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Karl Marx

philosopher · 37 mentions across 12 readings

In this course

Marx appears here primarily through the famous epigram about humans making history without knowing it, which the course uses to frame questions about agency, consciousness, and determination in systems that exceed individual awareness. This invocation sets up a key tension for the seminar: if we are simultaneously authors and products of complex systems (whether biological, economic, or computational), how do we think about intentionality and design in cybernetic and AI contexts? The reference supports an argument about the "naturalization effect"—the risk that we mistake constructed systems (social, technical, or biological) for natural inevitabilities.

Mentioned in 12 readings

Diedrich Diederichsen

from On (Surplus) Value In Art

 10
Just what is surplus value or Mehrwert when we talk about art and culture? Changing material conditions, market dynamics and cultural ideals are reshaping how this question may be answered today. Drawing on fresh readings of Marxist and pos…Yet the world of art production concerns a particular kind of Mehrwert. Both the capitalist and the artistic variety help to maintain a process that, like breathing and circulation, must continue uninterrupted in order for the organism to s…There are other justifications for artistic Mehrwert, but there is no need to elaborate them here. Autonomy, desire and authorship – these are not only the most common and most symptomatic; they also reveal the important feature that all th…

+7 more

Tiqqun

The Cybernetic Hypothesis (2001)

 8
Rationalist critics of the "economic creed" or of the "neo-technological utopia," anthropologist critics of utilitarianism in social sciences and the hegemony of commodity exchange, marxist critics of the "cognitive capitalism" that oppose …The contemporary history of economic discourse must be looked at from the angle of this increasing problem of information. From the crisis of 1929 to 1945, economists' attention was focused on questions of anticipation, uncertainty regardin…It comes across clearly then that cybernetics is not just one of the various aspects of contemporary life, its neo-technological component, for instance, but rather it is the point of departure and arrival of the new capitalism. Cybernetic …

+5 more

Matt Colquhoun

Acid Communism

 4
Acid Communism Matt Colquhoun Like so many of his neologisms, Mark Fisher’s ‘Acid Communism’ encapsulates a crisis of disambiguation, hurling a provocation into our midst. The phrase – which was to be the title of his next book, now unfini…Acid Communism is a project beyond the pleasure principle. It is not only a project for the recuperation of the counterculture’s lost potentials but also the expression of a desire for an experimental (rather than prescriptively utopian) le…For Marx, “desire” is so often inseparable from the commodity. It is never without object. On the very first page of Capital, quoting Nicholas Barbon, Marx defines it in a footnote: “Desire implies want; it is the appetite of the mind, and …

+1 more

Mark Fisher

SF Capital

 3
Hype-vorticism has been through a whole series of thresholds since. The simultaneous emergence of the Transformers toys and TV series in 1984 was one enormously significant moment: the toys were designed as 'characters' in a 'narrative', in…Hype-vorticism has been through a whole series of thresholds since. The simultaneous emergence of the Transformers toys and TV series in 1984 was one enormously significant moment: the toys were designed as 'characters' in a 'narrative', in…Insofar as Marx remained a humanist, he posited a transcendent use value that was distorted and masked by the ruses of capital. But use value - like all values - is no less fictional than capital. What is at issue is the temporal orientatio…

Benjamin H. Bratton

Platform and Stack, Model and Machine

 2
If you start looking for them, “stacks” are everywhere. In a way, the Earth itself is a spherical stack, from its molten core, to the lower and upper mantle, to the crust on which organic life evolved under the troposphere, stratosphere, me…branch, industry, state economy, central government, and finally enveloped by the twelfth, and final, layer of the whole nation. As seen in Beer’s diagrams, layers in the system could recursively influence layers it surrounded, with any one…

Catherine Malabou

Introduction from What should we do with our brain

 2
Introduction Plasticity and Flexibility—For a Consciousness of the Brain The brain is a work, and we do not know it. We are its subjects—authors and products at once—and we do not know it. "Humans make their own history, but they do not k…“naturalization effect is especially powerful in those disciplines which, aiming to connect biology and society, derive the social bond from implantation in the order of living organisms, or construct their representation of society on the …

China Mieville

On Social Sadism - Salvage

 2
Every person’s name is legion. Among our components are those we don’t want, and/or want not to want, and/or surrendered to which society itself couldn’t survive. A modicum of repression, then, is a necessity for social life. Herbert Marcus…Extra compassion? Compared to what? To the ‘natural’ compassion capacity of our polity, presumably. That the government offered to take a risible 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020 was thus signalled as a kind of ethical superprofit. An ingenio…

Félix Guattari

Integrated World Capitalism and Molecular Revolution

 2
The deterritorialization of capital itself is what Marx has already called the “expropriation of the bourgeoisie by the bourgeoisie,” but this time, it is on a different scale. After all, IWC is not necessarily a universalizing force. It do…The struggles for interest—questions regarding the general standard of living—remain carriers of essential contradictions. We must not underestimate their importance. Yet one can assume that, due to the fact that such struggles lack a compr…

Appears alongside

People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.

Michel Foucault 4Herbert Marcuse 3Friedrich Engels 3Mark Fisher 3Sigmund Freud 2Gilles Deleuze 2Jeremy Gilbert 2Nicholas Barbon 2Jean Baudrillard 2Oedipus 2Jean-François Lyotard 2Georges Bataille 2Atwater 1David Cameron 1Ames Hodges 1David Lapoujade 1Duccio Trombadori 1James Cascaito 1John Locke 1Mike Tomlinson 1R. James Goldstein 1Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1Friedrich Nietzsche 1Max Stirner 1Stephen Pearl Andrews 1Albrecht Dürer 1Charles Eames, Ray Eames 1Maximilian I 1Augusto Pinochet 1James T. Kirk 1

Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0 — ATEK-639/439 — Fall 2026 · QR code