Lyotard and Critical Practice by Kiff Bamford;Margret Grebowicz;

Author:Kiff Bamford;Margret Grebowicz; [Grebowicz, Edited by Kiff Bamford and Margret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350192041
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

We are the curse

But capital is not a logic that is suicidal or as alien to human invention as Lyotard would have us believe. The fable in which “the Human and his/her Brain, or the Brain and its Human”55 leave the solar system before the explosion of the sun is one step away from being a great and edifying story, as it tells about a process with a happy ending and involving everyone. The rub is that it lacks eschatology. What leaves Earth before the end is not the subject telling the fable, but an undefined energy formation—the Brain and its Human or something else—that will replace it. “The hero of the fable is not the human species, but energy.”56 We have already said that it is this lack of a happy ending, at least from a human perspective, that, according to Lyotard, is responsible for “the postmodern state of thought … its crisis, its malaise, or its melancholia.”57 Postmodernity means despair resulting from the impossibility of writing an ending, which, on one hand, would be a logical consequence of the processes we are part of, and on the other, could be defended from the perspective of the needs and goals of the subject that we are.

Lyotard makes it clear: whether dehumanization results from the disembodiment of thought or the inclusion of individuals in some universal technological network, pulsating in accordance with the algorithm programed by machine intelligence (“new update is available,” “you have 24 notifications”), it is impossible to continue from this place the story of human freedom as if nothing happened. The emancipation narrative halts at this point—as in the case of another “pure event” that is Auschwitz. Artificial intelligence will not bring freedom.

One can, however, add a logical ending to this story. Lyotard’s postmodern fable can be turned into a full-fledged eschatological metanarrative in one step. We “just” have to allow for the possibility that the actual goal and beneficiary of our daily economic activity is an entity other than a human being. Capitalism is the grand narrative of a biotechnological or bioinformational superbeing, a posthuman form of existence that is created as the result of coupling of the world into a global information and economic network: “what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.”58

But does “posthuman” necessarily mean “antihuman” or “inhuman” in the first, negative, dehumanizing sense? If man and capital were exclusively enemies and we were playing a hilariously unconscious role in another subject’s scenario, we would be in a comic realm. Our situation, however, is tragic. For, as Lyotard teaches, tragedy appears only when, following the example of Oedipus, we become aware that the most important problem is not external: “Oedipus resists his truth, until he also becomes aware that he is the virus.”59 Thus, in our case, we are the curse. Insofar as we are—and we are—desiring beings, we cannot but want capitalism.

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