Ben Stemper

Link to the issue: www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.p...

Picture of a print article in a journal. Title: La Mise en Scene de l'Utopie: Theatre et Imaginaire Utopique chez Joseph Déjacque

Abstract for the article: The Staging of Utopia: Theatre and Utopian Imagination in Joseph Déjacque This article examines Joseph Déjacque's only known piece of dramatical writing, Les Civilisés de la Décadence ou les Martyrs du Socialisme. Drawing on the work of Bertolt Brecht as well as contemporary socialist musings on theatre and opera, particularly by Étienne Cabet and Charles Fourier, this article analyzes Déjacque's play as a distillation of his utopian ideas for the stage. It argues that the characters in the play consistently oscillate between their individual identity and their existence as synecdoche. This introduces a critical force to the play, as it forces the audience to interrogate the actions on stage in relation to their own life and political convictions.

Very excited to see my article for the most recent edition of the Cahiers Charles Fourier out in print! I am incredibly thankful for the opportunity and the support provided by the Cahiers, including but not limited to translating the article, and Patrick Samzun in particular.

I wrote on the Parisian lawyer and dystopian theorist Eugène Huzar (1820-1890) as a degrowth theorist at the dawn of the Capitalocene for @nichecanada.bsky.social, grappling with whether adaptation to ecocide can ever meaningfully happen within a system geared towards infinite growth at every level.

A picture of a talk at a conference.

Very grateful for the opportunity to present a paper on Eugène Huzar's environmental dystopianism at the 15th London Graduate Conference in HPT

Have We Reached Peak AI? Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a 10-minute-long interview with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, with journalist Joanna Stern asking a series of thoughtful yet straightforward questions that Murat...

Today's newsletter: I believe we're reaching peak AI, and that the industry is going to crash to Earth as enterprises and consumers realize the limits and lack of utility of ChatGPT and co.

And it's all thanks to Sam Altman's empty hype cycle. 

tinyurl.com/wyea31824

The worst thing about reading Les Misérables cover to cover is that it still only counts as one book in my Goodreads challenge

TIL James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis's research on the "Gaia hypothesis" was funded in part by Big Oil.

@n.b. @ccmmody.bsky.social

Literature recommendations on thinking about linear vs. exponential growth in the nineteenth century?

The University of Kent, self-styled Britain's 'European University ' is phasing out language teaching. Mais tu blagues!

We are going to publish a special issue of History of the Present on "The Future of History in the Ruins of the University" - here is the CFP - get in touch with interest/questions

I am horrified that the University of Kent is planning the closure of many excellent programmes, including Anthropology, and is proposing up to 58 redundancies among academic staff! This further destruction of UK centres of academic excellence is heartbreaking.

I would really very much like you to click on this then click subscribe. It will always have a free option.

He should haved added "and these four ages repeat themselves forever." The ancient Egyptians understood this so well they worshipped the Phoenix, of the old Phoenix's ashes, who burned himself, arose the new one. Further, who can prove that these four ages have not already been repeating themselves since time immemorial, who can prove to us that before the world's last embrace [by the serpent destroyer] humanity did not already [...]

exist for thousands of years, then disappeared in this universal glassing of the planet, before reappearing today after the Earth had cooled down and the vapors had liquified, this opinion is all the more truthful as it does in no way contradict science and is entirely confirmed by Hinudism and the belief system of ancient Egypt.

Eugène Huzar walked so Graham Hancock could run

From L'Arbre de la Science (1855)

You closed this book without understanding it. Did I not tell you from the outset? [...] Civilization is not yet advanced enough, we are merely at the dawn of things, I say it again, this book is not written for this century, nor for you. Other times will come when humans, terrorized by the prodigies happening under its eyes, will understand it, and become terrified.

PhD application season (ouch) means I'm going down an Eugène Huzar rabbit hole, and did he know how to end a book.

Un paquet de voitures, avions, hélicoptères quittent la COP 28 traversant le désert

Vivement la COP 29 ! (Par Gros)

To clarify for those not in UK academia: this means no foreigners qualify to even apply for museum jobs, anything in heritage or libraries, junior fac jobs, UK postdocs, all are entirely out of the question.

And do that math outside academia- no foreign nurses, teachers, and on and on.

Salary threshold for migrant worker visa set to rise under legal migration curbs The hike is expected as part of plans to curb legal migration, which has hit record levels.

“The minimum salary needed to get a skilled worker visa will rise from £26,200 to £38,700 next year.”

Some current salaries for open museum positions:
Curator: Hoards (BM): £33,803
Senior Art Handling Technician (Tate): £30,848
National Programmes Manager (National History Museum): £37,230

Source: Eugène Huzar, "The Tree of Science (1857)" with commentary by J-B Fressoz in The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change (Yale UP, 2013)

I am not saying that the world council can be formed today, as at present nobody can see the need for it. But I tell you that a few centuries from now, after

witnessing disasters caused in some parts of the world by the unbridled ravages of industrial science, we will be able to justify such an institution.

Considering the news from COP28, I sometimes wish I had the optimism of a c19 catastrophist writer....

Sign the Petition On 30 November of this year, all staff in the Modern Languages, Translation and Interpreting section of the University of Aberdeen were told that they are at risk of redundancy, opening a false choice...

Aberdeen plans to remove all degrees and research in modern languages. Utterly disgraceful. Please consider signing this petition
www.change.org/p/save-langu...

I'm with @wolvendamien.bsky.social as I believe that we need to understand the religious and occult ideologies that are embedded in technologies, and which motivate their development and application. Moreover, I also believe that we need to recognize the influence of mythoi upon tech as well.

The Royal Historical Society, of which I am a Fellow, has today issued a strongly-worded statement about the huge cuts to History at Oxford Brookes. While I cannot of course comment on the specifics, I would ask you to consider the implications and spread the word. royalhistsoc.org/history-at-o...

Please consider signing this petition to prevent catastrophic job cuts at Oxford Brookes.

Arts & humanities are besieged as a consequence of policy changes, among other things. Brookes won't be the last to go through this. Solidarity is essential.

https://t.co/mNbElDKP5k

The speech itself is transmitted obliquely and heavily paraphrased, because the police agent present confessed to not knowing Italian, which opens up further questions on the linguistic organizations of anarchists in the Grand-Duchy. /end

Gori's speech itsef criticized the aims of moderate social democracy, arguing that any material improvement of the workers' conditions *under capitalism* would lead only to an enrichment of the capitalists themselves, creating a vicious cycle.

Gori's appearance there - and the presence at the meeting, of a key figure in the People's House's history, and not a noted friend of anarchism in general, Alphonse Meyer - testifies in many ways to the overlapping of various radical movements in the spatially fairly constrained Minette basin.

'Party News: The 2. Congress of the Luxembourgish Social-Democratic Party is being held on Ascension Day in the "People's House" in Esch. We will report in detail on its deliberations.' - Der Arme Teufel (08.05.1904)

First, the location. The People's House was a key locale of the Social-Democratic movement. It served as a cooperative as well as as an educational institution, being home to meetings and speeches etc.

A black and white portrait of Gori.

In 1903, the gendarmerie in Esch reported on a speech by anarchist poet and playwright Pietro Gori, held in the People's House in the same city, and attended by 50-60 Italian workers. The visit is fascinating for a whole number of reasons beyond the person of Gori himself. /thread

Please read and circulate this editorial by editors of the journal History and Technology, Amy Slaton and and Tiago Saraiva, which fully vindicates my STS (UCL) colleague Jenny Bulstrode and her paper 'Black metallurgists and the making of the industrial revolution'

doi.org/10.1080/0734...