[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