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Purchase a copy of
McKenzie Warks Molecular Red
at Versobooks.com

Bogdanov for the win!

Alexander Bogdanov: What is Karl Marx? (1913)

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Alexander Bogdanov: The Science of the Future

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Nikolai Bukharin: In Memory of A. A. Bogdanov

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On Platonov and the Anthropocene

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Andrey Platonov: On The First Socialist Tragedy

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Uncreative Writing and the Networked Book

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Andrey Platonov: Factory of Literature

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The Sex-gender Industrial Complex

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Andrey Platonov: Antisexus

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Proletkult for Sex Workers

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Kim Stanley Robinson: An Interview

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Introduction

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INTRODUCTION

by McKenzie Wark

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SOMETIMES

to take three steps forward one has to take two

steps back, back into the archive, to find the materials for going on, but in a
new way. I just dont think the canonic theoretical resources trotted out over
and over are adequate any more to understanding the present. We need new
ancestors, and new ways to read our contemporaries.
This reader complies material on two such ancestors, Alexander Bogdanov and Andrey Platonov. The former is all but forgotten except to specialists;
the latter has been recuperated as the author of modern literature but not as a
significant Marxist thinker. There may well be other resources in the archive
for other projects, but for me these were the ones with which to start thinking
a critical theory for the Anthropoceneor whatever else you might want to
call this unprecedented situation in world history.
Thanks to the generosity of David Rowley, Evgeny Pavlov, and Historical
Materialism, I include here their translations of two Bogdanov texts, one on
his relation to Marx and a second on his vision for a new practice of knowledge. Also included is Evgenis translation of Bukharins eulogy for Bogdanov.
Also here are Anna Kalashyans translations of two Platonov texts and, thanks

to New Left Review, a translation of another of his occasional pieces.

In Molecular Red, I tried to use the Soviet experience, as understood by
Bogdanov and Platonov, as an allegory for our own times. That Soviet civilization fell apart after barely a century ought not to give the victors of the cold
war much comfort, as the fall of that civilization seems to me more to prefigure the fall of our own.
And so in the second half of Molecular Red I went looking for the contemporary analogues of Bogdnaov and Platonov. How might we think the present from the labor point of view? How might we reorganize knowledge as a
collaborative practice in the interests of collective labor? What role might the
utopian play as a practical guide to organizing labor for its historical tasks?
At the end of this reader is a draft of a chapter I dropped from the final
manuscript, about the work of Paul Prciado (formerly known as Batriz) and
an interview I conducted with Kim Stanley Robinson (reposted from Los Angeles Review of Books). These resources might help orient the reader to the
questions of rethinking what the labor point of view might mean now and also
how Bogdanovs utopian writing might be reiminaged.

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BOGDANOV FOR THE WIN!

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by McKenzie Wark

THIS

is a famous picture of Lenin playing chess with Alexander Bogdanov while Gorky looks on. Bogdanov won. According to Gorky, Lenin was
a bit of a sore loser about it. But then Lenin did manage to checkmate Bogdanovs influence in the Bolshevik faction and have him thrown out, so in the
long run Lenin won everything.

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Bogdanov would be remembered in the Soviet Union mainly through Lenins attacks on him, in Lenins book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. This
version of the photo is one of those creepy ones in which several other people
have been erased. Bogdanovs fate was in some ways even worse: officially
designated as The One Who Had The Wrong Philosophy.
This sort of thing always makes me curious. Who was Bogdanov? What
was his life and work all about? Not reading Russian, it was hard to find out.
Not much is in translation, and still less is in print. His magnificent utopian
novel, Red Star, is available from Indiana University Press, at least as an ebook. Fortunately there is now a resource page for rare, out of print material in
English and French.
So why Bogdanov? Firstly, for his revival of the utopian imagination in
the light of Marx. He understood the emotional power of a promised land,
but unlike Gorky was not tempted by God Building. He was more interested
in opening the imaginative faculties to thinking about this world. His utopia,
even though set on Mars, is practical.
Secondly, for Proletkult. Bogdanov initiated a mass movement in 1917
that tried to become a counter-power to the state, but whose mission was proletarian culture. How could the people learn to organize themselves and their
world? How could the literary classics of the past, even Shakespeare, be a
way of learning what organization is? Proletkult was about learning forms of
self-organization that can exist outside of capital and the state.
Thirdly, his tektology. How can al organizational tasks, whether the organizing of labors relation to nature, or the organizing of different kinds of labor
with each other, share and develop knowledge? Bogdanov thought that after
the revolution, the real organizational work was just starting, and that the real
question was labors relation to nature.
We dont have that luxury. We are going to have to figure out a new relation between labor and nature while capitalismor whatever this mode of
production isstill lumbers along, turning everything into the commodity.
But I think Bogdanov is a useful guide to thinking and organizing otherwise.
After all, as I show in Molecular Red, he almost figured out anthrogenic climate change.
Sometimes to take three steps forward, one needs to take two steps backward, back toward what for Paolo Virno is the potential of history, but sometimes too to return to particular resources for moving forwards. And so, back
to Bogdanovfor the win.

WHAT IS KARL MARX? (1913)

by Alexander Bogdanov, translated by Evgeni V. Pavlov

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HE

died so long ago and yet the word death still strangely does not
belong to his name. After him, just like after any other man, remains basically
only one thinghis cause. And no man on this earth has ever left after himself
such a gigantic legacy.
This legacy is the idea, the organization, the example of life.
The idea He transformed political economy, history, and the entire
realm of the social sciences; he gave philosophy a new soul. Not only his
friends but even his enemies are again and again borrowing from the richness
of his thought and knowledge, and they will continue to do so for a long time.
At the basis of it all lies one all-unifying living idea. In itself it is a very simple
idea, but not everyone is able to understand its magnitude.
Three and a half centuries before Marx there lived a humble astronomer
called Nicolas Copernicus. He also transformed the science of his time and he
also had one simple idea; this idea is very similar to that of Marx.
Ancient astronomers dutifully observed the heavens, studied the motions
of the planets, and saw that they were ruled by a deep, elegant and immutable
regularity that they tried to express and explain to others. But here they found

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some strange confusion. The planets were moving among the stars sometimes
slower, sometimes faster. At times they seemed to stop and turn around, and
then go again in the same direction as before; and after some months and days
have passed they appear in the same place where they were before and the
entire process begins again. New complex theories had to be created in which
each planet had its own sphere, with its own orbits that rotated alongside other orbits and so on. But the confusion remained and the calculations were
extremely difficult to complete.
Copernicus had an idea: perhaps everything is so complex and confusing because we are looking at it from Earth? What if we change the point of
view and try, of course only mentally, to look at everything from the Sun? And
when he did so, it turned out that everything was simple and clear: the planets,
including Earth, were moving in circular and not tortuous orbits, and the Sun
was their center. The only reason that this was not clear before Copernicus
was because everyone thought Earth to be immovable and its own movement
was confused with the movements of other planets. Thus a new astronomy
was born, and it explained to everyone the life of the sky.
Before Marx, bourgeois scientists viewed and studied the life of the society, naturally, from the point of view of their own position in this society, from the
point of view of the class that does not produce anything but that subjugates
and uses the labor of others. But from this point of view not everything is
visible, many things appear in a distorted form, and many movements of life
become so confused that they cannot be properly understood.
What did Marx do? He changed the point of view. He looked at society
from the point of view of those who produce, from the point of view of the
working class, and everything turned out to be very different. It turned out
that the center of life and development of the society was found there, that
this was the Sun on which depended the ways and the movement of human
beings, groups and classes.
Marx was not a worker; but through the power of his mind he was able
to fully understand the position of the worker. And he found out that with
this transition everything immediately changed its contours and forms. The
powers of things and causes of events were revealed to the human eyes in a
way that was not possible from the old point of view. Reality, truth, even the
everyday appearance of things changed and became something different, often something opposite to what it was before.
Yes, even the way things appear to us! What can be more obvious for

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a capitalist than the fact that he feeds the worker? Does he not provide the
worker with the work and the salary? But for the worker it is no less obvious
that they are the ones who feed the capitalists with their labor. And in his discussion of surplus value Marx demonstrated that the first view was an illusion,
an appearance that was similar to our everyday perception that Sun moved
around Earth, but the second view was the truth.
Marx discovered that all human thought and feeling received different
direction and were formed differently depending on the class to which these
human beings belonged, that is, depending on their position in relation to
production. Different interests, habits and experiences lead to different conclusions. What is reasonable for one class is ridiculous for another, and conversely what is just, lawful and normal for one class is injustice and misuse of
power for another. What appears as freedom to one class, looks like slavery to
another. The ideal of one class causes horror and disgust of another class.
Marx summed it up thus: it is their social existence that determines their
consciousness. Or, in other words, thoughts, aspirations and ideals are determined by the economic situation. It is with the help of this idea that he transformed social science and philosophy. It is on this idea that he founded his
great doctrine of the class struggle and its role in the development of society.
He studied the path of this development and showed where it leads and which
class would create the new organization of production, what this organization
would look like and how it would end the division of classes and their long
struggle.
Marx was not a worker. But it was in the working class that the great
teacher found the foothold for his thought, the point of view that allowed him
to penetrate the depth of reality and to help him discover his idea. The essence
of this idea is the self-consciousness of the working proletariat. That is why
Marx more than any other thinker belongs to the proletariat.
He belongs to the proletariat also as the great organizer. He changed the
idea of the proletariat into a mighty instrument of organization. Sixty six years
have passed since the words of the famous manifesto he co-wrote with Engels
called the world to unity. And the echo of the living life continues to repeat
them, louder and louder, reaching the farthest corners of the planet. In the
east and in the west, gigantic organizations are formed under the slogans of
this manifesto; and they are growing, gathering forces, unstoppable, faster
and faster, forming an avalanche of History.
The fate of Marx the organizer was tragic as it was full of brilliant victo-

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ries but also of heavy defeats. Not once did cruel fate destroy what he built
up at the price of great efforts. As a true organizer he did not lose courage in
the face of difficulties. He waited for the right moment and conditions and
again began his work with more determination and scope that before. The
organization that he founded in Germany during the epoch of the 1848 revolutions fell apart under pressure from reaction. Marx found himself in exile in
a foreign land. But years passed and together with his comrades he founded
an international society of workers and lead its work, relying on his mighty
ability to persuade others. It turned out that the time for this organization has
not yet come. At first it grew and expanded, but later it was discovered that it
tried to unite elements that were too different. Working proletarians, the people of unity and comradely discipline, could not get along with anarchists who
were in some cases part of an embittered petite bourgeoisie that was perishing
under the blows of capital and in other cases lumpen proletarians who were
not connected with production and were not sufficiently educated by the participation in production. Anarchists split the organization and it soon died.
It was Marxs favorite child He, of course, did not doubt that it would
rise again. But he did not get a chance to see it. He died six years before it
happened.
It is true that he did see how Social-Democrats and other young workers
parties, inspired by the same ideas, grew in Germany and other countries. But
how happy would he have been if he were to learn that the world organization
to which he gave so much was to rise again and expand tens times larger than
before, that it would at some point ideologically connect over twenty five million people. He was not given this happy opportunity
Marx was an example of a human being, that is to say, of a worker and a
fighter. Labor and struggle constituted his life as they do the life of the working class. And his life was as pure as the banner that he carried throughout it.
In Marx there was embodied a new type that merged creative thought
and creative practice into one inseparable harmonious whole. And in that he
belongs to the new world.
At the same time as Marx there lived another great man of science, another son of bourgeois society, Charles Darwin. When Darwin made his
discovery regarding the origin of the species of living beings, Marx at once
understood and appreciated the significance of this revolution in science. Later Marx showed this understanding when he sent Darwin his greatest work,
Capital. But Darwin never bothered to read it. The genius of the proletarian

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world was able to understand the genius of the bourgeois culture, but not the
other way around.
There was no realm of knowledge foreign to Marx. He studied everything, his untiring mind was interested in everything. And in this he is the
proletariats closest kin. A worker does not have a lot of free time, but he wants
to know everything: nature whose resistance he overcomes with his hands,
society in which he is fighting, and the realm of science where he is looking
for direction for his life.
Marxs genius is the soul of the working class that reflected itself and came
to know itself in the most powerful brain of the nineteenth century.

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THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE

by Alexander Bogdanov, translated by David Rowley

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organisation is organised precisely to the extent that it is integrated

and holistic. This is the necessary condition for viability. This is also true of
cognition, once we recognise that cognition represents the organisation of experience. Therefore cognition always tends toward unity, toward monism. In
the history of humanity, there have been various means by which this monistic
tendency has been accomplished.
The first worldviews were, as we know, religious. They appeared and became dominant in the era when the division of labour in society was still weak.
Because of this, these worldviews did not involve any significant degree of specialisation, and they were distinguished by their simplicity and wholeness. All
the material of experience was aggregated around a chain of authorities in the
form of their precepts or revelations. The methods of these worldviews were
undifferentiated and essentially boiled down to authoritarian causality. In developed religions, a unified structure was achieved through the centralisation
of authority in the form of a supreme deity.
In a social system based on exchange, the broad and increasingly deepening division of labour resulted in the fragmentation of social experience and

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the specialisation of knowledge. The technological sciences directly corresponded to various branches of productionfor example, agronomy to farming and various fields of technology and applied mechanics to various realms of
industry. Abstract sciencesmathematics and the natural and social scienceswere applied, it is true, in many fields simultaneously. Mathematics, for
example, was employed in all fields. Astronomyto the extent that it was used
to measure time and to determine location and directionwas also employed
in all fields. Zoology was employed in fishing, hunting, and cattle breeding,
and also in agriculture to the extent that it is necessary to study animals that are
harmful or useful for agriculture. And so on. But each of these general sciences
itself became a particular specialty, elaborating its own particular technology
and sharply separating itself from other scientific specialties and even more
from technological specialties. It is precisely in our times that the most perfect
type of specialist has appeareda person with narrow one-sided experience,
routine methods, and a complete lack of understanding of nature and life as a
whole.
Specialisation is a necessary stage in the development of labour and cognition. Thanks to specialisation, a continually growing quantity of material
builds up in each sphere of experience, and methods achieve a previously inconceivable perfection and refinement. Narrowing the field of work for separate individuals, specialisation permits a much better and more complete mastery of these fields. But, like any adaptation in life, specialisation also contains
elements that resist adaptation. As specialisation develops, its limitations are
revealed ever more sharply. In our times, the need to overcome specialisation
has already become obvious, and, moreover, the path toward overcoming it has
already become apparent.
Specialisation stands in contradiction to the tendency toward the unity of
knowledge. It breaks up experience into pieces so that each is organised independently. As a result, two hugely important negative phenomena characteristic of contemporary science come about: an excessive accumulation of material and heterogeneous methods of cognition.
The accumulation of material in each special science is now so great that it
can be mastered only after many years of study. For people of average abilities,
sometimes even an entire lifetime is not enough. It is very rare that scientists
are able to work in two or three specialties. More often they are completely
closed off, each in their own field, and outside that field they become the most
maladapted, limited people.

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This insularity and limitedness sustains, consolidates, and intensifies the

divergence of scientific methods. Every specialty works out its own separate
methods in isolationotherwise it would not be able to stand apart. As time
goes on, it develops its methods in a one-sided way, moving ever further away
from the methods and points of view that are developed by other fields. This
is useful for continuous improvement in minor details, but it severely hinders
any progress in the bases and the principles of a given science. Furthermore, an
extreme conservatism of specialisation arisesthe philistinism of specialisation, in the expression of Macha kind of professional obtuseness, which is
why the greatest discoveries of past centuries usually encountered the most resistance from official representatives of that same branch of knowledge. There
are as many examples to cite as one would like. One need only recall the disdainful indifference with which learned physicists reacted to the brilliant idea
of Robert Meyer when he first formulated the idea of the conservation of energy or the bitter struggle that had to be waged in the last century to support the
theory of evolution of animal and plant forms. Subsequently, after a discovery
is finally adopted by the mass of specialists, they, of course, successfully apply
it further and improve it in particular details, without abandoning their fundamental conservatism in the least, displaying it anew at the next revolution in
science.
If we examine more closely how these revolutions occurred and what they
involved, we find that they usually involved the destruction precisely of the
boundaries between specialties. Some technique, method, or point of view that
had already been applied in one field of science or production was transferred
to another and transformed it. Thus, the law of the conservation of energy was
actually the idea of the indestructibility of existence that had long ago been introduced into chemistry by Lavoisier and was already known in philosophy by
the ancients, but only in the 1840s was it applied to the phenomena and forces
studied by physics. And Lavoisier arrived at the law of the eternal existence of
matter because he was the first to use the method of accurate weighing in his
research in chemistrya method of which had long been used in physics. And
the technique had been borrowed by physics from the technology of mining
and the jewellery trade, where strict determination of specific gravity of minerals, metals, and alloys is important. Darwin reformed biology by introducing
the principle of the struggle for existence which he took from the economic
doctrine of Malthus. Marx applied the dialecticformerly only a philosophical methodto the social sciences. The greatest successes in physiology have

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been due to methods of physics and chemistry, and contemporary psychology

depends to the same extent on the methods of physiology.
This all speaks clearly to us of the possibilityand even the necessity
of drawing together and unifying the various scientific methods and thereby
overcoming specialisation. But as long as specialisation still rules, the unity of
science is impossible, and social experience remains fragmented and unorganised as a whole. It is from this state of affairs that the need for philosophy arises.
Philosophy is nothing other than precisely the striving to organise what
has been divided and broken up by the force of specialisation. This is the meaning and significance of philosophy; this is why it is historically necessary. But
this is also the basic contradiction of all philosophythe tragedy that is characteristic of it and inseparable from it.
In human practice, social experience is, in reality, atomised. Is it possible
for a philosophical construction to combine, to connect what reality has disunited? It is objectively impossible to achieve this; the task becomes objectively
achievable only when reality changes, when practice ceases to be broken up
and disconnected and when specialisation is overcome by life itself. No power
of thought is able to gather and organise into a living whole the pieces of a body
that has been torn apart. Philosophy cannot work miracles, and to resolve the
tasks placed before it with the means available would indeed be a miracle.
Does this mean that philosophy is fruitless and impotent? Not at all. Philosophy cannot resolve its task as a whole because society and its experience
are not organised as a whole. But, all the same, exchange society is not an absolutely anarchical system, and the division of labour does not signify the disintegration of the social whole into completely separate individual units. Specialisation does prevail over the opposite tendency, and the struggle between
enterprises and groups does prevail over the connection between them, but
communication nevertheless occurs. Specialties are not so restricted that there
is no contact between them. Collective organisation of experience is being created. If this were not the case, there could be no talk of societythe very word
would lose its meaning.
Let us take, for example, the handicraft system at the end of the Middle
Ages, characterised by extremely sharp specialisation. Each craft was organised separately and independently of otherseven now, the word guild is a
synonym for specialty. However, it was not accidental that guilds supported
each other in the struggle with the old aristocratic patricians of trade. It was
not accidental that they acquired an extremely similar internal structure; it was

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not accidental that they developed approximately the same moral norms. A
practical community of interests and experience obviously existed. And, actually, no matter how dissimilar the technologies of the various handicrafts were,
they still had much in common in their ongoing manual techniques, in the
simplicity of their tools, in the small scale of their production, and in quite a
number of relationships among producers that arose from these factors. This
commonality found expression in similar methods of thought, of faith, of political views, etc.
The historical life of exchange society proceeded dialectically, in the
genuine meaning of this term; the separation of social human beings and the
gathering together of those same human beingspresenting two opposing
tendenciestook place simultaneously. In the beginning, fragmentation predominated, inhibiting the process of aggregation so much that it completely
masked it, making it invisible to ordinary, imprecise observation. Subsequently, aggregation gained momentum and little by little prevailed over fragmentation. It was not long before the relationship between aggregation and fragmentation was completely reversed.
This means that philosophy can organise general social experience to the
extent that experience is in reality tied together and united by life itself. Within
these confines, the unifying models of philosophy will be objective; outside
these confines, they will inevitably be arbitrary and will have significance only
for particular groups or schools and sometimes even for only an individual. For
example, in all modern philosophydown to and including German classical idealismthere is an underlying individualistic point of view; the separate
human individual is taken to be the centre of activity, the subject of cognition
and moral duty. This is an objective philosophical generalisation regarding those
eras and regarding the developing bourgeois-capitalistic system. It is accepted by everyone, both in life and in theory, as something that is self-evident.
On the contrary, any doctrine of monads or atomism, theories of things-inthemselves, or the principle of the creative I which posits not-I, belong to the
realm of the debatable and the unreliable. All of these doctrines are individual
attempts or, at most, group attempts that are incapable of grasping and organising social experience as a whole. They are incapable of attaining the power
of objectivity; they are products of limited experience that appear as universal
truths only to their creators and their creators disciples. But, as with all sorts
of organised endeavours, even goals only partly achieved provide material for
further unifying work.

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The saddest fate that can befall philosophy is when the power of specialisation completely predominates and creates a kind of guild philosophera philistine of a specialty. This is a completely perverse outcome, one of the most
absurd results of the atomisation of humanity. Philosophy exists precisely in
order to organise the disparate parts of experience into one whole, to establish
the interconnectedness which was destroyed by the division of labour and by
the professional narrowness that it produced. And now philosophy itself becomes just such an isolated part, a particular branch in the division of labour
with its own professional narrownessand what narrowness! The result is an
individual with a study and a library who can, of course, organise only what that
individual possesses, which is, to be precise, the experience of their study and
their libraryan infinitely small and very unimportant portion of the gigantic
amount of material which genuine philosophy must deal with. Each of these
individuals reads a hundred or a thousand philosophical books that are taken
from outside of the reality which gave birth to them and from outside of the
interests, forces, and social struggles that are reflected in themthe preserved,
cold corpses of experience lived by other people. These corpses are dissected,
scholastically investigated, and cut up into small pieces, all the while assuming
that the highest wisdom consists in the best method of splitting a hair into four
parts. Afterwards they take the bits and pieces and stitch them together into
a new book which, naturally, also possesses all the characteristics of a corpse,
except for onethat a corpse was at one time a living body. Such is the philosophy of true specialists, or of the majority of them, and especially of those
who work in university departments of philosophy. Other than in their use of
terminology, they have nothing in common with philosophy as a social-historical phenomenon and as a social form of worldview. They provoked Feuerbachs
sarcastic comment that the first indication of a genuine philosopher is not being a professor of philosophy.
As for the great masters of philosophy, they usually had an encyclopaedic
grasp of the knowledge of their times, and many of them, in addition to that,
were people of practical life and struggle. It is understandable that such people
were able to attempt to organise experience as a wholeif not with complete
objective success then at least with some benefit for the development of human thought. But the further specialisation has gone, with its accumulation of
material and diversity of methods, the more difficult it has become for individuals, no matter how brilliant, to acquire an encyclopaedic knowledge of their
times. Ultimately, philosophynot as the knowledge of guild specialists but

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as the actual generalisation of social experiencewould simply have been impossible if the new forces of life had not caused a turnabout in its development.
The starting point of this turnabout lies in labour practicemachine production, to be precise.
Machine production arose out of manufacturing, which took the specialisation of labour to its limit. Manufacturing broke work down into such small,
elementary operations, that workers who carried them out were reduced to the
roles of living machines. But then, since it is not difficult to build a machine to
execute a series of simple movements, this made it possible to transfer separate
parts of work to real, inanimate machines. And when this was accomplished, it
turned out that specialisation was transferred from people to machines.
Work with machines brings together various forms of labour, and the further technology develops, the more fully and thoroughly those forms of labour
are brought together. No matter how different the goods that are produced,
the producers have much in common in the content of their labour experience. The same basic relationship to the machine, consistent with the predominant nature of effort, is required of the workermanagement of the machine,
monitoring its movements, intervention to the extent that it is necessary, and,
consequently, attention, discussion, and understanding. Physical action on the
machine, which is of the most varied kinds, represents a continually less significant portion of the overall sum of labour experiences. Moreover, to the extent
that machines are perfected, that portion continually decreases to the point
where machines are transformed into a type of automatic process, and the mechanical aspect, proper, of the workers function completely disappears.
At the lowest levels of machine production there still remains a marked
difference between the operating function of a simple worker and the organisational labour of an educated specialist-engineer. As machines become more
complex and perfected, this distinction decreases. Automatic mechanisms already require an intellectual preparation of the worker that goes far beyond
the boundaries of purely practical skills. Workers must understand the mechanisms they are dealing with, not only in those particulars which are at their
fingertips, so to speak, but also in general and as a whole. Technical calculation based on knowledge (perhaps not strictly scientific but nevertheless quite
precise knowledge) occupies a continually more important place in their activities, both when they simply manage the whole complicated sum total of
a machines movements and especially when small irregularities, which occur
quite frequently in the operation of machines like these, demand that workers

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consciously take the initiative and intervene quickly and systematically.

The increasing use of mechanisms that are not only automatic but automatically self-regulating will raise the worker to a still higher level. This type
of machine will obviously serve as the foundation of the technology of collectivism. At present, this is only on the horizon. Many machines, beginning with
steam engines, already are fitted with regulators that mechanically monitor one
or another of their functions and correct any irregularities that arise. When
such methods achieve full development and become the norm, and when the
main occupation of someone who works on machines is to observe and correlate the given state of affairs reported by the monitoring and recording devices and generally to supervise and direct those regulating devicesand all
this with the help of appropriate scientific knowledgethen any qualitative
difference between a worker and an engineer will disappear, and all that will
remain will be a quantitative difference in preparation and proficiency. In this
way, labour will be reduced to a single type. The extremely deep divergence
produced in practice by specialisation will be removed, the division of labour
will cease to fragment humankind, and there will appear a simple division of
effort directed at various objects but essentially of the same kind.
Cognition, expressing and reflecting practice, follows behind the progress
of practice, and cognition will also experience the convergence of specialties.
The transfer of methods from one field to another, which we have already noted, prepares for the elaboration of general, unifying techniques of cognition.
Fields formerly extremely distant from one another will merge togetheras,
for example, in physics the theory of light merges with the theory of electricityand, by all appearances, in the near future those theories will combine
in a general theory of matter. And right now, all physics and chemistry are in
effect only subdivisions of general energetics, and psychology is on the path
towards merging with physiology, etc. But all this convergence occurs without
any planned pursuit of it; it has not been posed as a task for the development
of science, and it continually encounters passive and very often even active resistance from many scientific specialists. And they are essentially incapable of
posing this task, not only due to force of habit and professional-guild insularity,
but also due to the force of their real interests. For such scientists, specialisation is tied to their privileged position. Specialisation denies the mass of the
population from being admitted to their circles, it diminishes competition, and
it keeps their salaries at a high level.
By contrast, the working class, which in practice is moving toward the

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overcoming of specialisation, can and must set the very same task for scientific
knowledge. This is a matter of urgent self-interest; it is the precondition for a
cultural upsurge to a higher level and for the possibility of becoming the actual
master of social life without the tutelage of the departmentalised intelligentsia.
This is one of the most important needs of the new proletarian culture that is
now being born and is taking shape.
What will this unity of cognitive methods look like that will break through
the boundaries between specialties and that will organise social experience holistically, harmoniously, and coherently? Our point of view allows us to make a
definite and confident prediction about this.
We have seen that the progress of machine production imparts an ever
more fully and clearly expressed organisational character to the activity of the
worker. This is fully consistent with the historical tasks of the working class as
a wholeorganisational tasks of unparalleled breadth and complexity. The resolution of those tasks cannot be haphazard or spontaneous; by necessity it can
only be rationally planned and scientific. And this presupposes the unification
of all of the organisational experience of humanity in a special general science of
organisation. Such a science must be universal in its very essence.
As a matter of fact, all human activity has one thing in commonthe processes of organisation. Technological activity organises elements of external
nature in society; cognitive and artistic activity organises the social experience
of people. Even destructive work is nothing other than the struggle of various
organisational forms or tendencies. As we have already noted, war is an organised dialectical process in which each side is related to the other in the same
way that people typically relate to the hostile forces of external naturei.e.
they strive to overcome or incapacitate the objects their energy is directed toward, and they consequently also strive to generally organise the surrounding
environment in conformity with their interests. Even the activity of someone
who violates the law hasfrom the violators point of viewa completely
similar meaning. This is all the more true of the technically criminal activity
that goes on in the struggle for new, higher forms of social life against the old
and obsolete forms.
Even the elemental life of the universe is nothing other than the struggle
and development of various types and levels of organisation. In this, human
activity is indistinguishable from the activity of the world from which it is crystallised and at the expense of which it continues to grow. A science of methods
of organisation must therefore both embrace the methods which nature has

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worked out and perfect its own forms of organisation. Universal methodologythis is the essence of this science of the future.
Each of the contemporary sciences, technical and abstract, represents a
partial organisation of experience within one field or another. It is clear that, as
the general science of methods of organisation emerges, all sciences will conform to it. The particular methods of particular fields will be partial applications of the general conclusions of the general science. This will represent the
real overcoming of scientific specialisation. The differentiation between the
fields of cognition and practice will remain, but this will not mean that those
fields will be isolated from one another, that they will develop separately, or
that they will continue to diverge. They will be vitally and ever more tightly
interconnected, they will continuously exchange techniques, and their points
of views will continuously interact. All the sciences will be guided by a universally wide sciencenot one that is hypothetical, debatable, and vacillating like
philosophy, but a science that is exact and thoroughly empirical.
In this regard, this science will be the direct opposite of philosophy, which
is much less empirical than all the particular sciences. Philosophy is necessary
now because of the rupture of the various fields of experience, but it is not
capable of repairing that rupture. And that is why, not having its own special
sphere of experience, it cannot simultaneously and directly rely on the living
experience of all the separate fields, since they do not make up one whole but
are divided by blanks and gaps that sometimes form impassable chasms for
specialised thought. The new universal science, by contrast, will have its own
basis in experience just as broad as all practice and cognition taken together;
it must take note of and coherently systematise all of the methods and means
of organisation which are in fact employed in society, in life, and in nature. The
regularity that will be discovered and confirmed will provide universal guidance for the mastery of any aggregation of forces of nature, of any aggregation
of the data of experience.
From the most primitive cosmic combination of elements to artistic creativitywhich is by all appearances the highest and, so far, the least understood form of organisational activityeverything will then be elucidated,
clarified, and harmoniously interconnected by the conclusions of the formally
organised experience of the whole of humanity.
But, the reader asks, is such a science possible? Is it possible to generalise
and reduce to a unity what would seem to be heterogeneousthe methods by
which nature operates in its spontaneous creation of forms of movement and

R E D
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1. In the 1913 edition, this sentence ended which we, however, to avoid a long digression, will not
dwell on. [Trans.].

23

M O LEC U L A R

life and the methods by which humanity operates in its diverse forms of labour
and thought?
In principle the answer is very simple. History sets tasks, and so far humanity has resolved all the tasks that history has set for it. Humanity continually organises for itself the most alien and the most hostile forces of the universe;
it will also be able to organise for itself, in the process of its cognition, the same
methods of organisation. No one has ever proven that anything has existed
in the world, in experience, or in human activitythat is essentially inaccessible to organising efforts. The only question and doubt is how much such effort
and how much labour energy will be necessary for resolving a task and whether
humanity has accumulated sufficient energy to be able to bring the task to a successful conclusion. But we will discover this only in practice.
But in addition to this, there is now already a great deal of concrete evidence which argues in favour of the possibility and the necessity of a universal
organisational science. We have in mind those cases when nature or humanity,
or both, simultaneously apply the same method in the creation of forms and
combinations that are completely independent of one another and sometimes
belong to quite different realms of being. One can point to facts of this kind
that are truly amazing and are unquestionably not chance coincidences.
For example, the higher animals and plants descended from common single-celled ancestors that did not possess sexual difference or reproduce sexuallyunless one considers as copulation the fusion of a pair of cells that have
begun to decompose, after many generations, that were obtained by simple
division into two. Sexual differencethis ingenious method of producing new
combinations of properties of lifedeveloped independently and in parallel
in the two realms of nature. If we compare the organs of sexual reproduction,
we find an amazing architectural resemblance of structure in two such vastly different branches of life as the higher mammals and the higher flowering
plants. This resemblance is striking to anyone who has studied the anatomy of
flowers and even extends to quite a number of details ... 1
The same deep parallelism of structure exists between the seed of a plant
and the egg of a bird, for example. In both cases, there is an embryo surrounded by a nutritive layer and then a protective casing; only instead of the animal
proteins of the egg, the seed contains plant proteins, and instead of the fat of
the yolk, a physiologically similar starchy substance. In addition to this, the

M O LEC U L A R

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distribution of nutritive layers in the seed is approximately the reverse of what

is in the egg.
Still more striking is the similarity of the structure of the eye of cephalopod
molluscsoctopuses, cuttlefish, etc.to the eye of the higher vertebrates. The
eye is unusually complex; it is an apparatus for organising the visual elements
of light and form, consisting of many diverse parts. The common ancestors of
molluscs and vertebrates, it goes without saying, did not have eyes and had, at
most, pigmented spots for the retention of radiant energy. Nevertheless, the
construction of our eyes and the eyes of any octopus are almost identical down
to the tiniest detail, except that, once again, the layers of the retina are arranged
in reverse order, as if specifically emphasising the historical independence of
the production of both apparatuses.
It can also be confidently asserted that the distant common ancestors of
humans and ants were not social animals and of course did not possess even an
embryonic form of cattle-breeding technology or of slave-owning institutions.
Nevertheless, various species of ant have been observed, on the one hand, to
breed grass aphids that produce sweet juice in a way that is completely similar to the breeding of dairy cattle by humans and to cultivate edible fungi in
a manner similar to agriculture2, and, on the other hand, to practice forms of
slavery that are highly reminiscent of the military slave-owning system of ancient Sparta. As superficial as our knowledge of the life of social insects might
be, these major organisational coincidences have nevertheless been discovered
and many others besides.
The lives of human societies that develop independently of each other
present an incomparably greater congruence: the same general historical path
of development of economic interconnectedness. Thus, the transition from
primitive communism to patriarchy and from patriarchy to feudalism took
place on different continents without any mutual borrowing of forms.
Finally, let us compare the realm of life with the realm of so-called inorganic or inert nature. Exactly the same modelthe rhythm of wavesis endlessly repeated in both realms in the most heterogeneous processes. We find
it in the movement of the sea, in the phenomenon of sound, in the radiant
energy of light and electricity, andin astronomyin the change of relationships of planets to their central sun. But it is also found in the fluctuation of
the pulse, the breathing of animals, even in psychical changes of attention. The
2. The passage and cultivate edible fungi in a manner similar to agriculture is an addition to the
1923 edition. [Trans.].

same model also governs well-organised work and artistic creativity, such as
rhythm in music and poetry, and so on without end. The most dissimilar elements known to us, elements that are incommensurable both quantitatively
and qualitatively, group themselves according to one type.
It would be nave and unscientific to consider all these and countless other
similar facts to be chance analogies; the theory of probability would unquestionably not allow this. The only possible conclusion is this:

25

There exist general methods and natural regularities according

to which the most varied elements of the universe are organised
into complexes.

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3. Pierre-Simon Laplace, (17491827), was the first person to give full expression to law-governed,
materialist determinism, that is, the idea that the universe is nothing but matter in motion according to fixed laws, and that an intellect vast enough to embrace the positions of all the particles in the
universe could produce a formula that could predict the future. Needless to say, Bogdanov shared the
outlook of natural determinism, but he treated all human-made theories and formulas as relative and
not absolute. [Trans.].
4. This was written in 1911. There now exist the first attempts at the exposition of the bases of organisational science: my works, Tektologiia, Vvol. I (1913), Vvol. II (1918), in a new edition, parts I, II, and
III in one volume (published by Grzhebin in Berlin in 1922); Outlines of Oorganisational Sscience, in
the journal Proletarian Culture, 191920, nos. 721. There are also independent articles and pamphlets
by the author, working in the same direction. [This footnote was added to the 1923 edition . Trans.].

M O LEC U L A R

This proposition provides the basis for the great new science that will take
over from philosophy in order to resolve the tasks that are beyond the power of
philosophy. With the help of this new science, humanity will be able systematically and comprehensively to organise its creative powers, its life...3
This same science will for the first time create genuine universal formulas.
They will not be that absolute universal formula that Laplace dreamed of; they
will not be a formula that would embrace the universe in all its complexity but
that would itself be as complex as the universe; they will be other, practical
formulas that will make possible the systematic mastery of any possible sum of
given elements of the world process.
Philosophy is living out its last days. Empiriomonism is already not entirely a philosophy but a transitional form, because it knows where it is going and
to what it must give way. The foundation of a universal new science will be laid
down in the near future4. The blossoming of this science will spring up out of
that gigantic, feverish, organisational work which will create a new society and
bring the agonising prologue to the history of humanity to its conclusion. That
time is not so far off...

26

IN MEMORY OF
A. A. BOGDANOV

(Speech at the Civil Funeral Ceremony)

by Nikolai Bukharin, translated by Evgeni V. Pavlov

M O LEC U L A R

R E D

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COMRADES!

A number of us who are present are old Bolsheviks. We came here directly from the Plenum of the Central Committee of our Party in order to say one
last farewell to A. A. Bogdanov.
During the last years of his life Bogdanov was not a member of our
Party. In many issues, too many issues, he was not in agreement with the Party. It is well-known that our Partya party as stubborn as stone, as it was
ironically called by the liberal bourgeoisiedoes not make compromises of
principle and does not permit cowardly and rotten concessions in the sphere
of ideology. It is a Party of fighters, fighters of a harsh and beautiful time, and
it does not acknowledge relaxation of will and sugary sentimentality. But I
did not come here to speak in order to gloss over our disagreements with the
deceased, or, abandoning principles, to engage in some trade in ideas by eclectically connecting what is impossible to connect.
I came here, despite all of our disagreements, in order to say farewell to a
man whose intellectual status cannot be measured by ordinary means. Yes, he
was not orthodox in his views. Yes, from our point of view, he was a heretic.

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But he was no apprentice of thought. He was its most significant artist. In the
brave flights of his intellectual fantasy, in the stern and clear stubbornness of
his extraordinarily consistent mind, in the unusual gracefulness and internal
elegance of his theoretical constructions, Bogdanov was, despite the non-dialectical nature and abstract schematism of his thinking, undoubtedly one of
the most powerful and most original thinkers of our time. He fascinated and
enchanted everyone with his passion for theoretical monism, his theoretical
attempts to introduce a grand plan into the entire system of human knowledge, his intense search for the universal-scientific, and not the philosophers,
stone, his search for, if we can put it this way, theoretical collectivism.
In the person of Alexander Alexandrovich we have lost a man who in
terms of his encyclopedic knowledge occupied a special place not only in the
Soviet Union, but was one of the most significant minds of all countries. This
is one of the rarest qualities amongst revolutionaries. Bogdanov felt equally at
ease in the refined atmosphere of philosophical abstraction and in concrete
formulations of the theory of crises. Natural sciences, mathematics and social sciences: he was an expert in these fields, he could survive battles in all of
these areas, and he felt at home in all of these spheres of human knowledge.
From the theory of fireball lightning to the analysis of blood to the broadest
generalizations of Tektologythis was the true scope of Bogdanovs theoretical interests. An economist, a sociologist, a biologist, a mathematician, a
philosopher, a doctor, a revolutionary and, finally, an author of the beautiful
Red Starin all of these areas he was an absolutely exceptional figure in
the history of our social thought. Bogdanovs errors are unlikely ever to be
resurrected. But history will undoubtedly search through and find that which
is most valuable in Bogdanovs thought; it will allocate to him a worthy place
among the fighters for revolution, science and labor. The exceptional strength
of his mind, his nobility of spirit, his loyalty to ideasall these qualities entitle him to the lowering of our banners at his grave.
Our Party cannot but be thankful to Bogdanov for all the years that
he spent fighting, hand in hand, alongside Leninon the frontlines of the
Bolshevik faction, this embryo of the great Party of Communism. He experienced with this Party, and as one of its leaders, an entire historical period, the
period of the first attacks of the proletariat; these first heroic bloody battles
received artistic representation in the last pages of Red Star, pages that our
revolutionary youth read with awe and excitement. He greatly influenced an
entire generation of Russian Social Democrats, and it was because of him that

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28

many comrades made their decision to become revolutionaries.

Bogdanov was one of those people who, owing to the special qualities of their character, fight heroically for a great idea. Bogdanov had it in his
blood; he was a collectivist in feeling and in mind simultaneously. Even his
ideas about the transfusion of blood were based on the necessity for a peculiar
physiological collectivism in which separate individuals are connected into
one physiological circuit thus increasing the life activity of both individuals
and of the entire collective. When Alexander Alexandrovich was still a political fighter, his Bolshevik theory did not contradict his practice, and he was
one of the most significant revolutionary organizers, underground operatives
and leaders of the Party. The events that shook the world drew a deep tragic
line between him and the Party and condemned him to political passivity.
Undoubtedly, the most significant deviationmore significant than the political differences of the Vpered! eraresided in the theoretical errors of
Alexander Alexandrovich: one may compare his ideas about culture and the
necessity of preliminary cultural maturation of the proletariat with his political attitude toward the October Revolution in order to understand the deep
and intimate link between the two, and one may connect this line of thinking
with the very origins of Bogdanovs worldview, but this is not my task right
now. The fact remains: Bogdanov withdrew from the Party and ceased to exist
as a politician.
But with the same passion and the same physical strength of the mind
he fully immersed himself in scientific activity. And even here he was fighting
like a fanatic for his ideas. The wordfanaticis a frightening word only
for the philistines. For us, fanatic is anyone who tenaciously and seriously
pursues the best and most beautiful goal that one sets for oneself. Bogdanov
died a genuinely beautiful death. He died in battle, fighting for the cause in
which he believed and for which he worked.
The tragic and beautiful death of Alexander Alexandrovich may be
used by his enemies in order to discredit his selfless experiments, to strangle and finish off the very idea of blood transfusion, to put a headstone on
the cause for which this martyr of science died. This must not be allowed!
We cannot let some idiots of small caliber, some scientific petty bourgeois
cowardly both in theory and in life, some folks of the old ways who would
be incapable of inventing even a wheel, to use Bogdanovs death in order to
kill and annihilate the significance of his scientific sacrifice. No important,
really important and really new, task comes without risks for the pioneers and

trailblazers. In the realm of class struggle, in the realm of labor, in the realm
of science, peoplethe very best, the most selfless and bravest people whose
ideas and passions burn with bright flameoften perish in order to achieve
the desired goal of their lives, their own individual task, the task that is a part
of the objective social force that pushes them forward and onward. For philistines this is madness. But this madness is the highest peak of human hearts
and minds. Bogdanov died while performing his duty. And the very death of
comrade Bogdanov is the beautiful sacrifice of the man who knowingly risked
his individual life in order to give a mighty impetus to the development of the
entire human collective.
From the group of comrades and from Nadezhda Konstantinovna
Krupskaya I say here our final farewell.

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30

ON PLATONOV AND
THE ANTHROPOCENE

by McKenzie Wark

M O LEC U L A R

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REVOLUTIONS

are the locomotive history, according

to Marx in the Class Struggles in France. Andrey Platonov, who knew and
loved steam engines, was rather more literal minded about it. For him, locomotives were the locomotive of history, even if that meant the clapped-out
goods-wagons trundling around the infant Soviet Union during the civil war.
Platonov was that rare thing, a proletarian writer who composed modernist literature of the first order. He was mobilized during the civil war, he
had a regional career in journalism. But the famine he observed made him
quit writing to retrain as a hydrologist and engineer. When he returned to
writing in the mid twenties, his work is marked by a rare practical sense of
what was involved, and what could go wrong, in trying to build a new mode
of production from the ground up.
From the late twenties on, he composed a series of masterpieces that read
like a counter-history of the Soviet Union, written from a point of view that is
not so much history from below as from below the below. His central characters are usually orphans who have even less than proletarians.
None of his major works were published in his life time. We are fortunate

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that New York Review Books Classics have put out a series of magnificent
translations by Robert Chandler and his collaborators, including Foundation
Pit, about Stalins forced collectivisation of agriculture; Happy Moscow, about
the high Stalinist culture of the capital in the late 30s, and Soul, which travels
to the far west to look at Soviet power from the periphery.
Unfortunately, the book many would consider his masterpiece, Chevengur, is out of print. A older translation can be found here.Chandler and his
colleagues have released some fragments of a new translation. Here below is a
remarkable section in which the locomotive figures, perhaps as an allegory for
the failure of the infrastructure of the infant Soviet state to live up to the airy
language emamating from its superstructures.
In Molecular Red, I devote a section to working through Platonovs history from below the below of the Soviet experiment in creating a new mode
of production. It seems fairly clear that the current one within which we live
cant last. The Anthropocene is a catalog of the reasons why the ever-expanding commodification of everything is on a collision course with planetary limits. And so I turned to Platonov, not just as a writer, but also as a theorist, who
thought long and hard, and based on direct experience, about what it means
to build a civilization from nothing.
I want to read Platonov here as having an intuition of what the Anthropocene future is going to be like. He had ample first-hand experience of labors
struggles in and against nature, of trying to get things to work, of the recalcitrance and poverty of the material world. Many of his best fictional writings
touch on this. Here is a short text from his notebooks circa 1935 where he mediates on this theme. It appeated in New Left Review No. 69 May-June 2011,
but I decided to jailbreak it from out the paywall and share it here. It plays a
key role in my reading of Platonov in Molecular Red.

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32

ON THE FIRST SOCIALIST

TRAGEDY

by Andrey Platonov, translated by Tony Wood

M O LEC U L A R

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R E A D E R

ONE

should keep ones head down and not revel in life: our time is better
and more serious than blissful enjoyment. Anyone who revels in it will certainly be caught and perish, like a mouse that has crawled into a mousetrap to
revel in a piece of lard on the bait pedal. Around us there is a lot of lard, but
every piece is bait. One should stand with the ordinary people in their patient
socialist work, and thats all.
This mood and consciousness correspond to the way nature is constructed. Nature is not great, it is not abundant. Or it is so harshly arranged
that it has never bestowed its abundance and greatness on anyone. This is a
good thing, otherwisein historical timeall of nature would have been
plundered, wasted, eaten up, people would have revelled in it down to its very
bones; there would always have been appetite enough. If the physical world
had not had its one lawin fact, the basic law: that of the dialecticpeople
would have been able to destroy the world completely in a few short centuries. More: even without people, nature would have destroyed itself into pieces of its own accord. The dialectic is probably an expression of miserliness, of
the daunting harshness of natures construction, and it is only thanks to this

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that the historical development of humankind became possible. Otherwise

everything on earth would long since have ended, as when a child plays with
sweets that have melted in his hands before he has even had time to eat them.
Where does the truth of our contemporary historical picture lie? Of
course, it is a tragic picture, because the real historical work is being done not
on the whole earth, but in a small part of it, with enormous overloading.
The truth, in my view, lies in the fact that technology . . . decides everything. Technology is, indeed, the subject of the contemporary historical tragedy, if by technology we understand not only the complex of man-made instruments of production, but also the organization of society, solidly founded
on the technology of production, and even ideology. Ideology, incidentally,
is located not in the superstructure, not on high, but within, in the middle of
societys sense of itself. To be precise, one needs to include in technology the
technician himselfthe personso that one does not obtain an iron-hard
understanding of the question.
The situation between technology and nature is a tragic one. The aim of
technology is: give me a place to stand and I will move the world. But the
construction of nature is such that it does not like to be beaten: one can move
the world by taking up the lever with the required moment, but one must lose
so much along the way and while the long lever is turning that, in practice,
the victory is useless. This is an elementary episode of dialectics. Let us take
a contemporary fact: the splitting of the atom. The same thing. The worldwide moment will arrive when, having expended a quantity of energy n on
the destruction of the atom, we will obtain n + 1 as a result, and will be so
happy with this wretched addition, because this absolute gain was obtained as
a result of a seemingly artificial alteration of the very principle of nature; that
is, the dialectic. Nature keeps itself to itself, it can only function by exchanging like for like, or even with something added in its favour; but technology
strains to have it the other way around. The external world is protected from
us by the dialectic. Therefore, though it seems like a paradox: the dialectic of
nature is the greatest resistance to technology and the enemy of humankind.
Technology is intended for and works towards the overturning or softening
of the dialectic. So far it has only modestly succeeded, and so the world still
cannot be kind to us.
At the same time, the dialectic alone is our sole instructor and resource
against an early, senseless demise in childish enjoyment. Just as it was the
force that created all technology.

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In sociology, in love, in the depths of man the dialectic functions just as

invariably. A man who had a ten-year-old son left him with the boys mother,
and married a beauty. The child began to miss his father, and patiently, clumsily hanged himself. A gram of enjoyment at one end was counterbalanced by
a tonne of grave soil at the other. The father removed the rope from the childs
neck and soon followed in his wake, into the grave. He wanted to revel in the
innocent beauty, he wanted to bear his love not as a duty shared with one
woman, but as a pleasure. Do not revelor die.
Some naive people might object: the present crisis of production refutes
such a point of view. Nothing refutes it. Imagine the highly complex armature
of society in contemporary imperialism and fascism, giving off starvation and
destruction for mankind in those parts, and it becomes clear at what cost the
increase in productive forces was attained. Self-destruction in fascism and war
between states are both losses of high-level production and vengeance for it.
The tragic knot is cut without being resolved. The result is not even a tragedy
in a classical sense. A world without the ussr would undoubtedly destroy itself
of its own accord within the course of the next century.
The tragedy of man, armed with machinery and a heart, and with the dialectic of nature, must be resolved in our country by means of socialism. But
it must be understood that this is a very serious task. 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.

35

UNCREATIVE WRITING AND

THE NETWORKED BOOK

by McKenzie Wark

ANDREI

M O LEC U L A R
R E D
R E A D E R

Platonov is well known to contemporary readers of Russian,

but has not yet found his place among an international readership as one of
the great writers of the twentieth century. His deeply strange but unrepentant
Marxism kept him from being assimilated to the canon of dissident authors.
He was that rarest of things: a proletarian writer who is modernist in style.
Unfortunately, the English translation of his major work, Chevengur,
has long been out of print, although a pdf of it is readily available. Most of
his novella-length works and some of his classic stories have been carefully
translated by Robert Chandler and various collaborators, and are available in
excellent editions from New York Review Books Classics.
In Factory of Literature, (1926) Platonov writes about the method of
composition he first used in the story Antisexus, (1925-26) and probably
used in the composition of his later masterpieces.
Factory of Literature proposes a method of what Kenneth Goldsmith
calls uncreative writing, and which one might recognize as a distinctive
version of what the Situationists called dtournement, or a kind of plagiarism-and-correction process.

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36

Platonov goes on to envisage a whole production process for a new kind

of literature, collaboratively produced from the bottom up. It is among other
things an intimation of what Bob Stein calls the networked book.
It is also a sort of dialectical inversion of what would become the Soviet
literary industry of socialist realism, where all stories are cut to fit the template
of a communist horizon, determined from above by state literary administrators. Factory of Literature shares an interest in productivist culture that
was common at the time, although Platonovs idiosyncratic version takes its
distance not only from nascent socialist realism, and from the commodified
culture industry satirized in Antisexus, but also from certain features of the
Soviet avant garde.

37

FACTORY OF LITERATURE

by Andrey Platonov, translated by Anna Kalashyan

On fundamental improvement of literary creativity methods

ART

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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.
They saywrite stronger on a big canvas, show the essence of construction in the new era, illustrate the transformation of everyday life and present
the new type of human with new spiritual and emancipatory equipment, etc.
The writer gets overwhelmed but the amount of cognitive elements remains
the same. He sees the rationale behind this smart advice and its justice, and
acknowledges the practicability of these plans and projects, however he lacks
the bricks to build this novel.
Real literati travel to provincial communities in the Urals and Donbass,
to irrigation works in Turkmenistan, to state farms, to hydroelectric stations
and finally, just become activists in communities (in order to understand the

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everyday life, the elements and problems of apartment buildings, etc).

Writers open up their soulin comes the life elements and the warmness of this eraand this becomes the architecture of literature, the truth of
new characters and the signals of the weight of the new great class.
As a foreigner, this person walks around the factory and observes the
electric junction boxes, gets terrified of these ordinary things and then writes
extensively, with exaggeration and lies, being concerned about the pieces of
life observed and realizing the potential existence of a big Korovai bread of
much nourishment. It becomes a travelogue rather than creative writing. It
turns out to be a subjective philosophy about, rather than an essay on, what
is real and alive in the landscape of the unavoidable destiny of that alive. In
order to whip the alive and possess it not inside yourself but rather in front
of you.
Modern literary work divides into two types: dialectics of the authors
soul in a social setting (Babel and Seifullina); or honest social novel (dialectics of events)genuine effort of a kid to construct a bus by himself, etc. And
does such a good job so that people admire his bus.
Leylandlife, a baby with ironwriter. Whereas we need in literature
dialectics of social events that sounds like the contradiction of the living soul
of the author.
Take a look at where the electronics of aviation, chemistry, astrophysics
is today. People are basically the same as ten years ago but they make things
better than their ancestors.
Where is literature in terms of quality in comparison with Shakespeare?
Obviously now they write about mechanics rather than sons of kings, but this
is a quantitative element rather than qualitative. Shakespeare would write in a
positive manner about mechanics if he lived now.
Literature didnt really go anywhere: the writer sits down and writes
just with himself and his internal feelings. All the disciplines of knowledge
know how to use the increasing amount of objective factstheir experience
and others needsand know how to reform subjective methods of activity.
Meanwhile, the writers dont know how to do these things, as if they are still
primordial beings. They still make cars by themselves forgetting that there is
Ford and Citron.
Here no one likes Spengler but he was right when he said that in comparing the knowledge and intellect circulating in the world of manufacturers with
circles of writersthe comparison is not in favor of latter. You cannot hide

39

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from this. Talk to an engineer, a big constructor or manager and then talk to a
famous poet. While the engineer exhorts a healthy mind and the fresh wind of
concrete life, the poet smells like the hospital or the psychos mouth.
We need to create a literary method that is equivalent to modernity, taking into account the experience of it. It is absolutely necessary that methods
of creativity with words keep up with the pace of the revolution, if they cannot
develop with the same speed as humans.
Writers bet on the talent of people without doing anything to actually
develop new methods for their work. We live now in an era where we dont
respond to anything. The good news is that there is manufacturing and its
inertia.
Todays mechanics are using new methodsimproved machines (that
didnt even exist a hundred years ago) make quality better and quantity ten
times more while his grandfather didnt even have one. While this mechanic
is from the same era as us and has the same talent as us, he could have been
more cheap and unskilled than his grandfather. But its all about the machine
that the grandson posses now.
If this development took place in literature as well the modern writer
would write better and write more than Shakespeare even if one had just 1%
of Shakespeares talent.
We need to create not just novels but also methods for creation. Writing
novels is the writers job, whereas the critics job and main mission is to develop new methods for writing that simplify and improve the writers work. Until
now critics were busy observing their own shadows and assuming that it looks
like a human shadow. It can either be the case or not, but in any case, given the
fact that it is the shadow it cannot be equal to critics.
Critics need to become constructors of machines that produce literature, and the artist will work on the machines.
There was Furmanov and Reisner and they correctly identified what
needs to be there: living, fighting and traveling, they gained the gifts of life
and they used it to give back to literature as if adjusting these natural gifts to
their individual souls, without which a real art cannot exist. Therefore, art
becomes a reality in the process of being enriched by the artists individuality.
Furmanov was a military party official and Reisner was a revolutionary and
traveler and then they became writers.
Chekov had a notepad, Pushkin worked in archives, Anatole France advocated the scissors instead of a pen, Shakespeare was broadly relying on the

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memoirs of his circle of aristocrats.

I would like to clarify that I am not supportive of life protocols. I am advocating for the smell of the authors soul in his writings and simultaneously
for the real faces of people and groups in the same work.
The authors soul should be united with the soul of collectivity, since
without it an artist cannot possibly exist. 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 personthe writer. The latter of
course has a lot of rights and opportunities but he needs to construct the novel based on the social elements. Thats indeed the case, since words are social
elements just like events and chapters, as well as motion patterns.
Words are just social materials and they are very manageable and reversible.
However, why would you even use these resources when you can have
ready-made ingredients? From processed ingredients to the actual product is
an easier path than from raw ingredients, since you wouldnt have to spend as
much effort, and there are savings on quantity, which can become a quality
issue.
The modern writer usually relies on social resources rather than readymade components.
What exactly are ready-made ingredients?
Myths, historical and modern facts and events, everyday activities and
an ambitious or better destinyall 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. You can also
consider as ready-made components the personal stories of authors, as long
as these are real and genuine pure facts. Art is not just out there and objective
but rather is the sum of social objective events plus the human soul. (Soul is
an individual violation of a general trends of reality that is unique as an act
and for that matter the soul is alive. I apologize for the old terminologyI
developed a new meaning to it).
Soul is always existent and in sufficient amount and quality. Meanwhile
our literature is still not benign, therefore the lack of external and social material is the second part of ready-made components. However objectively
speaking this material exists in huge amounts so why is it not subjectively

enough for the writer? Because methods for identifying and understanding
the social material are absent. The social material can only be literary readymade components since the peoples fresh lips rarely formulate concepts and
rather provide an image for its development, since people are alive.
I am going to turn to specific examples now. I bought a leather notepad
and divided it into seven sections with the following headings:

41

1. Work
2. Love
3. Everyday Life
4. Personality traits
5. Discussion with oneself
6. Unexpected thoughts and findings and
7. Random and special.

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I chose very general headings to just direct myself. 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.
The notepad is being filled by a variety of different life things. Of course
we need a sharp eye and delicate taste, otherwise you will just end up filling
the notepad with bullshit instead of actual bread. 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.
You end up with an essay where your contribution is only 5-10% but its 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.
You have to start writing, not by using words and copying real languages

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but rather with pieces of that real language then editing these pieces and putting it together in an essay.
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.
Now you dont have to remember, accidentally find and lose, the ready
made components all the time. All you need to do is just take advantage of life
itself. And this will go back to people in a more profound and nutritious way.
I am not advocating but rather informing. I have an experience and I am
illustrating. I was comparing this to my previous method and got terrified.
Now I write, play and I am happy, but in the past I would suffer and get upset.
Now my ideas are exciting and in line with feelings.
People can say: wow he discovered South America. But this is what every
smart artist is supposed to do, just like every citizen. But this isnt what usually
happens and authors disregard this method most times.
This isnt easy and not easy at all.
You need to always mobilize your observation skills, your taste and vision
need to extrude just like a predators and you need to always dig in central
squares and other neighborhoods to find something. You need to know just
like an experienced gleaner where you can find what and where you will just
waste your time.
Maybe this isnt something that a writer is supposed to do? I dont know.
But its really interesting and easy. You need to always leave your mind and
soul open and the fresh wind of life goes through it and your role is to stop it
every once in a while, in order for the wind to leave some footprints in you.
And then at night when women and children are asleep, you start editing
and cutting depending on what you like. Its easier for you to write this way
and you are smiling to all the thoughts and ideas from the notepad. 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
friends speech into my essay. He read it and got excited but didnt remember
since I edited it a bit. He still doesnt get it that work that actually produces big
results just requires manual dexterity.
I admit I wrote only one essay using this method and its called Antisexus.
I started the notepad just recently so I cant really confirm the new method

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and I cant illustrate anything at this point other than what I just did. But you
know I am speaking the truth.
The manufacturing of literary works and essays should be done in a modern way, namely, rational with guaranteed quality.
I envision this type of literature factory in the following way.
In the middle of this factory is the editorial teamthese are the literary
editors, the writer himself who is working on a piece. This team is headed by a
critic or a team of critics that are supposed to improve and develop new methods of literary work, just like the head of a big car industry is a construction
team.
This department is always analyzing processes of production and categorizing the experience and studying the writers era to try to improve the
quality and simplify the production process.
The factory is the place where literature is made. Other factories are in
the country, in the body of life and their contribution needs to be spelled out.
I would do the following thing in the Soviet Union. We have got an allUnion literary journal. In every national republic or area and every territorial
unit there is a network of writers and each one of them focuses on one specific
theme.
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.
These units need to be very good observers since they need to identify
and assess the material that is out there in the world.
However, it is not required that the literary factory have excellent editing
skillsthat unique capacity to add something to the ready-made ingredients
and make an essay out of it.
The national literary factories need to have all the qualities listed above
plus education. The material that is received from this unit gets sorted into
different notepads, getting it cleaned of unoriginal thoughts and ideas that
are not valuable for literature. However the rights of these units need to be
restricted in that area so that they dont loose important material.
The central literary factory needs to take it slowly or just drop the whole
thing or just leave it, not even changing punctuation. Given the suggestions

44

from the literary factory, the central literary factory needs to just leave the
material. The national literary factory needs to know really well its audience
and the people, as well as the literature, and needs to provide suggestions and
support to other literary factories.
The national literary factory is a laboratory that controls the quality. They
dont need to add their own input to these pieces. For their own ideas there is
another space called accidental thoughts.
The material that gets collected by the national literary factory are sent
out to the editing department for creative production. Therefore you have got
the following:
The experts are by the machines (literary factories)
The factory experts (national literary factories)
Editors (writers, and collectors of materials)
Directorsengineers (critics).

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You can also have these units in different regions but these can be less
useful for writers since its more diverse and the interests of literature are not
in line with the interested of economics.
Honorarium should be the following:
50%the writer
5%critic
5%national literary factories
40%literary factories, for each piece published by this unit. The pieces
are published under the writers name and with the insignia of the literary
factory.
There are going to say that this is too hierarchical and bureaucratic. It is
not true. This isnt hierarchy but rather division of labor. This isnt bureaucracy but rather a real creative volunteer factory for processing these materials.
There shouldnt be any hurt feelings: all the staff members of literary factories are interested in this financially and morally. Every literary factory can
potentially become an expert based on their capacity and energy.
At the moment I work just by myself so I doubt I will achieve the impressive results that would illustrate the advantages of this method.
The most important benefit of the factory is of course the division of la-

bor and the fact that it covers lots of human lives, masses and territories, thousands of eyes.
In any case I will give it a try and illustrate the results of the publishing
units.
I would love this experiment to be on a bigger scale that is more applicable to our era.
However we need a lot if qualified people for that.
Maybe then we will get closer to reforming literature (content, style and
quality) and this will facilitate the process of collectivization of this field and
will eliminate archaic methods of literary work and that will at least bring us
closer to a bad factory that produces cars and weaponry.
I would like to kindly ask to write about this and provide feedback on the
content rather than finding fault.

45

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Factory of Literature is translated Anna Kalashyan from Oktyabr, No. 10, 1991, pp 195202. Initially, the piece was supposed to be published by Oktyabr in 1926 but it was returned to the writer, and he ended up publishing it in the journal of Peasant Youth.

46

THE SEX-GENDER INDUSTRIAL

COMPLEX

by McKenzie Wark

M O LEC U L A R

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ANDREI

Platonov is without question one of the great twentieth

century writers. He is a rare witness to the early history of the Soviet Union,
and at the same time the creator of a unique modern prose style. Unfortunately, the English translation of his major work, Chevengur, has long been out of
print, although a pdf of it is readily available. Most of his novella-length works
and some of his stories have been carefully translated by Robert Chandler and
various collaborators, and are available in excellent editions from New York
Review Books Classics.
Here we offer a provisional translation by Anna Kalashyan of an occasional piece by Platonov. In Antisexus (1925-26, Platonov writes in a parodic
vein about what Batriz Prciado calls the sex-gender industrial complex. The
production of gendered and sexualized bodies via technologies of the image
and the orgasm appears here as something that might be implicated in both
the western and Soviet modes of spectacle.

47

ANTISEXUS

by Andrey Platonov, translated by Anna Kalashyan

BELOW

M O LEC U L A R
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R E A D E R

you will find the text of an advertisement brochure published

in New York, in eight European languages, by International Industrial Review.
We cannot overlook the exceptional literary talent of the author of this
brochure, just as we have to acknowledge the imperial cynicism, serviceable
pornography, and terrible banality of this business essay, the size of which
makes it really sad. However, there is something in the same line of thinking as
this brochure that makes it similar in nature with the work of Anatole France,
granted we are allowed to talk about his great and honorary name. In fact, this
is what gave us the courage to publish this outrageous work.
The work below is the best document to represent the elements of this era
of degradation and stagnation of the bourgeoisie and its moral degeneration.
Even the most professional readers like us have never read anything like
this.
Expecting everything from the modern day substrate of capitalism, bureaucracy, fascism, and militarism that furnished reviews for the advertised
device, we were still not anticipating such complete stupidity and absence of
common sense.
Of course, comrade Shklovsky, who ironically analyzed this bullshit us-

48

ing formal methods, is excluded from this rule.

Apparently physiology (the brain decomposes last out of all organs)
is wrong and the Russian Bolshevik saying is right: the person who wants to
punish History loses reason first.
That is the case. For that matter, the whole Earth stinks from this Anglo-Euro-American illustrative piece, which comes from the sector of imperialism.
Therefore, the best counter anti-sexual agitation is to publish this interesting piece, since this will change peoples facial expression and make them
laugh, which is the best friend of our stomach and soul and, at the same time,
the worse enemy to this industrial moral physiological madness.

M O LEC U L A R

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LADIES

and gentlemen,
While our international firm works in different parts of the world different cultural environments, and different time zones, the demand for our
patented products exists everywhere from the Arctic to the Antarctic, not excluding the savage countries between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
Human passions dominate time, space, climate and economics. Our
companys efforts to disseminate metal industrial products for the satisfaction
of those passions is of cosmic importance both in terms of metaphysics and
morals.
It is truly fascinating that, despite the widely varying cultures, the chart
illustrating the annual sales of our product in the north is not different from
the south, given equal economic conditions and population.
Given this fact, let me conclude that human physiology is almost absolutely the same across borders and across space, race and culture, the existence of a publishing industry or its absence, etc.
Thus, the existence of satisfaction depends on the existence of demand.
The world itself aims to consume rather than produce. The world does not
produce the want for pleasure when there is no opportunity to meet it.
Given our international sales experience, our efforts to improve the features of our devices as well as to expand the reach of our factories, and attempts to ensure that our products are compatible with the individual needs
of our consumers, we decided to include the Soviet Union in our export mar-

49

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ket. The size of this market is big enough for us to justify the organizational
expenses that are related to the cost of adoption of our devices to the needs of
locals, which will guarantee our commercial success in this market.
The most distinguished moral authorities acknowledged our work without any doubts. In fact, it is considered worthy of state recognition and private philanthropic support. Our firm did not hesitate to take advantage of this
support.
The CEO of the firm, Mr. Berkman, is already included in the list of candidates for the Nobel Prize, and last year he received the honoris causa doctoral degree in Ethics and Aesthetic Sciences from the Academy of Paris.
Without further ado, let me share with you in a nutshell the principles
embedded in our companys international activities.
The sexual destiny of humanity was constrained during the war, and in
the postwar period it developed uncontrollably. This has contributed to our
firms financial prosperity.
Human sexual life is impossible to regulate and this can have disastrous
consequences. This is an issue of high concern for the founders of our firm
and the actual reason for us to act upon it.
It is also widely known that there is a correlation between sexuality and
morality. The virtue of the ancient institution of marriage is widely acknowledged, as it conditions the spouses to specific rules regarding marital love that
is considered to be the highest positive pleasure and spiritual appeasement.
In marriage, truth is replaced by comfort. In any case, no other philosopher
can prove otherwise. Humanity accepted comfort and peace as the supreme
truth. The object of commercial and industrial activity is humans rather than
philosophers.
Therefore, our firm announced a patent in all civilized countries for an
electromagnetic device called Antisexus that is designed to regulate the field
of sexuality and to bring out the highest function of humans, namely, their
spirit, that needs to be made more visible and widely used as one of the most
important goods of civilization.
Unregulated sexuality is unregulated soul or disorganized soul, and it
spreads misery and suffering that is not acceptable in the age of the general
scientific division of labor, in this age of Ford and radio, in this age of the
League of Nations, etc.
Progress follows a crooked path, meaning some parts are still behind.
Our firm aims to equalize the path of progress, destroy the sexual wildness

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50

of humans, and bring them to the culture of peace and calm with a planned
development rate.
In the age of social and economic crisis when marriage is under material
strain, in the age of alimony when giving birth is almost impossible and when
women become the muses of poets again because of mens poverty, our mission is to solve the international problem of sexuality.
Our firm turned sexual feelings into an honorable mechanism and gave
the world a moral behavior. We eliminated the element of sexuality from human relationships and made more room for spiritual friendship.
Taking into account, however, the value of pleasure that is part of the
relationship between sexes, we made sure that our device makes it possible
to achieve it even by a convict who just came from serving a ten year prison
sentence. This tells you a lot about the quality of our devices.
Moreover, special features make it possible to achieve pleasure of any longitude, ranging from a couple of second to a number of days, if the consumer
has the free time. Another feature makes it possible to regulate the amount of
sperm in order to achieve spiritual balance and avoid an unnecessary exhaustion of the body.
Our slogan is spiritual and physiological destiny for our customers and
we put the sexual satisfaction in his hands through the regulator. We have
achieved it.
Furthermore, senior citizens who have lost sexual desires get back these
feelings with our device. We work for all ages and all nations.
In the last eight years we have produced only three types of our devices
for men and three for women. The market apparently doesnt need a big diversity here due to the fact that each version of the device provides different
features.
Meeting the needs of our new customersthe inhabitants of Soviet
countrieswe decided to provide more benefits such as the members of
unions get: a discount of 20% and credit until 1 year. The price range for our
devices for 1926 are the following:
1. Type BS 00042 for individual usage without sterilization $20
2. Type BS 001843 for a limited group of people (for men of the family)
with sterilization $40
3. Type BS 000000401 for unlimited number of people (for public toilets, theaters, streets, organizations, etc) with sterilization is $100.

The prices are listed without the discount. For women, we offer the same
types but 15 % more expensive.
Let me emphasize again the moral value of our activities. We are defending your economic interest by protecting it from uncontrollable sexual desires
and providing the means to get rid of this budget line and become financially
successful.
We look forward to your orders.
General agent for Soviet countries,
Jacob Habsburg

FAMOUS

51

peoples reviews on the Antisexus device:

R E D
R E A D E R

HENRY FORD
Mr. Berkman, Shotlua & Sons have started a new era in the moral service to humanity. There is no doubt that the historical optimum is about the
regulation of the universe by human reasonregulation that is a transformer
which turns chaos into a regulated machine.
When I was twenty-five and just got married, the task of regulating the

M O LEC U L A R

HINDENBURG
War is humanitys passion. It cannot exist until life exists on earth, despite
what tired and politician-dreamers say. Warcourage that will exist until life
is courageous.
The devices offered by Berkman, Shotlua & Sons will have a great role in
the next war when thousands of young people will be satisfied by it.
During previous wars, the nervousness of the military was a big challenge
for commanders. Nervousness leads to defeat. We need an army of people
with tough nerves. We need an army of people who have found their spiritual
balance and are ready for decades of war.
The above mentioned device can help commanders in their difficult task
of victory.

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52

marriage physiology with formulas was already on my agenda but my mind

got distracted with mechanics.
Maybe I would have stopped working on the automation of car production and focused on the production of these devices that normalize morality,
which is closer to my spiritual nature.
But Mr. Berkmanan, Shotlua & Sons have guessed my thoughts and implemented them for the benefit of the society. I am very glad about it.
I wish this new production, that is so well organized, international prosperity, sales of the products of this unique firm, and dissemination among all
animals of the planet, and not just humans. This will reinforce an active balance of the firm, which will in turn reinforce morality in the world.

SON OF FORD
Analyzing the net cost of Antisexus devices, we concluded that it is way
too expensive. I asked the financial department to recalculate the price, given
our resources and instruments and decide whether it is possible to bring the
price down. I was told that it is possible to make the device cheaper by 30%.
Starting from next year, we will start its production in our factories in Detroit.
Moreover, we will make it possible to extend the payment plan to five
years.
This will eliminate prostitution and all the unemployed will have access
to these devices.
Regarding the young employees, we are providing the opportunity not to
think about marriage, to stabilize their budget, which will make it possible for
us not to raise their wages, which is what really prevents technical improvement of our factories and further progress.

GHANDI
It is better to let the sperm go down the metal, rather than use the vulnerable body of a human that is created for friendship, thoughts and holiness,
unless you intend to transform it into a tree of wisdom.

CHAMBERLAIN
Devices developed by Mr. Berkman, Shotlou & Sons make it easier to

govern the passionate races of the colonies and decrease the number of unnecessary revolts, rooted in the unsatisfied sexual feelings of young people,
that are directed against civilization. This also simplifies the work of colonial
administrators since their wives dont have to deal with rape anymore. Administrators wives who have the device will not be subjected to rape.

53

CHARLIE CHAPLIN
I am against Antisexus. It does not take into account an intimacy, a live
communication of human soulscommunication, which is always at stake in
the sexual relation, even if a woman is a commodity. This communication has
its own value, independently of sexual intercourse; it is that immediate sentiment of friendship and tender sympathy, a sentiment of felt solitude, which
cannot be achieved through an anti-sexual device. I remain in favor of human
closeness, for breath passing mouth to mouth, for a pair of eyes gazing at another pair, for the sensation of the soul in a most brutal sexual intercourse, for
its enrichment at the expense of other soul that it encounters. That is why I
am against Antisexus. I stand for the living, suffering, ridiculous, deadlocked
human being, which dissipates its poor vital forces in order to buy a moment
of fraternity with some other secondary creature. And for that matter I am
against all this mechanization. I will always stand by the concrete, sad, funny
but realsomething that promises to be powerful.

M O LEC U L A R
R E D
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THE FIRMS COMMENTS

Taking into account Chaplins objections, and not shying from publishing negative reviews, the firm would like to let the public know that our best
engineers are already working on an updated Antisexus that goes beyond its
rational construction and works not only on sexual organs but also on the
nervous system, in order to ensure that all the precious feelings described by
Chaplin become a reality.
The firm assumes that it will be possible to reproduce this feeling of belonging to the new universe with a pleasant image of a man or a woman, depending on the sex of the consumerthe image that is most desired by the
nervous and psychological system.
However, the firm doesnt anticipate wide dissemination of this device
since it is known that love is not something common for people, and this

54

wont be commercially promoted. Modern science has confirmed that love

is a physiological stage that happens to humans that are not healthy. But we
work not just for all ages and countries but also for all human structures with
all their diversity, since the firms goal is the moral stability of the world.

PROFESSOR SHTEINAKH
Having made the sexual act just about one human being, and making
pleasure accessible for allwe are on the path for virtue, for the dominance
of youth.

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MORGAN
Using Antisexus you feel youthful and then you sleep well. I havent slept
so well in the last twenty-five years. My body reproduced the source of youth.
I am very grateful to the producers of Antisexus. My daughter suggested I
found an Institute of Permanent Youth. I agreed with it and donated money
for that cause.

DOUG FAIRBANKS
With the development of anti-sexual devices we lost the famous and
beautiful set of motions that make passion happen. Thats a pity.
But we have gained sexual comfort, a balance of health and independence
from womens caprices. In addition, this also saves time. This is to be admired.
Moreover, the modern film industry will compensate for the lost sexual motions and replace it with a virginal and mighty body.

OSWALD SPENGLER
The future belongs to civilizations and not to culture. The future will conquer the spiritually dead and intellectually pessimistic man. In the landscape
of genuine civilization marriage is impossible since its only about mechanical
emancipation from organic powers.
The Antisexus machine has again symbolized that era that we are entering
nowcivilizationis a dead, comfortable building, the foundation of which
faces the green foliage of living and dead cultures.

SVEN HEDIN
The Antisexus machine is absolutely necessary for long trips and very
convenient. These machines are now very much needed and included in the
list of equipment for each expedition.
The presence of the machine is a plus for the success of the expedition.

55

KLAINS
When I was in Russia, I heard this song:
The person who lives with a milkmaid is very lucky. As soon as he leaves
the house he gets the sour cream and yogurt.
In the times when Europe is getting poorer and Russia is yet not that rich
and when not everyone has a wife that can provide milk we need a mechanical
milk provider. Thats what the mechanism of Antisexus is here for. Annually
humanity spends about 500 billion rubles on prostitution and this is not taking into account indirect health expenses, the waste of time and existence of
an evil international class of prostitutes.
This funding can be used for other purposes such as milk, yogurt and
sour cream for everyone.
Yes, this savings wouldnt be possible without Antisexus. Therefore, it is
more real than any other revolutionary economic reform.

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MUSSOLINI
I usually act rather than write. I consider Antisexus as a necessity that every cultural person needs to havea weapon that can be used both at home
and in the battlefield. We declared the exemption of the Antisexus from any
taxes. Women are liberated from sexual responsibility. For the members of the
Fascist Union the existence of Antisexus in necessary and everyone from the
king to the poor of Rome must have it.

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VIKTOR SHKLOVSKY
Women are passing by just like crusades. Antisexus is a natural early morning sunrise. But everyone can realize that it is about the style and format of the
automated era. You can live better than in a condom.

FIRMS COMMENTS
Since we cannot include all the reviews, the firm aims to publish three
volumes that are dedicated to the ratings that famous people in art, sciences,
social democracy, finance, politics and communism give to our devices. In the
next volume we will publish the reviews of the following thinkers...

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Antisexus is translated by Anna Kalashyan from Andrey Platonov, Writings Volume 1: Stories, Poems, Moscow: IMLI, 2004. The piece was published in 1981 in the West in Russian
Literature. It was first published in the Soviet Union in 1989 in the New World, No. 9, 1989,
pp. 124-136
This translation is provisional, and we welcome suggestions for improvement.

57

PROLETKULT FOR
SEX WORKERS

by McKenzie Wark

Humanity does not exist under the sign of

the divine but of the monstrous.
Batriz Prciado

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this!, he said, thrusting a soiled photocopy of a typescript

into my teenage hands. It will change your life! Then he disappeared back
into the public toilet he was cruising. This was my introduction to the works
of Foucault. It was an amateur translation, made by a self-described nasty
street queen. And it did change my life, after a fashion. The most interesting
books are often works of low theory. They may be written by people schooled
in the high theory of the seminar room, but they take those sorts of intellectual resources and apply them to the gap between abstract powers and the sensations of everyday life. Marx and Spinoza, lets recall, were not philosophers.
Testo Junkie by Batriz Prciado is a low theory book. Its a little rough
and raw, but its brilliant. I have never met Prciado, and its unclear what pro-

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READ

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noun would be best, so Im going for s/he. Like Haraway Prciado received a
Catholic education, perhaps of a more intensive form given that s/he grew up
in the dying days of Francos Spain. Prciados relation to it was rather more
contrarian than Haraways. Prciados first psychoanalyst explained to at age
14 that s/he wanted to arm wrestle God.5 S/he has traveled through at least
four cities, three languages, and two genders. She met Derrida while studying philosophy at the New School, while he was writing about St Augustine,
whose Confessions about changing faith reminded her of contemporary writings about changing genders. S/he lived in Paris for a while, then got a PhD
in architecture.6
In Testo Junkie, s/he documents a short period of life when s/he took testosterone, and builds out an astonishing conceptual frame for thinking what
that molecular experience might mean. Its not a memoir. It may be a study of
emotions, but only those that are not private. Like any good twenty-first century book, it is a a single point in a cartography of extinction.7 Its a rare
book in its frank knowingness about this discontinuity, about writing in the
wake of the carbon liberation front.
Prciado is not sure if s/he is a feminist hooked on testosterone, or a
transgender body hooked on feminism. As for testosterone: I take it to foil
what society wanted to make of me, so that I can write, fuck, feel a form of
pleasure that is post-pornographic, add a molecular prosthesis to my low-tech
transgender identity composed of dildos, texts, and moving images; I do it to
avenge your death.8
The death is that of French autofiction writer Guillaume Dustan. The
book hovers between a memorial for him, and a celebration of her relations
with writer and film maker Virginia Despentes: fucking her is harder than
factory work, but she comes to be covered with my feminism as if with a
diaphanous ejaculation, a sea of political sparkles.9
5. Batriz Prciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmapornographic Era, translated
by Bruce Benderson, Feminist Press, New York, 2013, p. 90.
6. Batriz Preciado, Pornotopia: Arquitectura y Sexualidad en Playboy Durante le Gerra Fria, Editorial
Anagrama, 2010. For some architectural antecedents to Prciado, see Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity
at War, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2007 and Beatriz Colomina et al, Cold War Hothouses, Princeton
Architectural Press, New York, 2004.
7. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 12.
8. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 16. On the trans question in feminism, see Rita Felski, Fin de sicle, Fin
de sexe, New Literary History, Vol. 27, No. 2, 1996, pp. 337-349, which interestingly links the transgender to the transhistorical.
9. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 98, p. 97; Guilaume Dustan, In My Room, Serpents Tail, London, 1998;
Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory, Feminist Press, New York, 2010.

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10. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 28.

11. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 51. On the commodification of life, see Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus,
University of Washington Press, Seattle WA, 2008.
12. On Fordism, see Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, Verso,
London, 2001.
13. Andrei Platonov, The Anti-Sexus, translated by Anne O. Fisher, Cabinet, No. 51, Fall 2013, pp. 4853. See also Aaron Schuster, Sex and Anti-Sex, in the same issue.

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The bulk of the book is not about such things. It is rather about what one
can think by extension from such experience. It is about mapping the commodity economy centered on the management of bodies, sexes, identities, or
what Preciado calls the somatico-political, of how it finds itself both making and made over by the sex-gender industrial complex.10 Its an exercise in
Bogdanovian substitution, building out a basic metaphor to show the whole
world made out of ones own experience of labor.
The most interesting kind of labor is now that of the production of the
species as species.11 For Prciado, the key objects to sex-gender business
are synthetic steroids, porn and the internet. What results is a pharma-porno-punk industrial complex. It was hidden under the Fordist manufacturing
economy and now revealed by the latters displacement onto the parts of the
world. In the over-developed world of Europe, America and Japan, this feedback loop between techno-science and bodily wants now emerges as the engine of commodification.12
Platonov, of all people, saw it coming. In a strange text of 1926 called
Anti-Sexus, first fruit of his factory of literature dtournement techniques, he
writes imaginary advertising copy for the Anti-Sexus device, whose manufacturers have conquered all the world markets and are now moving into the Soviet Union. Anti-Sexus is a sexdesign machine not for repressing sex but regulating it. Our company has transformed an elemental urge to an ennobling
mechanism. The spiritual pacification henceforth secured only by conjugal
love can now be had at a modest price by everyone. A special selector disc
allows users to regulate the expenditure of semen.13
Platonov writes fake testimonials from the great leaders of the day. Henry
Ford praises this electrical transformer that turns wild forces of nature into
standardized automatons. Fords son says it will free young workers from the
obligation to get married, after which they demand higher wages. Chamberlain says it will reduce colonial revolts, and spare the wives of colonial administrators from rape. Douglas Fairbanks foresees that it will change cinema,
which will have to attach itself to other desires. Mussolini thinks women will

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be freed by it and become assets to the nation.

Charlie Chaplin is against it, as sex is at least the pretext for moments
of comradeship between suffering bodies. And then theres Ghandi: If you
do not want to transform it into a tree of knowledge, it is better to drain the
seed down the metal, than into the vulnerable body of a human being, created
for friendship, thought, sanctity. While Platonovs sentiments are probably
closer to Ghandi and Chaplin, the conceit of its introduction into the Soviet
Union seems to suggest that this underbelly of Fordism, the industrialization
of sex and gender, found its way into the Soviet mirror-world version of commodification too.
I look for keys to survival in books, says Prciado.14 As in Haraway,
scattered in Testo Junkie are useful lists of writers and artists for anyone to
dtourn: Jean Genet, Walter Benjamin, Monique Wittig, Susan Stryker, Edmund White, Faith Ringgold, Faith Wilding, Jill Johnson, Valerie Solanas, Silvia Federici, Ellen Willis, Kathy Acker, Sandy Stone, Shu Lea Chang, Diane
Torr, Del LaGrace Volcano, Pedro Lemebel and Michelle Tea. Platonov is not
on this list, but he could be. As in any low theory book, the reading list is
determined by a need to survive rather than disciplinary boundary keeping.
What is of interest is how Prciado pulls it off.
This is not just another narrative account of the affect of a queer, bohemian experience. Preciado starts producing its concept: There is nothing to
discover in sex or in sexual identity; there is no inside. The truth about sex is
not a disclosure; it is sexdesign. Pharmaco-pornographic biocapitalism does
not produce things. It produces mobile ideas, living organs, symbols, desires,
chemical reactions15 Its not about the personal affects so much as the systematic effects that produce them: its a cyborg infrastructure.
Nor is all this something imposed entirely from without on some pre-existing body or sexuality. If theres an agency within the system, its not identifiable with the romance of the natural body. But there is nevertheless an agency
that could have a politics, in and against the mesh. What if, in reality, the
insatiable bodies of the multitudetheir cocks, clitorises, anuses, hormones,
and neuro-sexual synapseswhat if desire, excitement, sexuality, seduction,
and the pleasure of the multitude were all the mainsprings of the creation of
14. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 135. See Katie King, Feminism and Writing Technologies, Configurations, Vol. 2., No. 1, 1994, pp. 89-106.
15. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 35. See also Antonella Corsani, Beyind the Myth of Woman: The Becoming Transfemijnist of (Post-)Marxism, SubStance, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2007, pp. 107-138.

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16. Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 37. See Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy
in the Age of Empire, Penguin Press, New York, 2004; Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2004.
17. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 40; Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, translated by Mark Poster,
Telos Press, 1975.
18. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 131. See Charles Fourier, Des Harmonies Polygames en Amour, edited by
Raoul Vaneigem, Rivages Petite Bibliothque, Paris, 2003. In Fourier there are twelve passions, rather
than just one. Potentia guadendi may well be a dtournement of what Yann Moulier Boutang calls
libido sciendi, which is supposedly the new motivating force, after the desire for wealth and power. See
Cognitive Capitalism, Polity, Cambridge UK, 2011, p. 76.
19. See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, p. 9ff.

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value added to the contemporary economy? And what if cooperation were a

masturbatory cooperation and not the simple cooperation of brains? 16 This
adds a whole new field of sensation to comradely labor.
Theres a challenge here to rethink what the labor point of view is in
the twenty-first century, of a related but different kind to that in Haraway.
The raw materials of todays production process are excitation, erection,
ejaculation, and pleasure and feelings of self-satisfaction, omnipotent
control, and total destruction. The production of sex-affect is now the
model for all other kinds of production. Sex is the corollary of capitalism
and war, the mirror of production.17 Or so it at first appears. One might
rather inquire as to the infrastructure through which they are jointly produced and refracted.
But rather than labor power or the general intellect, Prciadio identifies
that which is both producer and produced, the agency of the system, as potentia gaudendi, or orgasmic force, a capacity for being excited, exciting and
being-excited-with. This sounds a bit like the passions in Fourier, but in Prciado, potentia gaudendi is not a romantic concept, a memory or residue of a
life before reification. Commodification is at the transformation of our sexual resources into work and also what exceeds it.18 As with the Anti-Sexus
product, capital tries to privatize potentia gaudendi but it exists really as an
event, a practice, or perhaps an evolutionary process that might point beyond
the commodity form.
Ill come back to this potentia gaudendi later. For now, its crucial to grasp
that for Prciado, it does not exist outside of techno-science. It isnt a natural
core. In this regard its different to Marcuse, or the sexpol of Willem Reich
and all that descends from it.19 The market isnt an outside power repressing
or even making work some natural given sexuality. Nor is the body even a coherent unit within this economy. The sexual body is the product of a sexual

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division of flesh according to which each organ is defined by its function.20

Here s/he sounds like media archaeology, but of all of the sex-organs rather
than just the sense-organs.
Prciado connects how the internet changes certain things about the
commodity form to two other regimes: pharmacology and pornography. The
pharma part includes the production of the Pill, Prozac, Viagra, while the porno part is a corresponding shot list of blow jobs, penetrations, spit-roastings
and so forth. What the internet plus pharma and porno produce is an distinctive kind of control of bodies coded female, while being attentive to the
ejaculatory function of bodies coded as male.
To the extent that pharma-porno apparatus produces objects, they are
just props for producing subjects. Those subjects are less coherent than they
appear. Its more a system of plugging pills or dicks into mouths, dildos in
vaginas, inserting silicone into breasts or transferring skin and fat from arms
to make penises, spritzing images at eyeballsand introducing hormones to
bodies of all kinds. Looking away from the corporeal fetish, we find a series of
molecular industries producing techno-fictive bodies.
Its a squishy version of Deleuzes control society thesis: A politically
programmed ejaculation is the currency of this new molecular-informatic
control. This is the age of the soft machine. Theres a new regime of power
more sophisticated than what Foucault called the disciplinary. The body no
longer inhabits disciplinary spaces but is inhabited by them.21 Whether or
not Big Brother is watching you, your artificial hormones and mood-managing molecules are certainly regulating you.
There are certain tensions in this system. On the one hand, these are technologies which have the potential to disassemble gender binaries, but on the
other, theres a massive effort to produce and reproduce exactly those binaries.
Pharma-porno capitalism fabricates the idea of a naturalism of sex and gender
all the better to make tech that approximates that cut. All the better to sell
image and chemical props to make bodies appear as if they follow the codes.
20. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 46. Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1992; Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford University
Press, Stanford CA, 1999. Kittlers work spawned a rather relentlessly empirical study of media archaeology of all kinds, but is also usefully read as a prehistory to the production of gendered cyborgs.
21. Politically programmed ejaculation, Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 77; the body no longer inhabits, Testo
Junkie, p. 79. Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, October, Vol. 59, Winter 1992, pp.
307. See Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2006.

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22. Haraway, Primate Visions, p. 355.

23. Haraway, Primate Visions, p. 377.
24. Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles CA, 2012.

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Prciado builds on the understanding of the gendered body Haraway extracts from her study of biological techno-science. Haraway: the natural
body is conventionally a biotechnological cyborgan engineered communications device, an information generating and processing system, a technology for recognizing self and non-self (paradigmatically through the immune
system), and a strategic assemblage of heterogeneous biotic components held
together in a reproductive politics of genetic investment. Genetic currency is
golden, a sign of a world always like itself, univocal.22
The sex-gender distinction, Preciado usefully reminds us, did not originate in feminism or the trans-community, but in the biotech industries built
on the techno-science biology of the postwar years that Haraway anatomizes.
Haraway: Gender is kind, syntax, relation, genre; gender is not the transubstantiation of biological sexual difference.23 By producing a conceptual distinction between bodily sex and subjective gender, a whole industry could
then emerge in which the one could be technically re-aligned with the other.
But to be clear, Prciado does not think that the lack of naturalism of the
trans-body in any way disqualifies it. All bodies lack this naturalism, and thats
no bad thing. S/he is not against the cyborg-body, or techno-body, which may
have as yet unexplored affordances. S/he wants to work through the way the
most contemporary forms of authoritarian and exchange relation, those of
molecular discipline and controlling code, produce certain bodies, but yet
might enable bodies to make themselves otherwise.
The existing sex-gender industrial complex produces and reproduces bodies according to a Platonic ideal of male/female forms. These are produced,
varied, but also policed by the production of normative codes of gender aesthetics, of recognition etc, which allow subjects to default towards identities
as male or female, hetero or homo, cis or trans. Sex assignment procedures
are based not just on external morphology but also reproductive capacity and
social rolea shifting and unstable terrain anchored by a relentless production of images that reduce the messy nodes of both sex and gender to a binary
form, whose most magnetic Platonic form is nothing masculine, but is rather
the jeune fille, or The Girl.24
A lot can be said about how images of The Girl fail to represent the bodies of actual women. The other side of the false coin of the image is not about

what it fails to do but what it actually does. How do images, and particularly of The Girl, act as intermediaries in exchange. The Girl becomes that always-young, always-fashioned form of what Pierre Klossowski called living
money, which acts as the guarantor of the commodity in an era without aura.25
Big Brother may not be watching you, but The Girl and her little sisters are
always there to be watched, and while she distracts, your data quietly ends up
in the possession of a new kind of business, whose margins are in that datas
unequal exchange.
The Girl can be the beard for the commodity, or can be the commodity
as porn. All kinds of codes are invented and re-invented for every sexualizable
zone of the Platonic ideal of the body, but the anus has a problematic status in
this schema: it creates a short circuit in the division of the sexes. As a center
of primordial passivity and a perfect locale for the abject, positioned close to
waste and shit, it serves as the universal black hole into which rush genders,
sexes, identities, and capital.26 No wonder ass-fucking is one of the defining
genres of internet era porn, the site at one and the same time of all kinds of
fantasies of male power and domination and of the ever present possibility of
their destabilization.
Platonic sexual ideals of male and female are in ever-increasing need of
tech and image props. Far form being natural, heterosexual reproduction is
part of a vast technical apparatus. There is no bare life, there is only a bare
techno-life.27 Heterosexuality is a politically assisted reproductive technology. While its not part of Prciados beat, any cis-woman who has negotiated a birth plan with a hospital will have a lot of thoughts about this. Long
before the decision about whether to eat the placenta, a whole series of negotiations with the cyborgian tendrils of modern medicine will usually have
transpired.28 Already by the end of the 50s, the supposedly natural reproductive system was becoming something else. Formula replaced or supplemented
breast milk. Oral contraceptive pills were poised to become one of the most
commonly ingested prescriptions of them all.

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25. Pierre Klossowski, Le Monnaie Vivante, Rivages Petite Bibliothque, Paris, 1997.
26. Prciadio, Testo Junkie, p. 71. See also Tim Stuettgen, Disidentification in the Center of Power,
WSQ: Womens Studies Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1 & 2, Spring 2007, pp. 247-270.
27. On bare life. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1998.
28. See Christen Clifford and David Heatley, My Home Birth: A Graphic Memoir, smithmag.net, 6th
May 2009, which recounts the home birth of Vera Clifford Wark, to whom this book is dedicated.

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29. Theresa De Laurentis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, Indiana University Press, Bloomington IL, 1987.
30. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 116, p. 118.

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Prciados thinking builds here on Haraway and also on Teresa de Laurentis, and her critique of second wave feminisms naturalizing of femininity.29
Under the universality of the category of woman a host of other things are
hiding as we now know, from race and class to technologies for producing
and sustaining genders. De Laurentis introduced the provocative concept that
there are technologies of gender. Gender becomes real when a representation
of it becomes a self-representation, and those representations are industrially
produced. An apparatus of gender makes the cut which produces one or other
of them in its ideal form, as a thing apart.
Theres a tension between the pharma and porno wings of the sex-gender
industrial complex. Image production has at its core a relentlessly Platonist
ideal of two genders, and spends quite a bit of time exposing and categorizing
ambiguous images in between. But from the point of view of medical, rather
than media, production, the category of gender reveals the arbitrary and constructive character of biomedical interventions.
Consider the different legal-medical regimes that apply to getting a nose
job versus a dick job. Your nose is your private property. If you think it is too
big or too broad or something, thats your concern, as are any complicated racialized assumptions about the Platonic form of perfection of the nose. But if
you want a dick job, thats something else. Removing one, or having one constructed on your body, is not a matter of the body as your private property. Its
a matter of your body as a thing whose normative sex and gender is assigned
by the state.
Bodies are not such coherent things, then. They are fabricated in meshes
of images, tech, laws, molecular injections and so on. We are not a body without organs, but rather an array of heterogeneous organs unable to be gathered
under the same skin. Pharma-porno gender is not just an ideology or an image or a performance. It gets under the skin. Its a political technology, and
the state draws its pleasure from the production and control of our pornogore
subjectivity.30
But its capital and tech rather than the state that most interests Prciado.
These artifacts (us) cant exist in a pure state, but only within our enclosed
sexual techno-ecosystems. In our role as sexual subjects, were inhabiting

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bio-capitalist amusement parks. We are men and women of the laboratory,

effects of a kind of politico-scientific bio-Platonism.31 She usefully extends
what is basically a Foucauldian way of thinking onto new terrain, where commodification and power meet.
In some ways Prciados writing is about what Jean-Franois Lyotard
called libidinal economies, which now work on digital and molecular tech that
produce sex, gender, sexuality and subjectivity. The pharma and the porno
parts of this economy work in opposition as much as together. Porn is mostly propaganda for Platonist sex division, although there are of course niche
tastes. (One wonders what Prciado would make of Mark Derys essay on
decapitation porn.) Gender-codes are continually mutating, distributing and
redistributing, if mostly curling around the same bifurcated distribution.32
But when it comes to pharma, there are only techno-genders, of increasingly ambiguous kinds. The disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong and F2M
trans-men are the product of the same kinds of hormones from the same kinds
of labs. Prciado wrote Testo Junkie while taking testosterone. S/he thinks of
herself as neither testo-girl nor techno-boy, but a port for inserting the hormone. She is aware that testosterone isnt masculinity. Prciados self-directed
endocrinal reprogramming only makes sense together with a certain political
agenda. It takes place outside of any medical regime, because to partake in
that is to give ones body over to the states decisions about what your sex and
gender are or should be, and what technologies will properly align these divergent parts of the states own property.
However, to do so is to risk getting caught in another disciplinary net
the one strung to catch addicts. If Prciados testosterone-taking is not sanctioned by one kind of medicalized discourse, it risks another. If s/he want to
convince a doctor that there is a misfit between a bodys sex and gender, theres
a regime to deal with that. But if s/he wants to remain ambiguously between
genders? If s/he want to take hormones for aesthetic reasons? And what is at
stake in taking a drug which transforms the physical body as its direct goal and
subjective feeling only secondarily, rather than the other way around? What,
in other words, is at stake in the industrialization of the hormone? Prciados
32. Mark Dery, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2014;
Jean-Franois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, translated by Ian Hamilton Grant, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington IL, 1995, Dominic Pettman, Love and Other Technologies, Fordham University Press,
New York, 2006.

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33. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 160.

34. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 167.

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drug-body is orphaned from both the disciplinary control of both addiction

and gender-reassignment.
The unconscious and the hormone were discovered around the same
time. The former is about linguistic signs, but the latter about chemical signals in the body. The study of hormonesendocrinologyis a part of the
founding or refounding of a wide range of knowledge on the basic metaphor
of communication, information and code-causality. There were some bumps
along the way, as with any new science. Even Bogdanov fell for some total
pseudo-science about monkey-glands as a way of promote longevity and vitality. In retrospect the surrealist monkey-gland moment in endocrinology
actually did foreshadow what the fields ambitions were, if not its methods.
Hormonal theory represents another form of mass communication. Hormones act at a distancethey are a kind of telesthesia. As such they can act to
discipline a body without having to restrain it.33
Hormones are bio-artifacts made of carbon chains, language, images,
capital, and collective desires.34 They are part of a genealogy of the techno-molecular control first of women (the Pill) now of men too: Testosterone,
Viagra, etc. All sorts of bodies can be produced via artificial hormones, but
they are still organized around the Platonist binary. Interestingly, the FDA at
first rejected the Pill. The early versions suppressed menstruation altogether,
which was too radical a technical reprogramming of gender. It was approved
once the period cycleor something mimicking itwas restored by lower
dose formulations.
Like Barad, Prciado wants to go beyond Foucaults thinking on the disciplinary apparatus, and also beyond Judith Butlers thinking about gender
performativity. Gender isnt just performative at the level of gesture and language, but also via a kind of bio-mimicry or bio-drag. Theres a molecular dimension, the pharma dimension. In that planetary California of the over-developed world at least, we all do bio-drag, a mimesis, more or less parodic, of
the Platonic gender ideals, propping up our bodies with chemical assistance
as much as dress codes and cosmetics.
From some advertising for cosmetics I saw stenciled on Bigelows pharmacy on 6th avenue in New York: Created by women, for women and tested

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on women. A certain appropriation of feminism into commodity fetishism

connects the flows of money and molecules via a remaking of bodies not just
as appearances but at the molecular level.35 Commodity fetishism joins hands
with code fetishism.
These relatively new kinds of molecular power modify bodies themselves
as living platforms: We are certainly still confronting a form of social control,
but this time its a matter of control lite, a bubbly type of control, full of colors
and wearing Mickey Mouse ears and the Brigitte Bardot low cut look, as opposed to the cold, disciplinary architecture of the panoptic illustrated by Foucault.36 This is an era of the weaponized adorables, where what is apparently
most cute and friendly is what is really out to acquire your data and metadata,
in exchange for a few meager jollies.
Walk around an affluent part of California and you will see them. It is a
new type of high-tech heterosexuality: the techno-Barbie, remaining eternally young and super-sexualized, almost entirely infertile and non-menstruating but always ready for artificial insemination and accompanied by a sterile
super-macho whose erections are technically produced by a combination of
Viagra and audio-visual pornographic codes37 Which suggests that there
are no cis-gender bodies, as the term implies that one could be on the side of
a pre-given standard, when all such standards are now products of a sex-gender industrial complex. The innovation of Prciados work is to insist so thoroughly that all of sex, gender and identity are on the same level, all produced
industrially, and by the same apparatus. Even the apparently natural cis-body
requires molecular processing, of its organic food intake, its herbal cosmetics,
and so on. Perhaps we are all becoming trans-human cyborgs now.
Prciado does not much mention hormone replacement therapy for
menopausal women, but one could add that to this picture. The next frontier
for the sex-gender industrial complex is probably marketing hormones to men
without undermining their sense of masculinity. The masculine body has its
own honor-codes of supposed naturalism. Taking steroids to improve athletic
performance is somehow always wrong, even if Viagra can now be an accepted chemical modification of the male body for improving sexual performance.
35. On commodity feminism, see Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman, Zero Books, Winchester UK,
2012; Laurie Penny, Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism, Zero Books, Winchester UK, 2011.
36. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 211. On what Rachel Law and I have called weaponized adorables, see
Rachel Law and McKenzie Wark, WANT, New York, 2013.
37. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 220.

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38. Here I have stolen a bit from Clive Martin, How Sad Young Douchebags Took Over Modern Britain, Vice Magazine, 13th March 2013.
39. Prciado, Testo Junkie, spectacle, p. 266; porn envy, p. 271; technobitch, p. 280.
40. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 269; p. 270.

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First world problems: If female bodies are supposed to mark their distance from the Platonic perfection of The Girl, male bodies are becoming
deeply strange. The young men one can see in the fashionable districts of Los
Angeles seem in the midst of a crisis of role. They work in service and retail,
and yet make their bodies with balloon animal muscles. Its an effect that can
be achieved even without hormones. Creatine and other protein powders
cause the muscles to retain water.38
So long as there are men there will be feminism. But Prciado wants to
pull back from certain entanglements made by liberal feminism. One is the
pact it entered with the the pharmacology industry. It is not that defending
Planned Parenthood is a bad thing, but that the unexamined component is
the hormonal transformation of the body. Prciado is also wary of feminisms
that are complicit with the state, including on issues of pornography. It hardly bears repeating that when states increase the policing of pornography it is
usually images of non-normative sexualities that are criminalized or excluded.
Pornography is sexuality transformed into spectacle. It is now the paradigm of culture industry. The culture industry is porn envy. Porn is the
management of the excitation-frustration circuit. The culture industry now
wants to produce the same physiological effect. Porn may have more to do
with freak shows and the circus than cinema. Certainly the culture industry is
now redolent with clowns. Paris Hilton represents the zenith of the sexopolitical production of the luxury white heterosexual technobitch.39 But it only
appears that she is living a reality-TV life of carivalesque prat-falls: her whole
life is under surveillance. Pornography is doubled by scrutiny and control of
the affects and discharges of bodies.
Porn is a kind of intra-action via which gender is produced. Porn is regulated by a kind of Spermatic Platonism in which only the cum-shot is real.
Porn produces the illusion of potentia gaudendi, when excitation is actually a
more or less involuntary response. However, pornography tells the performative truth about sexuality.40 One can claim that the sex in porn is merely performed and is thus unreal, or that the bodies are unreal, but this very unreality
is precisely the Platonist normative forms around which the whole sex gender

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industrial complex is made to circulate.

Not only sex but labor is becoming pornified. We are all coming to work
in a porn factory fueled by bodily fluids, synthetic hormones, silicon, stimulants, mood regulators and digital signs. Sexual labor transforms potentia
gaudendi into commodities. If one were to look for the proletkult of emerging
kinds of affective labor, it would be among pornographers and sex workers.
Sex workers are still the other to most respectable people, but perhaps a wider definition of sex work would help.41
On a spa day with Virginia Despentes, Prciado discovers the erotics of
the personal care industry. Perhaps some people would just rather have the
actual massage than the happy ending, but in a way its all sex work. Or perhaps, to riff off Prciados line of thought further, we should think about both
sex workers and gender workers as on a continuum in the industrial production of bodies and their identities.
Prciado calls this a pornification rather than a feminization of labor. The
concept of a feminization of labor assumes certain things about femininity.
For one thing, it omits the cum shot.42 And it still buys into Platonist gender
absolutes. Affective labor is a girl thing; effective labor is a boy thing. Flexibility as a girl thing; stability as a boy thingand so on.
Prciado is also hostile to the cognitive or immaterial labor thesis that
bedevils the thought of the inheritors of Italian workerist theory: None of
them mention the effects on their philosophers cocks of a dose of Viagra accompanied by the right image.43 Perhaps this is a time of bermaterial, not
immaterial, labor.
And it is not a sexual division of labor. The term sexual in sexual division
of labor silently sanctions a hetero view of reproduction, as if it goes without
saying that only hetero reproduction is normal. It also takes the asymmetries
of the hetero sex act as the norm. The list of body types that can be penetrated
includes at least the bodies of cis-females, trans-females and gay men. The
sexual division of labor concept also leaves out the technical apparatus within
which it is produced.
There is no immaterial labor, nor is there a general intellect. There is gen-

41. For a rare book that treats sex work as actual work, see Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The
Work of Sex Work, Verso, Brooklyn NY, 2014.
42. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 49.
43. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 293.

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eral sex. This might be another name for the potentia gaudendi, the impulse
for communal joy that travels through the multitude, convulsing the totality
of excitable producer-bodies of capital.44 Modernity is the sexualization of
the domestic and the domestication of the sexual. The sexual-domestic coupling has mostly taken place under the sign of private property. (Infidelity is
theft). But theres another sidepotentia gaudendithat which is both produced by, and enfettered by, the sex gender industrial complex.
Perhaps immaterial labor was not a particularly helpful concept. What
is refreshing about low theory is that when it works it starts from actual experiences, then it appropriates and adapts concepts to fit the articulation of the
experience. Its always a kind of dtournement or high-jacking of high theory
for other purposes. As such it tends to shun what might otherwise be endlessly productive research programs just for lack of evidence that their conceptual objects actually correspond to anything. Hence Prciado pretty ruthlessly
cuts through some decades of social theory.
S/he doesnt see psychoanalysis, as traditionally understood, as all that
much help either: The father and mother are already dead. We are the children of Hollywood, porn, the Pill, the TV trashcan, the internet, and cyber-capitalism. The cis-girl wants to transform her body into a consumable
image for the greatest number of gazes She wants her pornification to
transform her body into abstract capital.45 Cyborg bodies are orphan bodies
that call for a kind of media theory, not of how images are produced of them,
but of how images as produced as them.
Queer too is becoming commodified, and critical thought and practice
has to move on. But it has to steer away from both the annihilating temptation
(speculative realism) and the messianic temptation (leaping communisms).
Let us be worthy of our own fall and imagine for the time left the components of a new porno-punk philosophy.46 Such might be one cyborgkult
practice for the times.
Prciados program is to transform minority knowledge into collective
experimentation, to work for the common ownership of the biocodes. Like

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44. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 309. Compare here Prciado to some other attempts at a queer Marxism:
Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure, Routledge, New York, 2000; Kevin Floyd, The Reification of
Desire, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapois, 2009; Jos Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia, NYU
Press, New York, 2009.
45. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 408.
46. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 347.

Suely Rolnik, s/he sees psychiatry as a foreclosing of aesthetic responses to

creating subjectivity.47 S/he puts gender dissent in an aesthetic context, rather than one of dysphoria, pathology etc. S/he compares taking of testosterone
to Walter Benjamin taking hash, or (we might add) Alexander Trocchi taking
heroin and Bogdanovs early blood exchanges: a protocol for experiment not
sanctioned by the state or the professions, and to be understood more as the
construction of situations in everyday life.48
Political subjectivity emerges precisely when the subject does not recognize itself in its representation. That break creates the space not just for
another kind of representation, but another life. Its time, s/he says, to become gender pirates or gender hackers: Were copyleft users who consider
sex hormones free and open biocodes. S/he calls for a molecular revolution
of the genders.49 Theres no natural or private acts to which to return. As Haraway intuited, information technology abolishes the private by undermining
the partitions in time and space between public and private realms through
which they pass.
Praxis, then is a matter of inventing other common, shared, collective, and copyleft forms of the dominant pornographic representations and
standardized sexual consumption. Those who are its objects can become its
subjects. The organic intellectuals of such a movement are pornographers and
sex workers as theorists. And as for practice, in the over-developed world,
since the 70s, the only major revolution has been carried out by gays listening
to music while getting high and fucking.50
Power experienced slippage; it shifted, throughout the previous century,
from the earth to manufacturing, then toward information and life. But Prciado opens up a space for thinking that last bitlifein a fresh way. Desire
and sexuality, like information, or even as informationdefy ownership: my
possession of a fragment (of information, desire, sex, gender) doesnt take it
away from you.51 Sharing multiplies desire, sex and gender.

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47. See Flix Guattari and Suely Rolnick, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles
CA, 2008.
48. Walter Benjamin, On Hashish, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2006; Alexander Trocchi, Cains Book, Grove Press, New York, 1992.
49. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 397, p. 55, p. 234.
50. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 272, p. 417.
51. Prciado, Testo Junkie, p. 277, p. 277.

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But the idea of sexual liberation is obsolete.52 Theres no pre-existing natural state of sex that is repressed, as we all learned from Foucault, whether
from a street photocopy or in grad school. Now we have to think about how
to hack pharma-porno domination from within. Prciado has some slogans
for it, each of which could equally well name a punk band or a conference:
FreeFuckware! OpenGender! BodyPunk! PenetratedState! PostPorn! There
is monstrous fun to be had. There are new bodies and their relations to sexdesign.
As remote as they are in so many other respects, Preciado and Platonov
are interested in writing as versions of dtournement. Both write from the
point of view, not so much of labor as what the labor point of view excludes:
kinds of sub-prole practice. In Prciado, it is no longer a dtournement of the
languages of the new party and the old church. Its the languages of medicine
and theory.
Once we add Prciado to the mix, our cyborgian Haraway assemblage
is no longer occupying the labor point of view of production or the feminist
point of view of reproduction, but also the queer point of view of non-production and non-reproduction. Perhaps, after Baudrillard, we could call these
modes of seduction, in the sense of diverting turning aside, a kind of molecular drive.53
In The Gold Coast, his future vision of Californias Orange County as a
property developers dream, Kim Stanley Robinson has his young, garrulous,
gym-shaped, drug-addled characters come up with a game they call Negative
Disneyland.54 The premise of the game is that it takes much more time waiting
in line for a Disney ride than the ride itself. So: why not try to maximize the
waiting time relative to the ride time? This casual situationist game throws in
relief the gap between the awaiting bodies and the promised state of kinesthetic and corporeal enjoyment. Is that all there is? Like Prciado, these characters
at least make what they can of the detritus of a world not of their making, and
to which there is no outside.
Is there a way to think forward from the present to worlds that might be

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52. For a parallel rethinking, from one of the founders of gay liberation: Dennis Altman, The End of
the Homosexual?, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2014.
53. Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1991.
54. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Gold Coast: Three Californias, Orb Books, 2013. Which could be read
also as a zen rather than a situationist moment. See Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Possible Mountains and
Rivers, Configurations, Vol. 20, 2012, pp. 147-185.

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more habitable? Even if that more habitable world is, as in Bogdanovon

Mars? Here we turn to Kim Stanley Robinsons signature achievement, his
Mars Trilogy. Like his fellow Californian Donna Haraway, Robinson writes
from the starting point of cyborg-being, an inhuman life woven out of advanced techno-science. If Platonovs conceptual personae map out all the
routes to revolutionary failure, in Robinson we have a more optimistic set of
such personae, who between them figure a way out of this Negative Disneyland.
Haraway: Heroes are in short supply, but actors are proliferating.55 The
cyborg is a conceptual personae, like Marxs and Bogdanovs worker. It is a
more hybrid personae than the worker, more entangled in its intra-actions,
and not just with nature but also all kinds of apparatus. But it is not yet a plurality of personae. Haraway is adept at gleaning and inspecting the rhetorical
detritus that pools in the eddies between discourses and practices, and attuning the reader to question too quick an assimilation of any fragment into the
Borg-like edifice that is techno-science. Putting such fragments back together
calls for another kind of writing, as it happens in another genre that Bogdanov
also attempted.
Kim Stanley Robinson writes of a plurality of a certain kind of cyborg
character. They are not exactly comrades, as in Platonov, although they are
just as distant from the bourgeois world. Robinsons plurality of conceptual
personae are scientists, entangled cyborgs made of flesh and apparatus, each
sensing the world through a particular lens. Robinsons thinking is distributed
across the differences between several such personae, and asks the question of
how they might be more than scientific rivals and colleagues, but might also
be collaborators, and in a certain sense also comrades.
We turn then to the question: what might be the modes of existence of a
hacker class as a class? Might there be a way to write in the era of the carbon
liberation front within a genre that can navigate between multiple versions
of a very twenty-first century version of the labor point of view? Such a writing might afford not so much a horizon as a whole phase-space for imagining
ways of leaving the twenty-first century.

55. Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, p. xix.

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KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

AN INTERVIEW

MCKENZIE WARK
Lets start with sex. Theres not a lot of it in your books, but when there is,
its spectacular. Weightless, naked on Mars, in a treehouse in a blizzard.
Not to mention the tabling in Blue Mars. But it has usually been heterosexual. Then in 2312 we end up in a world of wonderfully complicated
multiple genders, which opens up all sorts of possibilities. What led you to
this more inventive approach to gender and sexuality in that book?

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Always good to start with sex!

In 2312,I was thinking that in three hundred years we may have become quite
a bit more capable of altering our bodies, and maybe bolder too, and I wanted
to suggest that in as many ways as possible. I wanted the estrangement effect
of setting the novel three hundred years from now to be strong, but also based
in things we are already seeing, so it seemed natural to play with gender, along
with size, longevity, and so on. I wanted to suggest that we might start to turn
ourselves into slightly different breeds of humans, like dogs. And if being both
genders happened to help people live longer (a big if) then our naturally curiosity about the matter might be much enhanced.

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KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

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I feel Ive been taught a lot about gender by science fiction, including books
by Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin, and others, and also by the
science-fiction community, which has a flourishing LGBT component, pretty
well integrated with the rest of it. Also I was very struck by my own experiences as a Mr. Mom when I did the home parenting for our two children,
especially when they were infants and toddlers. I wanted to write about that
again, as I did in the Science in the Capital trilogy, but from a different angle,
to express the feeling that grew in me that gender as feeling is labile and not
related to bodies per se.
I actually thought there was a lot of sex in my books, but maybe I am just more
aware of it than readers, because it feels risky and exposed to me; I dont know.
I do know that very early on I saw that stories often rely on sex and violence
for their thrills, and I thought (and think) that the violence in art is often very
ignorant, and so I was going to avoid it as much as possibleand compensate
for the resulting possible lack of thrills by putting more sex in my stories.
This has been a conscious policy. But then the sex has to be interesting as writing, which is not so easy. So its been a challenge, but something fun to try. If I
can shock myself (and I can), then I can shock the reader too, I hope.

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The adjective ballardian shows up in Blue Mars, and by 2312 all sorts of
author and book names from SF, or key terms used by famous SF authors,
seem to have passed into the everyday language: dhalgren, kipple, waldo,
and so on. Art works are described as goldsworthies or abramovics, as if
these were whole genres of work. Do you think art and writing can actually have that capacity to name the world? And what do you think the
Robinsonian contribution to naming the world might be?
Well for sure writing names the world, in that language names the world. As
for art, I think its names sometimes stick. I think it makes sense to call landscape art goldsworthies and performance art abramovics, because these
two artists have so excelled in these genres that they have brought them to the
consciousness of the general culture, so that the genres themselves can be understood to be major art forms, likely to get more and more important.
There is that big raft of words introduced into English by Shakespeare, and I
think it has been happening since at a slower rate, even since dictionaries came
into being. Science fiction has been pretty good at putting new words into the
language by naming things before they actually exist, such as waldoes or cyber-

space. And I think ballardian and phildickian are words now, like Orwellian or
Kafkaesque. I like that game, because I like to use odd words in my texts when
I can, its part of the estrangement effect of trying to convey a future. That can
be overdone of course, and as time passes most invented science fiction words
simply look odd (spindizzy), but its still worth trying.
I doubt I have done anything like this that will last, as I did not invent the word
terraforming but only picked up on it out of earlier science fiction; Jack Williamson invented it back in the 1930s. And the term robinsonian already refers
to the Robinsonade, the adventure of a solo human in nature, an accidental
association that I love.

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One of the kinds of language and thinking in play in almost all of your
books is a literary-critical one. Raymond Williamss structure of feeling,
Greimass semiotic squares show up. And yet your characters are often annoyed by the imprecision of just these concepts, particularly if they are scientists. Do you think its possible to stage a useful dialog between critical
and empirical or scientific thought, and might the novel actually be the
ideal place to attempt it?

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Yes, the novel is a great space for bringing these different realms of discourse
together, and seeing what happens. Ive been much influenced by Bahktins
image of the novel as polyvocal, what he calls a heteroglossia (another great
word!), so that it isnt so much the novelist as a single visionary but rather
something more like an old-time telephone switchboard operator, plugging
in different voices and then orchestrating the flow of that chorus, so to speak.
So you get chances for different points of view to speak or argue in dialogues
or larger discussions, and the plots themselves also express these arguments in
actions.
But also were seeing this discussion going on in the field called science studies,
or science and technology studies, which I take to be the application of various
aspects of what we call theory to science, its history and current practices. So
it is really the latest and most sophisticated and historicized version of philosophy of science, now that philosophy has become theory and science has
become science and technology, or STEM (science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics). This is a really important intersection of ideas and practices, given the situation we are in as a global civilization. Its a crucial conversation and I think its happening in all kinds of contexts, which is a good thing.

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When you are working on your books, do you treat it as a world-building

exercise in which the world has its own dynamics? Or does the story call
the world into being?
I think more the latter, but my story ideas are often somehow world-building
ideas. At least this was true with the Mars trilogy. If the story idea is, Mars is
terraformed over a few centuries, then this is a big problem for the novel as a
form (dealing with the centuries) but also a big opportunity.
Same with the idea for The Years of Rice and Salt, where the world is the same to
begin with, but history is different, so different that it resembles what we think
of when we say world-building. Maybe that one is Asia world.
So I would say that my ideas often concern a group of people dealing with a
landscape somehow (even the solar system as a landscape) and thus both parts
of it come into play at once, so that I couldnt say which comes first.

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In many of your books, things like the weather or the geology of a situation get equal attention alongside whatever is at stake between the characters, and sometimes even more attention. It is as if you had shifted the
novels attention to a whole other series of relationships. Do you think this
is a just an aspect of the novel that had not much been explored before, or
do you think you were bringing something into the form from other kinds
of writing?
Well, I think there has always been a kind of novel that explores the relationships between people and nature, or a physical situation or challenge, and I
have always been interested in these novels as a reader, going back to my childhood. So almost every novel has people as the central characters, but sometimes the antagonist is a natural situation, or the setting is not antagonistic
exactly, but extremely interesting.
Thus Robinson Crusoe, which naturally I liked; and then Im remembering
James Ramsay Ullmans novels about climbing the Matterhorn, or even Huckleberry Finn and the way the river is a very major presence in the novel, the
third major character so to speak, or simply a dominant setting. Also William
Goldings Pincher Martin, and really all his first four novels; and so on. The
more I think of it, the more I realize that these moments describing people in
the world stick out for me even in novels that are mostly social: in Tess of the

DUrbervilles, for instance, Tesss time working the fields on the moors was for
me the most striking passage.
Then in science fiction, this often translates to the planetary romance, where
the interest again is in people dealing with a new landscape. I always loved
this kind of SF, in Jack Vance, early Le Guin, Edgar Pangborn, Frank Herberts
Dune, certain early John Brunner, and really the whole subgenre of the planetary romance; these were among my favorite SF novels. Thats one of the reasons my Mars novels took up so much of my writing career.
I also took an interest in George Stewarts experimental novels where a natural
situation or process was made the protagonist of the story, as in Storm or Fire;
this was also somewhat true of Earth Abides (and his other novel centered on
an inhuman process, Orals Exam!). These books of his tended to convince me
that people were the necessary centers of novels, but they were like limit cases
that established how far you could take things.
So, not only were these the kinds of novels that were capturing me most, but
all along Ive spent a lot of time hiking in the Sierra Nevadas, and earlier in my
life in other mountain ranges too, and these experiences have been among the
most profound of my life. They are what I like to do. And when backpacking,
the weather really matters, in a way it doesnt down in civilization; it impacts
that very day, that hour. You live in it. This has always struck me as worth writing about, and as something to bring to my novels that is out of my life rather
than my reading. So Ive tried to find stories where those experiences could be
put to use.

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Im not sure about that. Maybe my stories are partly to explore how that might
happen. I am very interested in habits, and in describing in my novels how
people live in their ordinary lives. This comes partly out of my love for Prousts
novel and my admiration for how he managed to do that, by the use of certain
French tenses and what Gerard Genette called the pseudo-iterative, in which
Proust will begin by saying something like we always did this and then go
on to describe a day or time in such enormous detail that you come to realize
that it could only have happened that way once, so that when he says it always

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Your characters are often quite preoccupied with their everyday habits
and how or whether to change them. Theres a lot of experimenting going
on with forms of life. Do you think that is how social change actually happens? At the molecular level, as it were?

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happened like that, he means the form of the day was like that, with individual
details different; some kind of variations-on-a-theme thing.
So, of course novels must have plots, drama, and the urge in the reader to find
out what happens next; but theres also this deep question, how did it feel to
live daily life in that time and place? What did they do, what were peoples habits? Which when asked of people living on Mars or Pluto, or on a spaceship, or
in an alternative history where almost everyone is Asian, or in any really novel
situation, is a profound curiosity in the reader; at least it is for me when I read.
Certainly we read novels to get into other peoples thought processes, to have a
kind of imitation telepathy, but also to do a kind of living sociology or history
or life-sharing. So I have always been very interested in trying to do this part
of novel writing, which is a technical or formal problem, as ultimately plot is
crucial too. You need both the daily and then the thing that breaks the daily,
meaning the plot.
As for changing ones habits, that is so mysterious. Again from Proust; there is
the moment when you are cast into a new situation and have to change habits, and I think it was Beckett in his slim book on Proust who spoke of these
moments as the true existential exposure, the naked times when you are alive
without the protection of your habits, and have to think what to do moment
by moment, actually decide, until you settle into (I think Beckett called it exfoliating) into a new set of habits and are somewhat protected again from that
existential nakedness. This seems right to me, this is how it has felt for me, and
I am very interested to try to write these moments, and present these moments
as central to a plot.
Whether these moments come in reaction to broader historical changes, or
purely personal events, I dont know, I think it is probably both. Simply aging
can do it. Sometimes you get tired of your habits, and off you go in a new way.
I loved the way Washington DC is described in your Science in the Capital books, where the whole psychogeography of the city revolves around its
remnant forest. As a writer who is justly famous for his landscape writing,
I wonder what you think of actual cities, and the future possibility of cities?
I love certain cities that I know: San Francisco, New York, London, Zurich.
Ive also greatly enjoyed visiting many others. I was influenced in my feeling
for cities by my teacher and friend, Gary Snyder, and his wonderful poem de-

scribing New York as just another natural habitat, among other things. And
I think cities are better for the planets environmental future than suburban
sprawl, which I see so much of in California.
So: green cities, neo-traditional design and town planning, densification, white
and solar rooftops, garden zones, pedestrian zones, mass transit; and also better
agriculture to feed the urban populations, including habitat zones that connect
up, so that were sharing the planet well with the other life forms, especially the
mammals that are suffering so in the current dispensation.
There is, in short, an integrated total design, including an energy and agricultural vision that could keep all the parts of the ecosystem well, including us.
It still emerging but the outlines are clear, its only a matter of building it and
enacting it. It is not a technical problem so much as an economic problem,
meaning a justice problem. I think it is the big project of the next century or
two. And cities will be a major part of it.

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A lot of artists, writers, and filmmakers have destroyed New York City. In
2312, you drown it. What sets your version apart is that it is energetically
being inhabited and made to work by New Yorkers. Would you consider
yourself an optimist about the adaptability and ingenuity of our species?

M O LEC U L A R
R E D
R E A D E R

Not really, but only because I dont think it takes optimism on this subject, only
realism. We have been adaptable and ingenious as a species, and it wont stop
happening. People are born and grow up into circumstances that they tend to
think of as normal, just as we do, and if they are born and grow up in a drowned
Manhattan, then they will be dealing with that without too much moaning and
groaning about the lack of streets and taxis. Some will always lament and gnash
teeth, but the society will get on with things. That will be true everywhere.
That said, if we acidify the oceans to the extent that we kill off the bottom of the
ocean food chain, then there will be mass suffering for humans and a mass extinction event for land creatures as well as ocean creatures. So we are teetering
on the brink of some very serious catastrophes that we are causing ourselves.
But what I see now is the start of the response to that emergency; not a universal response by any means, but a growing majority opinion that we have
to decarbonize as fast as we can. The scientific community is convinced and
getting more active in pointing this out, and the public and their political representatives are responding to the news. There will be self-interested and contrarian responses too, but I suppose that is just part of what we are as a species

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and culture now. What matters is what the civilization itself does. So politics
matters, even the stupidest politics. (Groan, gnash teeth.)

M O LEC U L A R

R E D

R E A D E R

Practically all of your writing stages encounters between scientific or technical knowledge on the one hand and cultural or religious knowledge on
the other. And now in Shaman you have gone back into prehistory, before these were really separate ways of being. I am curious as to whether
you get different reactions and readings of your books from the respective
halves of the two cultures. Do your scientist readers imagine a different
KSR to us humanists?
Maybe so. My evidence is anecdotal and pretty various, in that it depends on
which scientists I am talking to, and which humanists.
I do often run into scientists who assume that I am a scientist, or scientifically
literate in the way that anyone would be in this scientific culture, and they take
the science in my books to be natural to the genre, also partial and speculative,
as it has to be. In other words, all that realm is a given to them, and then what is
interesting is to discuss ramifications of the technical innovations, etc.
There has also been a considerable amount of discomfort from scientists reading my work, or hearing me talk, when I suggest that scientists and scientific
institutions should get more directly involved in making political policy. That
worries them, or even offends or frightens them; they see it as a potential threat
to scientific integrity. But it is a way in to certain kinds of discussions about Science In Action, so I persist in suggesting this to them.
Its from the humanities and arts people that I more often get a response that
is something like, Wow, there is a lot of science in these books, how striking!
And they are more likely to ask, where did you get your science? or what
was your training?whereas many scientists dont think to ask, and seem to
assume this is something every person knows, or at least every science-fiction
writer.
This is as close as I can come to characterizing these various responses into a
pattern of sorts.
Not only in Shaman but in the rest of my science fiction, Ive been interested
to cross all these ways of knowing, to think about science as a kind of religious
activity, and definitely as a secretly hegemonic culture within our other various
cultures, while at the same time thinking about Buddhism or art as versions of
scientific thinking, or some other permanently valid way of looking at things.

The permanent necessity of philosophy and art, basically, so that we can decide what to dothat isnt a question science takes on or wants to take on.
Often in my novels all these aspects are mashed together in the characters
lives, and in the plots.

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While scientists, particularly when starting out, can be nave empiricists,

it seems to me that many trained in the humanities have become nave
Heideggerians. They are only able to imagine science and technology as
some fallen world without real being. One way to read your books is as
inquiries as to what to do when the past world of being is irredeemably
lost. And theres a range of answers, from getting on with pure science, or
engineering a better world, or creating new systems of ritual and arts of
devotion. But how can these practices be put in dialog with each other?

M O LEC U L A R
R E D
R E A D E R

Novels are good ways of putting these practices in dialog, by way of the characters lives, and the plots of the novels. Its often struck me that the name science fiction, in some ways so inaccurate and wrong, is actually extremely powerful anyway, because the two words can be translated into facts and values,
and the fact/value or is/ought problem is a famous one in philosophy, and
often regarded as insoluble, so that if you call your genre fact values you are
saying it can bridge a difficult abyss in our thinking.
This means frequent failure, of course, as it is indeed a difficult abyss. But it is
a strong claim for a genre to make, and Ive come to love the name science fiction and dislike very much the various replacement names that would supposedly rehabilitate or make respectable the genre: speculative fiction, fabulation,
the fantastic, etc. None of them have the power and historical heft of science
fiction.
I think we all believe deeply in science, no matter what we say as humanities
people or environmentalists or leftists or whatever else we think of ourselves as
(as I certainly do); any of the other positions that gives us a stance from which
to criticize the sciences (religion would certainly be included here): because
when we get sick, we go to the doctor. And the doctor is a scientist, and medicine is science.
Of course, as we live on, we learn that going to the doctor is by no means a sure
way to a cure, and that medicine leads us into a murky world of guesses and
art and precedence and probabilities, etc., etc.: but that means we are getting a
very good lesson as to what science really is, all across the scientific disciplines.

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Its just that when its your own health, the stakes are higher and the lessons
sometimes starker.
That being said, medicine has added many, many years to our lives, on the
whole. So that that whole realm of medicine becomes a really good practical
lesson in what we mean when we talk about science. I wish more people would
understand that connection before pontificating about science as instrumentality, desacralization, etc., etc. Of course, yes, all true; and in the same centuries modern science has been active, capitalism has been likewise active and
growing, so the two are like conjoined twins ruling the world, making it hard
to de-strand the two, they are so interwoven. But I remain an advocate of science as a method of understanding, a set of institutions and practices, a philosophy of action, a utopian politics.

M O LEC U L A R

R E D

R E A D E R

Shaman seems to be the first book you have written in twenty years that
doesnt have the word coriolis in itas in Coriolis effect. The word katabatic shows up a lot too (usually katabatic winds coming down off
mountains). Are these phenomena in the natural world that you have a
particular fondness for?
I can never remember which way the Coriolis force pushes things, and Im always calling planetary scientist Chris McKay to get it right. This first happened
when I was wondering which way the current would run in the Hellas Sea on
Mars, if there were a sea filling the circular Hellas Basin. Chris is someone you
can ask questions like that without startling him. I think the reason the word
has recurred is that I keep writing about situations where it will somehow be
a factor, as in Antarctica (is there a Coriolis force at the South Pole?), or the
interior of asteroids spinning in order to create a gravity effect inside them, and
so on.
Katabatic winds I have definitely felt, first when playing tennis in the Santa
Ana winds in Orange County, then very definitely in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, also a few times at Blacks Cliffs in La Jolla, and I think on certain nights
in the Sierra, camped under certain plateaus. Ultimately they are no different
than other winds in terms of their windiness, and fondness isnt the right word
for my response to them, but I do like the word.
I like to use words out of the sciences that particularize physical processes
(or generalize them) in ways ordinary language doesnt usually. In fact many
of these words are simply Greek or Latin, or mash-ups of the two languages,

but they suggest a scientific precision that strikes me as both writerly (like,
say, Joyce) and also comic, in the sense of Mr. Spock explaining his Spocklike thinking. Hippocampus, de-intensification, hierarchicalization, etc., etc.,
it goes on and on and is both funny and sharp, and musical too, in ways I like.

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In 2312, where asteroids are being hollowed out and turned into Bernal
spheres and inhabited, you describe in lovely detail some fantastic ecologies and sociologiesfrom sexliners to blackliners. Theres even an outie
asteroid called The Little Prince. Theres a tension between the practical
design problem-solving in your books and pure invention, whether of an
asteroid, a tree house, or a species. What role does a nonfunctional aesthetic play in making things? And can your own books be grasped as expressions of this same aesthetic?

R E D
R E A D E R

This interview originally appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

M O LEC U L A R

Yes, I think so. Form follows function, but whats interesting is how often a
functional form has its own beauty, which can then be enhanced by decoration
and playfulness in detail. This is true of design in all fields. And of course, art,s
main function is to entertain, so there play and beauty are part of the basic goal.
I am often trying to imagine my novels as having shapes, like vases, but this is
pretty abstract and invisible, and often I dont have any real shape in my mind
but am just hoping for some kind of shapeliness.
Then, in my free time, I enjoy making things with rocks, doing patio jigsaw patterns in quartzite around my house (I have one patio where three stones that
made an excellent map of California are in the middle of the patio, and have
rays of rock extending out from it; and another that is a kind of rock whirlpool
around a Japanese maple); I also am stacking and re-stacking a drywall lake
front at my wifes family place in Maine, made of glacial cobble so that every
winter the bad work I do slumps back into the lake, while the good work holds
longer.
All this rock work, I realized, is like doing novels that I can actually see, which
is why they give me such pleasure. My conclusion is that everyone should make
things for the fun of it.

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M O LEC U L A R

R E D

R E A D E R

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