[Entering a more reactive mode, knitting in some threads, which means more
dodging, deadening, indecision. 5 pg tl;dr. Ymmv.]
Close until Opened
Confessions of Dialogical Aporia on the War in Ukraine
A) To distance oneself from the war in Ukraine as it unfolds, while
focusing on the risks of it becoming an even wider global conflict, might
seem ridiculous, escapist and lacking in compassion, almost confusing
victims with villains. It's none of these things, I won't go into detail
here. It's too complicated, too stigmatised. Just to mention one: imagine
you work for years for the Red Cross or Médecins Sans Frontières, you learn
to help people, you don't take sides, you don't become a combatant. This is
not an imaginary neutrality, but a position in which one adopts a very
flexible focus, reads sources from across the spectrum, and develops a
sense of sitting in one of the seats in order not to participate in the
main simulation, the discursive pressure to condemn, to polarise, to follow
a rhetoric of annihilation, torture, guilt and punishment - in order to be
of some help.
It seems that most of the German debate on Ukraine suggests that it is on
the side of the suffering subjects fighting for democracy, but at the same
time it is performing a narcissistic transference: I am perfect and pure,
and I need you, Putin, to be the evil, crazy villain to confirm this, and
you, Ukrainian victim, to increase my fragile omnipotence, you defend my
values of superior purity. Instead, I prefer to remember that the conflict
has been brewing since 2010, and that until then various transatlanticists
had the most intensified interests. The whole enterprise here is not to
attack them head-on, but to go with the flow, looking for better
opportunities to let this threat fall into its own ruins, due to the
irreducible contingency of war.
Nowadays, all texts about this conflict have to begin with a disclaimer, a
confession, to reveal a conscious condemnation of this war as the
historical fallacy that it was. This is followed by attributes such as
aggression (which every war involves), crime (which every war invites),
imperialism (which most wars are about) or suffering (which can be extended
but not excused), suggesting moral rules (with double standards) that
normalise the conditions of social war in which today's capitalism places
us, so that at best we can adopt half a Baudrillardian position of a
comfortably numb diffusion of distinctions.
B) There is no need to defend Schmitt or the geographical determinism that
reduces everything that happens to a map view, which seems very convenient
in conditions of planetary crisis. Wherever Schmitt has been applied, it
has had a toxic effect on the conceptualisation of theory. Recent examples
are Agamben's assessment of the pandemic, Mouffe's assessment of right-wing
populism or M. Trontis's political theology. Bratton's Stack wrestles with
spatial design theory only to escape into planetary cosmism - but that is
an ongoing project. Even Wagenknecht/Lafontaine's lack of internationalism
can be interpreted as a tendency towards telluric nationalisation. Schmitt
marks a reactionary strain in Eurocentric thinking that still reappears in
Chinese and Russian (mis)readings, all the way to the Atlantic Council's
Roadmap [1] as a return to Mackinder's Heartland, one of Schmitt's
foundations. It also recalls a geostrategic thinking that originated in
German border colonialism, the 'Lebensraum' ideology and its complicated
traces in the nationalist collaborators of the OUN and the first progromes
of the 20th century - as an unwalkable path.
Just taking the slippery slope of 'territorial sovereignty' describes how
Schmittian concepts are ranked as axioms for a rule-based world order. They
tend to create top-down jurisdictional consensus, but infuriate mutually
expansionist polarisation and are traded upstream for security guarantees
with the imperial hegemon. The package historically comes with amplified
antagonism and partisan warfare. Sovereignty in its crisis also escapes
into various domains such as data or digital sovereignty, where it wreaks
conceptual havoc. The problem with sovereignty is that it smuggles in a
bunch of givens and aporias that have the potential to corrupt the design
of the system, instead of asking, with Foucault, "who has root access and
from what position?”
So I'd rather look for the anti-Schmitt, a radical anti-geospatial turn, as
in the "disappearance of space in cyberspace". Not as a submission to the
global liberalist consensus, but as a sincere search for better
alternatives and places. China is more of a systemic force, an economic and
technological one. If you want to add some of Sloterdijk's foam, a separate
technosphere, or with Yuk Hui, another possible techno cosmology. That's
enough to focus on technology as the "root of all evil" that must be
reconfigured in the fossil politics of the climate crisis, where
epistemological distinctions are reconfigured, aka the social and the
technical. Not to lapse into metaphysical ontological essentialisms, with
corresponding antropo-narcissistic eschatologies of annihilation and
extinction - the apocalyptic vibes of X-risk to prevent a robot revolution
has some strange resonances in Nazi science - and again fits with Carl
Schmitt's apocalyptic positioning of the legal rationality of the
political, against the pervasive powers of technology, with "the
katechon"[6].
The concept of multipolarity is also a Schmittian one, but it can be
reinterpreted as non-binary pluralism, recursive anti-manichaeism, quantum
logic detached from territory, an opening to the non-linearity of
differential equations with more than 2 variables. The result is
approximately unknown. [2] In order to find viable critiques of a Western
hegemonic just war theory (jus ad/in/post bellum), it is necessary to find
alternatives to Schmitt, that do not simply apply the Eurocentric
regionalism of the social construction of securitisation or the apocalyptic
orthodoxy of Alexander Dugin. As Hannah Arendt noted, the Nazis understood
soil as blood. The US has turned soil into capital (traded in dollars),
while the victory condition of the Ukrainian war is $100 billion in cash or
land leases. [3] Maps of soil quality, ethno-linguistic distribution and
electoral districts of 2010 still have some meaning, and it's still
worthwhile to map the movements of Nazi Germany´s long defeat in the WW2
onto the current theatres of war to give perspective on the biggest
possible tactical mistakes. But that's about it. Maps and territory don't
determine political outcomes and have a very limited primary function in
encoding the general future.
C) The most commonly used framing against China is often linked to the
special trade relationship between Germany and Russia, which has now become
patently useless. “How can you make the same mistake twice?” is the
question, asked across the Atlantic.
In fact, China can appear almost as an anonymous material force. There are
few fantasies or projections, much less than when Roland Barthes wrote
about Japan and electronic culture was obsessed with it. You have time,
because it is hard to avoid, China will be at your door, in the form of a
smartphone, of probably more than half of the materials and objects that
consumers tend to collect. They also represent decades of neoliberal
globalisation, the outsourcing of labour, the growth of the financial and
service economy, with greatly increased income inequality.
China and Russia have moved into very different shades of red or forms of
"hybrid capitalism". The same is true in terms of market supply and
systemic competition, as well as at the level of infrastructure and
technology standards.
Despite the sanctions, many European companies continue to trade with
Russia and even more with China. Whatever is said to please the partners in
their geostrategic ventures and the public in its solidarity with the
seemingly oppressed, the mercantilist facts may look very different. From a
German perspective, the offers of the Inflation Reduction Act are almost
predatory and clearly protectionist and statist - how can Germany be
allowed to join a Green Deal if it is organised first in the interests of
the US and the Blackrock ET?
A complete reboot of decades of globalisation will only make sense if the
entire industrial process is also reorganised in a green way. China has a
greater capacity to make this transition because of its top-down
institutional architecture, as seen during the pandemics, but also because
of its greater presence and acceptance in the global south.
A good example is Huawei 5G, which is technically generations better than
the OpenRAN emulations or alternatives offered by US industry - but for
critical infrastructure reasons (as we know from Snowden) its capabilities
do not meet specific Western critical infrastructure requirements. Another
example of collaboration is RISK-V, an alternative chip platform to ARM,
with very dynamic development in IOT and mobile, and soon in server farms
and AI, based on an open hardware licence. In the field of renewable
energy, such as solar, storage and the hydrogen chain, but also in the chip
industry, IT and AI projects are needed where all partners benefit, based
on copyleft principles. It is unclear whether the US is ready for this,
especially if the government would return to a proto-fascist one.
Just as the US offered its partners a stake in the post-colonial opening up
of emerging markets, China is now investing heavily in the global South,
but in a different style, because China itself was colonised by the West
(the Opium Wars). It is up to Europe to develop sound trade agreements to
participate with the ultimate aim of receiving high investment to achieve
the green transition of the fossil fuel layer across the line. The
mainstream press, think tanks and psy-ops agencies may work hard to change
perceptions, but companies tend to make decisions based on economic facts,
not on public opinion. This ugly economic world is the agency in real
existing capitalism today, and any kind of companion against the irrational
war-mongering of the ex-PNAC neo-Straussians is welcome, even if the
chances of a good outcome are increasingly slim. But since hearts are with
the oppressed rather than the oppressor. It will be the Chinese blue
helmets who can bring peace, leaving the bleeding wound of conflict along
newly drawn borders to keep Eurasia busy for decades to come.
D) Even aware of the agency argument, in this case I clearly prefer the
realism of recalibrating attachments and detachments to achieve more
systemic stability for a planetary transition phase. This is possible
without catastrophic annihilation events, without the risk assessment of
not relying too much, of not becoming codependent on the Western hegemon,
while avoiding Oedipal fixations on conflicts of authority or orientalist
projections. Incidentally, a Gnostic-Christian replacement of hell with
pure deletionism sets up a horizon to be erased. It's just that a realist
hierarchy of organisation into alliances and assemblies of groups, or that
the Green Deal and the AI revolution will hardly flow without a central
role for the autonomy of users/workers. The belief in the molecularisation
of individual decision-makers in a sea of "zero trust" n:n democracy is
anything but a dystopia. The agency of intelligence on machines of
intelligence agencies can only end in conspiratorial configurations (see
Assagange's "trial"). Those who have profited for decades from the long
boom of the financialised fossil industry will have to provide the
investment to enable the transition of the entire obsolete technological
layer.
E) The scenario not addressed by the various neocon think tanks is that of
Bayesian mass psychology. If the "Western hegemon" loses its face, and this
is a recursively reproduced self-image with a strong narcissistic
prevalence, there will be an immediate void, a massive blame game, and most
likely a shift of the American electorate to the right. So the perception
of winning the war is as important to Biden as it is to Putin, while it is
not as important to Europe, China and much of the rest of the world, with
the unfortunate exception of Ukraine.
Just as the Arab Spring was a failure, the Ukrainian Spring has led to
disaster. Market democracy (™) will not enable, but rather hinder the green
transition, and identity politics is a trap if not placed in an
intersectional political economy context. Social humanist theory without
deep technical skills is postmodern superstition, and so on. What is often
framed as false may just as well be dialectically true. Living with a bunch
of false positives and negatives makes it increasingly difficult to cut
through the simulation.
The escalation into a world crisis by increasing antagonistic containment
on China just to serve the advancing exceptionalism of transatlantic
neocons is probably the line of most anticipated rupture, while the dream
of an atomised 'liquid' democracy of liberalised singularities remains an
idea of subjectivity production often supported by 'solutionist' big tech
libertarians, with real existing black holes of misdirected mass attention
such as instagram, facebook, linkedin et al.
Politics as the prolongation of war (Schmitt's inversion of Clausewitz)
sets up an expansionist governmentality. It uses liberal democracy only as
a Straussian interface to unite the autonomous forces of the primary
political forces along the opaque interests of financialised capitalism -
the primary forces, alienated from the forces of labour and reproduction,
now transformed into tautological forces of liberalisation and
self-realisation. As in Artaud, the process of enforced subjectivation of a
neoliberal self as a simulacrum of a mini-corporate body of the very
machinic lineage, against which it is supposed to revolt as a productive
singularity, turns it into dualities. Objects and subjects of capital,
constantly under narcissistic pressure to maintain the integrity of their
unstable identity in sync and in order to remain socially productive. War
is therefore internalised, competing to improve tactical positions on the
social media graph.
Thus the neocons of PNAC have been able to embed themselves into the DNA of
contemporary liberal democracy with a cancerous claim to "rules-based"
hegemony, with the many names of think tanks, policy advisers, security
experts, international policy institutes and other interfaces to power
engraved into the Western liberal public opinion apparatus. A closer look
at these rules reveals a Byzantine labyrinth of exclusionary cantor sets of
rule-making by the various groups and alliances. UN, World Bank, IMF, Wipo,
Nato, EU, Dollar, Euro, Blackrock ETF, etc., making "rule-based" merely a
performative speech act.
The idea is not to block or accelerate, but to diffuse and fluidise the
blockages of the necessary systemic transition, what Guattari calls a
"molecular revolution". What was called mass in modernity can now be called
noise. The art of noise is to understand every dominant signal as a
potential blockage. To go with the flow of social media, to develop organic
audiences. Not to turn it into a freelance business, but to join platforms
of co-publishing, labels, projects, channels, forms of collectivisation,
micro-engagements and dialogical diffusion of oppressive rhetorical
formations and dispositions of nihilist power.
F) Insofar as digital autonomy is a relation to a systematised environment,
the acquisition of digital sovereignty involves an attempt to gain systemic
power in exchange for others giving up their user autonomy, most likely in
an antagonistic relation to other sovereignties. In a digital environment
of zero trust, the default mode is undeclared digital war, where every
participant is by default a potential adversary.
Instead, the solidarity of autonomous movements becomes one of the central
demands missing from the current anti-war movement in Germany. But such
internationalisation ("Tellerand"), bridging the gaps, is possible, to
build trust around common interests and overcome the drive towards
nationalist sovereignty. So that anti-war can only be an internationalist
movement by definition, which could even include local activist groups that
do not simply support the Orwellian language of "war is peace". An anti-war
movement is not necessarily pacifist, nor does it contribute to the
notorious lack of definitions of victory conditions. It simply asserts that
"this is not our war".
There is not enough Hegel and Marx in the AGI predictions. It is clear that
the question of property is one of the most unresolved in the AI
revolution. There is probably nothing to own here, except the fixed capital
of the means of production. No intellectual property of abstract labour, no
ownership of data, no ownership of intelligence, no copyleft if nothing can
be copyrighted because it is "not human". Updated again to more pragmatic
hybrids that allow a decapitation of capital without completely disrupting
the world economy in a transition process, that will most likely need to be
managed by slowly moving to a fully AI controlled dynamic world financial
market with systemically transparent high level price fixing, bond and debt
ctrl, via systems like Blackrock Aladdin. I am not an economist, but more
of an avid SciFi reader here, and would put my money on the fight to avoid
the "with X risk characteristics" tendency at almost any cost. Tunneling
through territorial firewalls to create reciprocal copyleft stacks remains
an attractive project goal.
It is only a matter of time before the effective altruists, formerly called
neo-reactionaries, now the Musk/Thiel-funded prompt engineers of the
AI-adaptation movement, waging a double-backlash culture war against the
language games of "wokeness", discover the republican "katechon" as a
demiurge-watchdog institution of a permanent state of exception to fight
anti-Christ and negentropy (while keeping the profits flowing in). It could
be better prepared than the usual mainstream liberal humanist entitlement,
since the declared external antagonist of the territorialised "AI war" will
once again be China, at the expense of Europe and the rest of the world.
bad links:
[1]
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/issue-brief/western-options-in-a-multipolar-world/
[2] https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/all-news/article-733147
[3]
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3025302/biden-signs-lend-lease-act-to-supply-more-security-assistance-to-ukraine/
[4]
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-army-secretary-lays-out-strategy-for-war-with-china/6985136.html
[5]
https://faireepars.wordpress.com/2019/08/18/la-autonomia-de-lo-politico-en-tronti-por-toni-negri-work-in-progress/
[6] "a radically anti-eschatological theological-political concept - is
opposed to the 'end of the world', or, rather, the withering away of
openness to the world" (P.Virno).
https://transversal.at/transversal/0407/virno/en
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
