WEEK 2 – CAPITAL IS (UN)DEAD (Jan. 16)

CAPITALISM & COLONIALISM

Andrew Bard Epstein, “The Colonialism of the Present: Scholar and Activist Glen Coulthard on the Connection between Indigenous and Anticapitalist Struggles,” Jacobin, January 1, 2015

Glen Coulthard, “For Our Nations to Live, Capitalism Must Die,” Rabble.ca, November 6, 2013

FINANCIALIZATION

Randy Martin—The Financialization of Daily Life

CYBERNETICS & CAPITALISM

David Bates—Unity, Plasticity, Catastrophe: Order and Pathology in the Cybernetic Era (2014)

Dean Lockwood & Rob Coley—Cloud Time, Ch. 2: Parasite Regime & Inception (introduction) (2012)

Tiqqun - Cybernetic Hypothesis, sections 1-5 (2001)

Gregory Bateson: Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning (1942) (Section 4.1)

In which the celebrated anthropologist / cybernetician floats the idea of a stealthily designed labyrinth occulting its own framework in the name of a putative freedom. (An idea taken up by British documentarian Adam Curtis in his series The Trap)

Friedrich Hayek: The Road to Serfdom (1943)

Favorite book of both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (!). Austrian economist Hayek argues that the economic planning required by socialism inevitably leads to forms of totalitarianism (eg. fascism).

Sigmund Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)

Important reference point for both cyber-inhumanists and post-WW2 social thought. The centrality of the death drive forces a prosecution of increasingly tight cybernetic systems to mold individuals. Inhumanists see Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as the third traumatic blow to anthropocentric conceit (following the Copernican Revolution and Darwinian natural selection).