Mckenzie Ward’s “Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocence” – Cyborg, Who’re You Calling Bourgeois!?

McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red is a “low theory” book of weird alternatives. Cyborgs, climate science, and soviet Utopian lunacy come together in what I can only describe as a science fair project for a Marxist robot high school of the future. It provides a fascinating account of Bogdanov, the forgotten, the soviet sci-fi alt-scientist, and of course, the political and philosophical “anti-Lenin”. Wark makes the case for a revival Bogdanov’s never-yet-popular Tektology as a corrective methodology appropriate to a world where environmental and technological rifts are increasingly radical and irreversible.

His science fiction super-villain, the “Carbon Liberation Front”, a collective and hilariously well chosen name for the anthropo-technical forces that have (unconsciously) brought about the emancipation of carbon into the atmosphere, causing a situation where there is no back button (or in Wark/Marx, a “metabolic rift”).

Wark wants thinking at the low-level (“designs for Life, low theory and everyday practice from the labor point of view”) to take its place next to, or perhaps push aside this generation’s inheritors of critical theory, Western Marxism, and all those, like Badiou and Žižek, whom he characterizes as worshipers at the the altar of a “psychoanalytic Leninist sublime”.

Wark’s book is very interesting. A revival is always interesting. Wark’s efforts are spent on the hopelessly maligned as Bogdanov, a wonderful crack-pot who, in 1908, almost took over the Bolsheviks, in 1917, was pushing an apolitical/non-revolutionary/technical Marxism, and in 1928 died from a weird blood transfusion experiment gone horribly wrong. Wark’s success in rehabilitating Bogdanov shows the truth behind Benjamin’s statement that “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history“:

The idea is a sort of impossible crystal, dead and inert, without which boredom and grief weather us. But the idea on its own is only the concept of death…Better to live then on a secondary idea, which mediates between the idea and labor, keeping the dead ideal from direct contact with life, where either the idea of death will live and kill life, or life itself will kill the deathly idea. The secondary idea should be practical, attaching itself to the problem of life and inert matter, rather than life and soul. The secondary idea is usually a design problem, and hence, in principle, soluble…Our species-being is lost when we make a fetish of a particular idea, a particular love, or a particular labor, as Bogdanov might say..

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Bogdanov was a big weird character, but Wark focuses on his biggest, weirdest project, Tektology, a proto-systems theory that humbly tries to describe and subsume all extant knowledge, practice and natural phenomenon as “organizational”. It is a work of emancipatory org-design as molecular connector – a kind of metaphor machine that allows one to freely and creatively import/export concepts from one science or praxis to another – a “zip and download” function for theory.

The formal process of a given activity can be the experimental template for another.

That this is a very useful train of thinking to revive in this era of design, “big data”, information systems, and metadata goes without saying too much. As a practicing information architect and information management consultant, I am actually salivating to use some of Bogdanov’s thinking around “conjunction” et al. in my professional work, and think they will even bear fruit. It is a “labor point of view” that design and information science sorely needs to hack its seemingly unstoppable sequences and processes for a “comradely” future.

Similarly cool is Wark’s willingness to be totally on side with Bogdanov’s Proletkult, the most avant-garde pre-Stalinist art/education movement in pretty damn avant-garde era of history. This is exemplified in the writing of Platonov, who, now that his works are published and translated, is getting the belated title of “best soviet writer ever”, totally snatching it from Pasternak or whomever. Wark’s readings of Platonov are both welcome and timely, convincing and unexpected. I feel like everyone who has ever been inspired by the avant-garde soviet 10s and 20s secretly was waiting for just this sort of justification of “literary factories”, out of the box proletarian education and artistic creation “from the labor point of view”. Think this kind of production with what the Italian collective Wu Ming are doing, and perhaps frame it with Badiou’s literary subject, and maybe we’ve got something worth doing.

The connections get weirder as Wark follows the Utopian chem-trail from Bogdanov’s utopia Red Star, the first great work of soviet sci-fi, to California, where we find Paul Feyerabend, Donna Haraway (and her cyborg offspring), and the sci-fi protege of Frederic Jameson, Kim Stanley Robinson. Here we have a look at the critical, queer-feminist-cyborg side of California Ideology. For those not familiar with the antihumanist joys of terraforming and cyborg-theorizing, this latter half of the book will inspire weird thoughts from the depths of the uncanny valley. His account of climate science as a potlatch but revolutionary vast-machine, heretofore unthinkable, ties well with his Platonov focus on the below the below, the infrastructure beneath the superstructure, and the sub-infrastructure or non-infrastructure, the gaping foundation pits of half-citizens and mad men.

The main thesis that underlies these excursions and revivals is that “molar” thinking, the thinking of high theory, western Marxism, philosophy etc., while perfectly comfortable thinking around the “death of God” , has not yet convincingly thought around the “death of the Goddess” (i.e. Nature). Only at the level of metabolic rifts, exact scientific accounts hacked by metaphors, détournements (or hijackings) of existing concepts, short-circuitings, a focus on “secondary”, rather than first, principles etc. can we confront the problems, the main problems, to shared and “comradely” life today.

Praxis starts and ends with the struggle for life; everything else is just useless duplicity or dangerous theology.

So why does he see all this as so incompatible with current theory? My main issue with Wark comes from the unnecessary name-calling, the denigrating, and the proletarian posturing he sporadically adopts against his bugbear Žižek and the other “western Marxists”, which near the end he labels outright as proponents of a beyond-useful critical theory, or hypocritical theory:

First – and last: from Bourgeois to Proletarian. Hypocritical theory is in love with the lovely things of its own class – bourgeois things. It makes a fetish of leaders, idolizing Lenin or Mao. It doesn’t want to talk about workers; it wants to deal only with representatives. Or: it finds excuses to remain within the detritus of a lost bourgeois culture – Wagner, Hegel, and Mallarmé. Or: it takes refuge in theology, as if only the gods could save us…

We get that you probably don’t headbang to Wagner, but as someone who is pushing the Apple infused world of “design problems”, and a theorist of “organizational science, isn’t this a little pot vs kettle?

We have to ask, who’re you calling bourgeois, Mr. Cyborg? If we’re going to play the ouvriériste, let’s go all the way. Isn’t Wark the one trying to rehabilitate Bogdanov, perhaps (by 1917 at least) the only non-Revolutionary Bolshevik? A writer who seems to imply that education and culture calmly plodding along and adding to the “shared life” stock pile will simply progress to, uh, more “shared life”? Has he ever played Starcraft? Is Wark aware that worker bees have enemies?

His point about the necessity to share comradely struggles against the environment, nature etc. is well taken, but his disdain for political activity and fetish for techno-science is, without a real revolutionary or subjective thrust, almost entirely compatible with the kind of Silicon Valley Common sense he is trying to combat. Are we all just going to throw out lot in with hackers and open-source coders and read sci-fi, and hope that comradely activity emerges unimpeded?

If the “molar thinking” thinking of a Badiou is in the clouds, and a Bogdanov is representative of good, molecular thinking, how does he explain tektology as “organizational design”? Isn’t organizational design the area par excellence of bourgeois, molar thinking today? In a review of Žižek’s Absolute Recoil, Wark claims:

The molar is the language of management. It’s the dialogue of ideas, in which the experience of those who organize labor substitutes for the experience of those whose labor organizes the material world directly.

If he ever does a survey of management theory, I think he’ll be surprised at how close it sounds, not to the “bourgeois communism” of Badiou, but precisely to his beloved Bogdanov. There is no reason in your book to address the Maos and the Lenins, the Shanghai and Paris Communes of history; but no need to attack those who theorize along those “molar” lines; thinking which, incidentally, the workers of history have always found easier to digest. Aren’t grand narratives precisely the narratives of the worker? Isn’t molecular thinking the luxury of the scientist who doesn’t have to work a minimum wage job all day?

If there is something to suspect in “molar” thinking, we mustn’t forget that Bogdanov is a writer who, in praising organization unabashedly, sees more value in the First World War than in the Bolshevik Revolution. Isn’t he being just the slightest bit “managemental” in his attitude to the workers when he says things like:

The World War turned out to be the greatest school of organization; it called for an unparalleled effort of organizational abilities from any person or any collective which was directly or indirectly involved in the War, giving it an invaluable organizational experience…For example, deficiency in people is compensated either by a reinforcement of the technical means of destruction or by an ideological rallying of people, raising the fighting spirit of a military collective through Inspiring and elucidating spheres and orders; deficiency in technical means is equalized by a replenishment of human material, etc. The unity of the organizational point of view intrudes here with the greatest force and creates an acute necessity for the unity of organizational methods.

To be proletarian alongside the bourgeois is perhaps even more unreasonable that believing in a subjectivized “bourgeois communism”. There is no compelling reason to toss out current thinkers like Badiou, who capture and rehabilitate in the name of the Event many elements of art, history, science and love from the enemy camp. Indeed, reading the high-level “organizational” categories of Bogdanov, every good information architect might smirk a little at the abstract philosophical generality that is present. Badiou’s use of Cantor and company certainly represents a more genuine encounter with real modern mathematics than Bogdano-Debordian détournements of science, however cool the latter may be.

But the differences are perhaps not even so stark as Wark thinks. Badiou uses mathematics as an empty or “void” ontology in exactly the same way Bogdanov seems to. There is no magic or bourgeois sentimentality in Badiou’s ontology, and his approach and Bogdanov’s are mutually understanding here. It is Wark who might re-read this paragraph from the Tektology:

Is it really possible that the same laws can be applied to combinations of cosmic worlds and biological cells, living people and etheric waves, scientific ideas and energy atoms? Mathematics provides a decisive and indisputable answer: yes, it is quite possible because it is in fact… Thus mathematics is simply the tektology of neutral complexes, developed before other parts of the universal organizational science.

Indeed, although a little buried beneath the blood, chloride and tektols, Bogdanov’s own concept of an eternal-type “truth” is not all that different from Badiou’s materialist dialectic:

Tektology will preserve and save for mankind much of its labour, crystalized in the verities of the past. Undoubtedly, contemporary verities will also become obsolete and die in their time; but tektology guarantees that even they will not be simply discared and will not be converted in the eyes of future generations into naked, fruitless illusions.

Wark’s book is compelling, fucked up, and probably true on many counts; his rehabilitations are not only interesting, they are obscure, cunning, funny and welcome. He is also probably justified in proposing a new, tektologically informed scientific molecular theory to go alongside the molar. It is something I, as a smarmy cognitarian, find not only exciting in the abstract, but actually applicable. It opens up whole new bypaths of thinking, and will undoubtedly help us, the unhelpable cyborg conglomerate of the 21st century. Molar and molecular need to be the new dynamic duo of critical theory. I Just don’t want to spoil the vibe by calling the one proletarian and the other bourgeois; that move is petty, weirdly archaic, and not at all “comradely”.

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