MAELSTRÖM LIFE – Ednei de Genaro

“Set of opposites” (1989) – Eduardo Nery

CONTEMPORARY TECHNOPOLITICAL ESCHATOLOGIES

Ednei de Genaro

[2020]

Introduction Capitalist Acceleration  2.1 The Singularity  2.2 The Anthropotechnical Condition Propositions on the Contemporary  3.1 Machinations  3.2 Contemporary Capitalism Postcapitalist Acceleration  4.1 Immanent Critique  4.2 Reverse Eschatology? Final Considerations References

Translated from the Portuguese original:
Genaro, Ednei de. Escatologias Tecnopolíticas Contemporâneas. Cadernos IHU Ideias (UNISINOS), vol. 18, pp. 1–45, 2020.
Available at: Cadernos IHU Ideias – Escatologias Tecnopolíticas Contemporâneas

 

1. INTRODUCTION

How can we understand and periodize eschatological discourses surrounding contemporary technoscientific progress, and how do these discourses relate to key analytical and interpretive dimensions at the intersection of political philosophy, sociology, and economics? These are the two overarching questions explored in this text.

Our reflections, analyses, and considerations are organized into three sections, guided by a research hypothesis centered on two technopolitical eschatologies: capitalist accelerationism and postcapitalist accelerationism. Between these sections, a third section clarifies theoretical propositions concerning the contemporary world, the concepts of human and machine, and the relationship between them – particularly in philosophical and sociopolitical terms [1].

“Illusory Space” (1989) – Eduardo Nery

2. CAPITALIST ACCELERACIONISM

How can we understand and periodize capitalist accelerationism? A growing number of scholars in the humanities and media studies have emphasized its significance (Levy, 2011; Haucap & Heimeshoff, 2013; Aschoff, 2015; Bolaño & Figueiredo, 2017; Robinson, 2016; Solon & Siddiqui, 2017; Pulkkinen, 2019). These authors identify Silicon Valley, California, USA, as the principal site where financial capitalism converges with technological innovation – particularly computational technologies. The region is characterized not only by a concentration of political and economic power, but also by experiments in and prophecies of libertarian forms of life and politics. In other words, it constitutes the locus of a virtual pendulum shaped by the simultaneous decentralization and centralization of processes, data, designs, flows, and capital, producing continuous rearrangements of labor and capital under what Rouvroy and Berns (2013) describe as “algorithmic governmentality.” This mode of governance is redefining sovereignty, forms of subjection, and contemporary geopolitics (Bratton, 2015).

Since the early 2000s, the algorithmic infrastructures developed in Silicon Valley – especially the “invisible” systems operated by the companies grouped under the acronym GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) – have played a central role in the accumulation of wealth by these corporations. Significantly, nearly all of them were implicated in the PRISM global surveillance program operated by the United States and revealed by Edward Snowden. By 2017, these companies had surpassed traditional industrial giants such as Exxon, Nestlé, General Electric, and Johnson & Johnson, becoming some of the ten wealthiest corporations in the world (Parra et al., 2018).

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

The Internet of Things, robotics, big data, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic infrastructures – all central components of Industry 4.0, grounded in cyber-physical systems and cloud computing – position nonhuman actors in increasingly advantageous ways relative to humans within capitalist regimes of quantifying spheres of life and extracting surplus value, particularly in the domains of management, execution, and communication. The opacity and depoliticization surrounding these technologies are alarming. At the dawn of global cyber-surveillance systems, it is precisely the technocratic and libertarian utopias and dystopias – expressed through the actions of experts and capitalist elites – that demand critical examination within contemporary democracies. After all, as Deleuze and Guattari (1997) suggest, Clausewitz’s dictum has been inverted: politics has become the continuation of war, while the promises of “eternal peace” and the “end of history” technically implement the silent and unlimited processes of total war and permanent states of exception.

Silicon Valley symbolizes the historical construction of a colossal center of calculation (Latour, 2000): technoscience itself; an inexorable maelstrom; a whirlwind simultaneously expanding and reducing worlds; a system of control over space and time through inventories, classifications, surveys, cartographies, and far-reaching incursions. It epitomizes circuits of compatibility, standardization, quantification, flowcharts, and organizational logics, establishing a form of relative universality that frequently overrides or marginalizes local singularities.

Our focus, then, is to understand 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, especially in the form known as the technological singularity, examining its meanings, practices, affects, and ideals. This also includes the political culture that emerges from and circulates through these beliefs.

In this essay, we first examine libertarian technopolitical eschatology, particularly the currents associated with Kurzweil, 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 and traditionally associated with “final judgments” in religious contexts. Over the past two centuries, humanity’s spiritual aspirations and utopian imaginaries have increasingly shifted toward technological eschatologies, often articulated through literary and science-fiction narratives. By the late twentieth century, these discourses had developed into an expressive technopolitical corpus disseminated through the media and, more importantly, through institutions and organizational structures.

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 anomalous state in which traditional rules break down: in mathematics, a point at which a function lacks a derivative; in physics, a region of spacetime where gravitational forces produce infinite density, as in black holes. Singularity thus conveys a decisive transition between distinct domains, introducing a rupture or discontinuity. It signifies acceleration beyond the limits of conventional explanation, exceeding the capacities of traditional mathematical and physical tools of cognition, evaluation, and prediction.

Ray Kurzweil is the principal figure associated with 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), both translated into multiple languages, Kurzweil argues that technoscientific progress advances exponentially, reshaping human life and capacities while redefining notions of the (post)human and of 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 Singularity University in Silicon Valley in 2008. Today, the institution maintains branches and partnerships in several countries. It functions simultaneously as a think tank, a business incubator, and a hub for disruptive technological innovation, fostering entrepreneurial, scientific, and technocratic 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 form of technoscientific speculation: a sequence of predictions grounded in data, graphs, interpretations, and events, while 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 concerning immortality, technocratic governance, and new frontiers of capitalist innovation and automation.

Discourses surrounding technological singularity offer an eschatological and utopian framework 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), thereby accelerating social and technological processes toward an idealized “good life.”

At the same time, these narratives do not operate in isolation but are embedded in broader processes of digitalization and platformization. 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 increasingly corporate strategies.

Against this backdrop, our goal is not to denounce 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 contributes to the depoliticization of 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.” Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoliberal triumphalism framed capitalism as historically 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 sought to reconcile Western secular-technological civilization with the messianic eschatologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. By the early twenty-first century, however, Fukuyama’s anthropocentric vision of the state confronted a form of corporate eschatology: technocentric, posthumanist, and driven by the accelerating logic of capitalism. 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 because they threaten to undermine 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 by relying on technological innovation mediated through venture capital, entrepreneurship, and state institutions, while simultaneously advocating automation and diverse experiments in ways of life 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)

As we enter the 2020s – a period increasingly shaped by business-oriented technopolitical eschatologies – we may 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, posthuman “Good News” of unrestricted optimism surrounding accelerationist corporations signify?

To critically distance ourselves from the technocratic-eschatological dimension of contemporary life – while avoiding the conservatism characteristic of Fukuyama’s state-centered eschatology – we must attempt a conceptual analysis of the notions of singularity and the posthuman condition, what we might call the anthropotechnical condition.

In contemporary philosophical thought, the concept of singularity diverges sharply from eschatological propositions. In philosophy, singularity designates a continuous process of becoming affecting beings, objects, and environments, identifying their potentialities as differentiated, spatialized, and temporalized within heterogeneous and multiple relations. Drawing particularly on Simondon’s philosophy, Deleuze distinguishes singularity from all notions 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 referring to the singularity of a thing as it emerges through events, mutations, and potentialities. Drawing on modern physics, Deleuze associates singularity with the theory of differential equations through the distribution of curves and potentials across neighborhoods, surfaces, and spaces. This approach distances itself from fixed paradigms, forms, 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 the self and the subject give way to new concepts that dissolve the intrinsic/extrinsic and subject/object dichotomies: individuation, associated milieu, internal resonance, and so forth. These notions allow us to understand the channels and flows of energy through which singularities unfold (Idem, pp. 83–84).

Singularity, then, may be understood as a convergence of forces, differences, realities, and worlds – a constellation fundamentally distinct from the hylomorphism and substantialism underlying technological-eschatological arguments. In Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, Simondon emphasizes that the development 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, entails a reduction in technical perfection. Higher technicality emerges through processes open 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 within the eschatological spectrum, which myths of progress and technical superiority continue to reproduce and 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 for the economic supporters of libertarian technocratic systems – perpetuates a feedback loop of feudality: connections devoid of singularization, social processes increasingly absorbed by automatisms, hypertrophies, and alienation.

Pierre Clastres, in The Society against the State, offers 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 grounded in a fundamentally affirmative relation between humans and the cosmos. In the spirit of Amartya Sen (1993), Amerindian societies valued their capacities and mobilized them in pursuit of well-being and freedom. Here, development and progress become synonymous with the expansion of capacities, associated with well-being and ecological care. By contrast, in modern societies, the instrumentalization of progress prioritizes economic prosperity, libertarian utopias, and fantasies of immortality, often detached from questions of well-being and ecological care.

2.2 – Anthropotechnical condition

The problem of technological singularity and automatism forces us to confront 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 recall 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 materialist, 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 only through technical modifications and, consequently, through continuous co-transformation with them. Our contemporary recognition of the constitutive role of technical exteriority in human physiology, biology, and memory derives both from scientific discoveries and from the declining dominance of anthropocentric thinking in favor of forms of mediation that symmetrically include humans and nonhumans. Rather than searching for the “essence of Being,” inquiry shifts toward compositions and modes of existence understood 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 through dichotomous or paradoxical frameworks, must be overcome. As Garcia dos Santos (2005, p. 165) notes, the principal 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 posthuman horizon, which conceives of itself as an advanced contemporary or future stage. Critiquing the posthumanist eschatological universe therefore requires addressing not only the political ambitions of libertarian technocracy, but also postmodern philosophical perspectives of an apocalyptic nature, which diagnose an “imperious” technical machine determining an era of “total cyber-transparency” and the exhaustion of political possibilities for generating diverse capacities for well-being and freedom within democracies.

In the critical conceptual analysis of postmodern philosophical perspectives – a subject still poorly understood – it is worth highlighting Jean-François Lyotard, arguably the central figure in diagnosing the constraints produced by the repeated assertion of a human-technical incommensurability and the resulting political desolation of subjects in democracies.

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

Despite his skepticism toward the humanist tradition in Western culture – common among postmodernists critical of Enlightenment legacies – Lyotard ultimately espouses what appears to be a substantially humanist position in The Inhuman (1987). Although often described as anti-humanist or posthumanist, few humanists would fundamentally dispute his position. He stands in stark contrast to enthusiasts of machinic 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 equivalent to surrendering to the inhuman, making the defense of “little narratives” essential in preventing such an 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 arriving at a conceptual cul-de-sac. Following a Nietzschean tradition, Lyotard identifies a reduction of thought to judgment and to the calculability of life. Within the “victory of capitalist technoscience,” success becomes the sole criterion of judgment, displacing ethical or justice-based considerations: success “is self-proclaiming, like a ratification of something heedless of any law” (Lyotard, 1993, pp. 18–19). The isolation of technoscience from other sociotechnical networks compels it to define unilaterally 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 characteristic of postmodern philosophies? Positively, a path toward politics and history remains; there remains space for an authentic and undetermined life. The question is not strictly one of being “against the posthuman.” Hesitation should not take the form of a philosophical negation of the advanced anthropotechnical inhuman or of a critique of the technological eschatology advanced by capitalist accelerationists. Rather, it should be understood as a political critique of projects seeking to eliminate desire and social machines (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983).

Abandoning the thesis of human-machine incommensurability, we must instead think through 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, of politics, expressing singularities emerging from the incalculable or undecidable[1] (Derrida), or from haecceity and indeterminacy[2] (Deleuze).

The diagnosis of “total cybernetic transparency” raises a fundamental and ultimately unanswerable question: “What is man?” Or, more provocatively, it eliminates the question altogether, imposing a limitless world governed by the general equivalence 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 forms of philosophical hesitation 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 the theoretical and epistemological propositions that we consider 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: within the “hybridization of realms,” “[c]ritical discourse should not base itself on a universalist humanism, lest it miss what contemporary assemblages constitute” (Pelbart, 2015, p. 91). The resulting notion of the machine remains 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, derived from μῆχος – mekhos, meaning means, expedient, or remedy) refers to a conception of “associative flows,” expressed through notions such as openness, multiplicity, alterity, and assemblage. Machination, understood as “areas of proximity and indiscernibility,” constitutes a system of flows and “cuts” that satisfies the planes of consistency between organic and inorganic beings.

Thus, we begin from a recovery and reformulation of the epistemological perspective inaugurated by Deleuze and Guattari. However, we are not limited to it, since these authors themselves reinterpret Marx and Freud – as well as the various Marxisms and Freudianisms derived from them. Influenced particularly by Gilbert Simondon, Deleuze and Guattari develop a sociotechnical theory grounded in the associations between technical, desiring, and social machines. Their aim is to articulate a notion of the human and of the world through a highly specific concept of the machine, encompassing multiple dimensions 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, and reductionist conceptions of the human and its socialization.

The machine is therefore understood as a “system of cuts,” which does not imply a separation between realities (completeness, sub-materialization, or isolation). On the contrary, it entails operations that extract “associative flows” – that is, machinations operating within the orders of desire, technicality, and sociality. Within this sociotechnical theory, such systems continually generate and render intelligible social productions (actions, connections), technical distributions (records, graphs, datafications), and the consumptions and desires (pleasures, anguish, pain) associated with becomings in general.

Engaging critically with psychoanalytic theory through schizoanalysis and the notion of machination, Deleuze and Guattari propose a new politics of desires, singularities, and subjectivities. Classical structuralist, individualist, or holistic epistemological frameworks prove inadequate; conventional terms and predicates – adaptation, structure, subordination, substitution, extension, exteriorization, impact, or incorporation – fail to capture the phenomena in their complexity. This approach should neither be reduced to linguistic operations (signifiers), nor centered upon individual or collective agents (intersubjectivity). Instead, composition, agency, individuation, associated milieu, diagrams, connection, servitude, and capture demand analysis 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 determine precisely when the discourse of technological singularity emerges, since the algorithmic era is defined by decentralized and non-teleological machines (Galloway, 2013; Serres, 2019). The previous mechanical – or homo faber – era produced tools and machines designed for well-defined purposes and uses. Algorithmic machines introduce a new condition: they are simultaneously universal, theoretical, and practical, capable of being employed in countless 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 amalgam of operations unfolding across space and time: movements (of raw materials, techniques, and humans), comparisons (of profits, cultures, information, and labor forces), and captures (of territories, temporalities, and human groups). These operations acquire unprecedented complexity and sociopolitical potential through centralized and decentralized associative media flows (Galloway & Thacker, 2007).

In reflecting upon the hybridization of realms, Deleuze and Guattari left several important conceptual contributions. Paolo Virno pioneered an intellectual and political exploration of collectives within this 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 convergence between work practices and ways of life, we cannot fully grasp the transformations occurring in contemporary production or in contemporary culture. In the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), the social, political, and economic fields become immersed in new forms of capture and production of subjectivities, as well as in forms of capital-labor exploitation grounded in capitalist machinations. Capitalism emerges as a “worldwide enterprise of subjectification,” operating exclusively through a State that guarantees the “axiomatic of capital” across populations.

Capital and State machines operate through two key, interrelated, and cyclical movements: liberation (innovation and the production of continuous and unlimited desires) and control (codification and normativization). Within this contemporary conjunction, populations are constantly subjected to forces seeking to constrain their modes of existence through 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 itself as a 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 discourses, 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 understood as a second modality of production and exploitation: a second dimension in the machining of subjectivity within capitalism. This modality operates simultaneously and complementarily alongside social subjection through processes of recoding, decoding, and machinic servitude. Such production corresponds to a system of human-machine interactions requiring only semiotic and asignifying 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 operate like nervous or cerebral machinations designed to capture individuals. As machinic operations proliferate, the subject becomes fragmented for the purpose of extracting, quantifying, and instrumentalizing bodies – revealing capitalism’s “dehumanizing cynicism.” Within the molecular power of machinic 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 the legacy of Deleuze and Guattari, it is also important to emphasize a final and 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, contradictory, and ambivalent flows, operating through pendular, diachronic movements. Decoders are primarily associated with money-capital and “free labor,” whereas encoders (axiomatics) are linked to the State. The capitalist social machine generates a spectrum of schizophrenic desires within populations, distinct from the depressive or paranoid operating orders produced by despotic State machines (centralizing, totalitarian, monarchical), or from the hysterical orders characteristic of territorial machines (savage, tribal).

Regarding the permanent innovation characteristic of capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari note that populations are subjected to a continuous “schizoid time of the new creative cut,” such 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 vehicle of overcoding, the State fulfills the cynical function of the “bourgeois field of immanence,” interrupting processes of liberation only to release them once more, while ensuring specific landscapes of social subjection and machinic enslavement. In this sense, the State machine, like technical machines, contributes to a broader diagrammatic order:

“[…] 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 introduced the problem of decentralized machinations within the French intellectual context of the early 1970s through a revision of Marxism and Freudianism, moving beyond the dominant notions of ideology and the dialectics of “master and slave” (class struggle) and “father and mother” (the Oedipus complex). The year 1972, when Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Volume 1 was published, was marked by the Cold War space race, the first neoliberal attacks on the Keynesian axioms of capitalist states, signs of exhaustion within the despotic states of the Soviet Bloc, and the unfolding of the “cultural revolutions” that followed May 1968.

In this context, Deleuze and Guattari sought to redefine the nature of capitalist production by conceiving the social as immersed in the subjective machinations of desire. As Lazzarato (2010, p. 179) observes, political action capable of becoming revolutionary—the kind that should nourish 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—frequently mobilized 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) notes, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the struggle against the reactive and nihilistic desires of capitalism could only emerge from a nihilism “[…] that intends to surpass, turning it around against itself […]”; thus, 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 the provocative and innovative proposition of Anti-Oedipus—“accelerate the process,” in reference to Nietzsche—would later be adopted as a political motto by postcapitalist accelerationists. This proposition opens controversial intellectual and political tensions surrounding active nihilism—that is, a position advocating a certain radicalization of political liberalism through tactics and strategies designed to advance the “productive forces,” so that these forces might no longer remain constrained by the axioms of the capitalist machine.

In theory, such tactics and strategies would depend upon counter-performative dynamics capable of activating machinic assemblages that genuinely dismantle axiomatized subjectivities, thereby enabling processes of liberation and the constitution of democratic sociabilities and emancipatory public spaces.

As with capitalist accelerationism, it is necessary to periodize and analyze the principal proponents and discourses of postcapitalist accelerationism, examining their arrangements of meanings, practices, affections, and imaginaries—that is, their distinct political culture.

4.1 – Immanent critique

At the beginning of the 21st century, in a pioneering attempt to develop technopolitical tactics and strategies capable of escaping the double movement of liberation and control inherent in social subjection and machinic enslavement, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt published Empire, engaging directly with the provocation to “accelerate the process.” In that work, Negri and Hardt sought not merely to resist capitalism but, above all, to argue that the real decentralization of political materialities could enable an immanent critique—and potentially an overcoming—of capitalism itself.

“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, pp. 206–07).

Beginning with Empire, Negri and Hardt advanced technopolitical propositions fundamentally aimed at transforming traditional leftist modes of thought, since the traditional left had historically insisted upon critique and mobilization through rupture, interruption, or immediate revolution of the capitalist mode of production—typically through proletarian uprising—thereby neglecting possibilities of immanent critique, subversion, and emancipatory détournements operating from “within” capitalism.

The propositions advanced by Negri and Hardt gained renewed prominence in 2013, when the manifesto #Accelerate Manifesto: For an Accelerationist Politics, signed by the British theorists and activists Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, was first published on the website Critical Legal Thinking and rapidly circulated through digital intellectual networks. The following year, Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian released #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Mackay & Avanessian, 2014), republishing twenty-seven classic and contemporary texts associated with postcapitalist accelerationist thought, including works by 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 Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015), while Srnicek later published Platform Capitalism (2017), a work intended to systematize and expand their political propositions.

Below are two excerpts from the aforementioned #Accelerate Manifesto, addressing 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 in broadly positive terms, highlighting the capacity of critical accelerationists to formulate a productive and purposeful approach to “revolutionary materialism” within 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 resonated within left-wing intellectual circles, fostering critical debates concerning the anachronisms and futurisms of contemporary political action. 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 broadly consensual point among advocates of leftist political tactics and strategies is the diagnosis proposed by Marx in the Grundrisse, particularly in the section known as The Fragment on Machines, which argues that the emergence of large-scale industry would make science and technology the central forces of production, thereby reducing the centrality of wage labor. In this context, various collectivities emerge pursuing political aspirations through horizontal structures of knowledge, constructing digital materialities that enable decentralized environments and forms of democratic experimentation. FabLabs, Hackerspaces, Wikispaces, and crowdfunding platforms are largely associated with the creation of both virtual and non-virtual environments, as well as with mobilizations aimed at monitoring public works and political representatives, expanding access to information, financing educational and artistic projects, and fostering collaborative initiatives. These platforms stimulate interactions among urban populations in support of ecological management, alternative forms of social and ecological exchange, and locally rooted political practices.

The objective, here, is to create active and interactive collectivities in opposition to the market-driven disruption and centralization characteristic of Silicon Valley’s technological pole—especially those platforms that rely upon social subjection and machinic enslavement in order to extract, process, and commercialize information and products, whether through advertising platforms (Google, Facebook), product platforms (Spotify), mobility services (Uber, Airbnb), cloud computing infrastructures (Salesforce, Amazon), or industrial systems (GE, Siemens) (Srnicek, 2017).

At a practical level, the challenge posed by postcapitalist accelerationism, as Srnicek (2017) argues, is to move beyond traditional forms of political action (“folk politics”)—that is, forms grounded in petitions, occupations, strikes, party activities, affinity groups, and unions. Such tactics and strategies often operate through common-sense assumptions and are sometimes anachronistic or ineffective, despite continually being repeated as the most “authentic” or “natural” forms of political action. Even newer leftist political experiments—horizontalist and localist movements such as Occupy, 15M, Tiqqun, and The Invisible Committee—continue to rely heavily upon these approaches. This does not imply dismissing traditional working-class politics; on the contrary, Srnicek argues that such politics remain necessary, though insufficient. Transforming neoliberalism into something different would require global action platforms, together with profound transformations in value systems, governance arrangements, and the integration of design, quantification, and computational technologies.

The Promethean horizon of postcapitalist accelerationism raises several important debates. One central issue is that, by emphasizing technological materialities—designs, architectures, flows, agencies, and algorithmic performances—these movements partially displace political strategies centered upon discursive praxis and the constitution 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 spaces 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 planning associated with 20th-century socialist states inevitably comes to mind. After all, the centralization of power in those societies did not lead to the overcoming of authoritarianism, scarcity, or the genuine emancipation of workers. Indeed, as Robert Kurz (1992) demonstrated, the effective meaning of many “public policies” became the construction of a “wall,” a “technological race,” and a form of “barracks socialism.” Nor should one overlook the broader trajectory of 20th-century socialist theory itself: once applied through the state during the mechanical era, it frequently generated intensified control, centralization, and rigid forms of social subjection.

Today, however—and fortunately—the meaning attributed to left-wing planning differs substantially: 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, oriented toward building, reclaiming, reprogramming, or reforming the diverse infrastructures of everyday life: production, logistics, exchange, finance, media, culture, and ecology.

Whether authoritarian-conservative governments are in power or not, the processes of algorithmic governmentality remain largely unchanged, orchestrated through state-business machinations. Reactive public-legislative governance, conducted by national and international institutions and organizations, remains insufficient and, in practice, often complicit. Responses grounded solely in resistance, “profanation,” or escapism are structurally limited by their microsocial scale. What, then, is to be done? Observing contemporary geopolitics— increasingly reorganized through computational engineering, which progressively displaces the traditional diplomatic nexus between states, the so-called “Westphalian sovereignty” (Bratton, 2015)—it becomes evident that the sociopolitical challenge of redefining constituent power cannot be resolved without the construction of a socio-technical counter-hegemony.

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

By elaborating distinct left-wing political temperaments, these authors have contributed theoretical and practical tools aimed at strengthening political expression through collective intelligence, plural and cooperative forms of coexistence, and the reinforcement of horizontal social bonds.

4.2 – Reverse eschatology?

What should be expected from the Deleuze-Guattarian provocation to “accelerate the process,” elevated by accelerationists into a political banner? Does it imply a political eschatology that merely reverses the first form of accelerationism? At a moment when raising consciousness about the destructive dimensions of anthropocentrism has become imperative, in what sense does the Promethean volition of postcapitalist accelerationists differ from that of neoliberal capitalist accelerationists? Put differently, although the two accelerationist camps diverge politically, neither fully escapes the modern logic of the domination and destruction of Gaia. One seeks the maximization of profit and “abundance”; the other, revolutionary “redemption.” Are postcapitalist accelerationists therefore reviving, in a messianic register reminiscent of certain Marxist traditions, the emancipatory development of the productive forces, thereby reproducing another form of eschatology alongside their adversaries?

Such an eschatological orientation invites suspicion. Mackay and Avanessian (2014, p. 4), for instance, define accelerationism as:

“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.”

Terms such as uprooting, alienation, decoding, and abstraction carry highly controversial philosophical and political implications – constituting, at the very least, a peculiar reading of Deleuze and Guattari. Within the abyssal maelstrom of contemporary life, futurology and speed continue to captivate the Promethean imagination of the moderns. The conjunction of progress and advancement has long been associated with what Stiegler (1994) describes as the forgetfulness of Epimetheus – that is, the elimination of hesitation, delay, and reflection.

As Wark (2015; 2019) argues, one possible alternative lies in the realization of a contemporary prolekult: the recovery of creativity, collectivity, and universalism from the perspective of everyday urban life, following intuitions already present in Bogdanov and Lefebvre. Such a project would require overcoming restrictive conceptions 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 in original).

Indeed, reflecting on materialities in relation to an altruistic, democratic, communal, slow, and non-alienated ecology presents a provocative dilemma: should one accelerate or decelerate the process? Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2014, p. 150 et seq.) oppose the “political economy of acceleration” to a “political ecology of slowdown,” the latter emphasizing attention, care, and openness toward alterity. In their critique, accelerationists are accused of reductionism, technological determinism, nostalgia for a “rationalist, imperialist, and triumphalist” past, and even forms of climate denialism. Yet this critique itself occasionally assumes a hyperbolic tone.

Nevertheless, mistrust toward unilateralism and authoritarian tendencies within postcapitalist accelerationist discourse is symptomatic of the current impasse faced by the Left. In response, Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (Idem, p. 153), much like Latour and perhaps Stengers, advance another provocation: an “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,’ who fear that Gaia’s intrusion will disturb the dream of perfect freedom – the freedom resulting from a Promethean mastery capable of taking us toward an ontologically disincarnated state, toward a techno-angelic transfiguration. It is a case of asking who has been smoking opium these days.”

This provocation is equally strategic. According to the authors, it valorizes becoming-Indian, techno-primitive bricolages, high-intensity syncretic assemblages, lines of flight, and political-metaphysical metamorphoses capable of articulating local and global experiences, as well as the particular and the general (Idem, p. 158). Such a political orientation begins from micro-resistances and temporary autonomous zones, while nevertheless aspiring toward broader global transformations.

“Expanding universe I” (1980) – Eduardo Nery

 

5. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

Pinker (2018, p. 56, emphasis added) states in his markedly optimistic book Enlightenment Now: “Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress.” Within the old dichotomy of being “for or against progress,” or within what Pinker describes as the “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 frequently confuse every critique of technological modernization with the twentieth-century projects that sought to “[…] re-engineer society for the convenience of technocrats and planners,” which James Scott termed “Authoritarian High Modernism” (Idem, p. 25).

Yet accelerationists – both capitalist and postcapitalist – together with anti-modern critics and their primitivist hesitations, continue to inhabit the problematic margins of “technical progress.” Ultimately, the question is not simply whether one should accelerate or decelerate processes. Rather, the issue concerns how to enable creations, deviations, decentralizations, experiences, differences, and collective singularities through the strengthening of techno-ecological structures, tactics, and strategies capable of deepening democratic life.

Faced with this dilemma, Pelbart’s (2015, p. 89) reflective prudence remains 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’.” One might complete this proposition by arguing that such an update must also be realistic, pragmatic, and programmatic. Left-wing techno-utopian discourses – from the recent promises of “fully automated luxury communism” (Bastani, 2019) to earlier emancipatory expectations surrounding blockchains – often end up reproducing new forms of opacity, illusion, and technopolitical fetishization, thereby generating renewed skepticism, as Noys (2014) observes.

Despite his sympathy for the “materialist and radically immanentist” orientations of postcapitalist accelerationism, Bifo (2013) warns that acceleration under contemporary conditions may increasingly produce interruptions in the formation of singularity itself. Processes of hyperstimulation and desensitization tend to reduce modes of existence to mere reactive stimuli. Deterritorialization and decoding are therefore not immediate synonyms for autonomy, emancipation, or the creation of singularity. A decisive question consequently emerges: in a world already marked by extreme acceleration, where technological mutations occur more rapidly than mental and social mutations, do the slower rhythms of psychic and collective adaptation become overloaded and blocked?

Between Anti-Oedipus and What is Philosophy? – that is, between 1972 and 1992 – Deleuze and Guattari’s own perspective appears to have shifted considerably. As Bifo (2013, p. 3) notes, “[…] during this period, economic globalization and the info-technological revolution intensified the effects of acceleration on the desiring body.” In this context, the problem of machinic acceleration becomes inseparable from the problem of subjectivation itself. Reflecting on the relation between “chaos” and the “brain,” Deleuze and Guattari 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).

To make politics – and, more fundamentally, democracy – is to create new spaces of life. Although Rancière (2005) does not directly engage the contemporary problem of technopolitical materialities, his conception of democracy remains highly pertinent. Democracy should not be reduced to institutions, constitutional forms, or governmental arrangements; rather, it emerges as the uninterrupted struggle against the privatization of the public sphere. Democracy is the conflictual encounter between two opposing logics: the political (the government of “anyone” and the possibility of dissensus) and the police (the hierarchical ordering and management of bodies, competences, and consensual arrangements)[3]. Democracy thus constitutes a pragmatic process of emancipation unfolding across multiple material, aesthetic, and affective dimensions.

In a complementary vein, Wright (2017), in How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century, argues that anti-capitalist aspirations require the construction of an effective economic democracy, supported by technologies capable of enabling cooperative economies, universal income mechanisms, and the democratization of productive and financial institutions. Similarly, Unger (2019, pp. 14, 49) contends that examining the most advanced forms of production, the “knowledge economy”, means recognizing what possesses the potential to “radically alter human life,” in contrast to the pseudo-vanguardism of hyper-specialized entrepreneurs, managers, and technicians (“a few thousand people in California”) who ultimately reproduce stagnation and inequality. The challenge, for Unger, is the creation of an inclusive vanguardism grounded in institutional arrangements capable of organizing decentralized economic activity democratically.

Materiality, aesthetics, and politics are inseparable within postcapitalist accelerationist propositions. Yet these propositions are often articulated in highly idiosyncratic ways, extending a liberal-Nietzschean sensibility already present in Deleuze and Guattari’s early collaborative work. In doing so, accelerationists adopt a provocative and often contentious vocabulary for articulating their political aspirations, generating as many critics as adherents. What ultimately remains unavoidable is the recognition that debates surrounding technics, democracy, subjectivation, and collective life cannot be resolved solely at the level of ideological dispute or speculative futurism. Without pragmatic experimentation and the construction of democratic socio-technical arrangements, the debate risks remaining trapped between technological messianism and political impotence.

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[1] Derrida, in the context of his 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 and 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 did not 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).

[2] Following Philippe Mengue’s formidable commentary on the Deleuzian interpretation of the machinic and indeterminate dimensions of life in Bartleby, by Herman Melville:
“What Bartleby – the Deleuzian hero par excellence – shares with the idiot is the idea that a politics of indeterminacy can only emerge as a non-causal condition capable of giving chances to the event [événement] (violent, disorganizing) and to the unexpected (undecidable, non-programmable). It is from nothingness, or from the indeterminate, that control slows down, hesitates, becomes powerless, and thereby opens a space toward a possible event. This does not mean that the indeterminate possesses value in itself or constitutes an ultimate end. Rather, it is from this indeterminacy that one must proceed – not in order to produce the event, but to make its emergence possible (since this depends on other factors). The politics of the event thus necessarily becomes a politics of indeterminacy.” (Mengue, 2013, p. 30).

[3] Here a question emerges: is this praxis analogous to that of the engineer (consensus) or to that of the hacker (dissent)? As defined by the Invisible Committee (2014, p. 126), the figure of the engineer resembles that of a police officer who seeks to make the world function in the best possible way according to a given system. The figure of the hacker, by contrast, seeks to discover flaws, invent alternative uses, and experiment – that is, to release new aesthetics and ethics through technical experimentation.