Marxism in Culture: The Logistic of Sense

When Marx was twenty five he sketched the sensory threshold of communism. The ‘supersession of private property’ would be manifested by a ‘complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities’, such that the faculty of sensation would be released from serving the accumulation process. In this talk, I shall use these remarks as a guide to the bleeding edge of materials science, sensor technologies, and digital fabrication as they are being folded into the social life, logistical architecture and human capital of the contemporary city. For though the emergence of robotic materials, programmable matter and spatial computation indicates the beginnings of a new urban form of life — one which transcends the anthropology of modernity —  new urbanism only appear to recombine the command of finance at the level of sensuousness and sensuality. What is at stake, I argue, is the attempt to capitalise from a logistical/environmental solution to the old metaphysical problem of personal identity; one that threatens to realise and dissolve Marx’s youthful hypothesis in a single ‘contactless’ transaction.

Bio
Louis Moreno is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures in the Department of Visual Cultures and Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. Louis researches the urban and architectural dimensions of financial capitalism.

All welcome!

Convenors: Matthew Beaumont, Dave Beech, Alan Bradshaw, Warren Carter, Gail Day, Steve Edwards, Larne Abse Gogarty, Esther Leslie, Luisa Lorenza Corna, David Mabb, Antigoni Memou, Andy Murray, Nina Power, Dominic Rahtz, Pete Smith, Peter Thomas, Alberto Toscano, Marina Vishmidt.