The everydayness of politics both brings forth issues of where the domain of politics sits and how such analyses overcome falling into banality as “everything as politics” devolves into inconsequential argumentation. Further, it raises questions of how one escapes or partialises themselves against battles for hegemony. A domain of politics has become increasingly fluid as issues surrounding art, ethics and identity become fodder for culture wars and key determinants for the production of new constituencies. Everything is a game of power in this sense.

All the frontiers have been closed. The expansive homogenisation of modernity and the incipient repetition of postmodernity have turned exits into loops. Closed cycles through which recurrence within set parameters becomes the primary mechanism of social action. Exits, where they do exist, are largely transitory and minimal, providing a small degree of separation from the wider machinations of civilisation. Where alternative ideologies or lifeways do appear, they are quickly colonised and inverted by processes of commodification and reconciliation with the prevailing managerial ideology.

“Exit can be similarly blunted. As was shown, organizations and firms that are ostensibly competing and are normally sensitive to exit can learn to play a cooperative, collusive game in the course of which they take in each other’s disgruntled customers or members. To the extent that the game is played successfully by competing organizations or firms, exit, compensated as it is by entry, ceases to be a serious threat to the deteriorating organizations”[1].

“The eternal absolute is the immobile point of reference around which temporal figurations circulate, their presupposition; however, precisely as such, it is posited by these temporal figurations, since it does not preexist them: it emerges in the gap between the first and the second”[1]. Zizek, in conceptualising the relation between the virtual and its actualisation, shows how the requirement of the ideological (symbolic) presupposes the proposition of the (un)attainable ideal. The progressivisation of history in its various guises follows this procedure, positing the objet petit a as the ultimate desire while also then sublimating this desire into a desire for the desire itself. From the virtual desire of utopia (“the utopic attempt to remove struggle is simply the attempt to instantiate a devalued mechanism of meaning”[2]) there emerges the actualisation of a fundamentalism to instantiate the ideological desire. The struggle is no longer neutered, instead becoming the primary locus of violent action against prevailing power.

“Platforms act as both springboards for alterity and the means for monopolisation. They increase exit amongst the platform owners in some senses, and amongst the users in others”[1]. They are hubs for communication and vectors for different forms of socio-economic organisation. If we view history as a series of Kondratiev waves (50-60 year developments of techno-social evolution) or epochal sequences (as defined by Mumford as the period of technics), our current period can be described as the “Age of Informations and Telecommunication”[2] or the intertechnic period[3] respectively. Much as the neotechnic phase of production that Mumford identified sat between the eotechnic and paleotechnic forms, in the intertechnic the power of e-commerce, internet communicatory networks and social media sit between monopolistic tendencies and decentralist modes, with Amazon as a particular vector of this intertechnic phase. This phase is not some cliff-edge, but rather a representation of the ambiguity of internet structures (platforms, marketplaces, multimedia, etc.) that both have decentralising means and tendencies and have individual organisations in this ecology that attempt to control the flows and methods of these tendencies. Thus questions of antitrust, economic organisation and what our institutions should do and will be come to be primary.

This is the transcript of the talk I gave for the Wyrd Patchworkshop Quattro – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYXemShH_Yo&feature=youtu.be

I define patchwork as the adaptation and fragmentation of institutional structures through the processes of exit and voice. In this sense patchwork can be seen in multiple real-world vectors where developments are creating institutional complexification and blurring the lines of jurisdiction and sovereignty. Spontaneous disorder, the overload of socio-economic information, is accelerating financial and logistical matters beyond direct control and thus altering and de-codifying the decentralised plans that Hayek described as integral to markets. These restructuring dynamics are part of what I would call our intertechnic period of socio-economic-technological capacities and apparatuses which gives precedence to communication, inter-operability and speed.

The intersection of social media and governance present an interesting dilemma between communication and commodification, as the pull of both produces disequilibrium between and amongst the various platforms and their relation to governing structures. There is a segmented relation between the use and reproduction of human capital (as represented through data, influence and images) and the possibilities for resistance and world-building that these platforms allow. “Images, information, knowledge, affects, codes, and social relationships . . . . are coming to outweigh material commodities or the material aspects of commodities in the capitalist valorization process” as “living beings as fixed capital are at the center of this transformation, and the production of forms of life is becoming the basis of added value”[1]. The governing of the interactions of socio-economic spheres have found a new force to contend with in the form of the platform and the social media network, as issues of data management, image control, proprietary rights and arbitration become central to people’s existence on online forums. A swirling disequilibria develops between the processes of social communication outside the market/company moorings, and the processes of commodification/valorisation that pull these communicatory nodes back into the circuits of capital.

Leviathan is the accomplishment of the totality, the sublimation into the monadic drive. The sum of its oppositions spread outwards into the stratosphere, escaping from and then re-conquering the jungle from which it came. The war of all against all is driven upwards, to the bounds of national sovereignty and the slow elimination of the borderlands. The subject is made the state, as the state itself becomes all-encompassing, mythologising it’s everlasting quality as a foundational axiom. It developed because it needed to be developed, tautologically justifying itself as a result of the condition of brute human nature. However, with its tentacles spreading ever further, it reaches the point of contradiction. In subsuming the antagonisms of society at large, it either accepts these as an existing framework for debate and conflict (thereby creating in itself the means to be wrought open), or makes itself increasingly totalitarian in its imaginations. All conceptualities come under its gaze in the latter formation, leading to a “commonwealth itself” becoming “a ‘demonic machine’, a tremendous enthusiasm mobilised against every other”[1]. The rationalist philosophy of Hobbes must take on the character of ideological totality, and thus in internalising conflictual patterns into its mythology must either let them fester (thus picking away at the initial wound) or externalise them as the enemy outside of its purview, to be removed.

The constancy of exit and decay that I’ve noted[1] within systemic organisation produces a peripheral pull from the centre, maintaining a residue of alterity with its own codes, languages and semiotic productions. This decentring force is more than just the development of smaller units of activity as the purposeful means for problem-solving and trust-development, being rather a recognition of the collapsitarian nature of all organisation that moves from striated to smooth space. In Lucretian terms, the decentring periphery is the clinamenetic force[2] that drives the constant flow apart[3], making the developments of exit and decay not so much constancies but cycles of flow and disjuncture. This goes beyond a political subsidiarisation toward more fundamental grounds of systemic existence, akin to accelerative forces that spiral between uncompromising technological capacity and collapse into new mechanisms of existential understanding alongside this capacity[4].

The development of decelerationist thinking as a counterpoint to accelerationism has raised an interesting debate about what the flows and meaning of capital are, and whether they are controllable. Decelerationism is a narrative of existence in and around Satan, the stock market as “a living breathing Overmind. Markets is not “THE BAD CAPITALISTS TAKING MY MONEY” no no no. The Market is a pricing-discovery neural network, an allocation-machine. All human and inhuman participants uplink themselves to determine what is bought and sold. It is the thing that governs your life. It is an entity”[1]. Capital in this sense is an oxymoronic entity, both internal to our very workings but external in its exigencies and developments. It works in, through and beyond the human capacity for understanding.