#povinelli

But something is causing these statements to be irrevocably read and experienced through a new drama, not the drama of life and death, but a form of death that begins and ends in Nonlife—namely the extinction of humans, biological life, and, as it is often put, the planet itself—which takes us to a time before the life and death of individuals and species, a time of the geos, of soulessness. The modifying phrase “insofar as” now foregrounds the anthropos as just one element in the larger set of not merely animal life but all Life as opposed to the state of original and radical Nonlife, the vital in relation to the inert, the extinct in relation to the barren. In other words, it is increasingly clear that the anthropos remains an element in the set of life only insofar as Life can maintain its distinction from Death/Extinction and Nonlife. It is also clear that late liberal strategies for governing difference and markets also only work insofar as these distinctions are maintained.

One of the great attractions of George Bataille’s Accursed Share, for instance, is its emphasis on a superabundance of energy that cannot be contained by the rationality of social systems—that erupts in an erotic and pure sacred surplus. Bataille’s wager was that this superabundant energy, exceeding the closed economy of capitalism and manifested in a waste and wastefulness of low material (shit, orgasm, sadism, war, human sacrifice), can never be fully recuperated into any social system. But, in a less read essay, Gayatri Spivak suggests that we might want to be cautious before separating capital and pure surplus. If, on the one hand, liberal capital claims the power to eat every last smear of its own excrement, on the other hand, it insists that the productive individual always has more power than she actual is. This bizarre, grammatically awkward phasing—that subjects are more than they are—lies at the heart of the “predication of the subject as labor-power (irreducible structural super-adequation—the subject defined by its capacity to produce more than itself).” This subject, in other words, is predicated as her own little sun The discursive toggle of excess energy which, on the one hand, threatens because it cannot be totalized and yet, on the other, beckons because it provides the dream of pure surplus, is explicitly mobilized during liberal and capital crises, but is also a constant pressure exerted across its wasted earth. Super-adequate subjects of capital powered by the superabundant energy that comes from pure waste continually roam the earth even as the ancestral catastrophe of the Black Atlantic and settler colonialism restrict agricultural acreage and potable water. The energy needed for the disavowal of this ancestral history grows ever greater until it finds that only the scorching sun will suffice. As geontological frameworks quake in the wake of a toxic homecoming of liberal capitalism, Western techno-energy bros and agricultural visions have shifted from the human subject to nature as subject, even as they double down on the predication of nature as a super-adequate being..

It was true in general that an effort in attention might bend the very material fabric of the world, but it was equally true that very few people were willing to do so. Instead most persons demanding a new self (sapere aude), through a specific kind of speaking truth (dire vrai), either find themselves different and will to become the same, or never confront the effort it takes to recoordinate the habits of mind and become different, too exhausting, or a sign that they are behaving, believing, and desiring wrongly. And lest we think at least James believed only philosophers like he and Charles Peirce could or would do so, James notes, “It is the personal experience of those most qualified in all our circle of knowledge to have experience, to tell us what is.” These persons were not philosophers, but those who lived in the kinds of exhausted conditions Giorgio Agamben describes. And no wonder: James and Peirce also remind us of the risk that Foucault saw in this kind of truth telling—the kind that seeks to dislodge, to fortify doubt, to refuse given systematizations of logical interpretants (savoir). Everything is at stake—one should not change the tendencies of gravity and expect to remain the same.

Human history, in other words, is an ongoing [...] experiment in which the [...] philosopher participates but cannot surmount and cannot even necessarily best represent or understand. The mind is not merely radically empirical and plural, so is the world—mind and world co-emerge in their mutual unfinished potentiality and thus also do new and subjugated knowledges. As a result mind, world, and truth are radically open questions whose answer takes us back into the world.

Again: Thought does something; it assembles and correlates; it does not represent something. And it is right here that we confront the impossible heart of Peirce’s reading of the logical interpretant: the height of semiotic reason is not the decoding of existents but the formation and coordination of the habits of beings, which are continually becoming otherwise in the act of formation and coordination. Peirce saw matter itself—such fundamental laws of nature like gravity—to be the result of a sort of conceptual habit he was describing. Brian Massumi calls them “habits of mass.” In short, all concepts, all truths, all acts of truth telling are radically immanent and radically material habits governed by the figural and meta-figural formations at hand at any given time. Peirce saw the material world—human and otherwise—as unfinished not merely because our mind had not yet succeeded in categorizing it like scientists now sequence DNA, but because in attending to it in a certain way we pull it into being in a way it was not before we did so. Thus, where and what this future is remains an open question. The future depends on the kinds of connections that are made in, and made possible by, the world that exists and the differential forces that keep it in place or move it. That is, the future is not a place somewhere or sometime else. Nor have its truths already happened—they are not just there waiting for us to catch up to them. Intellectual concepts and the truths they support are a “tendency” to behave in a similar way under similar conditions, produced by the combination of muscular and nonmuscular effort on the fancies and the percepts not merely now but as an orientation—a kind of future-making

As I am hoping will become clear, Capitalism has a unique relation to the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus insofar as Capitalism sees all things as having the potential to create profit; that is, nothing is inherently inert, everything is vital from the point of view of capitalization, and anything can become something more with the right innovative angle. Indeed, capitalists can be said to be the purest of the Animists. This said, industrial capital depends on and, along with states, vigorously polices the separations between forms of existence so that certain kinds of existents can be subjected to different kinds of extractions. Thus even as activists and academics level the relation between animal life and among objects (including human subjects), states pass legislation both protecting the rights of businesses and corporations to use animals and lands and criminalizing tactics of ecological and environmental activism. In other words, like the Virus that takes advantage but is not ultimately wedded to the difference between Life and Nonlife, Capital views all modes of existence as if they were vital and demands that not all modes of existence are the same from the point of view of extraction of value.

If, paraphrasing Gilles Deleuze, concepts open understanding to what is all around us but not in our field of vision,