The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World

Description

The global pandemic should be seen less as a "state of exception" than a revelation of multiple preexisting conditions. As each wave swept over the globe, different countries experienced the stages of grief --from anger to acceptance- in predictable sequence, but each dealt with the crisis in very different ways, some successful and some catastrophic. This stark moment of 'reality' enacted the largest control experiment in comparative governance in history. Can the world govern itself differently? The Revenge of the Real envisions a post-pandemic politics based upon the imperatives that have revealed themselves during the emergency. It demands that we imagine an epidemiological view of society, on a planetary scale: the need to rethink how governments interact with each other and their populations, as well as how we live, work and, perhaps, thrive with each other. The lockdown has forced new norms - social distancing, models and curves, masks and quarantine - that we have to accommodate into everyday lives. How do these alter what it means to mean care for one another? How does they impact on our relationships with automation and "surveillance"? What kind of society do they portend? Bratton proposes a radical rethinking of what a post-pandemic politics could be, and should be, one that demands, rather than delays, a coordinated, pragmatic, equitable response to the biopolitical challenges that define the 21st century.

Benjamin H. Bratton is Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. He is Program Director of The New Normal programme at Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow. He is also a Professor of Digital Design at The European Graduate School and Visiting Faculty at SCI_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture). He is the author of the hugely influential The Stackas well as The New Normal and Terraforming.

Benjamin Bratton shows, with brilliant insight and imagination, what the world is coming to look like in an era of planetary-scale computing. He cuts through many received ideas about technology, globalization, and so forth and presents a fresh vision of the architecture of the world. -- McKenzie Wark, [on The Stack] Endlessly thought-provoking, this amazing book is both cognitive mapping and a projective geometry of the new dimensions of technological reality we live in -- Kim Stanley Robinson, [on The Stack] Imagines a design brief for the whole world while floating or falling through all the ever-efflorescent plasmas and atmospheres of digital information. -- Keller Easterling, [on The Stack] Breaks more new ground than a carpet bombing. The Stack itself may or may not exist, but it's left everything that came before it in a state of rubble. -- Bruce Sterling [on The Stack] A major achievement. It is more than just philosophy of technology, software studies, or design criticism; it analyzes and guides our thinking in a baffling Anthropocenic era when computation works at the planetary scale and constitutes governance -- Natalie Jeremijenko [on The Stack] If you've emerged from the past year disoriented, you may find it exactly the right time to read Bratton's book. From quarantine urbanism, to 5G conspiracy theorists and technological refusal, to incisive philosophical analysis of mask-rejecting Karens and the West's shambolic response to covid writ large, Bratton is a ruthless guide to what has unfolded. But this book is soundly concerned with the future, through and beyond post-pandemic politics. Its pressing questions - can the world govern itself differently? how do we direct emergent technological capacities towards competent planetary governance? - will continue to be more and more relevant as the ecological crises deepen. There will be manifold books on the "lessons" of the pandemic, but Bratton uniquely grasps what is at stake. -- Holly Jean Buck, author of After Geoengineering Bratton is one of our best global systems thinkers, adding to theory and philosophy a sophisticated understanding of infrastructures, design, AI, and governance: what this adds up to is a rare and valuable insight into civilization and its match, or mismatch, with Earth's biosphere. In the wake of the Covid pandemic he has given us a swift and propulsive reorientation to the situation we find ourselves in, a species in a single biosphere, ruled by an ad hoc nation-state system. What can we do now to help sort things out and dodge the mass extinction event we are initiating? Read on and learn. -- Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry of the Future A provocative skewering of dogmatic Western political culture, Bratton's book is a crucial contribution to thinking through what planetary governance could and should look like post-pandemic. -- Nick Srnicek, co-author of Inventing the Future The pandemic has laid bare the frailties, failures, and fissures of the contemporary world. The Revenge of the Real offers a clarion call for organising ourselves differently. It is forceful, engaging, and thought provoking, and I expect it to prove immediately influential. -- Helen Hester, author of Xenofeminism When anti-lockdown stances such as the one espoused by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, QAnon's conspiracies, anti-vaxxer propaganda, and a return to an innocent relation between the humans and the planet are a match made in hell, the rise of crypto-fascism variants is the least of our concerns. We are indeed witnessing a fundamental erosion of the contemporary left's capacity to respond to planetary-scale emergencies. This inability to systematically think about and act upon the plights brought upon this planet is what Benjamin Bratton calls the lack of planetary competency. Bratton's The Revenge of the Real is a sober yet enthusiastic analysis of how and why some strains of the left continue to be appropriated by individualistic libertarianism if not by crypto-fascism. Yet Bratton's work is more than that, it sets a way out for the left by mapping the scale of planetary events and what it means to think and intervene at that scale. -- Reza Negarestani, author of Intelligence and Spirit Bratton's is an incisive intervention: at once polemic and productive. A counter to the self-imposed ineffectuality of certain strands of theory, The Revenge of the Real provides buoyant and zesty rebuttal to the suspicious mode in philosophizing, all whilst in search of more pragmatic alternatives. -- Thomas Moynihan, author of X-Risk Sharp as a tungsten needle, Bratton reveals the paradoxes of the pandemic at atomic resolution and etches a positive outline of how planetary biopolitics could be otherwise. Vital reading. -- Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI Every moment has a theorist native to its strangeness, a singular voice that can uniquely navigate its impossible truths and unfathomable realities. At the end of the end of the world it is Benjamin Bratton's running commentary that cuts swathes, like a megastructure through mountains. -- Liam Young, architect and filmmaker [Bratton's] call for a global shift in priorities is galvanizing. * Publishers Weekly * Fascinating. -- Pat Kane * The National * Enjoyable, nourishing ... [Bratton's] views are often far-sighted, which helps make sense of some of the bewildering side effects of this pandemic. -- Alex Mair * On Magazine *