Low Theory for the End of Pre-History

Diletta De Cristofaro (bio)
University of Birmingham

A review of Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2016. Print.

McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red is a provocative call for new critical theory – or “new-old” (Wark xii), given its roots in marginalized strands of the Marxist tradition – for the age of the Anthropocene. The “Anthropocene” is a “term widely used since its coining by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 to denote the present time interval, in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities” (“What Is the ‘Anthropocene’?”). Although the term has not yet been formalized as an official geological epoch, the Anthropocene Working Group —tasked with developing a proposal for such formalization to be considered by the International Commission on Stratigraphy —deems the concept as “geologically real. The phenomenon is of sufficient scale to be considered as part of the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, more commonly known as the Geological Time Scale” (“Media Note”). Although Wark is wary of the term “Anthropocene,” his book is informed by the realization that the planet has entered a new period of geological time and, thus, that we need new conceptualizations of the relationship between humans and nature. We are now at a conjuncture that Wark defines as the “end of pre-history,” when mankind comes to understand that “the God who still hid in the worldview of an ecology that was self-correcting, self-balancing and self-healing —is dead” (xii).

Drawing on Marx’s notion of the metabolic rift, that is, the rift between production and nature, Wark identifies the Anthropocene as “a series of metabolic rifts, where one molecule after another is extracted by labor and technique to make things for humans, but the waste products don’t return so that the cycle can renew itself” (xiv). A key and global metabolic rift in the age of the Anthropocene is what Wark, referring ironically to various liberation movements of the past three centuries, calls the “Carbon Liberation Front”: “carbon bound within the earth becomes scarce, and liberated carbon pushes the climate into the red zone” (xv). Wark thus calls for a “low theory,” attentive to the “molecular” order – a notion Wark borrows from Felix Guattari (xvi). In the era of techno-science, in which “life itself has been disaggregated and brought under forms of molecular control,” a molecular theory implies the emphasis on subtle and hidden processes, the flows and becomings of everyday life and, in particular, of labor (151). Wark’s objective in Molecular Red is to suggest ways to reorganize knowledge, in order to construct a “labor perspective on the historical tasks of our time” —addressing the disastrous effects of the Carbon Liberation Front (xx).

At a conjuncture in which apocalyptic pronouncements over climate change are in the news daily, accompanied by equally troubling political and corporate refusals to acknowledge the reality of the dangers, it is no surprise that interest in the Anthropocene is on the rise within the academy and beyond. Broadly speaking, academic explorations of the Anthropocene outside of the scientific realm can be divided into three categories. One, books that consider cultural responses to the Anthropocene, such as Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change and Sam Solnick’s Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. Two, studies that problematize the concept of nature, such as Jamie Lorimer’s Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature and Timothy Morton’s studies, from Ecology without Nature to Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Three, books that interrogate the notion of the Anthropocene itself, together with its political, ethical, and philosophical implications, such as Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne’s The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch and Frank Biermann’s Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene. Wark’s intervention in the field compellingly combines these three strands by considering science fiction (both Soviet and American); the nexus between nature and the human, especially through human labor; and, most importantly, philosophical perspectives that can be helpful in laying the foundations of a low theory for the Anthropocene.

To suggest ways to reorganize knowledge for the new epoch, Molecular Red’s first part, titled “Labor and Nature,” turns to Alexander Bogdanov and Andrey Platonov, both largely ignored Marxist thinkers. To Wark, Bogdanov’s views are useful in our current predicament for three reasons. Firstly, Wark goes back to Bogdanov because his science fiction – Red Star (1908) and The Engineer Menni (1913) – anticipates the Carbon Liberation Front and climate change. Secondly, combining Marx and the theories of the philosopher-scientist Ernst Mach, Bogdanov elaborates his own “worldview,” empirio-monism, which “frees our species-being from external a priori forms” by articulating a definition of nature that is attuned to the labor point of view (28). Nature, to Bogdanov, is simply “that which labor encounters;” the “physical world as we know it cannot be thought as preceding our labors upon it” (4, 26). This deeply resonates with the Anthropocene era, which is, in Wark’s terms, the end of pre-history, when humans realize the imbrication between their labor and nature. Thirdly, Bogdanov’s “tektology, a new way of organizing knowledge,” and his proletkult, “a new practice of culture,” are “key steps toward the practice of a molecular red knowledge of the kind we need today” (13). Tektology is a “metaphoric machine,” as it works through substitution, that is, the application of processes and understandings used in certain fields to other fields (49). Tektology is a low theory of the kind Wark calls for in the Anthropocene because it is not about creating theoretical systems of the molar, abstract order: “There’s no prior unity or ultimate synthesis” (44) to which tektology tends. Rather, tektology is about collaborating collectively to organize knowledge that is always materially and historically grounded in labor’s experiences – what Wark, recalling Michel Foucault’s discourses of power/knowledge, terms “practices of laboring/knowing” (13). This collective collaboration across disciplines is what is required to address Anthropogenic emergencies. Hardly by chance, Wark mentions climate science, “an evolution from discrete fields and technologies to a global climate knowledge infrastructure” (26), as an example of tektology.

Platonov emerges out of Proletkult, that “collaborative production of art, culture, even science, by and for the proletariat itself” (38). To Wark, the importance of Platonov’s work for our times is twofold. Firstly, Platonov’s anti-novellas refine the labor point of view as the point of view of comrades. “Living things are each other’s comrades” because they share life and struggle in the face of a nature which is “recalcitrant, enervating, unpredictable…. It has no necessary tendency to stability or order, no bias towards homeostasis. Its history is a history of metabolic rifts,” thus resonating with nature in the Anthropocene (106–107, 82). Secondly, “Platonov’s détournement of the socialist realism of the 1930s” can serve as guide to challenge the capitalist realism that dominates the twenty-first century, namely, the idea that there is no alternative to the current system (66). In particular, in “Factory of Literature” (1926), Platonov identifies writing from the labor point of view as a form of collective labor – “a distributed network of specialized text-filtering centers with central nodes for the final synthesis of literary works” – that anticipates a variety of forms of late-twentieth-century and twenty-first-century cultural production, including the Internet (Wark 167).

“Science and Utopia,” Molecular Red’s second part, builds on the key elements of the first part – the labor point of view on nature, empirio-monism, tektology and proletkult – by imaginatively and persuasively pairing Bogdanov and Platonov with more recent thinkers who work at the intersection of culture and science. In particular, Wark is interested in those who have been critical of capitalist realism’s “California Ideology,” 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” (118). First, Wark turns to Donna Haraway, or rather, “Cyborg Haraway,” Wark’s tektological assemblage of Haraway’s work together with the work of her sources (Paul Feyerabend), her colleagues (Karen Barad), and her students (Paul Edwards).

Via Feyerabend, Wark reiterates the importance of empirio-monism as a practice of low, rather than high, theory, a “comradely effort at collaboration through experimental substitution between particular efforts” which rejects ultimate authority for any discipline and theory (130). Through her theorization of the cyborg, Haraway’s work not only queers labor and re-orients it through her feminist standpoint, but also serves to emphasize how, in the age of techno-science, the labor point of view cannot but include nonhuman actors. Haraway, writes Wark, “begins what can only be a collaborative project for a new international – one not just of labouring men, but of all the stuttering cyborgs stuck in reified relations not of their making” (149). Barad’s notion of the apparatus adds another piece to the puzzle of the labor, or rather cyborg, point of view in the twenty-first century by drawing attention to the forces of production of knowledge. An apparatus is “techne, a media” that produces knowledge by constructing a “cut,” a distinction, between object and subject, nature and labor (159). Edwards applies the notion of apparatus to the knowledge infrastructure required in the tektology that is climate science: “The study of climate called into being a whole infrastructure of discrete apparatuses, of distinctive cuts,” gesturing towards “what a comradely, cooperative science could be” (167). “Cyborg Haraway” ultimately allows Wark to challenge a typical “romantic left” response to the Anthropocene, which consists in a “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” (180). This regression to nature is not only a fantasy – “We are cyborgs, making a cyborg planet with cyborg weather . . . . It’s a de-natured nature without ecology” – but rejecting techno-science ultimately entails rejecting the means of knowing and understanding climate change (180).

Molecular Red finally turns to Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction as an example of proletkult in the age of techno-science. Wark’s fascinating discussion of Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (1993–96) reads the texts as theoretical works that address the era of the Carbon Liberation Front by rejecting both capitalist realism and capitalist romance, namely, the belief that the market will take care of everything as it is a self-balancing and self-correcting natural order. Wark is particularly interested in the trilogy’s utopian response to the Anthropocene, a response embodied in the emergence of a praxis of collective labor out of ideological clashes, as well as in an understanding of revolution as “the accumulation of minor, even molecular, elements of a new way of life and their negotiation with each other” (196). In other words, the utopian dimension of Robinson’s Mars Trilogy is a matter of tektology, a “meta-utopia . . . . made of many utopias . . . but not a synthesis of them. It stages the conflicts; it respects their incommensurability” (211). By “dispens[ing] with the invisible hand, and with homeostatic ecology as a basic metaphor,” Robinson’s texts also gesture towards the need for new metaphors, new language (209). It is to this issue that Molecular Red’s conclusion turns.

Reflecting on the etymology of Anthropocene (anthropos, man, and kainos, “that which is not just a new unit of time but a new quality or form”), Wark writes that he is tempted to reject the term: “I want a name for what the kainos ought to be, not what it is. And in any case, it’s too anthropocentric” (221, 222). But he then considers how Anthropocene is a “brilliant hack,” which “introduces the labor point of view – in the broadest possible sense – into geology” (223). Thus, with a tektological gesture, Wark concludes that “Perhaps the challenge is then to find analogous but different ways to hack other specialized domains of knowledge, to orient them to the situation and the tasks at hand. Let’s invent new metaphors!” (223).

By considering an imaginative selection of thinkers and by creating a productive dialogue between them, Wark’s Molecular Red is a fascinating exercise in tektological assemblage in itself. There are two connected aspects, both related to praxis, that I would have liked Wark to discuss further. Firstly, the idea of meta-utopia, which is a promising critical tool to negotiate and combine different visions of the future, is barely sketched in Molecular Red. It would have been interesting to produce a tektological encounter between Robinson’s meta-utopian writings and theorizations of the notion of utopia, especially those, like Tom Moylan’s concept of critical utopia or Ruth Levitas’s conceptualization of utopia as method rather than dream, that are wary of normative utopian visions. Secondly, while Wark acknowledges that “Organizing praxis calls for a theory of history, a language of goals and objectives, even if only a provisional one. Praxis needs a conceptual space which relates knowable pasts to possible futures” (200), Molecular Red lacks a distinct theory of history. The Anthropocene is, of course, a temporal notion and deep time is usually central to discussions of the new era. Wark alludes to the temporal aspects of the Anthropocene by identifying it as the “end of pre-history,” but what comes after this end is not clear. One can only assume that, after the end of pre-history, history proper begins but the implications of this shift are never fleshed out. This reluctance could be related to Wark’s call for a low theory and his rejection of normative and prescriptive visions: Molecular Red outlines a “low theory approach, moving between scientific knowledges, not a high theory flying high as a drone above to adjudicate, legislate, or police them” (121). Thus, as he puts it, the theory of history needed by praxis “won’t be a teleology. History has no plan. There is no horizon to orient toward, no line from present to future” (200). However, the idea of an “end of prehistory” does outline a teleology, and Molecular Red would have benefited from a clearer negotiation of this tension, as well as from the exploration of the relationship between a “provisional” theory of history, which the book does not provide, and the meta-utopian openness to a variety of possible futures.

Nevertheless, with his rejection of theoretical practices that “adjudicate, legislate, or police,” it is hardly surprising that Wark refuses to be more specific and prescriptive in articulating the concrete implications of his molecular red theory, especially the ways in which this could be applied to address Anthropogenic emergencies. To Wark, it is the task of collective labor to experiment, through comradely negotiation, with the praxis of low theory. Molecular Red thus concludes with a call, addressed to a “Cyborg International” that embodies the labor point of view in the twenty-first century, for these comradely experimentations: “We all know this civilization can’t last. Let’s make another” (225).

Works Cited

• “Media Note: Anthropocene Working Group (AWG).” University of Leicester. Web. 11 Feb. 2017. Levitas, Ruth. Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013.
• Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986.
• Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2016. Print.
• What Is the ‘Anthropocene’? – Current Definition and Status.” Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. Web. 11 Feb. 2017.