Tim Luke - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Tim Luke
The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
On 9.11.01
Telos, Jun 20, 2001
Chapter 25:Technology and Culture in Online Education: Critical Reflections on a Decade of Distance Learning
Nuclear Reactions: the (re)presentation of Hiroshima at the National Air and Space Museum
... the human subjects who accept these regimes for accumulating and interpreting historical obje... more ... the human subjects who accept these regimes for accumulating and interpreting historical objects (Agger, 1989). To discover the ... Newly appointed Smithsonian regent, Senator Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi), promised to recommend to the Senate Rules Committee, now chaired ...
Marcuse’s Ecological Critique and the American Environmental Movement
Herbert Marcuse, 2014
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, Dec 2, 2013
This paper is a reflection on the publication practice of the journal Fast Capitalism, an opensou... more This paper is a reflection on the publication practice of the journal Fast Capitalism, an opensource, electronic journal established by Ben Agger and Timothy Luke in 2005. It also presents thoughts on writing, reading and publishing in postmodern capitalism.
Spinning Anthropocenarios: Climate Change Narratives as Geopolitics in the Late Holocene
Spectra, 2018
This essay reconsiders research programs in environmental studies as they confront the Anthropoce... more This essay reconsiders research programs in environmental studies as they confront the Anthropocene.While scientific investigations are conducted with a commitment to clarifying the scientific record for geological sciences, the interpretation of their goals, methods, and results have also become more fluid cultural, political, and social narratives with complicated and conflicted implications in today’s economy and society.Anthropocene studies, which have assembled multi-scale projects of multidisciplinary teams, now aspire to steer geoscience analysis, in part, toward planet-wide management of today's rapid climate change events as they propound new objects of study and control.This study poses some questions about these trends.Is the turn to the Anthropocene, which can easily serve be another mystified narrative for the “rise of the West” since the fifteenth century, an attempt to sustain technocratic projects for centers of power and knowledge based in the West?As with all politics, what decisive struggles are at stake between "who, whom" in these shifting geopolitical debates that now are cloaked in the advanced study of physical and social sciences?
Fast Capitalism, 2018
Science should never fully rest upon settled consensus, even though intense conflicts at key conj... more Science should never fully rest upon settled consensus, even though intense conflicts at key conjunctures in many scientific research programs often trigger such demands. Proponents of the Anthropocene thesis in various disciplines and different countries are lobbying hard now to force a consensus about its actuality, believing that the dire changes associated with this new epoch will alarm inventors and industrialists enough to slow rapid economic development and destructive climate change. Other geoscientists, however, doubt they should declare this moment in time as the close of Holocene epoch, which demarcates the last 11,000 to 12,000 years of the current Quaternary period in geological time. Furthermore, they are reluctant to rule that the planet now is so fatally ensnared by rapid anthropogenic climate change that this new geological epoch of humanity's making, namely, "the Anthropocene" definitely exists. Such forced settlements do not adequately conform to the methodical practices of prevailing geoscience research; and, even if they did, few believe the declaration would make much difference in the workings of human life on Earth. At the same time, the suggestive powers of the Anthropocene concept for many other intellectuals, scientists, and writers beyond the sciences have become almost irresistible (Lidskog and Waterton, 2018: 25-46). Its rapid proliferation in many cultural and scientific networks through their everyday spoken and written communication is a rolling daily plebiscite that leans toward ignoring the old rules. Professor Jedediah Purdy at Duke University's law school, for example, opines that human beings do, in fact, now inhabit "a new nature" since "the Anthropocene adds nature to the list of things we can no longer regard as natural," which transforms, in turn, the management of this "new nature" into "a political question because the Anthropocene future is, unavoidably, a collective human project" (Purdy, 2018). Soaking in the heated froth spraying from such rhetorical whirlpools, other thinkers also find an expansive remit to speculate more concretely about the current moment "as if " the Anthropocene epoch has become a reality during "the Great Acceleration" of economic and technological change since 1945 (McNeill and Engelke, 2014: 1-5). There are groups of museum professionals, who are also have decided to sail on this rhetorical tide by steering their institutions into the largely uncharted waters of these controversies . The catastrophic effects of rapid climate change are significant, and they do impact more than the taxonomic conventions of stratigraphers, geologists, or botanists about deep time. This study suggests nothing better exemplifies such add-on effects from these scientific debates than a few efforts by museums and other cultural institutions, first, to map new channels being cut by the currents churning up in debates about the Great Acceleration, and, second, to explore various rocks and ripples rising out of these discursive currents. Along the banks, one already finds some highly politicized collaborative conservation efforts at seed banks, zoos, biotic conservatories, aquaria, botanical gardens, and museums, as their curators struggle to sponsor the survival of Holocene life forms and cultural inventions as well as operate institutionally as arks for the activism needed to slow the accelerants of the
Fast Capitalism, 2015
This brief statement is a meditation on mystification. At this moment, the United States of Ameri... more This brief statement is a meditation on mystification. At this moment, the United States of America is beset by crises, contradictions, and conflicts. It remains engaged in long-running undeclared wars. Voter turnout for many local, state, and national elections is abysmal. Corporations are officially recognized as legal persons with definite basic rights. Much of civil society escapes daily into the cybernetic haze of social media. The deep state has virtually everyone under some sort of surveillance. Now many members of the armed forces, once deployed overseas have been returning home after "the surge" in Iraq and Afghanistan, but remain wary of a recall to new deployments in Syria, Libya or Yemen. At this same conjuncture of events, however, an august group of academicians, artists, and activists recently joined a few other experts, while averting their eyes from these disasters, to write a national report about the declining condition of the arts and sciences that America's citizens need to assess these disastrous events in their public and private lives. Coming together as the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, they produced a substantial white paper--The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities And Social Sciences for a Vibrant, Competitive, and Secure Nation--to extoll the national need to strengthen the humanities and social sciences at all educational levels. This bold move, they assert, would brighten America's already gleaming greatness. Learning more about the work of humanists and social scientists, according to the Commission, might help American citizens better participate more "meaningfully in the democratic process--as voters, informed consumers, and productive workers" (The Heart of the Matter [hereafter HM], 2013: 10), and thereby rise above the nation's current political malaise. Yet, they ignore, at the same time, the complex social forces whose influences neutralize collective power, estrange citizens in voting, and rob the country of good jobs needed for voters to be "informed buyers" in today's purportedly liberal democratic capitalism. Mystification then is indeed flowing through many aspects of this Commission's activities. Because this report's writers appear to have, as Marx notes, "accepted its language and its laws," the market strictures of today's globalized political economy dominate the Commission's analysis, exposing how nakedly "the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men" (Marx, 1978: 70, 71). Washington's inclination since 2000 to put the stability of insurance companies, money center banks, and equity markets at the heart of America's public policy matters suggests those elite institutions are valued far more than ordinary men and women. Even so, the Commission asserts more humanistic learning and social scientific research could make full amends for these troubles. In actuality, The Heart of the Matter report implicitly concurs with Marx. The more citizens participate under the influences of a false consciousness derived from nonhumanistic learning or unsocial nonscientific teaching, the
SPECTRA: the Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Theory Archives, 2015
This paper explores how the recent turn to the Anthropocene in many environmental and political d... more This paper explores how the recent turn to the Anthropocene in many environmental and political debates appears, first, to mystify the characteristics of the humans who are transforming the planet Earth on a biophysical scale in geological time, and, second, to justify the importance of new planetary eco-managerial interventions to administer the costs and benefits of these ecological events in the most efficient manner possible. As a result, the discourses of sustainability and resilience amid these worldwide changes appear to operate with increasingly conservative political agendas. On the one hand, they legitimate a strange fusion of ecological sustainability and economic development in green modernization programs, which could considered new policies for "sustainabilization." Yet, on the other hand, these codes of green performativity also work to preserve the historically inequitable distribution of wealth, technology, and power for those social forces that have caused the most ecological destruction around the world over the past 250 years.
Accumulation Crisis
Telos, 1986
Reading James O'apos;Connor's Accumulation Crisis is very confusing. At certain junctures... more Reading James O'apos;Connor's Accumulation Crisis is very confusing. At certain junctures, it reads like the “sequel” to The Fiscal Crisis of the State, elaborating the expanding of his 1973 critique of modem macroeconomic management as a spoils system of special interests. At odier turns, it comes across as a “prequel” to the earlier work, oudining a tortuous logic for the underproduction and accumulation crises that set off the “fiscal crises” he described over a decade earlier. Although not all that new, the plot of the sequel is occasionally interesting. The prequel side of the narrative, however, is very questionable and as old as the hills because, once again, the ancient apparatus of theories of surplus value is trundled out and fired up to “explain” the roots of the current crisis.
Review-Symposium on Soviet-Type Societies
Telos, 1984
Abstract Because of the growing debate concerning the nature of Soviet-type societies, a symposiu... more Abstract Because of the growing debate concerning the nature of Soviet-type societies, a symposium-review was organized around two important recent books on the subject. The following are discussions of either one or both of the following volumes:
Informationalism and Ecology
Telos, 1983
The disruption of the ecological balance sustaining human life has become one of the major produc... more The disruption of the ecological balance sustaining human life has become one of the major products of advanced industrial society. Nature has been despoiled at the expense of all life for the benefit of a handful of recent generations who have been “fortunate” enough to enjoy the role of consumers in the 20th century. This consumerist model thrives upon the wasteful production of private goods by destroying the collective resources of the natural habitat. Having overloaded the ecological system of North America, American firms have shifted capital and jobs to other continents, forging a transnational industrial regime out of their untapped ecological potential.
Anti-Work?
Telos, 1981
In “Anti-Work and the Struggle for Control,” John Zerzan argues that America's over-exploited... more In “Anti-Work and the Struggle for Control,” John Zerzan argues that America's over-exploited working classes once again are verging on total revolt. Although many points in his arguments are difficult to firmly pin down, Zerzan apparently holds that the recent increases in a whole range of work avoidance activities are the preliminary signs of a general crisis looming just over the horizon as the Reagan revolution slowly unfolds its program for the American economy. The broad-gauged systematic challenge of “work refusal,” in its many subtle forms across the spectrum from absenteeism to on-the-job drug abuse, now poses such a basic threat to corporate capital that big business and top management have retreated to the last bastions of codetermination, co-optation and, ultimately, corporativism in order to merely survive the coming crisis.
Telos, 1990
Recent unanticipated events in the USSR necessitate rethinking Marx's materialist conception of h... more Recent unanticipated events in the USSR necessitate rethinking Marx's materialist conception of history. This, however, does not mean forgetting him altogether. His metanarrative may be dead, but it is still moving. Paradoxically, it seems to reverse its time-sequence in practice. That is, in stage-skipping into the future through Stalin's "socialist" transition the USSR ironically ends up flipping backwards into the past. The key question facing the disintegrating USSR today is where will most or all of its fragments stop: capitalism, feudalism, oriental despotism, primitive society? Admittedly, Marx's road map to communism was always vague. Yet it postulated that feudal Europe had seen the development of capitalism from within its cities that gradually evolved into the crisis-ridden industrial phase in which modern European societies faced the prospect of leaping into socialism. This universalist account of historical change became the benchmark against which Lenin calibrated the trajectory for a revolution in Tsarist Russia. The Russian revolutionary upheaval would combine the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions into one. Skipping capitalism and bourgeois democracy, Soviet Russia would leap directly into socialism. Almost from the beginning, however, Lenin's revolution did not turn out either as he had expected or as Marx had forecast. With the First Five Year Plan, all the original projections for revolutionary 1
The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
On 9.11.01
Telos, Jun 20, 2001
Chapter 25:Technology and Culture in Online Education: Critical Reflections on a Decade of Distance Learning
Nuclear Reactions: the (re)presentation of Hiroshima at the National Air and Space Museum
... the human subjects who accept these regimes for accumulating and interpreting historical obje... more ... the human subjects who accept these regimes for accumulating and interpreting historical objects (Agger, 1989). To discover the ... Newly appointed Smithsonian regent, Senator Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi), promised to recommend to the Senate Rules Committee, now chaired ...
Marcuse’s Ecological Critique and the American Environmental Movement
Herbert Marcuse, 2014
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, Dec 2, 2013
This paper is a reflection on the publication practice of the journal Fast Capitalism, an opensou... more This paper is a reflection on the publication practice of the journal Fast Capitalism, an opensource, electronic journal established by Ben Agger and Timothy Luke in 2005. It also presents thoughts on writing, reading and publishing in postmodern capitalism.
Spinning Anthropocenarios: Climate Change Narratives as Geopolitics in the Late Holocene
Spectra, 2018
This essay reconsiders research programs in environmental studies as they confront the Anthropoce... more This essay reconsiders research programs in environmental studies as they confront the Anthropocene.While scientific investigations are conducted with a commitment to clarifying the scientific record for geological sciences, the interpretation of their goals, methods, and results have also become more fluid cultural, political, and social narratives with complicated and conflicted implications in today’s economy and society.Anthropocene studies, which have assembled multi-scale projects of multidisciplinary teams, now aspire to steer geoscience analysis, in part, toward planet-wide management of today's rapid climate change events as they propound new objects of study and control.This study poses some questions about these trends.Is the turn to the Anthropocene, which can easily serve be another mystified narrative for the “rise of the West” since the fifteenth century, an attempt to sustain technocratic projects for centers of power and knowledge based in the West?As with all politics, what decisive struggles are at stake between "who, whom" in these shifting geopolitical debates that now are cloaked in the advanced study of physical and social sciences?
Fast Capitalism, 2018
Science should never fully rest upon settled consensus, even though intense conflicts at key conj... more Science should never fully rest upon settled consensus, even though intense conflicts at key conjunctures in many scientific research programs often trigger such demands. Proponents of the Anthropocene thesis in various disciplines and different countries are lobbying hard now to force a consensus about its actuality, believing that the dire changes associated with this new epoch will alarm inventors and industrialists enough to slow rapid economic development and destructive climate change. Other geoscientists, however, doubt they should declare this moment in time as the close of Holocene epoch, which demarcates the last 11,000 to 12,000 years of the current Quaternary period in geological time. Furthermore, they are reluctant to rule that the planet now is so fatally ensnared by rapid anthropogenic climate change that this new geological epoch of humanity's making, namely, "the Anthropocene" definitely exists. Such forced settlements do not adequately conform to the methodical practices of prevailing geoscience research; and, even if they did, few believe the declaration would make much difference in the workings of human life on Earth. At the same time, the suggestive powers of the Anthropocene concept for many other intellectuals, scientists, and writers beyond the sciences have become almost irresistible (Lidskog and Waterton, 2018: 25-46). Its rapid proliferation in many cultural and scientific networks through their everyday spoken and written communication is a rolling daily plebiscite that leans toward ignoring the old rules. Professor Jedediah Purdy at Duke University's law school, for example, opines that human beings do, in fact, now inhabit "a new nature" since "the Anthropocene adds nature to the list of things we can no longer regard as natural," which transforms, in turn, the management of this "new nature" into "a political question because the Anthropocene future is, unavoidably, a collective human project" (Purdy, 2018). Soaking in the heated froth spraying from such rhetorical whirlpools, other thinkers also find an expansive remit to speculate more concretely about the current moment "as if " the Anthropocene epoch has become a reality during "the Great Acceleration" of economic and technological change since 1945 (McNeill and Engelke, 2014: 1-5). There are groups of museum professionals, who are also have decided to sail on this rhetorical tide by steering their institutions into the largely uncharted waters of these controversies . The catastrophic effects of rapid climate change are significant, and they do impact more than the taxonomic conventions of stratigraphers, geologists, or botanists about deep time. This study suggests nothing better exemplifies such add-on effects from these scientific debates than a few efforts by museums and other cultural institutions, first, to map new channels being cut by the currents churning up in debates about the Great Acceleration, and, second, to explore various rocks and ripples rising out of these discursive currents. Along the banks, one already finds some highly politicized collaborative conservation efforts at seed banks, zoos, biotic conservatories, aquaria, botanical gardens, and museums, as their curators struggle to sponsor the survival of Holocene life forms and cultural inventions as well as operate institutionally as arks for the activism needed to slow the accelerants of the
Fast Capitalism, 2015
This brief statement is a meditation on mystification. At this moment, the United States of Ameri... more This brief statement is a meditation on mystification. At this moment, the United States of America is beset by crises, contradictions, and conflicts. It remains engaged in long-running undeclared wars. Voter turnout for many local, state, and national elections is abysmal. Corporations are officially recognized as legal persons with definite basic rights. Much of civil society escapes daily into the cybernetic haze of social media. The deep state has virtually everyone under some sort of surveillance. Now many members of the armed forces, once deployed overseas have been returning home after "the surge" in Iraq and Afghanistan, but remain wary of a recall to new deployments in Syria, Libya or Yemen. At this same conjuncture of events, however, an august group of academicians, artists, and activists recently joined a few other experts, while averting their eyes from these disasters, to write a national report about the declining condition of the arts and sciences that America's citizens need to assess these disastrous events in their public and private lives. Coming together as the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, they produced a substantial white paper--The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities And Social Sciences for a Vibrant, Competitive, and Secure Nation--to extoll the national need to strengthen the humanities and social sciences at all educational levels. This bold move, they assert, would brighten America's already gleaming greatness. Learning more about the work of humanists and social scientists, according to the Commission, might help American citizens better participate more "meaningfully in the democratic process--as voters, informed consumers, and productive workers" (The Heart of the Matter [hereafter HM], 2013: 10), and thereby rise above the nation's current political malaise. Yet, they ignore, at the same time, the complex social forces whose influences neutralize collective power, estrange citizens in voting, and rob the country of good jobs needed for voters to be "informed buyers" in today's purportedly liberal democratic capitalism. Mystification then is indeed flowing through many aspects of this Commission's activities. Because this report's writers appear to have, as Marx notes, "accepted its language and its laws," the market strictures of today's globalized political economy dominate the Commission's analysis, exposing how nakedly "the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men" (Marx, 1978: 70, 71). Washington's inclination since 2000 to put the stability of insurance companies, money center banks, and equity markets at the heart of America's public policy matters suggests those elite institutions are valued far more than ordinary men and women. Even so, the Commission asserts more humanistic learning and social scientific research could make full amends for these troubles. In actuality, The Heart of the Matter report implicitly concurs with Marx. The more citizens participate under the influences of a false consciousness derived from nonhumanistic learning or unsocial nonscientific teaching, the
SPECTRA: the Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Theory Archives, 2015
This paper explores how the recent turn to the Anthropocene in many environmental and political d... more This paper explores how the recent turn to the Anthropocene in many environmental and political debates appears, first, to mystify the characteristics of the humans who are transforming the planet Earth on a biophysical scale in geological time, and, second, to justify the importance of new planetary eco-managerial interventions to administer the costs and benefits of these ecological events in the most efficient manner possible. As a result, the discourses of sustainability and resilience amid these worldwide changes appear to operate with increasingly conservative political agendas. On the one hand, they legitimate a strange fusion of ecological sustainability and economic development in green modernization programs, which could considered new policies for "sustainabilization." Yet, on the other hand, these codes of green performativity also work to preserve the historically inequitable distribution of wealth, technology, and power for those social forces that have caused the most ecological destruction around the world over the past 250 years.
Accumulation Crisis
Telos, 1986
Reading James O'apos;Connor's Accumulation Crisis is very confusing. At certain junctures... more Reading James O'apos;Connor's Accumulation Crisis is very confusing. At certain junctures, it reads like the “sequel” to The Fiscal Crisis of the State, elaborating the expanding of his 1973 critique of modem macroeconomic management as a spoils system of special interests. At odier turns, it comes across as a “prequel” to the earlier work, oudining a tortuous logic for the underproduction and accumulation crises that set off the “fiscal crises” he described over a decade earlier. Although not all that new, the plot of the sequel is occasionally interesting. The prequel side of the narrative, however, is very questionable and as old as the hills because, once again, the ancient apparatus of theories of surplus value is trundled out and fired up to “explain” the roots of the current crisis.
Review-Symposium on Soviet-Type Societies
Telos, 1984
Abstract Because of the growing debate concerning the nature of Soviet-type societies, a symposiu... more Abstract Because of the growing debate concerning the nature of Soviet-type societies, a symposium-review was organized around two important recent books on the subject. The following are discussions of either one or both of the following volumes:
Informationalism and Ecology
Telos, 1983
The disruption of the ecological balance sustaining human life has become one of the major produc... more The disruption of the ecological balance sustaining human life has become one of the major products of advanced industrial society. Nature has been despoiled at the expense of all life for the benefit of a handful of recent generations who have been “fortunate” enough to enjoy the role of consumers in the 20th century. This consumerist model thrives upon the wasteful production of private goods by destroying the collective resources of the natural habitat. Having overloaded the ecological system of North America, American firms have shifted capital and jobs to other continents, forging a transnational industrial regime out of their untapped ecological potential.
Anti-Work?
Telos, 1981
In “Anti-Work and the Struggle for Control,” John Zerzan argues that America's over-exploited... more In “Anti-Work and the Struggle for Control,” John Zerzan argues that America's over-exploited working classes once again are verging on total revolt. Although many points in his arguments are difficult to firmly pin down, Zerzan apparently holds that the recent increases in a whole range of work avoidance activities are the preliminary signs of a general crisis looming just over the horizon as the Reagan revolution slowly unfolds its program for the American economy. The broad-gauged systematic challenge of “work refusal,” in its many subtle forms across the spectrum from absenteeism to on-the-job drug abuse, now poses such a basic threat to corporate capital that big business and top management have retreated to the last bastions of codetermination, co-optation and, ultimately, corporativism in order to merely survive the coming crisis.
Telos, 1990
Recent unanticipated events in the USSR necessitate rethinking Marx's materialist conception of h... more Recent unanticipated events in the USSR necessitate rethinking Marx's materialist conception of history. This, however, does not mean forgetting him altogether. His metanarrative may be dead, but it is still moving. Paradoxically, it seems to reverse its time-sequence in practice. That is, in stage-skipping into the future through Stalin's "socialist" transition the USSR ironically ends up flipping backwards into the past. The key question facing the disintegrating USSR today is where will most or all of its fragments stop: capitalism, feudalism, oriental despotism, primitive society? Admittedly, Marx's road map to communism was always vague. Yet it postulated that feudal Europe had seen the development of capitalism from within its cities that gradually evolved into the crisis-ridden industrial phase in which modern European societies faced the prospect of leaping into socialism. This universalist account of historical change became the benchmark against which Lenin calibrated the trajectory for a revolution in Tsarist Russia. The Russian revolutionary upheaval would combine the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions into one. Skipping capitalism and bourgeois democracy, Soviet Russia would leap directly into socialism. Almost from the beginning, however, Lenin's revolution did not turn out either as he had expected or as Marx had forecast. With the First Five Year Plan, all the original projections for revolutionary 1
Sustainable Development, 2021
Overuse of resources is accelerating current negative trends in climate change, ecosystem destruc... more Overuse of resources is accelerating current negative trends in climate change, ecosystem destruction, and biodiversity loss. The ultimate outcome is that contemporary human society is reaching or exceeding the limits of planetary boundaries. It is therefore imperative to articulate a new theoretical understanding of resources and the ethical, political, and environmental conditions of their use. In this article, we take a radical departure from treating resources as having fixed, essential and ready to exploit qualities, and offer a non-essentialist theory that considers that resources come into being as a result of social processes. We label this approach resourcification. This shift offers a new theoretical platform for developing a postsustainability understanding of the relationships of humans to humans, to other living creatures, and to the physical environment, one that is more suited to meeting the challenges of working with the sustainable development goals in the Anthropocene.
![FIGURE 1. Dimensions of resourcification [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]](https://figures.academia-assets.com/68046589/figure_001.jpg)
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