Maelström Life – Ednei de Genaro

“Set of opposites” (1989) – Eduardo Nery

CONTEMPORARY TECHNOPOLITICAL ESCHATOLOGIES

Ednei de Genaro

[2020]

1. INTRODUCTION 2. CAPITALIST ACCELERATION 2.1 Singularity 2.2 Anthropotechnical condition 3. PROPOSITIONS ABOUT THE CONTEMPORARY 3.1 Machinations 3.2 Contemporary capitalism 4. POSTCAPITALIST ACCELERATION 4.1 Immanent critique 4.2 Reverse eschatology? 5. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS 6. REFERENCES

Translation of the Portuguese version: Genaro, Ednei de. Escatologias Tecnopolíticas Contemporâneas. Cadernos IHU IDEIAS (UNISINOS), vol. 18, pp. 1–45, 2020. Available at: http://www.ihu.unisinos.br/images/stories/cadernos/ideias/297cadernosihuideias.pdf

 

1. INTRODUCTION

How can we understand and periodize eschatological discourses concerning contemporary technoscientific progress, and what is their relationship to key analytical and interpretive dimensions of the current intersections of political philosophy, sociology, and economics? These are the two overarching questions addressed in this text.

Our reflections, analyses, and considerations are organized into three sections, based on a research hypothesis evaluating two technopolitical eschatologies: the capitalist accelerationists and the postcapitalist accelerationists. Between these sections is a third, which clarifies theoretical propositions about the contemporary world, the notions of human and machine, and their relationship, particularly in philosophical and socio-political terms[1].

“Illusory Space” (1989) – Eduardo Nery

2. CAPITALIST ACCELERACIONISM

How can we understand and periodize capitalist accelerationism? Various humanities and media scholars have increasingly emphasized its significance (Levy, 2011; Haucap & Heimeshoff, 2013; Aschoff, 2015; Bolaño & Figueiredo, 2017; Robinson, 2016; Solon & Siddiqui, 2017; Pulkkinen, 2019). They highlight Silicon Valley, California, USA, as the primary site where financial capitalism intersects with technological innovations—particularly computational technologies. This region is marked not only by a concentration of political and economic power but also by experiments and prophecies of libertarian life and politics. In other words, it is the locus of a virtual pendulum shaped by the decentralization and centralization of processes, data, designs, flows, and capital, generating constant rearrangements of labor and capital under what Rouvroy and Berns (2013) call “algorithmic governmentality.” This form of governance is redefining the concept of sovereignty, modes of subjection, and contemporary geopolitics (Bratton, 2015).

Since the early 2000s, algorithmic infrastructures developed in Silicon Valley—especially the “invisible” systems operated by companies labeled GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft)—have played a crucial role in their accumulation of wealth. Notably, almost all of these companies were involved in the American PRISM global surveillance program revealed by Edward Snowden. By 2017, these firms had surpassed traditional giants such as Exxon, Nestlé, General Electric, and Johnson & Johnson to become some of the ten richest companies in the world (Parra et al., 2018).

Behind these algorithmic infrastructures are human agents: manufacturers, traders, and funders who collectively produce the “Google humanity” of “users” (The Invisible Committee, 2017), imposed daily on all individuals through interfaces, websites, and background processes. Among them is libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, whose projects range from artificial intelligence and life extension to seasteading—floating islands in international waters designed as microterritories beyond the jurisdiction of nation-states—one of the ambitions of American libertarians (Gelles, 2017).

The Internet of Things, robotics, big data, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic infrastructures—all central to Industry 4.0, based on cyber-physical systems and cloud computing—position non-human actors with significant advantages over humans within capitalist models of quantifying life spheres and surplus value, particularly in management, execution, and communication. The unawareness and depoliticization of these technologies is alarming. At the dawn of global cyber-surveillance systems, it is the technocratic and libertarian utopias and dystopias—expressed in the actions of experts and capitalist elites—that warrant critical examination in the context of contemporary democracies. After all, as Deleuze and Guattari (1997) suggest, Clausewitz’s dictum has inverted: politics has become a continuation of war, while the promises of “eternal peace” and the “end of history” implement, technically, the silent and unlimited processes of total war and states of exception.

Silicon Valley symbolizes the historical construction of a colossal center of calculation (Latour, 2000): technoscience; an inexorable maelstrom; a whirlwind of expansion and reduction of worlds; control over spaces and times through inventories, classifications, surveys, cartographies, and far-reaching incursions. It epitomizes the circuit of compatibilities, standardizations, counts, flowcharts, and organizational charts, establishing a form of relative universality that often contrasts with or overrides local singularities.

Our focus, then, is on understanding the philosophy and political doctrine—or ideology—that sustains the technophilic belief in Silicon Valley as a center of calculation. We are particularly interested in technological eschatology, notably the version known as the technological singularity, considering its meanings, practices, affects, and ideals. This encompasses the political culture that emerges from and circulates within these beliefs.

In this essay, we first examine the libertarian technopolitical eschatology, particularly the Kurzweilians, whose views exemplify the ideals of capitalist accelerationism. But what does it mean to understand and periodize capitalist accelerationism?

An eschatological discourse is a doctrine concerning the destiny of life or humanity, often teleological in nature, traditionally associated with “final judgments” in religious contexts. Over the past two centuries, humanity’s spiritual aspirations and dreams have increasingly migrated into technological eschatologies, often framed as epistolary or literary narratives in science fiction. By the late 20th century, these discourses had developed into an expressive technopolitical corpus, disseminated through the media and, more importantly, institutional structures and organizations.

Technological singularity theory extends the concept of “singularity” from physics and mathematics into the technological domain. In these original fields, singularity denotes a peculiar or abnormal state in which traditional rules break down: in mathematics, a point where a function lacks a derivative; in physics, a region in spacetime where gravitational forces produce infinite density, as in black holes. Singularity thus conveys a decisive transition between two domains, introducing a gap or split value. It signifies acceleration beyond the limits of conventional explanation, surpassing the capacities of traditional mathematical or physical tools for cognition, evaluation, and prediction.

Ray Kurzweil is the principal figure behind the discourse on technological singularity, especially in political, media, and institutional contexts. Author of The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999) and The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), translated into multiple languages, Kurzweil argues that techno-scientific progress occurs exponentially, reshaping human life and powers and redefining notions of the (post)human and economics. In The Singularity is Near, he writes:

What, then, is the Singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself (Kurzweil, 2005, p. 25).

Together with Google, NASA, and emerging private companies in ICT, Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis founded the Singularity University in Silicon Valley in 2008. Today, it has branches and partnerships in several countries. The institution functions simultaneously as a think tank, a business incubator, and a hub of disruptive technological innovation, motivating entrepreneurs, scientists, and technocrats in their visions of individual and societal well-being. Its foundation rests upon technopolitical eschatology and the concept of technological singularity.

Kurzweil’s notion of technological singularity is, fundamentally, a technoscientific speculation: a sequence of predictions based on data, graphs, interpretations, and events, implicitly shaping sociopolitical expectations. In this sense, singularity functions as a political, economic, and cultural discourse, establishing a technocratic worldview that sustains political beliefs, whether true or false. These discourses articulate ideas about immortality, technocratic governance, and new frontiers of capitalist innovation and automation.

Technological singularity discourses offer an eschatological, utopian framing for technocratic values, suggesting a final destination or “paradise.” They present a teleological perspective grounded in technology, promising abundance, security, and happiness (Diamandis & Kotler, 2012), effectively accelerating processes toward an idealized “good life.”

As several authors note (Malabou, 2009; Pariser, 2011; Crary, 2013; Morozov, 2015; Wajcman & Dodd, 2017; Benkler et al., 2018; Zuboff, 2019), digitization processes emerging from Silicon Valley are reshaping cognition, neurolinguistics, and behavioral habits, subtly aligning populations with hyper-corporate strategies.

Our goal is not to critique Kurzweil’s theory or trace the genealogy of technological singularity—rooted in Vernor Vinge, John von Neumann, and others—but rather to analyze its periodization, meanings, and values. These regimes of fiction and truth underpin a technopolitical and eschatological ideal that fosters technological determinism and depoliticizes the world.

Secular technocratic-eschatological thinking was not unique to Silicon Valley’s “Californian Ideology” of the early 1990s. Another influential contemporary discourse is the state-centered eschatology of the “end of history.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoliberal triumphalism framed capitalism as victorious, exemplified in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Drawing on Hegel and Christianity, Fukuyama portrayed the “fully satisfactory” state of American democracy as the teleological apex of history, embodying liberal-conservative ideals. Nevertheless, this interpretation also highlights limits to the capacity of technoscientific progress to deliver freedom:

But while modern natural science guides us to the gates of the Promised Land of liberal democracy, it does not deliver us to the Promised Land itself, for there is no economically necessary reason why advanced industrialization should produce political liberty (Fukuyama, 1992, p. XV).

According to Sloterdijk (2010, p. 51), Fukuyama’s version of “Christian” eschatology aimed to reconcile Western secular-technological civilization with messianic eschatologies from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. By the early 21st century, however, Fukuyama’s anthropocentric vision of the state confronted business-eschatology: technocentric, posthumanist, and accelerated by capitalist logic. In response, Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future (2002) criticizes transhumanist and capitalist accelerationist movements as among “the most dangerous ideas in the world” (Fukuyama, 2002; 2009), especially for undermining human rights grounded in human nature:

It is my view that this turn away from notions of rights based on human nature is profoundly mistaken, both on philosophical grounds and as a matter of everyday moral reasoning… We do not want to disrupt either the unity or the continuity of human nature, and thereby the human rights that are based on it (Fukuyama, 2002, p. 101; 172).

Fukuyama opposed the rise of a cybernetic and biogenetic world order, viewed as an “advance in industrialization” and “political freedom.” This vision purported to protect the world from libertarian radicalization, relying on technological innovation mediated through venture capital, entrepreneurship, and state institutions, and advocating automation and diverse life-experiments within these frameworks.

2.1 – Singularity

Regarding The End of History and the Last Man, Derrida reflected on the media amplification of such discourses:

One would do better to ask oneself why this book, with the ‘good news’ it claims to bring, has become such a media gadget, and why it is all the rage in the ideological supermarkets of a worried West, where it is bought up just as, at the first rumors of war, people buy sugar and oil, when there is any left. Why this amplification by the media? And how is it that a discourse of this type is sought out by those who celebrate the triumph of liberal capitalism and its predestined alliance with liberal democracy, only in order to hide—and first of all from themselves—the fact that this triumph has never been so critical, fragile, threatened, even in certain regards catastrophic, and, in sum, bereaved? (Derrida, 1994, p. 85)

Entering the 2020s, a period increasingly shaped and instituted by eschatological-business technopolitics, we can similarly ask: what lies behind the media amplification of libertarian technological acceleration, particularly the concept of technological singularity? In other words, what does this new idyllic, material, post-human “Good News” of unrestricted optimism regarding accelerationist corporations signify?

To position ourselves critically at a distance from the technocratic-eschatological dimension of life, while avoiding the conservatism that marks Fukuyama’s state-centered eschatology, we should attempt a conceptual analysis of the notions of singularity and the post-human condition—what we might call the anthropotechnical condition.

In contemporary philosophical thought, the concept of singularity diverges sharply from eschatological propositions. In philosophy, singularity denotes a continuous process of becoming for beings, objects, and environments, identifying their potentialities as differentiated, spatialized, and temporalized within heterogeneous and multiple relationships. Drawing on Simondon’s philosophy in particular, Deleuze distinguishes singularity from any notion of hypostasis or determinism.

Singularity is understood as the immanence of being within a field of forces, operating across different worlds and machinic assemblages: psychic, collective, natural, and technical. As Deleuze writes in Logic of Sense:

Singularities are turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, ‘sensitive’ points. The singularity belongs to another dimension than that of denotation, manifestation, or signification. It is essentially pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual (Deleuze, 1990, p. 52).

In Deleuze, singularity cannot be understood as something predetermined or self-reproducing. It is synonymous with haecceity, a medieval scholastic term denoting the particularity of a thing arising from events, mutations, and potentialities. Drawing on modern physics, Deleuze associates singularity with the theory of differential equations, describing the distribution of curves and potentials in neighborhoods, surfaces, and spaces. This approach distances itself from fixed paradigms, shapes, patterns, universalities, and identities.

As Simondon observes, “The true identity is not the identity with itself, but the identity of the concrete permanence of the system through phases” (2013, p. 66). He argues that traditional notions of self or subject give way to new concepts that dissolve the intrinsic/extrinsic and subject/object dichotomies: individuation, associated milieu, internal resonance, etc. These notions allow us to apprehend the channels and energy flows through which singularities unfold (Idem, pp. 83–84).

Singularity, then, is a convergence of forces, differences, realities, and worlds—a constellation, distinctly unlike the hylomorphism and substantialism underlying technological-eschatological arguments. Simondon, in Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, emphasizes that the advancement of technical machines: “[…] does not correspond to an increase in automation, but, on the contrary, is due to the fact that its operation preserves a certain margin of indeterminacy” (1969, p. 11, emphasis added).

Machine automation, in fact, represents a reduction in technical perfection. Higher technicality emerges through processes of openness to individuation, as in the “open machine,” which assumes “[…] man as a permanent organizer, as a living interpreter of machines […]”; after all, “the conductor of the orchestra can only direct the musicians by the fact that he plays with them, as intensely as all of them” (Idem, pp. 11–12).

Reducing singularity to machine automation raises critical questions: why exalt technical progress in itself? It is essential to reflect on the political dimensions embedded in the eschatological spectrum, which myths of progress and technical superiority continue to amplify even after three centuries (Dupas, 2006).

Simondon warns:

If technology becomes industry and takes defensive refuge in a new feudalism of technicians, researchers, and administrators, it will evolve like language and religion towards closure, centering on itself instead of continuing to form, with man, an ensemble in process of becoming (2010, p. 232).

The regime of fiction and truth inherent in technological singularity, convenient for its heralds and economic supporters of libertarian technocratic systems, perpetuates a feedback loop of feudality: connections without singularization, social processes absorbed into automatisms, hypertrophies, and alienation.

Pierre Clastres, in The Society against the State, provides a precise framework for understanding these dynamics:

If one understands by technics the set of procedures humans acquire not to ensure the absolute mastery of nature (which is achieved only in our world and its extreme Cartesian project, whose ecological consequences are only now being measured), but to secure mastery of the environment relative to their needs, then there is no reason to impute technical inferiority to so-called primitive societies: they demonstrate an ability to satisfy their needs at least equal to that of which industrial and technological societies boast. Every human group necessarily exercises the minimum required domination over its environment. […] Hence there is no hierarchy in the technical domain; there is no superior or inferior technology. The only measure of a society’s technological adequacy is its ability to meet its needs in a given environment (Clastres, 1989, p. 191, emphasis in original).

Clastres (Idem, p. 199) describes the technological character of primitive societies as “more like positivity” between humans and the cosmos. In the spirit of Amartya Sen (1993), Amerindians valued their capacities and leveraged them to realize well-being and freedom. Here, development or progress is synonymous with expanding capacities, associated with well-being and ecological care. By contrast, in modern societies, the instrumentalization of progress prioritizes economic prosperity, libertarian utopias, and immortality fantasies, often divorced from well-being and ecological concerns.

2.2 – Anthropotechnical condition

The problematic issue of technological singularity and automatism forces us to consider the other side of the same coin: the idea of a “pure” human essence. Proclamations such as “Freeing oneself from the machine,” “having pure will, interiority, and desire,” and “meeting the core of the human” genealogically evoke the romantic spirit of Rousseau (Derrida, 1997; Stiegler, 1994; Deleuze, 2006); yet today, such ideas seem philosophically and politically unsustainable.

Human history, analyzed anthropotechnically, indicates a horizon of continuous machinations among the self, the social, and the technical. This perspective aligns with contemporary philosophical reflections of a materialistic, anthropological, and paleontological nature (Sloterdijk, 2010; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Stiegler, 1994; Serres, 2019; Leroi-Gourhan, 1964; Latour, 1994), which suggest that the human ancestor emerges exclusively through technical modifications, and hence through continuous co-transformation with these modifications. Our current recognition of the complementarity of technical exteriority for human physiology, biology, and memory is due both to scientific discoveries and to the declining dominance of anthropocentric thinking in favor of mediation that symmetrically includes humans and non-humans. Instead of searching for the “essence of Being,” the investigation shifts to compositions and modes of existence in terms of mediation, intensity, or transindividual reality, emphasizing attention and care for life and the cosmos.

Essentialist thinking, which frames the human-technical relationship in a dichotomous or paradoxical way, must be overcome. As Garcia dos Santos (2005, p. 165) notes, the main problem for advocates of the “essence of Being” is:

“[…] valuing the human in what he has as an animal, as if there were a kind of terrain to safeguard… [So that] the retreat for the animal implies the attempt to hold on to a kind of ‘essence of the human’ that no longer makes sense.”

Human nature has always been fluid and anthropotechnical. This position differs from the eschatological post-human horizon, which conceives an advanced contemporary or future stage. Critiquing the post-humanist eschatological universe requires addressing not only the scope of libertarian technocratic volitions but also postmodern philosophical perspectives of an apocalyptic nature, which diagnose an “imperious” technical machine determining an era of “total cyber-transparency” and the end of political possibilities for generating diverse capacities for well-being and freedom in democracies.

In the critical conceptual analysis of postmodern philosophical perspectives—a subject still poorly understood—it is worth highlighting Jean-François Lyotard, arguably the most important figure in announcing a constraint by repeatedly asserting a human-technical incommensurability and the resulting political desolation for subjects in democracies.

Living and proclaiming the “postmodern moment” of the Enlightenment, Lyotard occupied a position of paradoxical hesitations, anticipating a dire antagonism between the “inhuman fate,” the anthropotechnical, and human freedom. The exercise of human freedom in the context of increasing machinization would paradoxically entail a loss of human freedom through automation, the absence of thinking, and an “eclipse” of freedom.

Despite his skepticism toward the humanist tradition in Western culture—common among postmodernists, who are critical of Enlightenment legacies—Lyotard espouses what appears substantially as a humanist position in The Inhuman (1987). Though often described as anti-humanist or posthumanist, few humanists would dispute his approach. He stands in stark contrast to enthusiasts of machine-led culture such as Donna Haraway, for whom the cyborg, a conflation of human and inhuman, is desirable: “the machine is us.” From a Lyotardian perspective, pursuing cyborgization is to surrender to the inhuman, making the defense of “little narratives” essential to prevent this outcome (Sim, 2011, p. 106).

Lyotard (1984, 1993), alongside other French philosophers of his generation—particularly Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio—offers a critical affirmation of technological eschatology, ultimately finding themselves in a conceptual cul-de-sac. Following a Nietzschean tradition, Lyotard identifies the reduction of thought to judgment and calculability of life. Within the “victory of capitalist technoscience,” success is recognized solely as a criterion of judgment, sidelining ethical or justice-based considerations: success “is self-proclaiming, like a ratification of something heedless of any law” (Lyotard, 1993, pp. 18–19). Technoscience’s isolation from other sociotechnical networks compels it to unilaterally define what is “true” and “just,” leaving no room for value judgments or context-specific deliberation.

Latour (1993, p. 46) corroborates:

“Postmodernism is a symptom, not a fresh solution. […] It senses that something has gone awry in the modern critique, but it is not able to do anything but to prolong that critique, though without believing in its foundations.”

We must therefore ask: how can we move beyond the symptom and hesitation of postmodern philosophies? Positively, a path toward politics and history remains; there is space for an authentic, undetermined life. The question is not strictly “against the posthuman.” Hesitation should not be a philosophical negation of the advanced anthropotechnical inhuman or a critique of the technological eschatology of capitalist accelerationists. Rather, it should be understood as a political critique of volitions seeking to eliminate desire and social machines (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983).

Abandoning the thesis of human-machine incommensurability, we must propose a relationship between the mechanical and the non-mechanical: “[…] there is a complex relation at work that is not a simple opposition. We can call it freedom, but only beginning at the moment when there is something incalculable” (Derrida & Roudinesco, 2004, p. 49). This mechanical/non-mechanical association constitutes an anthropotechnical condition. Technical machinations—devices of calculation and repetition—engender the possibility of freedom and, consequently, politics, expressing singularities from the incalculable or undecidable (Derrida) or haecceity and indeterminacy (Deleuze).

The diagnosis of “total cybernetic transparency” raises a fundamental, unanswerable question: “What is man?” Or, more provocatively, it eliminates this question, imposing a wholly unlimited world as a general equivalent of mercantilism—a world of “nothing” (nihilism), devoid of history, politics, or God (Nancy, 1999).

Finally, Garcia dos Santos (2005) formulates key research questions, moving beyond paralyzing philosophical hesitations regarding the so-called “crisis of the human”:

To what extent are humans also machined, to what extent do they belong to the same pre-individual terrain, what relations exist between human and non-human, in the sense of the animal, in the sense of the machine? What transformations could still occur in the human? […] More interesting than opposition is precisely difference. What matters is the difference between the human and the machine and the level at which we can think about it. Technology should be considered as an individuation process. Where do we stand, and where do we differentiate ourselves from the machine? In what Simondon calls pre-individual reality. Despite differences, there are points of contact or high levels of correspondence between our mode of individuation and the individuation of machines (Ferreira et al., 2005, p. 165, emphasis added).

“Ambiguous structure IV” (1969) – Eduardo Nery

3. PROPOSITIONS ABOUT THE CONTEMPORARY

As announced, before presenting and analyzing postcapitalist accelerationist discourses, it is essential to outline theoretical-epistemic propositions that we believe are central to understanding the contemporary.

How can we understand—epistemologically—the human-machine relationship? As we have seen, the technocratic-eschatological framing of progress and its utopia of “abundance,” stemming from the deification of technical machines, reveals an important insight: in the “hybridism of the realms,” “[c]ritical discourse should not base itself on a universalist humanism, lest it miss what contemporary assemblages constitute” (Pelbart, 2015, p. 91). The notion of machine thus constructed is disconnected from the perspective of transindividuality.

3.1 Machinations

As demonstrated in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983; 1987), the term “machines” (from the Latin machina and the Ionian Greek μηχανή—mekhane, a derivation of μῆχος—mekhos, meaning means, expedient, or remedy) refers to a concept of “associative flows,” which can be expressed through nouns such as openness, multiplicities, alterities, and assemblages. Machination, as “areas of proximity and indiscernibility,” is a system of flows and “cuts” that satisfies the plans of consistency between organic and inorganic beings.

Thus, we begin with a recovery and updating of the epistemological perspective inaugurated by Deleuze and Guattari. However, we are not limited to it, since the authors themselves reinterpret the works of Marx and Freud (and of various Marxisms and Freudianisms). Influenced particularly by Gilbert Simondon, Deleuze and Guattari develop a sociotechnical theory based on the associations of technical, desiring, and social machines. Their aim is to articulate a notion of the human and the world through a very specific concept of machine, which encompasses various aspects of reality:

“There are only machines everywhere, and without any metaphor: machines, with their couplings, their connections. […] Every machine is, in the first place, in relation to a continuous material flow (hylê) that it cuts” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, pp. 11, 55).

The result is a heterogeneous critique of naturalist, mechanistic, or reductionist positions regarding the human and its socialization.

The machine is thus a “system of cuts,” which does not imply separation of realities (completeness, sub-materialization, or isolation). On the contrary, it entails operations that extract “associative flows”—that is, machinations in the orders of desire, technicality, and sociality. In this sociotechnical theory, such systems continually generate and make intelligible the social productions (actions, connections), technical distributions (records, graphs, datafications), and consumptions and desires (voluptuousness, anguish, pain) of becomings in general.

Deleuze and Guattari, engaging critically with psychoanalytic theory through schizoanalysis and the notion of machination, propose a new politics of desires, singularities, and subjectivities. Classical structuralist, individualistic, or holistic theoretical-epistemological frameworks are inadequate; conventional terms and predicates—adaptation, structure, subordination, substitution, extension, exteriorization, impact, or incorporation—do not fully capture the phenomena. This approach should not be reduced to linguistic operations (signifiers), nor centered on individual or collective agents (intersubjectivity). Instead, composition, agency, individuation, associated milieu, diagrams, connection, servitude, and capture merit study within a new problematic.

If the machine is not, as in tool-based models, a prosthesis or organ, then the human-machine relation cannot be reduced to either incorporation or exteriorization. Human-machine relations are always forms of coupling, assemblage, encounter, connection, or capture (Lazzarato, 2014, p. 91, emphasis in original).

It is difficult to pinpoint precisely when the discourse of technological singularity emerges, since the algorithmic era is defined by decentralized and unpurposive machines (Galloway, 2013; Serres, 2019). The previous mechanical or homo faber era produced tools and machines for well-defined uses and purposes. Algorithmic machines introduce novelty: they are simultaneously universal, theoretical, and practical, usable in myriad ways:

“[…] and even for a thousand more, precisely because they have no use. Dedifferentiated, universal, they transfer the builder’s utility project to the user, who employs them at leisure and as he or she sees fit” (Serres, 2019, p. 63).

3.2 – Contemporary capitalism

With the rise of algorithmic machines and the maximization of machinations, contemporary capitalism has increasingly become an amalgamation of diverse operations in space-time: movements (of raw materials, techniques, humans), comparisons (of profits, cultures, information, labor forces), and captures (of territories, times, human groups). These operations gain complexity and unprecedented socio-political potential through centralized and decentralized associative media flows (Galloway & Thacker, 2007).

In considering the hybridism of the realms, Deleuze and Guattari left several important conceptual contributions. Paolo Virno pioneered the intellectual and political exploration of collectives within this new conceptual universe, particularly emphasizing the characterization of:

“[…] the immediate connection between production and ethicality, ‘structure’ and ‘superstructure,’ the revolutionizing of the work process and sentiments, technologies and the emotional tonalities, material developments and culture.” (Virno, 2004, p. 84)

If we fail to understand the points of identity between work practices and ways of life, we cannot fully grasp the changes occurring in contemporary production or the forms of contemporary culture. In the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), the social, political, and economic fields are immersed in new forms of capture and production of subjectivities, as well as capital-labor exploitation based on capitalist machinations. Capitalism emerges as a “worldwide enterprise of subjectification,” operating exclusively under a state that guarantees the “axiomatic of capital” within populations.

Capital and State machines operate through two key, interrelated, and cyclical terms: the movements of liberation (innovation and the production of continuous and unlimited desires) and the movements of control (codification and normativization). In this contemporary conjunction, populations are constantly subjected to forces that aim to reduce their modes of existence via the dual movement of production and exploitation: social subjection and machinic enslavement.

As Lazzarato (2010; 2014) clarifies, the notions of social subjection and machinic enslavement highlight the semiotic dimensions of capital. Social subjection manifests as the semiotic process of subjugation—what Lazzarato calls “humanistic” cynicism—normalization, or governmentality. It is the regime that, as Marx originally theorized and Foucault later refined, subjects individuals to the social machine through speeches, ideologies, and segmented orders of power. This process organizes the formation of worker-entrepreneurs, consumers, patriots, sexual orientations, gender identities, and other governmentalities. Social subjection exerts a molar power over perceptual, sensitive, cognitive, and linguistic-affective behaviors, rendering them identifiable, manipulable, and quantifiable.

Nevertheless, Lazzarato writes:

“The concept of subjection, although with important variations, is a common thread in the philosophy and sociology of recent years. However, ‘machinic enslavement’ is Deleuze and Guattari’s original contribution to our understanding of how capitalism works. […] What matters to capitalism is controlling the asignifying semiotic apparatuses (economic, scientific, technical, stock-market, etc.) through which it aims to depoliticize and depersonalize power relations.” (Lazzarato, 2014, pp. 37; 41)

In the algorithmic era, machinic enslavement [asservissement] must also be considered as a second modality of production and exploitation: a second dimension of machining subjectivity within capitalism. This modality operates simultaneously and complementarily with social subjection, through recoding, decoding, and machine servitude. Such production corresponds to a system of human-machine interactions requiring only semiotic, asignificant machinations: coins, sounds, music, information, codes, algorithms, scientific diagrams, equations, architectures, and similar structures.

“Machinic enslavement activates pre-personal, pre-cognitive, and predictable forces (perception, sense, affects, desires) as well as suprapersonal forces (machinic, linguistic, social, media, economic systems, etc.) […]” (Lazzarato, 2014, p. 31)

These processes act like nervous or brain machinations to capture individuals. As machining actions multiply, the subject becomes fragmented, with the purpose of extracting, quantifying, and instrumentalizing bodies—revealing capitalism’s “dehumanizing cynicism.” In the molecular power of machine servitude, the subject is disfigured both in relation to the body-action—disposed as input/output, relay, piece, or tool—and in relation to the body-mind, rendered useful for cognition, memory, intelligence, affection, and sensation.

Within Deleuze and Guattari’s legacy, it is also important to highlight a final, significant proposition regarding the contemporary:

“Never before has a State lost so much of its power in order to enter with so much force into the service of the signs of economic power.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 300)

Under capitalism, a new social machine emerges from integrated, contrary, and ambivalent flows, operating in pendular and diachronic movements. Decoders are primarily associated with money-capital and “free labor,” whereas encoders (axiomatic) are linked to the State. The capitalist social machine generates a spectrum of schizophrenic desires among populations, distinct from the depressive or paranoid operating orders produced by despotic state machines (centralizing, totalitarian, monarchical) or the hysterical orders of territorial machines (savage, tribal).

Regarding the permanent innovation of capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari note that populations are subjected to a continuous “schizoid time of the new creative cut,” so that the State “[…] no longer determines the social system; it is itself determined by the social system into which it is incorporated in the exercise of its functions” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 221).

No longer an independent overcoding vehicle, the State fulfills the cynical function of the “bourgeois immanence field,” interrupting liberation to ensure, before liberating again, certain landscapes of social subjection and machinic enslavement. In this sense, the State machine, like technical machines, contributes to a broad diagram:

“[…] there are no longer even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves; there is no longer any need to burden the animal from the outside, it shoulders its own burden. Not that man is ever the slave of technical machines; he is rather the slave of the social machine. The bourgeois sets the example, he absorbs surplus value for ends that, taken as a whole, have nothing to do with his own enjoyment: more utterly enslaved than the lowest of slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine, the beast of the reproduction of capital, internalization of the infinite debt. ‘I too am a slave’ – these are the new words spoken by the master.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 254)

“Absurd space” (1970) – Eduardo Nery

4. POSTCAPITALIST ACCELERATION

Deleuze and Guattari announced the decentralized machinations in the French intellectual context of the early 1970s through a revision of Marxism and Freudism, going beyond the dominant notions of ideology and the dialectics of “master and slave” (class struggle) and “father and mother” (Oedipus complex). The year 1972, when Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Volume 1 was published, was marked by the space race of the Cold War, the first neoliberal attacks on the Keynesian axioms of capitalist states, signs of exhaustion in the despotic states of the Soviet Bloc, and the developments of the “cultural revolutions” following May 1968.

In this context, Deleuze and Guattari sought to redefine the nature of capitalist production by considering the social as immersed in the subjective machinations of desire. As Lazzarato (2010, p. 179) observes, political action that might be revolutionary—the kind that should feed the flows of desubjectification and the emergence of new forms of subjectivity—must “[…] refuse the injunction to occupy the places and roles within the social division of labor, and to construct, problematize, and reconfigure the machining agency, that is, a world and its possible.”

In this light, the famous passage from Anti-Oedipus—often publicized by postcapitalist accelerationists—can be better understood.

It is at the level of flows, the monetary flows included, and not at the level of ideology, that the integration of desire is achieved. So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? Psychoanalysis is of little help, entertaining as it does the most intimate of relations with money, and recording – while refusing to recognize it – an entire system of economic-monetary dependences at the heart of the desire of every subject it treats. Psychoanalysis constitutes for its part a gigantic enterprise of absorption of surplus value. But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one? – To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process”, as Nietzsche puts it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet. (Deleuze; Guattari, 1983, p. 239-40).

As Pelbart (2015, p. 81) writes, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the fight against the reactive, nihilistic desires of capitalism could only occur from a nihilism “[…] that intends to surpass, turning it around against itself […]”; so that the countermovement would not mean “[…] to halt, to brake, to block the escalation of nihilism—but precisely to intensify it, to exhaust it, to bring it to its end, to make it completed and turn it around against itself.”

It follows that Anti-Oedipus’ provocative and innovative proposition—“accelerate the process,” in reference to Nietzsche—will, as we will see, be adopted as the political motto of the postcapitalist accelerationists. This motto, obviously, opens up controversial intellectual and political tensions of active nihilism—that is, a stance advocating a certain progress of political liberalism, based on tactics and strategies to advance the “productive forces,” so that these forces may no longer be constrained by the axioms of the capitalist machine.

In theory, such tactics and strategies would rely on counter-performativities, activating machinic assemblies capable of genuinely dismantling axiomatized subjectivities, thereby liberating them and constituting democratic sociability and emancipatory public spaces.

As with the capitalist accelerationists, it will be necessary to periodize and understand the main supporters and discourses of the postcapitalist accelerationists, examining their arrangements of meanings, practices, affections, and dreams—that is, a distinct political culture.

4.1 – Immanent critique

At the beginning of the 21st century, in a pioneering attempt to develop technopolitical tactics and strategies that could escape the double movement of liberation and control inherent in social subjection and machinic enslavement, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt published the book Empire, in which they engage with the thought and provocation of “accelerate the process.” In that book, Negri and Hardt not only aim to resist but, above all, argue that, through the real decentralization of political materialities, an immanent critique and potential overcoming of capitalism could be carried out.

Deleuze and Guattari argued that rather than resist capital’s globalization, we have to accelerate the process. “But which,” they ask, “is the revolutionary path? Is there one? – To withdraw from the world market…? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization?” Empire can be effectively contested only on its own level of generality and by pushing the processes that it offers past their present limitations. We have to accept that challenge and learn to think globally and act globally. (Negri; Hardt, 2000, p. 206-07).

From Empire, Negri and Hardt put forward technopolitical propositions aimed fundamentally at producing changes in the way of thinking of the traditional left, since traditional leftists have always insisted on criticism and mobilization through breaking, stoppage, or immediate revolution of the capitalist mode of production, typically via the uprising of the proletarian social class—thus disregarding ideas of immanent critique, subversion, and emancipatory détournements from “within” capitalism.

The assumptions of Negri and Hardt gained greater prominence in 2013, when a manifesto entitled #Accelerate Manifesto: For an Accelerationist Politics, signed by the British scholars and activists Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, was first published on the site Critical Legal Thinking and quickly went viral on the internet. The following year, Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian released #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Mackay & Avanessian, 2014), in which they republished 27 classic and contemporary texts of postcapitalist accelerationist thinkers, including K. Marx (Fragment on Machines), T. Veblen (The Machine Process and the Natural Decay of the Business Enterprise), Lyotard (Energumen Capitalism), G. Lipovetsky (Power of Repetition), and N. Land (Circuitries). Williams and Srnicek also co-authored the book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015), and Srnicek later published Platform Capitalism (2017), a work intended to provide guidelines and propositions for their political views.

Below are two excerpts from the aforementioned #Accelerate Manifesto, in which they address aspects of political and economic conjunctures:

That the forces of right wing governmental, non-governmental, and corporate power have been able to press forth with neoliberalisation is at least in part a result of the continued paralysis and ineffectual nature ofmuch what remains of the left. Thirty years of neoliberalism have rendered most left-leaning political parties bereft of radical thought, hollowed out, and without a popular mandate. At best they have responded to our present crises with calls for a return to a Keynesian economics. […] The new social movements which emerged since the end of the Cold War, experiencing a resurgence in the years after 2008, have been similarly unable to devise a new political ideological vision. Instead they expend considerable energy on internal direct-democratic process and affective self-valorisation over strategic efficacy, and frequently propound a variant of neo-primitivist localism, as if to oppose the abstract violence of globalised capital with the flimsy and ephemeral “authenticity” of communal immediacy. […] Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism (Williams; Srnicek, 2013, n.p.).

Negri (2014) comments on the manifesto as having, overall, a positive balance, highlighting the capacity of critical accelerationists to construct a productive and purposeful approach to “revolutionary materialism” in the context of “cognitive capitalism”.

The MAP’s [Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics] argument is entirely based on this capacity to liberate the productive forces of cognitive labor. We have to remove any illusion of a return to Fordist labor; we have to finally grasp the shift from the hegemony of material labor to the hegemony of immaterial labor. Therefore, considering the command of capital over technology, it is necessary to attack “capital’s increasingly retrograde approach to technology.” Productive forces are limited by the command of capital. The key issue is then to liberate the latent productive forces, as revolutionary materialism has always done. It is on this “latency” that we must now dwell. (Negri, 2014, p. 3).

Postcapitalist accelerationist propositions had repercussions in left-wing circles, fostering critical discussions about the anachronisms and futurisms of leftist political actions. In To Our Friends (2015), we read:

Contemporary power is of an architectural and impersonal, and not a representative or personal, nature. […] Power is the very organization of this world, this engineered, configured, purposed world. That is the secret, and it’s that there isn’t one. […] Power is now immanent in life as it is technologically organized and commodified. It has the neutral appearance of facilities or of Google’s blank page. (The Invisible Comittee, 2015, p. 83-84)

A consensual point among supporters of leftist political action tactics and strategies is the diagnosis proposed by Marx in Grundrisse, specifically in the section The Fragment on Machines, which argues that the emergence of large-scale industry would make science and technology the central elements of production, thereby reducing the centrality of wage labor. In this sense, different collectives emerge that pursue political aspirations through horizontal knowledge structures, constructing digital materialities that support decentralized environments and democratic development. FabLabs, Hackerspaces, Wikispaces, and Crowdfunding platforms are mostly associated with the creation of both virtual and non-virtual environments, as well as mobilizations for monitoring public works and actions by public representatives, accessing information, financing, and promoting educational and artistic projects. These platforms foster interactions among city dwellers to support urban ecological management, introduce social and ecological forms of transactions and currency, and stimulate actions rooted in or responsive to local populations.

Here, the goal is to create interactive and active collectivities in opposition to the market-driven disruption and centralization characteristic of Silicon Valley’s technological pole, especially platforms that rely on social subjection and machinic enslavement to extract, process, and sell information and products—whether via advertising platforms (Google, Facebook), product platforms (Spotify), mobility services (Uber, Airbnb), cloud computing (SalesForce, Amazon), or industrial systems (GE, Siemens) (Srnicek, 2017).

At a practical level, the challenge of postcapitalist accelerationism, as Srnicek (2017) notes, is to move beyond traditional forms of political action (“folk politics”)—those based on petitions, occupations, strikes, party activities, affinity groups, and unions. Such tactics and strategies are often common-sense, sometimes anachronistic or ineffective, yet repeated as the most “authentic” and “natural.” Even new leftist political experiments—horizontal and localist movements such as Occupy, 15M, Tiqqun, and the Invisible Committee—still rely on these approaches. This is not to dismiss traditional working-class politics; on the contrary, Srnicek argues, it remains necessary but insufficient. Transforming neoliberalism into something better requires global action platforms, along with countless changes in value systems, governance arrangements, and the integration of design, quantification, and computational technologies.

The Promethean horizon of postcapitalist accelerationism raises several debates. One central issue is that, by focusing on diverse technological materialities—designs, architectures, flows, agencies, and algorithmic performances—these movements move away from political strategies centered on discursive praxis and the construction of political subjectivities.

To say, like Badiou or Rancière, that political subjectivation is not deductible to the economy, is quite different from the fact of posing the question from its paradoxical articulation. The first case illustrates the illusion of a “pure” policy, because subjectification does not articulate with anything, it never expects a consistency necessary to exist; the second, on the contrary, opens up beds of experimentation and political construction, since it must, if it wishes to exist and have consistency, operate a rupture, crossing and reconfiguring the economic, the social, the political, etc. (Lazzarato, 2011, p. 44).

Materiality, productive force, political economy: planning. The specter of the disastrous political and economic plans of 20th-century socialist countries may come to mind; after all, the centralization of power in these countries did not lead to the overcoming of authoritarianism, scarcity, or the genuine emancipation of workers. In fact, as Robert Kurz (1992) has shown, the effective meaning of “public policies” was the construction of a “wall,” a “technological race,” and a “barracks socialism.” Not to mention the 20th-century socialist theory: when applied to the state during the mechanical era, it promptly generated control, centralization, and the rigid modeling of social subjection.

However, today—and fortunately—the proposed sense of left-wing planning is quite different: collaborative, multiple, decentralized, and open-source democratic platforms.

The “infrastructures of society,” write Williams and Srnicek (2013, n.p.), “establish the basic parameters of what is possible, both in terms of behavior and in ideological terms.” Through immanent critique, postcapitalist politicization is translated primarily into the creation of experimental arenas of ideas and affections, aimed at building, regaining, reprogramming, or reforming the diverse platforms of daily life: production, logistics, exchange, finance, media, culture, and ecology.

Whether authoritarian-conservative governments are in office or not, the processes of algorithmic governmentality remain largely the same, orchestrated by state-business machinations. Retroactive public-legislative governance, carried out by national and international institutions and organizations, remains obviously insufficient and, in practice, often complicit. Responses through resistance, “profanation,” or escapism are naturally constrained by their micro-social limits. What is to be done? Observing global geopolitics, increasingly reshaped by computational engineering—which leaves behind the traditional diplomatic nexus between states, the so-called “sovereignty of Westphalia” (Bratton, 2015)—it becomes evident that the socio-political challenge of redefining constituent power cannot be solved without constructing a socio-technical counter-hegemony.

It should be noted that postcapitalist accelerationists, while emphasizing debates and solutions to these questions, do not operate in an entirely exclusive or original manner. Other academic authors coordinate laboratories with significant propositions and studies on this subject, including: Gerald Raunig (knowledge factories; creative industries), McKenzie Wark (hacker class; molecular red), Pierre Lévy (cyberdemocracy; semantic sphere), Adrian Mackenzie (software; sociability), Peter Sloterdijk (spheres; foams), Saskia Sassen (cities; open source), Trebor Scholz (cooperativism; platform), Bernard Stiegler (relational ecology; contributive economics), Tiziana Terranova (decentralized virtual currencies; bio-hypermedia), Bruno Latour (cosmopolitics; compositions), Nicolas Nova (designs; environments), Dominique Cardon (structures; semantic web), Geert Lovink (net critique; network culture), Mangabeira Unger (knowledge economy), Matteo Pasquinelli (critique of artificial intelligence), and Mark Poster (flows; free information).

By explicating different left-wing political temperaments, these authors have contributed theoretical and practical tools aimed at enhancing political expression through collective intelligence, multiple and joint forms of coexistence, and strengthening the bonds of horizontal social identities.

4.2 – Reverse eschatology?

What should be expected from the Deleuze-Guattarian provocation to “accelerate the process,” raised as the political banner of accelerationists? A political eschatology that reverses the first form of accelerationism? In times when it is imperative to raise consciousness about the “destructive destruction” of the anthropocentric dimension, how does the Promethean volition of postcapitalist accelerationists differ from that of neoliberal capitalist accelerationists? In other words, neither accelerationist camp shares the logic of the moderns—the cruelest logic—of the destruction of Gaia. One demands the maximization of profits and “abundance”; the other seeks revolutionary “redemption.” Are postcapitalist accelerationists summoning, in an (old) messianic tone reminiscent of certain Marxist traditions, the liberating development of the productive forces, thereby representing, in parallel with their critics, another form of eschatology?

Such an eschatological character invites mistrust. Consider Mackay and Avanessian’s (2014, p. 4) definition of this movement:

“Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.”

Uprooting, alienating, decoding, and abstracting are terms that carry controversial philosophical and political connotations—a peculiar reading of Deleuze and Guattari, to say the least. In the abyssal maelström in which we live, futurology and speed captivate the Promethean eyes of the moderns. The conjuncture of progress and advancement has long been seen as the forgetfulness of Epimetheus, marking the elimination of backwardness, that is, of reflection (Stiegler, 1994).

As Wark (2015; 2019) highlights, one consideration is the realization of a contemporary prolekult—the rescue of the creativity, collectivity, and universalism of the crowd from a focus on daily urban life as a whole, as Alexander Bogdanov and Henri Lefebvre first proposed. This requires overcoming the restrictive view of history:

“What accelerationist and negationist Marxism have in common is that they conceive of history as social history. Both make a prior cut between the human and the nonhuman and concern themselves mostly with the former” (Wark, 2019, p. 127, emphasis by the author).

After all, reflecting on materialities for an altruistic, democratic, communal, slow, and non-alienated ecology presents a provocative dilemma: accelerate or decelerate the process? Danowski and Viveiros (2014, p. 150 et seq.) confront the “political economy of acceleration” with the “political ecology of slowdown,” the latter emphasizing philosophical-political terms such as attention and openness to others. In their critique, the authors condemn accelerationists for reductionism, technological determinism, nostalgia for a “rationalist, imperialist, and triumphalist” past, and even denial of climate change. Yet this critique itself appears as a hyperbolic discourse.

Nonetheless, mistrust toward unilateralism and authoritarianism in postcapitalist accelerationist discourse is symptomatic of the current crossroads at which the Left stands. In response, Danowski and Viveiros (Idem, p. 153)—like Bruno Latour, and perhaps Isabelle Stengers—offer another provocation: the “anti-modern” one.

That is why the name of Gaia is an anti-modernist provocation, a way of exposing the ‘almost negationist’ position [Stengers] of the heralds of ‘acceleration on the left'[, that] fear that Gaia’s intrusion will disturb the dream of perfect freedom, the freedom resulting from Promethean mastery capable of taking us to an ontologically disincarnated state, to a techno-angelic transfiguration. It is a case of asking who has been smoking opium these days.

Such a provocation is equally purposeful; exalts, according to them, the becoming-Indian, the techno-primitive bricolages, the high-intensity syncretic assemblages, the lines of flight and the political-metaphysical metamorphoses capable of forming local experiences as well as global or particular as well as general (Idem, p. 158). A political volition that starts from micro resistances and temporary autonomous zones, thus expecting a global change.

ones, thus expecting a global change…

“Expanding universe I” (1980) – Eduardo Nery

5. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

Pinker (2018, p. 56, emphasis added) states in his Panglossian book Enlightenment Now: “Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress.” In the old-fashioned discourse of “for or against progress,” or in that “[…] 19th-century Romantic belief in mystical forces, laws, dialectics, struggles, unfoldings, destinies, ages of man, and evolutionary forces that propel mankind ever upward toward utopia,” intellectuals often confuse everything with the ideals of the twentieth century, which aimed to “[…] re-engineer society for the convenience of technocrats and planners, which the political scientist James Scott calls Authoritarian High Modernism” (Idem, p. 25).

Instead, accelerationists—both capitalist and post-capitalist—with their Promethean ostentations, including anti-moderns with their primitivist hesitations, occupy the anachronistic margins of “technical progress.” After all, is the question metaphorical—(de)accelerating—or is it about enabling creations, deviations, decentralizations, experiences, differences, and collective singularities through the strengthening of techno-ecological structures, tactics, and strategies of digital democracy?

Facing this question, Pelbart’s (2015, p. 89) reflective prudence is instructive: “We know that capitalism is quite capable against this and much more than what was believed at the time, but perhaps, much less—in any case, nowadays such an evaluation would demand a thorough ‘update’.” Let us complete this thought: an update that is realistic, pragmatic, and programmatic. Leftist techno-utopian discourses—the most recent being the idea of “luxurious communism” that would arrive with the full automation of work (Bastani, 2019), and the penultimate being “liberation” via blockchains—often result only in further delusions, opacity, and transparency games, generating suspicion, as Noys (2014) observes.

Despite sympathizing with those who manifest politically based on a “materialistic and extreme immanentist conception” of postcapitalist accelerationism, Bifo (2013) warns that accelerating today may actually produce interruptions in the production of uniqueness from experiences and desensitizations that reduce modes of existence to mere stimuli. Desterritorization and decoding are not immediate synonyms for autonomy, the creation of singularity, or emancipation. A pertinent question arises: in a life already highly accelerated, where technological mutations occur faster than mental and social mutations, do the latter’s slower adaptations become overloaded and blocked?

Between Anti-Oedipus and What is Philosophy?, that is, between 1972 and 1992, Bifo notes that Deleuze and Guattari evolved considerably: “[…] During this period, economic globalization and the info-technological revolution intensified the effects of acceleration on the desiring body” (Idem, Ibidem). Accordingly, the effects of machine acceleration on social subjectivity differ and are evident in their problematic reversal when addressing relations within “chaos” (technological disruptions?) and “brain” (subjectivations?). In What is Philosophy?, the authors write:

“We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master” (Deleuze & Guattari apud Bifo, 2013, p. 3).

Making politics or democracy is, essentially, the creation of new spaces of life. Rancière (2005), although he left aside the urgent discussion of the relations between materialities and democracy, clarifies that democracy—far from being an institutional environment and understood as the process of uninterrupted struggle against the privatization of the public sphere—should not be reduced to a form of government or a constitution. Rather, democracy is the encounter and conflict between two opposing logics: the political (the government of “anyone”; the possibility of dissent) and the police (the separation, hierarchy, and management of social skills; the formatting of a certain consensus) [5]. Democracy is thus a pragmatic process of emancipation across multiple forms and materialities, within aesthetic and affective dimensions—a point that is increasingly recognized in conventional discourses.

Wright (2017), in How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century, adds that anti-capitalist ideals require the construction of an effective economic democracy, relying on technologies that today can enable cooperative economies, mechanisms for universal income, and the democratization of business and banking spaces. In this sense, Unger (2019, pp. 14, 49), with his pragmatic and programmatic socio-political thinking, complements: studying the most advanced production practices, the “knowledge economy,” is to attribute due value to what has the potential to “radically alter human life,” as opposed to the pseudo-vanguardism (restricted, hyperinsular) of entrepreneurs, managers, and technicians—“a few thousand people in California”—who only generate economic stagnation and inequality. The aim is to create a genuine inclusive vanguardism, consisting of “institutional arrangements by which we organize decentralized economic activity.”

Materiality, aesthetics, and politics are inseparable in the propositions of postcapitalist accelerationism. Yet, these are advanced in a highly idiosyncratic way, expanding a certain liberal-Nietzschean spirit present in the first joint work of Deleuze and Guattari. They propose an inconveniently “spiritual” denomination for their concerns and purposes, which raises more opponents than supporters. They advocate a necessary causal relationship between an accelerationist spirit and the creation of new spaces of life through materiality, aesthetics, and politics. The “spiritual-ideological” debate is thus inescapable, enduring, and difficult; yet without a pragmatic perspective, it remains insufficient.

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[1] The text, essayistic, is the third part of a research project entitled Contemporary Materialism, Archeology of Apparatus and Democracy, it should be noted that, in Brazil, in times of extreme right-wing policies of outrage and dismantling of university institutions, it had been developed without research funding. I would like to thank Gustavo Denani, Felipe B. Gomes e Luciana P. de Souza for their critical and analytical readings.

[2] “The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought. This proposition should be distinguished from any discourse – positive or negative – according to which everything is ‘narrative’, with alternations between ‘grand’ narratives and ‘minor’ narratives. […] It is a matter of stating that the fiction of the aesthetic age defined models for connecting the presentation of facts and forms of intelligibility that blurred the border between the logic of  facts and the logic of fiction. […] Writing history and writing stories come under the same regime of truth” (Rancière, 2004, p. 38).

[3] Derrida, in the context of discussion on law and jurisprudence, writes: “The undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension between two decisions, it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged – it is of obligation that we must speak – to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules. A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process. It might be legal; it would not be just.” (Derrida, 1990, p. 963).

[4] Following the Philippe Mengue’s formidable commentary on the Deleuzian interpretation of the machining and indeterminacy of life in Bartleby, of Herman Melville: “What is common to Bartleby – Deleuzian hero par excellence – is the idiot, with the idea that we can only do a policy of indeterminacy as a non-causal condition, capable of giving chances for the event [événement] (violent, disorganizing) and the unexpected (undecidable, not programmable). It is from nothing or from the indeterminate that control slows, slows down, remains powerless and on this occasion an open space is created towards a possible event. Not that the indeterminate has a value in itself and constitutes an ultimate end. But it is from it that we must mainly count, not to produce the event, but to make its appearance possible (which depends on other factors). The event’s policy necessarily becomes a policy of indeterminacy.” (Mengue, 2013, p. 30).

[5] Here is a question: is this praxis the same as that of the engineer (consensus) or that of the hacker (dissent)? As defined by the Committee Invisible (2014, p. 126), while the figure of the engineer is that of a police officer who comes to make the world work, in the best possible way, according to a system; the figure of the hacker, in turn, seeks to find the flaws, to invent other uses, to experiment, that is, to release new aesthetics and ethics from technical experiments.