The Revenge of the Real

Politics for a Post-Pandemic World

The Revenge of the Real
Benjamin Bratton
RRP:
NZ$ 22.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 18.39
Paperback
h198 x 129mm - 192pg
12 Jul 2022 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9781839762574
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COVID-19 exposed the pre-existing conditions of the current global crisis. Many Western states failed to protect their populations, while others were able to suppress the virus only with sweeping social restrictions. In contrast, many Asian countries were able to make much more precise interventions. Everywhere, lockdown transformed everyday life, introducing an epidemiological view of society based on sensing, modeling, and filtering. What lessons are to be learned? The Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognizes that governance is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmas-climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society-all of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? What models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention.
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 for the FutureA 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 FutureThe 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 Hestor, author of XenofeminismBratton' 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 AIEvery 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 world it is Benjamin Bratton' s running commentary that cuts swathes, like a megastructure through mountains. -Liam Young, architect and filmmaker 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 SpiritFrom 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 J Buck, author of After Geoengineering
Benjamin Bratton is Professor of Visual Arts the University of California, San Diego. He is Program Director of The Terraforming think-tank at Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow. He is the author of several books, including The Stack which develops a comprehensive political philosophy of planetary-scale computation. See bratton. info
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781839762574
Published: 12 Jul 2022
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Verso Books
Publisher: Verso Books
Format: Paperback
Height: 198mm
Width: 129mm
Pages: 192

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