The Common, Force, and the Capitalocene

Abstract

Different as they are, Fredric Jameson’s “universal army” and Bruno Latour’s “Theater of Negotiations” both implicitly address the failure of a sufficiently large self-organized “common force” (à la Leslie Marmon Silko) to arise and repair capitalogenic ecological and social depredations today. Reading Jameson and Latour together offers a way toward affirmative transformation by exposing the need (“horizontal” ideals notwithstanding) for force put into critical tension with common effort to spur the ecosocial planetary repair humans— especially the privileged—are failing to do in a timely way, or at a sufficient scale, today.