Abstract: After Disney's nineteenth MCU film, Avengers: Infinity War , kills half of the franchise's superheroes, its sequel, Endgame , introduces the Quantum Realm—a subatomic reality that superposes all possible worlds as an inexhaustible resource to extend its grand narrative of superhuman salvation. Through Disney's quantum leap, this paper examines how new materialist thinking in current cultural production re-ontologizes, or "quantumizes," its intellectual properties as excess that enfolds contradictions, such as scenarios of hidden risks and their preemptive solutions. The current ontological turn in the social sciences and humanities speculates about this sort of quantumized substratum as a strategic means to think about disciplinary sustainability in the Anthropocene.

Dispossession, Property, and the Clash of Interests: Reflections on Early Marx and Late BensaïdA review of Daniel Bensaïd, The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor Bret Benjamin (bio) Bensaïd, Daniel. The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor. Translated by Robert Nichols, U of Minnesota P, 2021. No honest history of capitalist modernity can fail to account for the violence of dispossession. Marx famously grapples with the distinction between the ideal operations of capital through which surplus value is extracted from waged workers at the point of production, and the regular and persistent applications of “direct, extra-economic force” (Capital 900) characteristic of the period of “so-called primitive accumulation,” when capital comes into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (926). The relation between the economic and the extra-economic forms of violence, theft, enclosure, expropriation, and dispossession is ever in motion and, indeed, dialectically constituted. “Force,” Marx insists in his account of capital’s origins, “is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power” (916). Many of the most important thinkers in the tradition that bears his name—from Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin in the early decades of the twentieth century to David Harvey and Nancy Fraser today—have worked to define the precise theoretical and historical relationships between economic exploitation and the forms of dispossession which capital disavows.1 To what degree is the persistent use of force and theft a necessary precondition for ongoing capital accumulation? Do the dispossessions of the present issue from a different set of determinants than those that characterized the pre-history of capital in its conditions of emergence? How might this relation between exploitation and dispossession shed light on the structural unevenness of the world market, felt most acutely by those who have historically borne the most vicious forms of violence: the victims of imperialism and racialized discrimination? Robert Nichols has made noteworthy recent contributions to this always urgent debate in his writings on primitive accumulation and in his recent book, Theft is Property.2 As editor and translator of the brief but provocative The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor, Nichols makes a different sort of intervention, approaching the question of dispossession by pairing early writings by Marx with an essay by the eminent French public intellectual and activist Daniel Bensaïd. Originally published in 1842 in the Rheinische Zeitung, the five articles by Marx collected in this volume offer a characteristically blistering critique of positions set forth by the state and landowners during the Rhineland Assembly’s debates on legislation that criminalized the gathering of wood by peasants. Marx’s articles are preceded by the volume’s eponymous essay, Bensaïd’s “The Dispossessed,” originally published in 2007. The texts represent opposite poles of each author’s career. Marx’s Rheinische Zeitung articles, which Nichols contends “have long languished in obscurity, particularly in the English-speaking world” (xiv), were penned just prior to his profound engagement with, and critique of, political economy (only fully evident, Bensaïd rightly suggests, in the 1844 Paris Manuscripts). Bensaïd’s essay, by contrast, was written just three years before the end of his life when his long battle with AIDS appears to have prevented the completion of more sustained intellectual projects.3 Marx’s articles offer fascinating but incomplete points of intellectual departure, suggesting lines of connection between the critique in these early essays and his more fully conceived later work; Bensaïd’s essay offers an erudite account of the intellectual history of property that draws out the political implications of Marx’s wood theft articles, but struggles to articulate a structural account of dispossession and the capital relation. The pairing of early Marx and late Bensaïd is bolstered by Nichols’s helpful introduction, which provides historical context for both and brings their analyses up to the present.4 Taken as a whole, the volume makes a valuable contribution to longstanding Marxist debates about...

Democracy becomes modern after it abolishes slavery and assumes its primary feature—race. Paradoxically, political theory cannot formalize a notion of democracy that incorporates the ex-slave or a post-slavery democracy that does not prescribe racial genocide. This essay shows that this paradox is structural, and tracks its transformation from Alexis de Tocqueville’s and Gustave de Beaumont’s nineteenth-century meditations on the specter of abolition to UNESCO’s postwar statements on race, particularly through Claude Lévi-Strauss’s and W.E.B. Du Bois’s subsequent critiques of racial capitalism. It concludes by reflecting on the ethics of war as a materialization of the impossibility of multiracial democracy.

This essay brings together Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Ruth Ozeki's documentary Halving the Bones in order to situate the conceit of maternal photography within discourses of social and racial reproduction. Although Barthes's theory of photography neglects race, it prepares the ground for a logic of maternal reproduction through photography that is not realized within Camera Lucida. Ozeki extends Barthes's theory of photography-as-mothering to posit film as a medium that meets the needs of a contentious, mixed-race Asian body—both to escape narratives of race as enforced through the photograph, and to ensure the continued visibility of that body.

"This book … of traces and tremors, if book it be"A review of Michael Taussig, Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown Cory Austin Knudson (bio) Taussig, Michael. Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown. U Chicago P, 2020. In Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, anthropologist and ethnographer Michael Taussig confronts the reciprocal problems of theorizing and representing climate change. In this, he joins a popular strain of contemporary environmental humanities literature that examines how modeling the environment analytically or artistically limits or expands the ways we can think about, and perhaps mitigate, climatic catastrophe. Much of the work in this tradition tends to keep its models at arm's length, using sober, scholarly analysis to master the myriad representational forms of climate change. It straightens out—in theory—the disorder of a world on the brink without letting theory itself become infected by such disorder. Taussig, by comparison, seeks to meld analysis with its object, making his text both product and agent of epistemic meltdown. Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown (hereafter Mastery of Non-Mastery) in this way combines ecocritical and ecopoetic practices; it attempts to reshape, mutate, and parody the scholarly monograph in a bid to derive a form of expression commensurate with this surreal, volatile age of meltdown. Taussig's correspondingly surreal and volatile text might at first appear a gimmick, where writing erratically mimics erratic weather patterns, as it were. But Taussig insists elsewhere that "while it is hazardous to maintain a mimetic theory of language and writing, it is no less hazardous not to have such a theory" ("Corn-Wolf" 33). For him, the distance assumed between the subject and object of scholarly analysis together with a presumed epistemic stability form the foundations of much traditional academic writing. As such, academic criticism often mirrors and reinforces the ideology of Man's mastery of nature—or, more academically, of subject matter—while concealing the role of narrative (or what Taussig more approachably terms "storytelling") in the perpetuation of such a disastrous pretense. Taussig has thus cast his "apotropaic writing" as a "countermagic" to this hegemonic mode of thought and language ("Corn-Wolf" 32–33).1 Mastery of Non-Mastery presents his latest attempt to tap into the meeting point between reality and representation, where the "meltdown of the language of nature swamps the nature of language" (174). Thus opposed to what he calls the "crabby and secular language" (56) of much contemporary environmental literature, Taussig variously situates Mastery of Non-Mastery as "somewhere between science fiction, high theory, and the weather" (3), a "book … of traces and tremors" (20), "a firefly moment navigating between light and dark" (57), "a too-late experimental ethnography" (120), and "a threshold between a theater and a book" (180). Nowhere does he employ the language of structuration and utility so normalized in works of theory. This "book that is not a book" (180) does not build anything. Nor does it seek to furnish its reader any theoretical tools. Rather, Taussig's preferred models are dancing (16) and the meandering flight of a firefly (95). The salience of such images is apparent immediately on opening Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, which spans nineteen brief chapters laid out in discrete blocks of text that recall a collection of vignettes composed of aphorisms. The staccato rhythm of its format mirrors the way that ideas and intertexts are made to waltz and flit through the book's pages, often disappearing suddenly only to reemerge in new combinations ten or fifty pages later. Lines of argument meanwhile cross and re-cross such that the author's central concepts are gradually fleshed out more through creative patterning—or the layering of textures, or the thickening of an atmosphere—than by way of the gradual construction of a theoretical edifice. How else, he asks, should one write about a planetary condition where "nature turns more surreal each day with ominous green-yellow vistas and bluer-than-blue skies while the snow falls one day, rising the next as mist, stripping us naked as pixies as the cosmos draws close" (19)? Taussig here...