The process commonly referred to as business-as-usual has given rise to dangerous climate change, but its social history remains strangely unexplored. A key moment in its onset was the transition to steam power as a source of rotary motion in commodity production, in Britain and, first of all, in its cotton industry. This article tries to approach the dynamics of the fossil economy by examining the causes of the transition from water to steam in the British cotton industry in the (...) second quarter of the nineteenth century. Common perceptions of the shift as driven by scarcity are refuted, and it is shown that the choice of steam was motivated by a rather different concern: power over labour. Turning away from standard interpretations of the role of energy in the industrial revolution, this article opens a dialogue with Marx on matters of carbon and outlines a theory of fossil capital, better suited for understanding the drivers of business-as-usual as it continues to this day. (shrink)

The term “Anthropocene” is deployed to designate a period during which human activity has significantly altered global eco-systems and climate. But the term presents geological change as if it were something humanity controls, rather than a state of affairs out of our control. In his reading of the Anthropocene as a fetishization of the relationship between nature and humanity, Daniel Cunha calls for a radical break with a capitalist logic that has made catastrophic climate change an inevitable outcome.

Dana Ward’s 2013 poem Crisis of Infinite Worlds opens up a confrontation between recent critical articulations of infinity as it appears in, on one hand, eco-criticism, speculative realist philosophy, and object-oriented ontology and, on the other, totality as it appears in Marxian thought and, on Christopher Nealon’s account, in Ward’s poem. Infinity discourse is fundamentally anti-hermeneutic and anti-humanist, while Crisis of Infinite Worldsdemonstrates that there is no necessary division between interpretation, human experience, and the infinite.

Paul Stasi reviews Thompson’s edited collection Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy, and Aesthetics.

Rob Halpern reads Taylor Brady’s Microclimates and Occupational Treatment as examples of the way the novel form can, on the level of the sentence, account for the disjointed temporality of financialization. Brady’s novels narrate affective epiphenomena — the histories of particular bodies and selves — that emerge to accompany or resist the damage of crisis, making the logic of intractable economic forces perceptible.

Emilio Sauri reviews Roberto Schwarz’s Two Girls and Other Essays.

In his reading of Samuel Delaney’s Plagues and Carnivals, Kevin Floyd argues that the novel dramatizes “reading” as a mechanism by which events are made intelligible while suppressing a kind of multilegibility that better captures social relations. Delaney’s novel was written in the early days of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, but Floyd’s article reveals the way in which the reading practices it advances are no less relevant to global biopolitics today.

What if we were to understand Bahktin’s “dialogicality” as a description of the way we read, not the way we write? For Timothy Bewes, it is not the case that one novel is dialogical and another not; rather, a critic’s relationship to the novel should be dialogical. On this basis, Bewes questions the existence of the so-called crisis in literary meaning, developing a trajectory between Dostoevsky and contemporary novelists.