Tower of Sleep

I don’t know what Nick Srnicek is quoting above, but I recently finished reading John Robert’s incredible book The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and deskilling after the readymade wherein he makes a Marxist argument for human exceptionalism based on labour. What sets humans apart for him is how they tranform their own species-being throughout evolutionary time through technics. And he brings in a bunch of evolutionary theory and embodied-mind cognitive science to show how his human exceptionalism still accords with post-Cartesian notions of subjectivity. It’s non-essentialist and materialist but he still asserts the autonomy of art as a non-alienated practice through which we can transform our relationship to labour rather than just being transformed by technocapitalism in an alienated way. Very heavy stuff. I haven’t entirely processed it yet (I have neither the background in technical Marxism nor the equipment to assess whether his neuroscientific or anthropological claims are sound) but it’s made quite an impression on me.

(Source: vvervvolf, via nsrnicek)