https://www.e-flux.com/journal/165
“Issue #165 September 2026
Political and intellectual developments don’t emerge in a vacuum. They react to crisis and technological change, but also cause crisis and foment changes necessary to confront them. The invention of the ship, to gloss Paul Virilio, is the invention of the shipwreck, but it is also the condition for new ways of understanding the world before, during, and after the wreck. Furthermore, we should not forget that strange historical motors exist at the farthest possible points from centers of political power and its incumbent gravitational forces and institutions, often confusing or undermining the causal flow of events that structure the way we understand historical and technological development.
…
Existing sciences can be easily perverted to serve the aims of the dominant order they might have seemed to upend. Antonia Majaca finds two grammars animating contemporary techno-fascism: counting and clearing. While both were fundamental logics for settler-colonialism from the outset, she describes how they were systematized into theories of energy and sovereignty, respectively, and justified by perverse readings of Darwin. In this way, the dominance of a species is mapped onto the state, and only forms of social organization that prioritize maximum extraction and maximum destruction (and thus maximum surplus) are made to seem like the fittest, obscuring other forms of communal energy exchange that subsist at the margins. “
