Towards a Portal for Thinking Technosocialism
A reflection from my talk at "The Cultural Futurist" "Total Renaissance" Salon
This post was inspired by the Cultural Futurist Salon / Total Renaissance hosted by
on December 22nd. This salon was the first of many future salons to be hosted in 2024: to attend become a paid member of The Cultural Futurist and you will receive an invite link for future salons throughout the year.Is a “Total Renaissance” possible? My claim is that it is only if we think of totality in the sense of a broken whole-in-becoming in which every attempt to signify the whole only produces new symptoms for speculative cognition, which in turn produces new conditions of possibility for sublation.1
Consider Slavoj Žižek’s notion of a return to totality which overcomes both the naive New Age significations of a perfect connected wholeness (“organic Whole”) as well as the post-modern relativist view that any notion of totality leads us back to hegemonic Eurocentric notions of Enlightenment:2
“The Hegelian totality is not the ideal of an organic Whole, but a critical notion — to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include in a system all its “symptoms,” antagonisms, and inconsistencies as integral parts.”
From Žižek’s perspective, if we want to find the germs of a “Total Renaissance” we should start precisely by taking a close look at what most people do not want to look at: the symptoms, antagonisms and inconsistencies of what is considered “integral”. In this perspective, let us consider that today there is a revival of both old and new forms of communitarian localism/particularism. These forms are direct obfuscations of totality or true universality. This means that there are old/new forms of communitarianism that precisely do not aim to engage on the level of the concrete universal but rather attempt to stand for a pseudo-universality through the direct affirmation of their identitarian particularity (i.e. specific religious denomination, or elitist intellectual movement).
Thus, it is precisely at this moment that we should remember that the only real world historic political program that aimed towards a universalist communitarian layer — that of World Communism inspired by Marxism and directed by proletarian consciousness — absolutely failed in its attempt at “Total Renaissance”. Wherever we care to look: Russia, East Asia, Africa, Latin America — World Communism inspired by Marxism and proleterian consciousness failed. Another way of saying this is that secular communitarianism, as opposite of secular capitalism, fell into social tyranny and backward regression that has since become re-sublated by a form of neoliberal capital which has absolutely won, not only the day, but the century.
How are we to interpret this fact today?
One of the ways I have tried to frame the failure of communism and the rise of global capitalism is in teaching Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (which was also one of my original motivations for teaching Hegel’s phenomenology). To be specific, what we find if we read Hegel’s phenomenology closely, is that the conventional pre-modern horizon for communal subjectivity followed a very precise dialectic that was constituted by (what we generally call) “Religion”. Moreover, when we make the well-known intellectual move from Hegel to Marx, this religious layer of the phenomenal dialectic was replaced by a communitarian secular politics that absolutely failed to engage the work necessary to sublate religion.3 I actually believe this to be one of the, if not the, blind spot of contemporary leftist emancipatory politics.4
Consequently, not only is leftist politics effectively dead (drowning in woke moralisation without true dialectical thinking which requires tarrying with the negativity of difference constitutive of discourse), but also the emergence of communitarian thinking has regressed to the aforementioned level of particularity (where concrete universalist gestures are obfuscated by pseudo-universalist abstract identities).
To make matters worse, our situation is quite different from anything imagined by 20th century political consciousness.5 Not only did we not get the secular political utopia that was promised by Marxist revolutionaries (where we would live in a world constituted by “each according to his ability”, coupled with a safety net for “each according to his needs”), but we did not even get the secular political utopia that was promised by normative capitalists (where free markets lead to the establishment of a free peoples). We instead have a situation where, what was imagined as a unified empowered proletariat consciousness owning the means of production, has become a fragmented disenfranchised and disabled precariat class that pays rents on big tech platforms in order to continue clicking and scrolling on specular images.6 In this sense, the end of the Cold War and the birth of global neoliberal capitalism has produced a situation that seems to be taking us deeper into a regressive state of technofeudalism.7 Any semblance of a real progressive narrative where capitalist society contains the dialectical conditions of possibility towards democratic socialism — once a quite realistic possibility — now seems ridiculously naive and even utopian.
In short: technofeudal society is structured by a precarious consciousness paying rents to become entrapped by specular imaginaries. These specular imaginaries promise disembodied positive experiences and/or the illusory offer of the opportunity to be seen and heard in a free democratic competition of ideas. In the real of the system, any foundation for actual life becomes systematically undermined. What disappears is any semblance of an ethical commitment to structures supporting real long-term intimacy, because they are diametrically opposed to the specular imaginary of positive experience. Structures supporting real long-term intimacy are built in the symbolic fires of negativity and lack — the basic acceptance of symbolic castration — for the establishment of something that has often emerged in the relations between father-son, mother-daughter, or simply and perhaps most generally: elder and child (or even teacher and student). The social fabric of society is breaking down, not only because there are no longer elders that are willing to sacrifice for the future child, but also because we all seem to be put in the position of children entrapped by specular imaginaries. The result is not a society capable of mediating itself, but a society lost in the immediacy of positive experience structured by auto-erotic loops.
What is one to do in this situation? How is one to repeat a commitment to an ethical act? I would suggest that, given the real of symbolic castration and the real of technofeudal society, all one can do is one’s best to play one’s part in the establishment of a symbolic mediation that works through (tarries with the negative) and attempts to ground relations that resemble the reconstitution of elder-child bonds. This reconstitution need not resemble the elder-child bond of any ancient world, medieval or pre-modern normativity, but rather just work with the concrete singularity of the given relationships, and perhaps be surprised by the results. However, considering we live in a society that lives under the delusion of endless positive experience meditated by screen images, as well as lives under the delusion that we are competing on free markets to provide value that can turn a fair profit, this requires an enormous amount of conceptual patience.
This, in my view, is perhaps what has been under-thought in the post-Covid world. In my immediate digital network, I see the emergence of a digital multiplicity of “scene kids” (absolutely particular) without a real political-economic mediation. These scene kids do not have actual concrete elder-child relations (and are not working for them). What they have are anti-Freudian/Hegelian dream-fragments of a totality without symptoms, antagonisms and inconsistencies (i.e. a utopia). Thus, what they have is the lack of any capacity to structure a real intellectual milieu to build real professional alliances capable of anything resembling a “Total Renaissance”. But it is also not all their fault: there are also no elders willing to sacrifice for the establishment of real professional alliances capable of building. The bridge has to work both ways. As a result, precariat consciousness is on a precarious edge and risks entering a dark age governed paradoxically by technofeudal structures drowning us all in illusions of positive experience that we all know are illusions. There is perhaps no better example of fetishistic disavowal (“I know very well, but…”) characteristic of a perverted society.8
Here I am brought back to a signifier that was birthed by Owen Cox of
— who also spoke at ’s salon — Technosocialism. How to think technosocialism? How to act technosocialism? From my perspective, we must think and act in this direction, very practically, very entangled with our actual symbolic relations, inclusive of concrete notions of elders and children, inclusive of friendships that open the conditions of possibility for business alliances. This way we may be able to concretely challenge the immediacy of specular imaginary capture, and push towards real symbolic ground (which in the end will depend, not on any external guarantee, but the spirit of our abyssal relations).9 If we do not move from a concept of Total Renaissance that privileges positive experience which erases symptoms, antagonisms, and inconsistencies (the perfect symptom of technofeudalism), to a Total Renaissance that confronts symbolic negativity (totality inclusive of symptoms, antagonisms and inconsistencies), then who really knows what nightmare looms on our sociopolitical horizon?This is one of the important framings that will meta-structure Philosophy Portal’s next major project: the live event space. In short: I hope Philosophy Portal’s live event space can not only think through but act through the relations between Technofeudal conditions towards Technosocial conditions. If you are someone tired of specular capture, and searching for a real symbolic mediation, consider this the place for you.
Žižek, S. 2012. Chapter 6: Not Only As Subject, But Also As Subject. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 378.
Do we not find this blind spot active in the inability of the left to discursively engage the contemporary conflict between Israel/Gaza-Palestine?
Further proof that Hegel’s Owl of Minerva, warning us that we cannot predict or see into the future, is more necessary than ever.
I think the term “precariat”, inspired by the work of economist Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, is here helpful reality check for rethinking Marxist principles of a revolutionary proletariat consciousness. Standing defines the Precariat as “an emerging class, comprising the rapidly growing number of people facing lives of insecurity, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives” and that their lack of agency can/is giving rise to “political extremism”.
See Yanis Varoufakis on Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023).
I know very well that I am drowning in a sea of specular images, but… I will nevertheless continue doing it. This is perhaps also a concrete example of the real political consequences of psychoanalysis: clinical structures impact the social-political body, and the social-political body is composed of clinical structures (neurotics, psychotics, perverts).
‘My claim is that it is only if we think of totality in the sense of a broken whole-in-becoming in which every attempt to signify the whole only produces new symptoms for speculative cognition, which in turn produces new conditions of possibility for sublation’- Way to open with a bang. I’m also a big fan of the Zizek quote (‘The Hegelian totality […] and inconsistencies as integral parts.’), for that captures the case very well. We must indeed start by looking at what most don’t want to look at, and I think that leads into well on studying the failures of Communism.
‘Moreover, when we make the well-known intellectual move from Hegel to Marx, this religious layer of the phenomenal dialectic was replaced by a communitarian secular politics that absolutely failed to engage the work necessary to sublate religion’ – Completely agree. Religion in this sense would for me include the work of Philip Rieff and Peter Berger, which is to say that we have not yet collective thought well the problem of “tragic sociology,” which so far in history only religion has seem capable of sublating (for all its flaws). We indeed find ourselves fragmented, disenfranchised, and disabled today, as you noted, and I’ve been reading through Technofeudalism and thinking more and more how to think the book alongside Adam Smith’s thinking on feudalism. A severe regression is indeed occurring.
‘What disappears is any semblance of an ethical commitment to structures supporting real long-term intimacy, because they are diametrically opposed to the specular imaginary of positive experience’ – Very well put. This is also fire: ‘The result is not a society capable of mediating itself, but a society lost in the immediacy of positive experience structured by auto-erotic loops.’
‘From my perspective, we must think and act in this direction, very practically, very entangled with our actual symbolic relations, inclusive of concrete notions of elders and children, inclusive of friendships that open the conditions of possibility for business alliances.’ – Completely agree. Your article is full of invaluable and useful framings to assist real thinking.
‘If we do not move from a concept of Total Renaissance that privileges positive experience which erases symptoms, antagonisms, and inconsistencies (the perfect symptom of technofeudalism), to a Total Renaissance that confronts symbolic negativity (totality inclusive of symptoms, antagonisms and inconsistencies), then who really knows what nightmare looms on our sociopolitical horizon?’ – Agreed.
I have come to frame this as the Communist Lie, where the people are said to be in charge, but it’s really an elite totalitarian mafia, not some utopia. And the Capitalist Lie that the people are Free, but we are really being trained to be slaves and love it blindly and obediently. In the New World Order both have joined together. Your Techno-Feudalism fueled by drugs and attentionalism (and a comfortable chair). How long does the party last? Cheers