How have we evolved within the globalized market economy that has
reigned triumphant in the decades since the 1999 Battle of Seattle?
"Commentating, illustrating
Description giving, adjective expert
Analyzing, surmising, musical
Myth-seeking people of the universe, this is yours!"
--T La Rock, "It's Yours"
What are people like now? How have we, in a cultural sense, evolved
within the globalized market economy that has reigned triumphant in the
decades since the 1999 Battle of Seattle?
In People of the Universe, Charles Mudede begins with the distinction
between the cultural and the social. The former emerges from the latter,
which defines the kind of animal we are universally. Sociobiological
universality is stretched to the cultural with political consequences
whose temporality is not directly biotic (the social) but historical.
The historical specificity of a collective experience is defined by the
principles of a culture determined by the distributional logic of the
market system. We do not experience abstract time, which is the time of
always. We specifically experience market-time, which is not
transhistorical.
People of the Universe is infused with a futurism that is not without
its problems. A number of its essays examine the limits not only of a
futurism directed by an unthinking reverence of progress that has its
origins in the Victorian cultural world, but, more specifically,
Afrofuturism. Other essays scan the horizon with a third conceptual
tool, this time taken from world-systems thinking, which, in essence,
organizes the history of capitalist accumulation into four state forms.
Copublished by e-flux journal
