k-prole

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What is ‘k-prole’? Pt. III

k-prole is, in part, mythic. Myth and mythology, as Levi-Strauss demonstrated, is not reducible to a pre-scientific attempt at understanding a chaotic cosmos. Myth also functions to short-circuit and bypass a deadlock in the present, allowing for action where it had previously not been permitted by existing thought. By re-interpreting the concrete state of affairs, it becomes possible to posit a new set of actions as if the deadlock had been resolved. In this sense, myth structures in advance the social relations it produces, and to mythologize is perhaps the hyperstitional practice par excellence: it deploys new concepts in the anticipation that these will both disbar present deadlocks to action and give structure to a futurity yet to be realized (in our case: a newly emancipated, post-capitalist society).  Historical materialism’s ‘being precedes thought’ makes it a scientific approach to the study of history, no doubt. But Marx also imbued it with a ‘mythic’ function. Although there may be anthropological evidence for ‘primitive communism’, Marx’s conscious retrojection of this concept as the origin of historical development is deployed to allay and fear or doubt about the possibility of revolutionary change in the present: whatever material basis the concept has, it will only have become true retroactively, post the advent of full communism. The problem then with HistMat was never that it was ‘teleological’ (re: isolating an ‘essence’ that would assure one futurity over another), but that it is a rather incomplete myth/hyperstitional program that continually requires its own reimagining in the process of its realization. Although its energies are far from exhausted, the program is long overdue for an upgrade as new deadlocks posed by both technics/technology/informatization and seeming ecological collapse confront the prole’s at the present conjuncture.  Hence k-prole: in part a homage to our fallen comrade @k-punk, who taught us to distinguish the potential of the cybernetic from its enclosure and abasement at the hand of SV-capital by insisting on its original name kybernetes. Confronted by unprecedented by entwined ecological and economic crises, doubt and fear concerning the prospect of an emancipated post-capitalism ossifies the common, yet distributed libidinal energies of the prole in the wetware of the human-all-too-human ‘worker’. The Spectre of Saint Malthus, that high prelate of human finitude, has emerged again triumphant. Out of fear, Saint Malthus again perverts Leftist ‘common sense’ in ways that continually subverts all attempted stratagems at soberly envisioning post-capitalist futurity: at every turn, a deadlock posed by a transhistorical figure of the human as a finite, enclosed organism that has strayed (re: an‘unnatrual’ tendency towards geometric growth) from its ‘dwelling’ in a scarcity-ridden bios delimits all radical thought and action.

So, how to exorcise Malthus? As has always done before: through a conscious and collectively designed program of Promethean ambition to leverage and accelerate technoscientific achievement in ways that liberate the prole from its terrestrial hominoidism, reorienting its technogenic composition as an atomized ‘worker’ into the universal class of k-prole - a torsional project that structurally bootstraps the construction of a post-scarcity social order out of the entropic decelerative drag of capital’s obsolete social relations (re: ‘the human containment system’). 

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What is ‘k-prole’? Pt. II

Confession: I am years deep into a doctoral thesis on Marx and Lacan that is somewhat ‘deadlocked’. The project attempts a ‘political cybernetics’ of the human organism using the work of Lacan and Marx. To me, what unites the 19th century political-economist with the 20th century psychoanalyst is a ‘cybernetic’ approach that understands the human not as a ‘given’ entity but as a processual ‘effect’ of external 'command and control’ systems (’real abstraction’, ‘The Symbolic’). The key wager then: an irreducible ‘technics’ or ‘technicity’ of the human qua cyborg forms the theoretical pretext for the historical facticity of revolutionary change. Although these may seem like well-established, intuitive ideas within left-thought, the challenge was to reconcile this idea with the problematics of intensified automation under capitalism. In other words, the trick was to understand the cybernetic composition of the human within the socio-historical context of class antagonism.

But how can these insights contribute at all to 21st century Left?  It was (re-)reading k-punk’s eponymously named collection of writings that I realized I had ensnared myself in a lifeless, ‘descriptive’ mode of writing. K-punk, on the other hand, excelled at showing how capital’s decelerative fettering of the means of production translated directly into the developmentally arrested ‘human containment system’ that is the pacified consumer culture of late capitalism (contra Nick Land who had identified capital as that which liberates us from this system). As k-prole admonished in Noise As Anti-Capital: “Do not confuse the working class with the proletariat” This distinction made me recall Kojin Karatani’s re-reading of Marx’s Capital. The working class circuits through both active and passive relations to the capitalist. Passive, after having already contracted to work for the capitalist (re: the transcendental intelligibility of the identities ‘worker’ and ‘capitalist’ derive from the legal agreement to sell labour power for a wage). Of course, workers can strike for better wages and better working conditions, so Karatani’s use of the word ‘passive’ here might better understood to mean ‘reactive’: these activities taken by the workers are developed through their emergent class-consciousness as such, but for all that remain fundamentally a reaction retroactive to a contractual agreement actively defined by the capitalist. The de-radicalization of union strategy and tactics are a symptom of this: a lot of campaigns will focus on wage increases, which are crucial to the immediate alleviation of immiseration, and may even weaken the power of capital when successful, but they do not challenge the relation of worker-capitalist directly.

But where does this challenge to the relation emerge if not from the subjectivity of the ‘worker’?  The only time the working-class ‘actively’ encounters the capitalist is when it circuits to the primary subjective position of capitalism, which is not quite a subjectivity but an abstract individuality: that of a buyer and seller of commodities. The worker engages the capitalist ‘actively’ in the market when the capitalist needs the worker to consume the product they have created, but also when the capitalist needs the worker to sell to them their labour-power. Of course, the immiserated individual has nothing else to sell but their labour in order to consume. The fact remains, however, that their position relative to the capitalist is active in that they have not yet contractually assented to the terms of worker-capitalist. This as Marx noted, constituted the double-freedom of the proletariat: freed of all property except for the power to labour, but for that matter also freed from any subjective constraints on what that labour might create out of its unfettered drives and desires.

It is only from the unbound libidinal force of the prole that a challenge to worker-capitalist relation emerges. It is what summons forth from history the ‘gravedigger’ of capital: a working-class organized to abolish the capitalist through its own self-negation as such; The working class actively organizing its desire to call the bluff on the capitalist’s begging request that we ‘work or die’ and demand instead the very end of work (as it is posited by capital). Strategically, the re-radicalized union of the prole strikes for the shorter working day, for the fair redistribution of necessary labour, for the implementation of automation when available, and for the general-intellectual means by which to govern fully automated production.  *** Next: the final exposition, why the k- of k-prole? 

[k-prole]

What is ‘k-prole’? Pt. I

Or first, why blog about it?  Make no mistake, we are post-blog: the heyday of the ‘Left-blogosphere’ is now years behind us. Peaking through the early- to late-00′s, the blog appeared as if the medium of a new academic commons, in which activists and para-intellectuals (many ‘externalized’ by the neoliberal university) could think and debate collectively. During that time, I operated Nihility AD as a site for experimenting with Lacanian and Marxian critiques of contemporary culture. It  was quite lively: it was easy to get a couple hundred impressions on a post, and networks with other like-minded thinkers were easy to forge.  That said, it didn’t last, nor was the era ever so ideal. As Jodi Dean argued in Blog Theory (2009), the blog is far from a neutral platform for open dialogue and communication. Being part of the privatized infrastructure of Web 2.0, the blog-form (like all social media formats to follow) was designed to accelerate digital production and consumption as part of the nascent commodification of ‘attention’. What the platform demands from users is therefore engagement, irrespective of the content (a great example of this is the proliferation of metrics on Facebook). That is, the blog-form reorganizes user’s libidinal trajectories to privilege the affective intensity of mere interactivity over that of communication. Pace the emergence of what k-punk would term ‘The Vampire’s Castle’: unable to facilitate the political and moral complexities of the content in question, well intentioned attempts to educate and ‘check one’s privilege’ within the Left-blogosphere quickly devolved into the toxic ‘callouts’, ‘circular firing-squads’, and ‘pile-ons’ that are now ingrained in the culture of social media. This devolution was the beginning of the end for the ‘era’ of the blog. Why curate a blog with frequent and insightful long-form posts when other platforms had emerged capable of accelerating the hyper-activity of digital ‘prosumption’ (the collapse of production and consumption into one another)? Blogs rapidly lost their libidinal inertia to likes, emoji-reacts, and tweets elicited by the meme. For if the true source of enjoyment derived from blogging was the pile-on / call-out or witch-hunt for micro-aggressions, surely the pretext for any of these could be found within 144 characters: the less sense (qua meaning) the original post made, the better it made sense(-ation).  Knowing this, I return to the blog-form for the ‘experimentality’ it facilitates: to be able to write freely without the bureaucratic-form of academic writing or with a prefigured audience in mind.