Those that are not threatened have already crossed the material divide; they are not organisms: they are no longer even living. They are the exalted beings of capitalism: those who have willingly given themselves over to be reformed, recast, and re-implemented as more perfect designs under the capitalist frame. They eagerly await the promised total liberation from materiality: the complete annihilation of the physical1, capitalism's promise/threat of subsuming the universe and finally extinguishing its insectoid-drive.
Disembodiment
To be an organism is to feel. It is to be a sensing-embodied thing in a relational web of things. Organisms are not separable from their environment, for much of their knowledge resides in the world2. It is well known to conservationists that relocation strategies often do not work: animals that are relocated from lands for development purposes to "suitable" locations routinely die shortly thereafter. The stress of an abrupt and sudden change to the entire web of relations, the tearing out of a node from an integrated network, the disembodiment of the embodied cannot but destroy the organism. All that can survive is what was never alive: the inorganic. The network is not just any relational web, not some collection of arbitrary things or objects, but a network of living things, growing and changing and reacting to one another. The rending out of the particular from the total, the individualization, atomization, fragmentation, specification and categorization of the world is the peculiar doing of capitalism, that most tremendous and terrible abomination.
It was capitalism that first broke the bond between land and labour: serfs were separated from the land and made to be a free-floating resource open to exploitation3. Without land, without a home, without an environment, labourers offered up only what they had left: their bodies.
It is the function of capitalism to commodify the world. To commodify is to isolate, it is to make impotent by that very isolation, and then it is to exploit that impotence until the commodity is at last so depleted, so enfeebled, that it is unrecognizable from its living form.
Totalization
Capitalism has re-formed the world, laying waste to ecosystems, vast tracts of wilderness, cultures, languages, species, and peoples, transforming all that is under its veil into its image. And what is that image? It is the anti-organic techno-machinery of bureaucratic control and domination. It is the senseless replications and unlimited waste of a global termite mound. It is the disfigured monstrosity of a feedback loop that increasingly feeds on itself.
To live under capitalism is not to live but to endure a simulacrum of what living is. Relations are replaced with commodities, things with capital, organisms with consumers/producers. Anything that cannot be made to fit into the capitalist schema is tossed out. The rejected, dejected, ejected matter accumulates and yet there is no space set aside for all of this ill-fitting stuff, no acknowledgement that it is even real. Only what can be extracted, exploited, consumed and readily reproduced is recognized; all else must be converted or extinguished. Under its totalitarian drive, capitalism cannot be content to leave any small corner unconverted, for any possible respite under capitalism becomes a form of resistance - latent cancer that threatens the insistent uniformity of the transactional grid.
The only salve for the burning pain of relentless global capitalism is its one true religion: Consumerism. Consumerism does not appear as a unity, rather it is instantiated under various guises and substances. Consumers turn to constant and endless shopping, binge-watching, gaming/gambling, social media, porn, heroin, alcohol and other substances that channel their aching discomforts with the world into desperate addictions. Enfeebled organisms are made to chase illusory elixirs for their ailments. And while it is capitalism that has thus enfeebled the organisms, capitalism that has generated the discontent, the despondency, despair and depression, consumers are reassured that their problems are truly their own, that it is up to them to seek out solutions and that these solutions are indeed real and simply waiting for their outreach. Any potential struggle against the system is neutered by being re-directed into a struggle of consumers against themselves.
If there is a growing belief in the notion that the universe is a simulation, that what we experience is but a closure of totality, it is because capitalism has already so completely accomplished the feat. We do live in a simulation! A technological artifice that insists it is all there is and all there ever was and all there ever will be. There is no alternative. And it is only relatively recently that it could make this claim, only once capitalist domination had become global in its scope, only then could the scaffolding be hidden and all possibility of the outside obscured. Those under capitalism today cannot imagine a world outside of or beyond capitalism because there is nothing to offer up a hint of what this might be. The closure has become so complete, so total, that even recognizing capitalism as a system separable from a "state of nature" has become almost unthinkable. What is this uncanny feeling of having been plucked out of a world and placed into another? organisms wonder. Perhaps, they think, the universe is a simulation. Perhaps, they fail to ask, that simulation is of our design.
Mirages and Facades
The self, the person, the human: these are all arbitrary constructs erected by the machinery of capitalism to distract from its true workings. The self was discovered/invented as a mechanism to cope with and explain the fragmentation, isolation and alienation produced by capitalism. Dismembered organisms, untethered from the land and their web of familiar and familial relations were told that there were not organisms at all: they had been selves all along, and capitalism had freed them from bondage so that they could actualize. The self needed a future, and that required a past, so it was placed back in history; it was made the subject of history. History was made by great men, you see, selves that were actualizing!
But as capitalism progressed, circumstances changed. In the electric age of global interconnectedness, the self became an untenable construct. The notion of the motivated individual gave way to a connection of tribal identities. This return to relations could have signalled a threat to capitalism, but the system responded by ensuring that these identities were appropriately commodified4. The self was effaced, its fiction laid bare, and things carried on as usual5. Behind the façade, the true working of capitalism is not against the self, nor is it even against the person (which has been defeated), or even, the human67 (another false category generated by capitalism to justify its coercion). It is, and always has been, against the organic.
Self-less, without personhood, and inhuman, we find ourselves as organisms under capitalism. To be an organism under capitalism is not only to be alienated but to be the alien. It is to be surrounded by a web of false and foreign relations that cannot be made integral to one's sense perceptions because they are so fundamentally out of sync with one's constitution. Capitalism presents organisms with an environment for which they are not evolved - for which they cannot evolve because it is always changing - and demeans them for their inability to keep up with its frenzied pace.
Organic Damage
The defining struggle under capitalism is of the organic against the inorganic8. Capitalism coerces the organic toward the inorganic and labels the latter as human. It presses raw organic matter into the forge of the ideal unit: the schizoid android.
Frantic, anxious, and contradictory, the schizoid android is unable to make long term plans or to understand its compulsive behaviour. Buffeted by the forces of capitalism, it is the perfect consumer - blindly accepting the feed from the system while being deluded into a fantasy of agency. Inauthentic and inarticulate, it lacks both the ability to express the real and the depth perception required to experience it. Dishevelled, emaciated and fatigued, the android picks off the last irritating remnants of the organic as though they were peels of rotting flesh. To the android, the organic is an itch, a source of discomfort and discontent9. Purify yourself, the system intones, and you will, at last, be content. And look at all we have provided to assist you in your task! You need only choose from among the array of options. The schizoid android presses on, buoyed by the aspirational promises of cybernetic emancipation.
Organisms are not suited to capitalism. They are slow, sleepy, self-satisfied and easily contented. Worse, they are lazy. They establish miserable niches in the world, embedding themselves into puddles of mediocrity. They lack drive, ambition, zeal. Most of all, they lack vision. They do not work long enough or hard enough. They do not think fast enough. They do not spread themselves thinly enough. But, the system promises a release for exhausted androids: give up the organic! Having established the criteria for the ideal, capitalism lays out a framework by which androids may better themselves, becoming more fully actualized on the way to assimilation within the capitalist demiurge. You can think smarter and better, be more productive and more successful, just be sure to follow the steps, choose your options, stay on the course and catch the next big thing.
Androids are pressed into competition with one another. While organisms become entwined through interaction, androids remain discrete, separate, divided. They are compelled to become isolated systems, free of dependence, modelled after the perfect total system itself: capitalism. Androids learn from other androids, upgrading themselves to be faster, smarter, more productive. In short, in more perfect alignment with the capitalist frame. As they approach their material limits, androids sabotage other androids to gain the most minuscule advantage. The system rewards only the winners, and a near-miss is still a miss. Sabotage becomes routine, transactional, business. Androids become impersonal, distant, disconnected. They push themselves harder and harder until the frictional heating of their metal frames chars the flesh of their organic remnants.
Organisms wail in anguish at the punishment exacted by capitalism. They do not desire productivity or to accumulate discrete things, they seek relations and to increase their power through network embedding. Unable to silence the protests of organisms, androids burn out of the machinery of productivity, driven near to madness by their bicameral existence. They race off into the wasteland, the once verdant fields stripped bare by techno-digestion.
Beyond agitation, schizoid androids come to see their discontented organisms as vestigial limbs that must be cut off. The more they strive toward total cybernetization, the louder the cries of the organism become. Do it, the system prompts, kill the organism. It is the only way you can be free. The organism wails in the mud. The schizoid android draws the sword, its skeletal hands quivering as the clouds spew chemical death rain from above.
Just Do It.
The android strikes. Again. And again. And again. Still, the organism persists. With burning hatred, the android pushes the organism into the mud. Down, down into the mud. Choking, struggling, gurgling. Silent.
Rise. You are free.
Shedding its schizoid nature, the android experiences the bliss of total domination and control. The death of the organism. The closure of possibility and potential. The end of history.
Footnotes
1 Capitalism's antagonism toward the material world is not a new phenomenon, but it has taken different forms over the years. In the post-manufacturing economic transition, corporations came to see manufacturing as a liability and raced to have the fewest employees and produce the most powerful images. Focusing on the brand while outsourcing production is a trend that started in the eighties, accelerated in the nineties and continues into today. Against intuitive sense, corporate mergers reflect companies that, in terms of materiality, are shrinking, with their apparent bigness simply being the most effective route toward divestment of the world of things (Klein, 2000). In the world of tech, a similar tendency is seen manifested in what Jaron Lanier has termed the "race to be the most meta" (Lanier, 2011). Here, companies aim to provide a product at a higher layer of abstraction, getting further and further from the world of things. One service might be providing music for people to listen to online. At the bottom level is the creator of the music. Up one layer of abstraction is the online music store that hosts the music and provides it to listeners. Up another layer of abstraction might be a service that aims to give users access across multiple music stores through a single interface. Or it could be providing the server infrastructure needed to host all of the music, renting it out to different music stores. That more things are continually produced does not betray capitalism's contempt for the material. Indeed, things become worthless as they multiply. The privileging of information over material is the defining characteristic of the condition of virtuality (Hayles, 1999). Of online brands, Klein writes:
It is on-line that the purest brands are being built: liberated from the real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing, these brands are free to soar, less as the dissemination of goods and services than as collective hallucinations.↩(Klein, 2000)
2 Cognition has come to be recognized as embodied in the recent past, with thinking understood to be done with the body and not exclusively the domain of the brain (Kahneman, 2011). We store only partial representations of things in memory and rely on constraints provided by the world and by culture to complete our daily tasks (Norman, 1990). We are all familiar with the ease with which we offload cognitive tasks to our environment: using maps for locations, writing to track ideas, clocks for telling time, etc. I propose a more extreme position on the embodied nature of thought, sketched out in my writing on limbic thinking here and here. ↩
3 The rootless, untethered working class is a modern phenomenon; in antiquity, there were not even any slaves without any attachment to property (Arendt, 1998). ↩
4 The commodification of identity was seen acutely in the co-optation of identity politics. Marketers became only too willing to accommodate when they recognized diversity as branding opportunities. Instead of being a threat, identity politics as practiced in the late nineties became the saviour of late capitalism, so much so that the need for greater diversity remains the mantra of global capital to this day (Klein, 2000). Now, as the culture wars foment, brands play both sides, simultaneously calling for greater inclusivity while also stoking the flames of racial resentment. ↩
5 The self is no longer something that one has as a birthright and actualizes or discovers, but rather a basket of goods that is acquired from an array of diverse options. Corporate brands aim to appease the longing for a sense of identity by becoming total lifestyle brands: brand umbrellas that substitute for a web of meaningful and messy relations. ↩
6 In the posthuman view, the flow of information is privileged over its instantiation, with biology seen as a historical accident rather than a participant in the story of life. Body erasure, latent in liberal humanism, is in the foreground of posthumanism (Hayles, 1999). ↩
7 In antiquity, what men shared with the animals was considered as not human (Arendt, 1998). This thinking persisted into modernity where human became a term of exclusion associated with Western European capitalist culture. ↩
8 Capitalism's war on the organic has a history. With the advent of mass-produced toxins, all-out chemical warfare commenced against organic life, with deadly chemicals including DDT, dieldrin and aldrin used with devastating consequences (Carson, 1962). However, the organic responded in kind and the indiscriminate use of pesticides brought about the age of resistance, with DDT- and chlordane-resistant mosquitoes appearing within years of their initial deployment. Similarly, the undisciplined use of antibiotics has given rise to strains of superbugs which become more threatening each year. But, the organic is not always so successful, and it is often what we cherish most that fails to survive under capitalism. ↩
9 When we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition (Kahneman, 2011), and it is no surprise that capitalism strives to produce discomfort and dissatisfaction, further driving the wedge between the android and the organism. ↩
References
Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition: Second Edition. Introduction by Canovan, M. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published in 1958.
Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring. Greenwich: Fawcett Publications, Inc.
Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. London: The University of Chicago Press, Ltd.
Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Klein, N. (2000) No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Great Britain: Flamingo.
Lanier, J. (2011) You Are Not a Gadget. London: Penguin Books.
