When glancing at the Vessel in New York’s Hudson Yards, one must squint to subdue the shimmer bou... more When glancing at the Vessel in New York’s Hudson Yards, one must squint to subdue the shimmer bouncing off the gleaming sculpture. The Vessel, plated in a grime-resistant exterior, epitomizes the dystopian luxury found across today’s global cities. The end of the world is difficult to see with this glare in our face. The eschatology of the Vessel has been made tangible by the four suicides it has facilitated, but such architectural tensions map all along Manhattan’s Hudson River. One mile south of the Vessel is Little Island, a billionaire’s ecotopian fantasy growing out of the river. I examine these luxury developments through the slightly sardonic concept “wealth pollution.” Within this conceit, the ultra-wealthy are the rubbish bins of society, receptacles of capitalism’s unnecessary wealth. I argue that these megaprojects foreclose the ability to consider a future outside the perpetual growth of colonial-capitalism. In such a future one is forced to look at everything but see nothing. Prior to their glossy makeovers, these sites were outside neoliberal militarization. Notably, the Hudson piers facilitated subversive gay culture in the 1970s and 80s (as seen in the artwork of Alvin Baltrop and Gordon Matta-Clark).
Energy (in all its conceptualizations and connotations) is a glitch, a bug, an error. Energy is p... more Energy (in all its conceptualizations and connotations) is a glitch, a bug, an error. Energy is presented here as a roadblock in efforts to articulate and formulate a coherent physical model of the universe, as well as an impediment to achieving just and equitable social relations. Energy broke physics and broke society. This article traces conundrums and uncertainties that prevail in physics today, from the irreconcilability of quantum dynamics and gravitational spacetime to the unsatisfactory postulation of dark energy, and the profusion of probabilistic reasoning. I offer a brief history of thermodynamics and its entanglement with industrial capitalism via the steam engine. I explore alternate histories of energy (hydrodynamic and metabolic) and speculate on the potential social implications of these counterfactual trajectories. Finally, building on the novel Constructor Theory paradigm, I entertain the possibility of replacing energy with informed noticing as the undergirding architecture of physics, replacing dynamics with discernment as the underbelly of the discipline. The operation within is not to argue that the current course of energy-based physics is "incorrect," but rather that it is problematic both for reasons of cosmological compatibility and the social disharmony it has wrought.
The following offers a novel approach to critiquing and contesting the chronology of colonial cap... more The following offers a novel approach to critiquing and contesting the chronology of colonial capitalism. By examining the spatio-temporality of The Vesselthe suicidal shrine to neoliberal development in the heart of New York's Hudson Yards micropolis-this article illuminates heterodox notions of time, death, and economics. Borrowing from Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, I develop this "nekronology" to illustrate how the future is pillaging the present. I argue that architectural abstractions like The Vessel colonise the present from the future, taunting the present with the excess wealth derived from perpetual economic growth. Developments such as the Hudson Yards and neighbouring High Line exemplify this wealth pollution-the unhealthy disposal of excess wealth in public places. I then investigate the nekronology of current trends in postcolonial apocalypse and auto-homicide. Finally, I examine the aesthetics of nekronological time wealth via an analysis of dystopian sci-fi films and the temporally emancipating art of Black Quantum Futurism.
This article addresses the manner in which neoliberal society measures vulnerability. It is not u... more This article addresses the manner in which neoliberal society measures vulnerability. It is not uncommon today to come across quantitative metrics assessing the vulnerability of populations, ecosystems, or investments. The concern within is what exactly such figures represent. The following elucidates frequently overlooked temporal aspects of vulnerability and responsibility among populations that practice the perpetual growth of wealth. To investigate this concern, this article offers an examination of three contemporary conceptions of vulnerability: ecological, humanitarian, and fiscal. A brief overview of the origins of the relationship between quantification and capital is offered, along with a history of modern conceptions of vulnerability. Specifically, I am concerned with how the optics of capital displace vulnerability into a perpetually hypothetical future. In analyzing the case studies of ecosystem resilience, climate refugees, and commercial insurance, my aim is to show that dominant methods of measuring vulnerability derive from and reinforce a historically situated neoliberal method of knowledge production, resulting in a paralysis of responsibility.
This article examines several aspects of knowledge production among practitioners of 21st century... more This article examines several aspects of knowledge production among practitioners of 21st century capitalism, critiquing the motivations, funding, methods, and dissemination of today’s politically and economically dominant epistemology. We document a methodological experiment undertaken during the Oregon Eclipse Festival—a week-long event coinciding with the solar eclipse that crossed the United States on August 21, 2017. As commissioned participants in the festival’s Art & Science exhibit, we designed an interactive archeological excavation that sought to produce material evidence corroborating the (un)reality of UFO activity in Oregon. From this performance, we highlight four insights into the relationship between science, evidence, and responsibility.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019
This work traces a distinction between the extensive optics of capitalized knowledge production t... more This work traces a distinction between the extensive optics of capitalized knowledge production that engender extraction and accumulation, and an intensive optics that relies on integration and errantry. This distinction reflects the extensive and intensive properties observed in physics and measurement. Within, I map this distinction onto notions of narrative and poetic causality. At heart, this work is concerned with operationalizing the social changes necessary to halt the perpetually accelerating asymmetrical growth of wealth that beckons the mass extinctions of the Anthropocene and manifests injustice and inequity around the globe. To such ends, this discussion unites threads within philosophy, physics, and literature that posit causality as emergent and contingent, as opposed to sequential and teleological. That is, this article allies itself with the stance that time and space are not extensive qualities of a pre-existing universe, but rather intensive affordances that emerge through material interaction. I attempt to deploy these strands of theory toward political engagement with a novel form of non-cumulative measurement to destabilize the data-based epistemology used to justify inhuman development policies. Specifically, I examine the increased neoliberalization of urban space over the past decades, and the effects of this homogenization on public demonstrations of outrage and dissent.
IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology, 2020
The twenty-first century is programmed. From the fleet of Experience Designers (UX) employed by G... more The twenty-first century is programmed. From the fleet of Experience Designers (UX) employed by Google to optimize digital interactions to the machinists that automate lathes to grind the cogs of industry, there is an emphasis on reproducible and predictable outcomes—programmed output. The valuation of mechanized and machinic output has a history intricately bound to the economics and social relations of capitalizing Europe. This paper investigates the privileging of programmable output over the preceding centuries in a society that pursues the perpetual growth of wealth. I argue that shifts towards automation and programmability mark a significant transition in the concept of responsibility, both individual and social. That is, the outsourcing of responsibility to machines has engendered a dehumanized responsibility necessary to normalize detrimental and unjust socio-environmental conditions. To these ends, I examine encoded materials—the Jacquard loom, IBM’s early punchards, and today’s object-oriented programming languages—for insights into the mass-produced responsibility of the industrialized world.
The quantification of human environments has a history—a relatively short history. This article e... more The quantification of human environments has a history—a relatively short history. This article explores how the notion of quantifiable reality has become naturalized through the privileging of predictive utility as the primary goal of knowledge production. This theme is examined via the invention and application of temperature— how it was sociomaterially constructed and how it is globally restructuring social organization today. Temperature does not exist pervasively throughout all space and time. Physicists may affirm that fluctuations in relative heat are ubiquitous, but as a measurement of these fluctuations, temperature only emerges through arrangements of political and environmental observations. What phenomena do populations deem worthy of observation? How do populations manipulate materials to make such observations? By tracing the origins of thermometry and investigating modern efforts to reconstruct and model ulterior temperatures, I illustrate that temperatures, like other measurements, are cultural artifacts pliable to sociopolitical efforts of control and domination.
Tracce Urbane: Rivista Italiana Transdisciplinare di Studi Urbani, 2022
The geometry of the screen is pretty boring—rectangular. This article attempts to dissect and ref... more The geometry of the screen is pretty boring—rectangular. This article attempts to dissect and refashion the electric rectangles that consume so much of today's visual field. Rather than static surfaces, I argue that the hand-held screens of smartphones host a geometrical underworld that allows urban interactions to be rethought. Electric platforms offer a new density—millions of interactions can take place in a few cm2 of a phone display. How are we seen and how do we hide at these scales? The nanoscopic aspect of electrons reshapes traditional modes of narrative visibility. The velocity of electricity renders today's images semiotically stochastic. I explore these concerns by engaging the philosophy and aesthetics of xenofeminism along with Gilles Châtelet's geometry, which conceives distance as a surface rather than a line. As a case study, I analyze the electric object "#xenofeminism" on Instagram. Geometry is useful in studying electric geographies because it is scale independent (geometry works at planetary or subatomic levels). Today's screenscape induces alienation and boredom. I examine these affects to better appreciate xenofeminism's "politics for alienation."
Fire is irreversible—an entropic release that scatters and disorganizes aggregate pockets of life... more Fire is irreversible—an entropic release that scatters and disorganizes aggregate pockets of life, fuel, and resources. In fighting wildfires, forest managers attempt to scorch borders of death into the planet so that onrushing blazes have nothing left to burn. This article suggests that such tactics reflect a far-right political ecology which has come to terms with the limits of material resources (and thus perpetual economic growth). A far-right environmentalism has broken from the myth of endless growth propagated by mainstream economics. While this myth has been critiqued on the left for over a century in efforts to halt its deleterious social and environmental effects, the far-right response is quite different. Rather than halt the pursuit of perpetual growth, far-right sentiment, as expressed by the 2019 eco-fascist mass-shootings and popular right-wing media, attempts to burn a path for continuous growth by searing exclusionary borders between the present and future.
espanolEl fuego es irreversible; es una liberacion entropica que dispersa y desorganiza las redes... more espanolEl fuego es irreversible; es una liberacion entropica que dispersa y desorganiza las redes de vida, energia y recursos. Para combatir los incendios forestales que se expanden sobre el planeta, los guardabosques tratan de calcinar zonas y asi crear barreras de muerte de modo que las llamas no tengan nada mas que quemar. Este articulo sugiere que tales tacticas son reflejo de una ecologia politica de extrema derecha que ha asumido los limites de los recursos naturales (y por lo tanto del crecimiento economico perpetuo) y que ha roto con el mito del crecimiento sin fin propagado por las corrientes economicas hegemonicas. Mientras la izquierda lleva criticando este mito desde hace mas de un siglo en un esfuerzo por detener sus mortiferos efectos en la sociedad y el medioambiente, la extrema derecha ha respondido de forma diferente. En lugar de tratar de detener la persecucion del crecimiento economico infinito, el sentir de la extrema derecha, difundido a traves de sus medios o e...
When glancing at the Vessel in New York’s Hudson Yards, one must squint to subdue the shimmer bou... more When glancing at the Vessel in New York’s Hudson Yards, one must squint to subdue the shimmer bouncing off the gleaming sculpture. The Vessel, plated in a grime-resistant exterior, epitomizes the dystopian luxury found across today’s global cities. The end of the world is difficult to see with this glare in our face. The eschatology of the Vessel has been made tangible by the four suicides it has facilitated, but such architectural tensions map all along Manhattan’s Hudson River. One mile south of the Vessel is Little Island, a billionaire’s ecotopian fantasy growing out of the river. I examine these luxury developments through the slightly sardonic concept “wealth pollution.” Within this conceit, the ultra-wealthy are the rubbish bins of society, receptacles of capitalism’s unnecessary wealth. I argue that these megaprojects foreclose the ability to consider a future outside the perpetual growth of colonial-capitalism. In such a future one is forced to look at everything but see nothing. Prior to their glossy makeovers, these sites were outside neoliberal militarization. Notably, the Hudson piers facilitated subversive gay culture in the 1970s and 80s (as seen in the artwork of Alvin Baltrop and Gordon Matta-Clark).
Energy (in all its conceptualizations and connotations) is a glitch, a bug, an error. Energy is p... more Energy (in all its conceptualizations and connotations) is a glitch, a bug, an error. Energy is presented here as a roadblock in efforts to articulate and formulate a coherent physical model of the universe, as well as an impediment to achieving just and equitable social relations. Energy broke physics and broke society. This article traces conundrums and uncertainties that prevail in physics today, from the irreconcilability of quantum dynamics and gravitational spacetime to the unsatisfactory postulation of dark energy, and the profusion of probabilistic reasoning. I offer a brief history of thermodynamics and its entanglement with industrial capitalism via the steam engine. I explore alternate histories of energy (hydrodynamic and metabolic) and speculate on the potential social implications of these counterfactual trajectories. Finally, building on the novel Constructor Theory paradigm, I entertain the possibility of replacing energy with informed noticing as the undergirding architecture of physics, replacing dynamics with discernment as the underbelly of the discipline. The operation within is not to argue that the current course of energy-based physics is "incorrect," but rather that it is problematic both for reasons of cosmological compatibility and the social disharmony it has wrought.
The following offers a novel approach to critiquing and contesting the chronology of colonial cap... more The following offers a novel approach to critiquing and contesting the chronology of colonial capitalism. By examining the spatio-temporality of The Vesselthe suicidal shrine to neoliberal development in the heart of New York's Hudson Yards micropolis-this article illuminates heterodox notions of time, death, and economics. Borrowing from Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, I develop this "nekronology" to illustrate how the future is pillaging the present. I argue that architectural abstractions like The Vessel colonise the present from the future, taunting the present with the excess wealth derived from perpetual economic growth. Developments such as the Hudson Yards and neighbouring High Line exemplify this wealth pollution-the unhealthy disposal of excess wealth in public places. I then investigate the nekronology of current trends in postcolonial apocalypse and auto-homicide. Finally, I examine the aesthetics of nekronological time wealth via an analysis of dystopian sci-fi films and the temporally emancipating art of Black Quantum Futurism.
This article addresses the manner in which neoliberal society measures vulnerability. It is not u... more This article addresses the manner in which neoliberal society measures vulnerability. It is not uncommon today to come across quantitative metrics assessing the vulnerability of populations, ecosystems, or investments. The concern within is what exactly such figures represent. The following elucidates frequently overlooked temporal aspects of vulnerability and responsibility among populations that practice the perpetual growth of wealth. To investigate this concern, this article offers an examination of three contemporary conceptions of vulnerability: ecological, humanitarian, and fiscal. A brief overview of the origins of the relationship between quantification and capital is offered, along with a history of modern conceptions of vulnerability. Specifically, I am concerned with how the optics of capital displace vulnerability into a perpetually hypothetical future. In analyzing the case studies of ecosystem resilience, climate refugees, and commercial insurance, my aim is to show that dominant methods of measuring vulnerability derive from and reinforce a historically situated neoliberal method of knowledge production, resulting in a paralysis of responsibility.
This article examines several aspects of knowledge production among practitioners of 21st century... more This article examines several aspects of knowledge production among practitioners of 21st century capitalism, critiquing the motivations, funding, methods, and dissemination of today’s politically and economically dominant epistemology. We document a methodological experiment undertaken during the Oregon Eclipse Festival—a week-long event coinciding with the solar eclipse that crossed the United States on August 21, 2017. As commissioned participants in the festival’s Art & Science exhibit, we designed an interactive archeological excavation that sought to produce material evidence corroborating the (un)reality of UFO activity in Oregon. From this performance, we highlight four insights into the relationship between science, evidence, and responsibility.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019
This work traces a distinction between the extensive optics of capitalized knowledge production t... more This work traces a distinction between the extensive optics of capitalized knowledge production that engender extraction and accumulation, and an intensive optics that relies on integration and errantry. This distinction reflects the extensive and intensive properties observed in physics and measurement. Within, I map this distinction onto notions of narrative and poetic causality. At heart, this work is concerned with operationalizing the social changes necessary to halt the perpetually accelerating asymmetrical growth of wealth that beckons the mass extinctions of the Anthropocene and manifests injustice and inequity around the globe. To such ends, this discussion unites threads within philosophy, physics, and literature that posit causality as emergent and contingent, as opposed to sequential and teleological. That is, this article allies itself with the stance that time and space are not extensive qualities of a pre-existing universe, but rather intensive affordances that emerge through material interaction. I attempt to deploy these strands of theory toward political engagement with a novel form of non-cumulative measurement to destabilize the data-based epistemology used to justify inhuman development policies. Specifically, I examine the increased neoliberalization of urban space over the past decades, and the effects of this homogenization on public demonstrations of outrage and dissent.
IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology, 2020
The twenty-first century is programmed. From the fleet of Experience Designers (UX) employed by G... more The twenty-first century is programmed. From the fleet of Experience Designers (UX) employed by Google to optimize digital interactions to the machinists that automate lathes to grind the cogs of industry, there is an emphasis on reproducible and predictable outcomes—programmed output. The valuation of mechanized and machinic output has a history intricately bound to the economics and social relations of capitalizing Europe. This paper investigates the privileging of programmable output over the preceding centuries in a society that pursues the perpetual growth of wealth. I argue that shifts towards automation and programmability mark a significant transition in the concept of responsibility, both individual and social. That is, the outsourcing of responsibility to machines has engendered a dehumanized responsibility necessary to normalize detrimental and unjust socio-environmental conditions. To these ends, I examine encoded materials—the Jacquard loom, IBM’s early punchards, and today’s object-oriented programming languages—for insights into the mass-produced responsibility of the industrialized world.
The quantification of human environments has a history—a relatively short history. This article e... more The quantification of human environments has a history—a relatively short history. This article explores how the notion of quantifiable reality has become naturalized through the privileging of predictive utility as the primary goal of knowledge production. This theme is examined via the invention and application of temperature— how it was sociomaterially constructed and how it is globally restructuring social organization today. Temperature does not exist pervasively throughout all space and time. Physicists may affirm that fluctuations in relative heat are ubiquitous, but as a measurement of these fluctuations, temperature only emerges through arrangements of political and environmental observations. What phenomena do populations deem worthy of observation? How do populations manipulate materials to make such observations? By tracing the origins of thermometry and investigating modern efforts to reconstruct and model ulterior temperatures, I illustrate that temperatures, like other measurements, are cultural artifacts pliable to sociopolitical efforts of control and domination.
Tracce Urbane: Rivista Italiana Transdisciplinare di Studi Urbani, 2022
The geometry of the screen is pretty boring—rectangular. This article attempts to dissect and ref... more The geometry of the screen is pretty boring—rectangular. This article attempts to dissect and refashion the electric rectangles that consume so much of today's visual field. Rather than static surfaces, I argue that the hand-held screens of smartphones host a geometrical underworld that allows urban interactions to be rethought. Electric platforms offer a new density—millions of interactions can take place in a few cm2 of a phone display. How are we seen and how do we hide at these scales? The nanoscopic aspect of electrons reshapes traditional modes of narrative visibility. The velocity of electricity renders today's images semiotically stochastic. I explore these concerns by engaging the philosophy and aesthetics of xenofeminism along with Gilles Châtelet's geometry, which conceives distance as a surface rather than a line. As a case study, I analyze the electric object "#xenofeminism" on Instagram. Geometry is useful in studying electric geographies because it is scale independent (geometry works at planetary or subatomic levels). Today's screenscape induces alienation and boredom. I examine these affects to better appreciate xenofeminism's "politics for alienation."
Fire is irreversible—an entropic release that scatters and disorganizes aggregate pockets of life... more Fire is irreversible—an entropic release that scatters and disorganizes aggregate pockets of life, fuel, and resources. In fighting wildfires, forest managers attempt to scorch borders of death into the planet so that onrushing blazes have nothing left to burn. This article suggests that such tactics reflect a far-right political ecology which has come to terms with the limits of material resources (and thus perpetual economic growth). A far-right environmentalism has broken from the myth of endless growth propagated by mainstream economics. While this myth has been critiqued on the left for over a century in efforts to halt its deleterious social and environmental effects, the far-right response is quite different. Rather than halt the pursuit of perpetual growth, far-right sentiment, as expressed by the 2019 eco-fascist mass-shootings and popular right-wing media, attempts to burn a path for continuous growth by searing exclusionary borders between the present and future.
espanolEl fuego es irreversible; es una liberacion entropica que dispersa y desorganiza las redes... more espanolEl fuego es irreversible; es una liberacion entropica que dispersa y desorganiza las redes de vida, energia y recursos. Para combatir los incendios forestales que se expanden sobre el planeta, los guardabosques tratan de calcinar zonas y asi crear barreras de muerte de modo que las llamas no tengan nada mas que quemar. Este articulo sugiere que tales tacticas son reflejo de una ecologia politica de extrema derecha que ha asumido los limites de los recursos naturales (y por lo tanto del crecimiento economico perpetuo) y que ha roto con el mito del crecimiento sin fin propagado por las corrientes economicas hegemonicas. Mientras la izquierda lleva criticando este mito desde hace mas de un siglo en un esfuerzo por detener sus mortiferos efectos en la sociedad y el medioambiente, la extrema derecha ha respondido de forma diferente. En lugar de tratar de detener la persecucion del crecimiento economico infinito, el sentir de la extrema derecha, difundido a traves de sus medios o e...
This work investigates the material culture of public temperatures in New York City. Numbers like... more This work investigates the material culture of public temperatures in New York City. Numbers like temperature, while ubiquitous and indispensable to capitalized social relations, are often hidden away within urban infrastructures evading attention. This Archaeology of Temperature brings such numbers to light, interrogating how we construct them and how they construct us.
Building on discussions in contemporary archaeology this book challenges the border between material and discursive culture, advocating for a novel conception of capitalism’s artifacts. The artifacts examined within (temperatures) are instantaneous electric pulses, algorithmic outputs, and momentary fluctuations in mercury. The artifacts of the capitalized never sit still, operating at subatomic and solar scales. Temperatures, as numerical materials precariously straddling the colonially constructed nature-culture divide, exemplify the abstraction necessary to pursue the perpetually accelerating asymmetrical growth of wealth—a pursuit that engenders multiple environmental and economic calamities.
An Archaeology of Temperature innovatively reimagines theory and method within contemporary archaeology. Equally, in plummeting the depths of temperature, this book offers indispensable contributions to science studies, urban geography, semiotics, the philosophy of materiality, the history of thermodynamics, heterodox economics, performative scholarship, and queer ecocriticism.
Uploads
Papers by Scott W Schwartz
Building on discussions in contemporary archaeology this book challenges the border between material and discursive culture, advocating for a novel conception of capitalism’s artifacts. The artifacts examined within (temperatures) are instantaneous electric pulses, algorithmic outputs, and momentary fluctuations in mercury. The artifacts of the capitalized never sit still, operating at subatomic and solar scales. Temperatures, as numerical materials precariously straddling the colonially constructed nature-culture divide, exemplify the abstraction necessary to pursue the perpetually accelerating asymmetrical growth of wealth—a pursuit that engenders multiple environmental and economic calamities.
An Archaeology of Temperature innovatively reimagines theory and method within contemporary archaeology. Equally, in plummeting the depths of temperature, this book offers indispensable contributions to science studies, urban geography, semiotics, the philosophy of materiality, the history of thermodynamics, heterodox economics, performative scholarship, and queer ecocriticism.