The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World w/ Benjamin Bratton

Politics Theory Other

Benjamin Bratton joins PTO to discuss his new book, The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World. We talked about how the Covid-19 pandemic could transform our sense of human subjectivity, how to think about planning at a planetary scale - in a way that neither falls prey to techno utopianism, nor retreats into a romantic localism. We also talked about what the pandemic means for populism, and why taking an epidemiological view of society will aid us in dealing with future crises. And finally we also discussed the unfortunate response of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to the pandemic and why the dominance of the baby boomers in academia has led to an overemphasis on what Benjamin describes as a "negative biopolitics" that can only see governance and systems of mapping and planning in sinister, authoritarian terms.