I Stood Before the Source

''Capitalism’s representations are ubiquitous; less so are representations of capitalism. I stood before the source traverses varied contemporary scenes of accumulation, from data centres to tar sands, airports, prisons, trading bots, factories, mobile communication, vacant offices inhabited by speculation, earth’s atmosphere, and beyond. The exhibition features work that maps tightly integrated circuits of global political-economic power; tracks vast accumulations of dead labour as technological infrastructure; listens in on the plunge of financial markets; choreographs divisions of labour in commodity production; descends into the open pits of the stock exchange; and stages injuries of accumulation as extinction.'' -- Publisher's websit

Highlights from the SoilCAM project: Soil Contamination, Advanced integrated characterisation and time-lapse Monitoring

The SoilCAM project (Soil Contamination, Advanced integrated characterisation and time-lapse Monitoring 2008-2012, EU-FP7-212663) is aimed at improving current methods for monitoring contaminant distribution and biodegradation in the subsurfac

Lusternik-Schnirelmann invariants in proper homotopy theory

We introduce and study proper homotopy invariants of the Lusternik-Schnirelmann type, p-cat (-), p-Cat(-), and cat e(-) in the category of Γ2-locally compact spaces and proper maps. As an application, Rn (n Φ 3) is characterized as (i) the unique open manifold X with p-Cat(ΛΓ) = 2, or (ii) the unique open manifold with one strong end and p-cat( c) = 2

On the connectivity of skeletons of pseudomanifolds with boundary

In this note we show that 1-skeletons and 2-skeletons of n-pseudomanifolds with full boundary are (n+ 1)-connected graphs and n-connected 2-complexes, respectively. This generalizes previous results due to Barnette and Woon.Ministerio de Educación y Cienci

Elsewhere and Otherwise: Introduction to a Symposium on Fredric Jameson’s ‘Allegory and Ideology’

This text introduces the symposium on Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology (2019), the second volume in his six-part The Poetics of Social Forms. It frames the debate with a brief exploration of some of the figures and problems of allegory that appear across Jameson’s oeuvre, and surveys some of the Marxist conceptualisations of allegory that have shaped Jameson’s approach, as it straddles allegories of the commodity and allegories of utopia. The musical investigation of the nexus of allegory and affect, and the presentation of political allegory as primarily concerned with the disjunction between (national and international) levels are also touched upon as salient dimensions of Jameson’s theorising

Capital (It Fails Us Now): Introduction to a Mini-Symposium on Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century

This introduction to Historical Materialism’s mini-symposium on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century places the three contributions by Husson, Mann and Roberts in the context of an exploration of the link between methodology and politics in Piketty’s economic history of inequality. Touching on the role of time and literature in Piketty’s argument, as well as on his difficulty in accounting for the relations of capital – especially ones originating in colonialism and empire – it approaches Piketty’s book, and its success, in terms of its concerted effort to produce a cognitive mapping of contemporary capitalism that can serve as a prelude to its democratic reform

Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives

The sordid twilight of the Trump presidency raised the stakes of the debate on fascism. While much of the discussion has been magnetised by the legitimacy of analogies with the 1930s, this article argues that a rich and complex tradition of Black radical critique of right-wing authoritarianism provides a vital resource for thinking through the problem of US fascism beyond analogy – beginning with the DuBoisian insight that a racial fascism forged by chattel slavery and settler-colonialism anticipated the ascendancy of European fascisms. The article homes in on Black radical theories of fascism developed in the wake of the movements and uprisings of the 1960s and the US state’s intensification of its repressive and carceral apparatus. Exploring the theoretical insights generated in the prison writings of George Jackson and Angela Y. Davis, it challenges the widely held belief that the 1970s stood as the nadir of theorisation of fascism, its degradation into mere political insult. Instead, with particular emphasis on Davis’s articulation of an incipient or preventive fascism, it investigates the theoretical consequences of the differential experience of fascism across axes of racialisation and reflects on the pertinence of Black radical theories of fascism to our current moment of recombinant White supremacy