Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital: An Interview with Nick Land

This is the full-text transcript of an audio podcast, recorded over two sessions, with Nick Land. Several people contributed to the transcription effort, including Uriel Fiori, Luana Salles, Akira, Gullfire, and Nishiki.

Part 1: Acceleration, Ideology, Intelligence, Religion

Justin Murphy: You’re basically one of the leading thinkers, I would say arguably the leading thinker, of what we might call the school of thought that’s known as accelerationism. Accelerationism is something like the view that contemporary history is changing at an exponential rate, technologically and economically, and that this rate of change confounds nearly all of our traditional concepts for thinking about society and economics and politics. That’s just for people who have no idea what we’re going to be talking about, that’s broadly the school of thought you are known for and associated with, so maybe just before we even move forward (that’s my short, “elevator pitch” as it were), would you add anything to that? If someone on the street walked up to you and asked you “What is this whole accelerationism thing?” Is there a kind of essence or key upshot that you would add to what I just said?

Nick Land: We’re going to have this conversation so, you know, it’s probably … to try and anticipate might be a mistake, and I think as we start talking about it, we will find ourselves in various dimensions of accelerationism. In terms of my own involvement in it, I would say the guiding term, for certainly a long time, was cybernetics. The basic accelerationist thesis is that modernity is dominated by positive feedback processes rather than negative feedback processes, and the first wave of cybernetic theory — which consistently normalized negative homeostatic feedback and pathologized positive feedback — was therefore self-obsolescent. It was something that was not going to be a sustainable stance, given the — as you say — basic accelerating trend of the modern process, most extremely in its technological and economic dimensions. So that’s the “off the shelf” conceptual vocabulary that I think, at least initially, it comes in with, but it is itself extremely dynamic. And we’ve seen, an astounding range of different systems and terms of reference get sucked into this accelerationism conversation.

Justin Murphy: I’ve always been extremely curious about the relationship between your earlier work and your current thinking on these matters. A lot of your early work from the 1990s, it tends to embrace a fairly radical and even emancipatory political tone, I think it’s fair to say … it’s very kind of insurrectionary anarchist. There are a lot of feminist connotations. It’s very cyberpunk, obviously. It’s all about theorizing rebellion in the new digital context. Things like “hacking the macropod” and exploiting glitches in what you call the “human security system”, these sorts of notions … You talk about “k-war,” which I interpret as like revolutionary guerrilla warfare but on the level of the social codes. You’re even interested in more fantastic ideas such as stuff like “neolemurian time-war” in which one gets the sense that your position then seems to have been that these sorts of accelerationist insights might allow rebellious individuals and groups to fundamentally alter or hack the nature of social reality in ways that the status quo institutions are not able to defend against … There’s this very heady, emancipatory kind of tone to all of it, and so a lot of people who are interested in your work and your ideas, got into it through these early texts, and I think we know it’s very clear that since then, your thinking has evolved drastically, but what’s unclear I think is how and why exactly your thinking has changed or just how to understand the trajectory between those early heady, emancipatory connotations and your current viewpoints. So before even going into your current views and picking your brain about how you see these things today, I’m just curious if you could kind of mentally go back to the 1990s, when you’re theorizing all these kinds of radical ideas at the beginning. What was the first crack in that tendency for you? Like what gave, exactly? Was there a particular realization or insight or problem or anomaly in your viewpoint in the 90s that kind of cracked and made you see that all of these radical emancipatory ideas are not going to work, or how would you explain that?

Nick Land: These things come in waves. Wave motion is crucial to this. There was an extremely exciting wave that was ridden by the Ccru in the early to mid-1990s. You know, the internet basically arrived in those years, there were all kinds of things going on culturally and technologically and economically that were extremely exciting and that just carried this accelerationist current and made it extremely, immediately plausible and convincing to people. Outrageous perhaps, but definitely convincing. It was followed — and I wouldn’t want to put specific dates on this, really — but I think there was an epoch of deep disillusionment. I’d call it the Facebook era, and obviously, for anyone who’s coming in any way out of Deleuze and Guattari, for something called “Facebook” to be the dominant representative of cyberspace is just almost, you know, a comically horrible thing to happen! [Laughs.]

I just really responded to this with such utter, prolonged disgust that a certain deep, sedimentary layer of profound grumpiness — from a personal point of view — was added to this. But I don’t think it’s just a personal thing. I think that accelerationism just went into massive eclipse …

Justin Murphy: To me, what’s really at stake in this question is the nature of ideology — that’s one of the things I’m really interested in today — just what, exactly, is ideology? What is the most empirically sophisticated way to understand social communities’ tendencies to divide along ideological dimensions, the number of those dimensions, the relationship between those dimensions … I find it very fascinating and important because I think those are the tracks along which so much of the contemporary mass insanity and confusion go down … It almost seems to me like you — listening to you describe your own trajectory — it almost sounds like you’re endorsing a horseshoe theory of ideology, this idea that the radical left at a certain margin almost has to become right-wing to some degree? That seems to be kind of baked into what you’ve said about Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective on accelerationism, that the real way to rebel against capitalism is, in some sense, to be so capitalist that capitalism can’t handle it? Is that how you see it?

Nick Land: Actually, that’s not really how I see it, but I think it is an interesting suggestion and I think you’re touching upon this really fascinating and intricate zone in making that suggestion, for sure.

Justin Murphy: So what’s wrong with that, to you?

Nick Land: Before trying to respond precisely to that, let me just say that there is a fabric of discussion, obviously very connected to your point, which comes from the fact that (precisely because of this surreptitious, insidious strategy that Deleuze and Guattari use, I’m going to use them as the epitome of this thing that we’re involved in), the fact that that strategy has resulted in a question that has haunted accelerationism from its birth, which is precisely this “Is it a left-wing or right-wing process?” thing — that we’ve seen people exploring in stages later. The original leftist formulation of it was very different from anything that we get in what then becomes called left-accelerationism later. It’s almost like Lenin’s “the worse, the better”. The understanding of it is that, you know, what Deleuze and Guattari are doing, what the accelerationist current coming out of them is doing, is saying the way to destroy capitalism is to accelerate it to its limit. There’s no other strategy that has any chance of being successful.

Now, then, there’s a question, can we model what is being said there as a horseshoe? There is a certain kind of possible meeting point of hyper-rightists, proponents of capitalism, and hyper-leftists, defined as ferocious antagonists of capital. Yes, I will grant you, in that construction, that’s not implausible, that’s not impossible. And I think we do see these interesting crossovers. Obviously, one figure that is on the edge of this and of great interest to lots of people working in accelerationism-related areas is this guy who goes by the nick of Damn Jehu (if I’m pronouncing that right, I don’t know). He’s as absolute, fundamentalist Marxist as anyone I’ve ever come across. Absolutely fundamental anti-capitalist, proletarian-revolution economistic Marxist, and yet there’s a huge zone of resonance between his analysis and accelerationist currents, that could be seen as absolutely, offensively and unambiguously rightist in orientation. There’s something serious behind what you’re saying, it’s not like there’s nothing there, but I have to put my fourth point on the table, which will bounce back onto this question, which is the right-accelerationist commitment (that feeds into all kinds of later things but definitely is something already going on in the 1990s), that the actual, practical, social force of conservatism — all of what would be called “reaction” — is the political left. The political left is the thing that is set essentially against the imperative to accelerate the process.

By that definition of leftism, it’s really that — I can say this as soon as I’m not within a certain strategic context set by the the academy, but I think it’s not just the academy, it’s a structure of political and ideological hegemony — that it’s just misleading to really present this as a leftist project at all, you’re so against the basic grain, the basic impulsive imperatives of the left to say that, that it’s just … sure, you’ll do it for strategic reasons but then, when you’re no longer under that pressure, why would you? Why would accelerationism maintain some kind of affinity or affection for the left as a position, when it is in a position to come clean on the situation and just say, “Look, what the left is, is the counter-movement, it’s the opposition to the accelerationist process” … and that’s where I say it’s not really a horseshoe. It’s only a horseshoe if you continue to define the left in terms that don’t actually make any sociological sense.

[15:50] Justin Murphy: So if you think about the left and the right as both superficial, strategic, social, molar formations, then they’re really kind of mutually reinforcing paranoiac simplifications, trying to deal with the unbearable anxieties of economic acceleration. If you try to do either one of them too seriously, you might find yourself popping out into the other one, but that’s not for any deep meaningful reason but simply because they’re both delusional or strategically simplified, ultimately disingenuous tracks along which contemporary society sends people down, or something like that?

Nick Land: I think the terminology of left and right, for anyone like you who is fascinated by the question of ideology, it’s completely indispensable. I totally see why people get dissatisfied with that language and say “We have to move beyond this” or “This terminology ceases to be useful” but I have a sense of its kind of extreme resilience. I don’t see us ever stopping talking about the left and the right. It’s always going to come back in, I call it the prime political dimension, there is a basic dimension with left and right polarities that everyone returns to, after their wanderings and complications. And all kinds of ideological currents themselves have a strategic interest in either muddying the water or trying to get people to rethink what they mean.

But in the end, people come back to this basic dimension of ideological possibility and I think it is the one that captures the accelerationist tendency most clearly. On the right end of that is the extreme laissez faire, Manchester liberal, anarcho-capitalism kind of commitment to the maximum deregulation of the technological and economic process. And on the opposite extreme is a set of constituencies that seek in various ways to — polemically, I would say words like “impede” and “obstruct” and “constrain” and whatever, but I realize that’s just my rightism on display. And there are other ways of saying that, to regulate it or control it or to humanize it, I wouldn’t try and do a sufficiently sophisticated ideological Turing test on myself to try and get that right you know?

But I don’t think there’s any real … It’s not really questionable, which of those impulses is in play and I think that it’s on that dimension that so-called left-accelerationism is left, I mean, it’s left because it is basically in a position of deep skepticism about the capitalist process. It’s accelerationist only insofar as it thinks there is some other — I would say magical — source of acceleration that is going to be located somewhere outside that basic motor of modernity. They gesture towards the fact that things will somehow still be accelerating when you just chuck the actual motor of acceleration in the scrap. And I think that is the left.

Left-accelerationism is left in a way that is robust, that everyone will recognize, they definitely are in fact genuine leftists, they’re not playing games like that, and they catalyze, obviously, a right opposition as soon as they do that because they’re already [inaudible] the prime political dimension. They’re on the left pole of it, they’re in antagonism to, then, what is defining the right pole of that same spectrum.

Justin Murphy: So it sounds like you would basically say that Deleuze and Guattari are not really leftists. They might be writing from a kind of leftist milieu, and they might have some, sort of, leftist connotations, but the core of their project is not leftist because … you think leftism is basically the position of trying to slow down the accelerator?

Nick Land: Yes, I think that project is anti-leftist but smuggled-in — this insidious thing of subverting the Marxist tradition from inside. I think the Marxist tradition is easy to subvert from inside because the Marxist tradition is based upon an analysis of capitalism that has many very valuable aspects. And as soon as you’re doing that, then you are describing the motor of acceleration, and once you then make the further move that Deleuze and Guattari do — and Marx obviously at times does, too — of actually embracing the kind of propulsion that that motor is is generating, then you’re there. I mean, you’ve already crossed the line.

Justin Murphy: OK. I think that clarifies things. That’s interesting because you also said you think there are cyclical tendencies in ideological manifestations, you seemed to be referring to the possibility that in some times and places, to pursue a radically critical philosophy, you’ll tend to find yourself on the left, but at other times and places that might be more of a right-wing manifestation. Is that what you meant?

Nick Land: Yes. Well, nothing so articulate. But I think the question is extremely interesting. I’m not going to put a dogmatic response to that down. Sure. But I think the conversation could go down a huge, extremely interesting track, guided entirely by that question that you’ve just raised really, which would be, “Does the history of critique pass through these strange processes of ideological oscillation?” And I think there definitely does seem to be some indication of that.

There’s a lot of work that has to be done to really bring out the pattern really rigorously and clearly, but I’m absolutely convinced that Marxism in its core of maximum theoretical potency is definitely a working of critique in its strict Kantian, technical philosophical sense. And obviously, at a certain point, that seemed to have obvious anti-capitalist implications and I think that, in Deleuze and Guattari’s work that does flip, but it’s also complicated because in a sense Deleuze and Guattari are only excavating something that is already happening in Marx. They’re not really distancing themselves in any way from what Marx is doing, or even from his configuration of critique, they’re simply elevating it to an unprecedented point of lucidity. So maybe what you’re saying is that there is a kind of a subterranean rightist implication even in what seems to be, at a certain point in history, its absolute antithesis.

Justin Murphy: Well, how about this? What if we step out of the the ideological question and … let me ask you a question embedded in some of this, but without the ideological fetters on. Specifically, I want to go back a little bit to all of these notions and ideas that you spent a lot of time theorizing — which I mentioned before, in the 90s. There’s a lot of pretty concrete mechanisms or tactics, if you will, that you theorize in those early writings, ways that people can basically re-engineer our social reality — I referred to some of them before, I won’t go over them again.

But what I want to ask you is, has your empirical model of society changed in such a way that those kind of tactical ideas of reengineering social reality — do you believe that they no longer work? Or that you were wrong to think that they worked? Or is it just that those tactical abilities that humans have to alter social reality, maybe you would maintain that those ideas still empirically describe real possibilities available to people but they’re just not being pursued for idiosyncratic reasons, or what?

Nick Land: I think there are two dimension to this question, both are very interesting. On one level, there is a question of tactical — I’ll just repeat your language — various types of tactical potential. But I want to just abstract them from any attribution of a subject, because that’s what we’re going to then get onto on the flip side of this, which complicates things. Now, if we can do that, on one side we’re talking about the question of humanism, in its wider sense … Who is it who’s doing this stuff?

In the way you formulated the question, it’s very much like individuals or groups, conceived as agents, in a relatively conventional way, using or exploiting these tactical opportunities which therefore serve them as tools. You’ve got a clear teleological structure there. Coming along with that, therefore, you have a notion of political guidance at the level of these agents, where their individual collective is in some position of mastery over their tools or equipment or resources.

This second aspect is obviously much more complicated, though the first aspect [of tactical opportunities] … I would straightforwardly say: there’s absolutely no need to withdraw from this. This is partly back to this whole Facebook … this Facebook slump is the negative of this, but I think we’ve come out into an absolutely incandescent, new phase of technological and economic possibility driven by this fundamental dynamic vector of the internet. The basic socio-historical conditions right now are every bit as exciting as anything that was around in the 1990s. Totally.

And I would obviously say these blockchain technologies, I mean, they were envisaged in some sort of extremely abstract philosophical sense in the 1990s, everyone thought (who was looking at these issues at all), everyone could see that what the internet was going to do was produce these distributed structures that escaped the kind of established structures of governance that would be, in some insurrectionary sense, apolitical. You look back at some of these early cypherpunk and crypto-anarchist writings — Tim May, people like that — and they catch a hell of a lot of this stuff and what it’s going to do, and what it’s going to mean, and people were seeing that in the late 1990s and then they lost it …  the internet just looked like an extremely sad opportunity for this narcissistic implosion back into the most pathetic forms of subjectivity.

And then we’ve had an absolutely incredible resurgence of massively exciting processes in the last few years, the last decade, I don’t know how you would date it exactly.

So that’s all easily said. I haven’t at all become skeptical about those kinds of processes. But where I’ve always been skeptical is with the structures of agency that are supposedly employing these things. The big … I’m sorry if I’m relapsing back into ideological terminology you’re hoping to escape … my sense of just absolute distancing from the left is that I think it has a massive myth, a huge, massive, humanist myth about the fact that there are these human agents, they can be trusted in the final analysis to have sound political orientation, we should listen to them, we should trust their political judgments and instincts, and that all of these technological and economic resources properly belong in a state of teleological subordination beneath their political projects.

So you have this whole thing about “praxis is on top,” and capitalism [chuckles] … To summarize it, the technological and economic materials are subordinated in principle; even before you have your revolutionary suppression of capitalism, you have a theoretical suppression because you’re thinking of it as just a toolkit to be put in the hands of various kinds of human agents to pursue their projects. And as you’ve already said, that’s not, for me, a new problem. I mean, all of this — that’s the human security system! [Laughs.] I don’t trust the human security system, it’s not my friend … I’m not trying to empower it. I’m not … cheering it on. I don’t want it to improve its position of mastery in any way. I don’t see capitalism as its toy or tool, you know. My relation to that is just utterly antagonistic.

[33:30] Justin Murphy: So basically, all of the stuff you were thinking about in the 90s, which had a very left-wing flavor or a very emancipatory kind of motivation or drive or connotation — or I don’t know what exactly you want to call it — but these very emancipatory-seeming ideas that you’re theorizing in the 90s… You actually have not disavowed them at all. And interestingly, you’re kind of saying — if I hear you correctly — that you actually think they might be more salient now than ever, as we come out of this Web 1.0 or 2.0 slump. So that’s very interesting that …

Nick Land: Sorry, Justin, if I can just interrupt you for one minute, because again, this is two-sided … Yes, I nod along to everything you were just saying, but … the language of emancipation, it’s fine with me, you know, but — what is being emancipated?

Already in the 1990s, my interest is in the emancipation of the means of production. I have zero commitment to emancipation in any way defined by our dominant political discourses. I’m not into emancipated human groups, an emancipated human species, who reaches species-being to emancipate human individuals … None of that to me is of the slightest interest, so in using this word of emancipation, sure, I will totally nod along to it if what is meant by that is capital autonomization. I don’t think that’s something that it isn’t already there in the 1990s, but I’m no longer interested in playing weird academic games about this and pretending this is the same thing as what the left really means when they’re talking about emancipation. I don’t think it is. I think what the left means by emancipation is freedom from capital autonomization.

Justin Murphy: I definitely see the conceptual landmines here … The way that certain words here seem to have certain ideological affiliations you’re very keen to be on guard against, so I think I understand you clearly. I guess where I’m coming from, though — and I think this is a really important point — is that for people who read your work, and read accelerationism, who are aware of this school of thought, there is a very popular kind of interpretation in which it’s seen as, “Oh, accelerationism is that school of thought that says, basically, you should just accept the reality of capitalism and not only should you just accept the reality of capitalism, but you should more or less accept and even push forward its increasingly brutal tendencies”. So that’s obviously, for a lot of people, that’s a non-starter, but the reason that I’m interested in the questions I’m asking right now is because I think that common way of seeing accelerationism is really, really misguided, because on the one level, there’s everything you’re saying about how, yes, accelerationism does mean the foreclosure of human agency and the subject, and the increasing autonomization of capital, and a lot of these things that in the popular imagination are associated with oppressive dynamics, but … What I remain very interested in trying to understand, and also trying to explain and model, is that what a lot of people see as this kind of oppressive pessimistic horror show — and it sounds like you kind of play that up a little bit when you talk about things like horrorism (that’s sort of a separate sideline) — but what I’m interested in is, actually, there is a different way of reading the same empirical phenomena.

Yes it’s dehumanizing, its capital autonomization, and yes, there will be really brutal consequences. But at the same time, if what you’re really interested in is … if you see the world through categories such as freedom and liberation and emancipation, and kind of escape from oppression, if that is how you see the world, well actually, the accelerationist perspective still has a lot for you to be interested in. There’s still, in some sense, a lot for you to do. And you’re right that I’m kind of lapsing into a humanistic language which is, you know, just an unfortunate convenience, and you’re right you have to be careful to not kind of reproduce unnecessarily naive notions of the human subject.

But correctly understood, these processes of we might call “k-war” or “neolemurian time war” or hacking the human security system, all of these sorts of tactics that you very richly help people to see in your early texts, those are still there … And those are things that human beings who feel oppressed today can do. And maybe it’s not the naive human subject that’s going to be doing that, maybe it’s actually going to be a kind of tearing asunder of the human subject in the very act of doing it. But my point is simply, and this is what I wonder if you agree with, that whatever that is, it’s as close as we can get as human beings to what some of us have been calling “freedom” or “emancipation” or “liberation”, that there are still things we can do in this accelerationist paradigm, that are a lot like what people had in mind whenever they they’ve talked about liberation and freedom.

That’s kind of the really important upshot from the accelerationist worldview that I am extremely interested in and am actively pursuing, and I find it very … I do find it liberating! I find it actually energizing and propelling in a way that I consider to be emancipatory, and I think there’s a lot of research to be done on how to do those things and how to work those things out. But a lot of people can’t see that because they think this whole accelerationism thing is just a kind of reactionary capitulation to everything that they see as being terrible and oppressive. Does that make sense, I wonder?

Nick Land: Yes, that whole thing … I think it’s an extremely rich field, as you know because of your deep involvement in it. The accelerationist landscape right now is absolutely extraordinary, in terms of the incredible stuff people are doing. There’s a whole flourishing of just fantastic accelerationist resources and blogs and discussions and … it’s never remotely been in this state of flourishing and the kind of questions that you’re raising just there are very much integral to that, and being thrashed out very much by all kinds of people within these different interlocking, interacting strains of accelerationist theories. So for sure, that conversation, it’s not only that it’s interesting and to be encouraged, but I think it’s probably absolutely inevitable and something that we can just confidently predict is going to be one of these explosive dynamics.

I would tend to put myself, predictably [laughs], on the dark side of that whole ecology of discussion, because it just comes back to this question about humanism, the human animal, its ideological self-aggrandizement, and what is going on in that. I guess I’m sort of drifting somewhere very close to agreement with you, in saying something like, true emancipation, as something that is intensely and really produced, corresponds strictly to a process of dehumanization. Yeah, that would be the way I would put it, in trying to be in maximum resonance with what I took you to be saying.

Justin Murphy: OK well, I think that’s actually a really nice and relatively neat way to wrap up that segment of the conversation then. Maybe we should not beat a dead horse as it were, and move on a little bit.

Nick Land: Without wanting to seize the steering wheel, it seems to me like this is a really good place to go into the artificial intelligence discussion. The kind of problems and questions you were just raising are obviously extremely pertinent, in that, again, that huge field that I think intersects with accelerationism in a huge way, and is precisely haunted by the same kind of terrors of oppression … of whatever is mapped under this umbrella term of unfriendly AI, which is an update on a lot of the old terrors of what capitalism is delivering for us, and obviously again cuts across all these questions about agency in human identity, the definition of intelligence and subjectivity … So right there, already at this stage in the discussion …

[45:10] Justin Murphy: Sure. Is there a particular point about AI that you think feeds in directly to what we were just talking about?

Nick Land: Well, if I can just backtrack a tiny bit. I think there’s one point about the AI landscape that we reached right at the beginning of this whole discussion, which is that the model of intelligence explosion as it comes out of the more rigorous but still speculative side of the artificial intelligence world — I’m thinking particularly of this amazing essay by I.J. Good, I’m gonna forget the name now, I won’t try and recall it [Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine], but he launches the term intelligence explosion in that essay. It’s an extremely good fit for the kind of core commitment of accelerationism, and intelligence explosion is the name for the thing that accelerationism is looking at. This notion is obviously controversial within the whole AI discussion. I don’t think anyone would doubt its importance, but there are definitely people who have questioned its possibility. I think accelerationism finds itself committed automatically on one side of those internal debates around intelligence explosion.

Justin Murphy: There’s a popular image of the intelligence explosion, in particular the possibility of catastrophic failure modes in which, basically, superintelligence … one fine day in the near future … something clicks into place and suddenly there’s a kind of rapid take off. That’s, I think, a picture that has been put into a lot of people’s minds, in large part through Nick Bostrom’s influential book. He outlines a bunch of possible pathways, but now when people think of really catastrophic possibilities, this is something that commonly comes to mind, and something that I think about a lot is the connection to your work. You know, I’m very skeptical to be honest, of that picture of the situation, because I think if you look at capitalism in the kind of light that you do, if you see capitalism as this kind of pan-historical, almost substrate of reality itself, as kind of cybernetic, capitalism is almost in the nature of things, in your model. Correct me if you see it differently, but that’s kind of how I read you.

If you think of intelligence as this — how should I put this? — it’s almost like you see all of human history as a kind of intelligence explosion and that capitalism as we know it is already this long-term, explosive historical process. And so it’s always seemed to me that the very catastrophic, malignant failure modes of superintelligence — I take them very seriously — it seems to me like it’s already happening in the form of capitalism. There’s a lot of reason to read your work as saying that, but I’m not sure if you agree with that or not. What do you think?

Nick Land: I think it comes down, again, just to these very, very basic cybernetic diagrams to do with positive feedback. And one sort of image — it’s an entirely satisfactory image once it’s accepted that it is figurative — is a critical nuclear reaction. You have a pile of radioactive rods that are damped down by graphite containment rods, and you start pulling out those graphite rods, and at a certain point it goes critical and you get an explosion. It’s just absolutely — it’s not a metaphor — it’s a positive feedback process [laughs]. It just is a positive feedback process that passes through some threshold and goes critical. And so I would say that’s the sense [in which] capitalism has always been there. It’s always been there as a pile with the potential to go critical, but it didn’t go critical until the Renaissance, until the dawn of modernity, when, for reasons that are interesting, enough graphite rods get pulled out and the thing becomes this self-sustaining, explosive process.

So in a certain sense, a lot of the actual fabric, the social historical fabric, is actually a containment system. And I think that containment system had a failure mode in the Renaissance. Just to dip back into the hyper-ideological space for a minute, what the extreme kind of what I call “paleo-reactionaries” get right is that they they totally see that. I share nothing of their mournful affection for the medieval period, but I think they’re totally right to say that there was a catastrophic failure that unleashed this explosive process, and that is what modernity is from the perspective of the Ancien Régime. What any social system is for is to stop this nuclear pile going off. You look at Chinese civilization and you say, well, what is it really doing? What’s it for? From a certain perspective, it’s a capitalism containment structure that obviously worked better in this traditionalist sense than the European one. The European one was too fractured, it was subject to a whole bunch of wild, uncontrollable influences, and unprecedented feedback structures kicked off that no one was in a position to master in Europe.

And so we get capitalism and modernity in Europe, and capitalism and modernity is brought to China by Western gunboats. It’s not like they’re bringing a gift, what they’re bringing is … they’re coming to pull the [laughs] graphite containment roads out, you know, from outside. That’s what that process of Chinese modernization is. It’s a process of the indigenous Chinese process of containment being dismantled from outside until it then — obviously in a way that is no less spectacular than the one we’ve seen in the West — goes into this self-sustaining modernist eruption basically in the early 1980s.

Justin Murphy: I really like your vivid metaphor of the radioactive rods and the containment system. I think that really helps someone picture what’s at stake. Is this all to say that, do you think all of the people today who are talking about “AI alignment” — the people that are trying to ensure that, if and when there’s a superintelligence take-off, that it won’t be catastrophic — do you view those efforts as doomed?

Nick Land: Yes. Catastrophic, obviously, is a word that’s going to wander all over the place. And I’m a massive critic of the most popular catastrophist models epitomized by, I think, honestly, this pitifully idiotic paperclip model that was popularized by Yudkowsky, that Bostrom is still attached to, that you know, is very, very widespread in the literature, and I think, for reasons that maybe we can go into at some point, is just fundamentally mistaken. So that notion of catastrophe — as something very stupid happening as a result of an intelligence explosion — I find deeply implausible. But catastrophic in a technical sense, as it’s used in catastrophe theory — there being some trigger point we enter into as a self-feeding positive dynamic — is absolutely right.

This is all about the history of capitalism. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not talking about catastrophic failure modes; on the contrary, it’s precisely why we’re talking about catastrophic failure modes, because we’ve seen, in the case of modernity, that that is what happens. That’s what liberation looks like: pulling out enough of the containment structure that this new, self-feeding dynamic process erupts.

There are these reactionary voices that say that when liberals talk about liberalism, they’re really talking about some kind of disaster. I don’t think that’s a trivial or stupid thing to say. There’s obviously room for very different sets of evaluative responses around that, but there’s a thought there that is actually profoundly realistic — and one I definitely think is more realistic than the kind of facile liberalism that says “everything just gets better and better and better”. That perspective from which things are getting better is just deeply artificial and constructed. It doesn’t correspond to any real agents. The real, significant agents are the guys who are running the containment structure. The weak spin on that is deeply disingenuous.

Justin Murphy: One thing I’m thinking about is how you read this problem of intelligence explosion — say, the difference between Nick Bostrom’s book and the larger historical narrative that you get from your writings. The difference is really significant in terms of cosmology. It’s a fundamentally different picture of what human society and human history is — and in some sense, the history of the universe. Everything people like Bostrom are highlighting right now has been a possibility baked into the nature of reality. It’s basically the cybernetic substrate of the evolution of everything that we’ve ever known. So long as there have been intelligent processes, there has been the spectre of positive feedback of intelligent processes that take off and leave behind all carbon-based deadweights. All of this gets strangely close to traditional religious worldviews. Have you ever noticed that, or have you ever thought about that?

Nick Land: The fact that people now are seeing more and more of what is happening in terms of religious lineages is hugely important in its cold realistic development. So yes, absolutely. This has been a huge thing I’ve seen really in the last decade; this massive, massive explosion of saying, “Hey, look at this, isn’t this just actually intelligible within a particular religious lineage?”

[59:25] Justin Murphy: The very frontiers of science, the very frontiers of philosophy, even the very frontiers of the radical, critical, anti-institutional sorts of projects, and traditional religious worldviews, they’re all converging in a shared underlying model of reality. We are rapidly — and more rapidly than ever — approaching a limit, and we don’t know what’s behind that wall, but whatever it is was something there from the beginning. You talk a lot about how, on some level, you can’t really justify talking about the past causing the future, and that on some level of abstraction you can just as well say that the future causes the past. All of this stuff about intelligence is making us take these ideas increasingly seriously — people like Bostrom and lots of others who take very seriously the simulation argument, the possibility that perhaps everything we know has some sort of creator. In other words, they’re all of these very, very strange loops in which the most hardcore rationalist line of thought seems to converge with very traditional models of the world. In some sense, I think early pre-modern human beings always had a sense that our ability to intelligently exploit the environment was going to end really badly.

Nick Land: To regress a little bit in our discussion, one of the things that is coming into crisis is our sense of the relationship between humanity and intelligence. There is a certain way that that couple became very thoroughly soldered together, even in places where it seemed unlikely. For instance, for certainly popular modes of theology, the notion of a supreme cosmic intelligence as a deity is accompanied by this massive anthropomorphization of what that being will be like. There are all these resonances between god and man that cement this notion that there is some profound relationship between the anthropomorphic and the intelligent. This structure has been really badly pulled apart by modernity and has been coming to shreds, and people have obviously seen that happening long ago.

The discussions that are happening around artificial intelligence are deeply connected with that. The notion of friendly AI, for instance: I’m not saying it’s reducible to a kind of new, synthetic anthropomorphic model of intelligence, but it’s not completely separate either. It’s anthropomorphic pretty much to the same degree as theologies have been.

A sophisticated theologian will say it’s only the vulgar, low-grade versions of religious tradition that actually anthropomorphize superhuman intelligences — in the same way that someone in AI will say it’s only a vulgarization to think that they’re anthropomorphizing this notion of a friendly AI. But in both cases, the anthropomorphization is actually the predominant cultural phenomenon. There’s a fringe of sophistication that can, with some credibility, say it’s not fallen into that culture.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the utterly brilliant remark by Elon Musk where he says that it would be unfortunate if the human species was to turn out to be the biological bootloader for artificial intelligence. There’s a huge amount going on in there. All of our terrors are going on in there, that notion of what a catastrophic failure in this domain is going to be like. But also, what you see happening here is this rending of the fusion of humanity and intelligence where suddenly you begin to think — and a lot of people are — that actually, we’re not abstract intelligence. Our intelligence is supposed to be instrumental in relation to our humanity. We are a specific biological species with a set of interests that are determined in terms of species preservation, not in terms of intelligence optimisation. Maybe intelligence optimisation collides in an extremely vicious way with our biological species’ interest in terms of human self-preservation, whether as something recognisably human — whatever that means — or even as a carbon-based life form, or as something whose basic mode of reproduction passes through the DNA molecule. All of these things are open to a whole variety of extreme scenarios.

But it makes perfect sense for someone to say, “What science is telling me is that I am a transmission device for a hereditary piece of DNA code. And that’s where my interests lie. I don’t have any interest at all in the optimisation of intelligence insofar as it’s going to move the whole reproduction of complex chemistry on this planet onto a new reproductive substrate.” That’s extinction; that’s a disaster. But it’s a disaster that could still be intelligence-optimizing — a disaster that could still be,  in cold, neutral terms, the most glorious thing that has yet happened in planetary history. It’s entirely compatible that this could be totally consistent with the worst nightmare in our biological history as a species.

Justin Murphy: Again, it’s all extremely religious because it could very well be that the greatest catastrophe of the species is also the saving grace and the greatest glory of the species. These are all notions that are embedded in the world’s religions — at a low resolution, for sure. But we’re constantly falling back onto this vocabulary that it seems like there’s something else doing the work that’s not human agency.

When you think about how unfashionable religion is in the West, I find a symptom there. There’s something symptomatic going on there that might be a bit of a clue as to the mass ideological insanity that is wreaking havoc on the public sphere today. Rationalism is obviously the order of the day; it’s the order of modernity. On the one hand, it seems like if we have any chance of navigating what is coming down the pike and what is already underway with the explosion that is modernity, it seems undeniable that intelligence is a valuable and necessary asset in figuring out how to survive, how to live. And yet, it also seems to be that this headlong collapse into unbridled rationalism is also the cause of so much of what horrifies us.

When you take these things together — the fact that religious or traditional worldviews are being very strangely vindicated by the frontiers of science and critical philosophy — but you also take note that people are rabidly afraid of taking religion seriously, I think that is a symptomatic knot of what is driving people so insane.

Nick Land: This is at a slight diagonal to what you’re saying — it’s definitely not just a translation of it — but we’re back on these strange loops and the fact that the most archaic forms of religiosity are found at the end. Time is not simply taking us away from those things. So I agree with that. But I think the diagonal is also a set of revisions to a lot of niche public conversations that have come, as far as I’m concerned, from Mencius Moldbug’s work. He’s mostly talking about religion, and he’s mostly talking about the fact that secularism is cladistically religious. It’s not that it has simply put religion behind it; it’s a particular type of development within a religious tradition. I see so many people say this that it’s become difficult to attribute it to anyone in particular, but the claim that atheism, as it is generally understood in Western societies, is a particular variant of extreme Protestantism. It is not at all outside of it. It has not escaped our religious tradition, it’s just the dominant phase of our religious tradition. I’m seeing lots of people beginning to move into this mode of analysis.

What is collapsing is a certain kind of extremely smug notion of transcendent secular rationalism, as if it’s really looking at the world’s cultures from outside and above, in some position of perfect neutrality — whereas instead, it’s massively historically and culturally embedded, and it’s looking out of its own very specific cladistic branch of cultural development at other parts of the planet’s cultural shrubbery. It’s not that that doesn’t have roots; you could see the whole crisis that was visited upon the West by the introduction of comparative religion, where for the first time people couldn’t help but see their own religious tradition as something that was relativised by these other religious cultures that were being discovered around the world. It obviously had a very corrosive cultural impact. But what’s different about this is that it really is about losing the sense of transcendence completely.

There just simply are no perspectives that are not immanent to cultural history. Once that’s taken seriously, then the notion that people have put certain religious problems behind them just begins to look very smug. It’s a kind of smugness that is becoming increasingly fragile.

To loop this right back to what you were saying, that fragility is making people very bad-tempered. There’s a wide sense in a lot of people that these very basic structures of sensibility are disintegrating. They’re becoming unsustainable, and that makes people furious. They want to lash out at what they worry is a big challenge to it, or to things they think are somehow exhibiting less fragility, or as a way of demonstrating the fact that they still have remained in the same place, or for all kinds of reasons. When these basic belief structures enter into a crisis, it does produce this extreme atmosphere of vituperation and resentment that we’re seeing on a huge scale.

Part 2: Blockchain, Critique, Time, Patchwork

[1:15:44] Nick Land: [The term] “Bitcoin” can be used safely as being the carrier of the blockchain. There are a couple of reasons for that. The first one is just network effects, or first-mover advantage; it has installed itself. Part of its fascination is that it’s an open-source protocol. Anybody can just take that code today and launch a Bitcoin 2, or whatever, that is absolutely indistinguishable from Bitcoin 1, except for the history. The history is everything: all our Bitcoin has is the fact that it’s the first one. It has this first-mover advantage, this network effect. Why would you move from Bitcoin 1 to Bitcoin 2? The clone could be perfect, so there would be absolutely no reason not to, except for this mass accumulation of network effects that is already there with the first version of the thing.

Justin Murphy: I just wanted to clarify whether or not you were remarking about specific features of Bitcoin relative to other cryptocurrencies, or if you’re more generally talking about the properties of blockchain itself. It sounds like the latter.

Nick Land: Both are really interesting. If you get into the discussion, then you would very quickly start talking about other instantiations of the blockchain, other altcoins and all of this, which definitely can’t be just ignored or put aside. But if people are doing that in order to somehow dismiss the predominance or pre-eminence of Bitcoin, then I think that’s a mistake. Insofar as this is a blockchain revolution, it is because Bitcoin is going to continue to feature very, very significantly in that.

Justin Murphy: Maybe we could just dive in right away to the relationship between Bitcoin and philosophy, because I think that that very idea will confuse or surprise a lot of people. When people think about blockchain or Bitcoin, they think it’s a very interesting and potentially very important financial technological innovation, but how on Earth could this have implications for philosophy? Maybe you could help us understand how you see the philosophical implications of Bitcoin. In some sense, that’s what we’ll be unpacking for the better part of this conversation, but just as a first jump into that question … How did you first make that connection in seeing philosophical implications here?

Nick Land: There are two sides to this, from my point of view, that lock in the importance of the topic. One of them is already a sort of philosophically-freighted issue, but to a second order, and that is the fact that something like Bitcoin is baked into the modernist cake extremely deeply. The actual possibility of technically instantiating it relies on a set of incredible technical achievements having been made, but those achievements — that would be made one way or another — have been extremely predictable.

The whole tradition of spontaneous order, in the old sense, the liberal tradition of modernity — notably passing through the Scottish Enlightenment and then through the Austrian School of Economics — had broad schemas for the technical and economic developments that it considers to be compelled by modern development, that really draw a profile of something very much like Bitcoin. If you look more recently into the computer and internet age, you see a lot of old texts about crypto-anarchy, about the way that anonymous internet transactions are going to impact on society, that obviously were formulated before anyone had actually worked out how to make a blockchain.

But at the same time, when you get the blockchain, you have this “aha moment” of saying, “This is what people were seeing. This is the actual realisation of something that people were only seeing in much more abstracted terms before that”. That is, in the broad framework of political economy and political philosophy, Bitcoin is something that you recognise, when you see it, as having already been in play in a much longer tradition.

For the real, more crunchy, philosophical side, the argument I would strongly want to make is that there is a really powerful isomorphism between Bitcoin and critique in its Kantian sense. I’ll run through that really quickly and then we can pick over it like vultures later. The main way this works is that the most abstract formulation of critique is something like, “objectivity should not be confused with an object”. If you make that confusion, then you’re doing metaphysics, and recognising the error of that move — of confusing objectivity with an object — is basically the whole of the critical enterprise.

There are probably several ways that that translates across into the technosphere, but I’ll just reduce it to two. First of all, the internet itself. People know, in a broad socio-cultural and technological sense, the story of the internet and the fact that it begins from this series of strategic military imperatives for a robust communication system that would survive a nuclear exchange. The reason it would survive a nuclear exchange is because there are no indispensable nodes in the system. You can, to an arbitrary degree, take out important nodes in the internet — and of course, if you carry on doing that enough, you will finally eliminate the system — but the robustness of the internet is the fact that you have to work a long way down, taking out these hubs successively until you finally get to a point where the thing becomes dysfunctionally shredded. The further down you have to go to do that, the more powerful the internet is as a distributed system. And you get all the internet effects from that: the fact that it’s relatively censorship-resistant, that it offers a lot of autonomy to low-level nodes, the fact that it can route around obstacles. On the internet, when you route around an obstacle, you emulate a hostile nuclear strike. You say, “I don’t want to go past this or that gatekeeper, and I will just assume that they have been vaporised by a foreign nuclear device and go around them some other way”. There are always more of these other ways being brought on stream all the time.

So, with the internet, formulated in terms of critique, you make a metaphysical error if you misidentify the system with any node or group of nodes in the system. That’s the isomorphism, the relation between objectivity and the object, or the media system and the nodes in that system. The internet is already a materialisation, a technological instantiation, of critique, and Bitcoin then builds on that and takes it to the next stage.

Satoshi Nakamoto is completely explicit in his kind of repeated mantra about Bitcoin that it’s about bypassing trusted third parties. The trusted third party is in the role — in Bitcoin’s realized-materialized thought space — that a central commanding hub would be in terms of the internet, or the supreme metaphysical error that these metaphysical objects are for pre-critical philosophy. Bitcoin is a critique of trusted third parties, that is deeply isomorphic with critique in its rigorous Kantian sense, and then with the historical-technological instantiation of critique. And that’s why I think it’s a philosophically rich topic.

Justin Murphy: That was an excellent opening summary of how you see the philosophical implications. Maybe we could try to unpack it a little bit, because I think there’s a lot of stuff there that’s really fascinating but won’t at all be obvious to a lot of listeners. One thing that I’m thinking about, listening to you give that summary, is whether or not the story that you tell which begins with modernity — and with a sort of modern tradition of philosophical critique — whether or not the process you’re delineating really actually goes back to the beginning of time, as it were, in the sense that Bitcoin is a more perfect and formal realization of technological and economic dynamics of which the internet was an original kind of best shot, given the technological frontier at the time the internet appeared. But the internet was also really just the frontier manifestation of the same phenomenon that the printing press essentially was as well. And then further on down the line of historical time.

In other words, especially relating what you’re saying now to some of your other work, and some of the other ideas I think we both might be equally interested in about the nature of capital itself, and the nature of the long run of human history, or even life on this planet, seeing it as this kind of more or less continuous cybernetic evolutionary process, I wonder if there’s a reason why you begin your discussion with modernity. Why could you not tell one continuous story within the framework that you’re presenting? Or could you?

[1:30:32] Nick Land: You’re right that I would be reluctant to do that. I definitely think that modernity is a singularity, that there’s a huge historical discontinuity involved in it. I can totally see that that is a controversial argument, and historians obviously treat it, I think, quite explicitly, as a controversial point. People will argue both ways on that. But at the crudest level of responses, it just seems to me, empirically, there is a sort of stark historical discontinuity that happens roughly in the Renaissance, where it really seems that something new has begun to happen.

Justin Murphy: So basically, the thing that’s new with modernity — it’s very hard to pin down the primary variables, because it’s a cluster of variables, as you’ve kind of indicated — the very idea of applying human rationality to traditional institutions and thinking about them critically, early capitalism, early technological innovations such as joint stock corporations and double entry bookkeeping … all of these are candidates for the key cause that sends modernity off into exponential takeoff, or singularity as you put it. But I think it’s exceedingly difficult to try and pin down the primary variable among all of those variables, which was most importantly responsible for the takeoff that we call modernity. They seem to happen more or less in a self-reinforcing kind of cluster phenomenon.

Nick Land: I’m tempted to make two quite disconnected remarks about it. One is the fact that the arrival of zero in Europe does strike me as overwhelmingly synchronized with the catalysis of modernity. Now, people obviously say, “Well, zero was around a long time. So what’s so special about the arrival of zero in Europe?” I think that’s a good and important question to ask, and it maybe then bounces us onto the other side of this …

Which is to say, this notion — which is still entirely contemporary and probably intensified right now in a way it’s never been before — this notion of the route-around. I think it’s utterly crucial to this. Once you really have robust route-arounds, you have this process in motion. So what you’re trying to understand is “What is it that happened in Europe in the Renaissance with the arrival of zero that was different to what had happened in India?” I think it’s quite clear that China had a functional notion of zero, it was obviously so prevalent in the Muslim world that people often call the numeracy “the Arabic numerals” — that was certainly how they were received by the West at the time — in none of those cultures do you get that same dynamic of escape. Modernity just isn’t able to escape from the prevailing systems of social organization. There’s something about the European situation — I would say it surely has to have, as one crucial component, the massive amount of regime fragmentation that you find in Europe relative to these other cultures — that it was able to get out of the box in a way that was prevented in its other social contexts.

Justin Murphy: So the way you see it is that, perhaps, for contingent, historical, institutional reasons, it’s in Europe that something which human civilization, up until then had tried to contain — was able to, to some degree, contain — was able to get out of the box, as you put it, and you think that that is especially, uniquely, related to the arrival of zero in human mathematical capacities within Europe. You think that that was a profound qualitative rupture that allowed something to escape and something that we’ve really never been able to put back in the box since then?

Nick Land: Yes, I would say that’s exactly what I think.

Justin Murphy: So maybe we could think a little bit about what exactly is that thing that escaped, because, I mean, I guess one plausible candidate would be, perhaps we just call this intelligence itself?

Nick Land: The crucial notion is intelligence production. There’s always been intelligence kicking around, but what is specifically modern is the fact that you’re actually able to lock in a positive feedback circuit on intelligence production, and therefore, to have a runaway intelligenic process. This is something that is uniquely modern. Often when you’re looking at the highest examples of intelligence in a culture, you’re looking precisely at the way that it has been fixed and crystallized and immunized against that kind of runaway dynamic — the kind of loops involving technological and economic processes that allow intelligence to go into a self-amplifying circuit are quite deliberately constrained, often by the fact that the figure of the intellectual is, in a highly-coded way, separated from the kind of techno-social tinkering that could make those kind of circuits activate. And so what we’re talking about with modernity, or capitalism, is the fact that the inhibitor system on that kind of circuitry becomes dysfunctional and ceases to obtain.

Justin Murphy: What is unique about zero, you think, that kind of unlocks something? Why would the arrival of zero specifically be a candidate for the profound shift that occurs?

Nick Land: The most striking thing about the explosion of modernity, in all of its dimensions, is it has this immensely mathematical character. When you’re saying, “Has modernity erupted yet?”, you’re looking at the natural sciences, you’re looking at the mathematicization of theories of nature, you’re looking at business, you’re looking at, obviously, the absolutely fabulous explosion of the systems of accountancy that were completely unprecedented in scale and complexity and sophistication.

Before technology, similarly, it’s to do with applied mathematics. And so, on one level, the arrival of zero in the culture is the arrival of a truly functional mathematics, just out of that arithmetical semiotic. And if you go back the other way, you can say, “Well, in the mirror, when we’re talking about modernity as the singularity, we’re actually engaged in a study of social control systems, dampening devices, inhibitors, a whole exotic flora and fauna of systems for the constraining of explosive dynamics. And it seems to me, clearly, in the Western case — what we can see retrospectively — one crucial inhibitor-mechanism was the radically defective nature of the arithmetical semiotic that was then dominant in the West. And so, again, we’re really talking about a sort of negative phenomenon that zero just liquidates — a certain system of semiotic shielding, that is dampening down certain potential processes.

Justin Murphy: The pre-modern worldview can be thought about as an artificially constrained scale of the relative values and magnitudes of things. This is perhaps most famously encoded in the notion of the Great Chain of Being. So if we just very crudely simplify the pre-modern worldview as this worldview in which everything has a place, everything has some sort of positive value, in other words, starting at zero, and going up to god, or something like that. So everything in the world, everything that’s real, everything that exists, has some value greater than zero, in some sense. And those values are known, they’re enforced by traditional authorities. And they even make a good deal of sense relative to human heuristics about what is valuable, and attractive, and what’s not. And so, that can actually work fairly well in a limited way for some time.

But what’s interesting about that is you can see it as a kind of suppression of zero in some sense; what it’s not quite able to intuit is that, in fact, the number line goes from negative infinity to positive infinity, and there is, smack dab in the middle of that, a unique quantitative value of zero that actually has no value whatsoever.

And the reason why I think that this way of thinking about it might be relevant or just useful heuristically is because it seems to me that part of the catastrophe of modernity, as it unfolds, especially for human experience, and our ability to process what’s happening and to interact with each other in at all healthy and sustainable ways — there’s this very peculiar symmetry or really chaotic, chaotically cycling nature to intelligence, where it really is kind of the basis of all good and the basis of much that people call evil. And I wonder if your idea about zero has something to do with this because, in some sense, you can think of the pre-modern worldview enforced by traditional authorities as keeping a kind of forced lid on precisely that chaotic cycling around the zero point.

The liberation of mathematics is kind of the unmooring of rationality’s ability to anchor itself ethically. It seems to me that the pre-modern traditions and especially the world religions, and perhaps I have in mind Catholicism in particular is, almost, you can really read it as precisely one dedicated solution to that very problem. Perhaps that’s why zero is unique, if, in fact, your hypothesis is right, because it sort of makes possible this chaotically perverse symmetry around the number line, or something like that.

[1:45:10] Nick Land: Where you started off seems to me worth isolating in itself, because it’s super convincing: this question just about the scale of available magnitude. It’s obviously hugely characteristic of this transition of arithmetical semiotics. If you’re using Roman numerals, every new magnitude has a letter. I mean, you’d run out of letters! They don’t even use them all! Exactly as you say, the range of conceivable magnitudes would therefore be hugely constrained by that semiotic.

It clearly is a characteristically modern phenomenon to have this massive explosion in the range of conceivable magnitudes. And something that the semiotic obviously just pushes hard. It’s a really reliable index of acceleration. The fact that we now talk about billions and trillions, quadrillions, that’s very recent. You don’t have to go back very far before “a billion” seemed like an almost preposterous number. The notion that you would just be throwing it into casual conversation, that it’s something that’s just marked on your memory chip, was totally inconceivable. I think that there’s an imagined, to use your language, Great Chain of Being, that involves a relatively limited number of conceptually manageable magnitudes, marked fairly adequately by the letters of the Roman alphabet — and that is just blown to pieces into this screaming cosmic immensity that the new numbers open for us.

Justin Murphy: I guess zero is also uniquely abstract, if you think about it, so it might have something to do with a certain opening onto abstraction.

Nick Land: You can’t say that strongly enough. It’s the absolute definition of the absolutely abstract.

Justin Murphy: At a certain point, our technologies for abstraction reach a breaking point where intelligence itself becomes auto productive, if I understood you correctly.

Nick Land: That actually is closer to something like a Kurzweil-type historical model. And it’s not that I don’t think there’s much to that, but at the risk of being repetitive here, the thing I really want to emphasise when talking about what we mean by the pre-modern, is that we’re talking about an entirely positive inhibitory apparatus. In the early stages of control engineering, of cybernetics, all the emphasis is on the inhibitory apparatus. The inhibitory apparatus is considered, into the mid-20th century, to be obviously what control engineering is about. The explosive element is systematically themed as pathological, dysfunctional, as disturbance, as some kind of social threat. That’s why I’m slightly reluctant to see it translated as if there’s this long-term trend struggling towards getting to takeoff point, as if the historical impetus is basically straining towards this explosive outcome, as if it finally arrives at the capacity for modernity. This is not a realistic model. I think it’s rather that there is a regime failure that allows modernity to break out.

Justin Murphy: That’s an interesting distinction, definitely worth making. So you actually don’t see the explosive dynamics of intelligence accumulation over time as a process that begins in the beginning of time.

Nick Land: Yes, it has to be said that of course you only have a sophisticated, complicated inhibitory structure if there’s something that you’re inhibiting. In any complex information system — unquestionably throughout the history of life — there have been processes of positive cybernetic escape, and within those fields, appropriate systems of the production of an inhibitory apparatus. It’s not that I’m wanting to say that that positive potential is something that only miraculously arrived in modernity. I think I’m quoting Deleuze and Guattari — where they say, it’s the terror that has haunted the whole of history. When you’re doing this concrete analysis of the actual machinery of a pre-modern regime, you’re implicitly looking at the way that it prevents autocatalytic catastrophe happening under the conditions of that society.

Justin Murphy: One of the things I think is really interesting about your work is the way that you really emphasize that critique, as we know it, is more or less the same thing, if I understand correctly, as capitalism itself.

Nick Land: Yes, I think so. And absolutely as modern thought, modern philosophy.

Justin Murphy: A lot of people today I think walk around with a kind of model in their heads in which rational critique and leftism are more or less synonymous. People think of, you know, Marx and the whole the entire tradition of criticizing capitalism as kind of the epitome of applying the human mind to social institutions. So a lot of people carry around this kind of natural presumption that rationality, and intelligent critique, is a kind of natural partner of creating social organizations and projects and institutions to make the irrationality of capitalism more rational, in some sense. Holding this line that you’ve held, and working on it, and tilling this ground, quite against the grain of what a lot of people’s conventional wisdom is … is, I think, super useful now, because it seems to me that everyone’s ideological codes are being scrambled, and if you kind of have this natural presumption in which we use our intelligence and rationality to criticize the stupidity and insanity of capitalism, that gets short circuited pretty badly when you look around. So I wonder if you could maybe try to back-out this idea a little bit more.

Nick Land: There’s a lot of architecture in the history of philosophy that is basically putting this stuff into place. The largest recent shift is, again, the joint work of Deleuze and Guattari, where I think this fusion of the functioning of critique and the capitalist mechanism is brought together with huge intensity already very clearly. When you’re reading their account of history, and their reading of Kant, they’re exactly the same things. For them, the state is basically the ultimate metaphysical object. So everything we started with, in terms of this whole question of eliminating indispensable nodes, route-arounds — all of this kind of thing — plugs straight into that. The state is that historical element that presents itself as the Indispensable Node, the Great Hub, the Supreme Object — and in that way, it is actually the material and historical incarnation of metaphysics as a kind of materialized social problem, from the Deleuze-Guattari point of view.

Before that, in my graduate education, I was lucky to have some very smart Marxist teachers — I probably shouldn’t name them because it probably wouldn’t do them any favors if I did [laughs] — but the notion of a Kant-Capital complex was something that was totally in play for these people, already in the late 1980s, and far before that. That’s just where I came across it. If that’s the reference, then the dominant question about the overcoming of Kantianism is exactly the same, as a philosophical task, as the overcoming of capitalism, as a socio-political task. And I just want to say this was very explicit for them. It’s not that that requires some kind of later interpretive overlay to make that kind of move.

As an appendix to that point, when you’re talking about critique, and rationality, and these various notions that can obviously be quite nebulous — or they can be very philosophically rigorized — but I think if they’re philosophically rigorized from a leftist perspective, then they’re probably being rigorized in relation to this notion of what it would be to overcome Kant, and I don’t think that Kantianism itself, except by the most extreme set of intellectual confusions, can be understood as an inherently counter-capitalist mode of intellectual or cultural process.

Justin Murphy: Is it fair to say then, that in some sense, one of the reasons that blockchain is so fascinating is because it is this overcoming of Kantianism that is also an overcoming of capitalism — philosophy in practice? Is that how you see it?

Nick Land: Well, that is how I would expect an articulate leftist to see it. I would not go that way at all. My position is that the stubborn vindication of Kantianism as the horizon of modern intelligence is the dominant phenomenon. I see blockchain as being Kantian. There’s obviously some kind of updating that happens through the process of technical implementation, but there’s nothing like the kind of overcoming that is seen in the history of German idealism leading into Marxism. I just don’t see that kind of thing at all. I think that you’ve got a much more stubborn isomorphism between the actual mechanism of critique and the process of the blockchain.

Who knows what’s down the road. But it certainly seems to me that it’s an intensive transition in the autonomy of capital, which I think can be translated into the robustness of these route-around processes. So, while there is a deep leftist objection to the blockchain, which seems to be very rational and coherent and on point, there’s the fact that it obviously is an escape route for capital, and that it makes a whole series of social projects based upon the domestication of capital become increasingly implausible.

[2:01:24] Justin Murphy: While blockchain is clearly giving route-arounds for capital to escape, it’s also undeniably on the side of liberation from control, right? So if you’re against blockchain, if you want to suppress it and control it, and you generally see it as a bad thing, you can’t also pretend you’re interested in liberation from control structures. And I think that’s a very valuable and quite attractive by-product of the way that these theoretical notions are getting manifested in the technology.

Nick Land: I don’t think I would disagree with that. But it just seems to me that what is seen as the libertarian potential of these technologies, and its capitalist potential, are more or less synonymous notions, and that the dominant sentiment on the left is that these things are bad, and a language of liberation is the way that capital masks its actual process — in a language of emancipation that, taken from a leftist his point of view, is profoundly inadequate. It’s not sufficiently collective in its orientation and it’s extremely cold in terms of any questions of amelioration of problems of social disadvantage and underdevelopment. So I don’t see how anyone could disagree that there is a challenge to systems of control. I would have thought that the question is rather whether certain systems of control are actually required for the collectivization of emancipation, rather than it’s more Darwinian variants.

Justin Murphy: Some things might surprise me that don’t surprise you [laughs]. I guess perhaps the kernel of insight that was more promising in what I said is that it seems leftism — as that kind of sociological phenomenon that does still characterize the attitudes and behaviors of a fairly large number of human beings today — it still traffics in the connotations of liberation, and it seems to me that, a prediction that may emerge from this conversation about blockchain is that this will become increasingly less and less tenable as the technology becomes more widely distributed and it will become increasingly hard to deny that leftism is simply the break upon liberation in some sense.

Nick Land: Yeah, that language, it’s not that I’ve got any problem with it really, except it just sounds a little bit too triumphalist from the right. I do think, insofar as the language of liberation is about the ability to escape and route-around structures of control, then that is almost tautologically inevitable. I’m not really seeing a coherent objection. I’m not, as you know, the world’s greatest sympathizer of the leftist political orientation, and so I tend to see the language of liberation in leftist rhetoric as often quite sophistical. I don’t expect a lot of conceptual integrity from it. And I think the thing that blockchain is doing on this level, is that it just bypasses philosophical and political argument  people just simply do a route-around, it doesn’t require some sort of collective affirmation at the barricades or any such thing. So it seems to me the rhetoric around that is very obviously secondary in a way that isn’t true of a whole number of other socio-political projects, where the rhetoric and the political phenomenon are much more integrated.

Justin Murphy: Could you say a little bit about how you think blockchain or Bitcoin affects our understanding of time, because I think you have some particular ideas about that?

Nick Land: The whole of critique, and the whole of capitalism, can be translated into a discourse on time. Most famously the Heideggerian formulation of critique, that seems to me conservative in its essentials  that’s to say I don’t think it is a candidate for a post-Kantianism, but I think it’s definitely enriching in the fact that it’s quite clear about adding certain insightful formulations, and they tend to be time-oriented. The Heideggerian translation of the basic critical argument is that the metaphysical error is to understand time as something in time. So you translate this language, objectivity and objects, into the language of temporality and intra-temporality, and have equally plausible ability to construe the previous history of metaphysical philosophy in terms of what it is to to make an error. The basic error then, at this point, is to think of time as something in time.

So that’s just to say that if it wasn’t possible to make some point about Bitcoin and time it would be strange, having already said that Bitcoin is the highest level of technological instantiation of critique. There’s also an obligation that comes with that: what is it saying about time?

And I guess my argument is that it’s the first serious candidate that we have seen for artificial time. The context for that, that I think has drawn the most interest from people that I’ve had the opportunity to discuss this with, is really to do with Einsteinian relativistic physics, where the basic gesture that I want to make is a reactionary one, of saying there’s a revival of this Kantian structure that had seemed to be destroyed. There’s an extremely impressive, powerful, scientific case for the destruction of the autonomy of time from space  which seems to have been destroyed by the notion of general relativity. Minkowski space-time is where you get the clearest mathematical formulation of this new, modern take on that. The background to it is very tied up with the eclipse of Kantianism in the late 19th century/early 20th century, where it had seemed that Kant was incapable, due to his naive Euclideanism, of dealing with the new geometries introduced in the 19th century and their applications in physics that we see in 20th century.

There is an absolutely fascinating little exchange on a crypto mail board around the time that Bitcoin is actually being launched, and Satoshi Nakamoto, in that exchange says that the system of consensus that the blockchain is based upon  distributed consensus that then becomes known as the “Nakamoto consensus”  resolves a set of problems that include the priority of messages, global coordination, various problems that are exactly the problems that relativistic physics say are insoluble. In relativistic physics, between two sufficiently distant points in space, it’s simply impossible to say which of two events comes first, the notion of simultaneity is lost, time order is lost. Instead, you have space-time coordinates  from a certain reference frame there’s a certain ordering of events, but from another reference frame that ordering of events might be completely inverted. So, absolute Newtonian time is lost, Newtonian space is lost as well. But the blockchain simply cannot function …

Insofar as the blockchain functions at all, it’s because that kind of relativistic structure does not obtain upon it. Were it the case that the space and time of the blockchain were modeled by relativistic physics, then what Nakamoto calls the double-spending problem would be insoluble. So what I’m wanting to argue is that the double-spending problem is exactly translatable into the kind of problems of classical physics that relativistic physics describes as insoluble. The equivalent of relativistic physics within the world of blockchain would be to say, “You cannot solve the double-spending problem”. If we believe Einstein, and we believe it’s translatable into the blockchain, then the double-spending problem is insoluble, and since resolving the double-spending problem is the main thing that the blockchain does, there cannot be a blockchain. So the very existence of blockchains, in some fascinating way, shows that we cannot use Einsteinian physics when we’re thinking about this world.

[2:16:17] Justin Murphy: Okay, that’s fascinating. So you think that blockchain basically surpasses the relativistic theory of physics?

Nick Land: Well, I think you could easily end up saying really ridiculous things. So I would really like to be cautious about it. The minimal claim is to say that within the Einsteinian paradigm, the double-spending problem is insoluble. So how do we square this stuff? Obviously you don’t want to say Einstein is wrong, and that Satoshi Nakamoto proves that. There are a whole bunch of inflated weird claims — that Bitcoin has overthrown modern physics  that could flow from this, and I think clearly have to be avoided.

So, what is the acceptably sober conclusion that is drawn from this? And I think I can say, with some confidence, that the blockchain preserves a distinction in type between space and time that is not Einsteinian. That therefore, if we say, “Well, what do we mean by time when physicists say that we’ve lost that notion?”, I have to make a rejoinder in saying that we really still have time, that the blockchain tells us that we have time, and that we have time that is something totally different from space. And, in the structure of the blockchain, the difference between space and time is carried by the difference between the chain and blocks  every block is spatial when defined in terms of time, it’s a unit of simultaneity. Everything which happens within a block in the blockchain has no differential duration, whereas blocks, when they’re put together into the blockchain  the articulation of the blocks in the chain  is a time articulation, and it’s time articulation in a Kantian sense. Irreducible temporality in the sense that it’s not a spatial dimension.

So we still have space and time left. Well, how is it possible that we have space and time left? The answer to that is a technical theorization of this, that would be rigorously physical — it totally exceeds my competence in every way, but I’m able to see what it would look like. Bitcoin has a pulse, it has a tick, it has a set goal of the average time it takes to process a new block. (Well, I shouldn’t say it’s a tick, because it’s not like a clock, it’s not that it’s set so you’ll get a block every 10 minutes, it’s that the parameters of the system are designed to hunt that, like a thermostat, and that’s the equilibrium). So it has a model of the kind of regularity of these “ticks” and the difficulty of mining the block is adjustable and is fixed in order to keep it going at this rate that is considered ideal, and that rate is a function of the spatial scope of the system, so it can establish a model of time.

It still is subject to cosmo-physics. So if I’m mining Bitcoin on Earth, and someone else is mining Bitcoin, even somewhere close, like Mars, then we still have a relativistic problem, potentially. And if you’re going to have a blockchain, it must be that the metabolism of the blockchain considered, it’s “tick”, is sufficiently expansive for it to be able to absorb any relativistic distortion that happens due to the time lag of signals passing around in the system. Because, on Earth, the relativistic effects of large distances are pretty tiny  you’re just talking about a fraction of a second probably  then even regular turnover of blocks is completely satisfactory, given the way the blockchain works  it chunks time into units of simultaneity called blocks, and then stacks the blocks in this absolutely fixed chronological order, and the magnitude of the blocks, measured in time, is quite adequate to maintain this artificial temporality under terrestrial conditions.

But were the blockchain to be fanned out deeper into the cosmos, then the block time would become larger and larger and larger and larger, and ultimately, would become impractical. So you’d be mining a block every six hours or something if you’re just extending a blockchain into the inner solar system, or, if you go out into the outer solar system, then you need to have spent days for the system to tick forward and another block be added to the blockchain. So, I’m not saying that Einsteinian physics is wrong.

I’m saying that the blockchain is, in a substantial way, autonomous of the most extreme relativistic conclusions of that, because we do still have absolute time and the blockchain instantiates it. But Einsteinian physics put constraints on the blockchain, in that there has to be this relation between the regularity of block production and the spatial magnitude of the system. If you do then fan out beyond the Earth, they could become constraining, and this has the further implication that at astronomical scales you probably just have to have a plurality of blockchains. I don’t think the notion of the blockchain scales up astronomically for Einsteinian reasons.

Justin Murphy: I think that’s incredibly fascinating. And I would probably need to listen to what you just said a few times before I fully grok it. I think I do basically understand you and I don’t think that you’re making overly inflated claims about physics. It sounds like what you’re really just trying to say is that blockchain is able to technically instantiate something that one would think is not possible if one were thinking according to the relativistic physical model.

Nick Land: Yes, I think so. The relativistic model itself has certain constraints in the fact that it doesn’t apply on small spatial scales, it does apply in theory, there are minute relativistic effects, but they’re so minute that there’s an absolutely rigorous, reliable technical fix to relativistic problems on small scales, and the blockchain does that fix, and therefore restores a notion of time that means we simply don’t have to treat the foundations of critique, the Kantian foundations of critique, as having been obsolesced in this respect, we’re under no intellectual obligation to do that.

Justin Murphy: Without making any comments about Einstein or anything like that, it seems to me that we can say that blockchain is a system that supplies its own objectivity. Because the blockchain is this self-validating, trustless … it’s like a technical prohibition on the possibility of lying. Once you have rational critique, and rational critique is out of the bag, and everyone’s able to critique everything, you actually have some serious problems for the very possibility of rational critique, because everything becomes relative to everything else. And that’s a quick and dirty way to summarize the cognitive unmooring that modernity represents. You could kind of understand that in a spatial metaphor, in the sense that in modernity, up until this point, we can create rational systems that are internally rational, but their relationship to other people, or figures, or spaces, is totally relative and arbitrary. And people can just tell lies, right?

In the most quotidian sense, people can lie and get away with it in some part, because when they’re caught out locally, they can just sort of move spatially, they can leave the area in which they’re outed as liars, move spatially, and be liars somewhere else. And that spatial relativity — I only mean that in a metaphorical sense — seems to be a kind of basis upon which the cognitive chaos of modernity is possible, but if you’re arguing that blockchain is artificial time, that in some non-trivial, meaningful sense is able to instantiate itself in a way that is not subject to the relativism that we might expect, then, does it not solve the spatial problem of lying and the cognitive disorientation that the current state of modernity could perhaps be described as?

Within blockchains you’re going to have a perfect technical realization of objective truth and there’s no routing around that within the blockchain. Now, you can have multiple blockchains, and this might result in something like a patchwork of blockchains, which is actually another avenue of conversation we could very well go down, but you’re going to have perfectly objective internal systems and I just wonder is this not the perfection of critique into a state in which lying or spatial displacement becomes finally non-relative or impossible?

[2:30:53] Nick Land: I think that what you say about spatial displacement in relation to this question of lying  it’s quite strongly analogous to what you then, quite rightly, end up with in terms of this proliferation of distinct blockchains. Okay, I think this is something that has kind of haunted our discussion right from the start. And maybe we haven’t brought it out very explicitly in terms of these questions about rationality and critique, in it’s colloquial sense. There’s no question that you’ve obviously been very interested in this thing about the ideological valence of this notion of critique, and how this applies to left and right.

In this context — let me test you to see to what degree you think that this is right — the difference at stake is between a model predominant on the left, which has to do with [the fact] that what is meant by reason is really the formation of an intellectual community or, you know, you start off with people who have a disparate series of assumptions or are drawing disparate conclusions or inferences, and the process of rationality is one that in a certain sense harmonizes that intellectual community. Whereas the model on the right is much more open to fragmentation and enduring disagreement and the operation of various kinds of selective processes to resolve the issue. And so obviously, the business corporation is the model of this, in the sense that you don’t try and work out, in advance, as a society, what’s the best way to run a business. You allow people to basically try almost anything that they want, and the businesses that work, work. And the ones that don’t work, end up being liquidated. That selective process is the one that substitutes for the process and for the necessity of an intellectual community.

I don’t know whether you think that way of articulating these differences is something that is convincing from your point of view. Maybe I should pause and see.

Justin Murphy: Sure, yeah! I mean, I think it is a recurring theme perhaps, or recurring implication that I’ve had a sense of throughout my conversation with you, that it’s almost as if technological acceleration is simply going to obviate almost all of the conceptual baggage that we use to try and figure out our political situation as human beings. In other words, we have these legacy categories such as left and right that are largely just by-products of certain technological inefficiencies. We need to aggregate decision making over time. We need to aggregate attitudes over time across large spaces. So certain concepts emerge to deal with the fact that we have faulty cognitive baggage, we have tendencies to all kinds of biases, we have this basic and faulty cognitive hardware that we operate on. And for most of modern political history and modern political theory, a lot of the categories that we use really are just quite inadequate, simplifying devices to deal with all of our faulty pieces of hardware, or something like that.

But as the rationalization of that technology and the actual construction of technical hardware, or technical systems (combination of hardware and software) — as the proficiency of that accelerates, we’re just finding that almost all of our concepts are becoming no longer necessary, they just dissolve. There is just an immanent technical process that is occurring, and it becomes harder and harder to even make sense out of traditional modern political categories. That’s a kind of thesis that, as I’m listening to you, I’m becoming perhaps a little bit more convinced of.

Nick Land: But then how do you make sense of the modern — when I say modern … let me say contemporary — political atmosphere, which seems to be becoming if anything more radicalized, more polarized, more heated in terms of the weight of these various kinds of markers of ideological affiliation? I mean, I’m assuming you don’t see any hint of those things ceasing to obtain in that sort of terrain?

Justin Murphy: Well no, not necessarily. In the short run, anyway. But isn’t it sort of an implication of blockchain that capitalism, or the auto-development of systemic processes that generate value over time, that these are less and less in need of human beings at all in some sense? So once you can combine the idea of artificial intelligence with blockchain, it’s just becoming increasingly easy to simply imagine a purely machinic capitalism in which surely non-carbon-based, intelligent machines basically have their own kind of global capitalism and increase value on their own over time, without any human beings even [being] on the planet. It’s increasingly almost trivial to imagine capitalism carrying on through artificial intelligence and blockchain, as basically [with] every passing generation, human beings find it increasingly impossible to even survive, to the point that humans are completely bypassed. Is that how you see it, or not?

Nick Land: Well, I think if we say bypassed, then definitely! I think there’s a gradient of capital autonomization, and that what it is to be advanced in modernity is to be moving up that gradient. So, autonomous machines are the index that is used to say “how modern is this?” So, yes, I do agree.

But in terms of how that will play out ideologically … I don’t know whether you saw it, it was passed around Twitter quite a lot, that article in The New Statesman by an English politician, I think he’s called [Jon Cruddas] or something like that, about accelerationism. What he was basically doing — I mean, I only read it once, and fast, but it seems to me his basic thing was to say, “Look, accelerationism is inherently anti-humanist, even in its left-wing variants it simply can’t shake that, that’s just essential to it in a way that’s irreducible” and — even though maybe this was more implicit in his argument — it seemed to me he was saying, “For this reason the left cannot use this stuff, really, the left has to align itself with a kind of new humanist resistance to these dehumanizing, autonomizing technological processes.” Now, that seems to me very plausible.

If I was asking what is going to happen to the left, I think it’s going to become increasingly and explicitly and fiercely humanist in orientation. So nonchalance about the dehumanizing tendency of these processes, I think, will be seen as a marker of right-wing ideological affinity.

Justin Murphy: Right. I think that that’s a very reasonable prediction, and in large part that basically characterizes what seems to be happening right now. So I think you’re on point. I would only add to that at least one alternative possibility. And I should say very clearly, I’m not necessarily predicting [anything]. I’m really just kind of riffing and speculating about possibilities, and also indicating what I think is perhaps the most attractive line of thought for people today who are interested in radical philosophy and thinking as critically as possible about the human predicament at this point in time.

Especially for people from a left-wing perspective — and that the traditional modern coordinates of which are being rapidly destroyed. But if you do still have an interest in the left-wing tradition, personally, I think the most exciting lines of thought have to do with leveraging blockchain, to be honest. And I’m especially interested in potentially connecting blockchain to these ideas of patchwork because [those are], in my view, the most honest and intelligent positions for serious intellectual projects with a left-wing flavor. In other words, people who are still interested in the idea of building radical liberatory communities that are in some part insulated or that transcend the drudgery and aggressiveness that’s associated with market discipline.

It seems to me that if you’re really into that, and you think that there’s a way to organize life like that, that it is superior — and also, in engineering terms — possible and empirically serious, then we should be able to build a patch. Leveraging the most state-of-the-art technical possibilities to make something like communism a superior form of living that would actually function better than current forms of economic and political organization … And I’m actually fairly confident … I wouldn’t put the probability of achieving that very high, but I would probably put it much higher than most people who are thinking about this sort of stuff in any kind of mature or serious way. I actually think that it’s quite imaginable that a kind of communist patch, if organized correctly, would actually outperform and outcompete more reactionary-flavored patches.

But I’m also aware that we’ve been talking for quite a while. And I didn’t mean to just put a huge provocation on the table an hour and 40 minutes in …

[2:45:13] Nick Land: No, no, that’s all good! My position on what you’ve just said is, I totally welcome this tendency. Obviously, from outside. I mean, I’m profoundly skeptical about the prospects of these, as you say — I think in the most extreme way of describing it — a communist patch. You know, I’m not going to be investing in them, but I entirely support the project. And it seems to me that there’s a left lineage that should be tightly unobjectionable to the “liberal” (in the old sense) tradition of capitalistic modernity, which is the tradition of experimental communes, of experimental cooperative organized businesses, and now, as you say, of experimental left-flavored blockchain innovation. I just, I don’t think there is any legitimate basis for a right-wing critique of such things being undertaken. There is of course much, much room for right-wing skepticism about their chances of success, but that seems to be a isolable and irrelevant issue. Because I’m assuming you don’t need right-wing endorsement of these things. At that level you simply need social permission, and I would of course hope that social permission will be there, and be ever easier to find for this kind of thing.

Justin Murphy: It’s ironic but if there’s a social permission problem, it’s coming from the left. And that’s just so bizarre, and that can explain for you why I’m so obsessed with trying to unwind these strange ideological loops.

I know it’s late for you. And I know we’ve been talking for some time now. But it’s actually quite a natural segue since you invoked social permission …

Maybe you could reflect a little bit or maybe share some of your insights from your experience becoming, in a lot of people’s eyes, quite a pariah figure. Something I’ve always been very curious about is, when you first started getting a lot of condemnation, especially from the left, in England and in the West … I’m very curious. Were you even surprised how much condemnation was generated? Or had you already factored that into your model of the world? In other words, you were quite conscious of the provocations you were making and the effects that it would have, or you were stunned at how offended people were by some of your ideas?

Nick Land: The model was precisely predicting the level of condemnation that arose. The phase of my activity that has generated the most thermonuclear hostility is obviously based on my encounter with Mencius Moldbug, and particularly, with his basic model of what we’re dealing with — what he calls the Cathedral. The state church of the supposedly secular West. And that state church engages in entirely traditional modes of cultural policing, based upon zealous extirpation of heresy. All you need to know is what the significant heresies of the state church that you’re concerned with are, and then those responses are as predictable as the results from a particle accelerator given a good standard model of the nature of subatomic interactions.

I mean, it is completely unsurprising and, in fact, if surprising, surprising only in that they are so completely and unironically falling into the pattern predicted by their enemies. The tragedy of the left — as I’ve seen it, really, in the last five years — is the fact that it lacks any sense of what it looks like outside its own framework, and the fact that it does seem to be so entirely predictable in its set of responses.

Justin Murphy: Your model of the world had already been updated, such that you knew saying the things you wanted to say was going to trigger quite a lot of outrage. But in some sense, you were willing to do that precisely because your model of the world was such that you had really nothing to lose?

Nick Land: No … That condemnation was extremely valuable scientific confirmation, as far as I was concerned, of the validity of the Moldbug thesis, and it played a large role in consolidating it. Now, if nothing like that had happened, I would have probably had to just dump Moldbug in the trash and say, you know, “nice theory” but clearly the world doesn’t work like that.

Justin Murphy: It’s as though, if you actually want to try and figure out the left-wing project, your number one immediate enemy is all the people on the left today. Or at least, let’s say, the people who occupy the word and the associated vocabulary of leftism as a kind of recognized manifestation. These legacy concepts are just so overheated that they really don’t make that much sense anymore …

Nick Land: I think you can overdo historical analogy to some extent, but because modernity is a coherent — it’s cross-cut by all kinds of randomness and complexity and discontinuities, but ultimately — it’s a coherent process, and I think it supports to a considerable extent criss-cross historical analogies within the history of modernity (we’ve made lots [of this], and probably this is more my voice, more my vice than yours,  over the course of this conversation), and the one I think is just hugely, hugely relevant (and maybe we even talked about it last time we were talking, because it is so attractive to me) is the earliest stages of modernity and the processes of Reformation; and the interaction of this revolutionary new media system based on the printing press, and the traditions of church authority. And I think we’re seeing exactly the same thing. I think it fits extremely well with what you’ve just said.

I think that there is a church. It’s quite coherent, it has a very definite sense of orthodoxy and heresy. We know it does, we can argue about how fragmented or pluralistic or whatever society is, but you will get this language from the left (which is what I will continue to call it here). And that is based upon the fact that any “decent”, “acceptable” person will subscribe to this belief, and this [other] belief is completely unacceptable — it should be no-platformed, suppressed, maybe you even should be imprisoned for the voicing of certain extremely heretical opinions. So, of course, it is a coherent cultural entity. We can see! If it was not a coherent cultural entity, it could not possibly have any belief in its capacity for doctrinal policing. And we see that it has this confidence of doctrinal policing all the time. It’s just … we’re being bombarded with it.

The dominant ideological phenomenon of our age is the crisis of  — I would use Moldbug’s language — Cathedral doctrinal policing. And, of course, that crisis is being driven by new media technologies that I think are completely unstoppable. And I think that the Cathedral in its modern form has roughly the same prospects that the notion of a universal authoritative Catholic Church had in early modern Europe: none. There’s going to be wars of religion, heretical thinking is not going to be suppressible. There are questions about how much and what intensity of violence and conflict and failed policing operations will be required, but at the end of the day the media system — the technological and media system — dictates that there has to be a retrenchment on the part of the established church into a more realistic, defensible position: enclaves, partitions of various kinds, zones of sovereignties that are based upon an acceptance of fragmentation and diversity, and differential regime structures that as yet are not accepted. But I have absolute confidence that that’s the trend that were involved in.

Justin Murphy: Well, Nick, I think I’m gonna let you have the last word on that one. Because, I mean, I could talk with you much longer about many more things, but I’m conscious that it’s late there, and I really don’t want to overtax you, so you gotta draw the line somewhere, and I think I should let you off here.

Nick Land: Okay, that’s great. That’s really… This has been great fun, Justin. Best of luck. I would even go as far as “best of luck” with your communist blockchain, as long as you’re not looking for an investment.  va-tombstone1-03

Alien Capital

Primož Krašovec

translated by Miha Šuštar

The Alien Capital

There is a famous scene in the movie Alien where engineer Brett is chasing a cat in the space ship’s engine room and unexpectedly runs into an alien. So do the spectators, who see an adult alien for the first time—even a bit sooner than the character since the creature descends from the ceiling behind Brett’s back while he is staring into the camera and courting Jones, the cat. I believe our attitude towards capital to be quite similar—we are Brett the moment before he turns around, we sense something unbearably, monstrously alien behind our back, yet we still behave as if we were only chasing a cat. The alien capital in the title stands for alienness, for the eighth passenger aboard a spaceship with seven humans. The capitalist economy we are more familiar with also encompasses classes, entrepreneurs and employees, banks and finances etc. and something else, something alien.

A metaphor that Marx held dear was that in capitalism, something keeps happening behind the back of those who participate in it. This metaphor can be taken a step further: that capital does something behind our back does not only mean that the consequences of capitalist economic activity are unpredictable and not necessarily in accordance with the intentions and expectations of those who carry them out and that not only both capitalists and workers do not fully realise the scope of what they are doing, but also that capital operates according to its own logic that is independent of human intentions, desires and expectations. Capital is alien not (only) as an unconscious or unforeseen dimension of human activity, but as an additional actor, the “eighth” passenger of capitalist economy: alien.

I will try to approach the alienness of capital by shifting the perspective for research on capitalist economy, which usually focuses on human actors and institutions and profit (for profit is what—from the human perspective—capitalism is all about) and is therefore anthropocentric and profit-oriented. However, if this perspective is only slightly altered so that the main focus is no longer profit but competition, we experience something similar as Brett when he looks over his shoulder: we no longer chase the familiar, domesticated cat and instead begin to face something radically alien—competition as the very thing that determines the way capital functions in place of profit as what in the anthropocentric perspective acts as the motivation or goal of human participants in capitalist production.

Competition-oriented perspective is simultaneously capital-oriented, for it does not deal with capital as (solely) an effect of human enterprise (even if the latter is ideologically un-recognised), but also as a special technological and economic logic of operation that does harness human labour and intellect to an extent, but does not depend on them (as their side/unforeseen effect). We no longer proceed from human practices to research their unforeseen or undesired consequences, but rather take capital as our starting point and research the special way in which it uses human labour and intellect. In the 21st century, this way has been changing due to the development of autonomous machines and artificial intelligence in the direction that anthropocentric theories of capital are unable to detect, i.e. towards an ever greater independence of capital from humanity. If exploitation was the great economic problem of the 19th century, and regulation of the 20th, the problem of the 21st century is humanity’s redundancy from the perspective of capital, which is conveyed both through social devastation (extreme poverty of over a billion residents of slums)[note]See Mike Davis, Planet of the Slums (New York: Verso, 2017).[/note] and run-away activity of capital itself (automatisation of industry, financial bots, breakthroughs in the field of AI, autonomous robots and machine learning).

Surplus Value, Productivity, Competition and Technology

Before we move on to the new, competition-oriented approach, let us nevertheless begin with the classic Marxist theory of capitalist production: the capitalist process of production has a double character, for it is simultaneously a process of production of certain products and a process of creating value,[note]Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), p. 99.[/note] i.e. the production of surplus value. Production of surplus value is the social form of the process of production in capitalism. The process of production is subordinated to the imperative of infinite increase in value, which (for the human side) means or rather produces (structural) indifference to what is being produced. Employees and entrepreneurs can, of course, be emotionally attached to products, they may have even strived to find employment in a certain industry or company because they enjoy producing something, but if such activities do not produce surplus value, the company will, regardless of subjective factors, go bankrupt. The opposite approach can bring about the same result: we may, by a stroke of good fortune, obtain employment in a company where we do things we find interesting and compelling, but we still essentially work in order to survive, and the more desperate we become the less demanding we are and the greater the possibility for us to do any kind of work. Flexibility is not something that the ruling ideology has injected into our brain, it is rather the elemental and inevitable subjective disposition in capitalism, as both capitalists and workers are necessarily indifferent to products and thereby flexible, willing to do anything.

Even though products of capitalist production are intended for consumption, in part daily and in part capitalist one (companies buy and use machinery, financial instruments, electric energy, telecommunications etc.), in this perspective consumption is a subordinated moment of the process of capitalist production. The act of market trade confirms the value of products and allows income to flow into the company, and the purpose of capitalist production is that this flow be positive, that the final amount of money after the products have been sold be greater than the amount initially invested into materials, machinery and working equipment (Marx’s classic basic formula of capital: D → D’). Consumption is nothing more than a necessary evil, a bothersome yet inevitable step in the process of value creation. The production itself is not oriented towards consumption, but towards the circuit of money that quantitatively (if this process is successful, which is not given or guaranteed in advance) increases into infinity.

On the other hand, consumption, although secondary from the perspective of production, is extremely important in everyday life, in particular for buying and consuming food, clothes, apartments etc. The circuit of the relation between ordinary people and capital is as follows: structural dependency on the access to money → participation in capitalist production → everyday consumption. On the level of indifference, ordinary people are indifferent to how something is produced, to the very process of production (it is essential to gain access to money) and to the goods they produce as workers or capitalists, yet at the same time they are not indifferent to goods in the sphere of consumption (choice of mobile phone, food, clothes etc. is an extremely important part of everyday life). On the other hand, capital is indifferent to goods, but not to how they are produced: it is extremely important that the process of production be efficient, fast, on a high technological level and thereby competitive.

If we take the capitalist process of production into consideration from the two elementary class perspectives, Snoop Doggy Dogg’s formula holds true for both of them: I’ve got my mind on my money and my money on my mind. Both workers and capitalists care (more or less exclusively) about money, only in different forms: workers acquire money in the form of a wage, while capitalists acquire money for reinvestment in the form of profit. For workers, this fixation on money is a historical result of the gradual capitalist destruction of life that is independent from wages (self-sufficient farming etc.), while for capitalists it is the result of the imperative and logic of competition. Capitalists do not amass profit out of personal greed or fascination over money (although these are common psychological traits of real-life capitalists). Even if a capitalist is psychologically a good and modest person, he, unless he wishes to go bankrupt, must work on his company having as much profit as possible and then reinvest it into production, otherwise he will be overtaken and eliminated by competitors with better commercial strategies, cheaper products of higher quality and more efficient ways of production. Inversely, if a capitalist is greedy and were to yield to the temptation of luxurious personal consumption and use profit to buy too many luxurious cruises, private jets and diamonds, he, as a capitalist, would be in deep trouble, as he would not have sufficient means to reinvest.[note]Ibid., p. 88–89.[/note] From the capitalist’s perspective, the circuit of the relation with capital is therefore: structural dependency on money → managing the process of production according to the imperative of competition → profit, only a small portion of which is intended for the capitalist’s personal consumption (albeit an extremely luxurious one in comparison to personal consumption of regular employees) → reinvesting profit into production.

Reinvestment of profit into production mostly takes the form of technological research, development and innovation. The reason why technology is of great importance from the point of view of capital is that technological innovation represents the basic means of gaining competitive advantage over other capitalists or companies. To be more accurate, individual companies gain competitive advantage by increasing productivity (and technology plays an important part in this process). Increased productivity means more products in a given timespan and, foremost, at given wages: if employees initially produce 5 products per day, and 7 products after productivity had been increased, the company’s profit—given that employees receive the same wage—automatically increases, since proportionally speaking the costs of wages per item produced decrease. As products that are more productively produced are cheaper cost-wise, the company can sell them below the market price and thereby gain a competitive advantage, and as it can manufacture them faster than other companies, it can send more products to the market and by doing so increase its market share.

Productivity can be increased without the use of technology as well, for instance by using various techniques of organising the process of labour, psychological motivation (or intimidation) of employees, surveillance and control of their movement, division of labour etc. These means are by no means unimportant, but they are limited, for it is impossible (at least for now) to “hack” the very physiological traits of workers (“I can’t work any faster, I only have two hands!”), meaning that there are biological limits to workers’ speed and endurance. On the other hand, technology offers, in principle, infinite possibilities of increasing production: every single machine can be improved, remade or replaced with a new generation of more powerful machines. Technological development is not limited by slow and unpredictable biological evolution. Capital does harness, among other, human bodies and intelligence, but this is the material it ran into, and this material mutates according to the laws of biological evolution, which is, from the perspective of the imperative for ever increasing productivity, decidedly too slow and unreliable. On the other hand, it also harnesses machines whose evolution is fast and determined by capitalism and which permit a quick, infinite and unlimited increase in productivity, which is why using machine technology—under the pressure of competition—is the most common and the most important means of increasing productivity.

The introduction of machine technology during the industrial revolution is the material embodiment of the economic forces of capital. A machine is not a tool or an accessory of the worker, it is rather the worker who is an appendix of the machine which dictates the tempo and organisation of production; the supremacy of capital over production is materialised in the system of machines.[note]Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 548[/note] In the modern, high-tech capitalist process of production the role of humans is reduced to providing service and maintenance to machines. This point is already much closer to the competition-centred theory of capital. The two anthropocentric perspectives of capital correspond to the two elemental class positions in capitalism: the capitalist and the proletarian position. The proletarian perspective and attitude towards capital is to acquire money in the form of a wage for survival or everyday consumption, while the capitalist perspective is to acquire money in the form of profit for reinvestment. The perspective of capital, however, is different from both of them: it is the perspective of using both humans and money for infinite technological self-improvement. Capital is a matter of labour and money (in the form of a wage or profit) only from the anthropocentric perspective. What is crucial from the perspective of capital, however, is the logic of competition that determines infinite technological innovation, i.e. the characteristic technological dynamic of capitalism.

What from the human perspective is nothing more than senseless accumulation of the same (in the classic basic formula of capital the initial amount of money increases only in quantity) are from the perspective of capital (which is not the same as that of the capitalist and cannot be reduced to it) qualitative changes and innovation towards ever greater efficiency and productivity. Such events as when steam machines are replaced by electronic machines or the microelectronic revolution are not only increases in quantity and in them the mechanism of accumulation and profit reinvestment plays the role of an intermediary, it is neither the goal nor the purpose of the process. From the capitalist’s perspective, technological innovation is a means to reach the objective of quantitative increase in profits, whereas from the perspective of capital (and this is the deciding difference between the two perspectives) profits are a means to achieve a never-ending and infinite qualitative technological innovation.

The Fetish of Capital

The concept of capital as alien does seem to come up in the Marx’s theory in some sort of an embryonic stage, but the instances where capital acts as a third, an alien perspective are (at least at the first glance) ambiguous: on the one hand, capital is characterised as an automatic subject,[note]Ibid., p. 255[/note] whereas on the other hand, attributing autonomous abilities and characteristics to capital is labelled as a fetish of capital, for instance on the level of industrial production as the necessary illusion that the increase of the productive force above the sum of all individual working forces involved in the process of production originates from capital as its internal characteristic, and on the level of finance as the necessary illusion that money has the mystical internal ability to multiply itself. Marx noticed that there is something autonomous and monstrously different about capital, yet at other times he rejected this premonition as fetishism. But perhaps a zero sum game is not what it is all about (in the sense that if we wish to preserve the theory of fetishism we must abandon the hypothesis on autonomy/alienness of capital and vice versa) and the alien character of capital can be thought beyond fetishistic illusions without simultaneous refutal of its existence or renunciation of the theory of fetishism.

What is crucial for this attempt is Rancière’s theoretical intervention in Reading Capital. While the two well-known interventions, those of Althusser and Balibar, are quite sceptical about the theory of fetishism and understand it—as it appears in Capital—as an atavism or a return to pre-theoretical or ideological, humanist problematic of the young Marx, to the theme of alienation that the adult, scientific Marx overcame, Rancière’s intervention is different or rather the exact opposite. Althusser considers Marx’s epistemological cut also as a renunciation of the theme of fetishism, while Rancière tries to show that the epistemological cut can also be delineated inside Marx’s development of the theory of fetishism, which means that it is possible to develop an anti-humanist theory of fetishism and that fetishism is not necessarily a humanist ‘lost cause’. When he attempts to do so, Rancière—in place of the famous passage on the fetishistic character of commodities in the first volume of Capital—discusses some less-known and less-commented chapters from the third volume of Capital, where he shows that fetishism is something connected not (only) to commodities but to capital and that the whole problem is much more complex than mere mysteriousness of commodities.

Here is Rancière’s[note]Jacques Rancière, “The concept of ‘critique’ and the ‘critique of political economy’”, in: Economy and Society, 1. 5, no. 3, 1976, p. 352.[/note] starting point: fetishism is not alienation or an anthropological process (something human becomes a thing) or an ideology as a representation of economic relations. In other words, fetishism is a real, not an imaginary or ideological process, but at the same time also not an encroachment upon the subject by the object or supremacy of things over humans (humanist Marxism, on the other hand, defends humans from things). Fetishism is not something that things inflict on humans, but one of the dimensions of the very capitalist process of value creation. When exploring ever more complex, mediated and concrete forms of capital (the basic method of Capital is to begin with basic, abstract concepts and work its way through to increasingly determined, concrete concepts, which are also closer to the complexity of the concrete, real-life capitalism) Marx finds that as more complex forms of capital develop, previous levels get lost or rather the process (of becoming capital) disappears in its own result, of which the most blatant example is money or interest-bearing capital.

On the surface of the capitalist society, the most complex form of capital, D (→ D → B → process of production → B’ → D’) → D”, where the initial D represents the credit needed to launch production and D” the interest rates (and what we find between the two is the classic formula of the capitalist process of production: initial investment, purchase of labour power and means of production, process of production itself, sales and profit), operates in the most simple manner, i.e. as D → D”: as money that generates more money. It is precisely the fact that the process is concealed within the result that constitutes fetishism. Capital’s concrete forms of appearance are simultaneously the forms of its self-concealment,[note]Ibid., p. 368.[/note] and as forms of capital become more complex and developed, the process becomes blurred and they seem increasingly simple. The most concrete, complex and mediated form of capital, i.e. interest-bearing capital, also seems to be the most abstract, simple and un-mediated, and it is fetishised to the greatest extent. The process that determines these forms of appearance of capital disappears, the link between interest-bearing capital and determining capitalist production relations is lost; the capital relation is expressed in a certain form, yet at the same time this very form conceals it. What remain of the capitalist production relations on the surface of finance are only sums of money that increase quantitatively; the link between finance and capitalist production is not directly visible. Such an understanding of autonomy/alienness of capital would indeed be fetishistic and only a thin line separates it from existing fetishistic conspiracy theories of finance versus the working people or anti-Semitic reactions to the demonic power of money/finance.

Alienness of capital can also be understood differently and it is this different understanding of the autonomy of capital that Rancière stumbles upon when he’s trying to save the theory of fetishism from humanist/anthropological interpretations. “The becoming alien in question here does not mark the externalisation of the predicates of a subject in an alien entity, but designates what becomes of the relations of capital in the most mediated form of the process.”[note] Ibid., p. 358.[/note] The basic premise of Rancière’s critique of humanist theories of fetishism is that the latter is seen as a relation between people and things. Indeed, the problem with the theory of alienation is not really that it is humanist, but that it itself is fetishistic. If fetishism means that, for instance, productivity and profitability/generation of interest act as pseudo-natural intrinsic characteristics of capital, then the theories that consider these intrinsic characteristics as something that was taken away from humans and became property of things still remain part of the fetishistic problematic.

The difference between the theory of alienation as put forward by young Marx (yM) and the theory of fetishism (TF) in Capital is (according to Rancière) the following: in yM the subject (human) becomes the object of its own object and alienation is a relation between a person and a thing. In TF the subject is no longer separated from himself, his predicates no longer pass into a foreign thing; instead, it is the very form of capital that becomes alienated from the capital relation that it expresses: the process vanishes in the result. What is ‘objectified’ or ‘reified’ in all of this are not the subject’s predicates, but capitalist production relations themselves. This is how capital-as-a-thing usurps the function of the driving force of the capitalist process. Uncanny, mystical characteristics that capital-as-a-thing thereby acquires are not characteristics of the subject that were transmitted or taken from him, but capitalist production relations. While in yM the subject loses his predicate in the object and the object therefore becomes the subject, in TF the determinants of the capitalist production relations are reduced to characteristics of a thing, and this is why the result, in which the process has disappeared, appears as a haunting automatic subject. Fetishism is not a drama play featuring a subject and an object, a person and a thing, but a process that is inherent to capital itself—the determining relations conceal themselves in the form of appearance of capital and act as its inherent characteristics.

Even though capital’s relation of production (and not a relation between persons, for instance a class relation, nor between persons and things, as in the theories of alienation) is fetishised and mystified, it is nevertheless the main driving force of capitalist production. Rancière’s most elemental scheme of how a capitalist production functions is:[note]Ibid., p. 364.[/note]

past labour ↔ living labour (objective function),

capital (↔) labour power,

capitalist ↔ worker (subjective function),

where the most important relation is the middle one. The objective function of capital is a transformation of past profits into new ones, while the subjective function of capital is the capitalist (as a character mask of capital). The objective function of labour power is living labour, while the subjective function of labour power is its human pillar, the worker himself. The relation of production, the relation between capital and labour power, is the one that produces both the subjective as well as objective function of capitalist production. Capitalist production is not a scene of an (alienating) encounter between the subject and the object, for what really takes place is an encounter between objective (past labour in the form of constant capital forms a connection with living labour) or subjective functions of the capital relation (the capitalist hires workers and is their leader in the production process).

Alienness of capital is not alienation. The capital relation is the actual, i.e. non-human alien, the eighth passenger, and not something human that was taken away/alienated from us. If by automatic subject we mean capital relation, we can simultaneously preserve the theory of fetishism and of real autonomy of capital. The driving force is no longer capital-as-a-thing-with-mystical-characteristics, but the capital relation itself that appears as a characteristic of both things (productivity or the ability to self-increase sums of money) and humans (for instance diligence or entrepreneurship), but cannot be reduced to neither objective nor subjective function of the capital relation.

Real Subsumption of Production and Real Autonomy of Capital

Marx’s concept of real subsumption[note]Karl Marx, “Results of the Immediate Production Process”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/index.htm.[/note] denotes a real, complete appropriation and subjugation of production to capital. At first (historically speaking) subsumption is only formal, i.e. the capitalist becomes a private owner of the “company” (or rather the workshop) and the official employer of the employees. As such he is also a private owner of products and sales income, but he does not yet influence the process of labour, which in early capitalism remains traditional, artisanal. The relation of capital towards production is external or formal (legal property relations change, but the way labour is performed does not). Real subsumption, on the other hand, is a transformation of the very techniques of production and technologies in a way that is adapted and tailored to capitalism. The relation of capital to the process of production in modern capitalism is internal: industrial machinery and incessant technological innovations function as a materialisation, an embodiment of the imperative of competition.

Real subsumption of production that commences with the industrial revolution unfolds at a different speed in different fields. Initially, machines are more easily used to replace and discipline craftsmanship and manual labour, and it is more difficult to apply their use to intellectual activities, which is why real subsumption of intellectual activities does not begin until much later, the second half of the 20th century and the invention of computers. With this process, one we will consider again later in the text, machines become a competition-determined material embodiment of not only motoric functions of capital, but its intellectual functions as well.

However, for the ‘coercive law of competition’ to determine anything, competition as a techno-economic relation must first exist and be possible. Contrary to many profit-oriented theories of capitalism and capital (Braudel would perhaps serve as the best example), competition-oriented perspective helps us to more accurately explain not only how capital operates in our day, but also its historic exceptionality and genesis. In pre-capitalist European societies in the early modern period (17th to 18th century), profit and extremely well-developed trade (both local and long-distance) and finance (including banking systems and first stock exchanges) were already present. Money was also widely used, both for tax recollection and trade as well as a means of payment for craftwork and services, but that was not capitalism (although it might seem that way if the decisive factor of capitalism would be to systematically seek monetary profit, which then abounded both in trade, especially long-distance trade, and finance). There were no strictly economic purposes and self-referential economic activities, economy did not exist as a separate, specific social sphere. Trade, finance and craftsmanship were politically managed through allocation of privileges that exclude any possibility of competition (the privilege of performing a certain activity, for instance to import silk from China, means exactly that such an activity can only be performed by the company that was granted the privilege to do, and by nobody else). A privilege stands for exclusiveness.[note]Heide Gerstenberger, Impersonal Power: History and Theory of the Bourgeois State, (Leiden: Brill, 2007) p. 645–687.[/note] At the same time, purposes of ‘economic’ activities are external to economy, profits are either invested in luxurious consumption by the aristocracy or spent to political ends (development of military technology, for instance).

The historic turning point, the novelty and particularity of capitalism is precisely the separation between economy and politics, the political condition of which is the destruction of personal power and the system of privileges in the late 18th and 19th century.[note]Ibid.[/note] The result of this process, i.e. de-politicised economy, which has no purposes external to itself and is self-referential, allows for the competition to emerge (and to quickly, in only one hundred years, become the determining factor of global economy) and profits are reinvested into the economy through technological innovation (which makes it possible to earn even more profit and so on). The new, dominant enticing law of competition is not only independent from politics, it is also inhuman, indifferent to human intentions and needs. Developed capitalism is an automated self-referential global system, it has no (political or other) purposes external to itself and, in contrast to the pre-capitalist economy, it is not oriented towards wars neither luxurious or ordinary consumption (consumption is only a necessary yet secondary, subordinated moment of the value-creation process).

Competition also determines the trademark technological dynamic of capitalism and functions as a determining force in real subsumption of production. If we were to persist on the profit-oriented theory of capitalism, we would not be able to explain the sudden technological momentum brought about by capitalism (before the 18th century, markets and profits peacefully coexisted with a much slower technological dynamic and we cannot find anything about them that would, by itself, trigger an acceleration of this dynamic in the period of industrial revolution). At the same time, however, real subsumption, determined by competition, does not stop at production; it eventually starts to transform markets, money and finances as well. We will come back to real subsumption of money and finance later, but even the use of profit for means of competition (technological innovation with which individual companies increase their productivity and thereby competitiveness) can be understood as a formal subsumption of profits. These nevertheless remain traditional profits, surpluses in monetary form, but in capitalism they become a subordinated means of the capitalist techno-economic dynamic, they are not spent on personal consumption or political and military projects, but are rather used to continually finance new technological innovations. The relation of capital to surpluses of money is in this case still external (formal), but these are already subordinated to capital (subsumption), while with derivatives, as we shall see, capital achieves real subsumption of money as well.

It is already at this point (real subsumption of production) that operation of competition can be understood as real autonomy of capital. Real autonomy (RA) of capital denotes a technological dynamic that is regulated and determined by competition. In the phrase RA we have ‘autonomy’ because this logic is non-human, it is independent of human intentions and/or needs, and ‘real’ because this is actual autonomy, not a fetishistic illusion, it is not attribution of mystical intrinsic characteristics to things (to money or machines, for instance), but a description of how capital relation actually functions.

RA of capital also means that in the process of real subsumption capital reorganises production according to principles that are alien, non-human. This is what Camatte calls material community of capital, which first broke away from human community and then domesticated it.[note]Jacques Camatte, Capital and Community, (New York: Prism Key Press, 2011), p. 379–388.[/note] Individual capitalists as character masks of capital are not driven by greed or some other human intention or psychological characteristic, instead they function as domesticated carriers of the subjective function of capital that amass profits because they are pressured by competition. This does not mean that subjective intentions are replaced by systemic or ‘structural’ ones, as if amassing profit were a systemic coercion instead of a personal caprice of individual capitalists. If that were the case, this perspective would still be too anthropocentric, only that greed would be brought up to the systemic level and thereby anthropomorphised—as if capital were a big, although non-human, Uncle Scrooge, as if it possessed human characteristics and intentions, such as greed. Capital does harness profits, but these are not the goal or the final destination of the process of capitalist production, only a subordinated moment of its competitively determined techno-economic dynamic.

At this stage we can reverse Marx’s basic formula of capital D → PP (process of production) → D’ into PP → D → PP’, which fits the perspective of capital much better. In this perspective the process of production results in profit, which provides the possibility for improvement, a technological upgrade of the process of production and so on into infinity. Competition-oriented theory of capital is simultaneously technocentric: the emphasis is not on markets and profits (they are a subordinated moment of the process), but on the competitively determined technological dynamic of capitalism inside of which qualitative changes occur, i.e. existing technology is being replaced by a different, more productive, improved technology, while quantitative accumulation of money is only an intermediate, interim process. Accumulation of profit and organised, disciplined human activity (labour) are not central or determining characteristics of capitalism, but social practices that capital initially stumbled upon and began to use them in its own way: the institution of profit is useful for financing infinitely self-increasing technological innovation, while human labour and intellect are initially useful when these innovations are designed and manufactured. However, we might be entering an era where money and finance as well as human labour and intellect are becoming, from the point of view of capital, increasingly cumbersome, inert and obsolete and thereby redundant, a time where technologies of design, production and multiplication of technological innovation are immanent to capital itself (and are not borrowed from humanity).

Real Subsumption of Finance (Derivatives as Money)

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As we have already pointed out, when capital first sets off it appropriates existing forms of money, financial institutions and profits for the purpose of competitively determined technological dynamic. The financial system as such is much older than capitalism; money and money-mediated trade have been in existence for many thousands of years, banks for almost a thousand and extremely sophisticated and complex financial institutions and even stock exchanges have already existed in Europe in the early modern period. What is special about capitalism is not more markets or more use of money, but a shift in how money and profits are used: they are no longer funnelled into political or luxurious consumption of aristocracy (and later bourgeoisie), but into competition-determined capitalist technological dynamic (this also brings about a systemic marginalisation of consumption, which does not mean that there is less of it—capitalism nevertheless is a society of mass consumption—but that its importance is secondary, marginal with respect to the imperative of incessant reinvestment of profits).

In time, however, a new way and purpose of how money is used (its formal subsumption) begins to transform money and the financial system itself as well. At a certain stage of the development of capitalism—similarly as in the transition from manual to industrial production—pre-capitalist forms of money and traditional financial institutions proved to be out-dated and too cumbersome for capitalist use. Particularly in the last three decades of the 20th century, once the Bretton Woods system fell apart and the golden standard was abolished, and in the processes of ‘financial liberalisation’, 200 years after similar changes occurred in industry, began an intensive internal transformation of financial systems and money itself.

To name this process financialisation is perhaps not quite precise, since capitalism always featured an important and pronounced financial dimension. In the late 20th century, finance does not become more important than it was, on the contrary, it begins to change precisely because it is so crucially important for the functioning of capitalism (profits in the form of money give us the possibility for competition-determined technological investments, money is a ‘medium’ of each wave of technological innovations) or rather at the point when classic forms of money and financial business become too unwieldy and too slow considering the competitive pressure for speed, mobility and flow of capital.

The deciding process in the internal transformation of finance is securitization with which capital can be swiftly and efficiently transferred from one individual branch to another. As profitability of individual capitalist activities is necessarily unpredictable, every mechanism that increases mobility of capital (the possibility to withdraw capital from an activity or a branch that proves to be non- or insufficiently profitable and invest it somewhere else) is extremely important. For instance, ownership of capital in physical form is an extremely non-mobile and cumbersome form of capital management. If we own a fitness studio, and all of a sudden everybody gets into yoga, we will have a very hard time trying to get rid of all those weights, benches and other physical assets (as profits in this activity are low, nobody will buy them). Shares (papers that represent company ownership), however, are much easier to handle because we sell those documents (which entitle us to participate in profits) and not the assets themselves. Shares are a much faster and flexible form when it comes to transferring capital (it is impossible to sell 20 % of a workbench, but we can sell 20 % of a company’s shares). Shares and the stock exchange have long been an existing and basic form of securitization, i.e. the development of financial instruments by which it is possible to manage investment risk and provide mobility of capital.

Even more important is the second, more advanced form of securitization that is characteristic of the period from the 1980s onwards and makes it possible to trade in flows of monetary yields and risk with no transfer of assets themselves. If shares distinguish between physical assets and capital (we do not directly own means of production as such, but a fraction of a company as an abstract, interchangeable unit for profit production), new forms of securitization brought about an additional ‘dematerialisation’ or ‘becoming abstract’ of capital, for it is no longer about trading in assets in any kind of form, but betting on profitability and risk of certain flows of money (that are not necessarily profits of the company as a whole, but any money flows, be it the success rate of a certain department or activities within such and such company or changes in the price of such and such commodity or currency etc.). New financial instruments generate profit if the flow of money to which they are bound increases. They can also be freely combined, which is what gives capital in financial form significantly increased liquidity and mobility.

Shares smoothen out concrete differences between individual companies. On the concrete level one company produces basketballs, while another produces bicycle fenders: they differ qualitatively, yet from the point of view of a stockbroker they are nothing more than qualitatively identical sources of profit (the only difference is quantitative, i.e. how profitable they are). In this perspective and in this stage of development of finance, companies act as (quantitatively) different sources of profit between which we transfer assets through the stock exchange. This gives capital a certain level of abstraction, but to a much smaller extent than modern compound securities that make it possible to combine, for instance, bets on growth of productivity in an automobile factory and the risk of outstanding real-estate loans in the U.S.A. and the price trend of silver in the global market. Once capital unbinds itself from assets and develops the possibility to combine different flows of monetary yields, it becomes much more ‘really abstract’ than it was when banks and stock exchanges were the only financial institutions.[note]Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital, and Class (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 68–102.[/note]

In the modern process of securitization, derivative financial instruments or derivatives are of crucial importance. They are not only financial innovations, but also represent a new way of connecting industry to finance. As each monetary flow becomes a potential object of financial betting and a source of financial profits, competitive pressure thereby increases not only on individual companies, but on each activity or monetary flow within them as well. Each fragment of a company, each individual activity becomes ‘visible’ to the incessant and infinite financial competitive (e)valuation that indirectly signals productivity and efficiency of an activity from which a certain monetary flow within a company originates to the entire financial market through price trends of financial instruments, derived from that very same monetary flow. In this sense derivatives function as an instrument of real subsumption of industry (and capitalistically organised services). Shares (or rather their price trends) have already been functioning in this same way, but in what would today be seen as a slow and cumbersome manner, through quarterly reports to shareholders and only on the level of an individual company as a whole. Nowadays competitive valuation takes place in real time, ceaselessly (not only in quarterly turns; the difference is somewhat similar as between chess or rummy on the one hand and Starcraft on the other) and for every single monetary flow, not only for a company as a whole. Derivatives (as financial instrument, derived from any monetary flow) force companies into continuous technological innovation, increase in productivity and thereby competitiveness. The coercive force and discipline of competition therefore become exceedingly intensified due to the possibility to commensurably measure efficiency of all and any monetary flow in the world in real-time.[note]Ibid., p. 162–176.[/note]

Derivatives by themselves are not commodities nor ownership (of goods, assets or money) nor monetary flows (as for instance when banks own a certain loan and are thereby entitled to interests); they are financial instruments derived from monetary flows that bet on certain situations (for instance an increase in interest rates or a change in the value of a certain currency). From the perspective of individual capitalists, derivatives are useful as a form of insurance against risk (for instance a futures contract enables us to buy goods in the future at a price that we presume will be favourable at that time and is an insurance against a rise in price of these goods) and as such are not an ‘irrational’, ‘unhealthy’ addition to a supposedly rational and healthy industry or service, but are completely functional.

On the more basic or systemic level, however, they can be understood as a special, specific capitalist form of money,[note]Ibid., p. 135–161.[/note] one that has been slowly replacing cumbersome, inflexible pre-capitalist forms of money, such as gold. In the same way that capital has in the past subjugated and internally transformed industrial production, it is currently appropriating and internally transforming the sphere of finance. Once the golden standard is abolished and floating, unpredictable and chaotic exchange rates are imposed on the global monetary market, and derivatives (i.e. derivatives derived from individual currencies and their exchange) become the new ‘anchor’ of the global monetary system.[note]Ibid., p. 104–134.[/note] They are the new form of ‘meta-money’, such as gold once was, only that they are not as fixed/rigid, but flexible: they do not peg exchange rates on the monetary market, but make it possible to calculate complex mutual relations of floating exchange rates, making them commensurate, something that precious metals or traditional money cannot do. Flexibility of derivatives is synchronised with the dynamic and complexity of the global capitalist economy—derivatives are not only pre-capitalist money in the hands of capitalism, but:

A new sort of money, directly appropriate to the specific conditions of capital accumulation in the current period. With derivatives, money itself comes to be the embodiment of capitalist competition, because derivatives embody, in their composition, the competitive computation of relative values, including conversions across discrete, extant forms of money. So rather than being a passive instrument of competitive processes constituted outside the domain of money, derivatives as money internalise the competitive process. Derivatives are, in this sense, distinctly capitalist money, rather than just money within capitalism.[note]Ibid., p. 137.[/note]

To put it short, in contrast to traditional money, derivatives are not money that was formed outside of capitalism or before its time and was then tossed into capitalist use, but a form of money that develops inside capitalist economy and in accordance with its rules—they are the embodiment of competition on the level of finance, in the same manner as the system of industrial machinery is the embodiment of competition on the level of material production. Among the obstacles of traditional money that derivatives also overcome is that money is determined by nations or states. Derivatives have no homeland or master and it is only as such that they operate as the monetary embodiment of the global competitive process. They are the first entirely depoliticised or entirely economic form of money. As such, derivatives represent the next step in the process of flight or autonomisation of capital that begins with the emergence of a separate economic social field and a class relation as a purely economic form of social domination (that does not necessarily include personal coercion or political hierarchies, but can also be established between politically free and equal persons), autonomisation that simultaneously denotes self-referentiality.

In the same way that profits from industry are reinvested into it in a self-referential circuit, derivatives do not function as money for everyday shopping, or rather they do not have any purpose outside the capitalist process itself. This would be the pre-capitalist, market- and consumer-related use of money that is indeed still present in capitalism, but it is not (any longer) the most important or determining. In today’s capitalism the role of money as a means of trade is relatively unimportant and marginal, as trade represents only approximately half percent of annual turnover on financial markets.[note] Ibid., p. 149.[/note] What is much more important and extensive is the role of competitive valutation as well as allowing for and regulating both the exchange of currencies and means of investment.

The enormous and infinitely complex global financial system we have today is not an irrational outgrowth of what is otherwise a friendly, healthy and productive industrial capitalism, but an image of autonomous capital that is increasingly breaking its ties to consumption and labour and replacing the elements that it initially historically stumbled upon with its own. All analyses (even critical ones) of capitalism as a consumer society, commodification etc. are still based, firstly, on old concepts that are unsuitable for capitalism (pre-capitalist conception of labour, trade, money and consumption) and, secondly, on the anthropocentric perspective of “What capital means for us”, while what is nowadays essential in order to understand capital is that it cares less and less about us, our labour, consumption and existential distress. Nowadays the majority of financial activities are self-referential/autonomous and have no connection to consumption or trade. At the same time, finance is the driving force of the global capitalist system we have today, while consumption where we use traditional, old-fashioned money is an increasingly marginal historic curiosity.

Within the sphere of finance, derivatives represent a liquid and flexible form of money, the value of which is not fixed and determined in advance, but is sensible to financial processes themselves and changes in relation to them. The relation of derivatives as ‘meta-money’ to other, traditional forms of money (individual national currencies) is the same as the relation derivatives have to flows of money in industry: they make it possible to commensurately calculate values of other means, both industrial and financial. In other words, from the perspective of derivatives it does not matter whether the flow of money from which they are derived is industrial or financial. In both cases they operate in the same manner, as a way of transforming capital into a more abstract and liquid form. Both gold as a pre-capitalist form of money and classic assets (even in the more sophisticated form of shares) are, from the perspective of capital, cumbersome because they are tied to a concrete specificity (in order to function as money, gold must actually be gold, it must be mined; assets or rather ownership is always ownership of something concrete). Derivatives, on the other hand, are a means of abstract equalisation of things and activities that function as capital—which is a specifically capitalist role of money beyond trade and consumption.

Traditional money, i.e. money we carry around in our pockets, performs this function for individual goods on the market: it abstractly equalises handkerchiefs, airplane tickets and pizzas, it reduces their concrete differences to quantitative differences in value, expressed in terms of money (from the perspective of the market, they lose their concrete qualities and act as different sums of money), thereby making them commensurate and universally comparable and exchangeable. Derivatives do the exact same thing, but for different forms of capital: industrial, monetary, financial etc. From the perspective of derivatives, different forms of capital are nothing more than various monetary flows that derivatives make commensurate. In difference to traditional money, derivatives are not the money of trade, but the money of capital.

Financial derivatives are now a pivotal aspect of competition between capitals. The centrality of money capital to the whole accumulation process sees derivatives disciplining the terms on which… the output of production is transformed back to money capital. The competitive discipline in the sphere of money capital asserts direct pressure on capital in production… because all capital, everywhere, needs to be (and is being) actively compared for its on-going profitability. This competitive commensuration is what makes derivatives distinctly capitalist money…[note]Ibid., p. 155.[/note]

In other words, derivatives verify and/or guarantee that a monetary flow (any monetary flow) functions as capital (it brings increasing amounts of profit and thereby provides for technological self-expansion) in an automated way outside human oversight. This role cannot be performed by traditional money or gold: traditional money is limited to a national context and trade/consumption and can hardly and insufficiently function as the money of capital, although it was completely adequate and sufficient for its pre-capitalist use in banking and trade.

Early capitalism takes over traditional money and uses it in the process of capitalist transformation of markets and trade (the above-mentioned abstract equalisation of goods and the possibility to develop purely economic value in place of the former system where prices were determined politically through negotiations between guilds and through privileges of individual trading companies). However, in order to capitalistically transform the financial system itself and its relations to industry that has already undergone real subsumption, traditional money is no longer sufficient. Once again: this is not about having a manageable, regulable industrial capitalism on the one hand, and financial capitalism that is rampant and uncontrollable the moment neoliberal political conspiracy and inconvenient election results crush Keynesian class compromise (the standard left-wing interpretation of recent history of capitalism) on the other. The processes of real subsumption of industry and real subsumption of money are inseparable, since the money of capital also suits the industry of capital better. Just as capitalist industry surpasses craftsmanship and manual forms of production and becomes autonomous and automatic (by which it transcends the shackles that bind production to human labour), so do derivatives transcend the limits of traditional forms of money and its connection to trade and consumption.

Real Subsumption of Labour Power and Artificial Intelligence

Up to his point we have only discussed real subsumption of production and finance where artisanal practices get transformed into capitalist industry, while pre-capitalist use of money is superseded by derivatives as capitalist money. There is, however, another important field of real subsumption: real subsumption of the third factor of production alongside means of production and money, i.e. the labour power itself. Before we continue, let us only make a critical remark on the concept of real subsumption. The latter, at least semantically, supposes capitalist appropriation and transformation of existing human activities (subsumption as subordination). Yet as the history of both industry and finance clearly shows, this is only partly true. At first capital indeed appropriates and subjugates historically already existent methods of labour, trade and financial business, but it later replaces them with new ones that do not originate from the old ones; they do not represent their continuation or development, but a historic turning point. Industrial machines have nothing in common with tools, neither do derivatives with gold. After a certain time or rather as soon as new practices, ones that are better suited for capitalism, become available, capital discards the remainder of old ones.

This does not hold true exclusively for the fields of technology or finance, but for labour power as well. For instance, a ‘job’ or a permanent employment contract is a pre-capitalist, absolutist institution from a time when hereditary aristocracy began to be replaced by an administrative, ‘meritocratic’, specially educated and trained caste of bureaucrats that were not (necessarily) of noble origin.[note]Gerstenberger, Impersonal power, p. 645–662.[/note] In the field of employment relations as well, capital initially harnesses existing (aristocratic, administrative or guild) practices and institutions and then begins to replace them with new ones that are irreducible to old ones: new forms of independent individual entrepreneurship, for instance, are not only more insecure, temporary and fragile versions of classic employment—it is the very legal nature of the employment relation that is altered.[note]Sergio Bologna, “Nove oblike dela in srednji razredi v postfordistični družbi”, in: Gal Kirn (ed.), Postfordizem, (Ljubljana : Mirovni inštitut, 2010).[/note]

However, in the 21st century the relation between capital and labour power is not all about precariousness and the emergence of new forms of employment relations; the change is much more radical: humanity is becoming increasingly redundant from the perspective if capital, which is evident from the millions that live in absolute poverty and whose existence depends on access to money, but capital has no interest in them. Jobs and even wage labour have lost their status of the basic and most common form of the relation between humanity and capital and continue to exist only in relatively rare state-protected reservoirs. Nowadays what is key for the majority of humanity is no longer to look for ‘work’ or employment, but to seek money in any way possible: retail trade, personal servanthood, criminal activities, microrentals, project work, family solidarity and temporary work. The more monetary flows of capital become really abstract and autonomous, i.e. indifferent to humanity, the more abstract and indifferent to the concrete way of acquiring money (and traditional institutions, such as a ‘job’) are the forms of access to them.

Humanity is becoming redundant for capital because there is nothing about humans that capital would necessarily need. Classic anthroponarcissist theories of capital, even Marxist ones, stressed the necessary connection between capitalist economic value and human labour, and at the same time underestimated the radical novelty of capitalism, or rather they presupposed capital to be exclusively a reorganisation of human production and not a radically new, alien way of production. The latter still is a way of production, but not necessarily such that would need or be based on human labour power. What capital needs is a ‘de-objectified’[note]See Frank Fischbach, Brez predmeta ( Ljubljana: Krtina, 2012).[/note] and intelligent labour power, not necessarily a human labour power as such. De-objectified stands for flexible, not limited to such and such concrete activity and able to do anything, and at the onset of capitalism humans are undoubtedly more useful than animals (considering the existing possibilities of a labour power that capital stumbled upon and did not create by itself). Whereas animals perform specific activities (cats, for instance, can hunt mice and scratch furniture, but they cannot do everything), humans are universally unspecialised due to their peculiar evolution. Upright posture frees our hands, which are not specialised—in difference to crab claws that are specialised for grabbing and pinching, or horse hooves that are specialised for efficient walking and running – for anything, but can nonetheless hold, fabricate or use tools to do anything (apes have similar hands, but they use them to climb, meaning that their hands are not free to do anything, while human hands are free as a result of upright posture). Because of this entirely biological and evolutional flexibility humans are the logical first choice (both in comparison to animals as in a chronological sense) as the labour power of capital, since capitalist production is extremely dynamic and changes very quickly, which is why it needs a suitably flexible and adaptable labour power.

And that’s it—capital has no need for humans in the fullness of their humanity, only their flexibility (i.e. practical abstraction, not being limited to this or that concrete activity and the potential to perform any activity) and intelligence (the ability of abstract cognition, memory, learning and symbolic communication). These are not necessarily human, or rather if flexible and intelligent non-human creatures indeed existed, they could replace humans as a labour power. At the same time, humans are not an ideal labour power for capital (only the best one of those it initially stumbled upon), again for completely biological reasons: from the perspective of capital, what is problematic are not only aging, limited endurance and a long process of learning and training, but also human inability to change and adapt themselves on a biological level. Even if a certain activity would be more productive and efficient if performed with eight hands, a human (Shiva is not a human!) can still do it with only two.

Even if the human hand is very flexible and gives us the possibility to do anything, the biggest limitation of human labour power from capital’s perspective is the inability to accelerate and guide its own biological evolution. The latter is excruciatingly slow in comparison with technological evolution. “[It is becoming] more and more clear how inadequate the human being is – the flesh-and-bone human, a living fossil, immutable on the historical scale, perfectly adapted to external conditions at the time the human species was triumphing over the mammoth but already overtaken by them when required to use muscle to operate the trireme.”[note]Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 247–248.[/note] Technological evolution is faster than the biological one and it quickly ceases to imitate it. Primitive tools were still an extension of the human body and an imitation of various biological functions, but even first ships are not merely an imitation of fins and mills not an imitation of teeth. This ‘autonomisation’ of the technological evolution is faster and initially more evident in the field of motoric functions (lifting, moving, fabricating things) where the key historic turning point is the industrial revolution and the introduction of industrial machinery (machines that are no longer tools).

Technological intelligence begins to develop later than technological motoric, but even in this field the birth of computers is an important break. In the same way as industrial machines are no longer an externalisation of the motoric functions of the human arm in the form of a tool, computers cut off the development of intellectual technologies as an externalisation of human intelligence and cognitive functions. While the technology of writing, for instance, can still be considered as an externalisation of human memory, computers perform many cognitive operations different from those of a human mind. From the point of the industrial revolution on the motorical, and the microelectronic revolution on the intellectual level, further technological development is limited by neither the human organism nor human biological evolution.

At the same time, technological motoric and intellect that were separate from one another in the past are beginning to merge in the field of robotics. Machines are learning, they program themselves and perform autonomous activities. Their only truly great limitation today is that they are not able to reproduce. Once they learn to do that, “there would be nothing left for the human to do but withdraw into the paleontological twilight.”[note]Ibid., p. 248.[/note] While machines are perfectly adapted to the infinitely increasing productivity and self-improvement, the very biological structure of humans in relation to the technological civilisation of capital is increasingly burdensome. Human beings have a low tolerance for heat, noise and toxins that accompany technology, they perceive it as a threat and as pollution; that is why they wish to limit and slow down the development of technology and industry.

As long as technological evolution was limited to motorics, it was possible to adopt a certain anthroponarcissist intellectual snobism in our relation to machines—the stupid muscle work is carried out by machines so that humans can in the meantime dedicate themselves to higher, spiritual activities. At the time of the industrial revolution, many machines had demeaning names or nicknames (in England, steam engines were often called mules), similar to how black slaves and domestic animals were named. This form of anthroponarcissism loses some ground with the invention of computers, and today, in the time of machine learning and autonomous computer self-programming, it has been undergoing a deep crisis.

To refuse to see that machines will soon overtake the human brain in operations involving memory and rational judgment is to be like … Homeric bard who would have dismissed writing as a mnemonic trick without any future. We must get used to being less clever than the artificial brain that we have produced, just as our teeth are less strong than a millstone and our ability to fly negligible compared with that of a jet aircraft.[note]Ibid., p. 265.[/note]

Technological evolution broke through the biological barriers of the human brain, meaning the human intellect as well. At this point humanity is becoming redundant not only in the social sense, but also through the possibility of replacing human labour power in the capitalist process of production with thinking machines. Machines of the industrial revolution were indeed flexible, but they weren’t (autonomously) intelligent; it was possible to quickly adapt, modify, “hack” or replace them with new, more efficient ones, but they were not able to plan, carry out and adapt their own activities. They surpassed human biological limitations in the field of motorics, but not the field of intellect. Modern machines, on the other hand, are increasingly able to perform autonomous intellectual functions as well, which means that they might represent the embryonic stage of a flexible and intelligent labour power that will in time replace humanity.

This might come off as excessively futuristic, but let us take a simple every-day example that is completely common in today’s capitalist economy, i.e. apps on mobile phones. Human input is minimal: a hired programmer writes a code for an application that offers yoga advice, let’s say. A few extra people handle the marketing and promotion of the application, but the app does most of the work by itself: it answers the questions of consumers, adapts to situations, recalls previous queries etc. And in the end, the company earns profit, so the activity must have been productive and brought surplus value, which means that we have a situation where in capitalist economic activity it is actually the (flexible and intelligent) app that is being exploited.

A crucial factor in understanding how capital operates in our time is its ‘real autonomy’. This is a point where even the best attempts, for instance that of Marx, are ambivalent, for instance the concept of real subsumption as an appropriation and subjugation of something human (and not an autonomous development of something non-human, alien that initially harnesses human practices and institutions and human material) or the concept of general intellect (GI)[note]Tony Smith, “The ‘General Intellect’ in the Grundrisse and beyond”, in: Historical materialism, l. 21, no. 4, 2013.[/note] that is particularly important for exploring the intellect of capital. Marx and post-operaist authors, who used the concept of GI to the largest extent, mostly act as if what is embodied in the modern industrial technology as GI were only some kind of an embodied, materialised human intellect and not something alien. The scheme human intellect → materialisation in the system of machinery is still only a humanist theory of alienation that takes place on the relation the subject’s predicate → materialisation in the object. However, real subsumption is not a process of appropriating something human through capital; it is a competitively determined real autonomy of capital’s functioning.

The problem of capitalism is not that it would expand everywhere and ‘commodify everything’, leaving people with nothing because this commercial monstrosity would dispossess them of everything. Today it is increasingly obvious that capital rejects many things, for instance ‘jobs’, artisanal techniques of production and traditional money. This does not mean that it ‘takes’ something away from humanity or that it is appropriating, to the contrary: people still have jobs (but in the public sector), they still use simple tools (but as a hobby) and they still shop with traditional money. At the same time, capital has been developing new forms of production, finance and labour power (and intellect—if machines were the arms of capital, it is currently developing an autonomous mind) in an increasingly autonomous way, independently from and indifferently to humanity and humaneness. Machines of the industrial revolution were not simply bigger or composite tools (as extensions of the human arm or an alienating appropriation of human manual dexterity) and the same holds true for artificial intelligence today: AI is not something that was taken away from the human intellect, but has been evolving in a different way and independently of its rules and boundaries.

What the development of artificial intelligence also means is that capital can potentially begin to phase out not only human labour power, but markets as well; or rather, it is possible that markets will soon prove to be a primitive, insufficient institution that capital will discard. It could be that markets were only a temporary solution to the problem of fast and efficient communication between individual units of production through quantitative price signals that can be replaced by more efficient IT systems connecting artificially intelligent entities. In such a case capital would sever its final connection to humanity (through the market and consumption)—it could also be that consumer preferences and whims are not so much the centre of the capitalist system, but simply another obstacle that capital will overcome. And it could be that capitalism, if we take the process of liberation from work, markets and money into consideration, is not (any longer) about economy—not because ‘everything is political’—or rather that economic processes were only the environment in which capitalism was born and which it will overcome to become entirely technonomic.  va-tombstone1-03

“Alien Capital” was first published in Slovenian in Šum #7 (June, 2017). It can be read here. 


Synthetic Fabrication: The Myth of the Politics-to-Come (Part 1: The Generative Myth)

Previously: Synthetic Fabrication Part 0

Mysticism and Mechanization

Towards the end of his book on Henri Bergson, Deleuze mined from the philosopher’s work a spectral prefiguration of the people-to-come: the faint traces of an emergent and enigmatic open society, a “society of creators” and ‘privileged’ souls connected together by an imperceptible circuitry. Standing atop a grand, abstract summit, the open society derives its name not only from its differentiation to the closed society, but through that which it opens onto. The open society moves in the direction of what Bergson had called the élan vital, the impulse or force that compels self-organization in matter and morphogenesis through time. Such a movement is an affair of life itself, the sifting apart of the organic from the inorganic, organization from base matter. By ascending up a cosmological hierarchy in order to enter into unending engagement with this force, the mark of the open society is life at its most creative.

The “creative emotion” that defines this society is the “embodiment of cosmic Memory”, one that cuts across “all levels at the same time” and “liberates man from the… level that is proper to him.”[note]Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 111.[/note] The citizen of the open society is a new type who gives themselves to “open creative totality”. Bergson, Deleuze points out, sees in the figures of the artist and the mystic, each of which fabricates new things from past forms and raw matter, the avatars that best capture the nature of this type:

…the great souls — to a greater extent than philosophers — are those of artists and mystics (at least those of a Christian mysticism that Bergson describes as being completely superabundant activity, action, creation). At the limit, it is the mystic who plays with the whole of creation, who invents an expression of it whose adequacy increases its dynamism. Servant of an open and finite God (such are the characterisics of the élan vital), the mystical soul actively plays the whole of the universe in which there is nothing to see or to contemplate.[note]Ibid., 112.[/note]

Bergson himself intuits, at some undetermined level, a connection between the mystical experience and the processes of industrialization that define modernity.[note]In his comparison of the dark night of the soul with the process of industrial production, Bergson seems to be posing merely an analogy. Later, however, he writes that “we had caught sight of a possible link between the mysticism of the West and its industrial civilization.” See Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (London: Macmillian and Co., 1935), 251. [/note] In his book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, the experience of the dark night of the soul, that sacred passage privileged by the Christian mystics of the apophatic theological current, becomes imbued with mechanical analogies that seem to transcend mere literary flourish. In the final stages of the experience the mystic becomes akin to a “machine of wonderfully tempered steel” that has “became conscious of itself being put together.” This machine is subjected to stress tests and other trials to assess its durability and functioning; it undergoes the feeling of distress and lack. But this rigorous ordeal is precisely what must be passed through to reach a higher state. “The mystic soul yearns to be this instrument. It throws off everything in its substance that is not pure enough, not flexible enough, to be turned to some use by God.”[note]Ibid., 197-198.[/note] To be a creator, then, is to be properly created, and to be used to create, in turn.

This encounter with the creative, unfolding totality returns again and again in the pages of A Thousand Plateaus, particularly in the 11th plateau, titled “1837: Of the Refrain”. Here Deleuze and Guattari describe the already-underway arrival of the “age of the Machine, the immense mechanosphere, the plane of the cosmicization of forces to be harnessed”.[note]Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 334.[/note] In this age, the molecular moves to the fore, and the creative act that cascades across all the levels of the totality is revealed as the penetration of these forces and flows in order to unleash the production of the new. The figure of the artist-mystic is resurrected in these pages, but wears a new face: that of the “cosmic artisan” capable of taking leave from the earth. This artisan (alternatively referred to as the “artist-artisan”) helps realize, through the forces of deterritorialization and decoding, a “cosmic people” and a “cosmic earth” — the people-to-come and the New Earth across which they move.

Thus the plateau on the refrain, which charts (among other things) a movement of territorial formation, stability, and exit across a tripartite schema of Classical, Romantic, and Modern ages, provides a highly abstract prism that allows Bergson’s depictions of closed societies and open societies to be read historically. This, admittedly, is the purpose of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, a work that Ernst Bloch described as “very Marxist”.[note]Hisashi Fujita “Anarchy and Analogy: The Violence of Language in Bergson and Sorel”, in Alexander Lefebvre and Melanie White, Bergson, Politics, and Religion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 131.[/note] Others who followed Bergson and his work closely, however, might have found much to disagree with in this overstatement. Such was the case of Georges Sorel, engineer turned political radical, who expressed in an otherwise-sympathetic review of the philosopher’s work a “wish that Bergson would abandon the largely infantile applications of his philosophy to the natural sciences and instead apply this to the problems raised by the great social movements.”[note]Ibid., 132-133[/note] In Sorel’s hands, the vision of the élan vital is not one of a metaphysical system to be perceived as operating at a cosmological level, but the very force that can be found at each moment in the cascading development of industrial forces: “Bergson’s creative evolution simply imitates the history of human industry… The true place for Bergson’s philosophy is in social studies, especially those concerning the present day.”

Sorel’s reconfiguration and deployment of Bergson’s philosophies in the service of such a pursuit is of immediate interest to elucidating Deleuze’s perspective on fabulation, and the role that it plays in the overall architecture of his philosophy. In Sorel’s works, particularly the 1908 book Reflections on Violence, Bergsonian thought undergoes a mutation by way of a creative encounter with Marxism and revolutionary syndicalism. This mutation helps provide the backbone of an escape route from what Sorel describes as decadence — that is, a wide-ranging slowdown in the forces of industrial development, economic competition, and class struggle that occurs when the bourgeoisie and and proletariat deviate from the historical paths identified by Marx.

“[I]t has been suggested”, writes Jeffrey Mehlman, “that ‘entropy’ is perhaps the dominant institution of Sorel’s thought.”[note]Jeffrey Mehlman, “Georges Sorel and the ‘Dreyfusard Revolution’; in Gail M. Schwab and John R. Jeanneney, The French Revolution of 1789 and Its Impact (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995), 148.[/note] The second law of thermodynamics, as articulated by Rudolf Clausius in the early 1850s, had by the time Sorel was writing exploded over the socio-cultural landscape. The realization that force forever dissipates made shockingly clear that disorder in a given system builds over time and that, at the horizon, a grand extinguishing looms. The euphoria of the earlier industrial era, swept up in the dream of Newtonian balance and universal harmony, dissolved into a fog of cosmic ennui. Fatigue, dissatisfaction, and a generalized weariness with things radiated through society, matched by an intensified focus on maintenance, regulation, and fitness as a means of holding these forces at bay.[note]For a discussion on the cultural impact of the second law of thermodynamics, and its subsequent implications for industrial discipline, managerialism, organizational theory and the like, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Harper Collins, 1990).[/note] Entropy was civilization’s grand enemy. To see it rushing over the gates meant that civilization was splitting apart, teetering at the edge of a grand abyss. For Sorel, writing during a time which we can identify as the eclipsing of early, competitive capitalism by monopoly capitalism, the dimming of modernity’s flames under the conjoined complacency of reform-minded parliamentary socialists and a bourgeoisie that had become an “ultra-civilized aristocracy” heralded the threat of decay and degradation.

The question of entropy also played a major, if often overlooked, role in Bergson’s work, particular where the notion of the élan vital is concerned. In the latter half of the 1800s, the recognition of the doom wrought by entropy triggered oscillations between a world-weary acceptance of the conditions and attempts to forestall it wherever possible. It wouldn’t be until the 1940s when negentropy (negative entropy) would come to be known. Erwin Schrödinger, for example, wrote in his 1944 book What is Life? that a living thing “can only be kept aloof from [entropy], i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy.”[note]Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 76.[/note] In order to explain the apparent paradox between constant, localized producing of living order and cosmic decay, Schrödinger’s suggestion was that living organism is imbued with an “astonishing gift of concentrating a ‘stream of order’… of ‘drinking orderliness’ from a suitable environment.” Such a concept was precisely what Bergson was trying to strive towards with the élan vital, defined as it was by a capacity for spontaneous organization and self-regeneration through time.

The second law of thermodynamics, Bergson argued, was nothing short of a metaphysical principle: physics, without the aid of “interposed symbols and… artificial devices and instruments” now “discloses the direction in which evolution is going.”[note]Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 1999), 60.[/note] The direction, in its most generalized and cosmological form, appears in the work of physicists like Clausius to be a descent down the hierarchy, into the baseness of unformed, unorganized matter. But this is countered by another tendency, an “an effort to re-mount the incline that matter descends.”[note]Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Random House Inc., 1944), 268.[/note] This counter-tendency is the struggle against entropy, seen as necessary by Bergson to explain the existence of life and its prolonged development in the face of the irresistible tug downwards. It is not life itself, but a vital force that runs through the living in their onward evolution — the élan vital. It is the ascent up the hierarchy, characterized by an increase of organization in both social and individual senses, as well as the blurring between the two senses. The élan vital thus appears as a progenitor of the concept of negative entropy. Speaking of the second law of thermodynamics, Bergson wrote that

…everything happens as if it were doing its utmost to set itself free from these laws. It has not the power to reverse the direction of physical changes, such as the principle of Carnot determines it. It does, however, behave absolutely as a force would behave which, left to itself, would work in the inverse direction. Incapable of stopping the course of material changes downwards, it succeeds in retarding it. The evolution of life really continues … [as] an initial implusion: this impulsion… brings life to more and more efficient acts by the fabrication and use of more and more powerful explosives.[note]Ibid. (emphasis in original)[/note]

From this perspective, it isn’t hard to see why somebody like Sorel, concerned about entropic decadence derailing the progress of modernity into the upward momentum that Marx had identified, was attracted to such ways of thinking. If the the élan vital was an early attempt to elucidate negentropic tendencies, and was also that which the open society moved towards, then the affinity of the open society with negentropic organization becomes clear. By bringing into play Bergson’s own hints at a link between the mystic and the mechanical where the ascension to this morphogenicc force is concerned (not to mention Deleuze and Guattari’s own quasi-historicization of these processes), the theory is already moving in the direction that Sorel had wished for it to go — to assessing the development of industrial forces through capitalism.

The question becomes, then, how to translate this movement across a rough and complicated philosophical terrain, into something that counteracts decadence. The answer for Sorel is in precisely a function found in Bergson, albeit one that he disdained: the fabulatory function.

Building the Social Myth

In Bergson’s philosophy, both scientific knowledge and symbolic knowledge, insofar as they stamp nature with the “general bent of the human intellect” in order to bring it in line with a “geometrical and static order”, belong to the domain of relative knowledge.[note]Ellis Sandoz “Myth and Society in the Philosophy of Bergson”, Social Research, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Summer 1963), 173.[/note] The borderlands of this knowledge demarcate the very interior limits of the knowable, with its lines separating the faculty of the intellect from that which is beyond it — that is, the unrepresentable realm of continual change, crystallizing organization, and open systems unfolding through real duration. The intellect, in other words, is encased within the limit that prevents direct encounter with the élan vital, sheared off from access to the absolute.

This sifting-apart of the relative forms of knowledge from the absolute occurs along a fault-line of the temporal. “We do not think in real time”, Bergson suggested, adding that “but we live in it, because life transcends intellect.”[note]Bergson, Creative Evolution, 53.[/note] Thus the phenomenon of life, as an affair of particular and durable types of organization, moves through what cannot be grasped by the intellect — yet for Bergson it is a mistake to suggest that the position of the absolute beyond the grasp of the intellect means that it is fundamentally off-limits to thought. Such was his critique of Kant who, he argued, encased the mind permanently within the borderlands of the intellect. Against this approach, Bergson suggested that another, more subtle and intangible faculty is actually capable of transgressing these limits in order to explore the absolute directly: intuition. This is a faculty that ‘envelopes’ the intellect, and “may enable us to grasp what it is that intelligence fails to give us, and indeed the means of supplementing it.”[note]Ibid., 195.[/note] Intuition and intellect, taken together, are the two ways of knowing a thing, with each correlated to the absolute and relative forms, respectively. They mark the two sides of human consciousness.

Bergson saw the human as holding a particularly unique position in that it stands at the endpoint of the chain of natural evolution. The development of the intellect was vital in maintaining this trajectory, having endowed the human with the capacity to choose between various options at a given time and to navigate the situations that it found itself within. Yet the intellect itself comes to be a double-edged sword: as it enables choice and increased mobility, the possibly for a dangerous egosim haunts it. The intelligent self can continually act in its own interests alone, even at the expense of the society to which it is fundamentally bound. For Bergson, if the active threat of this egoism is not tapered, it will harm the interdependence of sociability, and with it the very possibility of longevity and survival.

How does egoism of the intellect become blunted, if the intellect is simultaneously the means to achieving survival? Here, a critical intervention is staged not by the faculties of the intellect, but by instinct under the guise of habits, or, more properly, the “habit of contracting habits”.[note]Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 17.[/note] As the intellect operates in an environment, dotted with encounters and obstacles and problems to solve, these habits come to compile and reinforce one another, forming into a memory that serves as the foundation for a social morality. The accumulation of habits becomes an order that aims at balancing freedom of choice with collective interest. The question then becomes one of compulsion: given the supposed capacity for free choice (intellect), what obligates the individual to follow this instinctual order of habit-memory? The answer is the story-telling function, fabulation, the formation of essential myths capable of unpinning society. Bergson:

It must be noted that fiction, when it has the power to move us, resembles an incipient hallucination: it can thwart our judgment and reason, which are strictly intellectual faculties. Now what would nature have done, if she wanted to guard against certain dangers of intellectual activity without compromising the future of intelligence? … if intelligence was to be kept at the outset from sliding down a slope which was dangerous to the individual and society, it could only be by the statement of apparent facts, by ghosts of facts; failing real experience, a counterfeit of experience had to be conjured up. A fiction, if it is vivid and insistent, may indeed masquerade as perception and in that way prevent or modify action.[note]Ibid., 109.[/note]

Bergson’s historical assessment was that the fabulatory function first arose in early societies through the attribution of forceful will and what could be regarded as a distinctly human agency to natural events. He padded this thesis out by drawing on William James’s experience of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. James had written of the incident that he had “personified the earthquake as a permanent individual entity”, a force imbued with an “[a]nimus and intent” like that exercised by “a living agent”.[note]Ibid., 130[/note] He quickly discovered that he was not alone in registering the disaster as an encounter with an uncanny intelligence: many in the midst of the event felt that the Final Judgment was at hand, and that the shaking of the earth was the presence of a “vague daemonic power” moving through the world. In one case, the earthquake was read not as something produced by the tensions of the earth’s crusts and disequilibrium among strata; it was the very thing, some abstract motive agent, that was producing the tensions and disequilibrium. “I realize now much better than ever how inevitable were men’s earlier mythological versions of such catastrophes,” James wrote, “and how artificial and against the grain of our spontaneous perceiving are the later habits into which science educates us.”[note]Ibid., 130-131[/note]

Extrapolating from these insights, Bergson put forward the argument that the genesis of fabulation occurred via the exploration of natural phenomenon through the lenses of a perceived non-human agency, which quickly became assimilated into the expressions of magical ritual and religious fervor. It becomes a machine for producing fictions that are so livid, so life-like that they come to haunt those who speak of it, the color of perception itself for the members of society. Through the regulatory mechanism of religion, fabulation became that which effectively transformed the compulsion to maintain society into cosmological dramas that imposed firm rules and punishment for transgressions. This dynamic, however, did not end in the passage from the ancient to the modern, as “a society without a religion” has never existed as such. Thus even societies that are ostensibly built upon a foundation of reason have, at their very core, a profound unreason, a hallucination or fiction that serves as the a priori for the deployment of the faculty of the intellect for the purpose of obtaining relative knowledge.

And yet the society bound to the fabulatory function will never escape the circular interiority of the closed society. Fabulation, in Bergson’s reading, does not simply produce a counterbalance against the individual’s intellectual egoism, but constitutes a mechanism for determining inclusion and exclusion in accordance with a given society’s mythic underpinning. In other words, fabulation itself is the very function that makes a closed society closed, producing in turn a singular and static order that in the long-term will begin that inexorable descent into entropy. The open society then, for Bergson, is a society that relinquishes itself from the fabulatory function, and trades the myth for the dynamic intuition that moves with the élan vital.

In his appropriation of the theory of the social myth, Sorel — much to Bergson’s criticism — fundamentally transformed this dire outlook on the ultimate nature of fabulation.[note]Bergson’s student Jacques Chevalier later recounted his mentor’s thoughts on Sorel: “He’s a curious man, this old engineer, whose thought had such an effect on Lenin and Mussolini. What he has tried to find in my work is the idea of the generative myth. But he had his own ideas in mind more than my own.” Fujita, “Anarchy and Analogy”, note 12, 124.[/note] No longer was the myth the indirect adversary of negentropic amplification, but the very force necessary to undermine the grip of decadence on society. Bergson might have posed the faculty of intuition as a rising divergence from the social myth, but for Sorel the myth becomes the medium for intuition itself, the prism through which passes that which cannot be known directly by the intellect. It even holds the capacity to power vast movements in the direction of the unknowable. Taking socialism, as a futurity that lay beyond the capacity to think-through it, as his chief concern, he wrote that

Ordinary language could not produce these results in any very certain manner; appeal must be made to collections of images which, taken together and through intuition alone, before any considered analyses are made, are capable of invoking the mass of sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war taken by social against modern society… This method has all the advantages that integral knowledge has over analysis, according to the doctrine of Bergson; and perhaps it might be possible to cite many other examples which would demonstrate equally well the worth of the famous professor’s doctrines.[note]Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 113 (emphasis in original).[/note]

Reversal

“Myths must be judged as a means of acting on the present,” wrote Sorel in Reflections on Violence. “[A]ll discussion of the method of applying them as future history is devoid of sense. It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important: its parts are only of interest in so far as they bring out the main idea.”[note]Ibid., 116-117.[/note] The myth is thus divorced from the expected outcome that it angles itself toward; what emerges as the important factor is what happens in the present as a result of the myth. The future remains utterly indeterminate — and this is in no small part thanks to the function of the myth itself. Expectations derived from the myth — say, the push towards towards socialism — entail a grand preparation, an immense mobilization even, that will produce effects which will themselves radiate into the indeterminacy of the future, if not ensure it outright. What is most important for Sorel is that mobilization under the directive of the myth breaks apart the static destruction of decadence and helps achieve a renewed sense of real progression.

Such an understanding cuts directly to the core of Sorel’s repurposing of Bergson. Sorel suggested that there was a distinct correlation between socio-cultural (and even industrial) stasis and political optimism. The parliamentary socialists that he so disdained, for instance, were optimists who believed in the ability for “small reforms of the political system” and “governmental personnel” to “direct the movement of society in such a way to mitigate those evils of the modern world which seem so hideous to sensitive souls”.[note]Ibid., 10.[/note] Optimism, correlated with humanist critique and piece-meal solution, undermines radicalism and trades it for a neutered pacifism.

Standing in stark contrast to optimism was pessimism, understood as a “march towards deliverance” that draws, on one hand, from an understanding of intrinsic weakness, and on the other the accumulation of experimental knowledge generated by the continual encounters with obstacles. Through each an understanding of how social order operates is derived. This understanding leaves no space for the social reformist path:

The pessimist regards social conditions as forming a system bound together by an iron law which cannot be evaded, as something in the form of one block, and which can only disappear through a catastrophe that involves the whole. If this theory is admitted, it then becomes absurd to attribute the evils from which society suffers to a few wicked men.[note]Ibid., 11.[/note]

The individual’s will-to-deliverance, the path through pessimism, is consecrated in the form of the social myth. Sorel used the history of Christianity to draw this out. The primitive Christian, for example, found themselves born into a life of bondage, a slave to the earth of which Satan is the prince. In order to survive in this world, the individual gives themselves over to the belief in the future eschatological conflict between God and these forces of darkness: the myth of war and the realization of the New Jerusalem transforms one into something capable of truly existing. The Calvinists took this even further with the added weight of the doctrines of predestination. In the sixteenth century they were able to power an immense revolutionary machine, a “real catastrophic revolution” that fundamentally transformed everything, shaking apart the power structures of Catholicism and undermining its long-held stability.

If Catholicism could be broken apart by the Calvinist revolutionary force, it was because it had lost its connection to the fire of the mythic through the disappearance of the “Church militant”. Calvinism, likewise, suffered a similar fate in the wake of the Renaissance, which for Sorel has ushered in a wave of humanistic thought that brought with it an unbridled optimism. Here, at this point, society begin to run afoul, the groundwork laid for a “ridiculous social pacifism” that drowned out vital, nourishing anger. The iron cage began receding into the background. Soon the bourgeoisie, much like the parliamentary socialists with whom they linked arms, would cease to be like Nietzsche’s ‘warrior types’[note]For Sorel, the Nietzschean ‘master type’ was based upon “ancient heroes and the man who sets out to conquer the Far West” (Ibid., 232). The European bourgeoisie, having slowly reclined into civilized comforts, had fallen short of this idealized state — but for Sorel, it could still be found in the industrious spirit exhibited by capitalists in the United States: “I believe that if Nietzsche had not been so dominated by his memories of being a professor of philology, he would have perceived that the master type still exists under our own eyes, and that it is this type which, at the present time, creates the extraordinary greatness of the United States.” Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari also draw attention to the exceptional, schizophrenizing nature of American capitalism in both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and even note in that “everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 19.). The relationship between the “American rhizome” and the figure of the people-to-come will be taken up again in a future section of this essay series.[/note], and come to prefer the large, cumbersome industrial cartels and rationalized industry to the competitive battlefield of the market.

This society, divorced from myth and swallowed by optimism, was (to use Bergson’s parlance) a closed society. Yet it is clear how Sorel reverses Bergson’s schema: for the earlier philosopher, the mythic society was the closed society, held under the sway of a ‘static religion’. In Sorel’s work, decadence was marked by stasis, and it is no stretch to treat the decadent society as the theoretical descendant of the closed society — except that the relationship to myth is fundamentally different. For Bergson, the open society follows the faculty of intuition in a proto-negentropic escape from the closed society’s mythic basis. For Sorel, a precise contrast: the negentropic opening follows through the reinvigoration of the myth of deliverance.

The Revolutionary Myth

It’s important not to mistake Sorel’s myth for more basic forms of propaganda. Perhaps an apt way to pull them apart is to compare each to Mark Fisher’s distinction between sorcery and magic.[note]I owe this insight to Cockydooody. Check out his Totalitarian Collectivist blog right now.[/note] For Fisher, magic, like propaganda, proceeds by operating within a given system, moving in line with its despotic programming in order to ‘organize’ and ‘install’ words and languages with the goal of capturing potentially divergent movement (and to ward off more powerful, threatening ones). Sorcery, by contrast, operates at a much higher — or perhaps, more properly, lower — level. It marks an opening to the Outside, the zone where the Outside pours into the interior. Instead of organizing words into programs, sorcery entails “words melting into Things, and building sensitive side-communication Meshworks that spread”.[note]Mark Fisher, “White Magic”, Virtual Criminologies, http://www.critcrim.org/redfeather/journal-pomocrim/vol-6-virtual/whitemagic.htm. See also CCRU, “Cyberhype VI: The Darkside of the Wave”, Mute, March 10th, 2001, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/cyberhype-vi-darkside-wave. Here, magic is the associated with the reformist gambit of Keynesian economics, and sorcery with the entrepreneur and the rhythmic pulse of creative destruction as identified by Joseph Schumpeter and his work on wave dynamics in capitalism. It goes without saying something like creative destruction is precisely what Sorel is hoping to win out over highly reformed, stagnant capitalism.[/note] It is thus out of reach of human control, generative, and radically open.

Indeed, as Bergson’s understanding of the myth entailed, it isn’t the product of any one person or institution; it is something that organizes itself through time in the intersection of the individual intellect and the wider congealing of habits into social memory. From there it’s only a small leap to Sorel’s Marxist theoretical ground, where social institutions, norms, belief structures, etc., are secondary formations relative to the primary generative processes. In his discussions concerning both ‘primitive Christianity’ and ancient Greece this becomes particularly clear, with the doctrine of original sin and the epic battles of the gods deriving their contexts from material conditions unique to each social order.

This dynamic is in play with Sorel’s chief topic: the myth of the general strike advanced by the revolutionary syndicalist movement of his time. Where did the myth come from? Not from any singular source. It congealed from Proudhon and Bakunin’s anarchic vision of grand industrial federations, and from the communist anticipation of the great revolution looming up on the horizon — and behind each, the tumult of history. The preconditional ferment of this revolutionary consciousness encompassed the eradication of the romantic pastoral under the gears of the dark satanic mills, the dispossession of the agricultural laborer and its assimilation into the inorganic army of the proletariat. Its logic derived from the regimentation of society by the temporal rhythm of the machine, and the expansions and contractions that compose the spiraling, metabolic pulse of industrialization itself. It patches itself together through the disparate strike activities and worker agitations that quickly faded out of sight. Proudhon, Bakunin, Marx, and even Sorel appear from here as speaking not in their own voices, but the voices of subterranean and imperceptible movements taking place underneath the seemingly-stable organization of things. The same dynamic is to be found in the myth of the general strike, as something that has self-organized from below, and is rising up to be spoken by agents who think they are deploying it by their own volition.

As alluded to earlier, whether or not the myth triggers the anticipated catastrophic revolutionary event is ultimately immaterial. As a myth of deliverance, Sorel argued, the specter of the general strike would compel the proletariat to refuse the humanist comforts offered by the parliamentary socialists. Instead, they would “repay with black ingratitude the benevolence of those who wish to protect the workers, to meet with insults the homilies of the defenders of human fraternity and to respond by blows to the advances of the propagators of social peace”.[note]Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 77.[/note] This is the simultaneous intensification of the class struggle and capitalism itself. Having been robbed of the peace promoted by the parliamentary socialists, the ultra-civilized bourgeoisie will cast aside their commitment to “works which promote social justice or [to] democracy”, and come to understand that “they have been badly advised by the people who persuaded them to abandon their trade of creators of productive forces…”.[note]Ibid., 77-78.[/note] Thus the much-required negentropic force becomes identifiable as “proletarian violence”, composing the

only means by which the European nations, stupefied by humanitarianism, can recover their former energy. This violence compels capitalism to restrict its attention solely to its material role and tends to restore it to its warlike qualities it formerly possessed. A growing and solidly organized working class can force the capitalist class to remain ardent in the historical struggle; if a united and revolutionary proletariat confronts a rich bourgeoisie ready for conquest, capitalist society will reach its historical perfection.[note]Ibid., 78-79.[/note]

In the final stages of Sorel’s analysis, the very distinction between socialism (here only capable of being glimpsed through the myth) and capitalism is thrown into disarray. In the forward push to mobilize for the general strike, the whole of the proletarian class undergoes a kind of industrial education. Like Bergson’s mechanical mystic, the individual worker, subjected to the gears of the machine and the pace of production, becomes something different than it was before — in this case, a soldier in an acephalic insurgency, an individual point in an anarchic swarm that undermines the power of the state and the bourgeois opposition.[note]Sorel here appears as an early progenitor of the “Insect Communism” advanced by the likes of Eliphas Apis, among others. See Eliphas Apis, The Insect Communist Manifesto (Terra Nova: Sov-Hive 325 Publishing, 2025). Directly presaging the concerns of Apis, Sorel himself describes ‘perfection in manufacturing’ as a factory or workshop capable of being “considered as a machine whose parts are men.” The industrial education of the workers here produces a “completely mindless life” based on automatic behaviors in relation to the rhythms of production. Thus the “skill the workers acquire can, in the long run, be compared reasonably to the instinct of an insect.” See Georges Sorel, The Illusions of Progress (Berkley: University of California Press, 1969), 195-196. It is also worth noting that Sorel is invoking Bergson’s somnambulist theory of instinct. For an overview of this controversial theory (and the influence of it on Deleuze’s early work), see Christian Kerslake, “Insects and Incest: From Bergson and Jung to Deleuze”, Multitudes, No. 25 (2006), http://www.multitudes.net/Insects-and-Incest-From-Bergson/. [/note] The historical perfection of capitalist society locks into an upward, explosive thrust, and the combatants in this borderless war are stamped with a new “morality of producers” that serves as a motive force for development of industrial production to soar ever higher, towards an economic bridge that pulls together capitalism and the historical stage that follows it.

…the idea of the general strike, constantly rejuvenated by the sentiments provoked by proletarian violence, produces an entirely epic state of mind and, at the same time, bends all the energies of the mind towards the conditions that allow the realization of a freely functioning and prodigiously progressive workshop; we have thus recognized that there is a strong relationship between the sentiments aroused by the general strike and those which are necessary to bring about a continued progress in production. We have then the right to maintain that the modern world possesses the essential motivating power which can ensure the existence of the morality of producers.[note]Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 250. On the “economic bridge” between socialism and capitalism, see The Illusions of Progress, 205-207. See also Vince Garton, “Technoindustrial Capitalism and the Politics of Catastrophic Velocity”, The Cyclonograph, June 23rd, 2017. https://vincentgarton.com/2017/06/23/technoindustrial-capitalism-and-the-politics-of-catastrophic-velocity/ [/note]

Sorel’s understanding of the web of relationships between the proletariat, the generative myth of deliverance, and the wider question of entropic and negentropic fluctuations in socio-economic systems and technological development is one in which the proletariat and bourgeoisie alike are but points in a vaster circuitry that cuts widely across historical development. Whether or not he specifically articulated it as such is rather unimportant, as the movement of the theory of the myth out from its Bergsonian roots makes it all abundantly clear. Social development remains inexorably tied to a techno-industrial underpinning, and actualization of a revolutionary consciousness itself remains fundamentally connected to these processes. The attempt to break out from these conditions — absolute revolution against the process — all but guarantees the pushing of the process to its higher stages. Such is the nature, perhaps paradoxically, of the movement from the closed society to the open society.

Such insight foreshadows, in many respects, the assessments of Deleuze and Guattari, who noted in A Thousand Plateaus that “[h]istory is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it).”[note]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 295[/note] It may seem a bit of a stretch to juxtapose Sorel’s work with Deleuze and Guattari, but under a closer inspection numerous similarities begin to appear. Sorel’s strategic inversion of the Bergsonian perspective on the myth is isomorphic to Deleuze’s own treatment of fabulation, which, as indicated in the introduction, is the conduit through which new political formations and can identities emerge. Similarly, the emphasis on closed and open systems returns again in the work of Deleuze, both with and without Guattari; as with Sorel, the relationship between these sorts of systems and thermodynamically-charged sciences is also highlighted. And finally, the intermingling of these forces in the production of the new acts as a profound bridge between the two. Each heralds the emergence of mutant politics, unique to the dynamics of modernity, that stretches itself towards the New People and the New Earth.

Nonetheless, it would be overstating matters to suggest a direct correlation between Sorel and Deleuze (and Guattari), as each pursued divergent paths that overlapped only at points. The following section will, with Sorel’s theories in mind, begin to unpack Deleuze’s own transfiguration of the theory of the myth.