1AC — Haptic Economics

1AC
 1AC — Haptic Economics
Debates must start from a theorization of Homo economicus. Neoliberalism has
commodified economic welfare into a logistical apparatus of control. Opportunities to
expand economization transforms social problems into economic ones, thereby
cementing the productivity of human capital into the calculation of risk itself.
Francesco Laruffa 22, Research Fellow at the University of Geneva, “Neoliberalism, Economization and
the Paradox of the New Welfare State”, European Journal of Sociology, vol 63(1), pp 137-146, eden

Schimank and Volkmann [2008] conceptualize economization

drawing on Luhmann’s theory of social systems and
Bourdieu’s concept of the “social field .” For Luhmann [1995], a modern society is composed of functionally
differentiated subsystems . Given the complexity of modern society, each social subsystem has a certain function,
following its own logic and specific “ codes .” While subsystems may be “structurally coupled” and thus
“interdependent” (for example, the science system requires a legal framework from the legal system, material resources from the
economic system, qualified workers from the education system, and so on), each subsystem is also autonomous in the sense
that it is oriented towards fulfilling its own task and, in realizing this function, refers only to its own logic .

Adopting a system-theoretical perspective, economization

can be described as the process by which the logic of the
economic subsystem is extended to other subsystems , replacing their original functions . In a capitalist
system, the economy is oriented towards “exchange value” and the principle of profit-maximization
(rather
than towards “use value” and the satisfaction of social needs ), so that the economic subsystem is
autonomous vis-à-vis other subsystems and the economic logic is relatively indifferent to other logics
[Schimank 2011: 6-7]2.

From this perspective, economization entails the extension of the logic of profit-maximization to non-economic spheres. For example,
economization occurs for journalists writing newspapers if the logic of profitmaking becomes their only orientation: the new function consisting
of selling as many newspapers as possible substitutes the original functions of journalism, such as reporting news truthfully and contributing to
the democratic quality of the public sphere by clarifying public issues [Schimank and Volkmann 2008: 383].

Thus, the autonomy of each subsystem can be corrupted . While for Luhmann this represents an exception, for Bourdieu
the fact that in a capitalist society the economic system threatens the autonomy of the other social
fields is the rule [Schimank and Volkmann 2008: 384]—and this is especially true of neoliberal capitalism [see
Bourdieu 1998, 2003]. Indeed, the universality of money, whereby all social subsystems use money for
functioning, makes society as a whole dependent on money and thus on the economic subsystem, so
that the capitalist economy eventually tends to subordinate all other subsystems, undermining their
autonomy [Schimank 2011: 11]. For this reason, a capitalist economy cannot be reduced to one social subsystem
among others: it always tends to expand, imposing its logic on all other subsystems. A capitalist
economy is always also a capitalist society [Schimank 2011: 9; Streeck 2012: 2].

For Polanyi [2001], society’s

dependence on self-regulating markets and the tendency of the latter to expand
to all social domains make capitalist societies potentially self-destroying. This threat in turn generates a
so-called “ countermovement ,” whereby society protects itself against the excesses of capitalism, which
—in its progressive form3— entails essentially two dimensions: the welfare state and democratic control of
the economy . Thus, governments intervening in the name of the “public interest” and “representing the
collective claims of ‘society’, act as socio-moral agents” through market regulation and social service
provision, with a view to correcting the “distortions of ethically free markets ” [Shamir 2008: 5]. From this
perspective, the political and cultural construction of “the economy” as an autonomous sphere also implied
the affirmation of the “social” as the locus of “non-economic” rationality [Ibid.]. As Marshall [1950: 29] argues,
capitalism and social citizenship follow “opposing principles”: social citizenship reposes on the principle
of equality among citizens, which opposes capitalism as a system of inequality. Thus, social citizenship
supplants the logic of “contract ” characteristic of capitalism with that of “ status ,” replacing “free
bargain by the declaration of right” [Marshall 1950: 68]. The rationale of social rights and “decommodification”
[Esping-Andersen 1985] hence amounts to a potential subversion of capitalism, allowing individuals to enjoy a
socially acceptable standard of living independently of market participation and allocating welfare
according to citizens’ rights, thereby (partially) replacing the market logic in determining the distribution
of socioeconomic outcomes .

Importantly, while constituting an antagonistic pole in relation to the capitalist economy, social policy
interventions protected not only society from the economy but also crisis-prone capitalism from its
own instabilities , so that, taken together, social politics and capitalism formed a “ functional
antagonism ” [Schimank 2011: 11-12]. Social policy is thus both a necessary and inherent component of a
capitalist society , and an “intruded” element. Indeed, while referring to a rationale that is at odds with the
capitalist logic, social policy is also what allows the existence of an economy oriented towards
accumulation, profit and productivity, and indifferent to social needs; that is, precisely because the
latter are covered by social policy, the economy can avoid taking them into account [Lessenich 2008: 25]. Hence,
as Offe [1984] argues, the relationship between the welfare state and capitalism is contradictory : the

principles of welfare clash with those of capitalism but the non-commodified institutions of the welfare
state are necessary preconditions for an economic system based on exchange , which uses labor and
other social objects as if they were commodities. Moreover, post-war capitalism greatly depended on social
policy provisions: in a Keynesian macroeconomic framework and within a regime of accumulation based on the cycle of mass production
and mass consumption (Fordism), welfare states stabilized aggregate demand during economic downturns, acting
as a countercyclical factor . Thus, the “functional antagonism” between social politics and capitalist
economy involved a “win-win” and self-reinforcing relationship : while economic growth provided
resources for pursuing social policy , the latter sustained consumption , thereby benefiting the
economy [Donzelot 1988].
Crucially, the fact that social policy was functional to industrial capitalism does not imply that it emerged spontaneously and/or
deterministically. Socio-political
interventions aimed at correcting the negative social consequences of a
capitalist economy appeared as a result of a “democratic class struggle” [Korpi 1983], using “ politics
against markets ” [Esping-Andersen 1985]. Also, the regulation of the economy is not “an automatic response to
the devastating effects of self-regulating markets” and it is not the result of market forces themselves
[Beckert 2007: 17]. Rather, the Polanyian countermovement aimed at establishing the “social” as an opposing
pole to capitalism and at subordinating the economy to political-democratic institutions involves
deliberate political interventions and is the “unstable result of social and political struggle ” [Ibid.: 17]. In other
words, within a capitalist society, the degree of autonomy of each subsystem or “field” is the outcome of
struggle: “although relative autonomy is a possibility within capitalism, every gain in it has been
conquered politically” because autonomy “is conquered not given” [Vázquez-Arroyo 2008: 139].
In particular, the post-war compromise between capital and labor— between those sections of the economic and political elites who
were convinced that such social corrections were needed in order to support capitalism in the long term and the reformist wing of the labor
movement [Schimank 2011: 13]—wasmade possible by a number of political factors . This included the presence
of a real alternative to capitalism at the global level [Vázquez-Arroyo 2008: 154]: the concrete “communist
threat” required capitalists to concede compensatory measures and socially oriented reforms to strong
unions and social democratic parties in order to prevent the development of revolutionary attitudes
among the populace, and the working class in particular. Also, the international order was characterized
by the principles of “ embedded liberalism ” [Ruggie 1982], whereby the commitment to international
stability and trade was made compatible with national states’ relative autonomy in pursuing social and
economic policies, especially through capital control .
Neoliberalism, Economization, and Welfare Retrenchment

The “functional antagonism” between capitalist markets and social policy was undermined by the
emergence of neoliberalism , which, according to Schimank and Volkmann [2008: 385], is characterized by a
reinforcement of the economization processes inherent in capitalism. This intensification is driven
mainly by slower economic growth in relation to the Fordist-Keynesian era. Because in a capitalist society all
subsystems depend on resources generated within the economy (either directly or indirectly through tax-based state
expenditures), the functional needs of the economic subsystem tend to dominate the whole society . While
during the Fordist period, rapidly increasing prosperity (high rates of economic growth) lowered economization pressures, under
neoliberalism the dependency of other social subsystems on the economy becomes stronger because
fewer and fewer resources are available (given slower economic growth) and competition for those scarce
resources increases. In turn, concerns about resource scarcity and competition to obtain them make
economic criteria and the economic viewpoint dominant in each social subsystem .

From this perspective, itis possible to link welfare retrenchment with processes of “economization of the
social,” entailing the extension of the economic rationale to non-economic areas . Indeed, the lack of
economic resources for welfare policies—i.e. fiscal austerity—generates economization because cost-
containment pressures make the economic rationale prevail over other possible logics in all spheres of
social life. Crucially, economization pressures and welfare retrenchment break the “win-win” relationship
between economic and social goals that was at the core of the social democratic compromise . Thus,
while the “social” and the “economic” continue to repose on two different logics, they no longer
compose a functional, but rather a dysfunctional antagonism . This situation generates competition
between social and economic goals: pursuing social goals (e.g. increasing welfare generosity) is in conflict with
economic imperatives (e.g. minimizing costs), and neoliberalism involves prioritizing economic goals over social
ones. As Peck and Tickell [2002: 394] argue, neoliberalism promotes a “growth first” approach, which reconstitutes “social-welfarist
arrangements as anticompetitive costs” and issues of redistribution as “antagonistic to the overriding objectives of economic development”
(emphasis in the original). The project of retrenching welfare thus reposes on a “deeply negative theory of the state” and on a trade-off
between equity and efficiency [Hemerijck 2012: 41-43], whereby efficiency is prioritized over social solidarity [Gill 1998a: 18].

To the extent that the austerity framework addresses social issues, it does so on the basis of the “trickle-down” assumption: focusing on
economic objectives will, in the long run, benefit all members of society, including the poor and marginalized, thereby also realizing “social”
goals. Policy should focus on economic goals—social ones will follow automatically from greater prosperity.

Towards a New Welfare State

If the idea that social policy is a necessary element of a capitalist society is right, then the project of
welfare retrenchment cannot be fully accomplished without putting the very existence of capitalism at
risk . While the 1980s were dominated—at least at discursive level—by the austerity agenda focused on welfare retrenchment, starting in the
mid-1990s, new ideas concerning the relationship between the “social” and the “economic” emerged. These can be linked to the concept of
“social investment” as a
welfare model that involves “a new understanding of social policy” as a “productive
factor, essential to economic development and to employment growth” [Morel, Palier and Palme 2012: 2]. Hence,
rather than a trade-off between social and economic goals, social investment “sees improved social
equity as going hand in hand with more economic efficiency” [Hemerijck 2013: 134]. This perspective has been actively
promoted by the European Union, the World Bank, and the OECD [see e.g. TaylorGooby 2008; Jenson 2010, 2017; Mahon 2010; Hemerijck
2018], as well as by prominent academics [e.g. Giddens 1998; Esping-Andersen 2002; Morel, Palier and Palme 2012; Hemerijck 2013].

The twofold goal of the “new welfare state” is to protect against the “new social risks ,” such as
precarious employment, long-term unemployment, and single parenthood [Bonoli 2005; Esping-Andersen 2002;
Taylor-Gooby 2004] and to recalibrate social expenditure “from passive to active social policies,” adapting

individuals to the “needs” of the “knowledge economy” by means of human capital enhancement
[Morel, Palier and Palme 2012: 9]. Hence, central to this new thinking about welfare is the emphasis on
“ preparing ” rather than “repairing” [Ibid.: 1]: investing in (especially children’s ) human capital should
prepare people for the needs of the economy, thereby preventing social problems, such as poverty and
unemployment, from emerging. While some scholars see social investment as an alternative to neoliberalism [e.g. Abrahamson
2010; Deeming and Smyth 2015; Ferrera 2013; Hemerijck 2013, 2018; Jenson 2010; Lammers, van GervenHaanpää and Treib 2018; Mahon
2010; Morel, Palier and Palme 2012; Perkins, Nelms and Smyth 2005], others have argued that even
if these changes in welfare
discourse and policy are important, they do not amount to a paradigm shift and should be considered
part of a new phase of neoliberalism . Thus, according to Peck and Tickell [2002: 384], “ rollback neoliberalism ”
characteristic of the “Thatcher/Reagan era of assault and retrenchment,” “deregulation and dismantlement,” “active destruction and
discreditation of Keynesian-welfarist and social-collectivist institutions” has
been replaced by “ roll-out neoliberalism ,”
which is associated with an agenda of “active state-building” and “purposeful construction and
consolidation of neoliberalized state forms, modes of governance, and regulatory relations ” (emphasis in the
original). Hence, the neoliberal project “gradually metamorphosed into more socially interventionist and
ameliorative forms, epitomized by the Third-Way contortions of the Clinton and Blair administrations ”
[Peck and Tickell 2002: 388-389]. This “second-wave neoliberalism” involved an agenda focused on promoting a “socially conscious market
globalism” aimed at integrating “market-oriented thinking” with an ethical discourse of social justice [Steger and Roy 2010: 50-75].

In particular, Jessop [2007] claims that the

Third Way involved the “ normalization of neoliberalism ” [see also Hay 2004].
On one hand, the Third Way “warmly embraced the logic of neo-liberal globalization” proclaiming its
“ inevitability” and “desirability ” [Jessop 2007: 284]. On the other hand, it also aimed to “temper the social costs”
of neoliberalism [Ibid.: 286], providing “ flanking mechanisms to compensate for its negative economic,
political, and social consequences” [Ibid.: 288].

Thus, it is possible to observe a recent shift towards more “social,” “inclusive” and “feminist” versions of
neoliberalism that emphasize the positive role of the state and of “good governance,” as well as the importance of
“social capital,” “gender equality,” and “ poverty reduction ” [e.g. Craig and Porter 2005; Fine 1999; Jayasuriya 2006; Prügl 2017; Ruckert
2006]. The academic literature has identified at least two different logics at work in these developments. The first relates to the need to
compensate losers: “social neoliberalism” reflects “the political realization that some social policy is required to win elections or avoid social
unrest” [Dorlach 2015: 521]. In this context, the
goal is to stabilize neoliberalism as a hegemonic project : these
“social” measures do not challenge the dominant economic model but provide compensation with a
view to advancing the legitimacy of neoliberalism. Following the second logic, alleviating the negative social
externalities of neoliberalism is not a matter of political calculations concerned with reinforcing popular
consensus; rather, the goal is that of remedying the dysfunctions generated by welfare retrenchment . In
particular, drawing on Jessop [2000], Graefe [2006: 72] argues that “ flanking”
measures aim to address the “contradiction
between the growing importance of extra-economic factors of production ” (such as trust) “and the tendency
of neoliberalism to consume such factors faster than they can be reproduced.” In this second
“functional” logic, social goals are thus promoted not as essential elements for building hegemonic
power but as factors that can help to restore the functionality between social and economic goals ,
which was lost in the austerity agenda.
Despite their differences, both the “political” logic focused on reinforcing hegemony and the “functional” rationale concerned with remedying
neoliberal dysfunctions seem to re-propose the old welfare strategy, whereby a logic clearly distinct from the economic one is called on to
counterbalance the economic rationale of capitalist markets, which, if left alone, would destroy both capitalism and society. In short, these
changes could be interpreted as efforts to re-establish a “functional antagonism” between social and economic logics. As Graefe [2006: 72]
argues, measures attempting “to mitigate the anti-social consequences of neoliberal policies” entail “creating or protecting institutions
embodying non-neoliberal principles” (emphasis added).

In the following sections of this paper, I argue that there is a third logic that informs the promotion of social goals in the discourse on the new
welfare state, namely the economization logic. Thus, social goals are promoted not only with a view to enhancing the legitimacy of
neoliberalism and to remedying its dysfunctions but also because the “social” itself is re-interpreted in economic terms. The “new welfare
state” then reconciles social and economic goals through the economization of the social, which is in line with—not in opposition to—the
neoliberal rationale. Indeed, re-framing social goals as economic investments makes it possible to implement measures for ameliorating social
outcomes without the need to refer to “non-neoliberal principles.”

Two Roads to Economization and The Rise of “Social Impact Bonds”

In the new welfare discourse, there are two essential ways in which the “social” becomes economically
productive and an investment object. The first involves the shift from “ decommodification” to labor
market empowerment as a central welfare principle. While the post-war welfare state aimed to protect individuals from
the (labor) market, the new welfare state aims to include them in the market through human capital enhancement. Indeed, social
investment “is essentially an encompassing human capital strategy ” [Hemerijck 2013: 142; Leibetseder 2018],
which seeks to “ rebuild the welfare state around work ” [Deeming and Smyth 2015: 299]. Social investment is
thus part of the “politics of inclusion” that transforms social citizenship into a “market citizenship,”
which seeks to enable participation within the economic order [Jayasuriya 2006; see also Nullmeier 2004; Plehwe 2017].
In this context, while social entitlements may be generous and expansive, they are justified “in terms of their
capacity to enable the greater participation of individuals within the economic mainstream ” [Jayasuriya
2006: 31].

The second way in which the “social” becomes an investment object involves the principle by which
“preventing” the emergence of social problems is less expensive than “repairing” them . On this second road to
economization, social problems such as crime, low education, illness, and unemployment are framed in terms of their economic costs for the
public budget: “Poor
people and those with various social needs are seen as expensive for the state to the
extent that they use government resources and programs” [Kish and Leroy 2015: 635]. Social interventions are
then framed as investments because they solve or prevent problems that are constructed as economic
costs [Dowling 2017: 300]. This second approach thus targets highly disadvantaged populations, which are framed not primarily as human
capital or labor power (as in the first way of investing in the social) but as “subjects who can be recuperated into worth to the extent that social
rehabilitation attempts to discipline them into costing the state less over time” [Kish and Leroy 2015: 636].

Reinterpreting social policies as economic investments that deliver returns, either in terms of enhanced productivity and higher employment
rates, or in terms of savings for the public budget—or both—implies that, in order to finance this kind of interventions, it is possible to attract
forprofit private capital. Indeed, given that these interventions generate benefits for the public budget, the state is able to pay a return to
private actors that invest in these social programs. This is the basis for the development of “social impact bonds,” which are innovative financial
instruments that allow financial actors to invest in social policy interventions and earn a profit on them if they are successful in achieving their
pre-established outcomes. In this context, poverty and social disadvantage become “investable” objects [Baker, Evans and Hennigan 2019] and
the social is made “profitable” [Dowling and Harvie 2014: 880], transforming social problems into investment opportunities for financial elites
[Bryan and Rafferty 2014; Cooper, Graham and Himick 2016; Dowling 2017; Joy and Shields 2018; Kish and Leroy 2015; McHugh et al. 2013;
Ryan and Young 2018]. This “de-differentiation” of welfare states and financial markets [Rohringer and Münnich 2019] implies the
“financialization” of social policy—which is in line with the argument that among the many forms that economization can take, in the
contemporary context the “financialised form appears to be particularly predominant” [Chiapello 2015: 15].

Social impact bonds are still in an experimental phase and are not yet widely used. However, they are diffusing very rapidly [Burmester,
Wohlfahrt and Kühnlein 2018: 82; Edmiston and Nicholls 2018: 58] and are increasingly supported by crucial international players, such as the
World Bank, the OECD, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, KPMG, and McKinsey & Co [Joy and Shields 2018].

What matters most in the context of this paper is that social impact bonds make visible the performativity of social investment discourse:
applying economic reasoning to social policy has the potential to actually transform the latter into an economic object, thereby promoting also
profit-making opportunities within non-economic domains.

Thus, in
the case of social investment, the two types of economization described by Griffen and Panofsky [2021] work quite linearly:
the diffusion of the economic frame to welfare discourse (first type of economization) has been translated into
the creation of new policy devices — social impact bonds —that concretely transformed social policies
into economic objects that can be manipulated in economic terms (the second type of economization). Yet, while
these two modes of economization in this case go hand in hand, it is important to highlight that they
nevertheless reflect different “ interests and aims of competing social actors ,” as argued by Griffen and Panofsky
[Ibid.: 519]. Indeed, the discourse of social investment was initially promoted by progressive scholars, such as Giddens [1998] and Esping-
Andersen and colleagues [2002], who used the economic argument for advancing social policies in a neoliberal, “economized” context. Thus,
the economization of the first type was instrumental in promoting welfare generosity, as the economic argument was used to convince the
political and economic elites to “invest” in social policy. However, more recently the application of economic reasoning to social policy has been
radicalized—through the economization of second type—by financial actors who have reversed this relationship between ends and means:
rather than the economic logic being at the service of social policy promotion, it is now the latter that becomes a profit-making opportunity. In
this context, while
economization is not disconnected from moral discussions and values, it seems that
morality is used mainly as a source of legitimization for the economic and political power of the
financial elites . As Dowling [2017: 296] argues, social impact bonds are part of an attempt to rehabilitate the
public image of the financial sector after the global financial crisis: they make it possible to extend the
reach of finance in a morally defensible way so that rather than “curbing the power of finance, the
solution lies precisely in promoting it .”

Fiscal management is inextricably linked to social and political norms. Securitizations

of debt and credit systems justify racialized extraction.
Forster-Smith ’18 [Christopher A. Forster-Smith; PhD student at Johns Hopkins University in
philosophy; February 2018; “The Color of Creditworthiness: Debt, Race, and Democracy in the 21 st
Century;” pgs. 149-156]//Adai *edited for language
III. Blackboxed Racism and the Return of the Debtor’s Prison

McClanahan reinforces the view of the debt economy as intractably social and political in her analysis of an advertising
campaign by FreeScore.com entitled “The Three Score Guys,” in which a consumer’s credit scores from all three major credit bureaus are
personified by men wearing black body suits emblazoned with each score.132 Two of the scores are good, depicted by handsome and athletic
white men, while one is lower, depicted by a short, tubby, balding man wearing a hockey mask (seemingly invoking the serial killer Jason from
the Friday the 13th horror films). McClanahan notes the visual contrast between fitness and fatness “registers the association
between personal responsibility and fiscal credibility .”133 In this ad the quantified measures of
creditworthiness/unworthiness are translated back into “ biopolitical norms ” associating physical fitness with
health/credibility and obesity with irresponsibility/profligacy.134 Most importantly, McClanahan also notes the ad’s
racialization : the men portraying the scores are “neutrally white precisely to avoid implying any essentialized link between particular
scores and particular ethnicities.”135 However the figures’ whiteness and maleness betray a “desperate attempt to disavow the link
between credit and race .”136

Here McClanahan raises the question of credit/ debt’s racialized management of “both the individual body and
the species body of the population” through the quantified techniques of credit scoring and control by
risk.137 Despite Lazzarato’s focus on debt as the site of contemporary class struggle, his insistence on the joint functioning of ethics and
economics to shape subjectivity, his concern over the alienating effects of the turn to “human capital,” and his attention to the dynamics of
“machinic enslavement” enacted through the credit infrastructure, nowhere does he concern himself with race, nor the racial politics of debt,
nor does he think to consider creditor-debtor relations in terms of the long history of settler colonialism ,
racial slavery , indebted servitude and various forms of ongoing accumulation by dispossession that we
explored, however briefly, in the previous chapter.

Lazzarato speaks of the injustice of humans being turned into money or capital, and the danger of modern forms of
enslavement without mentioning the actual history of racial capitalism and the slave economy in which, historian Walter Johnson remarks,
“Enslaved people were the capital ;” slaves performed the physical labor , the reproductive labor, and
acted as the collateral securing the circulation of credit necessary to keep the cotton planters in
business .138 Nor does Lazzarato mention slavery’s transformation, after Emancipation, to another regime of forced labor enacted and
legitimated by debt. Despite his mention of social subjection being supplemented by legal and police compulsion, he does not explore
contemporary connections between racialized indebtedness and mass incarceration. Perhaps, like Foucault, he suffers from a case of
Eurocentric myopia, but this does not excuse the glaring hole in his account because these phenomena certainly extend to Europe and beyond.
Lazzarato is not alone in this oversight; most of the critical literature on debt and finance remains silent on this question allowing the neoliberal
rhetoric of post-racialism and colorblindness to go unchallenged.

Perhaps then, couched in her criticism of Lazzarato and the burgeoning literature on debt, is McClanahan’s sense that the theoretical
scholarship has failed to attend to debt’s most brutal contemporary function as a vehicle for the
continuing racial domination of minority populations and as a covert tool of white supremacy . Racial
discrimination was not eliminated in the debt economy’s quantitative turn from the logic of
screening/exclusion to the logic of risk/inclusion; its methods were transformed to suit the new political-
economic reality of the post-Civil Rights era. As we will explore further in the next chapter, the turn to colorblindness, or as
David Theo Goldberg calls it, “racelessness,” developed first as an expression of the new civil rights regime, but then as a “reaction to state
commitment to affirmative action.”139 As we saw, in light of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and other legislation aimed at reducing
inequalities and exclusions in market practices, there was a move not so much to comply with the egalitarian spirit of the new legislation, but to
transform the credit rating and scoring process so as to appear as objective as possible by basing it on data about individualized behavior and
not on prejudiced subjective judgments. However, as Frank Pasquale suggests, the quantification of credit scoring does not
eliminate bias , but may actually serve to systematize it in hidden ways by “laundering past practices of
discrimination into a blackboxed score.”140 While neoliberal governmentality cleanses its discursive framework
of all overt mention of race (not to mention class, gender and other markers of difference and inequality), race continues to
function by and through the black boxes of the debt economy .141
The evidence of this can be viewed in the disproportionate effects of the subprime housing crash and foreclosure crisis on communities of
color. McClanahan cites a startling figure about the 2008 financial collapse: “every cent of the wealth accumulated by African American
households in the post-civil rights era was lost as a result of the collapse of home and investment values.”142 Housing policies and mortgage
lending that had excluded African Americans from accumulating wealth through the “prime” segment of the real estate market—confining
them to segregated neighborhoods through the practice of “redlining” in the first half of the 20th century—gave way to modes of predatory
inclusion in the mortgage market through racially targeted “subprime” lending, dubbed “reverse-redlining.”143 To note one prominent
example, Wells Fargo settled a Federal case in 2012 that accused it of practices that specifically targeted African Americans and Latinos [Latinx]
for “subprime” home loans with inflated and adjustable interest rates in Baltimore, Memphis, Oakland, Chicago, Cleveland and elsewhere.
Wells Fargo and other banks’ reverse redlining practices contributed to a wave of foreclosures after the 2008 financial crash that
disproportionately affected people of color,144 wiping away, in the words of one journalist, “two decades of slow progress.”145
The complaint revealed that Wells Fargo created a unit called the “Affinity Marketing Group,” based in Silver Spring, Maryland, that employed
African American loan officers to specifically target African Americans in and around Baltimore for subprime loans, which the team referred to
internally as “ghetto loans.”146 During the course of the housing boom, many more African American and Latino/a homeowners were pushed
into high-cost subprime mortgage credit than whites, even when they qualified for prime credit on better terms, and even when they weren’t
seeking credit in the first place.147 Putting the lie to banking and credit institutions’ own claims that the quantified techniques of credit scoring
do not discriminate based on race, gender, or class, McClanahan argues that the record shows that “the allocation and price of credit in the
United States are in fact stratified along precisely those lines.”148

How then does predatory inclusion in credit markets work to constitute and target racialized “subprime”
populations in spite of supposedly sophisticated, technical and colorblind techniques? McClanahan suggests the key is that an
individual borrower’s credit score is always calculated and understood in a statistical relation to “a
larger collective body . . . a group, a neighborhood, an economic class or, most often, a race.”149 The disproportionately
destructive effects of subprime credit on black and brown borrowers suggest that despite the use of
evaluation techniques calculating the terms of credit based on behavioral data, the interpretation of
these data remains socially and historically mediated and continues to determine one’s
creditworthiness based on stereotypical markers of race and class .150
To return for a moment to McClanahan’s reading of characterization in Super Sad, she suggests that while Shteyngart presents “excessively
particular data-persons” on the one hand, the “Credit Poles,” which read characters’ economic data from their “apparat” devices, use this data
to display racially and ethnically targeted ads.151 Hence the caricatures produced by an excess of data are reduced down to flattened
stereotypes depicting, for instance, all Chinese as miserly or all Latinos [Latinx] as spendthrift.152 Shteyngart’s novel shows how the internal
logic of credit scoring depends on stereotyping and racialization as a consequence of the imperative to reduce “an excess of data into a three-
digit score.”153

The model of control by risk seeks to include borrowers previously excluded from the marketplace (i.e.
African Americans historically redlined from credit), because there are profits to be made from the high interest rates
legally charged to “risky” borrowers with lower credit scores, as well as from the fees generated by securitizing
and selling their debt . Those targeted for “inclusion” in this way are constituted into the “stereotypical
category of the ‘subprime population’” which just so happens to correspond to same racialized
populations, particularly African Americans, who, since being emancipated from slavery, have been barred from owning property, indebted
to usurious landlords, criminalized and sold as convict labor and throughout been castigated by whites as profligate, unreliable, and
“undeserving” debtors.154

In his essay “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” Fred Moten argues that blackness has been associated at different
times throughout colonial history with the markers of “complete disorder” and “dereliction” such as
rape, crime, and AIDS, and now, in the contemporary United States, “whoever says ‘ subprime debtor’ says black as
well.”155 As we saw in the previous chapter, this is certainly nothing new. The subprime “crisis,” he argues, is simply the
“disruption and resocialization of an already given crisis”: that of the ongoing domination and
exploitation of black people by and through the white supremacist power relations of racial
capitalism .156 Neoliberal governmentality describes an open set of techniques and strategies which
maintain a highly unequal and racist social order under the legitimating cover of promoting,
deregulating and expanding competitive private markets and marketizing social and governmental
institutions – foremost among them the criminal justice system.157 Moten draws our attention to the wider history of struggle
in which the quantified neoliberal condemnation of blackness and attempt at racial control by debt is
situated.
The financialization of the commons perpetuates cognitive-linguistic neoliberal
violence in this space via the quantification of life itself. Computational capitalism’s
own conditions are its fatal flaw— always vulnerable to a systems disruption.
Jonathan Beller 17. Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Critical and Visual Studies at Pratt
Institute. “The Fourth Determination”. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/156818/the-fourth-
determination/
Spectral Politics and a New Money-Form: Global Post-Fordism as CGI

Computational capital has not ended racial capitalism ; it is an intensification of a viral modality of accumulation that
increasingly binds “civilization” to racializing violence. Computational capital has not dismantled racial capitalism’s vectors of oppression,
operational along the exacerbated fracture lines of social difference that include race, gender, sexuality, religion, nation, and class; it has
built itself and its machines out of those capitalized and technologized social differentiations . In short,
computational capital is the condition of possibility of the current conjuncture of hierarchical society that Silvia Federici aptly names “ The
System of Global Apartheid .” With intensified violence, the lived categories of race, gender, sexuality, nation, religion, disability, and
others are all mobilized, calibrated, and recalibrated across micro and macro domains, as logistics of extraction and control.
<<PHOTO AND CAPTION OMITTED>>

Consider the role of digitization and computation in reorganizing sign function and semiosis. In the twentieth century
quantification extends itself through the calculus of the image (film, television) and in the twenty first morphs again
into social media, where “communication” itself becomes a value-extractive process.1 The triumph of the touchscreen is the explosive advance
of the screen interface, further transforming semiosis into a deterritorialized, distributed factory , advancing the
thoroughgoing quantification of the life-world that began with the medium of money and the plantocratic and industrial
institutionalization of wage labor. Communication-as-means-of-expression, organization, aspiration, and liberation is captured in advance, by
means of digitization on platforms that operate as fixed capital , and is converted in real time to communication -as-means-
of- domination-and-control . In financialized informatic space, you can send your message, but at a price—and it is not only you that
will pay. Taken as a whole, the communications infrastructure is a medium of accumulation for the few and of dispossession for the many.

The celebrity and the celebrity leader, a condensation and mobilization of massive attention, is one type of output of this system, and masses of
people dispossessed of both the proceeds of their creativity and of the traditional commons is another. Such capture and deployment of
attentional capital by means of the celebrity-form marks a significant shift in the dominant mode of production while specifying a relation
between attention economies, coloniality, and cult. The mediological model of ambient computation functioning as a calculus of value has
become paradigmatic for industries subject to derivative pricing, wherein nearly all activities are subject to dynamic pricing and speculation.
From the poor Indian farmer to the self-styled Instagram model, everyone manages their assets in an semio-economic zone characterized on
the content-provider side by precarity, volatility, and risk. Care and attention are bundled and recut, and their surplus value moves up the
hierarchy. The algorithmic parsing of Facebook “likes” by the company Cambridge Analytica, which allowed the Trump campaign to send
surgically tailored messages to precisely profiled target audiences in the US, is one affordance alienated expression makes available to the
wealthy. Wealth is another.

Global semiosis has been systemically captured, extracted , and abstracted by financialized
computational media. Planet-wide hierarchized sociality places attention on the market, incentivizing fractal accumulation through
generalized algorithmic expropriation. The result is what I call computational capital . Considered as a process, computational

capital includes both the logistics of self-aggrandizement and visibility , as well as those of disavowal and
invisibility . In the same way that the process of industrial capital included both the celebration of work, and, in the moment of crisis, its
refusal—in the form of a strike or a lockout—so, too, does the cycle of computational capital include both the celebration of representation and
its refusal. And much more. As Allen Feldman shows regarding the production of “the terrorist” at Guantanamo, subjects are not just
disappeared but blurred, ontologies are both erased and reinscribed from without.2 Such practices are perceptible symptoms of the intensive
vectors of appropriation and dispossession that characterize contemporary sociality in the world-media system. However, the consequences of
feeding human emotion and cognition into binary machines responsible for manipulating and leveraging these
feelings and ideas in the service of accumulation go well beyond the screen. If fractal celebrity is really just a subgenre of fractal fascism, it is
because the crises of the “ old capitals ,” especially merchant and industrial capitals—think of the proverbial “downtown
destroyed by Walmart” or the “devastated factory town”—produce a reactionary politics every bit as sensational as the follies of the beautiful
class. Computational capital can accumulate across crises of a more traditional political-economic kind by
converting crises into attractions, or what Debord called spectacle.

Analogous to the land- and water-based commons that was planet earth, the cognitive-linguistic , the
visual-poetic, and the imagination have undergone massive colonial expropriations , following immediately
upon their separation and “liberation” from traditional ties to the body, and have entered directly into capitalist servitude. Bernard Stiegler
refers to this phenomenon of cognitive collapse and short-termist thinking, organized by what he refers to as mnemotechnologies
(technologies of memory that include print, cinema, and computation), as the “ proletarianization of the senses .” This follows
upon and overlaps with the proletarianization of the masses by the long industrial revolution and the capture and unspeakable violation of
designated bodies by the slave trade. These aggressive and oftentimes annihilating encroachments on corporality,
the senses, and the linguistic commons , achieved by cybernetic means , are mediological and technical phenomena
as much as they are sociopolitical ones. Put another way, the mediological and the technical have been sociopolitical all along—to such an
extent that with the level of technical saturation present today, “the political” has been lost.3 The “ loss of the political ” is an
acknowledgement of the subsumption of policies and programs by capitalized financial calculus that
chains representation to the process of accumulation. What indeed can “political” mean in a world increasingly characterized by algorithmic
governance and platform sovereignty, that is, where capitalist power is increasingly automated, and discursive and affective labor is posited as
a mere subroutine of capitalized computational processes—as engines of value creation? What of the political when “ politics ”
has become a subroutine of computational capital and its discourses and actions are a modality of value extraction? It is
an old lesson but it still applies (and we can see it from Israel to Burma): if subalterns use the same media and therefore modes of
value extraction as oppressors in their struggles, then politics is simply a war over who will get the
spoils of exploitation.

The expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic by capital reduces discursive production —including the discourse of politics—
to the subroutine of an abstract machine . This “machine,” though abstract, is nonetheless functional and material—we recognize it as
the increasingly ubiquitous, increasingly networked computer or discrete state machine, but we must not see it as mere technology. The
universal Turing machine, which when unified posits what I call the World Computer (“the invisible hand” codified as AI), has become

the preeminent form of fixed capital . Machinic enslavement, whether to the assembly line, to the “media,” or to the computer, is
indeed enslavement by other means, though we must insist that many of the “older” methods of extraordinary servitude stubbornly persist and
the pain, like the profit, remains unevenly distributed.

<<PHOTO AND CAPTION OMITTED>>

Inequality, now sedimented into institutions and machines as materialized abstractions and designed into apparatuses, operationalizes
historically variegated injustice, to produce and reproduce a planetary culture that at bottom is founded upon racism, gender

inequality, national and cultural codifications, modern slavery, and a near total dispossession for billions. Machines , too, must be
understood as racial formations . Given the data-logical nature of financialized systems underpinning “cultural” expression and
iterated in and as machines, it is no surprise that Facebook’s machine-learning algorithm “ Deep Face ” imaged the
minimally recognizable human face as that of a white man.
Converting social life and social history into digital information and digital machines facilitates the as yet un-transcendable program of
quantification that runs parallel to social-historical processes of social differentiation for the purpose of accumulation. The social
emerges not as an abstract idea, but as a concrete substrate of computation . Sociality is posited then
programmed as a series of leveraged accumulation strategies operating above or below or explicitly in and through everyday consciousness.
Public faces are forms of data visualization and, circulating as images, are both programs and programmable. Bodies become
“ necessary media ” of machinic digital operations that require from us (us bodies) attention, cognition, neuro-power,
virtuosity, and sheer survival. As the auto-enthnography that is critical theory in the West might indicate, the remainders—interiorities and isles
of awareness that fall away from informatic throughput—are in large part melancholic, cynical, disaffected, and abject laments.

The rise of actually existing digitality thus appears as inseparable from the development and intensification of
capitalism , that is, of media technologies as media of capital, which is also to say as media for the leveraging of agency and representation,
such that decisions are made hierarchically and systemically while many aspects of life become almost unrepresentable
and thus also unknown and unknowable. The ordinary taxonomies of social history continue to index zones and inflection points of this total
and in certain definitive respects totalitarian process of digital enclosure. Our situation is effectively one of platform totalitarianism in which
(the social ) metabolism itself is captured by a leveraged exchange with capital and our media and machines are not
only social relations but racial formations. This leveraged exchange of metabolism for forms of currency at rates set by platform capitalism is
managed by ambient and ubiquitous computation, an electro-mechanical network that is composed primarily of fixed capital. The skeins of
accumulation by means of informatic uptake lay closely upon body, mind, and time, and what value is extracted are the products of these.
Thought and feeling are rendered quantifiable, computable, and indeed programmable. However, it is always a mistake to imagine
that the impact of technology flows only in one direction : technical form emerges in a dialectics of domination and
metabolic capture of what was once called labor power and
struggle. The global, technical evolution in the scale and granularity of the
social cooperation—a capture that fragments and cellularizes populations as well as bodies, minds, and neural networks— is not without
its emancipatory potentials , as a Benjamin or a Brecht might remind us were they alive today. “The bad new things” are built out of
and in response to new forms of struggle, and as Antonio Negri has always emphasized, the innovations of
capitalist techné come from below , from the ways that the oppressed outflank domination and persist in living.
<<PHOTO AND CAPTION OMITTED>>

Towards a Reclamation of Value

How then to investigate the capture and neutralization of the political domain and its uncountable longings by media-interfaced Computational
Capitalism? How to transform and reprogram the failing powers of analysis, sensibility, and action such that they may function beyond the
horizon of capitalist control? Four main hypothesis can guide us: 1) Computational Capitalism is an ambient financial calculus of value extraction
working through any and all media. 2) Computational Capitalism is a development of Racial Capitalism and is thus also Computational
Colonialism: vectors of race, gender, nation, sexuality, and other forms of social difference have been configured by and as strategies of value
extraction and, like “structural racism,” have been sedimented into the operating systems and machine architectures of our machines. 3) The
specter of revolution is everywhere visible if one knows how to see it. 4) For the first time in history a
thoroughgoing revolution is possible that does not replicate the failed strategies of the radical break so tragically characteristic of twentieth-
century revolutionary movements, but instead works to decolonize computation by transforming the money-form
from within.
I take it as axiomatic that the items telegraphically listed in the previous paragraph have become inseparable. What we thought of simply as
computation is in fact computational capital—a supple and adaptive machine-mediated calculus on the social metabolism, one that can be
gleaned through a deeper reflection on the notion of convergence. To illustrate aspects of convergence, we note that racialization and
nationalization, along with regimes of gender, sexuality, borders, and incarceration, are part and parcel of the overall process of corporeal
inscription, codification, and programmatic control endemic to digitization. Niche marketing and profiling are but two of the ways in which our
bodies and practices are coded for capitalist and state-capitalist processing. One could add here the attempted subsumption of entire
demographics under codifications indexed by “thug” and “terrorist.” Historical codes, including but not limited to race, gender, nation, class,
and sexuality, are inscribed on our bodies, read, written, and rewritten by informatic machines. This functionalization of social difference
(representational, biometric), to say nothing of the branding and scarring of bodies that is both past and present at so many levels, serves both
as a means and a medium of capitalization and value extraction and as a necessary substrate to the development of computation.4 Within and
at the scenes of inscription, the code works us and we work the code —again with historically overdetermined
statistical variance. This is how it is at both the micro and the macro levels of struggle and organization. IBM’s role in the Holocaust, to
give but one example, must also be understood as the Holocaust’s role in IBM and in the development of Hollerith punch cards and
computational architectures, including search engines. Sociality and global lifetimes themselves have become the conditions of possibility for
what, writ large, is the totalitarian emergence of the World Computer. That is why no
existing political discourse can approach
this horizon because current concepts and the activities of thought itself are fully circumscribed by it—ideas themselves have
become operators (media) fully functionalized by and in the matrix of information.

Understanding the transformation of semiotic process by information functioning as a form of capital, we can take the general formula for capital M-C-M’ (where M is money, C is commodity and, M’ is a greater quantity of money)
and rewrite it as M-I-C-I’-M’, where I is image and C is code.5 The commodity as a distributed social relation has, with computation, become both produced and distributed in nonlinear networked operations that, unlike the
assembly line, depend upon digital forms of attention, cognition, images, and codes for full valorization. This dependence on transformed conditions of labor germane to the social factory is (now) true even of older forms of
production (e.g., automobiles) inasmuch as they are also networked in the world of information, advertising, Instagram, and the like. The valuation of a commodity requires a calculus of the image that modifies code, as does any
interaction that transfers rights and value to said commodity (what used to be called sales). Production, circulation, valuation are all mediated by image and code, and that mediation occurs on a global scale. As the Anthropocene
and its derivative concepts might testify, little or nothing remains untouched by this process of computational capital that penetrates down to the level of atoms. Here I want to propose further that this formula can be further
modified to read M-I-M’, where I is information. To put this modification simply, money becomes more money through the movement of discrete state machines, the motor force of which is ultimately the bios (what was once
thought of as the human life-world) struggling to survive its informatic capture. Labor becomes informatic labor and, as I endeavor to show in The Message is Murder, M-I-M’ means less that the commodity is one form of
information, and more that the domain of intelligibility known as “information” directly emerges in the footprint of the value-form.6

Data visualization by computational processes screen-interfaced with the bios is a fundamental condition of the current regime of accumulation sometimes called post-Fordism. In generating M’ from M, it also effects what Paolo
Virno calls “the communism of capital.” The programmable image as a worksite transforms and colonizes nearly all mental, sensual, and neuronal process while submitting them to interoperable regimes of background
monetization. This financialization of everyday life, where everyone is forced to continuously throughput information in order to manage volatility and risk, facilitates a machinic enslavement profoundly enabled by and integrated
with inherited forms of oppression. Navigating the matrix of capital-information is not an option, it is a matter of survival.

Somewhere along the way, “consumer society” and “conspicuous consumption” became a semiotic game of survival. In the dominant order, these encodings are among the terms of wealth and power and only those who strive to
organize in accord with a different order (or disorder) altogether have more than an inkling that there are better ways to be. We are dealing with the failure of revolutions, the overcoding of bodies and practices, and the absorption
of political energy by strategies of accumulation. Computational capital names the integration of discrete state machines with fixed capital and sociality such that Marx’s “vast automaton” has become a global financialized socio-
cybernetic system. “Politics” has been operationally reduced to a mere subroutine in the encroachment of this computationally integrated system on planetary life, and as Harney and Moten have pointedly underscored, “politics”
and “policy” are today always on the side of the state—and the state is a state of capital.

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Towards a New Money-Form

Whether or not there exists a real possibility of noncapitalist computational communization depends on the following question: Can we write
code for the undercommons? We risk this question here.

The long history of commodification, and the quantification that capitalism has gradually imposed on nearly everything
over the past seven hundred years, reaches a higher state of complexity in and through digitality. What we now call digital culture (Digital
Culture 2 or DC2) is the result of the longue-durée digitization of global life imposed by capital (DC1). Capital, as Nick Dyer-Witheford puts it
with electrifying clarity, was always already a computer.7 The systematic, antidemocratic exploitation of life-energy as quantitative capital
accumulation (colonialism, slavery, industrialization, imperialism), and the qualitative spectral legacies and insurgent sensibilities of
anticapitalist struggles broadly conceived (decolonization, feminist, antiracist, queer, neuro-diverse), are always already
situated within a matrix of emerging digital systems . The struggle with digitality so understood implies that many of the
terms of historical struggles and newly emergent pleasures of the past seven centuries were organized in large part by the logistics of money as
capital—money, it must be underscored, as a medium of racial capitalism and as a medium that extends in and through the informatics of
computational capital. Money that is reincarnated as information.

The three classical determinations of money—money as measure, medium, and capital—have been utilized to leverage power and construct
the built environment, including the domain of computation, but as screen interfaces intimate, new forms of currency such as likes and other
attention metrics have arisen to index screen-mediated value transactions. In addition to measure (price), medium (circulation), and capital
(surplus-value extraction), these digital metrics indexing new orders of digital transactions (e.g., likes) are not incidental but forecast a
transformation of the money-form adequate to the transformation of labor (which for the early Marx was always sensuous labor) by
screen cultures and screen technologies—be that labor manual, immaterial, affective, sensual, cognitive, whatever. In the
development of new forms of incentivization and recognition, we can clearly see that money as “general equivalent” and “general form of
social wealth” is being reworked in these techno-cultural shifts. Attention is harvested and brokered on platforms such as Google and Facebook
(and now by Steemit and Mozilla’s Basic Attention Token); this brokerage is in fact the business of these computational formations, and it is this
harvesting of attention, which must be measured, parsed, bundled, and sold, that produces shareholder (and in the latter cases token-holder)
value. Bitcoin and Ethereum, and at this point several hundred other crypto-currencies, have further abstracted and formalized schemas for the
monetization of sociality; indeed, their market caps are digitized aggregations of semiotic speculations regarding the futurity of their
communities. These currency platforms are in fact far more like Google and Facebook than is commonly understood. They are similar in that
they encrypt new forms of participation and potentiality in platforms that provide emergent forms of empowerment for their participants and
thereby produce economic value. However, rather than serving as a therapeutic medium of entertainment/access (as with TV), or of
expression/communication/access (as with Google and Facebook), which in each case siphons profits to third-party owners through the direct
financialization of the qualities of attention brought by participants, the participants are stakeholders. Thus many of the new crypto
communities enable a cooperative relation to money in all senses of that word.
Nonetheless, as financial media, crypto-currencies may be seen at present as an extremely narrow medium of expression since rather than broad-spectrum cultural relations (as with Facebook) participants engage primarily in
financial speculation, and only secondarily in the qualitative offerings of a rather limited number of projects involving notions of decentralization, AI, various investing formats, data storage, and the like. On the other hand, crypto,
with its publications, slack channels, meet-ups, start-up spaces, etc., could be seen as abstracting and harnessing with participants the general form of social media. It therefore represents a pared-down and more crystalline
platform template for potentially all activities that transpire on social media, but with an important twist: equity for media participants. Thus, in the most generous reading, crypto-currencies function as a medium that cooperatizes
social relations by giving users a share of the value of the platform they collectively create, rather than extracting their subjective energies as quantum units of value that then belong to third-party shareholders. Participant
ownership of tokens is not only a right to money, a quantity of value; it is equity in the platform—direct ownership of a share of the social product.
A currency such as Bitcoin is thus both means of payment in the pedestrian sense of something one can spend, and equity in the sense that a stock or private property is equity. Because crypto-currencies are not “fiat currencies,”
they do not rely on states and militaries for their backing; rather they rely on their perceived social utility—a multifaceted and distributed perception that is encrypted in the blockchain-distributed permanent ledger and
cryptographically secured by the vast computational network.

As a computationally secure currency-equity that does not rely on state regulation and indeed elides it, these monetary platforms can, on the one hand, be seen to harmonize with the long-suffering but never-dying ideology of the
landed gentry that sees every attempt at centralization as a move by the crown against the lords. This makes cryptos attractive for the intellectual descendants of the Austro-German ruling classes in particular, of which the “three
vons”—von Bohm Bowerk, von Mises, and von Hayek—are perhaps the most well-known. In the US these descendants identify as “libertarians,” and as David Golumbia has noted, their rantings about central banking are frequently
just one small step removed from their forbearers’ rantings about Jews. However, in appealing to the notion that “code is law” or to the notion that vested participants control crypto-currencies whose functionalized existence
resides on the globally distributed machines of participants, the platforms aim to create platform sovereignty—a sort of planetary Magna Carta limiting the capricious cruelties of the global meta-sovereign known as the US Federal
Reserve.

<<PHOTO AND CAPTION OMITTED>>

This schizoid dispensation partially explains the difficulty of locating crypto-currencies in relation to “capitalism,” which, as a term, mixes up the distinct lineages of bourgeois and aristocratic thinking, along with anarcho-communist
critique. And it does nothing to address the crypto demographic, which is by and large many of the same people you find in banking and tech around the world, although here, in some cases, with a cypherpunk inflection. Significant
questions like these however do not need to be decided in order to recognize the space opened up within the system by the invention of the blockchain. Beneath the Ron Paul bumper sticker one can find a number of currencies
invested in creating an institutional galaxy of unprecedented transparency and accountability, along with introducing radical decentralization. If the blockchain has an ideological grandfather, it is probably Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
This time, however, decentralized information processing and smart contracts may allow chits (tokens) linked to social qualities to outperform and/or otherwise resist market monetization controlled by media cartels and banks.
Platform cooperatives may just be better places to render creative power than the current post-Fordist options. Their conviviality may draw more and more activity away from extractive economies and begin to hollow them out. A
buildout of platform cooperatives using programmable money to create social architectures designed by collectives who set the terms of their own participation might provided sustainable formats for collective creativity. These
newly designed economic spaces would be preferable to the precarity and job contraction of the present-day capitalist economy.

Finance has long been a bad word on the left, and for very good reasons. It has consisted of instruments designed principally to extract private wealth from the organization of collective needs in unapologetically hierarchical ways.
Though it feels risky to say, this situation of finance may not amount to the transhistorical truth of financial instrumentation. Trotsky, some may recall, believed that metrics of valuation were necessary for the transition to
communism and, in apparent agreement with Hayek, thought that no discourse-only committee could be adequate to a planned economy because it could not possibly process enough information. If finance has to date been
nothing less than a sustained assault on the well-being of the traditional modes of life, this has everything to do with its programming, and its program.

Certainly now is the time to create money designed to stoke demand for new financial tools for activists, collectives, social movements, artists, refugees, and all who struggle for a life worth living so that they might catch and keep
their own value for themselves. Along with all traditionally remunerated and unremunerated forms of making, reading, writing, speaking, watching, and caring, protesting, loving, and fleeing could all be token-generative such that
there was no third party between socially cooperative labor and value abstraction. In short, society has advanced technologically to the point where it is conceivable, if not quite yet practicable, for sensuous labor to take on an
abstract value-form overlay without passing through exploitation, extraction, and accumulation, that is, without passing through wage labor or extractive new media. In effect, binding token issuance to qualitative activities would
give ordinary people the power to create derivatives based upon their communitarian practices.

With crypto-currency designed in accord with the historical demands of social protest, we are on the brink of a new determination of money, a fourth determination, that if properly engineered may also and at long last require the
tools for a decolonization of money and the hollowing out of capital. Out of a process that in a few short centuries has resulted in a world in which eight billionaires have more wealth than fully half the planetary population, we
may formulate a problem, remembering the words of Marx: “Mankind sets forth only such problems as it can solve.” In a planet stochastically governed by the informatics of computational capital, it is possible to decentralize and
reprogram platform sovereignty such that centralized and hierarchizing value extraction is not universal. Shockingly, in a moment when politics seems to have ceased to produce anything other than spectacular conflict generative
of profits for elites and misery for the majority, the end of capitalism is conceivable without also having to imagine the end of the world.

Can we have value abstraction without value extraction? Financial tools (central banks, securitization, currency controls, large-scale payment systems, loans, derivatives, printing money) currently belong to the rich, but it is now (or
should be) possible to create distributed financial instruments that can serve activist organizations, subaltern groups, marginalized people(s), refugees—the non-rich and even the dispossessed. But we do not know for how long
this window will remain open. Imagine a platform in which, without making a financial investment in money, an activist group could issue a token to support a boycott or to protest the criminalization of race. Participants could
receive tokens in accord with protocols they decide upon and supporters could invest in the project buy buying tokens. As the groups activity became increasingly vital, its economy would expand.

In existing post-Fordist economies, we have come to understand that our very metabolism is slated as productive of value ,
and not only in the obvious ways. We are now familiar with the idea that through discursive and corporeal social cooperation with the
hegemonic scripts of capitalist production (whether willing, coerced, or unconscious), we generate value for capitalists, but we
must also become aware that we do more of the same through our enclosure in apparatuses of surveillance, geolocation, and ambient
computation that enable the constant generation of metadata. In our precarity we produce the means of survival and of life, and yet most
of what we make is extracted (alienated) and accumulated elsewhere. What if we could capture these forms of value for
ourselves ? What if we could set the terms of our own valuation and, in setting the terms of valuation, requalify value—restore and retain
its qualitative dimension? This would mean collectively designing social architectures of interaction that foster collectively
held values.
To fully grasp the urgency and the possibility that opens a new horizon, we must confront head on the aporia that is “the political” in the world-
historical conjuncture known as the digital. We must reckon with the difficult reality that no matter how much we would like it to be otherwise,
“the political” alone will not solve the world-historical problems of abiding injustice and runaway climate change because it has been
thoroughly financialized by capitalism. We will require a clear understanding of how deeply bound planetary life is to computational media, an
unwavering surety that there is no return to a simpler past, and a brave conviction that prior forms of revolution and revolutionary war no
longer suffice.

To these ends, the fourth determination of money contains the possibility of restarting the promised and
then forestalled achievement of economic and social equality by the digitization of media, culture, and society. This analysis runs contrary to
the rampant boosterism so prevalent since the rise of digital computing and instead sees an activist engagement with computation and finance
as a necessary and indeed urgent complement to would-be political endeavors. Contrary not just to advertising and journalism, but also to
nearly all the literature on digitality up until the past few years or so, we must conceive digitality not as a self-
evolving, isolated process bent upon freedom, but as condition and outcome of blanket financialization and bodily-mental incorporation by
capitalism; it is, in short, a condition and strategy of exploitative accumulation bound up in the dialectics of political economy. To be sure,
these digital strategies have been met with resistance; indeed, innovation is arguably driven by resistance, and also by
social practices that outflank the immediate capacities of capitalism and capitalized media technologies. Nonetheless, as advertising teaches us
so well, technologies and cultural forms (e.g., Hollywood cinema or the commercialization of hip-hop) have also evolved to
capture resistance and utopian/revolutionary desire and turn liberatory aspirations into profits for shareholders.
The rise of computation and the attention economy created a whole new set of opportunities for value-capture. Self-consciously or not,
informatics has always been an economic science, and informatics has overtaken communication in a wholesale way. Thus, without quite being
aware of why or how, many and perhaps all of us have been adrift in a cognitive, affective, and structural transformation of planetary
proportions that increasingly seems to have commandeered our futures.

The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal

redistribution by establishing a universal basic income through mutual debt.

Understand communist distribution not as “to each according to his ability, to each
according to his need” but rather as hapticality — the sharing of indebtedness so we
may feel through others and so others may feel through us.
Moten & Harney ’13 [Fred Moten; professor of performance studies at the Tisch School of the Arts;
Stefano Harney; professor of Strategic Management Education at Singapore Management University;
2013; “Fantasy in the Hold;” The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study; pgs. 97-99]//ADai
HAPTICALITY, OR LOVE

Never being on the right side of the Atlantic is an unsettled feeling, the feeling of a thing that unsettles with others. It’s a feeling, if you ride with
it, that produces a certain distance from the settled, from those who determine themselves in space and time, who locate themselves in a
determined history. To have been shipped is to have been moved by others , with others . It is to feel at
home with the homeless , at ease with the fugitive , at peace with the pursued , at rest with the ones
who consent not to be one. Outlawed, interdicted, intimate things of the hold, containerized contagion, logistics externalises
logic itself to reach you, but this is not enough to get at the social logics, the social poesis, running
through logisticality.
Because while certain abilities – to connect, to translate, to adapt, to travel – were forged in the experiment of hold, they were not the point.
As David Rudder sings, “how we vote is not how we party.” The hold’s terrible gift was to gather dispossessed feelings
in common, to create a new feel in the undercommons . Previously, this kind of feel was only an exception, an aberration,
a shaman, a witch, a seer, a poet amongst others, who felt through others, through other things. Previously, except in these instances, feeling
was mine or it was ours. But in the hold, in the undercommons of a new feel, another kind of feeling became common. This
form of
feeling was not collective , not given to decision, not adhering or reattaching to settlement, nation,
state, territory or historical story; nor was it repossessed by the group, which could not now feel as one,
reunifed in time and space. No, when Black Shadow sings “are you feelin’ the feelin?’’ he is asking about something else.
He is asking about a way of feeling through others , a feel for feeling others feeling you. This is
modernity’s insurgent feel , its inherited caress, its skin talk, tongue touch, breath speech, hand laugh.
This is the feel that no individual can stand, and no state abide. This is the feel we might call hapticality .

Hapticality , the touch of the undercommons , the interiority of sentiment, the feel that what is to come is here.
Hapticality, the capacity to feel though others , for others to feel through you, for you to feel them
feeling you, this feel of the shipped is not regulated, at least not successfully, by a state, a religion, a people, an empire, a
piece of land, a totem. Or perhaps we could say these are now recomposed in the wake of the shipped. To feel others is unmediated,
immediately social , amongst us, our thing, and even when we recompose religion, it comes from us, and even when we
recompose race, we do it as race women and men. Refused these things, we
first refuse them, in the contained, amongst the contained,
lying together in the ship, the boxcar, the prison, the hostel. Skin, against epidermalisation, senses touching. Thrown
together touching each other we were denied all sentiment, denied all the things that were supposed to
produce sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home. Tough forced to touch and be
touched, to sense and be sensed in that space of no space , though refused sentiment, history and
home, we feel (for) each other .

A feel, a sentiment with its own interiority, there on skin, soul no longer inside but there for all to hear , for all to
move. Soul music is a medium of this interiority on the skin, its regret the lament for broken hapticality,
its self-regulatory powers the invitation to build sentimentality together again, feeling each other
again, how we party . This is our hapticality, our love . This is love for the shipped, love as the shipped.

There’s a touch, a feel you want more of, which releases you. The closest Marx ever got to the general antagonism was when he said
“from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” but we have read this as the
possession of ability and the possession of need . What if we thought of the experiment of the hold as the
absolute fluidity , the informality, of this condition of need and ability? What if ability and need were in constant play
and we found someone who dispossessed us so that this movement was our inheritance. Your love makes me strong, your love makes me
weak. What if “the between the two,” the lost desire, the articulation, was this rhythm, this inherited experiment of the shipped in the churning
waters of flesh and expression that could grasp by letting go ability and need in constant recombination. If
he moves me, sends me,
sets me adrift in this way, amongst us in the undercommons. So long as she does this, she does not have
to be.
Who knows where Marx got this inheritance of the hold, from Aristotle denying his slave world or Kant talking to sailors or Hegel’s weird auto-
eroticism or just being ugly and dark and fugitive. Like Zimmy says, precious angel, you know both our forefathers were slaves, which is not
something to be ironic about. This
feel is the hold that lets go (let’s go) again and again to dispossess us of ability,
fill us with need, give us ability to fill need, this feel. We hear the godfather and the old mole calling us to become, in
whatever years we have, philosophers of the feel.

The role of ballot is to endorse study as praxis.

Moten & Harney ’21 [Fred Moten; professor of performance studies at the Tisch School of the Arts;
Stefano Harney; professor of Strategic Management Education at Singapore Management University;
5/20/2021; “Plantocracy and Communism;” https://illwill.com/plantocracy-and-communism]//ADai
1.

Foucault presents his ‘tips’ on non-fascist living in anticipation of a cultivation of the self he may well have seen as a counter-strategy to the
production of the individual.1 But he sends his self-help text into a world of interpersonal relations, one he also documents in his account of the
intimate rise of neoliberalism. Another way to say this is that he sends his text into the mouth of democratic despotism. Neoliberalism
was nothing other than the completion of the Southern strategy , as Nixon and his aides refined it. The Southern strategy was
of course never simply about the Southern United States. It was about the global hegemony of the planters. A global plantocracy
made possible by democratic despotism . In this regard, Nixon’s United States political strategy is an extension of the Dulles
brothers’ foreign policy, which was in turn a transnational echo of the repression of “Black reconstruction in America.”

Neoliberalism sealed the global deal on democratic despotism. As Du Bois explains, democratic despotism was an innovative
form of the global color line . Workers would be designated as white and offered deputy positions in
the rule of each country, in exchange for aligning with the ruling classes against people of color inside
and outside the borders of that nation. But in reading Du Bois we see a second dimension to this deputization,
securing the deal through a promised, though always thwarted, individuation for these workers.

Or, today, for these homeowners. That is, democratic despotism was also about the democratization of despotism.
We have referred to this democratization as policy . But such a hacked word should not hide the brutality of the agreement.
Each of these persons was offered the opportunity to individuate through despotic violence against blackness (best understood, here, as the
refusal of refused access to the unity of whiteness and personhood). Indeed, this despotic violence was the core
manufacturing process of the thwarted individual . The production of white people on an industrial
scale required this democratization of despotism. Of course, signing up to a world of despotism, proving one’s ‘self’ through
ongoing predatory violence against those who claim the differences they enact, required accepting the democratization of despotism as a
general principle, and that meant accepting it in the military, in the state, and especially at work – as, in other
words, Fordism , and later, logistical capitalism , each of which, in their own way, necessitate and manufacture a
brutal little dictator in every workplace. And once despotism is accepted by white people, in and as every little ritual of
their own self-acceptance, all of which amount to an endless lag, an eternal deferral, the interpersonal becomes the only way
to mollify it. If interpersonal relations form the reservoir of whiteness into which the people tap for dead energy and
unsustainable sustenance, then the intersectional becomes the only way for the ones who wait on waiting,
whose doubly interminable wait takes the form of critique , to mollify the constantly redoubled despotism they face.
Either way, every body waits in vain .

But the interpersonal is not only not up to the task of mollification, it actually reproduces and refines thwarted
individuation and democratic despotism . These are the conditions under which the Southern strategy
flourished ; this is the spread soil of the plantocracy. And now, the pulling down of the Confederate statue proves the
strategy has triumphed. The global plantocracy reigns when the monuments walk, and rampage, like pattyrollers in the form of men. But how
can we call Foxconn or Goldman Sachs planters ? Because they work to fulfill the condition of any and all plantocracies.
Planters try to control and concentrate all the land, all the water, all the air, all the food, animals, and
plants. Pushing people into factories was just a temporary tactic in this control and concentration, not the
endgame . Marxism misunderstands this . The endgame is that no one can survive outside their rule, that
everyone and everything must walk into the jaws of the planter or, in other words, that the earth itself is what must be
consumed . Finance is completely explicit about using its menacing means to do this. So is logistics . They
are sciences of the planter. But understanding this regime as a plantocracy thriving in the individuating violence of democratic despotism does
not lead to the thought that there is no outside to the world.

It leads to finding some land to share and with which to share. Because in
the face of this despotism we need somewhere to
really care , which is the collective destruction of the interpersonal , and with and through it the delusion of
the individual, in open practices of welcome and visitation. That cannot be done in conflict with the plantocracy, where the interpersonal,
or freedom, or non-fascist living, becomes our faulty weapon. It is a battle that can only be won in the militant , self-

defensive, self-annihilative retreat of the new attackers. And given the nature of the rule under plantocracy, retreat
means finding land that is fugitive from the rule over land, water, air, etcetera, and then setting that land up anautonomously enough to start
the treatment. That land may be a squatted garage in the city or an abandoned mill in the countryside. That treatment may entail forming a
band, hosting a barbeque, a dance and a drink. It may be a farm and a daycare, an experimental writing collective, or a mechanics shop. Any
form of detoxification from the interpersonal. There will be no allies, no citations, no counter-portraiture. Every aggression will be massive. And
when we win, blackness will rain in sun showers while the time disappears.

2.
It is difficult for those of us coming out of the black radical tradition to embrace the currently popular timeline on fascism. If fascism is back, as
the common sense in Europe and the United States seems to insist, when did it go away? In the 50s with Apartheid and Jim Crow? In the 60s
and 70s? – not for Latin Americans. In the 80s? – not for Indonesians or the Congolese. In the 90s? – the decade of intensified carceral state
violence against black people in the United States? We don’t mean to deny fascism’s particular mix of lingering and resurgence in Europe, which
became the supposed anti-fascist’s attitude as soon the immigrant began the task of rebuilding Europe in the wake of the last of its racial
capitalist self-destructions; but we do want to say something about the fundamental difference between a common life and undercommon
living because we adhere to the black radical tradition’s expanded sense of fascism’s historical trajectory and geographical reach.

The idea of the commons as a set of resources and relations that we, as otherwise exploited and expropriated
people, build or protect, manage or exploit , creates and follows on from several assumptions. First and foremost is the
assumption that we could ever be anything but already shared and already sharing. Indeed, the condition
of our ability to share is that we are shared. In other words, we are not individuals who decided to enter into relations with or
through the commons. The commons cannot gather us . We are already gathered, as we are already dispersed and interspersed.
The idea of the commons leads to the presumption of interpersonal relations, and therefore of the person as an independent, strategic agent.
Such persons make not just commons, but states and nations, in this worldview.

The undercommons is the refusal of the interpersonal , and by extension the international, upon which politics is built.
To be undercommon is to live incomplete in the service of a shared incompletion , which acknowledges and
insists upon the inoperative condition of the individual and the nation as these brutal and unsustainable fantasies and all of the material effects
they generate oscillate in the ever-foreshortening interval between liberalism and fascism. These inoperative forms still try to operate through
us.

If the undercommons is not the commons, if the new word implies something inadequate about the old word, then it would be in this: that
the undercommons is not a collection of individuals-in-relation , which is precisely how the commons
has traditionally been theorized. We were trying to see something underneath the individuation that the commons bears, and
hides, and tries to regulate. It is what is given in the impossibility of the one and the exhaustion of the very idea of the one. What if the practice
of common life isn’t about new definitions of power and new relations across difference? What if the very idea of new
definitions of power /new relations across difference is nothing other than an alienation machine ?
3.

What would happen if every time people used the word ‘ university’ it came out sounding like ‘ factory’ ?
Why do people think working in the university is special? The university is a gathering of chances and resources; a cache of weapons and
supplies; a concentration of dangers and pitfalls . It’s not a place to occupy or to inhabit; it’s a place to work , to get in

and out of with such rapidity and rapacious purpose that it disappears in that its boundaries disappear. All of that work ought to be
securing the capacity to use those resources and to take those chances and to pass them around to the
extent that they are useful . It’s not a point on a line. It’s not an aspirational beginning or end; it’s a respirational organ that is all but
certainly laced with malignancy. It requires us to consider, as if it actually had something to do with us , what
farmworkers think of working on a farm, before that activity is congealed into the achievement of the identity ‘farmer.’ In this regard, the
undercommons is not , except incidentally, about the university ; and the undercommons is crucially about a
sociality not based on the individual . Nor, again, would we describe it as derivative of the individual – the
undercommons is not about the dividual, or the pre-individual, or the supra-individual. The undercommons is an attachment, a
sharedness , a diffunity, a partedness. If we mentioned the university at all it was because it was the factory
we were working in when we made our analysis.

This is all to say that the undercommons has no particular relation to , or relative antagonism with, a sector
created by the capitalist division of labor called higher education. As Marx said, the criminal creates the criminal
justice system. We find “informal and situated knowledge” amongst prisoners, prisoner’s families, courtroom clerks and reporters, etcetera.
This undercommon work is what the legal sector exploits. Lawyers and judges are primarily supervisory. And so it is with the healing work of
patients and families that makes the health sector. Doctors and nurses are primarily supervisory. Beyond all the ideology of the special mission
of the university sector it is worth remembering two things. First, students make the higher education system. Professors are
primarily supervisory. Second, students working to become teachers, in any area, are – all of them – being groomed for management. Graduate
students feel this contradiction and it hurts because they are moving from the shop floor to management. But the fact is that if you want to
teach for money in our system, you’re supposed to supervise. None of this would need saying if we were talking about the automobile sector.
Those who work in an auto plant know their roles. If they solder they are workers. If they evaluate the quality and speed of soldering, they are
management. Of course, managers get evaluated, too, and sometimes something like an appetite for being (de)graded, which accompanies the
appetite for (de)grading, appears to appear. But that’s small scale compared to the mechanics of “teacher-student relations,” which study
refuses.

Realizing that you have to supervise to teach for money, even lousy money, in our system can then lead to two forms of collective organization.
We can take from the job our money and do something else together, or we can work to overturn a system that chains study to supervision
because only this overturning is going to break that line. And at a certain point since any exodus both goes nowhere and undermines what it
leaves, these two forms of organizing come together. Any other approach is just waiting around to be offered “supervisor of the month” or a
“Distinguished Teaching Award.”

Of course, part of the ideology of the university’s exceptionalism is that under this capitalist division of labor the university is permitted to
gather knowledge, that is, supervise not just its own sector and its students but also to supervise other sectors. It creates agronomy
departments to share in the supervision of the agricultural sector, or an art department to share in the supervision of the art market, through
research. But this should not fool us. It is the same for the banking sector, whose oversight and supervision of other sectors produces papers
and reports.

4.

As we often suggest in conversations around the practice of study, once we try to study , the system will come for us , no
matter how minor our study appears to us. And so, there is really no possibility of disengaging given the constant
potential we carry to provoke engagement. Life demands we bring forth this potential again and again despite the
consequences.

But engagement itself also posits and re-posits us in a way that risks trapping us in an idea of ourselves as strategic
agents who have antagonistic relations with systems of power . The general antagonism admits neither strategy nor
strategic relations nor strategic agents. In fact, it points to the fundamental antagonism of all as difference: clashing, contrasting, emerging, and
Agents with strategies , that is, individuals, mistake all this difference for something
fading without agents or strategies.
out of which they can fashion choices, or decisions, or relations, which is also to say out of which they could fashion
themselves. But the general antagonism won’t let you go , no matter how hard it propels you, ‘cause it’s us. Your efforts
at recognizing yourself and being recognized will riot on you.

This is why we find complicity useful . When you think about how people worry about complicity it is
precisely a fear of the general antagonism . If someone is worried, as is typical, about how his art practice or curatorial practice
will be compromised by complicity with the museum, or worried about how her research and teaching will be compromised by complicity with
the university, at the base of that worry is the fear that they cannot sort themself out in the midst of this complicity. The person cannot say this
is ‘me,’ my strategy, and my relation to the institution. Complicity indicates a kind of falling into something and not
being able to disentangle what you see as yourself from the institution and its (anti-)sociality . The person
fears not being able to say this is the boundary, fears that the border is crossing them. But no amount of strategy , decisions, or
relations can disentangle us . The institution seems so much more successful than us at turning the
general antagonism into the ground for individuation . But why do we feel this way when the real feeling we get from the
institution is precisely the opposite, entanglement?

Now, maybe the way to deal with that resistance to the general antagonism provoked by the fear of complicity with an
institution is to invoke the other use of complicity . To be complicit with others, to be an accomplice, to live in ways that
always provoke conspiracy, a conspiracy without a plot where the conspiracy is the plot – this use of
complicity can help us. This second use of complicity emphasizes our incompleteness – when you see us you see
something missing, our accomplices, or something more, our conspiracy. It’s all good, it’s just not all there. We don’t make sense on our own.
There must be more of us, more to us. On our own we don’t add up. And that is what we are, and that is what we are in the institution, and
how we are in the institution, complicit with others who are not there in the institution, conspiring with them while inside, tangled up in the
institution with the thought or the sound or the feel of the outside, which is in us, which we share in this sharing with, this ongoing folding with,
this unaccomplishable com + pli. That kind of complicity can be deepened even as we deepen our place in, as we dig down through, the
institution. We can provoke here not a strategy of within and against, but a way of living that is within and
against strategy , not as a position, relation, or politics, but as a contradiction , an embrace of the
general antagonism that institutions feed off but deny in the name of strategy, vision, and purpose . Our
complicity refuses the purposive as its own reward and the more it grows the more the underlying entanglement of the
institution overwhelms its strategy. We will have been violent to, or malignant in, the institution, cutting it
together apart into nothingness, as Karen Barad might say.

Another word for this is communism . We can’t be spoken of in the same breath as the League of Revolutionary Black
Workers, but we can try to follow their example insofar as it doesn’t seem to be the case that they indulged in a lot of hand-
wringing and navel-gazing regarding their complicity with the auto industry. They didn’t feel guilty or conflicted about
working for General Motors. They didn’t identify with GM or derive their identity from their relative
antagonism with GM. Sometimes we are asked by graduate students if we feel hypocritical about being “career academics.” Did
General Baker – after whom, we might say, and we’d only be half-joking, the general antagonism is named – feel hypocritical about being a
career autoworker? We’d rather answer such questions by saying why we can’t answer them. We study with Baker and Robinson, even now,
and they share how they refuse the metaphysical foundations of politics and political theory. We study with Audre Lorde and Foucault, too, but
centering her pre-emption of his recognition of “the fascism in us all” doesn’t rid us of the task of reading – by way of them, in their wake,
under their influence and protection – against the grain of their metaphysico-political commitments to individuation, which each of them
articulate by way of a certain “care of the self.” What if what’s always being taken care of is not this or that self but
the very idea of the self that lies at the core of anti-socially reproductive carelessness ? We said non-fascist living
is a refusal of communism. It is. It is a refusal of complicity. It is an impossible ethics of individuation-in-relation. Individuals must, but
at the same time cannot, be in relation. Increasingly, we live and suffer contradiction as the genocide, and
geocide, we study to survive . Nella complicità!
5.

Let’s imagine that Foucault shared a problem with us, and that problem was the metaphysical foundations of politics. That metaphysics says
that there are individuals who bear rights and morals that must be protected by the state. Politics is the
way those individuals then relate to each other , to their own selves, and to the government that
emerges either from within this politics but also, as it were, outside of this politics by way of and also expressive of an authority
whose foundations are not only, as Derrida says, mystical but also in and of a hard, brutal, real(ist) presence. Foucault, of course, did not
believe in this metaphysics. He thought the individual, who will have been protected by the state but was in fact
created by the state, was a prison house – but one created so subtly and seductively that we would open the door to it
ourselves and close the door to it on ourselves. His tactic was to refuse this individual in favor of a self who would be
tended to, directly, by the animate body concerned. Now, we want to share Foucault’s refusal of the metaphysical
foundations of politics we find ourselves trapped within. We share that refusal , in fact, whether we want to or not. That is the

first sense of our complicity, that sharing , which is a sharing of and in desire. It’s just that it is a sharing that is not,
either in the first instance or the last, because there is neither a first instance nor a last, embodied. Sharing is, as Spillers teaches us, from within
the field of black feminist theory and practice that Lorde also cultivates, a fleshly animation that moves disruptively in, while also surrounding,
metaphysico-political individuation or, if you will, the body politic. We share, in complicity, that movement within that
also surrounds . It is not that what we want is bound up with politics. It is that we find ourselves reduced
or stayed by politics having to fight our way “back” to what is uncontained by politics . That elsewhere, where
map and territory or blurred, where return fades beyond belonging, so that back becomes before, in terror and beauty, as Dionne Brand in
submerged, cartographic walking, can’t be found by taking the path Foucault cuts, because that path, which is the animate body’s path, has
always been denied to the flesh, and therefore most especially to black people who are for historical reasons violently entrusted with the
keeping, in sharing, of what becomes what it always was, blackness, that anoriginal communism, which Morrison speaks of as the love of the
flesh before she speaks of the care of the sources of the self and its regard.2 Refusing the ‘selves' and ‘bodies' refused to them, black people
live in the duress of (the state’s, or racial capital’s political body’s) total access to – Spillers calls it a terrible availability of – what they protect
but do not have, which is and must remain as the absolute vulnerability to valuation, grasp and possession of the absolutely invaluable,
ungraspable, and dispossessively dispossessed. Therefore, if you follow in the swerving path of this access which must be kept open at the price
of being left open, you have to, and you do, find another way.

The refusal of metaphysics we share with Foucault, that Foucault’s brilliance lights in us, must nonetheless depart from his path, as it
continually departs from its own in fugitive flight from freedom, slavery’s preparer, accompanist, and haunted survivor. Therefore, we
have
to question both the metaphysics of the individual, and of relations, and, indeed, of the (inter)personal .
Marx wants us to organize our powers as social powers, and he warns us that so long as we divided our social powers from
ourselves in the form of political powers, we would not emancipate ourselves. But the problem extends further when we come
to understand that the only conception of emancipation we can have is a political one . And so, we have to
work on and for a communism that does not resolve itself into freedom or emancipation after having
done all that work against the political . And the way to do that is to shift Marx’s formulation under the guidance of
those whose emancipation is behind them, and in hot pursuit, as Hartman shows and proves. Otherwise we would be subjugating ourselves to
each other through individuals-in-relations of emancipation, the very free subjects who can do nothing but privatize, externalize, and brutalize
as, indeed, free subjects always have. Instead, we can imagine an entanglement of life, and constant bloom, amid an earthy
decay at which advanced, eurocriticality can only sneer in sterile and abstract disgust. We can imagine it because it happens
everywhere social life surrounds the political life that seeks to separate us from our powers by offering
us power, or worse, the right to demand a share of what we are forced to make and cut to meet the
conditions of the demand. We can imagine it, the anoriginal communism, because it is lived wherever blackness militates against itself
– wherever, as Sly Stone says, there’s a riot going on. And, unfortunately, we can imagine it because the regulatory force of politics, individuals,
and relations between supposedly discrete and sovereign humans, is, as Robert Johnson says, a hellhound on our trail.

6.

The act of emplotting yourself in time and space is – perhaps paradoxically at first – also the act of being all but
nowhere . That spot you mapped is dimensionless . It cannot be found precisely because your act claims that the point you
will have occupied is universal, the abstract point every individual can and must make and from which humanity
becomes possible, with and through and in which the human finds himself . And because it is nowhere , its
relationship to place is, in fact, one of impunity. It is this impunity that founds modern morality and the idea of responsibility
or sustainability which this act of impunity then hires as its security detail. Can there be a better description of the human: the being who lives
with impunity on the earth and is sorry about it? So, the question of what has happened can be taken with the question of what will happen in
a way for which normative ethical questioning makes room. Against this abstract preparation for the victory of reason over its
rivals, this tilting of the board toward one point, there is a way to live history and place that is not part of the

humanization , that is to say racialization, of our earth and its reduction to world, its degradation of its
means to mere logistical ends and its forfeit of sharing to mere ownership, all of which require and are
instantiated by emplotment and its rule(r). Amiri Baraka calls this entanglement of history and place “place/meant” and we hear
him, now, through M. NourbeSe Philip’s amplification of “dis place,” as if he meant for that errant and supplemental “a” to signify a movement
of and in place, a radical and irreducible movement that constitutes our undercommon indigeneity, our shared, native, ante-natal turning out of
(re)turn.3 If emplotment is how we give up the undercommons for a common grave, then dis place/meant is how we find and
mark the surrealistic spot.

Black imagination in the face of fascism is certainly an example of this, living history and place without succumbing
fully to this emplotment; but this is not to say living in some form of life that’s more ‘real.’ That’s not the point. It’s not even about the point
and it’s not about pointing. Some of the earliest speculative fiction we have is black speculative fiction written in response to American fascism
and it’s part of what is now the longest running and perhaps most successful, which is to say unsuccumbed to “success,” of the earth’s anti-
colonial movements – the struggle by black people all over the world against the fascist colonial order called the United States of America.
From Martin Delany to Octavia Butler, from Mary Prince to Frankétienne, emplotment is continuously
disrupted in movement’s names. And we could also point to the continuous non-coercive rearrangements of desire, to take a turn
again with Spivak, that constitute black music, which is neither metaphor nor allegory, which is nothing but generally ante-generic black social
life as it brings around its history and mashes up its place again and again.

This is what tells us that the answer to how to act is how we act. It’s
C. L. R.’s and Etta’s future in the present, which is this
train Sister Rosetta Tharpe is always talking about, that clean one Woody Guthrie sleeps on, as a pillow,
with all the unscheduled calypsonians in shared logisticality; it’s Gladys Knight’s midnight train, the
O’Jay’s friendship train, Bob Marley and the Wailer’s Zion train, Trane’s sun ship, Sun Ra’s funkadelic
spaceship, the general blinds we ride. Time and space emplotment is fundamental to every capitalist
production process, to all the circuits and metrics of production, beginning with the production of the human worker. Bending time and
space to our offbeat beat and displaced place is bound to fuck that up, ‘cause it already will. Now, if you need some, come on, get some, before
it’s too late. As long as you don’t steal, we share .

Hapticality opens up new jurisgenerative ways of being that invite cultural production
and production. You should refuse the state’s call to order.
Citton ’22 [Yves Citton; is professor of Literature and Media at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint
Denis and executive director of the Ecole Universitaire de Recheche. He co-directs the journal
Multitudes; 4/21/2022; “Cultural participation and jurisgenerative conversations;” hybrid;
https://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/1939]//ADai

The manufacture of cultural participation has only been considered in the previous sections as a cunning of market
or governmental reason, to extract profits or legitimacy from the very mobilizations supposed to free them from their
alienations. This picture is certainly too dark and too one-sided not to be deceptive. It is therefore necessary to understand
how participation can also be part of emancipatory dynamics . This is what the last sections of this article will attempt to
do, by proposing a series of principles intended to help evaluate the relative merits of the various forms of cultural
participation.

A first step consists in asking ourselves under what

conditions participatory mechanisms set up for the reasons mentioned above can
be turned around or diverted to produce effects other than those expected from above. I will answer this
question by looking to the poet, philosopher and political theorist Fred Moten for a first principle, according to which cultural

participation can only combat oppression insofar as it emanates from a situation of study that can lead
to a jurisgenerative process . To understand this first intuition, one needs to outline what Moten means
by the words “study” and “jurisgenerative.”

As discussed in a series of texts written with Stefano Harney and published as The Undercommons,14 study
occurs as soon as
speakers converse on a basis of equality of intelligences and of a sharing of their incompleteness . The
parties involved in this conversation do not rest on hierarchical positions of authority , they accept that none of
their selves is sovereign, that no one is in control of the exchanges . They bring each other towards a higher
intelligence, necessarily common, by “adjusting their mutual respect”15) as they go through their
relational and argumentative trials and tribulations. The practice of study shakes our individualistic
habits in that it invites us to “ consent not to be a single being ,” according to a phrase that Fred Moten takes from
Édouard Glissant. We are always more than one (because so many others speak through our mouth) and always less than
one (because we do not master this multiplicity of voices under the single authority of a sovereign subjectivity.16 True participation can only
occur, substantially to nourish our common culture, if such conditions are given that the participants are in a situation of study, to be conceived
as a situation of collective improvisation (of which improvising composers of the jazz tradition offer a paradigmatic example).17

As for the jurisgenerative principle, Fred Moten takes it from the conceptual reversal proposed by legal theorist Robert Cover. Instead of the
State and its courts being the original source of laws, Cover suggests that “it is the multiplicity of laws, the fecundity of the jurisgenerative
principle, that creates the problem to which the court and the State are the solution.”18 Far from creating laws ex nihilo, as narrated by
Hobbes, the modern State’s primary function is that of pruning this permanent excess of legal
generativity , in the name of a monopoly that bears not only on the legitimate use of violence but, much
more fundamentally, on the capacity to be recognized as a legitimate source of jurisdiction.

The jurisgenerative principle invests cultural participation with a power that does not only consist in
legitimizing pre-existing propositions or authorities, but in being the place of emergence of still
unpublished laws. Participation is not only understood as a validation (or as a critique) of the choices that have already determined what
belongs (or not) to the domain of “Culture,” what constitutes a good (or a bad) interpretation, a good (or a bad) argument in a debate, good (or
bad) taste, virtue (or crime). Jurisgenerative participation is about the constant emergence of a spontaneous
production of alternative and sometimes contradictory rules about (and from) what makes the strength and merit of
cultural productions as well as, more generally, about (and from) the ways in which our collaborations should be
organized. It is not just about making one’s voice count (in a poll or in a statistical quantification), but about questioning the very
principles of counting and accounting, of rights and responsibilities, of speech and silence .

Let us listen to Fred Moten’s always densely poetic prose (and therefore temporarily impenetrable) to articulate together the
jurisgenerative posture and the study situation:

criminality, militancy, improvisatory literacy, and flight collaborate in jurisgenerative assertion , ordinary
transportation, corrosive, caressive (non)violence directed toward the force of state interpretation and its institutional and
philosophical scaffolding. It’s
a refusal in interpretation of interpretation’s reparative and representational
imperatives, the mystical and metaphysical foundations of its logics of accountability and abstract equivalence, by the ones who are
refused the right to interpret at the militarized junction of politics and taste, where things enter into an
objecthood already compromised by the drama of subjection. In the end, state interpretation —or
whatever we would call the exclusionary protocols of whatever interpretive community —tries to
usurp the general, generative role of study , which is an open admissions kind of thing.19

The jurisgenerative principle thus calls for welcoming , within any regulated situation , that which goes beyond
the simple unfolding of pre-established combinatorics, but introduces the possibility of an alteration of the rules
themselves. In linguistic terms, this principle allows any writer to invent not only new sentences, but new
modes of writing, which enrich and sometimes transgress pre-existing standards of grammaticality . To
truly participate in one’s culture, as a writer, filmmaker or musician, is to allow that culture to metabolize itself through one’s self—which
implies “consenting not to be a single being”—but it also requires the ability to write, film, perform in a way that touches, disturbs and
rearranges the syntaxes governing inherited creative and interpretative protocols.

In the case of the cultural participation whose manufacture is studied here, the jurisgenerative principle is not restricted to
questioning the dominant grammars by setting forth new rules, potentially perceived as bad taste,
improper, incorrect, wrong, criminal. It implies, on the part of those from whom it emanates, to be in a
position to give, impose or wrest force of law to the claims that are generated in the course of
improvisational studies. As Raphael Bottani-Levy remarked in a personal conversation, for the generation that inherits environments
that have been devastated by centuries of ecocidal extractivism, the
most difficult thing is not so much to want to change
the rules as to find the means to translate the claims into articles of law: jurisgenerativism is not only a
matter of grammar, but above all of jurisdiction .