One of Bogdanov’s more engaging bits of journalism is actually about Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which he illustrates how the proletariat can usefully read the classics of the past to help it act within its present condition.⁷⁶ It is still a good statement of the Bogdanovite practice of détournement. It has the added charm of functioning as an allegory of Bogdanov’s own fate in the Soviet Union. How intentionally he meant it to be read as such we may never know. It remains an allegory for our times, too.

Hamlet is a soul torn between love and struggle. Bogdanov: “What should be done to restore harmony to the soul rent asunder by the sharp conflict between its deepest and sublimest need, and the imperious demand dictated by the hostility of his environment?” The proletariat too has this problem: it wants harmony and unity, but has to struggle with the rift between exchange value and use value. “Little joys have been given it, and great is the thirst for them; but even that little is constantly threatened with destruction or deformation by the inevitable elements of social hatred and anarchy.”

By contrast, Hamlet’s life has been a good one. Study abroad made him a cultured man, and he has the love of Ophelia.⁷⁷ But upon returning to his native land, horror grips him. He finds his family destroyed, his country shattered, a traitor on the throne, the good old customs breached, not honored. Even his mother is in the camp of the enemy. Something must be done, but what? Is he able to accomplish it? He has to be not just an aesthete, but an activist.

Hamlet must resort to tactics hostile to his nature. Bogdanov: “Here is the essence of the tragedy. The struggle demands from Hamlet a resort to cunning, deception, violence and cruelty; but these are repulsive to his mild and refined soul. And more, he has to direct them against his nearest and dearest.” This, he cannot do, at least not directly:

On several key points, he called it: The struggle against capitalism is not the same as the struggle for socialism. The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 was premature. Revolutions can be regressive as well as progressive, leading to less rather than more complex organization. The Bolshevik’s coercive policy of war communism was no different to the expediencies of other wartime states and was not a step toward socialism. War communism turned the worker’s party into a soldier’s party. Labor should neither be militarized (Trotsky) nor Taylorized (Lenin). While the peasants had to be appeased, the long-term alliance should be between workers and technical personnel. It is not enough to learn from advanced capitalist culture; socialist forms have to be invented within and against it.⁷⁸

Bogdanov recasts Hamlet’s role for a different time in not only creating a counter-spectacle, but in mapping out a pedagogy for how proletarian culture could become self-determining. The task of proletarian culture is the détournement of the past rather than the rejection or admiration of it. The overcoming of bourgeois modes of organization requires a broader grasp of organizational forms. The proletariat had to learn for itself the history of organizational design. This provides the key protocol for how to read the culture of the past.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet can be usefully read as a work from the last days of the feudal world. It has a double form: the molar form presents a struggle between an illicit hierarchy and a legitimate one, against the backdrop of military maneuverings. On the molar level, the king is to his minions “a massy wheel, fix’d on the summit of the highest mount, to whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things are mortised and adjoin’d.” The molecular form is Hamlet’s perception of a quite different organization of matter: “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.” Hamlet’s madness is in seeing through the huggermugger of courtly mischief to this other scale of organization which knows no ideal hierarchies.

Even the feudal aspect of Hamlet does not destroy its legacy for the proletariat. What can be extracted from a Bogdanovite reading of its worldview is something like what Raymond Williams calls a structure of feeling of a feudal mode of organization.⁷⁹ This is what it feels like to organize the world through authoritarian relations that present themselves as divinely inspired. The play’s merit is more than “to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.” Or, to show the vanity of that authority that would “go to gain a little patch of ground that hath in it no profit but the name.” It might teach as well that no matter what the form of state, “the readiness is all.”

Marx is not a philosopher or an economist or a sociologist and still less a theologian. He détourns from all of the above, ignoring property and propriety and paternity in the process.⁸⁰ He begins a new practice of knowledge from a novel point of view. Bogdanov continues in that vein. He is not faithful to Marxist writ, but détourns Marx and the modern life sciences from the labor point of view, with the same disregard for property and propriety and paternity.

If the proletariat wants different modes of organization to bourgeois ones, then there is a lot to learn from forms of organization that were as different to the bourgeois modes as the proletarian ones aspire to become. “And who else, if not the great and skillful artist, can lead one into the very depths of an alien organization of life and thought?”⁸¹ Bogdanov was perhaps not skilled enough an artist to describe Martian organization, but he was a good enough organizer to create the space where it might come into being of its own accord—the Proletkult movement.

FROM MARX TO PROLETKULT

After the October Revolution, Proletkult had an uneasy relationship with the Commissariat of Enlightenment, headed by Anatole Lunacharsky, Bogdanov’s old friend and former comrade of the Capri school days.⁸² The Commissariat took over the cultural and educational activities of the old Tsarist state. Proletkult, on the other hand, was interested in a specially proletarian culture. While Lunacharsky was not unsympathetic to Proletkult, his support or tolerance could only be partial. The biggest problem of his ministry—and its biggest success—was in raising levels of literacy. He lent support to a variety of factions and groups on the cultural left, of which Proletkult was only one.

Among the Bolshevik leadership, only Bukharin was at all supportive. Lenin most notably was not. Since Proletkult received its budget from the Commissariat of Enlightenment, and hence from the Bolshevik-controlled state, its desire for an autonomous proletarian culture was always compromised. Still, for a time it aroused considerable enthusiasm, and not least among class-conscious workers themselves. Bogdanov nearly got his version of the counter-spectacle to happen within and against the Bolshevik one.

For Bogdanov, scientists, artists, and philosophers are “organizers of experience” and the proletarian revolution should in turn organize their labors in a certain way.⁸³ If culture grows out of particular experiences within the relations of production and exchange, then the proletariat could not simply adopt or adapt bourgeois culture. Proletarian culture needed developing, not just as new content within the old forms, but as a new form of culture altogether. Most centrally, proletarian culture had to develop organically out of the experience of collaborative labor. The ethos of bourgeois individualism had grown out of competitive market relations; the ethos of proletarian collaboration would grow out of the sophisticated self-organization of labor in the most advanced industries.

Creativity—to overturn the fetish of the individual creator; to reveal the role of the unconscious in creation. The newspaper was the model of a collective creativity. One might note that all significant Marxists were also great journalists, and often editors and publishers as well, starting with Marx himself.⁸⁴

Collectivity—to work in groups and express the sensations of group life. Bogdanov did not however want to submerge singularities. His is rather the community those who have nothing in common.⁸⁵ His Martians, for example, were far from indistinguishable numbers, and their cooperation is imperfect.

Universalism—to break down the division of labor. This raised the problem of professionalism: should Proletkult have professional artists? When the going gets weird, as it did in the civil war, even as weird a writer as Andrey Platonov could turn pro, although in the end his professional success was meager. Professional specialization remained a conceptual problem for the whole life of the movement.

Proletarian culture is not an end in itself, and in this regard Proletkult is different to most flavors of workerism. It can tend to a certain fetishism of its limited perspective, rather than trying to expand out toward the most general account of the experience of the world. The violent rejection of bourgeois culture is no better than naive atheism. It is not able to put up anything as an alternative. The proletariat needs a point of view through which to assimilate the past. Proletarian détournement is not then a matter of picking out the bits that seem “revolutionary.” The proletariat should be self-developing rather than self-mythologizing.⁸⁶

Bogdanov anticipates those who, like Henri Lefebvre, move the focus of proletarian self-determination from the space of the factory alone to the space of everyday life in the city as a whole.⁸⁷ The city provides the situations for the development of the labor point of view. It is in the city that the worker can discover that in the struggle against the elements for existence the individual is a node in a web. On their own, workers are powerless playthings of external forces.

The city extends the time and complexity of cooperative action, but it has its limits: “while the masses are gathered in the cities, they become removed from nature. The latter reveals itself to the proletariat only as a force in production, not as a source of live impressions.”⁸⁸ The proletariat has to learn a more systematic way to organize its experiences.

Bogdanov co-authored a textbook of political economy that came out in 1919, and appears as his major contribution to pedagogy during the revolution.⁸⁹ It must have seemed somewhat counterintuitive to Bolsheviks at the time, in its stress on the revolutionary force of capitalism and its role in the development of the forces of production. The discussion centered on the development of an organic social system. As the pioneering Bogdanov scholar Ilmari Susiluoto puts it: “He had set his sights centuries ahead. He could not, therefore, provide exact advice on how a new society should be built. The ideal should be implemented through a prolonged period of learning, in the process of which the collective experience would raise the awareness of the people to a new level.”⁹⁰

Bogdanov thought a major area of proletarian learning had to be around new energy systems. Fossil fuels were limited and non-renewable. Tides and winds had to be harnessed as energy sources, as well as the “internal energy of the atom.” The power of the atom would also be a stimulus to more cooperative forms of government.

That cooperative form of government was more a form of what he elsewhere called the biregulator, where two systems regulate each other. In this case the two systems are labor and nature, and their relationship one of statistical automation. Bogdanov:

Since all goal oriented human activity is organizational in character, the organization of natural elements for the benefit of society is a technical process; the organization of experiences is a process of consciousness; the organization of human forces in society is an economic process. All of these join together in principle to form a single organization of socio-productive energy.⁹¹

The deficit of organizational intelligence made the formation of a proletarian culture, of a new type, a pressing agenda. The prevailing position in the Bolshevik Party was that the political revolution abolished the class basis of culture and made all of the cultural inheritance of the past common property.⁹² Bogdanov insisted that culture wasn’t just “content” that could be poured into a new form. Culture was itself a series of forms which had a definite class character. The proletariat had to struggle for its own form of culture, which Bogdanov saw as an extension of the commons of collaborative and experimental practice embodied in industrial labor at its most sophisticated.

Proletarian culture had to be more than bourgeois novels and symphonies mass produced for a mass audience by a “socialist” culture industry. It also had to be more than an extension of the Bolshevik propaganda of the revolutionary period, bringing consciousness from without. Proletarian culture should rather grow out of the laboratory that is labor, and the labor that is the laboratory.

This was also different to the avant-garde modernism that flourished in the early days of the Soviet Union, which confined innovation to questions of literary or plastic form. Bogdanov wanted to revolutionize the relations of production of culture, not just literary form or affective content.⁹³ Proletkult did not mean this or that modernist style of poem or painting. It meant the collaborative production of art, culture, even science, by and for the proletariat itself.

Proletkult was popular in the civil war period, although this may have been in part because the spaces Proletkult commandeered had food and heat.⁹⁴ It rapidly became a mass movement, and together with the trade unions, it provided some semblance of balance to the power of the Bolshevik Party within the state. When the civil war turned in the Bolshevik’s favor, and the party had less need of equivocal allies, the power of both the unions and Proletkult were seriously curtailed—although that of the Cheka, or secret police—not so much.⁹⁵

Like the French Revolution before it, the Russian Revolution called for an enlightenment, and like that earlier one, it was to be about not just particular ideas but new modes of practicing knowledge. Bogdanov thought a specifically proletarian encyclopedia a worthy project, to redact the sum of existing knowledge with a new kind of reader in mind.

Proletkult artists and writers are not as well remembered as other currents from the heady early years of the Soviet Union.⁹⁶ Much of what Proletkult achieved is still buried in the archives, waiting for the moment when a collective and common culture can recognize its own precursor. In the meantime, there is at least one writer who emerged out of Proletkult whose work is undeniably great in that recognizably bourgeois form—the genius. The work of Andrey Platonov does not mark the achievement of a new organization of perception and communication (although as we shall see, he proposed one). But he does at least open the door to a new practice of it by his particular example. Platonov is what could be made out of the ruins of what Bogdanov proposed for Proletkult.

While Bogdanov was not to get his own university, his plan for how to organize it, and how it might train the proletariat for the work of this world, remains. And it is still a striking model of how to organize labor and knowledge for interesting times—such as our own. Bogdanov’s most extraordinary achievement, however, was his tektology. It is a way of organizing knowledge for difficult times, such as the times of total war, revolution and civil war that Bogdanov experienced, and perhaps also for the strange times likely to come in the twenty-first century, courtesy of the Carbon Liberation Front.

FROM DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM TO TEKTOLOGY

Bogdanov belongs to that generation whose thought responds to the shock of the Great War, when “the command of the most insignificant individual … directed millions of people into an unprecedented hell of iron and dynamite …”⁹⁷ He served as an army doctor during the war. A distressing time, and not least because his training was mostly in psychiatry, not in cauterizing the bloody stumps of severed limbs. Experience taught Bogdanov what a crude form of organization the military was in his day.

Bogdanov: “The world war turned out to be the greatest school of organization.”⁹⁸ He had written his Empirio-monism volumes before and after the 1905 revolution. His second great series of inquiries, the Tektology, began in 1913 but received a great impetus from the war and the 1917 revolutions.⁹⁹ And just as he had summed up his earlier inquiries in Philosophy of Lived Experience (1913) so too his inquiries in tektology resulted in the synthesis of Essays in Tektology (1921). The former is a philosophical program for the revolution to come; the latter is an organizational program for a revolution that has come to pass.

Bogdanov thought that the stalemate produced by the February 1917 revolution bespoke a social formation with only a rudimentary organizational capacity. Even on the left, the differences among the rival forces created a deadlock that could only be resolved by force. Thus the Tektology is a program for a higher level of organization. If such abilities were not to be found within the Bolshevik state, then Bogdanov could at least formulate a program for higher education that might one day achieve it. He was not without success, for “Bogdanovites” populated key economic and technical bureaux until the time of Stalin.¹⁰⁰

The word organ, from the Greek via the Latin organum, can mean a tool, but also a part of the body. The seed of Bogdanov’s thought is contained within the metaphorical leap of this primary term. A tool is an external organ of a body; an organ is an internal tool of a body.¹⁰¹ And as to what then defines a body, when its organs can be outside and tools can be inside—that then gets rather interesting. “If several workers work at one machine, then as far as their system of collaboration is concerned, their relation to this machine, which binds them together, is an internal connection of the system, although this is a relation to a spatially external object.”¹⁰² What is inside and outside a system can be different to what is inside and outside an object or body. As we shall see, troubling kinds of fetishism can arise out of perceiving the body and not what organizes behind its appearance.

Bogdanov conceived of organization very broadly, even if part of the impetus was his particular experiences of it: “splits in organizations which occur in the political and cultural life of our epoch, which is full of contradictions, would probably be less frequent, if the leaders always clearly understood that in a partial and temporary separation is inevitably concealed a tendency toward a deeper and irreversible one.”¹⁰³ It’s an observation which could apply to the split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, or the further splitting of the Bolsheviks between Lenin and Bogdanov, both of which proved irreconcilable divergences.

In the cultural and scientific domains, Bogdanov wanted to equip the proletariat with the courage and the skill to understand the given world and realize its capacity to transform both that world and itself. Even before the October Revolution of 1917, he saw power not just as a matter of insurrection and seizing or smashing the state. His abiding interest was in the “fate of forms,” their emergence, persistence, and dissolution. Bogdanov was a writer in and against his times.¹⁰⁴ He was not in favor of Lenin’s seizure of power in October. He viewed with alarm the militarization of the party and state during the civil war.¹⁰⁵

This stems from the different relation Bogdanov and Lenin had with the proletariat. If, as Gorky put it, the worker was to Lenin what iron ore was to the ironworker, Bogdanov was fascinated by the flux of collective affect:

their strength now crystallizes into an unexpectedly mighty, triumphant transport, now spreads and dissipates into an elemental apathy; at times the success of the boldest plans is achieved with astounding ease, at others it is gained only through the most stubborn and intense efforts. Because of the changeability and instability of the environment, our politician develops a point of view and methods which include shades of utopianism and adventurism.¹⁰⁶

This might be partly self-criticism, but may also be directed at Lenin, who took the shift of the masses toward the Bolshevik position in late 1917 to be an historical alignment rather than a situational convergence.

Bogdanov’s was quite a different way of thinking to Lenin’s partisan splits and political leaps: “The working class carries out the organization of things in its labor, and the organization of its human forces in its social struggle. It must connect the experience of both fields into a special ideology; namely, the organization of ideas. Thus, life itself makes the proletariat an organizer of a universal type, and the organizational point of view is a natural and even necessary tendency for it.”¹⁰⁷ The only difference between political and economic organization is that the latter is usually more predictable.

The Essays in Tektology are the intellectual component of Bogdanov’s quiet struggle within the revolution over its fate, and as such are a discourse on forms. Tektology, he said, is “consciously practical.”¹⁰⁸ Bogdanov:

Assume that in this case some sensitive and experienced political figure has captured the essence of the situation by the analogies which he knows personally from life or history. But he is able to transmit to others neither his knowledge as a whole nor his practical sensitivity, and, therefore, his conclusions are not convincing to others. And, perhaps, the most vital elements would continue to expend their energies in the wrong direction, against the turning point of the wheel of history. Only a scientific organization of experience permits a real proof of such conclusions.¹⁰⁹

Bogdanov’s aim was not a “scientific socialism,” but a socialism of science. Based not only on his own experience but on extensive reading in the general scientific literature available at the time, Essays in Tektology is essentially a pedagogy in how forms emerge, evolve, interact, and decay. Bogdanov treats form as a category entirely independent of scale: “Is it really possible that the same laws can be applied to combinations of cosmic worlds and biological cells, living people and etheric waves, scientific ideas and energy atoms?”¹¹⁰ He sees exactly this metaphorical work of substitution as an organizing act in itself. It is a prototype of the organizational view of the universe. Tektology first proposes a metaphorical jump from one scale or form of organization to another.

Metaphor is the tektology of the everyday, a movement in language that recognizes the connection and relation of all things, but it has to be subject to verifiable experiment. While more positive about metaphor than Mach, Bogdanov is aware of the possibility that the substitution of ideas from one scale of organization to another that abounds in tektology might be no more than metaphorical.¹¹¹ Old habits of thought can lead to false analogies. A bee hive is not presided over by a “queen,” for instance. Nevertheless, language arises out of communal labor, and reason arises out of language. Language is where reason works.¹¹² So one of the methods of tektology is to trace metaphor back to the process of its production.

Tektology can also speculatively draw organizational principles out of the particular sciences. “The methods of all sciences are for tektology only modes of the organization of material supplied by experience.”¹¹³ Tektology is not a philosophy but a method of organization. It is a very different idea to that of setting up some version of “dialectical materialism” as the universal guarantor of particular knowledge practices. Nevertheless, tektology does have some basic operating assumptions, crystallized out of scientific, political, and everyday life experiences—not least of its founder.

Nature is the first organizer, and the human is just one of its organizational products. Everything is organized in some manner and in some degree. “Complete disorganization is a concept without meaning. It is, in reality, the same as naked non-being.” Once we break through the “membranes of fetishism,” we discover that “mankind has no other activity except organizational activity, there being no other problems except organizational problems.”¹¹⁴ And indeed, there is no more useful way of thinking the human than as a self-organizing population.

When the whole is more than its parts, there is organization; when there is less, there is disorganization. Bogdanov’s concept of organization excludes the positing in advance of a purpose, which he defines as a fetishism. Organization is as organization does. There are no goals or gods. Tektology “is just as alien to morals as it is to mathematics.”¹¹⁵ Mathematics is not ontology; tektology is not theology. Rather, it struggles against the residues of Platonism old and new, ontological and theological.

Tektology diagrams organizational forms and situations, but there are only particular organizations. There’s no prior unity or ultimate synthesis, no permanent harmony that they subtend or intend. Not even the revolution can forge a unity of the disparate natural and social forms as if by fiat. Even Red Mars has an imperfect way of organizing labor and nature, which can’t prevent the exhaustion of fossil fuels or the attendant effects of the Carbon Liberation Front. For Bogdanov, a political revolution is not the solution to anything. It merely enables the problem of organization to be posed. There can be no victory over the sun.¹¹⁶

Marx showed how private property and the wage relation turn particular and concrete labors into abstract labor.¹¹⁷ Concrete labors interact with nature and each other in particular ways, but are subsumed into the same commodity form. The commodity form is not the only form with which to organize the concrete via the abstract. There is another way that concrete labors are connected, and it is via the transfer of techniques. Steam power, for example, arose in one branch of industry (mining) and was transferred to others. Just as there is technology transfer, there is also tektology transfer. Forms of organization can migrate from site to site. Tektology is among other things a pedagogy for this other practice of synthesis, outside of the wage relation and the commodity form. Tektology’s movement is “towards a monism of organizational experience.”¹¹⁸

Tektology “was excluded from the minds of the old classes by the divisibility of their existence and the separateness and one-sidedness of their experience.”¹¹⁹ Once the bourgeoisie is surpassed, and with them the fetish of market competition within relations of exchange as the sole recognized organizational principle, tektology can begin in earnest. The bourgeois thinks in terms of the profit on an investment in competition with others; the worker thinks about the enjambment of his or her labor with those in the adjacent lines of the labor process. This for Bogdanov is the basis in everyday life for the organizational outlook. All that comes from without is the pedagogy for realizing what the worker already knows.

There is a pessimism in Bogdanov that is sometimes lacking in his Proletkult followers. Full organization is not possible, and “there is no absolutely harmonious combination.”¹²⁰ While organizational forms can be improved with conscious study and practice, they are not perfectible. Red Mars has in the end to face up to extinction (and does so in high-phallic style by sending the “seeds” of its culture off on rockets into space). There’s a note that pervades Bogdanov’s writing where he appears as a detached observer of his own fallibility: “Sometimes it is possible in the same system to observe factually all the transitional steps from the higher organization to the deepest disorganization; as happens, for example, with the gradually unfolding quarrel between close collaborators or between spouses.”¹²¹

“The basic significance of tektology lies in the most general statement of questions.” It refuses the unstated demand of the Leninist revival in the West of the twenty-first century, which repeats Mao’s slogan “put politics in command” but means by it “put philosophy in command,” and takes philosophy to be the language of an ideal state, if not to come, then at least legible in utopian moments such as that of 1917. “Tektology rejects as fruitless scholasticism the … philosophical theory of cognition which aims to investigate conditions and modes of cognition not as vital, organizational processes among other processes, but abstractly, as a process which differs essentially from practice.”¹²² A materialist philosophy is a contradiction in terms, for as philosophy its materialism remains contemplative. Tektology, as a monist approach to knowledge, organizes it. Materialist philosophy is new wine in old bottles; tektology seizes the bottle factory and makes it a cooperative.

Ideologies are not so much “false consciousness” as the “true” limited consciousness of particular modes of organization. For example, dualist beliefs, which separate spirit and matter, are org-charts to authoritarian power, which separates the leader from the led.¹²³ Or, to give another example: the doctrine of marginal utility, based on the subjective evaluations of atomized units, diagrams the possessive individualism of the market economy and private property. And while he was hardly explicit on the topic, one might imagine that Bogdanov perceived the Bolshevik faith in sacrifice in the name of history as an accurate ideological map to an authoritarian state embarking on a period of primitive accumulation in the context of a hostile peasantry, an exhausted working class and surrounded by imperialist enemies.

Viewed via tektology, the labor theory of value is not true where marginal utility is false, it is rather a form which anticipates a different kind of organization. All those categories that economists—even progressive ones—find superfluous, such as surplus value, use value, and labor power, point to the intractable externality within and against which any economic organization tries to contend.¹²⁴

Call it “nature,” but it is a nature that can only be known through particular organizational forms and processes. “For tektology the unity of experience is not ‘discovered’ but actively created by organizational means.”¹²⁵ An ideology is a mode of substitution specific to a mode of production. Bogdanov finds the roots of this organizational approach to ideology in Marx, “but Marx did not posit the question in a general form.”¹²⁶

Marx at least puts three related things on the agenda: the problem of the organization of collective labor, the problem of social needs, and the problem of nature’s intractability. Marx’s thought is relentlessly metonymic, showing how parts emerge out of wholes and are made back into parts of a transformed whole. His thought is horizontal and historical. Bogdanov’s thought is relentlessly vertical and metaphorical, jumping from one whole to another, showing how one whole differs from another.¹²⁷

The result is strange and beautiful sentences, worthy of Platonov, such as: “Conjunction is the assimilation of nourishment which sustains an organism and of poison which destroys it, soft embraces of lovers and mad embraces of enemies, congress of workers in the same trade and a close fight of antagonistic detachments.”¹²⁸ In so many respects a “bad Marxist,” Bogdanov has the singular merit of opening up a whole dimension that is present in a subordinate way in Marx’s thought. His is a non-standard Marxism in that it addresses a set of phenomena that includes what Marxism is traditionally thought to cover within a larger domain, but not in the form of a dialectical materialist philosophy.

Marx: “Capitalist production … only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original source of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”¹²⁹ Bogdanov might add two things to this. First, the undermining of the wealth of the soil is obscured for a time by the undermining of the worker. The depletion of the soil—the Phosphorous Liberation Front—emerges only belatedly as a problem for capitalist organization. The solution came firstly by way of “guano imperialism,” and then through the development of the chemical industry.¹³⁰ The molecular elements stripped from the soil are replenished from elsewhere, at least for a time, and yet the metabolic rift continues.

Second, Bogdanov’s concept of these undermining forces operates in a more abstract way. An organization is only as durable as its weakest component. That which disorganizes it could even be molecular. “People … are capable of the collective creation of fortresses which can withstand any living enemies but they are not yet able to guard themselves against geological and, even less so, against cosmic crises. We must, therefore, study the question within the limits of its relative solution.”¹³¹ If social organization is weakened by the Phosphorous Liberation Front at one moment, it may be the Carbon Liberation Front, or the Nitrogen Liberation Front, at another. The point is not this or that constraint, but that organization has to be thought more generally in terms of such constraints. Marx:

Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces the conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of the social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.¹³²

In the Russia of Bogdanov’s time, shifting the population from agriculture to industry seemed an intractable problem. In the twenty-first century, when the global urban population may now outnumber the rural for the first time, talk of “large towns” rather than a planet of slums seems quaint.¹³³

Still, in his own way, Bogdanov grasped the problem of the metabolic rift between economy as organization and nature as environment, as his fable of the Martians makes evident. Tektology was meant to be a design practice for organizing organization, conceived under very real conditions of scarcity and disorganization, but under no illusions that a rosy and harmonious future lay ahead. The Anthropocene makes Bogdanov our contemporary, and the tektology worth a closer look.

TEKTOLOGY AS METAPHORIC MACHINE

At the core of tektology is a handful of concepts: environment, conjunction, linkage, ingression, disingression, boundary, crisis, selection, equilibrium, egression and degression. There is always an environment: Bogdanov brackets it off at first to simplify the exposition, in which the primary term is conjunction. Before systems can interact, merge or destroy each other, or in short for there to be any kind of tektology, there is first their conjunction. Systems mesh at the margin. Nothing is entirely discrete. This is the basic principle of Bogdanov’s monism.

The breaching of a boundary starts a conjunction: “revolution is … a breach in the social boundaries between various classes … ; the boiling of water, a breach of the physical boundary between the liquid and its atmosphere; the propagation of a living cell, the creation of a vital boundary between its parts which acquire independence; death a breach in the living bond of an organism …”¹³⁴ Cooking is a conjunction of fire and water, labor is a conjunction of “the tender cells of the brain” with aggregates of steel. It is even “possible to coordinate the efforts of two workers who happen to be at the two opposite sides of the earth” by means of a “sufficient number of telegraphic stations.”¹³⁵

Linkage is the forging of connections between the elements of different systems, in the zone where they overlap. Ingression is the formation of a new system out of that linkage. Disingression is the decline of the conjugated system, a situation where these systems “mutually paralyze each other.”¹³⁶ An equilibrium is the stabilizing of a boundary between the two disingressive systems, such as the front line between two armies (and it is entirely characteristic of Bogdanov to think of two contending armies as one system). A crisis appears where the linkage of systems produces a disequilibrium.

Bogdanov wants to broaden the meaning of the term selection both toward events in the non-living world and events in human culture.¹³⁷ All of these are domains for “natural selection,” although not of the same kind. There is selection when the climate changes, as some species perish and others thrive. There is selection when a town catches fire, as the stone buildings survive and the wooden ones burn. There is selection in the way the awn on an ear of barley enables it to not only stick to but work its way up the sleeve of a peasant walking across a field.

Conservative selection governs the preservation or destruction of an organization in relation to an environment, where that environment is unchanging. Environment here means the “totality of the external influences under which a system finds itself, but taken exactly in relation to it.”¹³⁸ Where the organization survives, it is in equilibrium with its environment. But there are few, if any, unchanging environments, so the concept is a stepping-stone to the idea of progressive selection and of dynamic equilibrium, or the preservation of forms in changing environments.

Progressive selection is a change in the number of elements in a system that maintains a dynamic equilibrium with a changing environment. For instance, a drop of dew on a leaf is exchanging molecules of water with the atmosphere. Under certain conditions of temperature, pressure, and humidity, the molecules lost from the drop and those adhering to it are the same. If this was maintained, then it would be a situation of conservative selection. But all of these variables can change, and with them the exchange of molecules between the drop and the atmosphere. Progressive selection prevails, and from the point of view of the droplet, its effect can be positive or negative. It can either add or lose elements from its system. Moreover, the effect is not merely quantitative. If the droplet is diminishing, its form becomes more and more ovoid; if it is growing, it becomes less ovoid and flattens. If it grows some more, then the conjunction of water vapor within the liquid droplet, linking the new molecules with the existing form, may result in a disingression, where a boundary forms and the droplet splits in two.

Bogdanov anticipates those like Franco Moretti who find evidence for a process of selection working also in cultural forms. A culture retains those ideas “which correspond to the permanent and common conditions of its life.”¹³⁹ The domain of culture operates according to parallel processes of selection as other domains, although it has its own specific forms of tektological movement. “Cognition operates with complexes which are much more plastic; and its field, which has as its base the same field of physical labor, expands much faster and easier. Therefore it develops its chain of ingressions correspondingly faster and easier … cognition has long ago arrived at the idea of a continuous connection of all that exists, at the idea of a ‘universal ingression.’”¹⁴⁰ Culture opens toward the totality. But it does so in a rather open-ended way.

Tektology as organized labor experiments with the poetic substitutions of universal ingression, to propose social and technical forms, from among which history will select. This was the program intended for the Proletkult labs, and it might not be a bad one for twenty-first-century design practice either. It begins with a kind of détournement of existing forms, then experiments with their application in other domains, before testing out prototypes in situations where users select the most useful and discard the least useful.¹⁴¹

What is selected for in the life of organizing ideas is what in the past has enabled collective being to survive. Nothing guarantees that such ideas have eternal survival value, and in any case selection works negatively. Images, metaphors or concepts are preserved “which correspond to the permanent and common conditions of its life, and those disintegrate and disappear which are in opposition to them; this is the selection of social complexes.”¹⁴² Even the permanent and common conditions of life can change, however. The question remains of how ideas that in the past were selected out might be tried again under changed conditions.

The main question for Bogdanov is: how to build a program of knowledge oriented not only to survival but to growth in organizational capacities in relation to an environment. Particularly problematic here is that one can’t always know in advance where the environment is going to make itself felt. “The total stability of a system in relation to its environment is evidently a complex result of the partial stabilities of its various parts in relation to those influences which are directed against them.”¹⁴³

Education based on the assumption of conservative selection can specialize to meet what it knows to be the challenges of maintaining equilibrium in a given environment. But “conservatively formed organisms are stable only in a conservative environment.”¹⁴⁴ If the relation to the environment is one of progressive selection, it is much less easy to predict the points at which equilibrium might fail. “What can these hothouse plants put in opposition to the severe blows of actual reality?”¹⁴⁵ A different kind of knowledge is called for, one more flexible and adaptable, which can meet the challenge to survival at any point.

Bogdanov thought that the “replacement of conservative social structures by structures carrying the seeds of progressive development” calls for new kinds of knowledge:

when comparing two different political or cultural organizations existing within the frame of the same society, it is possible to conclude that one of them is structurally better adapted than another, i.e. more structurally stable. But if social conditions undergo an unusual change, such as a revolution, war or economic crisis, then the correlation will generally turn out to be different, sometimes quite the opposite.¹⁴⁶

And probably not knowable in advance, outside of historical praxis.

What is revealed in the moment of victory in 1917 is for Bogdanov quite the opposite of what Bolshevik optimism expected to find there. “Capitalism with its crises provides a mass of examples of hidden contradictions which accumulate under conditions of ‘prosperity.’”¹⁴⁷ Underneath the quantitative expansion of capital are underlying vulnerabilities. It’s a system built on the assumption of conservative selection, which has specialized to meet predicted challenges. It isn’t prepared for some rather less predictable ones that war and revolution might uncover.

In theory at least, the victorious proletariat of 1917 no longer confronts the bourgeoisie as a class, but confronts another boundary. The environment with which it has relations appears in a new form.

The entire environment of life on earth, the entire environment in which mankind acts and evolves, with its usual amplitude of fluctuations in the various conditions of its astronomical, atmospheric and other cycles, may be considered as limitedly-changeable; and this means exactly the environment in which changes are scientifically considered in advance, either in their totality or in broad summary conditions.¹⁴⁸

If the revolution really is the moment of proletarian victory, then those boundaries that are both biospheric and molecular at the same time could come into view—and at the time still appear to be limitedly changeable.

Science and labor together confront the problem of identifying and refashioning the weak points in the interaction of social and natural systems. What changes is that flexibility is needed not just for anticipating and healing internal ruptures within the social, but for ruptures between the social and its external conditions of existence, and not always at sites that are known in advance. This is the field of operation of tektology.

The Soviet Union of the civil war period found itself in an environment of progressive selection. Social relations came apart at the most unexpected places. Everything had to be learned again. One of the main challenges was famine. Bolshevik boot-strapping fell back to earth repeatedly on the inability to make much improvement on the struggle to extract agricultural surplus from the land, and indeed their policies repeatedly made a bad situation even worse, as Bogdanov had predicted. The reversal of policy in 1921, when “war communism” was abandoned in favor of the New Economic Policy, is a striking example of how quickly the struggle within and against nature can ramify through the whole social organization. Bogdanov: “the chain will break at its weakest link.”¹⁴⁹

In Red Star, Bogdanov anticipated the possibility that the weakest link would be not so much energy for organic systems but energy for inorganic ones. The Martians destroyed their forests to fuel their industries, and changed their climate. While Bogdanov does not foresee human-engineered climate change as the likely challenge to equilibrium in the Essays in Tektology, he certainly understands the dynamics of climate as a system and the kinds of disruptions it can cause: “Climate change occurs in a country: it becomes colder. Of the animals and plants inhabiting it, some are able to endure this change and survive; others perish. As a result, the organization of life on a given territory is regulated in accordance with new conditions.”¹⁵⁰

Animal and plant life are part of a system characterized by both divergence and complementarity. Divergence is a refinement of the Epicurean concept of the swerve and a primitive attempt at a concept of a chaotic system. Small variations in initial conditions can lead to divergent transformations of otherwise almost identical systems. Small variations in otherwise comparable states in the weather produce wildly diverging patterns with a short space of time. Or, over a much larger time scale, plants and animals are two of several forms of life that started to diverge from initially small variations on a common ancestor, starting some 3,500 million years ago.

Selection favors some forms over others, no matter what their origins, and in particular those which form relations of complementarity with each other. So it is with animal and vegetable life. These two forms of organism diverged a long time ago, but their relation is one of complementary difference. Plant metabolism requires carbon dioxide as an input and produces oxygen as an output; animal metabolism requires oxygen as an input and produces carbon dioxide as an output. Their fates are linked.

Bogdanov understands life as part of a self-regulating system, although not necessarily one that will always find equilibrium. The cyclical exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen:

forms a basis for complimentary correlations between life as a whole—the biosphere—and the gaseous cover of the earth—the atmosphere. The quantity of carbon dioxide is maintained at a definite, stable level. If, due to the development of animal life, forest fires and also a discharge of carbon dioxide in volcanic processes or from other sources, there is an overproduction of carbon dioxide, then the growth of plants immediately intensifies at its expense, and the surplus is absorbed.¹⁵¹

And vice versa. Remarkable for his time, Bogdanov has some understanding of the biosphere as a system. His struggle for a monist practice after philosophy has all been leading up to this threshold. The concept of the biosphere calls for a new worldview.

Philosophical monism and the cooperative point of view of labor point Bogdanov toward a symbiotic view of evolution, although in no sense does he see it as an intentional or teleological system.¹⁵² Rather, it is an argument from the principle of selection. Any system that endures is likely to be self-correcting within given parameters, as is the systematic interaction of the atmosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere of earth. “Thus the regulation of their quantity by conjunctive couplings between the three spheres is a basic condition for the maintenance of a stable, on average, level of their temperature.”¹⁵³ In the Essays, Bogdanov grasps the carbon cycle, but has now forgotten the possibility he canvassed in Red Star of the destabilizing effect of the Carbon Liberation Front.

The early Soviet Union is a microcosm in which a revolutionary society, no longer bound by the old laws of private property, nevertheless had to confront “the cognitive struggle with nature,” or rather struggle(s) with(in) nature, and under difficult conditions.¹⁵⁴ It is a microcosm for us in the twenty-first century, for the Carbon Liberation Front will bring with it a widening metabolic rift, destabilization, and reduced circumstances. As for what forms of social organization will emerge, that is anybody’s guess. Or perhaps not a guess. Perhaps tektology has a perspective on the fate of social forms in the Anthropocene.

This brings us to the concepts of egression and degression. Degressive systems are skeletal, often a matter of a waste product externalized, as with the skeletons of animals. It is not always hard like an animal skeleton. A squid’s ink is a degressive system. So too is the surface tension of water. Interestingly, so too is writing. Meaning exceeds the sign, but the signs “protect from decay the living plastic tissue of mental images.”¹⁵⁵

Egression is a system of sub-systems, one of which predominates. There’s a protocol of interaction, within which one sub-system influences the others more than the others influence it. One could call it leadership, which may or may not be permanent. If the environment remains constant, and all the sub-systems are in the same environment, and one sub-system is better organized than the others, then “egressive difference” can only increase. Power accrues to the leading sub-system. “During revolutionary epochs, the process of conversion of organizations with an embryonic egression, in the form of a hardly noticeable authoritarianism, into organizations of fully expressed egression, strict authoritarian discipline and ‘firm rule’, appears quite frequently and quite vividly.”¹⁵⁶

Environments aren’t constant, however, and equilibrium is usually dynamic. The environment can become more or less favorable, and in consequence selection can become positive or negative. In either case the better organized sub-system has the advantage. If the environment is favorable, it is enriched faster. Under negative selection it loses ground less quickly than the other sub-systems.

What comes together in tektology is molecular and biospheric thought. The war, revolution, and civil war ripped the veil away long enough for Bogdanov to see through to another way of organizing knowledge and practice. He was no enthusiast. He clearly saw the problems the Bolsheviks had set for themselves. He distanced himself from their authoritarian worldview, their new idealisms, their militarization of everyday life, and their instrumentalizing of labor. He was inclined as they were to champion labor’s struggle in and against nature, even though elsewhere in his work he had already developed the concept of the biosphere and the feedback loop between the molecular rifts labor opens up and the planet as system. The arrest of Bogdanov in 1923 led him to focus more narrowly on scientific work, putting an end to the evolution of his larger frame of thought.

BLOOD EXCHANGE

By the time the Essays on Tektology came out in 1921, Bogdanov’s position was a precarious one. Bukharin, under orders, attacked him in print. He was packed off on a trade mission to London by his friend Leonid Krasin to keep him out of harm’s way. While in London he caught up on the latest in blood transfusion theory and technology. This was a topic of longstanding interest to Bogdanov—his Martians practiced it. He set up a small and rather secret group to experiment with it upon his return from London. His arrest came in 1923, when he was accused of leading the opposition group Worker’s Truth. While his writings may have influenced such groups, he denied all involvement. The secret police interrogated him for two weeks in the basement of the Lubianka prison.

By 1924 Bogdanov was conducting experiments in which blood transfusions were simultaneous exchanges between two parties. The idea was that blood was a collective resource of the body, which could in turn be collectivized between bodies. The physiological basis of this was shaky. Nor did Bogdanov know modern scientific method. The lack of control conditions rendered his results meaningless. Yet it appears that he really did help Krasin recover from a case of anemia in 1925.

Krasin was not the only communist leader who suffered from anemia at the time. A veritable epidemic of exhaustion was passing though the Bolshevik leadership. Holding a monopoly on state power while sending not just your enemies but also your friends into exile or prison came at a cost. The leading circles of the party created their own private healthcare system, in part to deal with this endemic exhaustion. In 1926 Bogdanov got his own institute, whose mission was to develop blood transfusion techniques for sustaining the health of the party leaders. His institute was not approved in the usual way and stood outside the now very extensive scientific apparatus of the Soviet Union. More scientifically rigorous researchers in the field ignored it.¹⁵⁷

Bogdanov died in 1928 as a result of a blood exchange with a student who had an inactive form of tuberculosis. He received a state funeral. Bukharin delivered the eulogy, although the meaning of this was rather obscure.¹⁵⁸ Having Bukharin preside may not have meant that Bogdanov was accepted as part of the party, but rather that Bukharin was joining Bogdanov among those who were already excluded from it. By 1929 his institute had been named after him, but had at the same time become a properly scientific one, and part of the establishment of a modern blood transfusion regime. Stalin invested resources in transfusion as part of his mobilization and militarization of the whole of society.

Attempts are sometimes made to make Bogdanov a precursor to Stalin, but this is itself a smear campaign of the Stalinist type. It is true enough that when Stalin was consolidating his power he mobilized the rhetoric of the cultural revolution that sounded a bit like Proletkult. But this was a top-down power play, not Bogdanov’s self-organization of labor from below. In any case, Stalin quickly abandoned such rhetoric once it had served its purpose.¹⁵⁹

It is also true enough that Bogdanov thought that acquired characteristics could be passed on by an organism to its offspring. But this was a common error among Darwinists even in the early twentieth century. A proper synthesis of Darwinian selection with Mendel’s genetics had yet to be thought through (and would come, incidentally, from Marxist biologists in both the Soviet Union and Britain). Bogdanov is not to blame for the persecution by Stalin of Vavilov and other genetic scientists, and the elevation of the fraudulent but seemingly “dialectical materialist” work of Lysenko to scientific respectability.¹⁶⁰

The legacy of Bogdanov lived on not in philosophy or science so much as in engineering culture. Some of the leaders of Lenin’s electrification program were Bogdanovites. Platonov, as we shall see, went from Proletkult to hydro-engineering to an extraordinary synthesis of the literary and technical aspirations of the Proletkult movement. While not a major figure in his day in either technical or literary circles, Platonov now looms large as not only a great witness but also a great theoretician of his age.

That Bogdanov fell out with Lenin does not make him a Stalinist. On the other hand, it made him a non-person to the Western Marxists who thought that they were returning to an authentic Leninist thought prior to Stalinist falsifications. The revival of Marxist thought by the New Left, which consolidated the canon of Western Marxism as we now know it, also selected against Bogdanov. Its interests were largely in grafting political and cultural theories onto Marxist political economy, and it looked to Lenin, Trotsky, and to Marxist philosophers in the West for the resources for this.¹⁶¹ In the twenty-first century, when of all the liberation fronts it is the Carbon Liberation Front that is ascending, perhaps Bogdanov is the point to which to return.

Here our method can itself be a tektological one. For tektology, even superseded organizations may have their uses. “In this sense, tektology will preserve and save for mankind much of its labor, crystallized in the verities of the past. Undoubtedly, contemporary verities will also become obsolete and die in their time; but tektology guarantees that even they will not simply be discarded and will not be converted in the eyes of future generations into naked, fruitless illusions.”¹⁶² It’s hard not to see in this statement, poignant given the circumstances in which it was written, a Bogdanov who is appealing to future readers, appealing, dear reader, to you. The Essays in Tektology are science fiction in reverse: not the present writing about the future, but the past writing to the future. Bogdanov wrote for the Martians, and the Martians are us.

At its most expansive, tektology makes not only all humans comrades, but all things comrades:

But what is the origin of the tektological unity itself? The more science develops, the more it is revealed that this unity is nothing else but the result of a genetic unity, that in it is expressed the bond of origin, although this bond is quite remote. It unfolds to the entire universe of the experience accessible to us; and the formal convergence is being thereby reduced to a more indirect real convergence.¹⁶³

The qualifying clause is quite important. An absolute unity of being can be posited as a worldview, and both science and labor discover through praxis the particular tektological forms via which all things embrace and transform each other, but a praxis can never be perfected. Our finite nature limits us. It is enough of a struggle for our species-being for it to survive those relentless pressures of selection that would erase it. This might be a particularly key point now that it is our own science, and our own labor, that sets loose the Carbon Liberation Front, which makes progressive selection progress at an ever faster clip.

The tektology can be read as a first, perhaps premature attempt at a systems theory. Bogdanov’s systems are curiously less autopoetic than they are what Donna Haraway calls sympoetic.¹⁶⁴ While systems theory never quite became a science of science, it did spawn a series of metaphors and techniques which migrated sideways from science to science, illuminating systems and structures. Tektology is then not so much a failed attempt at a science of science as an intuition about a certain kind of “sideways” organization of knowledge in the world.

Bogdanov thought the great task for collective labor was the organizing of the world. That meant finding methods of coordinating across the division of labor other than commodity exchange. What he came up with is a model for a kind of experimental practice where the concepts developed in one labor process can be metaphorically substituted into others, and tested there in practice.

The labor and knowledge practices of Bogdanov’s time were far too slender an infrastructure for such a tektology. The means simply didn’t exist for comradely sharing of qualitative experiences from particular labors. There is a certain poignancy in Bogdanov’s death from blood sharing. Neither the sharing of biological materials nor the sharing of conceptual materials was yet possible. Tektology, like blood exchange, was utopian.

And yet, as we shall see in Part II, the far more advanced techno-scientific infrastructures of the twenty-first century do indeed support all kinds of substitutions between fields, and not just of a metaphorical kind. In a relatively new field like climate science, it is certainly possible to see echoes of many of Bogdanov’s premature insights—and not least about atmospheric carbon. Not the least reason to restore the memory of Bogdanov’s work is that he already anticipated the systematic and organizational problems that would confront working people in our time.

Part of Bogdanov’s originality was to insist that the central tenet of Marx’s work is not dialectics or materialism or the critique of political economy, but the labor point of view. Bogdanov grasped the central role in Marx of what Deleuze calls the conceptual personae.¹⁶⁵ Marx, as Bogdanov reads him, thinks capital through the persona of the worker. The worker-persona both maps out, and constitutes, in its relation with other class personae, particularly its antagonistic relation to the capitalist-persona, the space of Marx’s thought. The worker-persona is not a product of the author’s mind, as the persona and the author are also mutually constituting. Personae are not so much novelistic characters as embodiments of concepts, even though the personae may at the same time have a certain affect and a certain appearance that attaches to them.

What Platonov will add to this persona of the worker is the persona of the comrade. He does not simply assume a universality of the worker point of view, as is sometimes the case in Marx and Bogdanov. He is interested in the struggle to become comrades together. For Deleuze, personae carry with them possible modes of existence. While Platonov writes both appealing and terrifying comrades, they are all integral to his thought, which is precisely the thought of the space between these various incarnations of the comrade. To understand Platonov, then, is to understand what is between comrades as a plural but not universal point of view.

2

Andrey Platonov: A Proletarian Writing

SON OF PROLETKULT

Famine and war appear on the first page of Platonov’s great (anti) novel Chevengur. The old woman Ignatevna can cure children of hunger. She feeds them a broth of grass and mushrooms. They fall asleep and never wake up, “dry foam flecked on their lips.”¹ She will take an old skirt or an iron for her services. There is not a lot to look back fondly on from the time of the Tsar.

The peasants leave their village to beg, or for the front. Pavlovich stays behind, living on boiled grass. He makes in wood all the things that used to exist in metal. He even makes an oak frying pan. He brings water to the boil in it slowly so the wood doesn’t burn. He understands the material constraints on wants. He listens to a locomotive, off in the distance, but it stops.

Every page of Platonov contains condensed emblems of the Soviet experience. On the one hand, peasants and workers and their ways, doing and making, and the sensations that arise out of their labors. On the other hand, agents of the revolution, some noble idealists, some sinister hacks, and their fantastic exhortations. He stages close encounters of these comrades with each other, usually far from the center, in the village or the countryside, or the far, far east.

From the point of view of the high-minded Leninism of the Soviet state, it is like a game of telephone. What we get is not the governing universals of the philosophy of the center, but how minor characters in the provinces mix signal and noise to suit their own situations and experiences. In Platonov we touch that highfalutin language only from beneath. His personal party line is rather like that of the comrade who said to me once that “the party should stick to the working class like shit to a blanket.”

Platonov was born into the working-class family of a metal worker for the railways in the provincial city of Voronezh. He grew up in one of those raw interzones between the industrial and the agricultural that are characteristic of early industrialization.² As the oldest of ten kids, he had to work to help support the family from an early age. He supported the Bolsheviks from the start of the revolution, and was briefly a party member, but a more lasting influence was Proletkult. He became something of a provincial success as a journalist, poet and story writer. The local Proletkult organization even sent him to Moscow for a congress, at which he heard Bogdanov speak.

While an accomplished writer of stories, Platonov’s most striking works are a series of anti-novels or anti-novellas. Taken together, they are an allegorical history of the Soviet Union. Chevengur stretches from the revolution, through the civil war and war communism, to the New Economic Policy of the early 1920s. Foundation Pit tells the story of Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture, beginning in 1928. Happy Moscow turns on Stalin’s 1934 statement, after the completion of the first five-year plan, that “life has become merrier.”³ Soul escapes the imminent era of the great purges by traveling east, and confronts the whole history of the revolution with a fable of its failure and redemption in Turkmenistan.

Platonov’s writings lend themselves to multiple readings. I leave it to others better qualified to account for his distinctive use of the Russian language, his cosmist or theological themes.⁴ My reading concentrates on three things, read through three series of figures: his historical allegory of the revolution; the everyday quality of that history; and a kind of tektology that arises from his distinctive method of constructing proletarian prose. In the rather limited sphere of the production of writing, Platonov actually pulled off in a minor way something of what Bogdanov suggested, even if Bogdanov himself would have been rather perplexed by the results.

The first of these three readings—historical allegory—is mediated in turn by three figures, who no doubt literally loomed large over Platonov his whole adult life: Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. His play Fourteen Little Red Huts presents condensed versions of all three. About Marx, the intellectual says: “All his life he was looking for something serious and laughing at the current nonsense of every event.” The peasant replies: “you’re lying, man of science! Marx didn’t laugh at us—he loved us, in advance and forever.”⁵

This Marx addresses two classes, hacker and worker, as both critic and savior. One of Platonov’s abiding themes is a Bogdanovite one: who is Marx to the proletariat? Marx’s Capital traces an allegorical descent into hell of the worker who passes through the factory gates, out of the realm of circulation and equality into the inferno of production.⁶ Platonov’s world is a hell beneath that hell, of non-production, of bare want, but his proletarian is a being that speaks rather than being spoken of, opening a fissure in the Marxist canon, between high and low.

Fourteen Little Red Huts is set on a distant collective farm, over which presides a scarecrow, pointing into the distance. While this straw-man Lenin points to the remote future, in the near present the “class enemy” steals the livestock and even the children. The collective farm chairperson declares that: “We are poor here, we have no one except Stalin.” Yet as the intellectual has already told her: “It’s our fate not to be heard.”⁷ Lenin is present, but has no effect, while Stalin is absent, and yet his effects are everywhere.

The second series of three figures through whom I want to read Platonov are witnesses to a quite different disenchantment, that of postwar consumer capitalism: Henri Lefebvre, Raoul Vaneigem, and Guy Debord. Lefebvre inaugurates a critique of everyday life and its various alienations. This critique entails “relinquishing the traditional image of the philosopher as master and ruler of existence, witness and judge of life from the outside, enthroned above the masses, above the moments lost in triviality …”⁸ Today’s Leninoid philosophers and the Stalinist apparatchiks of the past join hands in denying low theory, emergent from below, and the Marx to be found there who loved us, in advance and forever.

Lefebvre’s discovery, or rediscovery, of everyday life takes an even more pointed form with his apprentice, Raoul Vaneigem: “People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”⁹ That might be a perfect epigram for Platonov, with a tad less love, and rather more corpses.

For all the apparent modernism of his prose, Platonov is the writer of the material practice of popular sense-making. Platonov’s method, in a word, is détournement, the collective labor of unmaking from below the language of those above. Platonov’s workaday characters have a naive genius for lifting the seal off official languages, whether of church, state or party, and using them as lubricants for the machinations of their own concerns, even if their use of it is no longer always dialectical. Language is material, but not a final means with which to grasp other kinds of materiality. Debord: “Whatever is explicitly presented as détournement within formulated theory serves to deny any durable autonomous existence to the sphere of theory merely formulated.”¹⁰ Language is just one kind of materiality among others.

Platonov describes one of his techniques of détournement in his story “Among Animals and Plants,” his oblique account of the gulag:

Federov preferred to choose pages at random—now page 50, now page 214. And although every book is interesting, reading this way makes it even better, and still more interesting, because you have to imagine for yourself everything you have skipped, and you have to compose anew passages that don’t make sense or badly written, just as if you too were an author.¹¹

Here he perfectly describes the literary communism discovered by Lautréamont and practiced by the Situationists, which erases a false idea and inscribes in its place the correct one. Platonov’s détournement of the socialist realism of the 1930s might not be a bad guide to what is to be done with the capitalist realism that is the only acceptable language of our own time.

The third reading of Platonov is via our three rebel Bolsheviks of Capri: Gorky, Lunacharsky, and Bogdanov. As in Gorky, everything in Platonov begins and ends in labor. Gorky: “The music of toiling men drew me down the Volga. Even now it has an intoxicating effect and I remember very clearly the day when I first became aware of the heroic poetry of everyday life … My soul was brightened by the desire to spend my whole life in that half-insane rapture of work.”¹²

Like Lunacharsky, Platonov thought socialism had to be more, rather than less, than a religion. Lunacharsky:

To me, the revolution was a stage, inevitably tragic, in the worldwide development of the human spirit toward the “Universal Soul,” the greatest and most decisive act in the process of “God-Building,” the most striking and definite deed in the realization of the program which Nietzsche had so felicitously formulated when he said, “there is no sense in the world, but we ought to give sense to it.”¹³

Much in Platonov reads like a running critique, in and against that sentiment. God-Building is surprisingly easy; actual building is relentlessly hard.

His relation to Bogdanov is rather more interesting. His key works can be read as pressing even further the pessimistic note in Bogdanov: the impossibility of designing a dynamic equilibrium of human and natural processes. His is a writing that always returns to the entropic, to the residues that can’t be recycled into a molar narrative line. There are hints in Bogdanov of how everyday subjective experience appears from the point of view of tektology, but it is Platonov who pursues the tektology of the everyday to its logical conclusions.

Platonov: “There is a kind of link, some kinship, among burdocks and beggars, singing in the fields, electricity, a locomotive and its whistle, and earthquakes—there is the same birthmark on all of them and on some other things too … Growing grass and working steam engines take the same kind of mechanics.”¹⁴ What ensues is a strikingly poignant and subtly molecular account of everyday proletarian life, among rocks, animals, and plants—as comrades.

Platonov’s early stories and journalism were caught up in the utopian fantasies of the technical overcoming of material constraints typical of Proletkult, if not of Bogdanov. He wrote about cloud seeding to alter the weather, and dynamiting a hole through the Urals to warm Siberia. Platonov responded to the practical as well as the utopian side of Bogdanov. In the wake of the terrible drought and famine of 1921, Platonov left journalism to study engineering and work on electrification. In 1924 he was working with considerable energy on land reclamation projects in his native Voronezh region. His own praxis as an engineer led him to a critique of what Susan Buck-Morss calls the Soviet sublime.¹⁵ Given that similar plans are one response to the Carbon Liberation Front, both his experience and his writings are pertinent to our time as well.

The great literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky met Platonov at this time. He has little to say about Platonov’s character—they didn’t hit it off—but he left a memorable portrait of his work. “All these rivers we studied in our geography books … do not exist. They are overgrown with rush. If you push the rush aside, the ground underneath is wet. Platonov dredges the rivers.”¹⁶ There’s no water, sometimes for forty kilometers; the villagers work all night at the well with their buckets. The peasants plow their fields using cows. Platonov straightens rivers, drains swamps, spreads lime to counteract the acidity of the soil. The dams are made of dirt and clay, and constructed in the winter when the ground is frozen. “Comrade Platonov is very busy. The desert is advancing.”

Platonov somehow gets an orchard to flourish. Water flows to the trees down chutes on wooden stilts. Oats grow around the trees to prevent the rabbits from eating the fruit. There’s no motor. The screw pump, of the kind designed in ancient times by Archimedes, is worked by hand. Platonov: “Given the agrarian over-population of the village and the famine in Voronezh … there’s no motor cheaper than the village girl. She requires no amortization.” (Or so Shklovsky says he says.)

Shklovsky: “Platonov understood the village.” His work went well. In 1926 Moscow summoned Platonov to join the central land reclamation effort. He was sent to the restive Tambov region in 1927, but had less success there.¹⁷ Back in Moscow, and with Gorky’s support, he became a writer again. His attempt to leave literature, this experience of technical labor and of the real revolution in the countryside, is part of what makes his return to writing great.

Proletkult opens the possibility of writing to Platonov, but technical labor tempers Proletkult’s raw enthusiasm with its constant encounters with recalcitrant nature. As Bogdanov had already shown, language overshoots most other kinds of material in its malleability. Tektological wholes are not so easily made with other stuff. The tragedy of the totality is the recognition of the gap that can open between them. Collaborative labor is the work of narrowing the gap, even if it can never be fully closed, rather than making a fetish of the difference.

In his (anti)novellas, Platonov sketches a history of the revolution not so much from below, as from below the below.¹⁸ It is not just that the usual bourgeois characters of the novel are absent or in the margins. His characters are barely even proletarian. They are often orphans, landless, wanderers—typical figures of the actual period. Lenin had worn out the working class in revolution and civil war. These déclassé characters were the actual base of the social formation.

Platonov is the great writer of our planet of slums.¹⁹ He saw beneath the sheen of socialist realism to the disorganization of labor beneath, like an old mole that undermines the surface. His work is like an allegory for what lies unseen under our own capitalist realism. The difference is that socialist realism at least felt obliged to acknowledge the reality of labor as subject if not the reality of the object of its labors. Platonov got critical purchase through attention to those personae closest to the struggle to wrest a surplus from nature.

Bogdanov gives us the tragedy of the totality from the point of view of those whose job it is to try to grasp that totality. Platonov sees it from below the below. He sees the tragedy of attempting and failing to get anything to work at all. His is a writing of residues and remainders. The era of the Carbon Liberation Front calls for both kinds of work, on the totality and on its failures and fissures.²⁰ Bogdanov and Platonov, taken together, are our contemporaries, then. The revolution they witnessed is an allegory of the weird times to come.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First: a reading of Platonov, through the protocols of historical allegory, everyday life, and tektology, which extract from the interplay of his comradely conceptual personae a plurality of concepts and figures for our situation.

CHEVENGUR AS HISTORICAL NOVEL

Chevengur can be read as two linked (anti)novellas, the first of which is an epic historical novel of the war, revolution, and civil war as seen from below the below. The characters are—like Marx’s worker in Capital—conceptual personae caught at the same time within the exogenous struggle of nature and the endogenous struggle within the social formation.²¹ The difference is that there is no social formation. There is no capitalism, and nothing has replaced it. The comrades struggle to create the base for the dream of Lenin’s leap.²²

Early on in Chevengur we meet with Pavlovich, who lives without music, but loves mechanical things. He loves only the finished thing, made by labor, which had begun its independent existence. “Machines were his people, constantly arousing within him feelings, thoughts and desires.”²³ He has discovered all on his own a kind of labor that is not alienated—the synthesis of art and work to which Proletkult aspired. Nature troubles him as something quiet and sad, “some sort of forces acting without return.”²⁴

When he finds the child Prokofy begging, his love of machines blows away in the wind. From then on Pavlovich finds it hard to work without love and just for the wages. Tinkering with mechanical things only appears to assuage his own sadness, but doesn’t really, as the sadness of the child still exists.

Pavlovich is a foster-father to Sasha Dvanov, who also works with him on the railways, but has a different attitude to the technical. “Sasha was interested in machines as he was in other moving and living things. He wanted more to feel them, to live their lives with them, than to find them out.”²⁵ Dvanov wants to enter into the relations, not the things, and views all relations as parts of tektological wholes. The machinic is not a thing apart for Dvanov, but rather part of our species-being, a matter of organization.

Dvanov is a reader, while Pavlovich learns through his hands. “No matter how much he read and thought, some kind of hollow place remained ever within him, an emptiness through which an undescribed and untold world passed like a startled wind.”²⁶ There is no logos, no logic common to word and world, whereby word can grasp world entire and as an object of contemplation. Words are just one of the forms of matter of the world, and perhaps even less helpful as a praxis than other kinds, like Platonov’s land reclamation work, although that too will reveal its disappointments.

The war with Germany convinces both Pavlovich and Dvanov of the uselessness of the government, perhaps of all governments. And Pavlovich’s beloved trains just seem to make war possible. The machine isn’t free. The revolution is to Pavlovich the path of least resistance, easier than war. Dvanov’s affective experience of the revolution is a layered one. “In the melody of the bells he heard alarm, faith and doubt. These same passions are also at work in revolution, for people are moved not only by cast-iron faith, but by shattering doubt as well.”²⁷ A revolution is not just a leap of faith.

Pavlovich takes Dvanov in search of the most serious party. One party sounds like Mensheviks. They say “happiness is a complicated article, and not in it is man’s goal, but rather in historical laws.”²⁸ Pavlovich prefers the Bolsheviks. “Probably this would be the smartest power, which would within the year either completely build the world, or else raise up such a fuss that even a child’s heart would grow tired.”²⁹ Nonetheless, Pavlovich is more skeptical than Dvanov about these Bolsheviks. It was the workers and soldiers who made the revolution. What do we need a party for, he asks, let alone a state? He thinks the people can organize itself for itself.

The Bolsheviks send Dvanov to see if socialism has popped up anywhere of its own accord. After all, the people have nothing but each other now. “Dvanov remembered various people who wandered among the fields and slept in the empty buildings at the front; maybe those people in fact had already bunched up in a gulley somewhere, out of the wind and the government and there they lived, content with their friendship.”³⁰ Such things actually happened. The comradeship of the war and civil war sent many landless, displaced former soldiers and wanderers off to make their own communes and organize their own lives. Platonov never loses a basic solidarity with that revolutionary structure of feeling.

One part of Dvanov’s revolutionary feeling comes from Pavlovich, and is technical in nature, like improved irrigation: “He thought of the time when water would begin to glisten in the dry uplands. That would be socialism.” But he is skeptical about the transformative power of the technical, which aligns with a whole ontology: “Nature had no gifts for creation … it succeeds through patience.”³¹ In history, as in natural history, selection erases all that is not fitted to endure. Communism for Dvanov combines raw comradeship in the face of common hardship with the technical overcoming of scarcity. These turn out to be compatible aims only in certain situations. State and ideology get in the way; machines go off their rails, and not everything can be redeemed at once. In Platonov, there is no shortcut to enduring happiness.

In the countryside during a civil war, “where there’s mud we’ve got peace.”³² Friction, fog, and sheer distance get in the way. Locomotives collide head-on, while the engine drivers look on helplessly. The new Soviet state loves harvests, and while the peasants now have their land, they prefer to make stills from old machine-gun parts and brew moonshine. Dvanov encourages them to take over the landowners’ estates. There’s more than one civil war going on.

Captured by an anarchist band, Dvanov is rescued by Kopenkin, who “could have set fire to all the immobile property of earth with conviction, so that within man would remain only reverence for one’s comrade.”³³ He is an old man who had never paid much attention to his own life, living on “unreasoned hope” rather than bread. He is not the party and still less the government, but a natural force. His mount is Proletarian Strength, not a noble charger, more the kind of horse with which you pull up stumps.

In his cap is a picture of Rosa Luxemburg, whose portrait he once stood before in a district party office. “He had looked at her hair and imagined it as a mysterious park …”³⁴ She is to him like a mother, and yet also like a woman who died in childbirth. On that day when he first saw her image, he killed a kulak who had incited the peasants to attack a Bolshevik grain requisitioner. Kopenkin is the book’s queer libido, its cod-Don Quixote, but not its central character.

Platonov dispenses with the residues of what Bogdanov would call “authoritarian organization” that adhere to Cervantes. Something keeps Dvanov from adopting Kopenkin’s quixotic zeal. In a fever, a sick Dvanov’s dreams of things. “Little things like boxes, shards, felt boots, and jackets turned into huge objects of enormous size and poured down on top of Dvanov.”³⁵ They enter his body. He fears they will rip open his skin. The Bolsheviks’ problem isn’t just the masses, it is the intractable mass of things. In his madness Dvanov knows this, while Kopenkin, in his, does not.

Dvanov thinks communism is about getting water onto the steppes, and imagines this, in the spirit of Charles Fourier, as a kind of aesthetic perfection of the biosphere: “Because of the cultivated grain the earth will be shinier and more visible from other planets … and then too the water cycle will get stronger and that will make the sky bluer and more transparent.”³⁶ He is still stuck at this stage with an image of nature as a thing to be contemplated rather than as a taciturn object against which to labor.

Dvanov thinks the revolution is about both subjects and objects, which he has learned from Pavlovich and Kopenkin respectively, but he does not yet know how hard it is to organize them, let alone how to organize part-objects or quasi-objects. He learns such things through experience, but tends to be a bit literal minded. A banner quotes Marx: “The revolution is the locomotive of history.” This only makes Dvanov think of clapped-out old freight trains.³⁷

Taking metaphors literally is a sort of tektology in reverse. Bogdanov’s interest was in the poetic suggestiveness of processes, of how the sensation of one might open up onto the diagram of another. Platonov is more attuned to the difficulties a metaphoric leap encounters when brought back into a material practice. The “locomotive” in the slogan “the revolution is the locomotive of history” is already an idealized one. Dvanov, like Platonov himself, is rather more knowledgeable about actual locomotives, which, at the time of the civil war, are in a very poor state indeed.

Kopenkin rides into what is not much more than a one-horse village. As an act of self-authorized revolutionary justice, he redistributes the nags from the rich to the poor peasants. One formerly rich peasant cracks wise: so the former rich, now poor, should get the foals when they are born, from the former poor, now rich. Such subaltern wiliness only enrages Kopenkin.³⁸ He does not see the futility of redistributing such impoverished resources, or that a simple leveling is not in itself communism. There can be no equality of heterogeneous things and hence no equality of the subjects with which they are inextricably connected. The peasant, more canny than Kopenkin, predicts a failure of productivity. There’s a tension between Kopenkin’s theological desire for equality in poverty and Dvanov’s techniques for increasing the total wealth.

Like Quixote, what makes Kopenkin an enduring character is that sometimes his madness works, and yet is still madness. Another village does no plowing because they are too busy with their meetings. Here Kopenkin’s remedy is actually a wise one. He prescribes even more meetings. Sometimes the remedy with someone pretending to be ill is not to contradict them but rather to persuade them they are really very ill.

The exhortations of the Bolshevik press don’t much impress Dvanov and Kopenkin. They are only confused by talk of “Kronstadts of excess.”³⁹ It is perhaps 1921, and the Bolsheviks have put down the mutiny of the revolutionary workers and sailors of Kronstadt, once the arsenal of the revolution, and yet Dvanov and Kopenkin are deaf to the signals of what it must mean. Kronstadt was a clash between the interests of the working class and those of the state, in which the Bolsheviks—Trotsky included—sided with the state. It is no accident that this is when Dvanov and Kopenkin meet Pashtinev.

They find him in a forest—perhaps the forest of Rosa’s hair. Pashtinev is a more earthy character than Kopenkin. He thinks the revolution ended in 1919, when the German working class failed to topple the bourgeois state. He lacks Kopenkin’s avenging mission, although his communism is, if anything, even more egalitarian. Of Trotsky, he says: “What comrade is he of mine, if he’s commanding everybody?”⁴⁰ In Platonov, authoritarian organization is continually questioned, from below.

For Pashtinev it is all over. The law has come: “Armies, governments, and ways of life have come and gone, but to the people they always said the same thing … ‘Stand up, get back in the ranks, you start work on Monday.’” He lives on “volunteer plants.” He alone knows that the land can’t be given to the peasants, because “the land is self-made, so that means it’s nobody’s.”⁴¹ Dissolving the fiction of particular private properties abolishes with it the more abstract fiction that the earth is there for us, to be arraigned around our wants. Pashtinev probes the limits of the Proletkult worldview.

A village blacksmith, loyal to his village and an enemy of everyone else, explains: “It’s a sly business. First you hand over the land, then you take away the grain, right down to the last kernel … The peasant doesn’t have anything left from the land any more except the horizon.”⁴² The communist horizon: the party abolished the heavens, and has not (yet) replaced them. But it has abolished the old base as well, leaving only the distant line between. Ideology is switching polarities, from vertical to horizontal; from earth as a fallen image of the divine, to a present as an imperfect realization of a future. The absolute of the eternal heavens gives way to the absolute of time itself: History as absolute. In this wavering moment, before socialist realism has made the communist horizon the new Godhead, Platonov’s smith—an intermediary character between peasant and worker—still has the capacity to question it.

When Dvanov goes to the city, it looks to him as if the Whites have taken it. No longer a fortress of the revolution, there is even food in the shops. The New Economic Policy (NEP) is taking effect, even if comrades in grain procurement are still getting killed. But things have not quite gone back to the old ways. “Now all the people knew that it is difficult to grow grain, that a plant lives as tenderly and complexly as a man … People had learned many things previously unknown. Their professions had expanded, their sense of life had become social.”⁴³ At least for the moment, they see beyond the fetishism of the market.

With food in their bellies, people feel their soul and as a consequence particular appetites return. Elsewhere, Platonov defines soul as “an individual violation of a general trend of reality that is unique as an act and for that matter the soul is alive. I apologize for the old terminology—I developed a new meaning to it.”⁴⁴ Soul always exists in sufficient quality and quantity. It’s a question of whether surplus life enables one to feel it.

In the city, Dvanov meets up with comrade Gopner, who wonders whether food and revolution can coexist: “we are all comrades only when there is identical trouble for everybody.” Gopner is technically minded, but he thinks machines are quantifiable and life isn’t. He has the approved Hegelian language to hand: “We’re not objects now, we’re subjects.”⁴⁵ Still, it’s the object world that will be the trouble. The light in the district party room pulses. Gopner knows that the drive belt for the dynamo at the power plant is not working smoothly. With no light there’s no Bolshevik meetings. The molecular corrodes the infrastructure of the revolution, which is held together by a few skilled workers like Gopner—and Platonov.

When told of the NEP, Pavlovich declares: “So it’s a lost cause then.” The objective conditions won’t allow Lenin’s leap, and “what doesn’t ripen in the correct time was sown in vain.” It is in the context of the apparent retreat represented by the NEP that they encounter Chepurny, who claims to come “from communism,” even though to Gopner that sounds like “a village named in memory of the future.”⁴⁶ Constructing socialism is difficult enough on such a shallow base, so Chepurny’s claim to have over-leapt it into the communist developmental stage is both crazy and appealing.

In a détournement of Marx’s restrictively humanist formulae for stepping toward communism, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” Chepurny describes communist Chevengur as a place where “the blessings of life, the precision of truth, and the woe of existence all arose of their own accord in correspondence with their need.”⁴⁷ These three realms, and the possibility of selecting a new tektological mode of their dynamic equilibrium, are Platonov’s whole quixotic quest, and from the revolution to the start of the NEP he thought it might just be possible.

CHEVENGUR AS UTOPIA

The retreat of the NEP marks a break in the text, where the historical (anti)novella breaks off and steps into what Slavoj Žižek calls a “gnostic-materialist” utopia.⁴⁸ As in Bogdanov, in Platonov it is the failure of revolution which prompts the utopian mode. Chevengur is where those imbued for life with the comradeship of the civil war can find a way to live on in that spirit—a not untroubled affect as we shall see—while town and country realign their interests within that strange NEP-space of state-directed capitalism. What Debord called the concentrated spectacle governing the commodity form on the Soviet plan is close to hand.⁴⁹ Chevengur, and within it the almost-utopian place of Chevengur itself, preserves Platonov’s sense of a struggle for another life foreclosed, where life, truth, and matter might evolve together.

From afar, the Chevengurians look like “people on vacation from imperialism.”⁵⁰ For all its apparent placidity, Chevengur is a product of civil war. The violence there is hardly unique or unprovoked. The Whites kill the Reds; the Reds kill the Whites. Some “bourgeois” hoard so much grain and salt in their ceilings that they cave in—trusting in a superstructure that would not hold such providence. The Reds arrange a “second coming” for this bourgeoisie, who shall be granted the heavens, although not in this life.⁵¹ The everyday life of utopia is founded on force, and in this regard it is exactly the same as any other everyday life.

Chevengur is a town that ate its scapegoat to share equally in guilt, and now “it reeks of some raw god.”⁵² During the Capri years, Lunacharsky and Gorky advocated God-Building, through which the proletariat would come to deify itself. Like George Sorel’s myth of the general strike, it was a class-based inflection of Feuerbach and the civil religion of the French Revolution, the doctrine of that Marx who loved us in advance and forever. It does not escape Platonov’s attention that while faith is a common bond, it also signals an originary violence; or that idolizing the leaping proletariat severed from its material conditions of existence, the subject without the object, is just a kind of fetishism.

Chepurny’s communism is more that of the landless than of the peasants: “Chevengur doesn’t collect property, it destroys it.”⁵³ Chevengurians don’t labor for an abstract, invisible common good, but for “close, comradely people.” Even private family relations seem to have been abolished: “We don’t have wives. All that’s left is female companions.”⁵⁴ It’s the utopia of the landless, the displaced, rather than the utopia of hacker and worker cooperation in Red Star. In Chevengur, they have mobilized the sun, the worldwide proletarian, and they live off the surplus power of the solar base. Now that “the soul had been made the main profession,” there’s little to eat.⁵⁵ They prefer communism to labor discipline. Communism should be biting; sorrowful, but shared.

Boris Pilniak, Platonov’s friend and collaborator, left his own portrait of the kind of men who might come together in a place like Chevengur:

Here slept Communists who had been called to duty by war communism and discharged by the year nineteen hundred and twenty-one, men of arrested ideas, madmen and drunkards, men who, living together in a cave and working together unloading barges, sawing firewood, had created a strict fraternity, a strict communism, having nothing of their own, neither money nor possessions nor wives: their wives had left them.⁵⁶

None of the Chevengurians have read Marx. Their communist manifesto has four theses: sun and soil; water and wind. The tektological unity of these elements is somewhat abstract. “Chepurny could not bear the mystery of time, so he cut short the length of history by the rapid construction of communism.” The time of decay, of disorganization, the natural history of time, is simply erased by the absolute time of the communist horizon. “Dvanov guessed why Chepurny so wanted communism. Communism is the end of history and the end of time, for time runs only within nature, while within man there stands only melancholy.”⁵⁷ In Platonov, as in Bogdanov, there can be no end of history, because natural history does not end. That is the tragedy of the totality.

Platonov writes brilliantly of the natural world of the steppe, with a kind of solar tektology of the effects of summer daylight: “the sun leaned dry and hard into the earth, and the earth was the first to falter in the weakness of its exhaustion, and began oozing the juices of grass, the dampness of loam, and disturbing the entire fibrous expanse of the steppe, while the sun only grew more tempered and strong from its tensed, dry patience.”⁵⁸ And of daylight’s passing: “The sun departed, releasing the moisture of the air for the grass. Nature became a deeper blue and calm, purged of the noisy solar laboring after the general comradeship of languished life.”⁵⁹ The Chevengurian revolutionaries could not quite mesh their wants with this world of living and dead matter. The earth is not the equal of the sun; life is not the equal of the earth.

Nothing was planted in Chevengur for three years, and so the wheat and thistle propagate by themselves, and work out their own equilibrium, of three to one. The human and inhuman have not found their relation. Chepurny “touched a burdock. It too wanted communism. The entire weed patch was a friendship of living plants … Let the wild grasses grow in the streets of Chevengur, for just like the proletariat, this grass endures the life and heat and the death of deep snow.”⁶⁰ But Chepurny’s communism has leapt against the wind and has not found a way to endure.

The mark of the impasse in Chevengur is that it lacks women. Chepurny thinks that sex and reproduction are “an alien and natural matter, not a human and communistic one. Woman was acceptable for the human life of Chevengur in her drier and more human form, but not in her full beauty …” He wants “women of course, but please … you know … just barely, so there’s just a tiny bit of difference …”⁶¹

For the Chevengurians, women trouble the boundary between the actual natural world of water, earth, and air agitated by the sun, and the communism of the fantastic leap, for which the sun is an emblem but not a tangible and tactile force. The comrades are a rather homosocial lot, perhaps even homosexual: “Deprived of families and work … all the sleeping Chevengurians were forced to animate nearby people and things in order that they might reproduce and lessen the life which accumulated in their stuffy bodies.”⁶²

When the women finally arrive they are frightened. In the revolution and the civil war, they are used to being abused by men, and always right away. There weren’t long speeches first, like here in Chevengur. At best, “they had exchanged their bodies, their places of age and blossoming, for food …”⁶³ The men realize that the women are orphans too, like them. They want the women to become the mothers and daughters of the men; they want the men to become sons and fathers of the women. They want to end orphanhood for everyone. But the women don’t really believe the fraternal and paternal feelings of the men. Women are the public irony of the eternal sphere.

Chepurny is one of two leading communists of Chevengur. The other is Prokofy, the former beggar-boy, who has rather more authoritarian inclinations. For Chepurny, the party belongs to the proletariat; for Prokofy, the proletariat belongs to the party. “Revolution is our job and our duty,” Prokofy says, “all you have to do is listen to our orders, and then you will stay alive and things will go well for you.”⁶⁴

Chepurny grasps that “the enemy used to live among us head-on, but we got him spit out of the revolutionary committee and now in place of the enemy we got the proletariat, so either they’ve got to be spit out too, or else the revolutionary committee is unnecessary.”⁶⁵ He naively thinks that Prokofy is still his comrade, and cannot imagine that he himself will be on the side spat out. Only the sinister Prokofy has complete information about the objects and subjects gathered in Chevengur. He has taken an inventory of his future estate.

When Dvanov and Kopenkin, Gopner and Pashtinov come to Chevengur, they are skeptical. The death of a child shakes all these comradely conceptual personae. Dvanov had only intended to go to Chevengur and then return to people who were barely alive to help them. Gopner quickly sees there’s no labor being performed. Pashtinov thinks the leap was worth taking but it failed. Kopenkin may be a rather idealistic communist, but his Rosa is always out of reach, always buried in an alien land. It is a ghost that moves him, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, only this ghost possesses no paternal authority over him, but is rather a mother and daughter, a lover and most of all a comrade.

It is the evening of Chevengur, and the fall is coming. Still, they labor to try and make it work. Kopenkin harnesses Proletarian Strength to the plow. Gopner and Dvanov try to improve irrigation. They use oak crosses from the “bourgeois” cemetery for building material. While a rather disturbing clay statue of Prokofy has appeared, Gopner and Dvanov merge art and design into a practice of the productive object. Some of their inventions are rather impractical. They attempt to generate solar power but it never quite works. Platonov reverses the tenets of productism, perhaps the most radical artistic tendency of the time. In Platonov’s version, rather than artists bringing the aesthetic to labor, he has workers bringing their labors to the point of becoming art.⁶⁶

In order to protect and not exhaust his communism, Dvanov cultivates the secondary idea: “Now he feared the expansion of his calm spiritual sufficiency and wished to find another, secondary idea by which he might live and which he might spend and use, leaving his main idea as an untouched reserve, dipping into it but rarely for his happiness.”⁶⁷ So he works on irrigation, on food security. No matter how spiritual the communist leap of faith, it only lives on in people’s bodies, and bodies have wants. The secondary idea preserves against the melancholy that attends the first, whether it be the impossibility then of achieving communism—or the impossibility now of confronting the Carbon Liberation Front. The secondary idea does not dream backwards from the absolute time of a future horizon. It works outwards, from a particular present situation, looking for lines out of cramped spaces.

Even Chepurny learns from his new comrades, and not least this concept from tektology: “Chepurny had discovered one comforting secret for himself: that the proletariat does not admire nature, but rather destroys it, with labor.” No romantic greening of labor here; Chevengur isn’t pastoral. The problem of organizing labor and nature is precisely their difference, their heterogeneity to each other. Not least because the time Chepurny foreshortens is the time of disingression and decay. There is only nature without ecology.⁶⁸

This nature is recalcitrant, enervating, unpredictable, only ever partially known, and if known at all, known badly, through the metaphors of the time. It has no ecology, in the sense that it is nature without guarantees. It has no necessary tendency to stability or order, no bias toward homeostasis. Its history is a history of metabolic rifts, of varied cosmological, geological, and biological causes. God is dead, and so too is ecology. Disingression awaits. Stabilities are temporary and haphazard organizations. Platonov lacks even Bogdanov’s tenuous belief that selection selects for equilibrium.

Serbinov the party bureaucrat arrives, investigating a 20 percent drop in land under cultivation. He is a sad sort, an enervated time-server, and yet he writes in his diary: “Man is not meaning, but a body filled with passionate veins, ravines of blood, mounds, openings, satisfaction, and oblivion.” And: “History was spawned by a base failure who invented the future in order to exploit the present.”⁶⁹ These insights into want and time are private. Serbinov is like a stone in the river, the revolution flowing over him while he stays sunk to the bottom by self-regard.

In Chevengur the amount of grain growing has actually risen. Chepurny’s unitary town plan, which moves the houses about in close formation, had the unintended consequence of letting grasses grow in the streets.⁷⁰ The technical improvements of Dvanov and Gopner might actually work. But the hint of a possible victory is purely local. The Chevengurians labor freely for each other, not for the state. It’s a strange kind of comedy, this season of reconciliation with the world.

The report to headquarters that Serbinov writes about these happy, useless, ungovernable people may well be the text of Platonov’s Chevengur: “It had turned out intelligently and ambitiously, hostile and sarcastic both toward Chevengur and the capital.”⁷¹ It is not clear whether it is Serbinov’s report or Prokofy’s scheming which is Chevengur’s undoing. It is not clear whose soldiers come, although the Chevengurians can only shout “Cossacks! Cadets!”—as if their only enemies could be the Whites.⁷² They kill all the Chevengurians with a machine-like precision. Prokofy is left with an empty town.

FOUNDATION PIT: IMPOSSIBLE INFRASTRUCTURE

That dead and living matter might find an alignment with the revolutionary ideal is a possibility still open in Chevengur, no matter how much violence and waste attends the attempt to forge the revolution of everyday life. In Foundation Pit such possibilities are foreclosed. Platonov was one of very few writers who had seen first-hand what a disaster Stalin’s forced collectivization was, from travels in the countryside in his technical, rather than writerly capacity. The civil war was finally settled, and at the peasants’ expense, in a bloody liquidation.⁷³

Foundation Pit is a détournement of Zola’s Work and Stalinist “production” novels.⁷⁴ It is the great work on the intimacy of violence and spectacle. But rather than comfort bourgeois sensibilities in our own time, the effect is really the reverse, for the same critique applies now as then. This excavated underworld is, if not the foundation of our own world, then of one of its precursors. Capitalist realism is not that different to socialist realism: both are saturated in idealist fantasies about immaculate goals. The difference is that in capitalist realism these are mostly invoked to sate private wants, for shiny cars and condos.

Socialist realism had a phantasmal conception of the infrastructures beneath its gleaming communist horizon. Capitalist realism’s relation to its conditions of existence are no less attenuated. The drought of 2012 obliged American farmers to feed their dairy cattle ice cream sprinkles, gummy worms, marshmallows, fruit loops and cookies. These varieties of high fructose corn syrup products were cheaper than the corn American cows would usually eat.⁷⁵ Neither socialist nor capitalist “realism” has much to say about the molecular struggle of labor in and against nature, although socialist realism at least had to acknowledge that labor exists.

Voschev is, by his own account, “a vain attempt by life to attain its goal.” He is a ragged-trousered Hamlet. His soul has stopped knowing truth. He doubts the necessity of the world. Thought no longer engages the worlds of living and lifeless matter in a viable project. He finds a leaf on the ground and puts it in his sack. He will keep it and remember it, find out for what it once lived and has now perished. He “collected every kind of obscurity for memory and vengeance,” as “documentary proof of the planless creation of the world.”⁷⁶ In a world that really is topsy-turvy, where truth is a remnant of falsehood, Platonov, like Voschev, creates a salvage-punk practice for gathering the relevant ephemera.

He goes out into the “speechless existence,” where “only faraway water and wind inhabited this darkness and nature, and only birds could sing the sorrow of this great substance.” Voschev finds a building site where a small band of workers dig an enormous foundation pit for a future House of the Proletariat. The most energetic of the workers is Chicklin, but even he knows the job is probably futile: “This job’s a killer. And time will eat up all the use.”⁷⁷

The House of the Proletariat, a great superstructure raised over a massive base, is Prushevsky’s idea. He is a Bogdanovite of sorts, who thinks the soul is the surplus warmth of life. But is it an inevitable surplus? He tackles the relation between matter, life, and soul with a bit of tektological thinking culled from his experience of everyday life: “He could see how the topsoil rested on a layer of clay and did not originate from it. Could a superstructure develop from any base? Was soul within man an inevitable by-product of the manufacture of vital material? And if production could be improved to the point of precise economy, would it give rise to other oblique by-products?”⁷⁸ Prushevsky does not trouble himself for long. He goes about his work with a sort of tender indifference. He concerns himself only with “eternal matter,” that against which every engineer labors.

Safronov is also a technical worker and also has his doubts. “If one looked only at what lay below, at the dry pettiness of the soil and the grasses living in the very thick and in poverty, then there was no hope in life; a general, universal unprepossessingness, along with people’s uncultured gloom, perplexed Safronov and shook the ideological directive in him.”⁷⁹ Unlike Prushevsky he cannot still his soul by working only on dead matter. His calculations of nature are turning him gray. “He pictured the whole world as a dead body, judging it by those parts he had already converted into structures.”⁸⁰ He tries to imagine the base on the model of the superstructure. He is too aware of the rift between a sorrowful nature and the relentless optimism of the five-year plan. They are not the same kind of organization.

In Prushevsky, “the passion of reason is the pull toward death.”⁸¹ Prushevsky concerns himself only with dead matter; Safronov consoles himself with the thought of the leap beyond it. Both avoid the third layer, the problem of life, on which Voschev dwells, if not always morosely: “Sadness is nothing … it means that our class senses the whole world.”⁸² Voschev’s wager is on the comradeship of shared sadness. He extends Proletkult’s self-assumed task of organizing the whole world of production to production’s byproducts and externalities, including its odd affects.

At night, the workers lie side by side, exhausted. At least their dreams remain their own: “Various dreams come to a laboring man at night—some express a fulfilled hope, while others foresee a personal coffin in a clay grave—but daytime is lived by everyone according to the same stooped method, through the endurance of a body digging the earth in order to plant into a fresh abyss an eternal stone root of indestructible architecture.”⁸³ Labor is the only really shared part of human experience in Platonov. Ideology is always, strangely, idiosyncratic. Everyone détourns universals in light of particular experiences. In Platonov’s world, even Bogdanov’s Red Star could not offer the Sorelian myth of a universal horizon for everyone.

In an abandoned tile factory, a child cares for her dying mother, who was herself the daughter of the former owner. The child is not sure if her mother is dying from being bourgeois or from death. The workers from the pit find the orphaned girl and bring her to their shelter to care for her. Some of them nod approvingly at this child who spouts aggressive slogans and seems to know more about comrade Stalin than about her own mother. Safronov calls Nastya “the substance of creation and the aim and goal of every directive,” and, rather more ambiguously, “our future object of joy.”⁸⁴

The workers dig the pit ever deeper and wider. It is as if no base could ever support the extravagant superstructure promised as the substance of the plan. Voschev alone seems alert to the ontological crisis. Base, dead matter supports the living, and life supports the soul, each a meager surplus of the layer below. But if the soul can’t expand itself to the point of immersion in the whole world, then the world cannot be organized. Its efforts remain partial and futile, and life slips back into the boring emptiness of dead matter. Time not only has no end or goal but does not even permit the passing on into the future of temporary reserves against entropy: “Endurance dragged on wearily in the world, as if everything living found itself in the middle of time and its own movement; its beginning had been forgotten by everyone, its end was unknown, and nothing remained but a direction to all sides.”⁸⁵ Another world is possible, and it is exactly the same as this one, just a variation among variations.

The failure of the plan, its alien quality over both the dead and the living, prompts only Voschev to attempt some other relation to being. Even Chicklin, the pure proletarian digger, gets caught up in a peculiar ideological fervor. Chicklin says to Voschev: “Who is it that exists in the world—the party or you? Who is it that is?” Voschev is caught in the nightmare spectacle of a being he knows to be false, but whose existence cancels his own possibility of being as anything but refuse or worse—a “wrecker.” Voschev waits in vain for the Celestial Party to advance on its own ontological rift. “When would a resolution be passed there to curtail the eternity of time and redeem the wearisomeness of life?”⁸⁶

However, the dominant reaction is Safronov’s, which is to double down on the leap: “We no longer feel the heat from the bonfire of the class struggle.” The exhaustion of the working class and its old revolutionary vanguard has come to pass. Safronov says in despair: “Ay, you masses! It’s difficult to organize you all into the gruel of communism. What do you bastards want? You’ve worn out the entire vanguard, you vermin!”⁸⁷ Even Bogdanov’s transfusions could not keep this vanguard going.

Safronov volunteers to assist with the forced collectivization of a nearby village into the General Line Collective Farm, and he and another are killed for their troubles.⁸⁸ The civil war between town and country is being fought to its bitter conclusion. Chicklin assumes within his body all the undone tasks of his dead comrades. If Voschev keeps an archive of the forgotten thing, Chicklin tries to preserve at least a fragment of lost human labor, but in both cases it is in vain. The living and the dead have their own organization and it isn’t the plan.

Presiding over the collectivization is a character known only as “the activist,” who for all of his outward personality seems to have evaporated into the letter of the plan. The activist imagines he is the “most ideological worker in the district superstructure.” Yet he is troubled from time to time by the anguish of life, even as he gets the benefits of future time on credit by being in the vanguard. “Is truth the due of the proletariat?” asks Voschev.⁸⁹ The activist offers what’s left of the proletariat agitation without truth, a perpetual and futile motion which produces its own apparent truth out of itself but is void of any basis in the tektological forming and deforming of life out of matter. The activist even thinks the wind is out to sabotage the plan. And of course, in Platonov’s sense—wind as eroding time—it is.

The peasants are mostly nameless and faceless in Foundation Pit, as they were to the Stalinists, but they are not voiceless. As one peasant describes the situation: “There’s no jam in the middle. It’s total collectivization—no joy for us!”⁹⁰ Another mourns for the trees, which he feels are his own flesh, and which will no longer be part of his being once they are collectivized. Another correctly predicts that some form of the old property relations will be the only result of forced collectivization. It isn’t the people who will own the land, but Stalin and his factotums.⁹¹

And yet the peasants slaughter their own livestock rather than lose it. “Cows and horses were lying in these yards, their carcasses gaping and rotting—and the heat of life accumulated through long years beneath the sun was still seeping out from them into the air, into the shared wintry space.”⁹² Platonov conjures the eerie sight of an untimely plague of flies, a swarm of black dots on the white snow, the seasons out of joint.

A strange fur grows on proletarian bodies. Perhaps it is related to the “last unknown proletarian,” a bear who works at the smithy. The bear, or the hammerer as he is also called, is taken around the peasant huts to sniff out kulaks.⁹³ He denounces peasants who really did exploit him. It is time, as Nastya says, to “liquidate the kulaks as a class.” Not: liquidate the kulaks, as a class. That is, abolish class distinctions between rich and poor peasants. Rather: liquidate the kulaks as a class. Meaning, liquidate them all physically. The activist has a raft made so they can be “liquidated” by floating them off, down the river, “organized for eternity.”⁹⁴

Nastya the innocent ideologue asks: “Have you made a collective farm here for Stalin?” In a notorious article called “Dizzy With Success,” Stalin put the blame for the mass murder of kulaks, the destruction of livestock, and the inevitable famine on his underlings. In Foundation Pit, the decision is sheeted home where it belongs. The activist will be denounced as a wrecker. The bear pounds the iron in the smithy into ruins. The poor peasants dance madly after the kulaks leave. They have been rendered numb by events. “We sense everything, only not ourselves,” the assembled collective says to Chicklin.⁹⁵

The activist draws up his accounts of the collective farm. He measures inputs and outputs. He decides who has worked how much and who receives which wages. But Voschev has his own information. He collects objects which are the worn traces of human life and labor. They might be the tokens of another tektology, of an impossible organization, by which “soul” might stand for that which organizes living labor in and against dead matter for shared life. In the absence of which they are rather tokens now only of “vengeance through the organization of eternal human meaning—on behalf of those who are now lying quietly in the earth.”⁹⁶ Both the activist and Voschev make their reckoning gifts to Nastya. Voschev’s is a sack of “rare toys, not for sale anywhere”—those worthless fragments of lost lives that cannot be commodified even in the topsy-turvy concentrated spectacle of the Stalin era.⁹⁷

For Voschev the futile, destructive laboring of the bear is a witness to the absence of truth. Truth cannot call itself into existence by tugging on its own bootstraps. The result is just a fake ontology, an unsupportable being that destroys the clay on which it stands. And yet there’s nobody left to mourn the passing of truth from this world, its becoming unreal and spectral. As Voschev says over the dead activist: “So that’s why I never knew meaning! It wasn’t just me you sucked dry, you arid soul, it was the whole of our class! And we were left to ferment like quiet dregs, and to know nothing!”⁹⁸

Nastya’s heart grows tired and she dies, and Chicklin buries her in the depths of the foundation pit. In a weird way Platonov’s own faith that some sort of communism might not be impossible is buried in the depths of Foundation Pit. His act of witness is not just a moral one. The future House of the Proletariat really is sheltered in here, but in its depths, and in death. While this is in many ways his bleakest text, certain things remain. Voschev still feels the absence of truth in both soul and body. He still has the fallen leaf to remind him.

HAPPY MOSCOW: SUPERSTRUCTURAL PEOPLE

If Foundation Pit is about the endless labor to produce an infrastructure, then Happy Moscow is about mostly “superstructural” people, living high up in city apartments.⁹⁹ It is a portrait of the cream of the first Soviet generation, with no memories of capitalism or the Tsar, whose lives are insulated from much of Stalinist reality. Most of the characters are technical intellectuals, the proto-hacker class, Bogdanov’s people, successful and renowned.¹⁰⁰ This is the era of Stalin’s second five-year plan. If the first was all about basic industry, the second pays at least some attention to leisure and consumer goods, produced in quantities sufficient at least to reward those faithful to the regime.

Life has become happier, Stalin has declared, but not for Platonov. Among other things, Happy Moscow is—astonishingly—a critique of commodity fetishism written right from the heart of the socialist second world. The revolution has become a manic repetition of production and consumption, where the common project of labor yields only solitary consumer satisfactions. “The spherical hall of the restaurant, deafened by the music and the howls of the people, and filled by the tormenting smoke of cigarettes and the gas of squeezed passions, seemed to revolve, every voice in it sounded twice, and suffering kept on being repeated.”¹⁰¹ Can there really be even the beginnings of a socialist base if the symptoms of capitalism are appearing in the superstructures? Stalin has to deliver rising living standards, for he has taken away everything else.

Platonov gathers most of his characters for an event at the Young Communist League. Many famous engineers gather, as well as artists, understood at the time as “engineers of the soul.” Who will sit next to whom at the communal table? “What they really wanted was to sit next to everyone at once.” Platonov does not doubt the intentions of his art and tech hackers, only the efficacy of their methods. They want the shared life, but they cannot find it. “They all knew, or guessed at, the sullen dimensions of nature, the extensiveness of history, the length of future time and the true scale of their powers; they were rational and practical people, not to be seduced by empty delusion.”¹⁰²

Like Dvanov, they live at best on secondary ideas, at worst, stuck where they are by what Lauren Berlant calls a cruel optimism, their own private desires impeding them. Certain music, particularly Beethoven, calls the characters to the great project of finding and building the common life. It is the “last dream of a heroic world.”¹⁰³ The music excites the common space of the air, but is heard in individual and fragmentary ways.

Like so many Platonov characters, Moscow Chestnova is an orphan. She was raised by the state and trained as a parachutist, because she likes wind and sun. She is a bit like Dvanov, a pure revolutionary spirit caught up in events. She wants to stand by the accelerator of the locomotive, not experiencing life but making it. She embodies the labor point of view. “Her heart could have regulated the course of events,” but it doesn’t.¹⁰⁴ She is more object than subject of history.

There is an ascetic side to Platonov, much more characteristic of a certain strain of Russian intellectual of his time than of our own. There is a distaste for sexual love in particular, and hence a queasiness about women, whom he takes as tokens of it. But in Happy Moscow he is onto something that still speaks to our time: that the obsession with the couple, and the sexual love mixed with romance that legitimates it, are at best stand-ins and at worst obstacles for shared life. Moscow’s dérives, wandering the city, and her serial trysts, are attempts to find both the uses and the limits of love. Marriage is not the answer. She “began to love just one sly man who kept a tight hold on her, as if she were some inalienable asset.”¹⁰⁵

As in Foundation Pit, Platonov takes literally Marx’s notion of an economic infrastructure below and a cultural superstructure up above. Only here the story is not about the endless task of building a base, but about the other Stalinist desire: to occupy the heights above such a base immediately. This is why Moscow is training to be a paratrooper, going higher even than the newly sprouting towers of her city. The aircraft, rather than the locomotive, is the gleaming new technological image of historical momentum.

One of Platonov’s most striking images is of Moscow lighting a cigarette while testing a new parachute technology. Descending from an aeronautical superstructure toward the earth, a solipsistic pleasure distracts her. The webbing catches alight and she has to pull the reserve ‘chute to make it. “So world, this is what you are really like! … You are only soft so long as we don’t touch you!”¹⁰⁶ She glides past the boundary separating technology and catastrophe. She gets fired from the Air Corps upon landing for having an attitude of luxury rather than modesty toward nature. There lies Platonov’s whole critique of the Stalinist twist upon Bolshevik volunteerism, of Stalin’s attack on the earth from above. The leap has its own vanity.

Moscow tries not to repeat that selfish turn in her wanderings on the surface, looking for a way to share life that is neither too airy nor too earthy, too merry nor too sad. She is the spirit of the commons, “she belonged to nobody,” she is a “living truth.”¹⁰⁷ But perhaps her solution to the riddle of the shared life is just to keep trying to live it: “She wanted to take part in everything and she was filled by that indeterminacy of life which is just as happy as its definitive resolution.”¹⁰⁸

The conceptual personae that Moscow encounters on her wanderings play out variations on the struggle for the shared life. Bozhko is a dedicated shock-worker by day. By night he writes letters to proletarians all over the world—in Esperanto. He sits at his desk under portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and the inventor of that artificial common language. But he also puts up smaller pictures of nameless people from all over the world.

Bozhko works in the Weights and Measures Office, as did Platonov for a time when he could not publish. He wants the people to have accurate measures of their labor so there will be no more riots on the collective farms, as if it were just a problem of measure for measure. He picks up every crumb so the country can thrive in its entirety. He generously pays for Moscow’s tuition at flying school, and is very proper with her, but after her visits, “Bozhko usually lay face down on the bed and yearned from sorrow, even though his only reason for living was universal joy.”¹⁰⁹

Sambikin is a surgeon obsessed with longevity. He would not be out of place among Bogdanov’s blood transfusion enthusiasts. Dissecting the baser strata, his concern is with a more physiological layer of being than the social being of Bozhko. “His mind lived in a terror of responsibility for the entire senseless fate of physical substance.”¹¹⁰ In a troubling scene, he operates on the brain of a sick child, but leaves a little of the infection in him, as removing it would require paring his little body down even to its toenails. It is the molecular that irks him.

Like many of Platonov’s more conscious comrades, he can see around the corners of the dream that protects us from material life, and adopts an experimental attitude to it. “Sambikin began to ponder the life of matter—the life of his own self; it was as if he were a laboratory animal, the part of the world he had been allocated so that he could investigate the entirety of everything, in all its obscurity.”¹¹¹ But where Bozhko lights upon the totality and not the particular; Sambikin loses himself in the molecular.

Sambikin extends true but partial metaphors out of his labors. This is how one can read his “dialectical psychology,” which holds that what is distinctive about our species-being is that we obsess about the gap between two kinds of thought isolated from the world, which for animals are separate, yet intimately related to their world. He locates them in the brain and the spinal cord; cognition and sensation; reflection and labor; molar and molecular—as if dualism were an evolutionary error.

Unhappiness is a body where cognition and sensation are out of joint. “But then our two consciousnesses couple together again, we once again become human beings in the embrace of our ‘two-edged’ thought, and nature, organized according to the principle of an impoverished singleness, grits her teeth and curls herself up to escape from the activity of these terrible dual structures which she never engendered …”¹¹² Sambikin is terrified of his “two passions eternally copulating.” Unlike Bogdanov, Platonov is pessimistic about the feedback loop from cognition to sensation. The rift, he senses, may be inevitable. Both cognition and sensation are physiological, but that does not guarantee a smoothly functioning monism.

A possible name for one of those passions is soul. Sambikin the physiological materialist thinks he has located the soul in the intestine, in the gap between that part of the intestine that is digesting food and that part that is accumulating waste for excretion. He cuts open a cadaver to show it to his friend Sartorius: “This emptiness in the intestines sucks all humanity into itself and is the moving force of world history. This is the soul—have a sniff!”¹¹³

Sartorius later decides, “If the passions of life were concentrated entirely in the darkness of the intestines, world history would not have been so long and fruitless.”¹¹⁴ Life, at least the life of our species-being, is also something else, dependent on, but not reducible to, want. Even Sambikin knows something of this. But to be human is to be limited, to not be up to the task of the shared life physiologically, at least not now. We are only the embryo of something. But it is unhappiness which shows the way forward, not happiness. The happy know not their own disingressions.

What Sambikin and Sartorius have in common is a “yearning for a definitive structuring of the world.”¹¹⁵ Sartorius is a famous engineer, and at first more immune to feelings for Moscow than Bozhko or Sambikin. Better to love atoms and dust! He is a little further along the way to becoming part of a baser, more molecular world. But he falls for her too. “If Moscow had squatted to pee, Sartorius would have begun to cry.”¹¹⁶ He sniffs her shoes. “He could have looked at the waste products of her body with the greatest of interest, since they too had not long ago formed part of a splendid person.”¹¹⁷ Sambikin’s obsession with the intestine and the interiority of the soul here becomes reversed into an obsession with the body and the exteriority of life—and in Platonov the waste products of both body and soul can be sniffed!

Sartorius wants to marry Moscow but she is always exceeding what can be an “inalienable asset,” and in any case Moscow refuses him, as she alone knows that the couple could be just a barrier to shared life rather than a step toward it. When they fuck it only gets worse. It does not dissipate his possessive desire. As Moscow insists, “it is impossible to unite through love” and “love cannot be communism.”¹¹⁸ It’s an appetite, a want. It’s like eating food, a necessity, but nothing sacred. Here Platonov pursues the death of God into what is still its last hold-out: romantic-cum-sexual desire.

Sartorius abandons the “high road of technology.”¹¹⁹ But he remains in a sense an experimental engineer, a human soul engineer, but in the reverse sense to that meant by Stalinist doctrine. “Sartorius could see that the world consisted primarily of destitute matter, which it was almost impossible to love but essential to understand.”¹²⁰ The soul is that part of human matter that cannot be instrumentalized, which has to be treated as the temperamental organ of an everyday practice. “Sartorius realized that love came into being as a result of the poverty of society, a universal poverty that had still not been eliminated and which meant people were unable to find any better, higher destiny and didn’t know what to do with themselves.”¹²¹ Love is a falling short of organization, or a compensation for its falling: the heart of a heartless, and Godless, world.

Sartorius buys a black-market passport and begins another life as someone else, and starts to forget being Sartorius.¹²² This throws into shocking relief a moment when hearing Beethoven almost makes Sambikin recall some former life. What if everyone passed into someone else and forgot their former self? Sartorius goes out into the world to “research the entire extent of current life by transforming himself into other people.”¹²³ And this might be Platonov’s account of his own method, of locating fragments of lost labor, which in their sadder moments reveal the ungainly and partial synthesis so far achieved by our species-being, our fallings-short of dynamic equilibrium.

Sartorius at least gets as far as debunking the extorted reconciliation of contraries in a false totality supposedly ruled by communist will:

Sartorius made a movement of his hand—thus, according to the universal theory of the world instigating an electro-magnetic oscillation which must disturb even the most distant star. He smiled at such a pathetic and impoverished conception of the great world. No, the world was better and more mysterious than that: neither a movement of the hand nor the work of the human heart would disturb the stars—otherwise everything would have been shaken to pieces long ago by all this trembling piffle.¹²⁴

Sartorius, become the worker Grunyakhin, can still say: “I’m an engineer, I can tell you: nature’s something altogether more serious. You can’t play games with nature.” Even as nature toys with us.

The last of Moscow’s lovers and admirers is not one of the superstructural people but Komyagin, an ailing would-be artist eking out a marginal existence. His former wife still visits him. Moscow listens through the sewer pipe in the wall as they fuck. “Our love has grown into something better—into shared poverty …”¹²⁵ Komyagin, who reserves himself from the Soviet state and its great projects, is in some ways the character closest to communism with his “worn out love.”

But there is something too enervated about Komyagin. Moscow rejects him too. “No, this was not the high road that led into the distance; the road of life did not pass through the poverty of love, or through the intestines, or through the zealous attempts of a Sartorius to comprehend precise trifles.”¹²⁶ Moscow is not on a journey with a destination. There is no Hegelian overcoming and uplifting. There is no land or sky, or even horizon. As Bozhko, of all characters, realizes: “Mother history’s made monsters of the lot of us!”¹²⁷

Moscow’s line is more a drift, a dérive, outside of the division of labor and its partial results, but one which touches on the fragments of what might have to be brought together in a shared life, a comradely life, the only life outside of death.¹²⁸ Bozhko’s selfless communication, Sambikin’s clinical regard of the material body, Sartorius’ molecular precision, Komyagin’s love shorn of self-involved desire—these are the traces Moscow finds in the city, after wandering high and low, and far and wide, within the city’s perimeter, the stray leaves of the labor point of view. Where Voschev collects fragmentary objects, Moscow collects bits of subjectivity.

As Fredric Jameson has noted of Platonov, the molar and the molecular don’t add up.¹²⁹ Something keeps falling out of the story, even at the scale of characters. Even big-hearted Moscow vents a Stalinist urge to have useless Komyagin erased from life. But in the end she knows that’s no solution. The leap of faith comes down to earth, and in its self-regard, it burns itself up on its descent.

THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER COMMUNISM

At a time when Stalin declared the final victory of the socialist economy in industry and agriculture, Platonov managed at least a temporary escape to the Soviet far east. There the women still ground corn by hand, and Soviet power was still somewhat notional.¹³⁰ Unable to publish, Gorky got him attached to a writer’s brigade expedition to Turkmenia in 1934, to which he was able to return for a few months the following year.

Soul, also known as Dzhan, is the novella that resulted. It is a détournement of “high Stalinist” adventure writing.¹³¹ It is not about the mythic proletarian of the old Bolshevik imagination, but rather the cult of the Stalinist leader. It follows Chagataev from Moscow to the East, where he was born, and back again. He is of course an orphan, who found a father in Stalin, and whose return journey is to the country of his mother. Soul is, most astonishingly, an imagining of a kind of non-Stalin. It is also a restaging of the scenario of Chevengur, but with a surprising outcome.

Chagataev is from a homeless, wandering people called the Dzhan, made up of exiles and deserters of all nations. Their name means soul, their only possession, for they have less even than proletarians. And yet they outlive empires. “The beys thought that the soul meant only despair; but in the end it was their dzhan that was the death of them; they had too little dzhan of their own, too little capacity to feel, suffer, think and struggle. They had too little of the wealth of the poor”—rather like all ruling classes.¹³²

The Dzhan play out a series of tactics. Cruelly oppressed by the Khan of Khiva, who tortures his subjects to make them fear him, the Dzhan walk right into his city and demand to be killed all at once. The Khan only manages to kill those Dzhan who feared death. The others walk about the bazaar unscathed, nonchalantly picking fruit from the stalls and eating freely without payment, before returning to the desert. It is not unlike Platonov’s own strategy for enduring Stalinism.

As the child Chagataev says to his mother of living in the desert: “We can live without thinking anything and pretend we’re not us.”¹³³ But the desert is hard and poor, and the Dzhan exhaust themselves in it. The desert is an extreme version of Bartleby’s, “I would prefer not to,” a refusal of any and all engagement, but it comes at the price of extinguishing not only life and selfhood but also the soul, which requires a surplus of life for it to exist.

The Dzhan are the defeated in a spiritual class struggle. “The class struggle begins with the victory of the oppressors over the ‘holy spirit’ confined within the slave: blasphemy against the master’s beliefs—against the master’s soul, the master’s god—goes unpardoned, while the slave’s own soul is ground down in … destructive labor.” And so the Dzhan nation chose to forget it had a soul. It was not tempted by anything and could live on next to nothing. “It pretends to be dead—otherwise those who are happy and strong will come and torment it again.”¹³⁴

Little Chagataev is sent off with the last of the food and with only a walking stick for company to find a new father for himself. The one he finds is Soviet power. He studies economics in Moscow, where he meets Vera, with whom he forms a relationship, but without “furious pleasure.” Vera already has a child—Ksenya—and is pregnant again when she and Chagataev meet. Platonovian dissatisfactions trouble him: “Chagataev could not endure the strength of his own life,” and “he could not understand why happiness seemed so improbable to everyone.”¹³⁵

Fortunately a mission intervenes: Soviet power sends him to find his lost nation. As the train heads east, he notices that the portraits of Stalin look less and less like the man they are supposed to represent. “The artist tried to make Stalin’s face resemble his own.”¹³⁶ As perhaps does Platonov, who in Soul imagines a non-Stalin in his own image.

Like Dvanov, Chagataev abandons the train and heads out on foot, beyond the reach of the locomotive of history, and even of the history of locomotives. Beyond the rails is a harsh landscape. The desert is not grand; nature isn’t providence. It was not made for the human and is indifferent to us: “It was as if the world had been created for some brief, mocking game. But this game of make-believe had dragged on for a long time, for eternity, and nobody felt like laughing any more.” And yet Chagataev sides, in this landscape, with the powers of life. He cares for “an entire, difficult world.”¹³⁷

He wanders the land of his childhood in search of his people. Most have gone their separate ways. Some are off working on irrigation projects around the Amu Darya River. Some still live in families, and have love for one another, but have neither hope nor food nor happiness. Chagataev finds his mother, and now “everything was here—mother and homeland, childhood and future.”¹³⁸ But his mother moves about as if in a dream, and it is as if he wakes into this dream. His mother still believes in property, but hasn’ t the strength even for greed. The Dzhan are beyond thought and language.

Chagataev is not the first agent the state has sent out into this wilderness. He finds the skeleton of a Red Army soldier and adopts his helmet. He meets his immediate predecessor, Nur Mohammad, who gave up trying to bring the Dzhan to communism. “I can’t resurrect the dead,” he says.¹³⁹ Nur’s policy is to keep burying the Dzhan until they’re all gone, then return to the state and report “mission accomplished.” Or so he says. Nur has something of the same cruelty as the Khan of Khiva: “If you torture people too long, they die. You should torture them a little, then let them play, then torture them again.”¹⁴⁰ Plato has it in The Laws that we are all the playthings of the Gods.¹⁴¹ Nur would have earthly power aspire to that Godly power, rather than to that of the things with which it plays.

The Dzhan lose a three-year-old child in the desert and barely notice. Here it is not communism but its absence that is responsible for the lost generation. One of the last born of the Dzhan is Aidym. Nur had intended to lead all the Dzhan into Afghanistan and sell them for slaves, but only Aidym is of any value now. Nur rapes her, but in this version of the story the children born of communism suffer yet don’t die.

Chagataev, the good agent, the non-Stalin, bearer of the memory of the revolution, has to fight the bad agent, its betrayer. Chagataev is resolved that his nation, “more than anything, needed a different life, a life that didn’t exist yet and which they could live without it being the death of them.”¹⁴² When he learns by telegram that his Vera, back in Moscow, has died in childbirth, he knows that the faith that was once an objective worldview has passed from this world, and there is nothing for it but to press on, if only to another iteration of this world.

Alone in the desert, Chagataev starts to tune in to the ambient chorus of the natural world, barely audible and indifferent to him: “All through the night he heard round him a vague humming, a diverse agitation, the troubled movement of a natural world that had faith in what it was doing and where it was going.” But it offers nothing for the Dzhan. Their souls scatter and expire. Chagataev too succumbs. “He began to mutter words to himself, living his life as if it were superfluous to him.”¹⁴³

The Dzhan find sheep in the desert, but without a shepherd. The sheep watch impassively as one of their number is slaughtered, as if it were no concern of theirs. The Dzhan follow the sheep, while wild beasts follow the Dzhan in an endless routine of subsistence without direction or end. Life goes on by habit, inertia, while the sand grinds, grain against grain, in the wind. Sometimes the sheep stray, and like the tumbleweeds are blown off course, “and so the universal guiding force, of everything from plants to humans, is really the wind.”¹⁴⁴ This is bare uneventful time, without accumulation or memory, genesis or goal:

But what was the dream that nourished the consciousness of the nation, if the whole of this wandering nation was able to go on bearing its fate? The nation couldn’t be living off truth; had it known the truth about itself, it would have died at once from sorrow. But people live because they have been born, not because of mind or truth, and, while the heart goes on beating, it breaks up and grinds away their despair, losing its own substance as it destroys itself through work and endurance.¹⁴⁵

In this closed loop of everyday, unexaminable life, the Dzhan forget themselves, but endure.

All except Chagataev, who is tormented by memories. “Stalin was alive and would bring about the universal happiness of the unhappy anyway, but it was a shame that the Dzhan nation, who had a greater need for life and happiness than any other nation of the Soviet Union, would by then be dead.”¹⁴⁶ Or perhaps Chagataev, their non-Stalin, might have another idea, not one which introduces the surplus death of the universal into life, but rather one which both produces a surplus out of dead matter beyond subsistence, and which in turn introduces life into thought. The utopia of Chevengur starts with the universal of equality by which any violence can be justified, and which cannot support life. The Dzhan start with life, to which surplus is added, and out of which a comradeship might form, the only viable tektological formula.

Chagataev has to find a different way to lead, after the disenchantment with great men and their fatal plans, tempting though they are. He learns to lead from a situation rather than to a horizon. “It seemed to Chagataev that the whole of humanity, were it here before him, would be looking at him with this same expectancy, ready to delude itself with hopes, endure disillusion, and busy itself once again with diverse, inescapable life.”¹⁴⁷ Having endured disillusion with the universal, there’s nothing for it but designs for life, low theories, and everyday praxis from the labor point of view.

Chagataev is the expendable, rather than conquering, vanguard. He is not Stalin, to whom a people belong like slaves. “He felt as if he belonged to others, as if he were the last possession of those who have no possessions, about to be squandered to no purpose, and he was seized by the greatest, most vital fury of his life.”¹⁴⁸ The last possession of bare life lies in someone else’s memory of it. Chagataev both remembers the Dzhan as they are and loves them as they might be, in advance and forever.

Chagataev designs a viable life with his people. Aidym becomes the president of their soviet. They no longer have to strain their memories to remember themselves. It is hardly utopia. The Dzhan still prefer oblivion to communism. They have forgotten the aim of life, like zombie-Bartlebys. They forgot their own wants, since nothing had ever come of them. They live only through inertia. They may have no soul left to lose. “Had everything there been so worn away by suffering that even imagination, the intelligence of the poor, had entirely died?”¹⁴⁹

Praxis starts and ends with the struggle for life; everything else is just useless duplicity or dangerous theology. Chagataev helps them find food. “He knew that this was very important, since only a minority of people living on the earth dine every day and the majority do not.” The nation are still not convinced life is an advantage, but they now grasp that life at base upon which soul depends, and without the fetishism which makes soul appear as autonomous or even causative. They know that the soul, like the body, has to eat. “They ate without greed, taking care of the food in their mouths, with a consciousness of the food’s necessity and meek thoughtfulness, as if seeing in their imagination the faces and souls of all those who had labored hard to procure the food and give it to them.”¹⁵⁰

His mother dies, leaving Chagataev orphaned now from both the state and his own family. In Soul it is the past that falls away, as it should, not the future. But the Dzhan go their separate ways. Dreams separate us, even when they are dreams of communism. Or rather: communisms, since in Platonov, actual communisms are never a stage in a molar narrative, but are at best proliferating situations in which comradely love prevails, if just for a time. Like all people, the Dzhan can find how best to live for themselves. Chagataev is surprised not to be of any use to his nation any more. As Aidym says, “We want something different now, a different kind of grief, a more interesting grief.”¹⁵¹ The Dzhan want a grief adequate to the tragedy of the totality.

The role of Chagataev as non-Stalin can only be negative, a vanguard that dissolves itself in acts. Yet Chagataev wants to gather the nation back, and goes in search of them. In a market town he meets Khanom and experiences love—one of the few such instances in Platonov. “And then Chagataev put both his arms around Khanom, as if he had seen in her an image of what had never been realized in him and never would be realized in him but would remain alive after him—in the form of a different, higher human being, on an earth grown kinder than it had been for Chagataev.”¹⁵² Sexual love can now generate an image of a future evolution. Perhaps the memory of the future can be kept there, rather than buried deep in some base crypt.

Chagataev writes a report to the capital, which is perhaps like the one Serbinov writes from Chevengur, except that this one is about the happiness of the shared life of the Dzhan, and also their still-pressing material need. In Chevengur, the documenting of one or several communisms is the end of them. The troops arrive on horseback in answer to Serbinov’s report. In response to the report of Soul, trucks arrive not with guns but with provisions, a great gift from elsewhere.¹⁵³ Comradely love and the production of a material surplus, like clay and top soil, rest on one another but are separate achievements. Chagataev takes Aidym to Moscow, and the Dzhan elect Khanom president of the soviet. Chagataev reunites with Ksenya. The text ends with them holding hands.

SOCIALIST TRAGEDY

None of Platonov’s great series of (anti)novellas were published in his lifetime, although some of his very fine stories were. Somehow he survived the 1930s. He became a war correspondent, and after the war published versions of traditional folk tales. His last story appeared in a children’s magazine, and recounts the fortunes of a speck of grain and a speck of gunpowder. Even this molecular fable attracted censure.¹⁵⁴

While without doubt one of the great writers of the Soviet experience, he can be read also in other registers. The critical misalignment of the non-living, the living, and the organizational diagram is no less a problem of our own time. One can’t help suspecting that the Carbon Liberation Front would have come as no surprise to him. He was already thinking about the problem of labor and nature as a problem calling for new kinds of writing outside of socialist realism. The challenge of writing in and against capitalist realism calls for another Platonov, or perhaps rather for a new kind of proletkult.

Platonov’s Marxism is an ascetic one, based on the experience of sub-proletarian everyday life. Nature is not abundant—and just as well. If nature was abundant then it would have been plundered and squandered by history already. Or perhaps nature would have destroyed itself by now, even without human agency. “The dialectic is probably an expression of miserliness, of the daunting harshness of nature’s construction, and it is only thanks to this that the historical development of humankind became possible.” Otherwise it would all be over, “as when a child plays with sweets that have melted in his hand before he has even time to eat them.”¹⁵⁵

Technology plays a decisive role in the struggle within and against nature. Technology for Platonov is not just machines and such, but, as in Bogdanov, a method, or even a design, of organization. Included in a technology is its technicians, and even their ideology. This ideology is not superstructural. It is internal to technology’s organization, one of its elements. The technology, technician, and ideology assemblage, or apparatus, organizes itself and its objects in particular ways, and is prone to breakage, decay, and misdirection. Platonov pays particular attention to the technician’s part within this as a kind of love for the machine.

“The situation between technology and nature is a tragic one.” Technology offers leverage on the world, but always from a particular vantage point. Nature can always surround or surmount it. The “dialectic” of nature always eludes the apparatus of labor and technology. Nature is the enemy of our species-being.¹⁵⁶ Technology can only soften it. There’s no end to the struggle in and against it. The unruliness of nature never goes away, not least because it is part of the technical anyway, an unsleeping rust.

In both Bogdanov and Platonov, in complimentary but different ways, we find the resources to think again about labor’s relation to nature as primary. Capitalism keeps capturing our attention. Communism fascinates some once again, as an understandable but hardly helpful nostalgia. Meanwhile, the two most useful categories to think with, and think of—labor and nature—receive hardly any love. This is where Bogdanov and Platonov come, like Dvanov and Kopenkin, to the rescue.

Every increase in productive forces comes at some cost, somewhere. As Platonov says in a prescient pair of lines: “The ancient life on the ‘surface’ of nature could still obtain what it needed from the waste and excretions of elemental forces and substances. But we are making our way inside the world, and in response it is pressing down upon us with equivalent force.” The mining of the earth for its properties undermines at the same time this very labor. It is Bogdanov’s biregulator in a more pessimistic mode. There’s no enclosure that can keep nature out. It is as true of Stalin’s grand projects as of our time’s gated communities.

Language is a thing, and like other things it can be appropriated and shared by labor. But while it belongs to the class of things, no thing has special access to the objects beyond their ken. The world of things keeps coming to light through a range of practices, and sometimes in difficult and intractable forms. Hence the vital significance of Platonov’s experience of electrical and hydrological engineering, through which the molecular thing enters his field of perception and also his writing. The intractability of things gives rise to a special kind of tragedy.¹⁵⁷

Sadness is the mood by which the divorce between the sensation of the world and the idea of it is felt and thought. This rift can be ignored, and thought can go its own way, leaping fatally into the void. Or, grief can be shared. The comrades are the ones with which we share life’s task of shoring up its impossible relation to a recalcitrant world. All we can share are the same travails, and we are only comrades when we might all share all of them. An injury to one is an injury to all.

We live on in spite of the impossibility of living, as if by habit. Everyday life is a kind of inertia. Molecular matter yields a surplus on which life fuels; life in turn can yield another surplus, for that other life of the soul. But there’s no transitive relation between these superstructures and their base, between topsoil and clay. It’s hard to actually know anything about the infrastructure and nature from the experience of its surplus. We are nature’s orphans, or perhaps just its clones. We know it as cause but not so much what or how it causes, and even our own actions are included back in its causative effect on us, unilaterally, without a two-way exchange or shadings of difference.¹⁵⁸

That surplus that is soul can dream of a higher, universal idea, but those ideas are always singular and inflected by private desires. They can’t be generalized. Only (non-intellectual) labor and (non-romantic) love are shared—Platonov adds love to Bogdanov’s labor—and in both cases not without their limitations. An idea is always a folly, but a necessary folly. The idea is a sort of impossible crystal, dead and inert, without which boredom and grief weather us. But the idea on its own is only the concept of death, as if it could be outside of the entropy, inertia, and forgetfulness of life in time. Ideas are there as material for experiment and substitution.

Better to live then on a secondary idea, which mediates between the idea and labor, keeping the dead ideal from direct contact with life, where either the idea of death will live and kill life, or life itself will kill the deathly idea, but leave only boring emptiness. The secondary idea should be practical, attaching itself to the problem of life and inert matter, rather than life and soul. The secondary idea is usually a design problem, and hence, in principle, soluble.

There is only one hope, and it is in eternal life, but this endless life has nothing to do with spirit or even the idea. It isn’t universal. It exists only in the sensation of shared existence. Living things are each other’s comrades, even in their struggles against each other. Our species-being is lost from shared life when we make a fetish of a particular idea, a particular love, or a particular labor, as Bogdanov might say. Platonov shows the deadly consequences of fetishes of this type.

When drawn into the practice of everyday life, ideas dissolve into their constituent parts, the bits of language, which are articulated in new and surprising forms. This is détournement at work, the molecular labor of making and remaking sense in given situations. The people make meaning, but not with the means of their own making. The proletariat might one day substitute for its various fetishisms an objective worldview, a tektology that might organize base and superstructure. The “relative autonomy of the superstructures” is actually one of the fetishes to be overcome.¹⁵⁹

THE FACTORY OF LITERATURE

While it is of considerable antiquarian interest, Platonov’s “The Factory of Literature” also lends itself to a reading as a method of constructing text that anticipates not only détournement, but several critical forms of twenty-first-century cultural production that are usually seen as separate or even antithetical. Here is a bold precedent for the “uncreative” writing methods of Kathy Acker, Vanessa Place, and Kenneth Goldsmith. It is also based in part in a kind of “cultural analytics” of big data of the kind advocated by Lev Manovich. And it touches on the kind of “networked book” advanced by Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Bob Stein.¹⁶⁰ Even so, Platonov’s version might have as yet unexplored affordances. Where socialist realism would subordinate the labor of writing to the mythic templates of the party, Platonov, as usual, reversed the procedure. He built a prose from the bottom up. It might yet work as a procedure in and against capitalist realism as well.

I bought a leather notepad and divided it into seven sections with the following headings: 1. Work, 2. Love, 3. Everyday Life, 4. Personality traits, 5. Discussion with oneself, 6. Unexpected thoughts and findings and 7. Miscellaneous and special … I include into this journal everything that I find interesting and everything that can be a ready-made component for literary work, including excerpts from newspapers, separate phrases from the same source, pieces from different popular and not popular books, real dialogues from different sources, and I write my own ideas, themes and pieces. I am trying to live my life in a way that I notice everything that is valuable for the notepad.¹⁶¹

One could see this as a sort of tagging exercise, sampling language and adding metadata to it of seven kinds. But that’s just the start. Now comes the hard part: “I flip through the notepad in the evenings and I focus on one specific note and I start working on that theme, also taking into account the next notes and sketches. I focus on dialogues, description of streets and other miracles that I slightly alter, depending on my goals and my capacity to connect these pieces by personal cement.”

As with Platonov’s contemporary, the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, the emphasis moves from making the elements of the work to the editing:

You end up with an essay where your contribution is only 5–10% but it’s all about my edits and ambitions. Editing is what brings us closer to the author since it is a very intimate spiritual individual corrector, that illustrates the presence of a real and passionate hand and personal passion, as well as the ambition and goal of a real person. Borrowed from people, I give it back to them having thought it through … The result is, or is supposed to be, truly fascinating because thousands of people worked on it and contributed their individual and collective reviews of the world.¹⁶²

Like détournement, it’s a matter of borrowing and correcting ready-made elements. In Platonov, the metaphorical substitution runs from prepared ingredients in food preparation to text preparation:

What exactly are ready-made ingredients? Myths, historical and modern facts and events, everyday activities and an ambitious or better destiny—all of these which are proclaimed by thousands of mouths and hundreds of dry and anonymous official papers will be ready-made components for writers, since all of these are made unintentionally, genuinely, for free and by chance and you cannot write better than that: this is a 100% equivalent of life that is enriched by a virgin soul.

Like Kathy Acker, Platonov experiments with mixing “real” and “fake” biographical elements:

You write all kinds of things and improve … Your friends will ask you where this is coming from. You smirk and I say that it comes from people themselves. A lot of writers do a better job in telling the story than writing it. I decided to experiment once and included my friend’s speech into my essay. He read it and got excited but didn’t remember since I edited it a bit. He still doesn’t get it that work that actually produces big results just requires manual dexterity.¹⁶³

Writing is work for Platonov, a kind of labor, not the “life of the mind.” On the contrary it is more mineral than spiritual:

Art is organically an essential part of life, just like sweating is part of a human body and motion is part of wind. However, in passing within the subsoil of a body, in geological layers in areas with narrow coverage of human collective structures, art is not always visible and publicly accessible. It is about making it visible and bringing it out of the geological layers onto the surface of everyday life.

Given how malleable words are, it is striking how the labor of transforming them is still caught up in petit-bourgeois ideas of the craftsman producer, as if each writer could make a motor car by hand: “They still make cars by themselves forgetting that there is Ford and Citroën … comparing the knowledge and intellect circulating in the world of builders with circles of writers—the comparison is not in favor of latter.”¹⁶⁴

One division of labor that might advance the production of literature would be a kind of critic-engineer, whose job is not to anatomize forms, but to actually produce them: “the critics’ job and main mission is to develop new methods for writing that simplify and improve the writers work … Critics need to become constructors of ‘machines’ that produce literature, and the artist will work on the machines.” A second division of labor, once such a form exists, is between the inductive and editing labor processes. The literary component is not the making of the words, but the editing of that product: “But literature is a social phenomenon and therefore it needs to be developed by social collective force only under the leadership and editing drive of one person—the writer.”

The factory of literature works up the raw material of speech and text into prefabricated elements, being careful not to edit out in advance what is “nutritious” in it:

In every national republic or area there must be at least seven literary factories. Maybe the story can be divided into sections and each factory works on one section. So these literary factories are primary workshops where ready-made ingredients are processed. And then this material gets delivered to national literary factories that are the most experienced ones, where actual writers work … However, it is not required that the literary factory have excellent editing skills—that unique capacity to add something to the ready-made ingredients and make an essay out of it.

To the extent that anyone built anything like this, in the Soviet Union it was the secret police, and in our time the National Security Agency. But the difference is that while those textual factories attribute statements to individuals to make them culpable, Platonov’s version does the reverse. The circulation of language produces its effects—heretical or orthodox—in its speakers, not the other way around. “This isn’t hierarchy … The most important benefit of the factory is of course the division of labor and the fact that it covers lots of human lives, masses and territories, thousands of eyes.” But eyes that aren’t looking for suspects. Platonov’s factory is anonymous.¹⁶⁵

Of course the Factory of Literature is a fantasy, a utopia, or perhaps a meta-utopia, a means of making not only actual but virtual worlds out of language. It is not a communist horizon but a non-Euclidian space of possibility, of n-dimensions, folds, forkings, and joining paths. And while it may be the case that the twenty-first century has the technology to realize it, what was actually built is quite the opposite. Still, it remains just one of a whole menagerie of living forms, possible but not actual, with which to shape what Anne Balsamo calls the technological imagination, but one that integrates a unique form of workers’ inquiry, or in the era of the social factory, of mass observation.¹⁶⁶

In everyday life, language acquires a necessarily partial adhesion to whatever loves and labors it is made to work with. This is why the personae of Platonov’s texts matter. Each embodies a given practice and the fetishisms specific to that situation. Comradely life becomes possible when the rule of the universal over such situations is abandoned. Such situations cannot even be grouped in sets, for there is no ruling idea even of their separation and ordering.

In Foundation Pit, Voschev gathered up lost things, forgotten things, wasted things, things that deviated from the fantasy realism of the times. Voschev gleans them and keeps them in a bag, as an inventory and offering, as a gift to another time. Perhaps it is now time to look for such gifts from times past. Here in the overdeveloped world, it is as if, in the dream of the seven fat decades, we forgot about the seven lean decades. We lived in and looked only to the superstructures, assuming the base was too basic and vulgar for our refined minds. The Carbon Liberation Front changes all such calculations.

The great patrons of the critical thought of our time are still speaking mostly of useless things. Their words are dead to us. We find ourselves orphaned from those other queer ancestors who, like Platonov, might speak to our most vulgar problems. Fortunately, it is still possible to cobble together a kind of mad Golem that can speak to this era of metabolic rift in something like the accent of the overdeveloped world, who can rail against capitalist realist certainties with a quite other kind of realism, one which limns close to what’s there to be actually sensed.

3

Cyborg Donna Haraway: Techno-science Worlds and Beings

California! Über alles!

—The Dead Kennedys

THE CALIFORNIA IDEOLOGY

If Part I of Molecular Red is set in a slightly mythical early twentieth-century Soviet Union, Part II spirits us off to an even more mythical late twentieth-century California. This story too can begin as a story about water, and metabolic rift. This western edge of American Empire is a coastal plain backed by a vast mountain range, the waters of which have been routed through a hydraulic engineering project about as vast as that which drained the Aral Sea.

The centerpiece of this infrastructure, which would have staggered the imagination of Platonov, was built on the ruins of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the largest estuary in the western hemisphere. The State Water Project and the Central Valley Project pump water falling on the Sierra Mountains through here on its way from northern to southern California, mostly for agriculture, but also providing a small though crucial part of the water supply for the great southern cities. Not to mention the golf courses of California, which between them use more water than the city of Los Angeles. The water can travel 500 miles, and the whole exercise uses 5 percent of the state’s electricity. It is perhaps a ruin still in slow-motion progress, plagued by drought and rising sea levels.¹

But for now it hydrates the fresh skin of that familiar California landscape of suburbs and gulags, malls and freeways. Like its water infrastructure, that landscape was built after the Pacific War and on Pacific trade, but also in large measure on military industries. This is where capitalist realism’s “California Ideology” was born. It is a feral cross between cyber-culture and counter-culture, where the disruptive power of “tech” is supposed to power the freeing of any and every resource for commodification. Part II of Molecular Red is about some Californians who have been critical of the California Ideology, but who did not seek any refuge from it in returning to the worn clichés of a bourgeois liberal humanism.²

As we shall see, there’s no haven to be found in any of those romantic longings for something outside of the combined powers of strategic command, commodified vectors, and technological refashioning that undergird the California Ideology. It is no longer the case that art or literature or the imagination or the body or desire or the human or nature or the absolute or even the communist horizon could be the ethical or cultural or political avatar of the thing-in-itself, the locus solus outside the machine of the military-entertainment complex. It has no outside, and it is accelerating.

Even California’s majestic, ancient Sierra Nevada mountains no longer stand as mute witness to the human vanity below. They too are changing as the climate changes, and irrevocably.³ In the era of the Carbon Liberation Front, there is no way to return to a lost ecology, where that is understood as a cyclical, healing and soothing natural orderliness. The California coast, that most westerly edge of this new world, is no longer the terminus of manifest destiny.

California’s latent destiny is now that of which we must speak. Manifest destiny had a spatial horizon, the ever-westward advance of a civilization that took that very colonizing momentum as proof of its own virtue. Latent destiny has a more temporal horizon. It is an undoing of that time in which the future was like the present, only more of it. Latent destiny is a temporary temporality populated by spectacles of disintegration, of glyph and .gif glimpses of new futures that refute old pasts. The going is getting weird.

Packing an intellectual knapsack for clambering around the sierras of this new kind of unstable ‘cene is a challenging task in itself. My wager is on the utility of a group of writers who could be thought of as coming from the same bag as Bogdanov and Platonov. They might equip us with a latter-day empirio-monism, tektology, and labor point of view, and even a utopian fiction for the times. Part II of Molecular Red is the prep list for the trek out of theories-past toward the Anthropocene present.

Given the advanced stage of the division of intellectual labor, there’s nobody in late twentieth-century California who attempted to write theoretically about as many topics as Bogdanov, let alone in fiction as well. The writer who comes closest is Donna Haraway. Certainly, the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California (Santa Cruz), where she taught, is the closest thing in the United States to a tektological research program. Haraway and her colleagues and students performed both critical and constructive work on the way metaphorical substitutions leap between scientific, technical, social scientific, and humanistic knowledge production.

But it seems fittingly Bogdanovite to approach the creation of a latter-day tektology as a collaborative and collective project, rather than focus on Haraway’s work as a solo act—great though it is. Hence our itinerary visits with one of her sources (Paul Feyerabend), then Haraway’s own work, then that of a colleague (Karan Barad), followed by one of Haraway’s students (Paul Edwards). Their respective labors allow us to update in turn Bogdanov’s empirio-monism, his tektology, the labor point of view, and his attempt to think at the scale of the molecular and of the biosphere. I approach these writers as if they were what Haraway calls messmates. I call the composite that arises out of their breaking bread together Cyborg Haraway, as it is a sort of text-machine of indeterminate type that makes itself through critical thinking in and about the various sciences.

Thinking about labor today, not least scientific labor, calls for a close attention to something that does not quite rise to the level of a concept in Bogdanov—the apparatus. The highly specialized and differentiated kinds of labor of the twenty-first century, particularly in the sciences, give off fascinating and diverse substitutional chains of metaphor, image, and diagram through which to construct basic metaphors for worldviews of far more generality than Bogdanov could ever have imagined, but also a host of new dangers. Here the physicist and feminist science studies professor Karan Barad can help us grasp what it means to think through the apparatus and the sensations of modern physics, to construct a worldview whose experimental bases really are molecular, if not sub-atomic.

Having assembled a Cyborg Haraway remake of empirio-monism and tektology, the last chapter of Molecular Red asks whether there is a role then for the speculative fiction of Bogdanov’s Red Star, and his anti-theological insistence that writing respond to yearnings and desires for a horizon of the absolute with popular fictions rather than specialized philosophies. It proposes the writings of Kim Stanley Robinson as an equivalent to Bogdanov’s utopian writing in the era of the Carbon Liberation Front.

Early twenty-first-century critical thought is expressing the desire for another life in two main ways. One is a revival of a kind of revolutionary subjectivity, a psychoanalytic Leninist sublime. The other is a kind of speculative absolute, a theory purified of any merely human phenomenal dimension and set free in a hyper-chaotic or vitalist cosmos.⁴ The former radicalizes the category of subject; the latter absolutizes the category of object. What tends to get evacuated in both cases is the bit in the middle, the media between object and subject (or whatever contemporary avatars of those ancient concepts is in vogue). The situation which mediates between and enables the cut that delineates object from subject is where we find sensation, apparatus, and the labor point of view.

This is where we build a contemporary empirio-monism, tektology, and that component of a proletkult that might take the form of a meta-utopian fiction, all of which in their lowly way is where we might start to grapple with the Anthropocene. After working through Robinson’s conceptual personae and their narrative arcs as myths for a new proletkult, we can then turn, by way of conclusion, to thinking how labor and nature, science and utopia, might forge organizational forms for the Anthropocene. But first, let’s turn to that most unlikely Californian—Paul Feyerabend.

FROM MACH TO FEYERABEND

The “Machist” strand of thought fell silent among the competing leftist theories of the late twentieth century.⁵ But Mach himself had at least one first-rate champion in science studies. “The nineteenth century produced one philosopher who was not prepared to accept the status quo, who was not content to criticize science from the safe distance of a special subject either, but who proceeded to suggest concrete means for its change. The nineteenth century produced Ernst Mach.”⁶ The twentieth century produced Paul Feyerabend.

While he was once offered a job by Bertolt Brecht, Feyerabend was always remote from, not to mention contemptuous of, Marxism. Feyerabend: “Is it surprising that I dislike reformers like Brecht who turn the theater, one of the last strongholds of magic, into a sociological laboratory?”⁷ His was more of a dadaist soul. The challenge is to think forward from Feyerabend’s revival of Mach to what a more contemporary strain of Machist Marxist thought, one adequate to the twenty-first century, might become. Perhaps even one with a little, but not too much, magic. The question of whether Feyerabend’s Mach is the actual Mach-in-himself, or only one refracted through Feyerabend’s own lens, need not detain us. Nor do I claim to give all that complete or accurate a resemblance of Feyerabend.

The Mach who colors Feyerabend’s world is the philosopher-scientist, running theories through practices and vice versa. He grants science autonomy from any logical construction or idealized reconstruction. Science is as science does; a knowledge without foundation. The scientist is not someone with access to a special portal to the real, and the knowledge he (yes he for now, we shall come back to that) creates can be connected to other kinds of knowledge practice, and other kinds of knowledge practitioners.⁸

Feyerabend’s thought anticipates more of a democratic than a proletarian knowledge. He had a keen sense of science as an alibi for colonial power, but his sense of how class and capital work in knowledge production is rudimentary. The quality of his work is elsewhere. He wanted to demystify science, to open the possibility of critique to science as a whole. He wanted a way to move across the divisions of labor within not only science but knowledge more generally. There is no unthinking border between science and folk knowledge, sentience and sapience.

Not many people other than Mach could dilate with such verve about “the awful Newton,” who is not a scientific hero to Feyerabend, but rather someone who set the pattern for science as a mode of authority, as a discipline in its creeping senses.⁹ But at least the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century involved a close collaboration of science and philosophy. Things really went wrong when philosophy became separate, and started to produce its own problems, or when it specialized in codifying science without a reciprocal relation to it (particularly with Kant). By defining the limits of the reasoning subject, philosophy claims to ground science by specifying the conditions under which the phenomenal object of knowledge correlates with a thinking subject.¹⁰

Recall that Bogdanov read these symptoms in slightly different terms. Idealist philosophy practiced a mode of substitution that privileged the experiences of intellectual labor. Its problems were the problems of overcoming the organization of the subjective element, rather than more “objective” ones. Curiously, Feyerabend, like Bogdanov, had a preference for sticking closer to those philosophers for whom the organizing of perceptions of the objective world were closer to hand. They land on one of the same figures in such a counter-history of Western thought: Ernst Mach.

With the benefit of a little more hindsight, Feyerabend is clearer than Bogdanov that Mach’s influence has not always been beneficial. Feyerabend defends Mach’s practice, not his theory. Reifying his theory, as Mach himself and certainly Bogdanov sometimes do, could only lead thought astray. What matters is that Mach connected philosophy-as-practice back to science-as-practice. As a scientist he was able to treat all of science’s components—its theories, methods, apparatus, and results—as available for critical suspension. Science works on the play between all of these elements.¹¹

Most of us are inclined to agree that there is a real world beyond our minds, even if the really-real aspects of it may be hidden from us. The problem with such—broadly—realist approaches to either science or philosophy is that they fix a boundary between object and subject in advance. Some object, whether apparent or hidden, is real. Some subject, perhaps aided by some special method, apprehends it. This diagram can be a complicated one, with all kinds of faculties and forms, but something remains unthought in assuming in advance that there is this object and this subject.

Particularly troubling for such realisms are mediating phenomena. Something has to go on at the boundary between the object world and subjective cognition. Such phenomena trouble the structure of the concepts which cluster and encrust a prior decision, separating object and subject at some arbitrary point. To use a language very foreign to Feyerabend, such mediating phenomena might even deconstruct the givenness of object and subject.¹²

An alternative starting point might be to take the mediation, the stuff between the object and subject, to be what at first glance or grasp is most real. But it is only a starting hypothesis, not a first philosophy: start by treating phenomena as in some sense that which is real. Mach called these phenomena sensations, but they are not reducible to subjective sense impressions, contrary to what Lenin and many other critics of Mach assume.¹³

Rather than posit in advance that there are objects behind the sensations which a subject apprehends, Mach asks a prior question: what are these sensations that end up being parceled out into the subjective and objective? What is the activity that chunks sensation into an index of some object, on the one hand, and as traces via which a subject might come to assert its own separateness, on the other? Inquiry might begin then with the apparent reality of sensations, and an attempt to assay the most simple and regular connections between elements of sensations.

This treatment of phenomena as real is a tactic for Feyerabend rather than a dogma. It does not preclude the possibility of touching on a real, external, even alien world. It is simply a matter of wanting to tack close to practices where the existence of such things can actually be established. Mach used this tactical monism of sensation against the physics and philosophy of his time, which insisted too strongly on a version of a metaphysical real that could not be assayed and tested, and was likely to be a barrier to further knowledge. In Bogdanovian terms, metaphysics was then a resistance to overcome in organizing inquiry.

Sensations are not an absolute. Sensations are to be parsed into elements and connections. Hence the title of Mach’s book, The Analysis of Sensations, where Mach adopts a realism, the realism of sensations—and then applies it.¹⁴ He introduces the working rule that sciences should contain only those concepts that can be connected to sensations. Hence his objection to metaphysical ideas, such as Newton’s, of absolute space and time. These are ways of describing a noumenal world, beyond phenomena, beyond sensation, but which are merely philosophical and cannot be tested. Feyerabend:

Mach develops the outlines of a knowledge without foundations. He introduces cosmological hypotheses as temporary measuring sticks of criticism. The cosmological hypothesis he appeals to most frequently assumes that all our knowledge is related to sensations. Using this hypothesis he criticizes physical theories such as … Newtonian mechanics. The cosmological criticism is strengthened by a more specific examination and by the suggestion of alternatives. In this way Mach achieves unity between science and philosophy that has been lost as the result of the dominance of Newton’s physics and his philosophy.¹⁵

But Mach’s would-be inheritors, such as the logical positivists of the Vienna circle, lost this unity again. For them, sensation primacy becomes a dogma. They mistook the tactic of deploying specific hypotheses in particular circumstances for a generalizable method. In Bogdanov’s terms, what they lacked was the point of view of scientific and technical labor which still imbues Mach’s whole approach. Science is not an object of philosophical contemplation to Mach. It is something at which certain people, including himself, have to work.

It is not for philosophy to extract from past science its universal principles, with a view to imposing them on the future. Feyerabend is a dissenter from that moment when the critique of actual science was replaced with either its logical construction or idealized reconstruction. Such procedures relied on a selective reading of scientific results or on scientists’ self-reporting, after the fact, of their methods. His main object of attack was his own teacher, Sir Karl Popper, but the various epistemological edicts which dog Western Marxism all through the twentieth century attracted his ire in a passing fashion as well.¹⁶

The one thing a Marxist theory of knowledge could not be in that long dark century was “positivist,” and Mach was held loosely to be—at best—an example of such. But Mach’s writings on physics show an approach to knowledge that is not dogmatically positivist. What he calls “instinctive” principles play a large role, and not least because they may be in productive conflict with particular empirical facts. Sometimes the facts have to adapt to the principles. Facts sometimes need to be extracted from the rather particular circumstances in which they are produced. The natural sciences are not then always inductive. Abstraction and imagination are key practices. Mach: “grasping nature by imagination must precede understanding so that our concepts may have a lively and intuitive content.”¹⁷ Ideas do not follow facts; ideas and facts adapt to each other.

Mach did not think that the psychological domain of thoughts, feelings, desires, could know itself by itself, but he did think that research which traces the physical connections could bring thought closer to knowledge of itself. His methods are hybrid methods: knowledge of the physical world should take account of psychological factors; knowledge of psychology should take account of physical factors. These mixed methods have a critical function, of bracketing off the fixed assumptions of the division of subject from object, mind from matter, body from soul, not to mention certain divisions of intellectual labor. In the sciences it has the merit of putting under critical pressure the faith in an absolute external world. In humanistic knowledge, it has the reciprocal merit of critical leverage on the assumption that the reasoning subject alone is the guarantor of knowledge.

Mach has no such faith. His “instinct” works in particular historical situations, with results from this or that particular apparatus. Rather than attribute theoretical leaps to “creativity,” to some humanist derivative of divine inspiration, he asks a more immediately “realist” kind of question: what concrete situations produce such instinctive substitutions? One could call this détournement, or tektology. Feyerabend thinks it’s a species of dada collage method.¹⁸ Perhaps all of these are ways of thinking an historical, and in a sense materialist, approach to the production of novelty in the domain of knowledge. Novelty comes from instinct, which mediates between previously separate domains of inquiry.

Curiously, the apparent lack of immediate foundation for an instinct in specific experiments, conducted in known ways, is what lends it a certain strange authority. Instincts appear independent of our actions and beliefs, even if they are the product of determinate historical circumstances. They usually appear to negate particular assumptions. They emerge more often in situations where the researcher has some contact with a wide range of scientific, technical, and labor processes, and is able to intuit something that cuts across their specificity. This is what Bogdanov, rather than Feyerabend, would stress about Mach: that instinct might be a matter of the speculative substitution of an idea from an adjacent work in progress to the one at hand.

Mach famously held out against the theory of the atom, and this often counts against him in retrospective accounts of the outbreak of revolutionary philosophy-physics around the turn of the century. Feyerabend defends him on this: “There is no need to discredit Mach for his unwavering opposition to atoms. For the mechanical atom of the nineteenth century has indeed disappeared from the scene.”¹⁹ This atomism was not so much a physics as a metaphysics. This atom was a noumenal rather than phenomenal thing, an absolute thing-in-itself rather than a theory about particular sensations.

Rather than reject atomic theory outright, Mach made it a provisional substitution. To be useful, atomic theory had to become phenomenal rather than noumenal. This is exactly what Einstein achieved: a reformulation of physics in ways that would meet Mach’s objections. Whatever Mach himself may have thought, Einstein’s special theory of relativity is “Machist,” not in corresponding to some dogmatic theory of knowledge, but in the sense that in this case Einstein works the way Mach works, for example by suspending belief in an absolute noumenal time.²⁰ In the subsequent debates about quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr will deploy Machist tactics against Einstein.

For Feyerabend, there is no royal road to science. Incorrect ideas can lead to good experiments, theories can succeed even when they don’t account for significant facts. As he notoriously put it: “anything goes.”²¹ Or so the actual history of science would appear to a rationalist, including those Marxists, who, like Lukács and Althusser, think there are special methods, and that the philosophers are their guardians. Feyerabend makes a useful counterpoint to those versions of Western Marxism that were obsessed with coming up with a correct exposition of dialectical materialist method, and which thought that philosophy had some privileged, legislative role in adjudicating what that method ought to be.

Let’s think Marxism then as a heterogeneous collection of rhetorics, theories, methods, results. It is a labyrinthine archive of conceptual personae whose hidden riches may well lie in unexplored aisles. In the absence of a secret police, it no longer has an orthodoxy, regardless of how orthodox some in that archive might have wanted to consider themselves. Haraway: “I want to know how to help build ongoing stories rather than histories that end. In that sense, my kinships are about keeping the lineages going, even while defamiliarizing their members and turning lines into webs, trees into esplanades, and pedigrees into affinity groups.”²²

This would queer a certain precious heirloom from the Marxological cupboard. Lukács:

Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious “orthodox” Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto—without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the “belief” in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a “sacred” book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders.²³

In relation to dogmatic insistence on the truth of Marx’s results, this venerable passage might still seem like progress, but in place of it is a dogmatic privileging of method. Gone is the putting to work of all of the elements against each other, of facts and theories, intuitions and substitutions. In Bogdanov’s terms, it is knowledge as authority; it is philosophy as high theory. Philosophy rules! It is not a comradely effort at collaboration through experimental substitution between particular efforts.

It is not often noticed that Lukács elaborates this theory-dominant approach in opposition not just to the positivism of the “vulgar Marxists,” but also against the “Machists,” whose thought-crime is different: a comradely equality of different modes of inquiry. The problem with the Machists, says Lukács, is that for them reality is “impenetrable, fatalistic and immutable.”²⁴ They concede too much to nature’s resistance, to the objectivity of particular sciences, and they do not recognize that science is merely a “weapon of the bourgeoisie.” They refuse the philosopher’s top-down causality of the totality, and limit themselves to the bottom-up procedure of working collaboratively from the particular sciences and labors. Lukács sees the Machists as a product of the decline of bourgeois self-confidence that its thought adequately described the world, although unlike Bogdanov, the Lukács of the 1920s does not seem to know very much about actual sciences.

Thus spake the philosopher in the land of the lotus-eaters. Feyerabend is useful for keeping critical thought once again from getting lost in the misty domains of the speculative realisms or the void, vibrating, or vitalist materialisms of high theory. He isn’t much help for bringing it closer to what actually became of the metabolic control of molecular processes on the planet, and their ever widening rift. If Feyerabend can help us reanimate the corpus of Mach for the twenty-first century, then who can help us do the same for Marx? Here we turn to a very different kind of Californian thinker and writer, with whom Feyerabend shares a fondness for dogs and primates, if nothing else.

FROM MARX TO HARAWAY

It is hard to imagine a landscape more remote from Russia in the early twentieth century than the West Coast of the United States in the late twentieth century. In place of scarcity, a bright abundance. Some central nodes to the military industrial complex were born and grew there, particularly in the aerospace industry, not to mention the Air Force’s own private think-tank, the RAND corporation. And as California prospered, so did its finest universities, such as Stanford and Caltech and Berkeley, not to mention Berkeley’s rivals at the peak of the public University of California system. Pump enough Pentagon money into this cluster of institutions and the result is Silicon Valley.²⁵

It is hard to imagine an organization of knowledge and labor more remote from what Bogdanov was proposing at the Socialist University after the Bolsheviks came to power, or even from that extensive and effective apparatus that the Soviet Union actually constructed after Stalin died.²⁶ But in its own terms, the Californian military-industrial complex worked. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the dominant forms of power, economy, even of human life, owe their existence to what Donna Haraway calls the techno-science that issued from a handful of research universities in the Cold War years. It was not pure serendipity that brought Paul Feyerabend to Berkeley to teach the philosophy of science in the midst of an astonishing flowering of both pure and applied science. The term techno-science highlights how implicated science is and was in particular moments in the history of technology.

Feyerabend’s grasp of this part of the picture was never strong. Perhaps he was fatally hampered by his endemic hatred of all things Marxist. Perhaps the new world would not reveal its workings to someone so touched by the old. More useful in this regard is the work of Donna Haraway. Born in the 1940s, trained as a biologist, radicalized during the Vietnam War years, and lodging at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980, Haraway is, on her own admission, a product of both Cold War techno-science and the struggle in and against its imperial consequences. Haraway: “I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-Second World War arms race and cold war as by the women’s movements.”²⁷

If for Bogdanov the catalyst that diverted him from the life sciences was the labor movement, for Haraway it was feminism. Haraway: “Feminists re-appropriate science in order to discover and to define what is ‘natural’ for ourselves. A human past and future would be placed in our hands. This avowedly interested approach to science promises to take seriously the rules of scientific discourse without worshipping the fetish of scientific objectivity.”²⁸

There is an interesting tension here, even a productive one. With some startling exceptions such as Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex, most strands of Western Marxism taken up by critical thinkers in the United States in the postwar period were allergic to techno-science.²⁹ Even among radical social scientists of this period, knowledge of, and commitment to, some version of natural science as a mode of inquiry was rare, and where it existed it was not often combined with such a strong commitment to a thoroughgoing critique of the existing form of science.³⁰

Haraway’s is a very different intellectual formation to the one that grew out of the influence of Herbert Marcuse, who taught at the other end of California to Haraway, in San Diego, from 1965 until he was forced to retire in 1970.³¹ While there are détournements of Lukács and Marcuse in Haraway, they are very much applied to understanding two immediate phenomena: new kinds of techno-science, and the rising social movement of feminism. What formed at the juncture was feminist science studies.³²

Science? Technology? Goddess preserve us! There are plenty of feminisms that try to take their stand against techno-science from without, as if it had some prior and given claim to speak for nature. Haraway: “Feminist theory has repeatedly replicated this ‘naturalizing’ structure of discourse in its own oppositional constructions.”³³ A useful attribute of feminist science studies is that it tends not to make the assumption that there is something inherently radical about philosophy, or culture, or play or poetry over and against the scientific and technical. It does not take sides in advance within the existing intellectual division of labor. It is, among other things, a practical critique of that division of intellectual labor. “Destabilizing the positions in a discursive field and disrupting categories for identification might be a more powerful feminist strategy than ‘speaking as a woman.’”³⁴

It retains a sort of double discomfort, asking critical questions in a scientific zone, and speaking knowledgeably about actual sciences in a humanities zone. This is irritating, and usefully so. Feminist science studies persistently recasts the objectivity claims of the sciences, and does so, to make it worse, without dismissing the scientific endeavor. It is so much harder to dismiss a critic who takes a knowledge practice seriously, who wants not to abandon objectivity, but wants a stronger one, grounded in making a more extensive series of mediating links in the production of knowledge available for scrutiny.³⁵

This is irritating in another way as well. Haraway: “Marx insisted that one must not leap too fast, or one will end up in a fantastic utopia, impotent and ignorant. Abundance … is essential to the full discovery and historical possibility of human nature. It matters whether we make ourselves in plenty or unfulfilled need, including need for genuine knowledge and meaning.”³⁶ This is what Platonov knew from daily experience. Surplus feeds the body which feeds the soul. There can be no retreat into the superstructures when there is no food, shelter or safety. The production and reproduction of our species-being, whatever it may be, has to be a central concern of any critical knowledge. Given the rising inequality, poverty, and hunger in twenty-first-century California, to which the state has responded by mirroring its great universities with a series of equally great prisons, questions of material need that were so palpable to Platonov return at the heart of the empire.³⁷

Haraway’s California is that part that is still a land of surplus, where some more complex questions about food arise other than its insufficiency. Haraway tells two archetypal California stories about food. On arriving in Santa Cruz in 1980, she is plunged into a debate about what to do with the placenta after a “natural” childbirth. Should it be eaten? How should it be cooked? Who should eat it? Can vegans eat human placenta? Maybe vegans ought to be obliged to eat it: not only was no animal killed in its making, one was brought into the world of the living. In the second story, a religious studies professor prepares a meal for the department party, the centerpiece of which is a feral pig he shot with an arrow. Complex debates ensue about ritual, ethics, impossible ecologies, and so on.³⁸

Both stories are like metonymic fragments of Marx’s metabolic rift. Molecules—in this case proteins—lack enclosing loops back through any sort of dynamic equilibrium. Haraway eschews any easy answers on either of these questions, and makes a wry nod to “the contradictory, thick quality of what we mean when we say ‘California.’”³⁹ They are all the same real questions. If for Platonov the question of a surplus to feed body and soul was a matter of quantity, in California the uneven conquest of quantity reveals the qualitative problems. Here in a contemporary, ramified form, is Bogdanov’s tragedy of the totality, a vast yet molecular process that only reveals its contours when something goes wrong, when there is a metabolic rift, of which there are now many, from feral pigs to feral carbon.

What is of interest in feminist science studies that is in some ways reminiscent of Bogdanov is a commitment to studying the reality of the process of the production and reproduction of knowledge. There is some progress to be made by weaving Bogdanov back into the fabric of critical approaches to scientific and technical knowledge, of which feminist science studies is now a leading exemplar. This is not, let me hasten to add, an attempt to subsume feminist science studies under the head of the Great Man who precedes it; quite the opposite. It is that there may be modest contributions Bogdanov can make to supplement Haraway and her messmates.

Haraway has on occasion described herself as an illegitimate daughter of Marx, and “something of an unreconstructed and dogged Marxist.” She remains attentive to how relations congeal into apparently natural things. “Property is the kind of relationality that poses as the thing-in-itself, the commodity, the thing outside relationship, the thing that can be exhaustively measured, mapped, owned, appropriated, disposed.”⁴⁰ As we shall see, this becomes in her work a useful starting point for understanding how distinctly twenty-first-century modes of property and technology are organized.

Unlike many other Marxists, Haraway insists on including nonhuman actors in what would be an otherwise relentlessly human category of that-which-labors. “The actors are not all ‘us.’”⁴¹ Techno-science explodes the already wobbly partition between object and subject, nature and culture, apparatus and labor. Marx may have shown how the thing is full of labor, but the category of chimerical objects, those mash-ups of flesh-tech, has much expanded, even if there is still a tendency for the fetish of the thing to obscure the relations of its making. Hence the world can now appear as a vast accumulation not just of commodities or spectacles but of “big data” or “selfish genes.”

Marx was already well aware of capital’s “unnatural” acts, causing something to reproduce in new ways, on its own terms. He even puts the figure of the vampire to work.⁴² Capital is a vampire, sucking life out of labor to make and remake its own undead carcass. Bogdanov nods to this vampire figure of capital too, but for Haraway it’s a more polymorphous figure. The vampire is both threat and promise: blood-sucking capital but also the marginal other of “impure” sexual and racial mixing. Like Bogdanov, Haraway is always showing how the metaphors embedded in knowledge do their work, but she is also interested in what other work they might do.

Haraway tries to keep in view the relations of production that the fetish of the commodity obscures. “I believe wealth is created by collective practice, figured by Marx as labor, but needing a messier metaphoric descriptive repertoire.”⁴³ There is a fetishism of labor itself—man-with-hammer—that needs attending to as well. If, like Bogdanov, one takes the labor point of view to be what is central to Marx’s work, then what, in the age of techno-science, might now constitute such a point of view?

If Marx proceeded through a critique of the dismal science of political economy, Haraway works through a rather more lively if no less difficult science—biology. “I have always read biology in a double way—as about the way the world works biologically, but also about the way the world works metaphorically.”⁴⁴ One of the many functions of biology is to “discursively reproduce the species,” defining the limits of what can be said about the potentials of the human, about our species-being. Is there a “human race,” or are some races not fully human? And if all races are human, what might the human become?

Haraway tries to untangle the matrix of figures of nature, nation, sex, race, and blood that both impinge on biological science but which are also centrally produced and modified in biology. It is not that biology is reducible to culture and politics, rather, “the material-semiotic tissues are inextricably intermeshed.”⁴⁵ Haraway expands the object of Marxian critique from political economy to the life sciences, which are no less implicated in the production of the infrastructural givens of the contemporary commodified world. This adds an essential dimension, if critique is going to grasp—such a primate metaphor!—Marx’s no less full-bodied metaphor of metabolic rift, and flesh it out.

Here the job might be to refract Haraway through Bogdanov, to show that there have been three basic metaphors of the causality of the human in the modern period: race, population, and gene. Each has its dissenters, critics, and utopian or dystopian writers.⁴⁶ Each has its genuine scientists caught up in substitutions drawn from social organization which color and overshoot the process of producing evidence. Each also has its ideologues and moral entrepreneurs.

Race causality held that accumulated cultural differences are somehow carried in the blood. Even among progressives, the very category of race could create a fear of race mixing. Haraway: “The evolution of language, the progress of technology, the perfection of the body, and the advance of social forms seemed to be aspects of the same fundamental human science. That science was constitutively physiological and hierarchical, organismic and wholist, progressivist and developmental.”⁴⁷

Bogdanov’s intervention within this regime is a queer one. He seemed to accept that blood carries differences, but advocated the sharing of blood to overcome them.⁴⁸ Rather than be prey to the vampire of capital, labor shares among its own, as if the brotherhood of man could be made physically so through blood exchanges. There’s a will to sameness at work here which is a usefully perverse read on the obsessions of the era, but which remain of their era.

A more common response was the welter of attempts to categorize and characterize the races, arranged in some sort of hierarchy. Differences of culture or power become expressions of an order of nature. Haraway: “No wonder universal nature has been a less than appealing entity for those who were not its creators and its beneficiaries.”⁴⁹ To which one might add that the temptation to overcome a supposed biological destiny of race, by severing the social from biological being altogether, is and remains a powerful temptation. It has the unfortunate side-effect of cutting critical thought off from thinking biology as a techno-science with powerful and perhaps increasing abilities to create new unequal relations for the production and reproduction of life.

While popular racialism lives on, the substituting of racial for other kinds of difference did not survive in biological science. In the postwar years, after the debacle of racialized Nazi biology, and in the wake of new research methods, the basic metaphor of population causality arose in its place. A population is a semi-permeable group within a species. There may be as much variation within a population as between. Each may nevertheless be a pool which contain adaptations that are more or less successful.

Populations are not types in a hierarchy; nor are they sets. Each is constantly in flux in changing environments, rather like Bogdanovite ingressions. The metaphysical shift is from a hierarchy of self-same types, where miscegenation at the boundary produces less viable instances, toward a different way of figuring difference and similarity. Populations are internally differentiated but formally equivalent in relation to each other.

Population became a central figure in the modern synthesis, which brought together naturalists, geneticists, and experimentalists in a new kind of biological science and culture. Haraway: “This was a scientific humanism that emphasized flexibility, progress, cooperation, and universalism.”⁵⁰ It broke with the language of race and blood. It stressed the flexible and plastic nature of the human condition, and its capacity to change through education. The human can be socially self-constructing. Actual differences in power, such as the colonial relation, are elided by what ought to be: the “family of man.”

The organizational challenges of postwar capitalism put on the agenda the question of the limits to the adaptive nature of the human. Primate studies became a way of conducting experiments and building theories aimed at the adaptation of the human to the rising complexity of technics and organization. Primate researchers focused on two linked topics: sex and dominance. The male primate fights with other males for access to reproduction. Researchers substituted Freud into the animal realm and back again. Alongside interest in observing primates in their “natural” setting were experiments on the primate as an embodiment of drives to sex and power, designed to see how adaptable its species-being was to the office politics of living in cages and pressing levers for food.

The primate was an experimental subject who could yield insights into techniques for regulating sexuality and power in the modern world for human primates too. Rather than repressing desire or the will to power, technologies and therapies could help the human primate adapt. It’s a small step from the study of primate behaviors to the hormones that supposedly regulate them, and then on to the construction of a techno-science of intervening in the hormonal regulation of primate sexuality—particularly that of humans. The contraceptive pill is here the great techno-science success story.

Population causality naturalized the patriarchal family. Its origin myth is that of man the hunter. It is man who is assumed to be the maker of tools, the inventor of elaborated social organization and hence of language. It is man who is curious, who explores, while woman stays home yanking yams from the dirt with babies on her teats. This figure was supplemented rather belatedly by woman the inventor of basket-weaving, in some cases as a result of the work of feminist researchers.

Liberalism’s finest hour was its efforts to overcome, in both science and culture, the benighted effects of the category of race. Haraway wants to push on from that self-congratulatory ethos. “I believe that this capacity of reproducing the Same, in culpable innocence of its historical, power-charged specificity, characterizes not just me but people formed like me, who are liberal, scientific, and progressive …”⁵¹ The problem with the liberal family of man is that “what’s not collected in a reproductive family story does not finally count as human. For all the … emphasis on difference, this is the grammar of indifference, or the multiplication of sameness.”⁵² Tautology reigns: that which survives is functional; that which is functional survives.

The liberal family of man gave way to the neoliberal “selfish gene” of sociobiology, and the basic metaphor of gene causality. The population regime took as its units of thought individual bodies and their social groups. Now the gene becomes the controlling code which uses both bodies and groups for its own ends. The causal metaphor is still functional, but the unit to which it applies is now molecular: the gene that survives is functional because the function of the gene is to survive. Haraway: “Sociobiology is narratively a hyper-functionalism and a hyper-liberalism.”⁵³ Genes are logos in the market of life. “My genes, my self, my investment, my future. It’s much more strictly capitalist.”⁵⁴

Such a science is the product not only of a certain naturalizing of the exchange economy, but also of powerful technologies which produce the gene itself as an artifact in a database. Haraway: “something peculiar happened to the stable, family-loving, Mendelian gene when it passed into a database …”⁵⁵ The gene becomes one of the units of currency of the era of “big data.” Genomics and informatics merge. The gene can exist in a variety of media, from software to wetware, and some in between. Nature starts to yield not the authoritarian causality of race hierarchies or patriarchal families, but the exchange causality of property in a purified form.

The genetic database is at once about the genes of specific individuals, but also sub-units of that code, and at the other extreme, about our species-being. The design of such a database shapes what can be compared, what kinds of labor can most easily be performed, but meanwhile the gene becomes a thing separated from a totality and accorded its own agency.⁵⁶ Meanwhile sub-disciplines of biological science, such as genetics or population biology, start to fork off and coalesce around much more differentiated apparatus, practices, and objects of knowledge.

The construction of the gene as an object of techno-science is just one component in an important shift in the practices of substitution between organizational levels. Haraway:

Nineteenth-century scientists materially constituted the organism as a laboring system, structured by a hierarchical division of labor, and an energetic system fueled by sugars and obeying the laws of thermodynamics. For us, the living world has become a command, control, communication, intelligence system … in an environment that demands strategies of flexible accumulation. Artificial life programs, as well as carbon-based life programs, work that way. These issues are about metaphor and representation, but they are about much more than that.⁵⁷

Ideology, as Bogdanov well knew, is productive. The shift from thinking organization as energy systems alone—as Bogdanov himself does—to thinking in terms of a combination of energy and information systems, enables not only new kinds of science, technology, and power, but also opens up a space for their critique.

Interestingly, some of the new modes of substitution producing both ideology and knowledge might no longer be metaphorical so much as algorithmic. Haraway sees in genetic code and computer code a new kind of fetishism that is partly, but not entirely, legible to the old Marxist and Freudian versions.⁵⁸ One might call it the fetish of the program, a new kind of code causality, of which gene causality is but one instance. It is not entirely reducible to either authoritarian or exchange causality, although it has features of both. It is certainly not the comradely causal universe that Bogdanov and Platonov imagined.

By way of illustration, Haraway points to an issue of Mammalian Genome, which offered its readers a representation of the contents of the chromosomes of a mouse under the headline, “the Complete Mouse (some assembly required).”⁵⁹ Code becomes the master layer in the stacked protocols by which an organization is managed. In genetics, code becomes the part via which a whole can be reductively understood. In place of messy flesh, the clean execution of command and control, although as we shall see there are code-based sciences where such a reduction is not easily made.

Commodity fetishism occurs when relations between people take on the features of relations between things. The formula for the fetish Lukács offers is caught in a prior distinction between object and subject, even if this distinction appears in a more sophisticated form. Collective labor is what hides behind the commodity. But perhaps it is not so easy to separate labor and thing. So Haraway, like Bogdanov, wants to broaden the fetish concept a little. “Curiously, fetishes—themselves ‘substitutes’, that is, tropes of a special kind—produce a particular ‘mistake’; fetishes obscure the constitutive tropic nature of themselves and of worlds.”⁶⁰ A fetish is a naturalizing of the very thing whose “nature” needs calling into question, but while it may be limiting, it may nevertheless be peculiarly productive: “There are amazingly creative aspects to commodity fetishism.”⁶¹

Gene technology is implicated in commodity fetishism, but maybe also in “another and obliquely related flavor of reification that transmutes material, contingent, human and nonhuman liveliness into maps of life itself and then mistakes the map and its reified entities for the bumptious, nonliteral world.”⁶² Haraway’s détournement of the fetish repurposes it. Rather than the commodity fetish, she asks about the corporeal fetish. How do bodies appear as autonomous things against a background of invisible non-bodies? In commodity fetishism, the apparent world of things, governed by the code of exchange value, obscures social relations among people and the production of use value. In corporeal fetishism, the apparent world of bodies, governed by the code of the gene, obscures the tangle of both human and nonhuman processes that produce life.

In corporeal fetishism, the gene becomes a source of value as a kind of thing-itself, or perhaps code-itself. “So the fetishist sees the gene itself in all the gels, blots, and printouts in the lab, and ‘forgets’ the natural-technical processes that produce the gene and genome as consensus objects in the real world.”⁶³ An abstraction replaces the concrete; the map becomes the territory. “Gene fetishists ‘forget’ that the gene and gene maps are ways of enclosing the commons of the body—of corporealizing—in specific ways, which, among other things, often put commodity fetishism into the program of biology at the end of the Second Millennium.”⁶⁴

Just as the commodity fetish makes all things property to be exchanged, so too the corporeal fetish makes all of life a thing to be commodified through ownership of its code. “Genomics ‘globalizes’ in specific ways. Species-being is materially and semiotically produced in gene-mapping practices, just as particular kinds of space and humanity were the fruit of earlier material-semiotic enclosures.”⁶⁵ Private property produces the split between commodities and the labor that makes it; intellectual property produces the split between the gene and the organism that makes it.

What was once biology’s commons of research materials becomes increasingly commodified. Haraway takes the Human Genome Diversity Project as a case study in agency in the age of the gene. It was supposed to gather samples from populations at risk of losing their more or less distinctive characteristics. Indigenous communities were not involved in formulating the project, which at best sought their permission, not collaboration. Many indigenous peoples are strongly against the results of such work leading to patents.

The “mutation” of the private property form into strictly controlled “intellectual property” makes whole new classes of things available for commodification. “Like the stigmata of gender and race, which signify asymmetrical, regularly reproduced processes that give some human beings rights in other human beings that they do not have in themselves, the copyright, patent and trademark are specific, asymmetrical, congealed processes—which must be constantly revivified in law and commerce as well as in science.”⁶⁶ Intellectual property grounds a new kind of class power.

A patent defines what is nature and what is not. An artifact of “nature” cannot be patented. For that to happen, nature has to be mixed with labor. Patent is a site of struggle over what counts as subject and what as object. Haraway’s famous example is DuPont’s OncoMouse, the first patented mammal, specifically engineered for the study of breast cancer. All sorts of organisms are now integrated into a strange techno-nature meant to support human life, or at least those parts of it that can be commodified. Not only mice but dogs and all sorts of other beings are our “companions” within techno-science. In place of the liberal-humanist family, quite another kind: “the technoscientific family is a cyborg nuclear unit,” now that “life is a system to be managed.”⁶⁷

What kind of critical agency is possible in the world of OncoMouse? Do lab rats belong to the working class? Should battery hens be unionized? Should one have the right to share in the surplus produced by one’s cells, even when those cells are not in one’s body? Consider the case of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American tobacco worker who died of cervical cancer. Cells taken from her body, without her knowledge or consent, were cultured and used in all kinds of research long after her death, from the polio vaccine to AIDS treatments and gene mapping. Those cells proved not only useful for research but profitable for medical business, while her descendants could not even afford health insurance.⁶⁸ How is one to think the molecular agencies of such a story?

For Haraway this is a question of “how to queer the modest witness.”⁶⁹ There is a certain historical structure of feeling that might characterize the ideal of the scientist: the modest witness. Driving women out of forms of knowledge and power is not unconnected to the rise of science.⁷⁰ How could the “man of science,” who refrains from public contests of valor and power, resist becoming a feminized figure? By proposing a new structure of feeling: the noble woman is modest of body; the good scientist will be modest of mind.

How can this figure be retrieved? Not by returning to a feminine modesty, but rather by imagining a feminist one. “My modest witness is about telling the truth—giving reliable testimony—while eschewing the addictive narcotic of transcendental foundations.” It is about reconnecting the making of observations to the scene of their making. There’s a limit to how far an observation can be abstracted from the situation that produces it. A thorough witnessing sees also the means by which it sees what it sees, and knows what it knows. “The modest witness is the one who can be engaged in situated knowledges.”⁷¹

Perhaps these gestures made to establish science as a whole way of life were tactical rather than essential. Perhaps there are other tactics by which the struggle for objectivity can be waged by others, even by those whom this structure of feeling once excluded. That might be exactly the reason to work in and against it: “The point is to make a difference in the world, to cast our lot for some ways of life and not others. To do that, one must be in the action, one must be finite and dirty, not transcendent and clean.”⁷²

The figure which Haraway famously proposed as a point of view is the cyborg. “Like any important technology, a cyborg is simultaneously a myth and a tool …”⁷³ It is not the labor point of view, as if labor existed independently of the apparatus with which it is entangled. It is not women’s point of view, as if one could speak of it as a universal subjective perspective, existing prior to the social and technical relations in which it meshes. Cyborgs are affinities rather than identities, hybrids of human and other organics, information systems, ergonomic laboring, producing and desiring. Cyborgs are monsters, or rather demonstrations, in the double sense of to show and to warn, of possible worlds. “As monsters, can we demonstrate another order of signification? Cyborgs for earthly survival!”⁷⁴

In moving on from proletkult to “cyborgkult,” the point of view expands somewhat from the makers to the makings of the molecular. In place of the “God-trick” of speaking as if one had access to a portal to the absolute, the cyborg is a kind of ironic myth, a heretical counter-story to the human as pre-given. “Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community.”⁷⁵ Like the Marxist-feminist critic inside the research university, the cyborg is always an insider and outsider to techno-science, which after all is pretty much the case now for all of us. “I think the way I work is to take my own polluted inheritance—cyborg is one of them—and try to rework it.”⁷⁶

The cyborg isn’t an innocent figure. “The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.”⁷⁷ Cyborgs are a kind of orphan, in a more troubling sense in that parentage is not lost or forgotten but never quite existed, even though “the cyborg … doesn’t have a mother, but it does have a matrix.”⁷⁸

The cyborg is a contemporary kind of Platonovian conceptual persona, although it is not so much that which is beneath the proletarian, as that which is between the worker and her apparatus. Or rather, between three kinds of boundaries: between the organism and the machine, the animal and the human, the physical and the nonphysical. Indeed, looking back now on Platonov’s orphans, Chicklin and his shovel, or the terrifying hammerer-bear, many of them are indeed already proto-cyborgs in the making, in the age of steam engines rather than difference engines.

Haraway: “Too many people, forgetting the discipline of love and rage, have read the ‘Manifesto [for Cyborgs]’ as the ramblings of a blissed-out, technobunny, fembot.”⁷⁹ Surely this stems from the persistence of the ideological pull of the figure of nature, and an inability to think and feel through the emerging forces of production as anything other than poisoned product of techno-science. Haraway:

From One Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1964) … the analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance … But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies.⁸⁰

Perhaps it would be possible to sense a web of human and nonhuman agents, more a mechanically and digitally reproducible compound eye than a single labor point of view.

Perhaps this point of view could be broader than that of labor, and not separate, out in advance, production from reproduction. Perhaps it could also include something a bit distinct from either, a kind of activity that neither produces nor reproduces, but proposes other means of doing either, or neither, or both. Could it even include the hacker class as a distinctive point of view not entirely reducible to labor? One might start here with Bogdanov’s notion of organization, rather than production, as a “basic” level of analysis, but look aslant at its unquestioned functionalism.

There is no real traction to be gained from trying to base a critique on nature versus culture, or the human versus the machine, nor is there leverage in play versus labor. In an era where there is money to be made from all sorts of effort people put in to voluntarily creating and sharing information, labor itself becomes an unstable category. Haraway: “We are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system—from all work to all play, a deadly game.”⁸¹

Information is more than a powerful metaphor extended via substitution into an explanatory causality for the world, or even for the cosmos. It becomes a powerful means of organizing worlds. Haraway: “Communications science and modern biologies are constructed by a common move—the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.”⁸² It’s a matter of seeing this, as Bogdanov would, as at once an actuality, as an ensemble of real phenomena, and yet also as historical, as the product of certain kinds of labor, or more specifically of techno-science as a central way that power works in this stage of the commodity economy—whatever it might be.

It was prescient of Haraway to notice, and early on, that “the new communications technologies are fundamental to the eradication of ‘public life’ for everyone.”⁸³ The reduction of a wide range of processes, and not just labor, to a thing, or in this case to code, supports a vast extension of private property relations. Bogdanov was rare among Marxists of his time in thinking that commodification may have a long course to run before a transformation into other modes of production might be possible, but not even he imagined anything like this.

The monstrous omens Haraway detected in the late twentieth century came to pass:

A major social and political danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of color, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance … The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable.⁸⁴

And so it came to pass, only it came to be called precarity.

Creating any kind of knowledge and power in and against something as pervasive and effective as the world built by postwar techno-science is a difficult task. It may seem easier simply to vacate the field, to try to turn back the clock, or appeal to something outside of it. But this would be to remain stuck in the stage of romantic refusal. Just as Marx fused the romantic fiction that another world was possible with a resolve to understand from the inside the powers of capital itself, so too Haraway begins what can only be a collaborative project for a new international⁸⁵—one not just of laboring men, but of all the stuttering cyborgs stuck in reified relations not of their making.

While Marx was rather diffident about the utopian side of socialist culture as a counter to capitalism, these days it sometimes seems to be about all we have. And so Haraway proposes as theorists for cyborgs some late twentieth-century analogs of Charles Fourier and Flora Tristan.⁸⁶ If the critical cyborg is made in part from encounters with both science and feminism, its other liaison is literary: Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, John Varley, James Tiptree Jr., Octavia Butler—to which list we shall shortly add Kim Stanley Robinson.⁸⁷ As Bogdanov and Platonov knew well, the alternative to trying to work the God-trick in our favor is some version of that mythical Marx who loved us always and forever, in the form of queer encodings in the language of the times of what another time could be.

God is dead, and so too is the Goddess. The disenchanting corrosion of all that is solid into the molecular abrades more than one way. If there is no thing-in-itself, no scientific-realist absolute, then there’s no prior and originary subject for a social movement, either. We are always and already insiders:

Feminisms and Marxisms have run aground on Western epistemological imperatives to construct a revolutionary subject from the perspective of a hierarchy of oppressions and/or a latent position of moral superiority, innocence, and greater closeness to nature. With no available original dream of a common language or original symbiosis promising protection from hostile “masculine” separation, but written into the play of a text that has no finally privileged reading or salvation history, to recognize “oneself” as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering. Stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins.⁸⁸

This is part of the terrifying force of Platonov’s insistence on the figure of the orphan. There’s no mother nature, no father science, no way back (or forward) to integrity. To be orphaned is not to be alienated, in the sense of the parting of a thing from a former “organic” whole. Tektology is all about constructing temporary shelter in the world, but it is something that has to be made, now and for a future, rather than an inheritance or entitlement to be retrieved.

There is work to be done, however, to bring Bogdanov and Platonov fully into the present, as comrades on the cyborg reading list. What needs reworking is the struggle of labor in and against nature. Haraway:

Humanistic Marxism was polluted at the source by its structuring ontological theory of the domination of nature in the self-construction of man and by its closely related impotence to historicize anything women did that didn’t qualify for a wage. But Marxism was still a promising resource in the form of epistemological feminist mental hygiene that sought our own doctrines of objective vision. Marxist starting points offered tools to get to our versions of standpoint theories, insistent embodiment, a rich tradition of critiques of hegemony without disempowering positivisms and relativisms, and nuanced theories of mediation.⁸⁹

The cyborg point of view is shaped in part by social movements around labor, race, gender, sexuality, and indigenous rights. The cyborg point of view is also shaped in part by the sciences, by struggles to produce objective knowledge of the world, complete with substitutions transposed into it from the dominant forms of organization. Part of the operation of a twenty-first-century tektology is to beam the former through the latter and vice versa, in a speculative play and comradely labor of working toward a knowledge adequate to the tragedy of the totality from the bottom up.

The cyborg point of view has at least one other component: the point of view of the apparatus itself, of the electrons in our circuits, the pharmaceuticals in our bloodstreams, the machines that mesh with our flesh. The machinic enters the frame not as the good or the bad other, but as an intimate stranger. The apparatus, like sensation, is liminal and indeterminate—an in-between. It is an inhuman thing, neither object nor subject. One of its special qualities as such may, however, be to generate data about a nonhuman world. The apparatus renders to the human a world that isn’t for the human.⁹⁰ An apparatus is that which demonstrates some aspect of a monstrous, alien world. An apparatus yield aspects, particular monstrosities, which never add up to that consistent and absolute world that remains the God, or Goddess, of all realists. An apparatus affords the real, material and historical form of mediation.

If critical theory is to grasp what techno-science has made of us in the twenty-first century, then at least a passing understanding of biological science might be an asset, for this is an era in which life itself has been disaggregated and brought under forms of molecular control. What makes that control possible is a whole series of technologies based on sciences whose object is not just on the molecular but even the sub-atomic level. Rather than assert a claim to contemplate these transformations as if from the outside, what might actually be more useful is a way of accounting from the inside for the apparatus that produces us as cyborg beings in an Anthropocene time on a planet experiencing vast metabolic rifts. With that aim in mind, I turn now to the work of Karen Barad on the apparatus, and then using concepts extracted from that study, I move on to the work of Paul Edwards on the science of climate change.

FROM BOGDANOV TO BARAD

Bogdanov wrote at a time when the science of physics was undergoing a profound revolution. This was not the least reason he avoided any attempt to define nature by means of materialist philosophy alone. If such a theory of matter has any content it will be rendered obsolete by further discoveries, and if it cannot be rendered obsolete then it is a metaphysical add-on that the practice of knowledge can do without. Better, he thought, to stay close to the materiality of the process of the production of knowledge about “matter,” whatever that might now mean. What “matter” might be changes, even the means of knowing what it might be changes, but what is constant is that matter is known through the combined efforts of labor and apparatus. As the apparatus for the production of such knowledge has extended on the one hand to the subatomic scale and on the other to planetary and even cosmic scales, all kinds of new metaphors await for substitutional play, not to mention new kinds of causation.

Of particular interest here is the work of Karen Barad. A colleague of Haraway’s at the University of California Santa Cruz, Barad has a PhD in physics, and has worked as a physics professor, but her book Meeting the Universe Halfway is more an attempt to extract a feminist theory of scientific practice from particle physics. It could, as we shall see, actually be a work of tektology. Barad and Bogdanov practice kinds of politics of knowledge that overlap. Their situations are very different. Regardless of its quality, Russian science of the early twentieth century did not come close to the power and extent of the American science of today. A critical thought for the times needs at least a passing acquaintance with the techno-science that makes these times.

Born in the 1950s, Barad, like Haraway, grew up in the heyday of American scientific and technical leadership and power. In the physical sciences, that leadership really accelerated in the 1940s. The development of the atom bomb is the best known instance, but it is worth noting that during World War II the United States committed even more resources to the development of radar.⁹¹ That research built the theoretical foundations and technical infrastructure for postwar electronics and computing, which in turn influenced many other fields of scientific research. If one attempted to untangle the sticky ball of the postwar American military, economic, and technical complex, then physics would be a consistent thread running through it.

American postwar techno-science grew so far and so fast it even drew women into its operations to meet its “manpower” needs. Thousands of women trained in technical and scientific fields. If they succeeded in these fields it was against tremendous odds. Sharon Traweek, in her classic ethnography of particle physics in the 1970s, refers to an image from a standard textbook of the time, which illustrates for the aspiring physics undergrad what they are to look for and what they are to ignore as distractions. Among the things to ignore is the body of a woman.⁹² On this account, physics as big science was a machine for producing, among other things, certain kinds of white guys. Not surprisingly then, another strand one can pick out of the sticky ball of postwar American power, a very tiny strand but a strong one, is feminist science studies. The conditions were right for producing a cadre who understood one or another science very well, but who also understood only too well that they were enmeshed in a field of gender and other relations of power that called for systematic critique and action.

I want to concentrate in this chapter on some interesting resonances Barad’s work has with Bogdanov’s analogical thought. At first, this might seem like a stretch. Barad is leery of the legitimation of power and exploitation by reference to analogies from the natural world. And yet her writing makes tactical use of analogies, as we shall see—just different ones, even queer ones. Interestingly, Barad tries to draw useful tropes and images directly out of the practices of scientific labor. Perhaps it’s a matter then of a kind of tektology, of a poetics of producing alternate analogies to the dominant ones, but also a critique of the limits of analogical transposition.

This applies in particular to Barad’s “over-arching trope”—diffraction—that she borrows from Haraway.⁹³ Diffraction patterns occur in everyday life. The Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre tells the story of swimming seaward one day and getting caught too far from the beach when the weather turned. The imaginary order, his body’s power against the world, is suddenly rent, and all is plunged into surviving the wavy real. As he strokes shoreward, his strength waning, he finds a pattern in the chaos of the water, a rhythm and a form in the peaks and troughs of the waves. He is in a diffraction pattern, waves interweaving with waves, their forms passing through each other, as if occupying the same positions. Some peaks are specially high, where two waves coincide; some are reduced, where a peak coincides with a trough. As he swims Lefebvre finds the rhythm. Waves are not things existing in a void; they are forms passing through fields.⁹⁴

Diffraction is also a key phenomenon in physics. For example, Lefebvre’s contemporary, the Marxist scientist J. D. Bernal, kicked off his long career with studies of the diffraction of X-rays passing through crystals to find their structure.⁹⁵ X-ray crystallography does not produce images that reflect the form of the crystal. Rather, the X-rays pass through the crystal lattice, which blocks and bends their path toward an X-ray sensitive plate. Bernal had to measure and interpret the two-dimensional diffraction pattern to find the three-dimensional structure of the crystal. As a kind of evidence, a diffraction is more like an index than an icon, more a trace of an event than a mimesis of a thing.⁹⁶ X-ray crystallography, in this instance, is a record of an event that happened within its apparatus.

Diffraction is not about how one thing is an imaginary reflection or double of another. It does not take as given what is object and what is subject, or what is nature and what is culture. It is about their joint production. Diffraction is about how things pass through and produce differential patterns. Barad: “Diffraction attends to the relational nature of difference.”⁹⁷ Barad goes on to claim for her own approach that “calling a method ‘diffractive’ in analogy with the physical phenomenon of diffraction does not imply that the method itself is analogical.”⁹⁸

Actually, it might, but there might be different ways to produce analogies. One way is representationalist, which tries to get one domain to resemble another via the analogy. Nature is like culture, or culture is like nature. Diffraction, on the other hand, is a non-representational analogy. Diffraction, at its best, does not look for the way science is just a mirror of culture, as the social constructivists might. Nor does it take science to be a mirror of nature, as scientific realists might. Rather, it’s a question of taking apparently separate things, passing them through each other and seeing how they interact, how they might in part be mutually produced by each other, yet not alike.

Barad aspires to “respectful engagements with different disciplinary practices.”⁹⁹ Her diffractive tektology passes an image or figure from one domain of practice through the apparatus of another, not to produce similarity, but to produce a pattern of refracted differences. It is an experimental procedure for language, another orphan practice to put alongside Bogdanovite tektology, Platonovian détournement, Feyerabendian dada or Haraway’s irony.

Diffraction is only partly about the passing of a form from one domain into another. It is also about the testing of the pattern of that transposition. Descriptions of nature are always caught up in substitutions, but there might be a way to work it so that assumptions from the dominant organizational forms are filtered out a bit, and some patterns from the labor of working in and against apparently natural materials come more to the fore. It’s a practice of diffracting one body—or are they waves?—of knowledge through another.

Barad: “interpretive questions about quantum theory plagued me as a graduate student in theoretical particle physics.”¹⁰⁰ Even in Bogdanov’s time, advances in physics seemed to rule out certain kinds of metaphysics. For example, devotees of dialectical materialism applied interpretive contortions to bring it into line with both experimental results and theories in modern physics, but it was just one of a series of positions that physics called into question. Any kind of strong realism—which assumes that it can describe in advance the constants of a real world with which every genuine experimental result should be consistent—was in trouble.

What can one say of the real when different experiments produce reliable results which are not consistent with the same metaphysics of what that real, independent world actually is? For example: Is matter made of waves or particles? It can’t exactly be both. Particles are localized in space and time, whereas waves can extend. Waves can overlap, like the waves of water that produced the polyrhythm of peaks and troughs through which Lefebvre swam to save his life. The problem for physics in the early twentieth century was that there were reliable experimental results that showed both wave and particle behavior.

One solution to this sort of problem is Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.¹⁰¹ This in essence says that there is a lower limit to the certainty with which a behavior in an experiment can be observed. The experiment will influence the observation. This saves the honor of realism at the expense of a closer examination of what actually transpires in experimental labor. A metaphysical real world is still assumed, entire and complete in all its primary qualities. It’s just that this noumenal world of things-in-themselves is always just out of reach of the phenomenal world of experimental confirmation.

Here Barad prefers to follow Niels Bohr, who had a subtly different approach. He notes more accurately that wave behavior and particle behavior are observed in different and particular—he would say complimentary—kinds of experiments using different apparatuses, and mutually exclusive ones. Both are “real” phenomena—sensations in the Machian language—but each is the product of a different apparatus. Bohr’s challenge is to Newtonian assumptions: that the world is composed of objects with individual and determinate boundaries that can be represented by abstract values independently of any particular apparatus.

At first sight this would appear to wreak havoc with any notion of objectivity. Now, it needs to be said that objectivity is a category with a history.¹⁰² There was a time when it meant something like the word of a gentleman as a modest witness. As science got bigger and the act of recording results became industrialized, what was objective no longer took the discriminating powers of the gentleman to observe, but was more a matter of a worker checking a dial and writing down the number on the log sheet. Curiously, in both these versions of objectivity, the labor of making something objective does not really figure. In the first case, because gentlemen don’t work; in the second case, because while workers work, that is all they do. The work is just there to prove or disprove what really matters, which to a wide variety of theories of knowledge, including even some supposedly Marxist ones, would be the conceptual problematic of knowledge alone.

If you want to measure the position of a particle, you need a fixed point of reference. If you want to measure the momentum of a particle, you need something movable, which can absorb that momentum and measure its force. These are different kinds of apparatus, one producing position-sensation, the other momentum-sensation. They are determined by mutually exclusive apparatuses. We can’t subtract the practice of measuring from the phenomena measured. But the larger consequence is that there is no good way of discriminating between the apparatus and its object. No inherent subject/object distinction exists. There is an object-apparatus-phenomena-observer situation. The experiment itself produces the cuts which make these appear to be separate things.

Barad’s version overlaps with some standard accounts, including that of Feyerabend, in seeing Bohr as this kind of realist.¹⁰³ As Barad says, for Bohr:

there aren’t little things wandering aimlessly in the void that possess the complete set of properties that Newtonian physics assumes (e.g. position and momentum); rather, there is something fundamental about the nature of measurement interactions such that, given a particular measuring apparatus, certain properties become determinate, while others are specifically excluded. Which properties become determinate is not governed by the desires or will of the experimenter but rather by the specificity of the experimental apparatus.¹⁰⁴

The key category Bohr advances, which is only implicit in Bogdanov, is apparatus. “As Bohr says, there is no inherently determinate Cartesian cut. The boundary between the ‘object of observation’ and the ‘agencies of observation’ is indeterminate in the absence of a specific physical arrangement of the apparatus … The apparatus enacts a cut delineating the object from the agencies of observation.”¹⁰⁵ This is an elegant solution to the problem of how the object of knowledge is supposed to correlate with the subject of knowledge. In place of that binary, Mach offered a monism based on sensation, Bogdanov on labor, and now Barad on apparatus. Mach draws attention to the making of knowledge, Bogdanov to its relations of production, and Barad to its forces of production.

Any particular apparatus makes a particular cut. The real is not observation-independent nature nor does it collapse back into the cultural. The real is a phenomena that the apparatus produces. An apparatus is not an idea; it is techne, a media.

Apparatuses are not Kantian conceptual frameworks; they are physical arrangements. And phenomena do not refer merely to perceptions of the human mind; rather, phenomena are real physical entities or beings (although not fixed or separately delineated things). Hence I would conclude that Bohr’s framework is consistent with a particular notion of realism, which is not parasitic on subject-object, culture-nature, and word-world distinctions.¹⁰⁶

Like Bogdanov, Barad escapes the Kantian correlation, where objects may only appear to subjects. Here rather is a realism of the sensation and the work of the apparatus that produces it. Only where Bogdanov stresses the work, Barad stresses its techniques. These we can think of as complimentary aspects of the techno-science cyborg. And where Haraway stresses the connected and undecidable “nature” of the human and inhuman cyborg ensemble, Barad stresses that aspect of the cyborg apparatus that makes the cut, producing the appearance of a subject distinct from its object.

Even if one acknowledges that the apparatus produces the cut that makes the observer-subject, it is tempting to put data on the side of the apparatus and the concept on the side of the subject. But for Barad, no such neat assumption can be made. “Apparatuses are the conditions of possibility for determinate boundaries and properties of objects and meanings of embodied concepts within the phenomenon. Indeed, this embodiment of concepts as part of the apparatus is ultimately what secures the possibility of objective knowledge, as defined in terms of Bohr’s epistemic criteria of reproducibility and communicability.”¹⁰⁷ That the apparatus is a kind of media that can reproduce not just a result but also its concept is what makes not just the data but also the concept part of objective knowledge.

Barad: “Apparatuses produce differences that matter.”¹⁰⁸ So far so good. But for Barad, Bohr reifies the apparatus, freezing it in space and time, as if it too did not have a history, as if it was not the product of labor. He limits the apparatus to the laboratory. He cuts the apparatus itself off in advance. How is the cut that makes the apparatus (which in turn makes other cuts) itself produced? Barad: “Apparatuses are neither neutral probes of the natural world nor social structures that deterministically impose some particular outcome.”¹⁰⁹ The apparatus has its own history. It is part of a larger mode of production and organization, but it does not necessarily reflect it. Rather, Barad steers our attention to how the specific apparatus might rather refract the larger world of productive forces and relations.

The challenge is to abandon a realism of the object of knowledge, the idea of the real as a separate world, while holding on to a realism of the process, the sensation, or the phenomena, that the apparatus produces. “The phenomena that are produced are not the consequences of human will or intentionality or the effects of the operations of Culture, Language, or Power.”¹¹⁰ Phenomena are real, but their specific reality does not warrant too firm an assertion of a reality in general of which they would then be representative examples.

Here Barad has something to offer beyond Bogdanov. Her primary metaphor of refraction steers away from the analogical excesses of tektology, drawing attention to the apparatus that makes a refractive field of differences rather than a reflective doubling of labor into a picture of the world. Analogy has its place in Barad, but her thinking is more metonymic than metaphoric, in that it is more interested in the apparatus as that which produces a part of the real than in labor as a metaphor for the production of the real as a whole, as is sometimes to be found in Bogdanov.

Things don’t necessarily exist as separate or separable prior to the cut made in the world by the apparatus, which yields the phenomenon of something separate and knowable as an object of knowledge to a subject. It is the apparatus that produces the phenomena, here of waves, there of particles. There is thus a bit less one can claim about the causal order of the real. The deterministic universe, separate from the observer and relentless in its cause-effect sequences, can’t be said to be there.

Another way to approach this might be to ask: What counts as agency? What can be said to act? Agency is not something that humans or even nonhumans “have.” It is not something that some possess and some do not. It’s an effect of a situation, often a situation that includes an apparatus. For an agent to appear, there’s a prior cut. The agent appears separate as an effect of a kind of “exteriority-within-phenomena.”¹¹¹

Barad abandons an approach in which agents interact, as if the agents always existed before the actions. She speaks instead of intra-actions. “Intra-actions always entail particular exclusions, and exclusions foreclose the possibility of determinism, providing the condition of an open future. But neither is anything and everything possible at any given moment. Indeed, intra-actions iteratively reconfigure what is possible and what is impossible—possibilities do not sit still.”¹¹² Agency is, then:

a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has. It cannot be designated as an attribute of subjects or objects (as they do not pre-exist as such). It is not an attribute whatsoever. Agency is “doing” or “being” in its intra-activity. It is the enactment of iterative changes to particular practices—iterative reconfigurations of topological manifolds of spacetimematter relations.¹¹³

Such might be the beginnings of a basic metaphor for comradely cyborg labors for our time.

The objectivity of the labors of producing knowledge is not waved away on this account. Rather, the work of constructing a particular determinate cut within a particular apparatus, but in such a way as to be repeatable and communicable, is the basis, the infrastructure, for a certain kind of knowledge, a science. “The condition of possibility for objectivity is therefore not absolute exteriority but agential separability—exteriority within phenomena.”¹¹⁴ Strangely enough, “intra-actions enact agential separability—the condition of exteriority-within-phenomena.”¹¹⁵ There is no a priori object, or subject, or correlation between them. “Knowing is not about seeing from above or outside or even seeing from a prosthetically enhanced human body. Knowing is a matter of intra-acting.”¹¹⁶

As in Hamlet, where a king can go through the guts of a worm; as in Platonov, where peasants, burdocks, water, and steam engines are comrades, so too in Barad: the category of possible agent does not decide in advance what is an active and what is a passive partner. Barad calls this an agential realism, but one might also say a queer realism. And as in any attempt to write about the materiality of process, the effort puts some pressure on the material of writing itself, on language, leading to sentences such as: “Intra-actions are non-arbitrary, nondeterministic causal enactments through which matter-in-the-process-of-becoming is iteratively enfolded into its ongoing differential materialization.”¹¹⁷

The apparatus has entered critical theory mostly as a way of accounting for the production of bodies. From Michel Foucault to Judith Butler, there’s a line of thought whose substitutions are architectural, and which pay close attention to the building of worlds that productively shape bodies, which in turn generate resistance against that shaping, and sometimes come to perform themselves even against that shaping apparatus. This framing of the subject via the meat-space of its making can go further, however.

Barad: “Theories that focus exclusively on the materialization of human bodies miss the crucial point that the very practices by which the differential boundaries of the human and the nonhuman are drawn are always already implicated in particular materializations.”¹¹⁸ There’s a fetishistic quality, then, to such procedures, which show in detail the moments of the human emerging out of the mesh of power apparatuses, but pay less attention to the reciprocal creation of those very apparatuses as apparently inert and resistible things.

Butler and Foucault might point toward a sort of post-humanities, but one still a bit too tied to the point at which the human appears out of the apparatus.¹¹⁹ However, “apparatuses are not merely about us.”¹²⁰ Barad’s writing might point instead to a kind of critical rewriting of what might instead be thought of as the inhumanities. The inhuman would here be the apparatus, the cuts it makes, the phenomena it records and communicates, that produce sensations from a nonhuman world. The inhuman mediates the nonhuman to the human. This preserves the queer, alien quality of what can be produced by an apparatus—particle physics for example—without saying too much about the nonhuman in advance.

Marx grasped the inhuman quality of machine production as the pushing to the periphery of the human worker’s labor. The machine came to have its means of both power and control, and the worker becomes a monitor of these systems. What Marx did not anticipate was the pushing of the human to the periphery of not just the industrial apparatus but the scientific one as well. In the late Marx at least, species-being is entirely enmeshed in the processes that produce it rather than being a pre-given essence. But the human is orphaned not just from laboring but from knowing. Thinking this process cannot stop with the peripheral production of the laboring or knowing body, but has to press further into the techno-science that produces many such cuts, between objects and other objects, just as much as between the object and subject, even when thought in the more sophisticated form of the cut between apparatus and body in Foucault and Butler.

In the early twenty-first century certain philosophies became popular which dispensed with the subject of knowledge as the necessary correlate of the object and opened up a speculative relation to it rather than a critical one. Having grown bored with the subject being all and the object nothing, now the object is all and the subject nothing. But this is just a reversal of a certain kind of fetishism, in which the whole of collective labor and apparatus which produces the cut between object and subject is elided and a purely contemplative realism asserted in its place. To the contrary, our journey through Marx, Mach, Bogdanov, Platonov, Feyerabend, Haraway, and Barad is among other things one that restores to the center of attention the realism of labor, practice, apparatus, and as we shall see even in science—infrastructure.

The subject of knowledge is as much a production of the apparatus as the object with which it apparently correlates. But this is neither a dogmatic nor a speculative realism, both of which concern themselves with an object of knowledge that is metaphysical in nature. Such realisms are not comradely, as each insists on philosophy’s unique power to legislate at the portals of the absolute. What appears most likely to be productive of new knowledge is a phenomenal or agental realism that inquires closely into the means of its own production.

In Barad, we likewise glimpse the queer world of particle physics, that inhuman view of a nonhuman world that is so far below the threshold of human perception that we struggle for language to describe it.¹²¹ Barad nevertheless offers certain concepts that help push the game of substitution in a new direction, and that might help in particular with Marx’s vision of the metabolic rift. The apparatus and its cuts, and the intra-actions that the apparatus both effects and stabilizes, might help us with thinking what might be the central discipline of the inhumanities: climate science, to which we turn next.

We started Part II of Molecular Red with Feyerabend’s reading of Mach, which would have us stay close to the realism of sensations, but is not entirely without its playful and creative use of substitution. Then Haraway helped us put that in the context of thinking our cyborgian point of view, in which we are at one and the same time a product of techno-science and yet inclined to think ourselves separate from it. There we learned not to make a fetish of either the thing or the body but to inquire as to the molecular relations in which such nodes emerge. Barad then extends the cyborg’s agency deep into the inquiry as to the physical composition of things. It’s time then to jump to a much larger scale—a planetary scale—and examine not just the apparatus but the whole infrastructure of apparatuses via which we come to know our climate as potentially unstable and as destabilized by metabolic rifts opened up by the collective laboring cyborg that is our species-being, itself shaped by the commodity form and techno-science.

CLIMATE SCIENCE AS TEKTOLOGY

Platonov worked on four kinds of infrastructure: the railways, electricity, irrigation, and the rather more subtle but pervasive one of standards, when he worked on weights and measures. He gives a vivid description of the struggle to build up infrastructure in “The Motherland of Electricity.” Set in 1921, his story tells of a young engineer, “haunted by the task of the struggle against ruin,” who is summoned to a remote village by a rather poetic communiqué from the secretary of the village soviet.¹²² The land is parched, the peasants are starving. So the engineer concocts a scheme to build some infrastructure to help them.

There are few resources: searching through the loot expropriated from the landlord, the poet secretary and his new comrade the engineer find some Picasso paintings, but no pumps. There are irrigation channels but no way to move the water. The young engineer persuades an old peasant to give up the alcohol he makes in his still. The alcohol will run the one engine in the village, an old motorcycle. The engineer then persuades the local mechanic to take some scrap metal and make a paddlewheel. This replaces the back wheel of the bike, and now pumps water through the old irrigation channels.

The engineer succeeds—at least for a moment—in building an infrastructure out of available parts in which the technologies—such as they are—interlock. In this case the social practices that might go with this system don’t quite take. The still explodes, killing the old peasant. He was using his own stomach as the apparatus to test the proof of the liquor, and fell asleep on the job.

Often in Platonov the infrastructure fails to live up to the superstructure of the revolution. Nevertheless, he thought a key piece of it should be a knowledge infrastructure. In his plan for a literary factory, he imagined a distributed network of specialized text-filtering centers with central nodes for the final synthesis of literary works. This, like Bogdanov’s Socialist Academy, did not come to pass. The knowledge infrastructures that did get built around the planetary west, such as California’s great research universities, intimately intra-act with commodification, military strategy, and digital technology.¹²³ This aggregate apparatus, all these cyborg knowings and inhuman doings, have the queer quality of both reproducing the world as commodity and strategy, and yet also of generating intimations of a nonhuman world.

A quite surprising knowledge infrastructure that did get built is the one through which scientists came to know about climate. What distinguishes climate science from particle physics or even genetics is that the data has to come from the whole of the big, bad, outside world. In climate science, it is not possible to build an apparatus that makes a cut, separating and delineating the object of study in its totality. Atmosphere is all around. You are sucking it in right now. The study of climate called into being a whole infrastructure of discrete apparatuses, of distinctive cuts. Climate science thus poses some fairly novel problems as to what a science is or should be, and not least what a comradely, cooperative science could be.

Our guide to climate science is A Vast Machine, by Paul Edwards, who was a graduate student with Haraway before becoming a noted historian of science. A Vast Machine takes its title from a remark by John Ruskin, who in 1839 imagined a panoptic system for knowing simultaneously the state of the weather on the entire surface of the planet.¹²⁴ Ruskin prefigures in some respects what actually came to pass—the building up, bit by bit, often from existing parts, first of partial systems, then a network, and by the twenty-first century an entire infrastructure for gathering weather data.

In some other respects, perfect weather surveillance turned out to be as impossible as the perfect surveillance of elementary particles. What Edwards calls friction, for which Bogdanov’s term resistance could well substitute, stands in the way of a perfect knowledge of real weather. There is data resistance, which impedes the gathering of weather data readings. There is metadata resistance, which is a limit to what is known about the circumstances relevant to particular weather readings. There is computational resistance, which limits the accuracy of the calculation of future weather states from weather data. Edwards also gives many examples of kinds of cultural and political, or in Bogdanov’s terms organizational, resistance that had to be overcome to produce a global knowledge of global climate.

Despite the differences in the results that climate modeling scientists get from their efforts, there is an overwhelming consensus around certain propositions that could at this point be called facts. Average temperatures around the world are rising. One of the causes of that trend is increases in the levels of atmospheric carbon. The cause of that increase is collective human labor.¹²⁵ In short, climate science holds that what I am calling the Carbon Liberation Front is real. As in any established science, there is plenty of controversy, but debates occur within this consensus.

The scientific recognition that collective human labor is causing climate change could well be one of those great discontinuities in perspective such as the heliocentric universe of Copernicus and Galileo, the evolution of species in Darwin and Wallace, and what Althusser rather problematically calls Marx’s opening up of the “continent of history.”¹²⁶ In the Anthropocene, some neutral, pre-given planetary nature is no longer available as a fiction of the real. We fucked it up.

Labor in and against nature is an intra-action which produces a second nature, a constructed, material world, the ant-heap of so-called civilization. Perhaps it even produces a third nature, a networked, communicative world, a digital pheromone trail of signals, signs, and symbols, a global interactive spectacle.¹²⁷ Nature always appears in the rear-view mirror, as a reflection of that which recedes from this juggernaut of an SUV in which we rattle on into the future. Or perhaps nature is just the movie that’s playing on the screen now embedded in the dashboard, while the SUV idles in a ditch, no longer going anywhere, just waiting for the wave of travail it left behind to catch up with it. Here comes the Carbon Liberation Front, and the slo-mo replay of the molecular products of metabolic rift catching up with the vehicle which tore across the world, excreting it.¹²⁸

Edwards doesn’t spend much time on the concept of the Anthropocene as discontinuity, but it would surely have interested Bogdanov. It is an historical moment when one true worldview is superseded by one of greater generality. Mother Nature as passive resister to he who acts no longer holds as a basic metaphor. Resistance has to be rethought a bit, perhaps along the lines of Platonov, as a labor that presses on an earth pressing back. But certainly there can be no resort to the figures of Gaia any more than to Prometheus.¹²⁹ The Gods cannot save us; the Goddess cannot save us. As Haraway insists, the engendering habits of thought about nature have to become an object of critique as a whole, rather than merely reversing the poles and celebrating a divine feminine nature. Our cyborgian selves are at last forced to face, with sober senses, our un-kind relations with the real.

Having something to say about climate science is surely a central test for any viable critical theory in the Anthropocene. Climate science understands the planet as a system with a history. It is the coming together of three separate kinds of knowledge: weather forecasting, the empirical study of climate, and theoretical meteorology. Bringing those three fields together required the growth of an extensive infrastructure of observation, communication, processing, and modeling. This infrastructure is a vastly more elaborate form of exactly the same sort of thing Platonov was working on in the countryside. It is embedded, extensive, standardized, modular, and—as he knew all too well—visible when it fails.

Through war and peace, the various sciences of weather and climate oscillated between forms of scientific nationalism and internationalism. Imperial power brought with it attempts at universal standards, a universal time, Morse code, and the vector of telegraphic communication, which moves information faster than weapons or commodities, although as yet not much faster than weather itself. Attempts at international cooperation on weather collapsed during both world wars. Yet war made weather an even higher priority. Meteorology aids accurate ballistics, not to mention the timing of troop movements and air sorties. Just as the ship had once become a mobile weather station, so too did aircraft, adding a third dimension to data-space.

As a field, climatology started off as descriptive and empirical.¹³⁰ The notion that clearing forests could cause local changes in climate had already occurred to David Hume, and it would appear that early on Marx and Engels had grasped something of the same perspective:

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself—geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.¹³¹

But it was Eduard Brückner who in the 1880s came up with some plausible ideas about different causes of climate change. He thought German climate data showed periodic fluctuations around a thirty-five-year cycle, and he linked increasing desertification and drought to deforestation. Svante Arrhenius brought concepts from physics into climate thinking. He calculated that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would raise global temperatures by five or six degrees Celsius, but he was more interested in explaining periods of global cooling.

Thomas Chamberlin started combining gas physics theories with geological data, and arrived at both a concept of the carbon cycle and of the role of life in the carbon cycle. The idea that the carbon cycle was a driver of global climate changes fell out of favor until the 1930s, as other research with other apparatus seemed to show that the water vapor in the atmosphere had a stronger greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide. Bogdanov’s interest in it in the 1910s and 1920s appears idiosyncratic. The idea that held favor was one linking climate change exclusively to variations in the earth’s orbit and tilt.

Edwards: “Data are things.”¹³² If we are to avoid a commodity or corporeal fetishism of such things, then critique has to inquire as to how data is produced. Data are the product of a whole series of labors, of observing, recording, collecting, transmitting, verifying, reconciling, storing, cataloguing, and retrieving. In each of these processes, human labor and the apparatus intra-act in all sorts of ways. The most utopian thing in Bogdanov’s Red Star is that data and computation resistance have been overcome, but the overcoming of these resistances is not part of the back-story of The Engineer Menni. In climate science, we have just such a story of the labor of information, which overcomes resistances corresponding to neither Bogdanov’s mental nor manual resistances to organization.

The exigencies of war were a great fillip to overcoming such resistances, and it leaves its traces. The image of a storm “front” is a substitution that derives from military forecasting. Speed was the essence of weather forecasting, and so the forecasters did not want too much data. The overcoming of communication resistance had outstripped the speed of the processing of data. The labor of processing data caught up with its transmission with the punch-card Holerith machines. In the United States, there was even a depression-era WPA project to put all past ship weather data onto punch cards for the study of climate.

World War Two was the weather war. Even the Western Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre found himself, in his brief military career, drafted into launching weather balloons and recording wind velocity data for the artillery.¹³³ Military aircraft discovered the jet streams, and, finally, theories about how upper level weather controls ground weather could be confirmed. Weather data captured from the Germans was treated as an intelligence find and several tons of records were carefully shipped back to the United States. It was an era when computing resistance was falling, but data resistance was still high. Too much manual processing was still involved. The human labor took the form of a series of analog-digital conversions: recording an observation from an instrument in a log book, then transcribing those numbers for communication by telegraph, then writing them back into tables by hand, and so on.

The Normandy invasion confirmed the military value of forecasting. It was launched under cover of appalling weather conditions, based on a meteorological prediction that the weather would clear once the Allied forces had crossed the English Channel. It could be said that the weather was not a chance circumstance in this instance but had been fully weaponized. Postwar weather data infrastructure was a vast improvement on its prewar state, but as in Platonov, it had been cobbled together from different kinds of parts. For example, teletype automated part of the data transmission, but shortwave and microwave transmission vectors were used in some situations as well.

The wartime development of computing made numerical weather prediction a possibility for the first time. John Von Neumann grasped how computers could be used for weather data. Like the hydrogen bomb, weather is basically a matter of fluid dynamics. Via a kind of tektological redeployment of the algorithm, what worked in one field might work in another. Jule Charney used the ENIAC computer for forecasting experiments, although it took more than twenty-four hours to compile a twenty-four-hour weather forecast. This was the beginning of a shift from analog to digital forecasting. As in other fields, early results led to optimism about computing power, which took a long time to pay off.

What particularly appealed to military taskmasters was the prospect of controlling the weather. The Normandy invasion weaponized the weather that just happened to occur through accurate prediction. What would appear a next logical step would be to command it. But before it could be controlled, it had to be measured and modeled. Not for the first or last time, a fairly remote military objective fueled a whole range of research. The postwar period is one of the growth over time of model sophistication, model resolution, and computing speed, in part fueled by military funding and imperatives, but in the process creating something else. Edwards: “In the 1960s and 1970s, this data-driven, regionally oriented, descriptive field would be transformed into a theory-driven, globally oriented discipline increasingly focused on forecasting the future.”¹³⁴

Something quite strange happens when computing power reaches the point that it can handle the complexity of a climate model: “If you can simulate the climate, you can do experiments.”¹³⁵ The computer itself becomes the laboratory. And over time, more and more processes can be integrated into the model, starting from a—relatively—simple thermodynamic engine which transports air from the equator to the poles, and eventually including a comprehensive model of how the atmosphere and the oceans process solar energy, of the effects of clouds, ocean currents and turbulence, of the albedo effect of different surfaces, and so on.

Climate models become earth system models that include the entire carbon cycle. Such an apparatus still can’t predict the actual weather too far in advance. Weather is complex, so predictive models aren’t accurate past a week or two. No model yet reproduces all features of recorded climate, but they do simulate its general patterns. The computer becomes the apparatus for a kind of infinite forecast, predicting both past and future climates of simulated planet Earths.

What made all this possible was supercomputing infrastructure. “No fields other than nuclear weapons research and high-energy physics have ever demanded so much calculating capacity.”¹³⁶ Climate science is one of the few fields that has influenced the development path of supercomputing. The first Cray supercomputer (model 1) shipped to a client was a prototype that went to Los Alamos in 1977 for weapons work, but the next (model 3) was for climate research.

In this regime of code-causality, modeling problems remain. There is a trade-off between the resolution and the complexity of a climate model: should it have more finely grained detail and only a few processes, or more processes but less fine detail? Then there is the problem of rounding-off error. To how many decimal points should a result be calculated? Tiny errors accumulate and effect the outcome. Even when starting with the same data, small differences in computer code can result in different simulation outcomes when modeling the same climate on different machines. The simulated Earths of climate science all differ a bit from each other—although all of them heat up.

Meanwhile, on the actual Earth, connecting up the weather data-gathering practices of the planet turns out to be an interesting precursor to the creation of the internet. Overcoming geopolitical resistances to get agreements on standards, and getting them implemented, took patience and persistence. Cold War geopolitics and decolonization movements favored a kind of infrastructural globalism. The superpowers sought global information in all sorts of areas, of which weather was just one, and preferably from some direct technical means, rather than relayed via allies. Former colonies attempting to establish themselves as sovereign states wanted to participate in global information sharing, but were not in a position to make major infrastructural commitments. Global weather data came to rely on two standard kinds of Cold War apparatus: the computer and the satellite.¹³⁷

The Cold War saw an escalation of the “techno-politics of altitude.”¹³⁸ When the Soviets shot down Gary Powers’s U2 spy plane in 1960, the Americans claimed it was doing weather research, which may even have been slightly true. Climate science intersected with the Cold War in one particularly eerie way: the “atmospheric” testing of nuclear weapons also turned out to be a nuclear testing of the atmosphere. Tracking radioactive fallout was a boon to the development of three-dimensional models of global circulation patterns, and also to atmospheric chemistry.

The United States and the Soviet Union each launched their own weather satellite systems, but superpower rivalry generated a subsidiary counter-discourse of peace, cooperation, and scientific progress. Weather was an area in which to realize all three. “The project enrolled scientists and weather forecasters in the competitive goals of the superpowers while simultaneously enrolling the superpowers … in scientific cooperation.”¹³⁹ The Soviet Union shared weather data from the vast territory it controlled, although it withheld the locations of certain weather stations, which of course were likely military installations.

With some sort of infrastructure cobbled together, it was feasible by the late 1970s to execute something called the Global Weather Experiment, which is possibly one of the largest scientific experiments ever conducted, and the first to attempt to produce a fully global data set about planetary weather. It also led to regular meetings of climate modelers from around the world. Climate emerges as a global object of a global knowledge practice, but overcoming geopolitical resistances hardly resolves the other kinds of resistance.

A key part of Edwards’s presentation of the genesis of climate science is his insistence on what Barad might recognize as a kind of intra-action. The data and the models co-produce each other. It’s not that there is data and then a model of that data. At a certain point in its evolution, the model acquires the capacity to create a certain quality of the data set itself. “Adding the third dimension, computer model grids became an ideal Earth: the world in a machine. Data from the real atmosphere had to first pass through this abstract grid-space, which transformed them into new data calculated for the model’s demands.”¹⁴⁰ Interpolation algorithms adjust data to what the model predicts it to read.

To test how a model fits the world, climate science does not compare model to data, but model to another model, to a model of the data. “Simulating data to test simulation models; using one model’s output to measure another one’s quality: welcome to the mirror world of computational science.”¹⁴¹ The mutual adjustment of model grid-points and observational records is a kind of data assimilation. Data and models intra-act. Sometimes models with simulated data predict better than ones with actual observations. Such might be some of the peculiarities of trying to produce knowledge in the era of code-causality.

Part of the difficulty for climate science is that the difference between “raw data” and analysis is much wider than in a lot of fields, due to the kind of data gathered.¹⁴² The apparatus is an inside-out cyborg, as it were. In a bench science, the apparatus effects a cut from the world, producing a situation where an event can happen that can be contained and repeated. In climate science, there are thousands upon thousands of instruments, each of which is an apparatus that makes a particular and local cut, measuring the value for temperature, or humidity, or barometric pressure. What is between and beyond these cuts remains indeterminate. The data have to be gathered “in the wild,” and will always fall short of being perfect records due to the instabilities inherent in the placing of the apparatus within the situation it records, rather than having an apparatus produce the situation then record it. The theory-laden nature of data is pushed to extremes in this science.

Climate science is not a reductionist science; it is a reproductionist science. “Reproductionism seeks to simulate a phenomenon, regardless of scale, using whatever combination of theory, data, and ‘semi-empirical’ parameters may be required. It’s a ‘whatever works’ approach …”¹⁴³ From a rationalist perspective, this looks like Feyerabend’s “anything goes.” From a naive positivist perspective, it starts to look like it’s “not science.” But it makes sense from the point of view Mach practiced, at least as Feyerabend understands it, which sticks close to the sensations that the apparatus produces, which toggles between data, model, and theory, and which uses conceptual, even critical tools to understand how each element in the practice of producing this knowledge, in and against the world, proceeds.

Models emerge as a relatively new category of knowledge production, when the basic metaphor becomes one of code-causality. Models are mediators between the apparatus, the data, and the theory. They are a distinct kind of technology, embodied in code and the machines that run it. As Feyerabend might expect, there’s no purity in either the data or the theory. The scientist’s chief job is trying to control for artifacts. How is the apparatus itself turning up as an artifact in the results as a kind of index of its own determinate form? An unwanted refraction may show up in an image made with a compound lens as lens flare. Digital devices produce quite different and strange artifacts of their own.¹⁴⁴

The vast panoptic machine Ruskin imagined did not come to pass, even in the era of big data. More data seems always to mean more data resistance. There are limits to observability. The apparatus produces the data it’s designed to produce, and has value precisely in its determinate quality, in the cut that makes it. Edwards: “You will never get perfect knowledge of initial conditions.”¹⁴⁵ Any particular model will always diverge from observations, in part because of the determinate quality of those very observations.

The problem with climate data is that most of it is actually weather data. It was collected for the purposes of short-run prediction, not long-run modeling. There is no consistent metadata attached to the data. There are not always records of what instruments were used, or if there were changes in the conditions of their use, nor are there always calibrations of a new instrument against the one it replaces. Perhaps the instrumentation was moved further up the hill, or a gauge was replaced by one from another manufacturer. Artifacts in the data set can result from all sorts of such little changes.

For instance, there appears to be a sudden drop in sea temperature of .03 degrees in 1945, but it might be caused by a switch from data gathered by American ships that measure engine intake water to British ones that drop a bucket over the side. Edwards: “Historically, climate scientists have often found themselves stuck with damaged goods—leftovers from a much larger forecasting enterprise that ignored consistency and reliability in its constant drive to move forward with newer, better technology.”¹⁴⁶ Ironically, this is a situation where the constant revolutionizing of the means of production introduces resistances of its own.

The methodological response in climate science is in a curious way an historical materialist one: “If you want global data, you have to make them. You do that by inverting the infrastructure, recovering metadata, and using models and algorithms to blend and smooth out diverse, heterogeneous data that are unevenly distributed in space and time.”¹⁴⁷ Inverting the infrastructure might be thought of as a way of working past a fetishism. The fetish is not so much of the commodity or the corporeal kind, but a kind of communicative fetishism, where what is communicated is severed from how it is communicated. Climate science requires a theory and a method of studying the means of production of its own data—a media theory.

This makes climate science vulnerable to attack by those with an interest in preserving a carbon-fueled commodity economy, or those with an emotional investment in maintaining the everyday life it appears to sustain. Techniques pioneered for the defense of tobacco, acid rain, and ozone depletion now appear in attacks on climate science. Edwards: “During the George W. Bush administration (2001–2008), even as the scientific consensus grew even stronger, political appointees carried the manufacture of controversy to the point of criminal corruption.”¹⁴⁸

Crucially, both the social constructivist and Heideggerian critiques of science now shift in their effects to the right, by undermining confidence in the methods of climate science and the consensus reached on climate change. Hence the need for progressive forces to think tactically about where and when the critique of science is prudent. Perhaps returning to something like the classical Marxist and Bogdanovite open-mindedness toward the sciences might be appropriate, rather than the Heidegger-inflected critique of Marcuse and others, which sees all science and technology as embedded in the same Western metaphysics.

Here we arrive at something of a crisis point for what one might call the romantic left.¹⁴⁹ This current wants a totalizing critique of technology more than of capital, that would ground its rejection of techno-modernity on a claim to something prior to or outside of it: on being, on nature, on poetry, on the body, on the human, or on communism as event or leap. But the problem is that the attendant closing of thought to science and technology now plays into the hands of climate denial. That the Carbon Liberation Front is changing the climate is a knowledge that can only be created via a techno-scientific apparatus so extensive that it is now an entire planetary infrastructure. To reject techno-science altogether is to reject the means of knowing about metabolic rift. We are cyborgs, making a cyborg planet with cyborg weather, a crazed, unstable disingression, whose information and energy systems are out of joint. It’s a de-natured nature without ecology.

Climate science has no need for Marxist theory, but Marxist theory has need of climate science. Its project has to move on, from the critique of political economy to the critique of its Darwinian descendants in biology, to the critique of climate science as a knowledge which shapes the most general worldview of the Anthropocene. It may sound like hubris to name an entire epoch the Anthropocene, as this seems at odds with the decentering and demoting of the human that was a significant achievement of ecological thought. But the Anthropocene draws attention to androgenic climate change as an unintended consequence of collective human labor.

The Anthropocene calls attention not to the psychic unconscious or the political unconscious but to the infrastructural unconscious. What labor builds is a disingression. Moreover, viewed via the Anthropocene, human action remains quite modest and minor, it’s just that in fluid systems a small action can have disproportionately large effects. Bogdanov had glimpsed something of this in his law of the minimum.

Bogdanov is an unacknowledged precursor to today’s reproductionist sciences. While his grasp of the actual science, even for his own time, was limited and idiosyncratic, he understood that critique has to advance from political economy to other sciences that shape the horizon of organizational possibilities. Rather than retreat to the high ground of philosophical method, he plunged on into a practice of comradely sharing among different knowledge practices.

So far I have made the case for a revised empirio-monism, to shear off the metaphysical extrusions of a pre-Anthropocene era. I have made a case for a revised tektology in which a humanist style of thought might collaborate with the sciences without futile attempts to legislate for them, and yet without accepting a naive scientific realism either. I have advocated a more nuanced version of the labor point of view, which understands labor’s imbrication in the apparatus. What remains then of Bogdanov’s orphan legacy is to rethink what might become of proletkult. Here, rather than follow Platonov, I return to Bogdanov’s foray into utopian science fiction.

One version of what might constitute a popular, affective way of writing low theory that is close to the experience of the technical and scientific labor of our times might be science fiction. There’s no finer exponent of it than Kim Stanley Robinson, to whom we turn next. Robinson is very much a Californian writer, who grew up in the shadow of its booming aerospace industries, but also had time for the Sierra Mountains nature writing of Kenneth Rexroth. He is even, in part at least, a writer shaped by California Marxism. He studied at the University of California (San Diego) after Herbert Marcuse’s tumultuous time there, but was shaped by his influence, not to mention that of Fredric Jameson, under whose direction he went on to produce a doctoral thesis on another great Californian writer, Philip K. Dick.¹⁵⁰ Not of least interest in Robinson’s work is the way these influences are woven together into a forward-looking fictional world.

4

Kim Stanley Robinson: The Necessity of Creation

Alternative futures branch like dendrites away from the present moment, shifting chaotically, shifting this way and that by attractors dimly perceived. Probable outcomes emerge from those less likely.

—Kim Stanley Robinson

RETURN TO RED MARS

“Arkady Bogdanov was a portrait in red: hair, beard, skin”—and red politics, although it will turn out that there is another kind entirely.¹ He is a descendant of Alexander Bogdanov, and he is on his way to Mars, together with ninety-nine other scientists and technicians. Or one hundred others, it will turn out, when the stowaway surfaces. This First Hundred (and one) are the collective protagonist of Kim Stanley Robinson’s famous Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars, published in the early 1990s.

If Bogdanov’s 1908 novel is a détournement of pop science fiction, then Robinson’s Red Mars, is a détournement of the robinsonade, a version of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe story. If we were to pick just one book as the precursor to capitalist realism, Crusoe might well be it. What makes it so characteristic of the genre is that it lacks any transcendent leap toward the heavens or the future. It is as horizontal as a pipeline. It is about making something of this world, not transcending it in favor of another. It makes adventure into the calculus of arbitrage, of the canny knack of buying cheap and selling dear.

Defoe organizes the bourgeois worldview with a forward-slanting grammar in which time is segmented and arranged serially. Robinson confronts this, does that, attains this benefit. Here’s a characteristic sentence: “Having mastered this difficulty, and employed a world of time about it, I bestirred myself to see, if possible, how to supply two wants.” Moretti: “Past gerund; past tense; infinitive: wonderful three part sequence.”² It’s the “grammar of growth.” Bourgeois prose is a rule-based but open-ended style.

This grammar creates a whole new visibility for things. In Defoe, things can be useful in themselves. They are connectable only sideways, in networks of other things. With this you get that, with that you make this, and so on. Things are described in detail. Everything appears as a potential resource or obstacle to accumulation. What is lost is the totality. The world dissolves into these particulars. The capitalist realist self sees a world of particular things as if they were there to be the raw materials of the work of accumulation, for it knows no other kind of work.

In Red Mars, Robinson bends the robinsonade to other purposes. There is neither heaven nor horizon, but the practical question of how various ideologies overcome the friction of collaborative labor. It is not a story of an individual’s acquisition and conquest. It’s a story about collective labors. The problem here is the invention of forms of organization and belief for a post-bourgeois world. Robinson’s ambition is the invention of a grammar that might come after that of capitalist realism.

The leaders of this joint Russian-American expedition are Maya Toitovna and Frank Chalmers, experienced space and science bureaucrats. Frank and Maya are different kinds of leaders, one cynical the other more emotive. They quickly find their authority doubled, and troubled, by more committed and charismatic potential leaders, Arkady Bogdanov and John Boone. Bogdanov and Boone over-identify with the political ideologies of their respective societies, Soviet and American, the Marxist and the liberal.³ They actually believe! Chalmers and Toitovna find this especially dangerous to their more pragmatic authority.

These four could almost form a kind of “semiotic rectangle,” an analytic tool used by both Fredric Jameson and Donna Haraway.⁴ It’s tempting to reach into the bag of tricks of formal textual analysis and run the Mars Trilogy through the mesh of such devices. The problem is that Robinson already includes such devices within the text itself. The character of Michel the psychiatrist is particularly fond of semiotic rectangles, for example. The usual “innocence” of the text in relation to the formal critical method no longer applies here—Robinson did, after all, study with Fredric Jameson. Perhaps that’s why Robinson always seems to want his stories to exceed the formal properties of such a schema. Rather, his characters form loose networks of alliance and opposition, always making boundaries and linkages. The novel tracks one possible causal sequence in a space of possibilities. There’s no single underlying design.

Robinson did not coin the term “terraforming,” but he surely gives it the richest expression of any writer.⁵ While there is plenty in the Mars Trilogy on the technical issues in terraforming Mars, Robinson also uses it as a Brechtian estrangement device to open up a space for thinking about the organization of the Earth.⁶ On Mars, questions of base and superstructure, nature and culture, economics and politics, can never be treated in isolation, as all “levels” have to be organized together. Maya: “We exist for Earth as a model or experiment. A thought experiment for humanity to learn from.”⁷ Perhaps Earth is now a Mars, estranged from its own ecology.

Of the First Hundred, Arkady Bogdanov has the most clearly revolutionary agenda, and one straight out of proletkult. He objects to the design for their first base, Underhill, “with work space separated from living quarters, as if work were not part of life. And the living quarters are taken up mostly with private rooms, with hierarchies expressed, in that leaders are assigned larger spaces … Our work will be more than making wages—it will be our art, our whole life … We are scientists! It is our job to think things new, to make them new!”⁸

There are many actually existing, contemporary or historical societies that for Robinson exude hints of utopian possibility: the Mondragon Co-ops, Yugoslav self-management, Red Bologna, the Israeli kibbutz, Sufi nomads, Swiss cantons, Minoan or Hopi matriarchies, Keralan matrilineal land tenure. One of the more surprising is the Antarctic science station. This he experienced first-hand in 1995 on the National Science Foundation’s Artists and Writer’s Program.⁹

Robinson imagines the first Mars station at Underhill as just like a scientific lab—and just as political. As Arkady would say, ignoring politics is like saying you don’t want to deal with complex systems. Arkady: “Some of us here can accept transforming the entire physical reality of this planet, without doing a single thing to change ourselves or the way we live … We must terraform not only Mars, but ourselves.”¹⁰ Thus the most advanced forms of organization can be a template for the totality.

A field station like Underhill is not only an advanced social form, for Arkady it connects to a deep history:

This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize if from three million years of practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get a chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, or make things, or satisfy our curiosity, or play. That is utopia … especially for primitives and scientists, which is to say everybody. So a scientific research station is actually a little model of prehistoric utopia, carved out of the international money economy by clever primates who want to live well.¹¹

Not everyone gets to live such a life, even at Underhill, and so the scientific life isn’t really a utopia. Scientists carve out refuges for themselves from other forms of organization and power rather than work on expanding them. The crux of the “Bogdanov” position in the Mars Trilogy is making the near-utopian aspect of the most advanced forms of collaborative labor a general condition.

This Arkady Bogdanov, not unlike the real Alexander Bogdanov a century before him, is a kind of scapegoat to the revolution. Nearly all of the early leaders fall, in one way or another, and not least because they are too much the products of the old authoritarian organizational world. Mars has to transform its pioneers, or nurture new ones, on the way to another kind of life. A new structure of feeling has to come into existence, not after but before the new world. This is what Alexander Bogdanov thought was the mission of proletkult. Overcoming the logic of sacrifice is not the least of its agenda.¹²

John Boone, meanwhile, finds many of Arkady’s ideas wrong, and even dangerous. John Boone is a charismatic, hard-partying Midwesterner. He is politically cautious, but acknowledges that “everything’s changing on a technical level and the social level might as well follow.”¹³ His mission, at first, is to forget history and build a functioning society. But while dancing with the Sufis, he has his epiphany: “He stood, reeling; all of a sudden he understood that one didn’t have to invent it all from scratch, that it was a matter of making something new by synthesis of all that was good in what came before.”¹⁴

Bogdanovists are modernists who start over; Booneans are détourners of all of the best in received cultures. Boone practices his own style of détournement, copying and correcting, and tearing off enthusiastic speeches: “That’s our gift and a great gift it is, the reason we have to keep giving all our lives to keep the cycle going, it’s like in eco-economics where what you take from the system has to be balanced or exceeded to create the anti-entropic surge which characterizes all creative life …”¹⁵ The crowd cheers, even if nobody quite understands what Boone is talking about.

Saxifrage Russell is a more phlegmatic kind of scientist, entranced by the this-ness, the “haecceity,” of whatever he happens to be working on.¹⁶ For Sax, the whole planet is a lab, and when John Boone asks him, “who is paying for all this?” Sax answers: “The sun.” Sax quietly ignores the heavy involvement of metanational companies, for whom the whole Mars mission is a colonization and resource extraction enterprise. When John later uses this same answer to Arkady, the latter won’t have it: “Wrong! It’s not just the sun and some robots, it’s human time, a lot of it. And those humans have to eat …”¹⁷ Like Arkady, Sax sees science as a component of a larger praxis of world building, but for Arkady there’s still more. There’s the question of what kind of world and who it is for—the question of the labor component of the cyborg apparatus.

For Sax, science is creation. “We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread it around, to go look at things, to live wherever we can.” Ann the geologist disagrees. “You want to do that because you think you can … It’s bad faith, and it’s not science … I think you value consciousness too high and rock too little … Being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it into a mirror image of us. It means rather fitting into it as it is.”¹⁸ But what does it mean, to “fit in,” when the fitting changes what it is in? Is it not metaphorically more like a refraction?

Ann’s is the most “flat” ontology of the First Hundred.¹⁹ Human subjectivity has no privilege in her world, and neither does life. The real for her is this: “The primal planet, in all its sublime glory, red and rust, still as death; dead; altered through the years only by matter’s chemical permutations, the immense slow life of geophysics. It was an old concept—abiologic life—but there it was, if one cared to see it, a kind of living, out there spinning, moving through the stars that burned …”²⁰ If the basic metaphor for Hiroko is that life is spirit, and for Sax that life is development, for Ann it is at best selection, the lifeless life of impacts and erosions of the geological eons.

Later, Robinson compares Ann’s relation to Mars to that of a caravan of itinerant Arab miners: “They were not so much students of the land as lovers of it; they wanted something from it. Ann, on the other hand, asked for nothing but questions to be asked. There were so many different kinds of desire.”²¹ For the miners, nature is that which labor engages; for Ann, nature is that which appears to science only, shorn of any wider sense of praxis. Ann’s worldview is not so entirely selfless, with its “concentration on the abstract, denial of the body and therefore of all its pain.”²² Nevertheless, it does speak to an absolute nonhuman outside to knowledge, an outside that even Sax will eventually have to acknowledge.

While also technically trained, Hiroko is more of a mystic. She believes in what Hildegard of Bingen called viriditas, or the greening power. This is the key to her aerophany, her landscape religion. Hiroko: “There’s a constant pressure, pushing toward pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms. It’s a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening power we call viriditas, and it is the driving force of the cosmos …”²³ Arkady wants a kind of work beyond its alienation in wage labor; Hiroko wants work to be a kind of worship. As with Ann, Hiroko has a kind of ontology, but a vitalist and constructivist one, oriented to a practice that transforms its object.²⁴ In each case it’s a substitution which starts with a kind of labor and imagines a universe after its basic metaphor.

There’s a constant play in the Mars Trilogy between what is visible and what is hidden. Hiroko hides Coyote, the stowaway, and herself goes into hiding, with her followers, on Mars. She asks Michel the psychotherapist to go with them when they leave the Underhill base and set up a secret sanctuary: “We know you, we love you. We know we can use your help. We know you can use our help. We want to build just what you are yearning for, just what you have been missing here. But all in new forms. For we can never go back. We must go forward. We must find our own way. We start tonight. We want you to come with us.” And Michel says, “I’ll come.”²⁵

When Hiroko, the Green Persephone, surfaces again, her actions require some justifying: “We didn’t mean to be selfish … We wanted to try it, to show by experiment how we can live here. Someone has to show what you mean when you talk about a different life … Someone has to live that life.”²⁶ This is another tension in the Mars Trilogy: between political struggle and the enactment of another life directly, in the everyday, as experiments in self-organization that create new structures of feeling.

In the color scheme of the books, Hiroko stands for Green and Ann for Red. To estrange us a little from what we think these colors mean, the Greens are those who favor one or another kind of terraforming, to artificially make a biosphere for life. For the Greens, nature is synonymous with life. For the Reds, nature is prior to life, greater than life. “Ann was in love with death.”²⁷ The Red Mars isn’t really a living one, and the Green one is more like a garden or a work of art—culture. Neither are an ecology, if by that one means some ideal model of a homeostatic, self-correcting world. For the Greens, nature is that with which one works; for the Reds, it is that which one contemplates.

Part of the problem is working up an organizational language adequate to techno-science, or as Boone says to Nadia Chernishevsky the engineer: “Muscle and brain have extended out through an armature of robotics that is so large and powerful that it’s difficult to conceptualize. Maybe impossible.” Life is a tektological problem, lived against external constraints, but as Frank despairs, “they lived like monkeys still, while their new God powers lay around them in the weeds.”²⁸

It is like Platonov’s tragedy of nature and technology in a different mode. The potential of technical power far outstrips organizational forms or concepts, which remain narrowly acquisitive and instrumental. They are on Mars to prepare the way for corporate resource extraction, after all. This is the driving tension of the Mars Trilogy. All of the experiences of Mars, through study, work, or worship, are fragments of a new ingression, but they have to link together, overcome their boundaries, and form a new boundary against the exploitative and militarized forms of life that sent them all there. But crucially in Robinson, not only is a potential politics (Arkady and John) counter-posed to an actual one (Frank and Maya), but a potential technics is counter-posed to the actual one of the metanationals (with the Sax character moving from the one to the other). The struggle for utopia is both technical and political, and so much else besides.

The first Martian revolution—there will be three—is in a sense against “feudalism,” against a residual part of the social formation based on self-reproducing hierarchies. It is a revolution against a world where the ruling class, like the Khans of Kiva, is impoverished by its distance from any real work—in this case an inter-planetary distance. It arises out of the conflict that pits the First Hundred, leading the Martian working class, against the metanational corporations and their private armies. As Frank Chalmers says: “Colonialism had never died … it just changed names and hired local cops.”²⁹ To the metanats, Mars has no independent existence. To the Martians, it’s a place where the apparent naturalness of the old economic order is exposed as artifice, inequality, and fetishism.

The first revolution founders. Its vanguard is poorly coordinated, and relies too much on force, in a situation where the population in revolt is now heavily dependent on vulnerable infrastructure, which turns out to be egressive and fragile. The metanats and their goons need only shut down life support to bring refractory populations to heel. Bogdanov’s law of the minimum applies here. The movement is forced underground. But perhaps this same techno-science can also support autonomous spaces outside the metanat order, where new kinds of everyday life and economic relation might arise.

The first revolution is perhaps their 1905 Russian Revolution, although as Frank says, “Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can’t grasp the current situation.”³⁰ The first revolution results in a treaty of sorts, negotiated by Frank, the cynical and pragmatic politician. For Frank, “the weakness of businessmen was their belief that money was the point of the game.”³¹ Sax at this point still wants metanat investment, but Frank wants to contain it. As Frank says to Sax: “You’re still trying to play at economics, but it isn’t like physics, it’s like politics.”³² Science and capital, it is clear to Frank but not yet to Sax, are not natural allies.

In defeat, Arkady and the Bogdanovists will hide in plain sight, to continue the revolution of everyday life: “Why then we will make a human life, Frank. We will work to support our needs, and do science, and perhaps terraform a bit more. We will sing and dance, and walk around in the sun, and work like maniacs for food and curiosity.” They will create the counter-spectacle of an underground as a “totalizing fantasy,”³³ onto which everyone projects their wants. It is a matter of making extravagant proposals for another life with enough serious seduction to draw bored and disaffected labor into believing in it.³⁴

Failure to spark a global revolution on Mars prompts a kind of theoretical introspection, not unlike the ones that happened after the failure of world proletarian revolution on early twentieth-century Earth, which resulted in the theoretical reflections of Western Marxism.³⁵ It is neatly captured in a dialogue between Frank Chalmers and his assistant:

“How can people act against their own obvious material interests?” he demanded of Slusinki over his wristpad. “It’s crazy! Marxists were materialists, how did they explain it?”

“Ideology, sir.”

“But if the material world and our method of manipulating it determine everything else, how can ideology happen? Where did they say it comes from?”

“Some of them defined ideology as an imaginary relationship to a real situation. They acknowledged that imagination was a powerful force in human life.”

“But then they weren’t materialists at all!” He swore with disgust. “No wonder Marxism is dead.”

“Well, sir, actually a lot of people on Mars call themselves Marxists.”³⁶

Most Western Marxists thought ideology in its negative aspect, its misrecognition; Bogdanov was more interested in its affirmative aspect, in the way an ideology overcomes resistance to a given form of social labor.³⁷ From that point of view, what matters in this exchange is the form of the dialogue between Frank and Slusinki—master and servant—rather than the content, a Marxisant critique of ideology. The Martians do not yet have a form of communication that expresses the organizational style of their emergent social formation. The problem is not with the language or the theory, it’s with the forms of organization and communication. The failure of this revolution does not call for the Western Marxist turn to the superstructures, but rather a Bogdanovite turn to evolving new forms of organization, including a new infrastructure.

The Martians are not ready for their revolution. Still, even an unsuccessful struggle can create powerful structures of feeling, which may have future uses. “Arkady answered them all cheerfully. Again he felt that difference in the air, the sense they were all in a new space together, everyone facing the same problems, everyone equal, everyone (seeing a heating coil glowing under a coffee pot) incandescent with the electricity of freedom.”³⁸ As Platonov says, we are comrades when we face the same dangers.

This moment of the fused group, united in action, might seed a memory for another time.³⁹ These moments in the Mars Trilogy are rather like the civil war section of Platonov’s Chevengur: the new space and time, the new subjectivity it calls into being. But just as in Platonov, the disorganizing power works faster and more conclusively than any organizing power. The emphasis in Robinson is not on the moment of revolution as universal leap toward the communist horizon, but on the accumulation of minor, even molecular, elements of a new way of life and their negotiations with each other.

Civil war destruction and sabotage transform the Martian landscape. The First Hundred are on the run. Ann is distressed by the death of her dead world. “Here in the flesh she found it almost impossible to grasp. The landscape itself was now speaking a kind of glossolalia.”⁴⁰ The civil war wrenches Ann from her strictly scientific relation to Mars. She becomes a contemplative realist of a more metaphysical sort, her antennae oriented to a great outdoors. “And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos.”⁴¹ Ann is alone with a chaotic, indifferent universe. A solitude which, paradoxically, draws others to her.

Anne’s intuition of the absolute beyond the dining room window is beautifully described by the philosospher Quentin Meillassoux:

what we see there is a rather menacing power—something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm.⁴²

A hyper-chaos, in short, for Bogdanov is not thinkable, but for Ann is the very condition of possibility of knowing Mars at all, since it withdraws in advance any cosmic guarantee for any human project.

And yet it’s the kind of thought that finds expression, and adherents, in moments not of cosmic but of social collapse. Struggling with the human, technical, and “natural” disasters of a failed revolution, Michel says to Nadia: “These are times that try men’s souls.” And Nadia answers: “Women, however, do fine.”⁴³ As the arc of the Trilogy progresses, the gender balance of the human actants shifts. In the end it will be a victory over both property and patriarchy, but it’s a victory still a long way off when the first volume concludes.

GREEN MARS: TEKTOLOGY AS REVOLUTION

Green Mars opens in Hiroko’s world, a secret, green enclosure under the Martian polar ice cap. It opens too with a next generation character. Nirgal is a child of Hiroko’s cyborg-matriarchal clan, as only Shulamith Firestone could imagine.⁴⁴ Nirgal is caught between not the Green and the Red, but the Green and the White:

Looking from the green side, when Hiroko confronted something mysterious, she loved it and it made her happy—it was viriditas, a holy power. Looking from the white side, when Sax confronted something mysterious, it was the Great Unexplainable, dangerous and awful. He was interested in the true, while Hiroko was interested in the real. Or perhaps it was the other way around—those words were tricky.⁴⁵

Nirgal the “ectogene,” raised in a matriarchy, outside of the nuclear family, still has to leave it to come into himself. He becomes a student of Coyote, a fellow wanderer. Nirgal is our guide to the Mars underground. Arkady is gone, but most hidden sanctuaries are Bogdanovist, except for Hiroko’s, and those of the francophone utopians, readers of Foucault and Fourier.⁴⁶ He will also guide another character, a stock one in utopian writing: the visitor from something like our pre-utopian world.

Debord once said, “Yet the highest ambition of the integrated spectacle is still to turn secret agents into revolutionaries, and revolutionaries into secret agents.”⁴⁷ On Mars, the character who is both is called Art. He can be read, among other things, as the stock character of the visitor from our world. Or as a stand-in for the commercial science-fiction publishing industry, of which the Mars Trilogy is a mature product, with its ambiguous role of both propagating and co-opting the radical imagination.

Art works for Praxis, a somewhat unusual metanational corporation, as a fixer and problem-solver. After “eighty continuous years of metastasizing,” Praxis is one of the biggest companies, but the aristocratic elite who run it have a serious case of noblesse oblige.⁴⁸ Fort, its president, is enamored of the full world economics of Herman Daly: “We have been liquidating our natural capital as if it were disposable income … man made capital and natural capital are not substitutable.”⁴⁹ The goal of Praxis is to get into the bio-infrastructure business, as natural resources have a theoretically infinite price, by acquiring them from distressed countries. As Fort says to Art: “We want you to acquire Mars.”⁵⁰

Art’s intra-actions with the underground change him. Nirgal insinuates Art into the underground. He introduces Art to the principles of gift economy: “Get before you give, and give before you burn.” Art is rather perplexed by Nirgal’s explanations. “There’s a money economy for the old buy and pay system, using units of hydrogen peroxide as the money. But most people try to do as much as they can by the nitrogen standard, which is the gift economy.”⁵¹

The displacement of Red by White reveals also another “color” to the revolutionary flag, and another character: the legendary stowaway, Desmond the Coyote, late of Trinidad. Hiroko smuggled him to Mars. They were lovers once, but as Hiroko gathers around herself her matriarchal, polyandrous cult, the Coyote becomes a wanderer, moving between underground bases, teaching everyone the principles of eco-economics, with this double economy of gift and commodity. As Coyote says to Nirgal: “We are the primitives of an unknown civilization.”⁵² He teaches Nirgal the black arts of hiding in plain sight.

Coyote is not a great believer in revolutions. “It’s not politics, but survival.”⁵³ Rather like Platonov, he thinks revolutions are reactive, driven by fear and hunger more than universal ideals. He is not shy of illegality, just more of an anarchist than any of the other characters. He travels between the underground enclaves—Gramsci, Fourier, Mauss-Hyde, Bogdanov-Visniak, Fourier, Cole, Bellamy, Proudhon—as if on a caravan across the folds of the critical utopian archive.⁵⁴

He is teaching and practicing a new kind of social relation. Coyote: “I’m saving people from their own ridiculous notion of economics, that’s what I’m doing! A gift economy is all very well, but it isn’t organized enough for our situation. There are critical items that everyone has to have, so people have to give, which is a contradiction, right?”⁵⁵ Coyote puts into practice the eco-economics worked out in theory by Vlad and Ursula. He bargains hard to give more than he gets, just short of potlaching, which is the problem of ever-increasing gifting.

Meanwhile, Ann is becoming a “bakehead,” wandering too long on the surface of Mars alone. She survives a landslide, which she just watches and does nothing to avoid, her survival a matter of chance, a mere shake of the dice. “It had nothing to do with value or fitness; it was pure contingency. Punctuated equilibrium, without the equilibrium. Effects did not follow from causes … In the random flux of universal contingency, nothing mattered; and yet, and yet …”⁵⁶

On her anabasis, she has a particularly intense vision of molecular red:

the boulder field took on a weird beauty … The boulders were basalt rocks, which had been scoured by the winds on one exposed surface, until that surface had been scraped flat. Perhaps a million years for the first scraping. And then the underlying clays had been blown away, or a rare mars-quake had shaken the region, and the rock had shifted to a new position, exposing a different surface. And the process had begun again. A new facet would be slowly scraped flat by the ceaseless brushing of micron-sized abrasives, until once again the rock’s equilibrium changed, or another rock bumped it, or else something else shifted it from its position. And then it would start again.⁵⁷

While she perceives a molecular red world, she cannot see a project that would orient collective human labor within it. Ann has a vision of all the other leading protagonists and their orientation to a kind of tektology, in which organizing has an objective, or rather a criteria, but in each case a different one. Each wants a “net gain” in something, but not the same thing.⁵⁸ For Vlad and Ursula, the scientists who created the longevity treatment and then Martian eco-economics, it’s a net gain in health. For Hiroko, beauty; for Nadia, goodness; for Maya, intensity; for Arkady, freedom; for Michel, understanding; for Frank, power; for John, happiness; for Sax, complexity. And for Ann? Nothing. She is the only character for whom a Meillassouxian nihilism is the ground tone.

Still, Ann’s Redness remains a counterpoint for Sax’s white hot passion for the techno-science of terraforming. “Terraforming isn’t science,” she insists.⁵⁹ As soon as science has a goal it loses its struggle for objectivity in advance. It loses the great outdoors. For Sax, favoring living over non-living systems is a value, a “holding action against entropy,” and a struggle for a “net gain in information,” to vary the formula once again.⁶⁰

What makes all of these variations on the temporal signature of the Carbon Liberation Front is that they exclude in advance the narratives of capitalist realism and capitalist romance. Continuous growth, resolving its internal imbalance by projecting forward into an open world, is excluded. So too is a return to homeostasis, a closed loop balanced by some invisible hand or self-correcting order. Rather, progressive selection has to try to factor in all its own byproducts, but without the regulative ideal of a stable ecological model—that last avatar of God.⁶¹

Under Ann’s influence, Sax starts to question his own reliance on secondary ideas alone, of applied science, terraforming, and so forth. For Sax, these secondary ideas keep at bay those deathly ideas of an absolute contingency that are so inimical to life, but to which Ann is in thrall. And yet, Ann claims, and not without justice, that Sax does not know Mars, at least not until his near death experiences. Sax will be put through trials. One of which, curiously, is a stroke that causes aphasia. He will lose language, just as Ann did, but far more severely. “You should hear the way he can say bad results.”⁶²

Language is a key aspect of Robinson’s work. His novels are at once “realist” and have a heightened reflexivity about what realism in science fiction might entail. One aspect of this is a kind of détournement of scientific lexicons, not unlike Lautréamont’s use of Buffon and other natural history texts in Maldoror. The Mars Trilogy books anticipate the search-engine age, as they bristle with terms that the reader can usefully look up. One can learn that a chasmoendolith, a life form that lives in the cracks in rocks, is different from a cryptoendolith, which gets into their internal cavities. There is even a fan-generated wiki.⁶³

The Sax character himself becomes aware of the problem of language in relation to science, and even arrives at an understanding of language as universal ingression: “Analogies were mostly meaningless—a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy).” For Sax, culture is a “huge compendium of meaningless analogies … a kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness.”⁶⁴ He thinks Michel’s psychology is a mess of analogies. Freud thinks the mind is a steam engine: application of heat, pressure buildup, displacement, venting, and so on. Sax imagines the mind on the model of the more contemporary sciences that he knows, such as climatology.⁶⁵ The basic metaphors of causality are out of date.

For Sax, as for Bogdanov, language offers the most plastic medium of substitution but also the most dangerous, as most of its substitutions will not work at all in another medium. The problem is finding a method of selection from language into other practices. It’s a problem for Sax, where it would not be for Ann, because of his attempt to find a praxis with a net gain. Organizing praxis calls for a theory of history, a language of goals and objectives, even if only a provisional one.⁶⁶ Praxis needs a conceptual space which relates knowable pasts to possible futures.

But it won’t be a teleology. History has no plan. There is no horizon to orient toward, no line from present to future. “In that regard there was a similarity between history and evolution, both of them being matters of contingency and accident, as well as patterns of development. But the differences, particularly in time scales, were so gross as to make the similarity nothing more than analogy again … History directing evolution. It was a daunting thought.”⁶⁷ The goal of science, external to it but orienting it, would ideally be a science of history. “He needed a science of history, but unfortunately there was no such thing. History is Lamarckian, as Arkady used to say.”⁶⁸

Or could be, or should be. If only we could acquire characteristics that have survival value and pass them on. We still tend to think that if we stop certain actions, an ecology will right itself and return to homeostasis. But perhaps that is not the case. Negative action might not be enough. It might take positive actions to create a new ingression. What if on the actual Earth, as on this fictional Mars, there is no ecology? What if there is only an unstable nature, a progressive selection, here on Earth too? What if it was a matter of continuous conscious adaptation through experimental variation via the détournement of existing forms?

The journey of the Sax character is one of finding a place along a continuum from rational, model-based science toward a more empirical and contingent one. He is representative of scientists as a class. “They were apolitical, supposedly, like civil servants—empiricists, who only wanted things managed in a rational scientific style, the greatest good for the greatest number, which ought to be fairly simple to arrange, if people were not so trapped in emotions, religions, governments, and other mass delusional systems of that sort.”⁶⁹

He is the godfather of terraforming, and still attracted to vast geo-engineering projects, particularly of the climate. The estrangement device here is that the problem on Mars is one of raising temperatures, rather than lowering them: “Sax moved on, a little smile fixed on his face. Twelve degrees! Now that was something!—over twenty percent of all the warming they needed, and all by the early and continuous deployment of a nicely designed gas cocktail. It was elegant, it truly was. There was something so comforting about simple physics.”⁷⁰ Part of the project of Green Mars is to put this “accelerationist” glee in dialogue with tempering ideologies, without losing this sense of scale.

What brings Sax to an awareness of the problem with science in its complicity with the metanats is his encounter with what should be a kind of utopia—the scientific conference. But metanat-sponsored science becomes a war of competing corporate agendas. “Everyone knew what was going on, and no one liked it, and yet no one would admit it.”⁷¹ The aim of this science is nothing scientific. Sax does not abandon science for Hiroko’s mysticism, or retreat into Ann’s merely contemplative version of science. He starts to see that the passion of reason is the pull toward death, not just in Ann but in himself.

Sax embarks on a double project of bringing science to politics and politics to science. Fredric Jameson: “any first scientific reading of the Mars Trilogy must eventually develop into a second allegorical one, in which the hard SF content stands revealed as socio-political—that is to say, as utopian.”⁷² What is lacking from this reading is its dialectical complement. Any socio-political reading can also develop a secondary reading in which the utopian content intersects with its scientific—hard SF—determinants.

Actually it doesn’t stop there. The Mars Trilogy stages encounters between otherwise incommensurable kinds of knowledge organization: science both pure and applied, engineering, design, politics, culture, religion, folklore, and so on.⁷³ It’s not that there’s a synthesis to be had. Rather, it’s that each mode of knowing, and hence each layer of possible reading of the Mars Trilogy itself, can be usefully framed by another, which contains within it the positive, functional, working ideology of some component of the labor process as a whole. In this respect the Mars Trilogy is a work about tektology.

For Sax after his tribulations, as for Bogdanov after his, the useful framing knowledge comes from natural history. Sax makes his own observations in the field. Natural history is a real science, and “it had discovered, there among the contingency and disorder, some valid general principles of evolution—development, adaptation, complexification.”⁷⁴ He does not abandon the modeling central to his original training in theoretical physics, but rather starts to take a more skeptical approach to it, to put cognition and sensation together more tentatively. All his field observations are of a wildly unstable nature, and like Bogdanov, he has already experienced the wild instability of political time. He comes to see scientific time as—at times—unhelpfully artificial.

“Here on Mars all kinds of hierarchies were destined to fall.”⁷⁵ The problem of the Mars Trilogy is not unlike that of Foundation Pit, a problem of base and superstructure. Only here the superstructure already exists, at least in potentia. The scientific station is a working model of a superstructure. But it has to build its own base. It has to construct a nature that will support it.

The centerpiece of the middle volume is a conference of all the underground factions, hosted by the matriarchal Dorsa Brevia enclave. It is a negotiation between at least four kinds of vision for Mars. Coyote the anarchist has very little interest, and so the four parties are the Red, the Green, the White, and what one might call the multicultural question. How can a just society accommodate different ways of life? What are the limits to acceptable difference? Who gets to decide on the boundaries of exclusion?

Interestingly, Robinson seems to draw here on two preoccupations of late twentieth-century thought that often had little to do with each other: multiculturalism and civil society.⁷⁶ The former came out of the critique of colonialism, combined with American experiences of the politics of race, gender, and sexuality. The latter arose out of the experience of post-Soviet societies in transition. The Martians arrive, at their Dorsa Brevia convention, at a vision of a polyarchic society of federated city-states, bound by something like a new Declaration of Independence.

This Dorsa Brevia manifesto is a synthesis, in displaced form, not only of Terran civil society and multicultural thinking, but also of socialist and ecological economics. The land, air, and water are a commons. One of its key theses is: “The goal of Martian economics is not ‘sustainable development’ but a sustainable prosperity for its entire biosphere.”⁷⁷

How is the Dorsa Brevia manifesto to become a reality? Nirgal is out traveling, like Coyote but less hidden, and among those who are enacting Dorsa Brevia in their everyday lives. “They were agronomists, ecological engineers, construction workers, technicians, technocrats, city operators, service personnel.”⁷⁸ These are the twenty-first-century equivalent of Bogdanov’s class-conscious industrial workers.

Meanwhile, Maya divides her time between hydrology work for Praxis, the underground, and enjoying the new Martian theater and music. “Politics needed to coopt some of that erotic energy, or else it was only a matter of ressentiment and damage control.”⁷⁹ Maya and the others from the First Hundred want to prevent “another October.” They are like Mensheviks, educating and proselytizing, holding back, waiting for the right conjuncture, and not trying to force the pace of history. “It was frightening—as if history were a series of human wave assaults on misery failing time after time.”⁸⁰ With Coyote, Maya fears the merely destructive leap.

They are waiting for the trigger, the spark, to restart the revolution. Back on Earth, the western Antarctic ice sheet collapses, causing sea levels to rise everywhere. Curiously, global warming is happening on this Earth, but Robinson does not make it the cause of the ice sheet falling into the sea. It is as if, in Bogdanovite style, one needs to pay attention not just to predictable challenges to organization. There is more than one metabolic rift, caused by all sorts of molecular liberation fronts, interacting in unpredictable ways.⁸¹

While the rising seas divert attention and resources on Earth, the Martians launch their revolution, and like most revolutions, it suspends habit as well as law. They can be understood via a kind of tektology. Nadia the engineer:

Melting occurred when the thermal energy of particles was great enough to overcome inter-crystalline forces that held them in position. So if you considered the metanat order as the crystalline structure … But then it made a huge difference if the forces holding it together were interionic or intermolecular; interionic, sodium chloride, melted at 801C, methane, intermolecular, at –183C. What kind of forces, then? And how high the temperature?⁸²

This time, the temperature is right.

BLUE MARS: AFTER UTOPIA

Like Bogdanov, Robinson finds that the interesting problems begin after the moment of revolution, not before it. Curiously it is Sax who grasps the power of the symbolic gesture. He destroys the soletta, which gathers and magnifies sunlight, as a concession to the Reds, to bring them back within the fold of a constitutional politics. The Greens will have to work harder to make up for the loss of their artificially augmented sun.

Cultural revolution, or “a new collective unconscious,” plays a significant role in the transition to a new mode of production, much as Bogdanov thought it should.⁸³ It is not just that the Martians have new ideas, but that their new ideas organize new kinds of social relation. Michel: “On Mars it may be that the ego ideal is shifting back to the maternal. To the Dionysian again. Or to some kind of post-oedipal reintegration with nature, which we are still in the process of inventing. Some new complex that would not be subject to neurotic over-investment.”⁸⁴ Or perhaps it is a twenty-first-century version of proletkult, an organic ideological product of self-organizing labor, learning from experience how to work with both objective and subjective resistances.

Turning the Dorsa Brevia manifesto into an actual constitution is no easy feat. It calls for another convention, and more rounds of furious politicking. Art: “It’s kind of scary … Win a revolution and a bunch of lawyers pop out of the woodwork.”⁸⁵ What Fourier called the cabalist passion has free reign here, and by some sort of “flocking algorithm” a new constitution emerges, and a first chair of the executive council: Nadia, because “she had the charisma of the sensible.”⁸⁶

The Martian post-revolutionary state manages to keep its radical commitment to the abolition of private property. The strongest advocate of this is Vlad Taneev, the co-inventor of the longevity treatment. Having seen extended life, his creation, denied to people on Earth by the commodification of medical science, he is passionate about overcoming the residues of feudal privilege. “That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings … If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why should people give up these rights when they enter the workplace?”

Vlad reminds them that the Dorsa Brevia manifesto “says everyone’s work is their own, and the worth of it cannot be taken away. It says that the various modes of production belong to those who created them, and to the common good of the future generations. It says that the world is something we all steward together.”⁸⁷ While some think these ideas smack of old-fashioned socialism, Vlad insists that to defeat capitalism it is worth looking back to those social forms that capital itself defeated.

The centerpiece of Blue Mars is the return to Earth of Coyote, Michel, Nirgal, and others. Here Robinson works a double estrangement, showing Earth transformed by rising sea levels from the alien point of view of Martian revolutionaries. “We are the primitives of an unknown civilization,” Nirgal tells the Terran crowds, détourning a line from Coyote’s teachings.⁸⁸ Back in his homeland of Trinidad it is Coyote who is the hero, nicely displacing the First World characters among the First Hundred. Michel finds his native Provence both familiar and strange. The beaches are gone and will never return, but Arles is connected once more to the sea, and once again rivals Marseille as a port town.

Robinson’s most striking image is of the Thames estuary, where a new inter-tidal civilization is being cobbled together. “And then the wind turned and poured over the tide, and all of the waves were suddenly rushing out to sea together. Among the long cakes of foam were floating objects of all kinds: boxes, furniture, roofs, entire houses, capsized boats, pieces of wood. Flotsam and jetsam … ‘It’s London,’ Bly said, ‘It’s fucking London, washing out to sea.’”⁸⁹ Diving down around an abandoned, flooded village, “Nirgal swam slowly around the wedge-shaped building, looking in second story windows at offices, empty rooms, flats. Some furniture floated against the ceilings.”⁹⁰

The landscape of Mars is no less unstable: “The land was slumping in all its characteristic permafrost patterns: polygonal pebble ridges, concentric crater fill, pingos, solifluction ridges on the hillsides. In every depression an ice-choked pond or puddle. The land was melting.”⁹¹ Ann struggles with the concept of a Red aerophany, distinct from Hiroko’s conflation of aerophany with viriditas. Is there a way to stand in relation to the unliving universe that does not privilege life? She wants to know how to live with an absolutely flat ontology in an age when ontology is dead.

Nadia finds herself enmeshed in one political crisis after another, but she and her factional backers insist that process is the most important thing about politics. Some of it is a cobbling together of many old ideas for limiting the concentration of power, such as electing representatives by lottery.⁹² They resist the cult of personality that has developed around Jackie Boone and her party. Some of the new process involves new objectives, like legislating the height of the sea level, or rationing the heat each city can put into the atmosphere.

Nadia really wants to return to engineering, but there is no heavy machinery for her to drive any more. Most things are automated. She turns to the problem of making soil, but it turns out be as much a molecular art as a science:

There were the macro-nutrients—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur, potassium, calcium, and magnesium—there were the micro-nutrients, including iron, manganese, zinc, copper, molybdenum, boron, and chlorine. None of these nutrient cycles was closed, as there were losses due to leaching, erosion, harvesting, and outgassing; inputs were just as various, including absorption, weathering, microbial action, and application of fertilizers.⁹³

Metabolic rifting and cleaving is no simple thing.

With the revolution won, Nirgal does not know what to do with himself. Jackie Boone has taken over the party of which he was once the charismatic center. “He wanted to settle into a full human life, to pick a place and stay there, to learn it completely, in all its seasons, to grow his food, make his house and his tools, become part of a community of friends.”⁹⁴ For Nirgal as opposed to Jackie, politics was always a matter of everyday life rather than holding office or ruling a faction.

He is attracted to the teachings of some Zen gardeners, who “talked about ecopoesis, which for them was terraforming redefined, subtilized, localized. Transformed into something like Hiroko’s aeroformation. No longer powered by heavy industrial global methods, but by the slow, steady, and intensely local process of working on individual patches of land.”⁹⁵ He becomes an ecopoet. Like Thoreau, he tends his small corner of the world. But his plants are attacked by a viroid, which requires the most advanced science even to diagnose, and in the end a dust storm buries his whole world in a meter of mud. The world is not a garden.

As Sax says, “There’s all kinds of invasions going on. Population surges, sudden die-offs. All over. Things in disequilibrium. Upsetting balances we didn’t even know existed. Things we don’t under-stand.”⁹⁶ Sax has been cured of his earlier belief in mathematics as a kind of ontological reality, even if he is no less convinced of its modeling power. “Over and over Sax watched a thousand years of weather, altering variables in the models, and every time a completely different millennium flitted past. Fascinating.”⁹⁷ In an expanding universe, order isn’t order. It might just be the difference between actual and potential entropy. Humans mistake the difference for order. Sax is as committed to scientific methods as ever, but the sheer resistance of nature to method makes itself felt in him.

Sax does not abandon science. “It was surely one of the greatest achievements of the human spirit, a kind of stupendous pantheon of the mind, constantly a work in progress, like a symphonic epic poem of thousands of stanzas, being composed by them all in a giant ongoing conversation. The language of the poem was mathematics …”⁹⁸ Rather, he puts it in the perspective of labor’s struggle in and against nature. “Science was a social construct, but it was also and most importantly its own space, conforming to reality only, that was its beauty.”⁹⁹ There is something inhuman about science. Its modes of perception, modeling, and verifying are outside the parameters of the human sensorium, even though they are dependent on an apparatus that is itself the product of human labor. The objects of science are not dependent on human consciousness. And yet science happens in history, constrained by forms of social organization of a given type and of a given time. As such, existing social relations are a fetter upon science in its pursuit of the inhuman sensations of the nonhuman real.

Martian utopian science looks not unlike how Bogdanov imagined Soviet science could be organized. It’s Sax’s experience of the elite research lab or field station generalized:

As he watched them Sax realized for the first time that the versatile, responsive, highly focused nature of science that he had been getting used to … was a feature of all the labs arranged as cooperative ventures … With the scientists in control of their own work, to a degree never seen in his youth on Earth, the work itself had an unprecedented rapidity and power.¹⁰⁰

If Blue Mars is a realized utopia, then one of the tests of its utopian quality is the status of art within this world. Robinson offers several versions of what becomes of art. One is Harry Whitebrook, the genetic engineer, who invents whole classes of organism as if they were works of art. Another is Coyote’s version of the early Situationist slogan: “Never work!” As he explains: “What I like to do … is to go to a sidewalk café and toss down some kava and watch all the faces. Go for a walk around the streets and look at people’s faces.”¹⁰¹ Perhaps in effect the whole organization of the planet has become an artwork, although one heavily dependent on, and respectful of, scientific method.

History merges with natural history, which both Sax and Ann describe as “punctuated equilibrium without the equilibrium.”¹⁰² Sax: “See how beautiful it is—in its own way. In itself, the way it organizes itself. We say we manage it, but we don’t. It’s too complex. We just brought it here. After that it took off on its own. Now we try to push it this way and that, but the total biosphere … it’s self organizing. There’s nothing unnatural about it.”¹⁰³

But while natural history might be self-organizing, it is not homeostatic. There is no invisible hand at work in either natural or human affairs. One substitution that Robinson, like Bogdanov, resists, is to see nature as an ecology, as like a market, and markets as therefore also, by reverse-substitution, “natural.” The emphasis is rather on the instability of the relations of the new Martian species to each other and their world, “all of them monsters together.”¹⁰⁴ There may be patches of relative ecological stability, but they are local and temporary. To dispense with the invisible hand, and with homeostatic ecology as a basic metaphor, is to live once again after God is dead.

When his farm fails, Nirgal’s new version of “Never work!” is running. He runs races around the entire planet, his victories full of “counter intuitive extravagance.”¹⁰⁵ Out on a training run, he falls in with a nomadic feral co-op of hunters, gatherers, and farmers. Without the boundary lines and fences of private property, the landscape grows into a network of forms built as much as anything for wandering. It’s like Constant Nieuwenhuys’s utopian project New Babylon, only on Mars rather than Earth. This is a world, as Sax says, of “so many different kinds of nomads.”¹⁰⁶

When Nirgal meets Zoya (or Zo) among the ferals, he does not know he is actually her father. She is a “wild” character, a thrill-seeker. She loves to fly with a bird suit. For Robinson, the question of what a utopian sport might be looms even larger than the question of a utopian art. For Zo, “this was the meaning of life, the purpose of the universe: pure joy, the sense of self gone … The best, cleanest use of human time.”¹⁰⁷ Apart from a little diplomatic arm-twisting as her mother Jackie Boone’s enforcer, Zo lives without dead time.

Alongside utopian art and sport, there’s utopian sex, not unlike that in Fourier, with his emphasis on the combination of all the passions, on groups, and on tableaux. Here is Zo being tabled by friends of various sexes: “And then the whole group was on her, hands and mouths and genitals, a tongue in each ear, in her mouth, contact everywhere; after a while it was an undifferentiated mass of erotic sensation, total sexurround, Zo purring loudly.”¹⁰⁸

Blue Mars is not a closed world utopia. Zo meets the builders of a new life on the Jovian moons, “throwing themselves so energetically into a project that won’t be completed until long after their death—it’s an absurd gesture, a gesture of defiance and freedom, a divine madness …”¹⁰⁹ It’s like Bogdanov’s Red Martians, sending the seeds of life into the universe.

In this paradise, Robinson broaches a rare topic: what does utopian ageing and death look like? Maya suffers from jamais vu.¹¹⁰ Each day seems an exact repetition of another, an eternal return. Jackie, her personal powers fading, joins a voyage out of the solar system. Sax can no longer hold a train of thought long enough to document it. The longevity treatments keep these cyborg bodies in a zone of complexity between the too orderly and the too chaotic, but they have their limits.

This utopia even has its own kind of revolution. Earth invades Mars by sending unauthorized colonists; the “native” Martians respond by embracing them and absorbing them into their world. The most effective tactic, as in the two previous Martian revolutions, is “people in the streets.”¹¹¹ In this post-colonial confrontation, the natives have a higher level not only of cultural but also of technical organization, and prevail.

Here are utopia’s three achievements: “Nowhere on this world were people killing each other, nowhere were they desperate for shelter or food, nowhere were they scared for their kids.”¹¹² Perhaps nothing should be said of the good life beyond the principle that nobody should go hungry. Not every possibility for “development” need be opened up. As in Platonov, the more labor dug into nature, the more nature presses down in return.

On Mars, not every kind of development is pursued. Sax withdraws his support for terraforming at any price when he destroys the soletta. The question in Robinson is not the refusal but the selection among kinds of development. The value of science fiction as a form is in organizing blocks of possible causation.¹¹³ It is a laboratory of substitutions for the basic metaphor itself. Robinson’s writing is rich in causational models: the coriolis effect, flocking algorithms, punctuated equilibrium, cascading recombinant chaos, and so on. The Mars Trilogy is particularly rich in geological causal substitutions. Science fiction is, or at least can be, a method for testing out new basic metaphors. In Robinson’s hands, it is a dialogic procedure. Characters play out different organizational practices and corresponding ideologies, particularly ones that work out various basic metaphors and their attendant chains of substitution.

While in a very different key, Robinson shares with Platonov a sense that a revolutionary praxis has to be more than a religion, rather than less. Extracting a surplus from recalcitrant nature makes life possible, and this in turn is the condition of existence, in Platonov’s terms, of the soul. But it is no guarantee of one. Utopian life only poses more completely the problem of how one is to live. This is what makes Blue Mars the most interesting of the volumes. It is a kind of meta-utopia. It is a détournement made of many utopias—some marked by the place names to which Coyote travels—but not a synthesis of them. It stages the conflicts; it respects their incommensurability.

Platonov documents all too vividly how the struggle for life under acute and trying circumstances can fail, how disorganization accumulates, how information is lost forever and in the process a whole ontology collapses in on itself. It is not that Robinson holds out hope for another fate. Rather, it is that he practices a different kind of realism. One that tests different causal sequences—like Sax running the climate simulator from different starting conditions over and over (if one can pardon the analogy). Based on language, it is a tektology that is much more open than “the craft of constrained storytelling,” as Haraway calls it, of the sciences. And yet it is still bounded by the way labor might actually organize the world.¹¹⁴

At least one version of this “dialectic,” if that is what it still is, finds in catastrophic moments the possibility of new kinds of organization. It is not so much a leap beyond material circumstances as a march right into them. It has happened before. Robinson is fascinated by the proposition that a previous era of climate change—the Ice Ages—forced forward momentum in human biological but also cultural evolution. In his tektological laboratory, climate crisis might be the moment for the accelerando as one possible causal sequence.¹¹⁵

Tektology in Robinson is a turn toward those sciences and technical knowledges that can ground an understanding and a praxis that combine work on a resistant objective world and the resistant subjectivity of politics and culture. He has found a form in which the incommensurable statements from both technical and organizational labor can meet on the same page without being reduced one to the other. It’s a “laboratory of history” for thinking the twenty-first-century condition.¹¹⁶