Beyond the Possible
Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: It is difWcult to imagine an indeWnite extension of the manifold and overlapping contradictions of contemporary global capitalism. The desires and dreams of peoples are amassed and quantiWed through patented data analytics of private Wrms and speculated on as projections of consumption and global labor productivity. 1 The local use- values of indigenous communities are enclosed through industry- backed nature conservancy policies and captured in the market logics of global Wnancial resources (World Rainforest Movement). Online marketplaces trade credits that can be cashed in by private corporate polluters, and nations, for the privilege of sidestepping the few remaining legal protections of ecological commons (Lohman). The future, no one needs to be reminded, looks grim. Indeed a certain structural myopia in which the future is only imaginable as a return on the probability of the same of the present seems to be the sine qua non of a mode of production that is subordinate to the processes and apparatuses of Wnancial speculation in the twenty- Wrst century. Yet a profound resistance to this present— a present in which the exploitation and the negation of a sustainable existence for this world are integrated into the mode of production of society itself— is evident everywhere. Strikes, occupations, mass marches, and novel Internet- based forms of activism echo the demand of the movement of movements: Another world, another future, is possible. Theorizing exactly what is meant by “the possible” is precisely the site where the anonymous researchers and activists of the Uncertain Commons propose to intervene in their recent manifesto Speculate This! 2 For if what we seek— assuming we seek anything at all— is an escape route from a future that is preWgured by the conditions of possibility in the present, we must invent concepts adequate to the task, concepts that, at minimum, help us to avoid an encounter with more of the same cloaked as difference. As we will show, while important,
Source: Cultural Critique
Authors: Matthew S. May, Alexander Monea
Language: French
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2346633573