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OverviewThe Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognises that how populations govern themselves 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? If so, what models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that, instead of thinking of technology as something that happens to society, we must see how it can form the basis of a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. He urges us to reconsider questions of “surveillance” in the face of necessary testing and care. He asks what did the “mask wars” reveal about the destructive nature of individualism as the basis of sovereignty? The book proposes that it is time to transform how we live, work and thrive. Rethinking governance means rethinking how we interact with each other as a global population, and how we ensure our obligations to each other. For this, we should build a society based in a new rationality of inclusion, care and foresight. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Benjamin BrattonPublisher: Verso Books Imprint: Verso Books Dimensions: Width: 12.90cm , Height: 1.30cm , Length: 19.80cm Weight: 0.159kg ISBN: 9781839762574ISBN 10: 1839762578 Pages: 192 Publication Date: 12 July 2022 Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , General , Professional & Vocational Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsReviewsIf 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 for 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 Author InformationBenjamin 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. He is the author of the hugely influential The Stack as well as The New Normal and Terraforming. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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