Achille Mbembe: Deglobalization
‘We see less and less of what is there for
us to see and more and more of what we desperately want to see, even though
what we want to see does not correspond to any original reality. Perhaps now
more than ever, other people can stand before us as a concrete, tangible and
physical presence and yet be no more than a spectral absence, an equally
concrete, almost phenomenal void. This is what happens to migrants, refugees
and asylum seekers.’
Digital computation is
engendering a new common world and new configurations of reality and power. But
this ubiquitous, instantaneous world is confronted by the old world of bodies
and distances. Technology is mobilized in order to create an omnipresent border
that sequesters those with rights from those without them.
Every sphere of life
has been penetrated by capital and subjected to quantification. In this
context, borders have become nothing other than the violence underlying our
world’s order, a war against mobility that is filling Europe with dead bodies
and migrant camps. Can we dare to imagine the abolition of borders? The escalation is
undeniable. No sphere of contemporary life has been left untouched by the
spread of capital. Admittedly, its penetration is uneven. In many parts of the
world, it operates primarily by proxy. Stupefied by poverty, destitution and
deprivation, whole classes of people experience first-hand the dissociation
between the world as actually lived, the material world of life at a specific
place on the Earth’s surface, and the ubiquitous and blissful world of the
screen – visible but utterly untouchable, uncontactable, unpossessable.
Peace as a punctuation mark in eternal war
Alexandre Koyre: The Political Function of the Modern Lie (1945)
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Industrialization of the Mind (1982)
Nothing seems to
escape capital’s control, whether affects, emotions and feelings, linguistic
skills, or manifestations of desire, dreams or thought – all of life, in short.
Capital extends its grasp deep into the underbelly of the world, leaving in its
wake vast fields of debris and toxins, waste heaps of men ravaged by sores,
abscesses and boils. Now that everything is a potential source of
capitalization, capital has made a world of itself: a hallucinatory phenomenon
of planetary dimensions that produces, on a grand scale, subjects who are
simultaneously calculating, fictional and delirious.
Capital having been
made flesh, everything is now a function of capital, even interiority. The
processes driving this universal expansion are erratic. Everywhere they create
randomness and uncertainty. Everywhere they institutionalize the risk inherent
in the misfortunes of reality. Every-where they are subject to diversion and
solicitation. No matter: capital has become our shared infrastructure, our
nervous system, the transcendental maw that maps out our world and its
psycho-physical limits.
Digital computation
This world creation
process is going on at a time when all societies are organized according to the
same guiding principle: digital computation. The term must be understood in
three ways. First, as a technical system or mechanical device specialized in
the abstraction, and so the capture and automatic processing, of data (material
and mental) that must be identified, selected, sorted, classified, recombined
and activated. If digitization is a task of abstraction, that task is
inseparable from another: calculation – of both the liveable and the thinkable.
The computational is a
force that produces and serializes subjects, objects, phenomena, but also
consciences and memories and traces, which can be coded and stored and which
are capable of circulating. Finally, the computational is the institution
through which a common world, a new common sense, and new configurations of
reality and power are brought into being and shaped. This world and this common
sense result from the fusion of three types of reason, each subject to constant
extension and augmentation: economic, biological and algorithmic. These three
forms of reason are haunted by a metaphysical phantom: technolatry.
Computational
mechanisms, algorithmic modelling and the extension of capital into every
sphere of life are all part of one and the same process. Whether operating on
bodies, nerves, material, blood, cellular tissue, the brain or energy, the aim
is the same: first, the conversion of all substances into quantities – the
pre-emptive calculation of possibilities, risks and contingencies with a view
to their financialization; second, the conversion of organic and vital ends
into technical means. Everything must be detached from any kind of substrate,
from all corporeality, from all materiality; everything must be artificialized, automated and autonomized.
Everything must be subjected to quantification and abstraction. Digitization is
nothing other than this capture of forces and possibilities and their
annexation by the language of a machine-brain transformed into an autonomous
and automated system. All this is now
driving an unprecedented unification of the planet... read more:
Read also Adam Tooze’s
account (A Time of Debt) of the emergence, a decade ago, of the dogma of austerity from the
ruins of the global financial system: Two years after global
economy crashed in 2008, austerity politics swung into action. Using Greece as
its example, a transatlantic alliance of right-wing fearmongers, conservative
political entrepreneurs and centrist fiscal hawks abandoned stimulus and instead
turned the screw.
