Power, Powerlessness, Thinking, and Future

“To think powerlessness is difficult because it is also and firstly to think the impotence of thinking itself, its inability to pass from dunamis (power or potential in Greek) into action (energeia). This also and at the same time necessarily involves thinking the relations between knowledge and power, or knowledges and powers, and so on.”

“Behind all this lies proletarianization, which today affects all forms of knowledge, and firstly as a destruction of knowledge — of how to live, do, and conceptualize. Those who define themselves as “intellectuals” internalize this situation, oblivious to the fact that today they themselves have been proletarianized. And here we should recall that in The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels defined proletarianization not in terms of poverty but by the loss of knowledge (one consequence of which is pauperization), which in the end, they say, affects “all layers of the population.””

“After its destructive effect on savoir faire, on knowledge of how to do, proletarianization began to destroy savoir vivre, knowledge of how to live, shared culture, when consumer capitalism replaced this knowledge with the behavioral prescriptions produced by marketing. Since the beginning of the 21st century, it is conceptual knowledge that is finding itself ruined, proletarianizing the “intellectuals,” who try to hang on to their existence by adopting attitudes and poses rather than by producing concepts.”

“For proletarianization is also the widespread generalization of entropic behavior, that is, behavior that leads to the destruction of life. Such is the horizon of the new question of rationality.”

“Let us recall that entropy came to prominence in the 19th century, understood as the unavoidable dissipation of energy — whereas in the 20th century life was defined as what opposes to this universal tendency a negative entropy, a negentropy characterized by its ability to organize entropic chaos. When we refer today to the Anthropocene, we are referring to a process leading to an immense chaotic disorganization, involving a considerable increase in the rate of entropy, among the consequences of which is, for example, that systemic mutation we refer to as “climate change.””

“Instead of producing sweeping statements that are merely a smokescreen (through which we cast our impotence upon others), is the point not rather to know what “right” and “left” mean, and to understand how they relate to what this word “intellectual” supposedly designates, and which it is not difficult to believe is something that requires thinking? But to think this, we must remember that there was thinking before the right and before the left, and there will be thinking after — inshallah.”

“Marx and Engels showed at the beginning of The German Ideology (1845) that humanity consists above all in a process of exosomatization that pursues evolution no longer through somatic but through artificial organs (which was already glimpsed by Herder 70 years prior to these two early theorists of the role of technology in the formation of social relations and knowledge). But humankind has discovered to its stupefaction that this exosomatization is now directly and deliberately produced by the market — and, with respect to the immense transformations to which it gives rise, without offering any choice other than, in the best case, the profitability of investment, or, in the worst case, the pure speculation involved in the increasingly tight connection between the casino economy, marketing and R&D conceived according to inherently short-term, and therefore speculative, models of disruption.”

“Technology is disruptive because the pace of its evolution and its transfer to society (so-called “innovation”) has become extremely rapid, causing what Bertrand Gille called the social systems (law, education, political organization, forms of knowledge, and so on) to always arrive too late. Now, it might be objected that, as Hegel said, the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk — and hence that philosophy has since long ago always arrived too late. Certainly. But I believe that today, in this disruption, this lateness is unsustainable and irrational, and that it must be in advance overthrown, not by rejecting technology, that is, exosomatization, which could only be purely illusory, but by elaborating a new politics (evoked in July 2014 by Evgeny Morozov in a remarkable article in The Guardian).”

“The “intellectuals,” whether of the “left” or the “right,” are stuck in an antiquated opposition between “intellectual” and “manual” that refers in a more profound way to the opposition between logos and tekhne against which Marx fought, and which he posited as the basis of the ideology that was then called “bourgeois.” This has largely been forgotten, in particular by the heirs of Althusser and firstly by Alain Badiou. For the consequence lies in the fact that, contrary to what Badiou’s hero, Plato, wants to prove, knowledge is always constituted by technics, which in so doing always constitutes a social relation.”

“It is by starting out again from these questions that the relationship between right and left must be rethought. This is profoundly tied to industrial history. If the distinction between “left” and “right” occurs during the French Revolution, this is because the latter was the effect of a transformation of society by the bourgeoisie, and where the divide that organizes social dynamics and historical blockages ceases to be the opposition between “nobles” and “peasants” but becomes instead that between capital and labor.”

“The left defends labor and the right defends capital. Freed from the constraints of the Ancien Régime, the bourgeoisie were able to constitute industrial society, which was the major achievement of the First French Empire, and in which two completely different dynamic contradictions co-existed: on the one hand, the Ancien Régime and Revolution, which endured long after the French Revolution — as evidenced by the Restoration and the Counter-Revolution — and on the other hand, right and left, which are different categories again, describing the new division arising when the Ancien Régime was truly gone — a transitional world lasting until Napoleon III, which was described, notably, by Balzac and Flaubert.”

“It is in this context that the notion of “Progress” arises, and consequently the notion of the “Enlightenment”: the discourse of the left is a conception of what is rational in an industrial society, that is, such that it can be characterized as “Progress.” “Progressive” then means “left-wing.” The discourse of the right is another conception of what is rational in this respect, often consisting in wanting to limit “Progress” — but not always. There have been, rarely, right-wing discourses that would intensify “Progress,” but that question whether the priority of “Progress” is the reduction of social inequalities.”

“The context of these questions is disruption. In this disruption, society is literally disintegrated by innovation, in turn driven exclusively by the market, itself in the hands of shareholders. This can lead only to what Nietzsche (rather an opponent of “left-wing” thinking, if not himself “on the right”) called ressentiment. And Nietzsche distrusted those who were called not yet “leftist intellectuals” but “democrats” and “socialists,” because they seemed to him figures of ressentiment.”

“The great question of our time is that of becoming in the Anthropocene, in the course of which exosomatization, of which Marx and Engels were the first thinkers, has passed completely into the hands of the most speculative, irresponsible, and self-destructive capitalism”

“a new age of exosomatization. It is as such that these issues must be addressed, and it is as disruptive technologies that the market promotes them. “Progressive” or “conservative” attitudes are nothing more than two ways of denying this new state of fact, which remains to be thought — that is, to be transformed into a state of law, rather than exploited in order to distract attention from the fundamental issues, of which these technologies of life are cases.”

“Immense unrest has seized hold of the world. The risk is that this unrest will turn into something more than just disquiet, and more even than anguish: into terror. This danger is obvious to anyone who is not too afraid to look at what is taking place, and it is fundamentally connected to the becoming of the Anthropocene: the direction in which this geological age is unfolding is increasingly seen by humankind as an inexorably fatal form of becoming.”

“We argue that to combat the protean regression afflicting our age, we need to look clear-sightedly at the world, in order to propose a new macro-economic organization. The latter must be based on the systemic and systematic valorization of negentropy — which requires a redefinition of the theory of value, as Marx called it in his “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, a text ignored in France (except by Lyotard).”

“Entropy is becoming, devenir. Negentropy is what inscribes within it a future, avenir. Becoming and future have until today been confused. It is this confusion that makes us powerless, and it is what the impasse of the Anthropocene reveals”