Nonsite.org

New to nonsite

Looking Backward to Counter Mysticism and Despair

Adolph Reed, Jr.

Because even structuralists like Reuther and Charles Killingsworth shared with the Keynesians the viewpoint that interests of capital and labor were harmonizable and that economic problems were therefore fundamentally technical, the deeper political significance of the differences went unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon. The effect was to obscure the systemic roots of economic inequality in American capitalism, in fact eventually to render it invisible as inequality.

Looking Backward to Counter Mysticism and Despair

by Adolph Reed, Jr.

Blinded by Righteous Outrage: From the 1994 Crime Act to Trump 2.0

by Touré F. Reed

Robotic Pollocks in the Age of Amazon: Ex Machina, Actions, and Mechanical Art

by José Antonio Arellano

The Earth’s Intentions: Richard Powers’s The Overstory and the Limits of Anti-Anthropocentrism

by Stephen Schryer

Marxism and the Good Picture of Intention

by Pawel Kaczmarski

Robotic Pollocks in the Age of Amazon: Ex Machina, Actions, and Mechanical Art

José Antonio Arellano

Ex Machina helps make visible the effects of the technologically enabled economy that led to the historical convergence of theories of art and action that today appear as the stuff of common sense. The problem the movie presents is less about empathy for the other than it is about a society structured by an economy wherein the concept of intention no longer obtains. Ex Machina thus prompts viewers to consider the political significance of creating and interpreting a work of art today.

Revisiting Race, Politics, and Culture: A Symposium

Thomas Jessen Adams & Andrew Feenberg & Cedric Johnson & Howard Levy & Adolph Reed, Jr. & Preston Smith II

Scholarship and popular memory has far too often taken on the role of hagiography or sought a pure and true 1960s spirit, “uncaptured” by elites and reflective of real, authentic radicalism. Rather than being critically analyzed as key nodes of causation in the defeat of an effective egalitarian politics and the subsequent turn toward reaction—as the contributors to Race, Politics, and Culture do, befitting the seriousness with which they took their charge as both scholars and political actors—the worst tendencies of sixties-era social movements are now almost religiously worshipped in nominally left organizing and thought.

The Wrong Durée: The Politics of Cedric J. Robinson’s Racial Capitalism

Cedric Johnson

Instead, a race-essentialist understanding of epistemology lies at the heart of both Robinson’s notions of racial capitalism and the black radical tradition. In the former, we find racism intrinsic to “European” culture as early as antiquity and reaching maturation in the Iberian Peninsula on the eve of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, while he presents African medieval societies and black colonial subjects as innately peaceful and less violent. And in this regard, Robinson’s claims are consonant with a longer line of black nationalist thinking in the United States, which inverts the assumptions of white supremacy and holds that white domination is an endemic phenomenon.

The Inauthenticity of our Class Discourse: or, Publishing Respects your Foodbank Usage

Sunjeev Sahota

The issue, therefore, is not that we need to stop representation from benefiting elite minorities—that’s just representation in its most indefensible form—but that we need to stop believing that representation, or, more broadly conceived, anti-discrimination, should be our foremost social justice commitment. Without a prior grounding in a politics of economic equality, all anti-discrimination boils down to is the neoliberal promise that people should have an equal opportunity to escape poverty; rather than trying to get rid of it.

The Global Rules of Art: The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy

Respondents

It is assumed that “thinking globally” is a moral imperative within the humanities. Is it? Among other things, it presumes a neutral space from which to expand one’s geographic purview, as though curators and scholars could stand outside the global game of profit and recognition. In this issue of The Tank, art historians and critics respond to sociologist Larissa Buchholz’s analysis of the global contemporary art field. Do globalizing initiatives really serve artists outside the Global North? Or do they refract neoliberal logics of concentrating capital and expanding markets? Has the global turn transformed our evaluative norms? Or has the very concept of “the global” become just another currency for meting out prestige?

Blinded by Righteous Outrage: From the 1994 Crime Act to Trump 2.0

Touré F. Reed

From the 1994 Crime Act through to the re-election of Donald Trump, liberal thought shapers and policymakers have tended to draw upon a moral righteousness that uncouples racial disparities from the material contexts that engender them, thereby obscuring neoliberalism’s inability to deliver for poor and working-class Americans—blacks being overrepresented among them. As the Trump administration aggressively moves to dismantle the gains that African Americans and other non-whites have made since the Civil Rights Movement if not Reconstruction, progressives should take seriously the counterproductive implications of a righteous, groupist social justice discourse that mistakes sermonizing for analysis while treating “races” as epigenetic identities (rather than ascriptive categories) with discrete interests.

The Earth’s Intentions: Richard Powers’s The Overstory and the Limits of Anti-Anthropocentrism

Stephen Schryer

Critics have celebrated Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory (2018), for the way that it distills key ecocritical ideas that gained traction in the humanities in the 2010s. Echoing New Materialists’ insistence that we set aside subject-centered ontologies that reduce non-humans to an instrumental status, the novel endows trees with agency, even granting them the ability to speak in a language that human beings might learn to understand. This essay pushes back against this desire for deep ecology, arguing that it short-circuits the novel’s critique of global capitalism. Drawing on a Transcendentalist model of language, Powers’s novel imagines trees using natural signs that collapse signs and referents, allowing them to directly change the chemistry of human brains. This fantasy of mind control distracts from the novel’s investment in communicative action, marked by recurring scenes of reading and persuasion.

The Man Who Would Be King: Method in Trump’s Madness, Contradictions in Trump’s Method

Sam Gindin

Trump can meet the expectations of those looking for a hard line on immigration and can grant his corporate backers the tax cuts and deregulation they greedily seek. But it is the economy that will be decisive for his populist base, and on this measure, Trump is very unlikely to succeed. As for the business elite, they have always assumed Trump was not so mad as to start a tariff war that risked undermining the American empire itself. As that danger materializes, business will rebel. The question will then shift from what Trump intends to do to what he will he do as his plans go astray.

The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to BlackRock

Respondents

The central argument we make in the book, contrary to the received wisdom on the left, is that the rise of capitalist finance in the current period cannot be understood as a cause or symptom of the decline of the “real” industrial economy. Nor can it be considered as “separate” from production. Rather, finance is and has been utterly integral to the dynamism, flexibility, and strength of capital. Moreover, we show that it is precisely as a result of the role of finance that capitalist development has not led to increasing monopolistic stagnation but has increased the competitiveness of capital by facilitating its growing mobility across space and among economic sectors. Capitalist financialization has thus served to intensify the competitive discipline on all investments to maximize monetary returns.

Issue #50: When Compromises Come Home to Roost — Issue #50:
When Compromises Come Home to Roost

Issue #49: Portraits of Divided Light: In Memory of Joseph Marioni (1943-2024) — Issue #49:
Portraits of Divided Light: In Memory of Joseph Marioni (1943-2024)

Issue #48: American Finance, the Global Market for Art, and the Need for Speed — Issue #48:
American Finance, the Global Market for Art, and the Need for Speed

Issue #47: The New Deal & Its Legacies — Issue #47:
The New Deal & Its Legacies

Issue #46: The Nineteenth Century (Part Four) — Issue #46:
The Nineteenth Century (Part Four)

Issue #45: Derrida’s “Signature Event Context”: The Next Fifty Years? — Issue #45:
Derrida’s “Signature Event Context”: The Next Fifty Years?

Issue #44: Toward a Critique of Possibilism — Issue #44:
Toward a Critique of Possibilism

Issue #43: Architecture and Politics at Mid-Century — Issue #43:
Architecture and Politics at Mid-Century

Issue #42: Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era at 50 — Issue #42:
Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era at 50

Issue #41: Socialism or Moralism — Issue #41:
Socialism or Moralism

Issue #40: New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century — Issue #40:
New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century

New to nonsite

Looking Backward to Counter Mysticism and Despair

Adolph Reed, Jr.

Looking Backward to Counter Mysticism and Despair

by Adolph Reed, Jr.

Blinded by Righteous Outrage: From the 1994 Crime Act to Trump 2.0

by Touré F. Reed

Robotic Pollocks in the Age of Amazon: Ex Machina, Actions, and Mechanical Art

by José Antonio Arellano

The Earth’s Intentions: Richard Powers’s The Overstory and the Limits of Anti-Anthropocentrism

by Stephen Schryer

Marxism and the Good Picture of Intention

by Pawel Kaczmarski

New to nonsite

Looking Backward to Counter Mysticism and Despair

Robotic Pollocks in the Age of Amazon: Ex Machina, Actions, and Mechanical Art

Revisiting Race, Politics, and Culture: A Symposium

The Wrong Durée: The Politics of Cedric J. Robinson’s Racial Capitalism

The Inauthenticity of our Class Discourse: or, Publishing Respects your Foodbank Usage

The Global Rules of Art: The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy

Blinded by Righteous Outrage: From the 1994 Crime Act to Trump 2.0

The Earth’s Intentions: Richard Powers’s The Overstory and the Limits of Anti-Anthropocentrism

The Man Who Would Be King: Method in Trump’s Madness, Contradictions in Trump’s Method

The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to BlackRock

Past Issues

New to nonsite

Looking Backward to Counter Mysticism and Despair

Robotic Pollocks in the Age of Amazon: Ex Machina, Actions, and Mechanical Art

Blinded by Righteous Outrage: From the 1994 Crime Act to Trump 2.0

Revisiting Race, Politics, and Culture: A Symposium

The Earth’s Intentions: Richard Powers’s The Overstory and the Limits of Anti-Anthropocentrism

The Wrong Durée: The Politics of Cedric J. Robinson’s Racial Capitalism

The Man Who Would Be King: Method in Trump’s Madness, Contradictions in Trump’s Method

The Inauthenticity of our Class Discourse: or, Publishing Respects your Foodbank Usage

The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to BlackRock

The Global Rules of Art: The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy

Past Issues