Stakes of Sublation in Technofeudal Society
Or: why what you think about Hegel is of no importance
C.S. Lewis points out that what you think about God is of “no importance” unless it relates to “how He thinks of us”.1 In a structurally precise way, Lacan’s Écrits makes the claim that what your ego thinks about the notion of the unconscious is of no importance unless it relates to “how It thinks us”. Here, in a properly atheist move, Lacan replaces the normative structure of “Me and God” with the “Ego and the Subject of the Unconscious”.2
One of the important keys to understanding Žižek’s philosophy, is recognising something similar to Lewis vis-a-vis God and Lacan vis-a-vis the subject of the unconscious: what you think about Hegel is irrelevant (i.e. being textually precise, reading Hegel to the letter, etc.). What is much more important is (after having consumed Hegel) basically running a type of thought experiment: what would Hegel think about actual contemporary World Spirit?
Hegel’s absolute knowing does not mean that Hegel knew the completed mind of God, it means that Hegel was aware that his own historical positionality not only necessarily constrained his capacity to interpret the mind of God, but also meant that the mind of God was itself incomplete, absolute only insofar as it was properly constrained by the positionality of historical subjectivity. In other words, in a move that I have come to find crucial, it is not only that we, mortal suffering humans, need God, but God, the immortal infinite being, needs us. Without us, historical spirit, as Hegel notes at the very end of the Phenomenology of Spirit, God would be:3
“lifeless and alone”
This means that Hegel’s entire philosophy is absolute only insofar as we read in Hegel’s own historical positionality, writing as he was in the “gappy-void” of post-French Revolution World Spirit. He did not and could not have anything to say about, for example, technological singularity.4 That is the job for our time.
Since completing my doctorate I have been taking the steps I feel necessary to, not only think through technological singularity, but to play my active role as a part of a larger social movement.5 One of my friends, and more importantly, alliances, along the way, is David McKerracher of Theory Underground (from here on referred to as “Dave”).6 Dave’s work at Theory Underground has been a beacon of hope in my second year of running Philosophy Portal because, as far as I can see, not only is he one of the only other serious scholars actually working on building an online business in the extra-academic or post-academic digital ecology of contemporary thought, but he is also willing to and capable of real-deep collaboration.
Dave is not only the creator and founder of Theory Underground, but also a researcher and writer in his own right. He has developed two important concepts for me this year:
One in his recently published book, Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy, focuses on the concept of Timenergy, which defines “large energy-infused blocks of repeatable time”, and emphasises that any real emancipatory movement on the level of our being-in-the-world requires a political-economy of timenergy.
The other is “Scene to Milieu”, which he presented on at this year’s Philosophy Portal conference “Logic for the Global Brain”, emphasising the importance of the current digital post-academic ecology not just being another scene, and instead a real milieu capable of deep engagement with each other’s works.
The two concepts are interrelated: if we do not have timenergy than we cannot really build a milieu, and if we don’t have a milieu then we devolve into a disconnected and fragmented scene without any meaningful capacity for engagement inclusive of productive antagonisms and tensions.7
One of the major symptoms of a regression from a milieu to a scene is basically just interacting with a lot of people. Dave notes that if we are “good talkers” we can just infinitely interact with lots of people all day long, no problem.
But that does not make a milieu.
To make a milieu we cannot just “talk a lot” to “lots of people”. That is the easy (and psychotic) path (in the clinically precise sense of the symbolic disconnected from the real).8
The hard path is finding the real constraints and conditions of possibility for speech.
It is in this context that Dave invited me to his Theory Underground anniversary to discuss the trials and tribulations involved in actually building an online business. That is something I have been trying to do for two years now, and it stands to reason that both the philosophy I have used to do it, and the experience I have developed along the way, may have some relevance to the larger “scene” (which can hopefully one day become a milieu).
What is it like to build an online business in a “post-academic” field?
I will tell you that I would not wish this type of entrepreneurship on my worst enemy. It is certainly not fun, especially for someone who only started a business as a necessity to continue an intellectual drive in light of a devastatingly corrupted academic system, and a void of any meaningful investment from the older generation. There are a lot of people building abstract universal systems or paradigms which seem insanely disconnected, and very little practical investment in the next generation of creators whose “useless excess” may not survive whatever accelerated wave of technological disruption emerges next year.
In any case, in this core of un-fun, the axiom that has been most helpful/fruitful for me is “die again, die better”. In short, this axiom captures the trial and error process that is inherent to building any business. The main reason why people do not start a business is because they do not want to get their hands dirty in the real. Another way to say it is that people do not start a business because they do not want to see if their ideas are really materialist. They would rather keep living in their ideal castle where the only person that has to really answer for the way they think is their own self-enclosed stupidity.
When you are building a business you find out how stupid or brilliant your ideas really are, because whatever business plan you construct, the real of your business plan, is nothing but the endless eruption of failures, and if your lucky, disturbances, that disrupt the internal consistency of your logical chain. These failures/disturbances, if you have the right mental frame to approach them — that is a mental frame oriented by a negative vector — are material for sublation.
What is sublation?
Sublation is Hegel’s paradoxical concept that combines cancelling and lifting, or ending and raising higher. Moreover, it is a mechanism that opens a form of progress that is marked by, not the achievement of a perfect totality or utopian system, but the deepening and intensification of contradiction. When we usually think of cancelling or ending something, we equate it with falling into nihilism in the sense that we think the entire process of identity that is ending was, retroactively, pointless. Sublation corrects this short-sighted viewpoint by seeing the conditions of possibility for lifting or raising higher at the same time as cancelling or ending something.9
In short, sublation is mechanism that is capable of seeing the larger process at work, while at the same time recognising that one cannot predict or know in advance what this larger process might reveal in/as time.
In the context of business, when you are building, you cannot be aligned positively with “what you know”. What you know is relevant insofar as it is working, but what will constantly require your attention is an alignment with your own ignorance in a very real way, i.e. in a way that brings a constant relation to pain (beyond the pleasure principle).
In short: new knowledge comes in truth where it hurts, where one is de-centered from the process at work.
The major metaphysical difference in orientation here must juxtapose the classical pre-modern circle of a total identity, striving as it always does to maintain some idea of a perfect relation intact, with what Hegel called the “circle of circles”. The circle of circles is constituted by a circle with a gap/lack in it (like Hegel’s philosophy itself being derived from the aforementioned “gappy-void” of post-French Revolution World Spirit). With every repetition of the circle, one can either obfuscate the gap/lack in the circle with a positivist concept of knowledge, or one can align with the gap/lack as such. This means that one is, practically speaking, focused on the mistakes, and how one might sublate them (i.e. bring them to an end/cancel them, while simultaneously lifting/raising the project higher). The consequences of reflexive sublation is that, with every iteration of the circle, there is a progress, something new is possible.10
Thinking in this way can occur at various scales, but for our purposes, we can start by thinking on the scale of years. While Theory Underground is celebrating its first birthday, Philosophy Portal is celebrating its second birthday.11 In each annual iteration of Philosophy Portal there have been major successes (four major courses, a collaboration course with Theory Underground, two anthologies with a third on the way, three conferences, an emerging ecology of interesting new thinkers12), but also major mistakes. From the external point of view, one can mostly see the major successes, but on the inside of the thing, if one is seriously focused on building, one is focused on all the mistakes.
For example, in the first year of Philosophy Portal, I was able to offer large-scale courses coupled to conferences and anthologies, which was itself something that was more derived from positivising mistakes than from a positivist vision or plan. One does seem to need some semblance of a positivist vision or plan, but it is mostly how one reacts to the negative vector of the materialisation of the plan that leads to real results. Here to get concrete: in the first year I was unable to include guest lectures or include formalised student-level leadership opportunities. There was a certain pain involved in these dimensions: how can I diversify the teaching base? How can I get students even more involved?
These questions were the foundation for thinking the second year of Philosophy Portal, where we expanded our services to include guest lecturers and expanded student-level leadership opportunities in the formation of exegetical reading groups.
Still, in this second year, the expansion of Philosophy Portal, as actual as it was and is, seems correlated to a number of new negativities. In other words, the more you grow the more there seem to be “growing pains”. There are constantly new problems and negativities circling, whether internal to Philosophy Portal itself or in the general consequences of Philosophy Portal’s presence on the larger digital scene, which are in many ways “too close” for an interpretation. Hegel was right: philosophy can really only ever happen “after the fact” (retroactively).13
What is more clear as day, after the fact, is that one cannot escape the big Other even though it does not exist.14 In creating Philosophy Portal I jumped from one big Other (the academic system), to another big Other (the online system). In the academic system one is regulated by citations and professional hierarchy, while in the other system one is regulated by attention and specular capture. We cannot escape being a part of some system (Other), and whatever system (Other) we find ourselves in, we can become confronted with our own lack, impotence, or perhaps most fundamentally: symbolic castration.15
Nevertheless we must follow our desire, since we also cannot escape that. Leaving academia came as a result of following my desire, of not making compromises with academia that would destroy/kill my desire, and feeling that there was an emancipatory possibility online. The dialectic here is that, following Todd McGowan’s Emancipation After Hegel: there is no emancipation without encountering new contradictions.16 Every emancipatory gesture in its immediacy will confront contradiction in its mediation. It is a matter of whether you are willing to cognise that contradiction, take what you have built (in my case, in academia), and carry that to a new horizon (in my case, the digital economy).
Now there are obviously many limitations with social media and online digital economies. Can these limitations be worked with? Can there still be emancipatory possibilities here or is there another, “third path”? This is something I am actively exploring but it is hard to language, precisely because it is “too close” to the real and not yet “after the fact” (properly philosophical). There are experimental jumps, there are things happening “here and there”. There are connections, avenues, possibilities. But there is nothing yet that looks like a “third path”. There are “possible pathways” that somehow can include both academia and the online world, and at the same time, exclude both.
I suppose 2024 will be my attempt to, retroactively, make sense of this.
On this path, one of my friends, Owen Cox, suggests that we are entering a new Dark Ages, and that many features of our contemporary world give the impression that we are cognitively recapitulating early 1st century World Spirit. This seems to me to be at least pointing in the right direction. There is definitely something true about it. In my aforementioned discussion with Dave, he even brought up that a project for Theory Underground in 2024 involves hosting (somewhat ironically) a “Council of Nicaea” where the community will discuss what would make the “holy scripture” for 21st century global capitalist society.
There is one problem with this ironic gesture, however, which brings me to one of the concepts that has proven most relevant for my analysis of contemporary World Spirit that has nothing to do with the 1st century and everything to do with the 21st century: Yanis Varoufakis’s “technofeudalism”. Technofeudalism is a concept that argues that “Capitalism's twin pillars - markets and profit - have been replaced with big tech's platforms and rents”. In his latest book of the same name the subtitle reads “What Killed Capitalism”.17 In other words, and true to the Marxist dialectic, it is not that we are actually in 21st century global capitalist society anymore: we have advanced to a global society while regressing to a feudal system, i.e. all of these tech platforms which dominate the attention/screen economy are not really capitalist (free markets where we can make a fair profit) but feudal in their basic structure (serf platforms in which we pay rents to lords).
We should remember, that in Marx’s dialectic, when a new socioeconomic level emerges, it is not that the previous levels disappear, they just become marginal, less central. For the past two centuries, in modern capitalist society, the previous central modes of organisation: feudalism, servitude/slavery, or even primitive communism for that matter, do not vanish, they just became peripheral to the main game. But they are still very much there. Moreover, and crucial to the real activity of the dialectic, if the contradictions of the main system are not worked with/sublated (say, from capitalism to socialism to communism), then regression to the previous system is always possible (say, feudalism, or even servitude/slavery). I would argue that the idea that we are entering a “Dark Age” or the idea that we are recapitulating 1st century World Spirit, is a symptom of technofeudalism, and possibly even a sign that we are falling deeper and deeper into systems of servitude and slavery as a result of not working the contradictions of capitalism to socialism.18
The stakes of sublation today should be conceived on this level: how can we affirm global society while working the contradictions of capitalism towards socialism and communism? The risks of not engaging such a motion is that we regress back to feudalism. This is why, as was suggested by Dave in our conversation, any “Council of Nicaea” cannot de-historicise itself (i.e. regress back un-ironically to an actual 1st century mode of World Spirit), but must rather attempt to sublate history inclusive of everything that we have sublated previously, inclusive of the Protestant reformation (engaging our own deep textual interpretations of scripture), liberalism (individual rights and freedoms), as well as communism and its failures (the attempt for an emancipatory social/secular order beyond capitalism and inclusive of real diversity of thinking and practice).
Here I consider Philosophy Portal, inclusive of all its many failings and struggles, to be well-positioned as a very real and very active participant in the struggle to sublate technofeudalism. Here the focus must be, in tarrying with the negative, the capacity to work the contradictions of capitalism in the age of the screen/attention economy, for something that might look more socialist, even, why not, more communist. That’s why one of the major drivers for the third year of Philosophy Portal, will be an attempt to expand our activities, towards becoming a live event space, that can help enrich and expand the formation of the next generation of thinkers that must attempt to actualise this sublation. To find out more, or to get involved in
2024, see: Philosophy Portal Event Space.
Philosophy Portal has an entire course focused on Lacan’s Écrits, the first of its kind and best in its class, which you can find here.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 493.
So I wrote a thesis about it, see: Global Brain Singularity.
This includes not only the publication of Systems and Subjects, as a type of dialectical exposition of the contemporary dynamic between subjectivity and general systemics, but also and more importantly, the establishment of Philosophy Portal, as an online education platform attempting to teach the foundation of modern discourses.
Friend is an important concept, but it is extremely limited, and one should be well aware of those limits, especially as it relates to the real of libidinal and digital economy.
If you have the timenergy and inclination, get involved: Theory Underground / Philosophy Portal.
I could publish an article everyday on here, I could publish a video everyday on my YouTube. But that pure productivity is pointless unless it is reflectively included in the larger conditions of possibility of participating in a milieu.
Check my recent discussion with Tony from 1Dime for more on Hegel’s concept of Sublation, see: Understanding Hegel.
In a psychoanalytic sense, we should think about the condition of possibility of embodying sublation as “becoming our own Father” or “becoming the Father we need but never had”. Here the pre-modern relation to a total identity and perfect relation is a precise double move where, as Lacan says regarding the neurotic, that what they wish for/demand: “is clearly the dead Father — that is plain to see. But he is also a Father who would be the perfect master of his desire — which would be just as good, as far as the subject is concerned.” Lacan, J. 2005. The Subversion of the Subject in the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious. see: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 698.
Check out some of the recent interviews Matthew Stanley of Samsara Diagnostics hosted with Quinn Whelehan on “Nagarjuna and Hegel” and Dimitri Crooijmans “Liberating Love Politically”.
That is why Philosophy Portal’s logo is a representation of Hegel’s Owl of Minerva.
One should read Lacan’s passages about the consequences and burden of responsibility on the “I” in relation to the big Other who does not exist: “Experience proves that jouissance is usually forbidden me, not only, as certain fools would have it, due to bad social arrangements, but, I would say, because the Other is to blame — if he was to exist, that is. But since he doesn’t exist, all that’s left for me is to place the blame on I”, see: Lacan, J. 2005. The Subversion of the Subject in the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious. see: Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 694-695.
See: McGowan, T. 2019. Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution. Columbia University Press. See also: Emancipation After Hegel.
Varoufakis, Y. 2023. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Penguin.
I have often told Owen that the signifier for his YouTube channel, TechnoSocialism, perfectly captured what needs conceptual mediation.
Here's to more philosophers starting businesses, and more entrepreneurs doing philosophy. We desperately need more points of contact between theory and practice. As an entrepreneur I interpreted sublation as the progress of solving bigger and more interesting problems. Problems never end with any business, but your business will end if you repeatedly struggle against the same problem.
Excellent piece, Cadell, and I took copious notes to reflect on. This work is tracing-out the edge of what we need to think.