Research and editorial consultation

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Image: Erik Desmazieres, original illustration to
Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel (1941)

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In the hopes of supplementing my income — which is rather modest as things currently stand — I’m hereby offering my services to the public as a freelance research and editorial consultant, available for a negotiable fee. Since a number of readers have already contacted me with questions regarding the content on this site (hoping to track down a specific quote or source an image), or seeking my advice about their own studies and intellectual pursuits, I figured I’d formalize the process.

Normally, of course, in the past this has all been done pro bono. But as the volume of inquiries I receive has begun to significantly increase in recent months, to the point where it’s become unmanageable, this is no longer a viable option for me. This, I hope, will help me prioritize those tasks which I can actually take on and commit myself to fully. Longer-term projects under different arrangements would be welcome as well. So if any groups, individuals, or institutions would be interested in hiring someone with my qualifications on a more permanent basis, don’t hesitate to ask.

Jorge Luis Borges

Erik Desmazieres, original illustration to Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel (1941)

While nothing has been cast in stone as yet, the cost of a given assignment will depend upon the amount of work it requires, measured in terms of both the size and difficulty of the project. At first the price will probably be relatively lower, until I’ve gotten a few under my belt and have a better sense of how much time and energy demand. Still, it’s not as if I haven’t done this sort of thing before, albeit in a slightly different setting and under different arrangements. Whether in an academic or professional capacity, the quality and consistency of my work is self-evident throughout.

On this page, I’m thus including a copy of my CV in PDF format, with clickable hyperlinks to examples of my writing and a copy of my employment history. My areas of greatest specialty include politics, philosophy, architecture, Russo-Soviet and European history, and archival research in multiple languages (especially Russian). However, I’d be happy to work in an editorial capacity on written pieces as well, helping to iron out any problems with grammar, style, formatting, or flow that that might exist. Given my extensive experience with visual media, also, I’d be willing to edit and curate any photos or videos you might need.

Please feel free to contact me with questions or requests. I can be reached at rosslaurencewolfe@gmail.com.

Curriculum Vitae

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Post-Futurist Anti-Capitalism (re-blogged from Anti-National Translation), as well as Notes and Oscuridades (UK), and my Tumblr

Entrance to the Perisphere, 1939 New York’s World Fair, Queens.  Designed by Harrison and Fouilhoux.

Post-Futurist Anti-Capitalism

A recent summation of my post “Memories of the Future” appears on the excellent Anti-National Translation website.  It is reproduced below.  My thanks to the author of that blog.

Ross Wolfe, of the Charnel House, has a long post on the temporality of radical politics, criticising, among other temporal orientations, various forms of hankering after divers real and imaginary pasts, and particularly the longing for a ‘prelapsarian past, of the “good old days” before everything went wrong’.  Much of the post is devoted to Franco “Bifo” Berardi and  his latest book, After the Future (2011).

Among the targets are Jewbonics/MondoWeiss blogger Max Ajl.  His text “Planet of the Fields” was in Jacobin magazine and not published online, as far as I know.  Wolfe alleges that:

It soon becomes clear, however, that the only way the author thinks humanity can survive is for it to reinstate the past.  Against bourgeois society’s “ceaseless drive to urbanization, industrialization, and capital- and input-intensive agriculture,” Ajl follows Colin Duncan in stressing “the centrality of [‘low-impact’] agriculture.”  He thus counterposes an order founded upon a more modest, traditional agrarian model to the megalopolitan nightmare-city of the last couple centuries.[34]  In order to carry out this neo-Neolithic revolution, Ajl calls for a policy of “repeasantization” — a telling slip-of-the-pen.[35]  Presumably, what he means by this is not literally the restoration of some sort of peasantry, as this feudal title tends to imply a certain legal and political status: enserfment, congenital bondage to the land (the manor or estate of a local nobleman), and the compulsory alienation of one’s property and labor to his lord as part of a corvée system.  Most farmers are not peasants.  Rather, what Ajl probably has in mind is a new yeomanry, tilling the soil in the bucolic splendor of the countryside.  Although he insists that “smallholder agriculture is not an antiquarian curio,” the spirit that animates Ajl’s atavistic vision is clearly conjured out of the ideological ectoplasm of romantic anti-capitalism.[36]  It is nourished on “the view that if only capitalism had not come into existence we could all be living in a happy hobbit-land of freed peasants and independent small producers.”[37]

(Personally, I have a problem with the simplistic ortho-Marxism Wolfe seems to be channelling in his criticism of the term “peasantry,” as I believe that the peasantry as a class are defined by the objective contradiction between proletarianisation and autonomy/communisation, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Wolfe continues, and this is where it becomes relevant to the concerns of this blog:

This would perhaps seem a neat bit of buffoonery — a quaint throwback to the petit-bourgeois socialism dismissed in the Manifesto as “reactionary and Utopian”[38] — were it not for the widespread support it enjoys in anti-capitalist circles today.  The idyllic past it portrays is, of course, a fiction.  Family farming has since the 1970s become fetishized by the “small is beautiful” Left, roughly around the same time as family-owned farms began to go extinct (transformed into subsidiaries of large-scale agribusiness).  Leftish urbanites and self-proclaimed student radicals today often see in traditional agriculture the vestiges of a simple, honest, and upright way of life that has otherwise been lost in modern times.  Seldom is it remembered that in former times the provincial homestead was a bastion of conservatismand bulwark of the ancien régime, home to ignorance, illiteracy, patriarchy, superstition, and the domestic slavery of women.[39]  Not for nothing did Marx and Engels contemptuously refer to it as a haven for “the idiocy of rural life.”[40]…

In the absence of any viable future, the gaze of all humanity turns impotently toward the past.  What emerges from such inauspicious times as these is thus a renovated passéism, in which the only imaginable society other than the one which presently endures must be seen as reminiscent of its earlier incarnations.[41]  Instead of forging a way forward into the great unknown, into an as-yet-unseen social formation, the only path that presently seems feasible for humanity is to flee into the familiar comfort of a new dark age.  Even Ajl’s “Planet of Fields” is just one step removed from Zerzanite primitivism.  To their credit, Mohandesi and Haider explicitly reject this latter-day Neo-Luddism,[42] reasserting the openness of the present.  Ajl, by contrast, addresses the primitivists’ challenge only en passant, obliquely brushing it aside on the grounds that nomadic hunter-gatherer society could never support a large population.[43]  And yet the Zerzanites can be said to possess at least one undeniable, if somewhat dubious, merit — the extreme lucidity with which they express their madness.

The post continues developing its critique of Bifo and gestures towards some alternative orientations to the past and future.  What I want to push, though, is the point that various forms of “post-futurist” romanticisms have become the default mode for anti-capitalism today, pervading the #Occupy movement, for example.  While the critique of this sort of romantic anti-capitalism is well developed on the Marxish left (see e.g. 3WF), the important messages is that that some apparently Marxist anti-capitalisms (Ajl is above all an anti-imperialist) are also mired in the “post-futurist” romance.

Also read: Ben Lear on lifeboat communism.

Related articles

Notes publication, Oscuridades, etc.

Jamie Patel of the publication Notes, run by students at Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, approached me about contributing a piece for the publication.  A worthy endeavor, methinks.  A journal of theory, creative writing, and poetry, Notes caters to a market that has up to this point been sorely neglected on campus: critical thought and investigation, accepting and promoting “anything that involves and would stimulate original thought.”  In the meantime, Jamie has been kind enough to re-blog my recent post “Memories of the Future.”  My own tastes incline me away from much of the post-Henri Lefebvre French theory they discuss on the site, but this is hardly a matter of principle.  It is encouraging to see these kinds of initiatives taking shape.

Also, many thanks to my friend Lucas Sutton from London, author of the blog Oscuridades, where Astorian noir is still gestating, for his thoughtful notes and comments in response to the post.

Tumblr

I now have a Tumblr account.  Follow me if you’d like.