Infrastructure as Method: 5 Notes

Lecture by Professor Joshua Clover, University of California, Davis.

Within the historical materialist tradition in the west, there has developed a sort of divergence between works of “theory,” which obtain an academic prestige corresponding to their degree of crystalline abstraction; and employment which descends into the soot of strategy and tactics, trading prestige for practicality. This talk is a provisional approach to some ways that the Marxist method might help us think about capitalist infrastructure, and that infrastructure might help us understand the Marxist method. These notes are toward a more considerable effort to close the gap between the two scholarly paths, presently subtitled “Value Theory for the End of the World,” that reflects on how an adequate theory of value has real consequences for forms of political struggle and vice versa.

Bio

Joshua Clover is the author of seven books, including Roadrunner (Duke University Press, 2021) and Riot. Strike. Riot: the New Era of Uprisings (Verso, 2016), a political economy of social movements, with recent editions in French, German, Turkish, and Swedish. A former journalist with the Village Voice, The Nation, and others, he is currently a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis, as well as an Affiliated Professor of Literature and Modern Culture at the University of Copenhagen.