2 documents
# 65
Arsenic Dreams
Steven Shaviro
In 2010, a group of scientists working for NASA announced a startling discovery. They claimed to have found a strain of microbes, hidden in the depths of Mono Lake in California, that were able to consume arsenic as a replacement for phosphorus. This was a surprise. Phosphorus is one of the basic, necessary building blocks of life alongside carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur. Arsenic, on the other hand, is generally toxic: not just to human beings—for whom it has a long history…
e-flux Journal
Posted: May 1, 2015
Category
Nature & Ecology
Subjects
Science, Animals, Science Fiction
# 46
Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption
Steven Shaviro
Tout se résume dans l’Esthétique et l’Économie politique . Everything comes down to Aesthetics and Political Economy. Mallarmé’s aphorism is my starting point for considering accelerationist aesthetics. 1 I think that aesthetics exists in a special relationship to political economy, precisely because aesthetics is the one thing that cannot be reduced to political economy. Politics, ethics, epistemology, and even ontology are all subject to “determination in the last instance” by the forces…
e-flux Journal
Posted: June 1, 2013
Category
Capitalism
Subjects
Accelerationism, Beauty, Sublime, Affect