Violently At Apocalypse
The Capture of Doom and The End of A World
“Our machines are disturbingly lively, while we ourselves are frighteningly inert” - Donna Haraway
Despair and incomprehension are the only results of years of positivist academia. We no longer have a clear criteria for what really is turning sour. All we do is ricochet from the world burning up its aluminum carcass, yet we remain tied to the nihilistic logic of progress. It’s all devoid of affirmation but instead relies on hopefulness to replace its praxis ; the worst kind of superstition. The war drums of intellectual self-cannibalism echo through our vapid tombs, yet the world still lives. Why does the earth take so long to die ?
It has been years since despair was motivating, taking on creative political lengths impossible without it. The wish for administration, that one rhetorical tool many radicals have been mauled by in the past, is nothing but a lax “giving up“ of creation. But it’s lost, and the crisis is yet to go away, to be managed or extinguished.
Since 2023, the disappearance of “Les Soulevements de La Terre“, last stand of the Tiqqunist tradition, left a significant hole in those reclaiming the aesthetic urgency of an end of the world, conceived entirely through the cleanest of looks and images. Green growth, the excess of plastic sustainability, all tied to the same perverse look of amicable, positive technocapital. All combines with haunting, predatory wishes of the Ordoliberals-in-chief to repress their expression institutionally, mimic its rhetoric against it and suffer the kind of abolition logic we seek for an end to catastrophe. The “Soulevements” got hanged as priced roadkill.
These aesthetic categories tell us so much about praxis : we no longer fight as if the end of the world is coming. Or worse yet, we no longer comprehend what an end to Capital-become-world entails.
Our hell was now incomprehensible. The capacity to capture, understand, feel our inhabited space dies with simulacrum, and turns into an aesthetic phantom haunting our visage covered in despair ; it was no longer the fight against the industrial, or the machinic. It could no longer be about exalting what’s left of human agency. It all consisted on how well we could capture a rupture.
In all its forms.
Rupture has now become an aesthetic category on itself, rallying much more than programs. It seems as if the vagueness of the act of “ending“ calls for a deeper, more radical understanding that the world of Capital and Technofascism must end.
It is no longer plausible to capture a world devoid of topical crisis ; crisis management becomes the norm of the theory of the 21st century and we all have to deal with the consequences of fabricated doom, wherever we are.
And it seems as doom has rebranded to a form of docility, an unexplored potential that is hardly ever reworked.
We are not at the end of large narratives, of fabricated scare tactics, of generational moral panics or even at the dreading of existential end. This end of the world seems to be rule of law in no matter what context, yet is pushed to total sterilization.
Can we not speculate and live our putrid decomposition ? Is the apocalypse cancelled too ? If Technocapital seems to act upon existence much more than we do, what capacity of construction do we have left ?
This can all come from both our inability to consider our death as “organic“ (alongside with a world that can no longer go back to being that) and our failure to capture the objects of our collective demise.
We no longer feel that connections and relationships can exist without particular empirical exchange.
Organicity seems to always be a cry for help within us. We wished for a life without a clear encadrement, and all we gained was alienation from ourselves being organic. It’s a fight for capture. So much abstraction leads to so much ease-of-being. Humans fusing with doom bringing machines (without even a single technological consideration, purely in the machinic sense of ideology) remains the truest form of extension of possibilities when it comes to terminal feelings. Apocalypse could really be the affirmation of Organic life, as far as anyone is concerned.
The perceptions we gain, in Humean fashion, come from cold and hardwired ties to logical epistemic practices, all pre-discourse and hence, lacking our input. We are forced to make sense of the world, as its end CANNOT come because institutions work on a blatantly different rationale. We recognize that states of the economy can no longer collapse, the end CANNOT come.
All of our inquiries of producing an apocalyptic, depressing, sorrowful present are cancelled by the episteme of impossibility (the lingering corpse of Modernity). Our spaces are filled with capture of practical zones, political spaces of actual happening but we can never FEEL as if the space itself is transformed.
In Bergsonian terms, the immediate capture of politicized spaces fails continuously. The vital spirit of our capture relies on a “colonization“ of space in benefit of abstracted rationale. It is simple to recognize this as one more attempt at reducing the action we have on the environment ; all perception theory requires a minima of information, the immediate ones (per Hume once again) generate the framework on which we organize the rest. Cascade effect, we all diverge from the same source (machinic theory and the exaltation of independent imagination), without passion.
The evils empiricism show when left to universalize capture. Academia has left to wonder a theory of perceptions so rich in policing, it might as well replace surveillance with reductionism. The experience trap is not one that exalts subjectivities, captures and folds. It never will. The footnote in history these theories have created have linger for longer that what, admittedly, anyone with a pawn on the game wished to recognize. Capture comes from the collective.
We no longer have the psychological effect that post-modernity grants us in order to corrupt as much territory as we can repurpose.
The aesthetic experience of a world in decay ends up reduced to speculation, to pessimism.
In Flatline Constructs, Fisher would come to consider :
” Jameson […] insists, “that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings – which it may be better and more accurate, following J.F. Lyotard, to call ‘intensities’ – are now free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria.” ”
What “feels” imply is directly tied to capture logics. In process philosophy we find the term akin to the subjective, but it takes on a concrete and creative stance when put inside a social ring. The feels we understand are nothing but what we taught ourselves to be these “inter-subjective subjectivities“ academia loves so much. Great narrative endeavors of duty and submission are feelings on themselves, carrying information from aesthetic projections tied to the order of the construction of such words.
Feels can also be understood genealogically ; it is that by which we can constitute a potential realm of knowledge production, for how alternative the base might be as referential.
Foucault correctly claimed :
“The space of knowledge is not that of lived experience”1
No amount of pragmatism will ever constitute enough creative power as we see with these eternally differentiating affects. The feels we now get to base around are not the abstractions we should denounce, but the utmost certainty of the subject bound to a rationalizing world.
This all comes with a heavy form of theory disruption ; why did the Bolsheviks focus early on the social and literary project of the Prolekult ? Why did the 60’s social movements rely on evasions from the norm ? 2
All of these disruption situations took place in order to be rationalized. These abstract moral relations are commonly understood to be material ; they tie back to existing alternative parliament handling, a relationship to the new anthropology of man and a seemingly pragmatic attempt at combating essentialism. It is the end of the end of their own projects by the imposition of the problem, solution, resolution and re-kindled contradictions.3
But the end result is pure rationale, pure impossibility of apocalypse, and hence, abolition. It is the imposition of an epistemic cadre even more restrained than the earlier ones.
This is what heritage the revolutionary subject has worked under through modernity. This is precisely the type of replacement logic that cannot exist under an increasingly combative, self destructive post-modern praxis (here referring to the praxis instrumentalized by Capital).
The kind of heritage the entities of our world hold have been informed by the base of the civilisational order towards insatiable excess. It seems to me that we have created an abject rejection for an apocalypse situated in a particular plane, of a particular form. It all must be permanent.
Far from us lies the cultural order of “feeling despair“. Far from us lies the last standing impulse towards abolition our bodies allowed whenever the collective unconscious fabricated another meta-narrative fallacy. There is an excess of activity, the one that lacks the muddiness and grayness of an actually decaying animal corpse.
Prose is no longer one that is combative, we live over eternal denunciation and awareness, as if power isn’t grotesque enough to be shown even when the invisibility of their projects is baked into their functioning. And all prose that seems to render the apocalypse more appealing fails to capture any amount of wrongdoings of capital.
The desecration of our corpses no longer moves us !
What can we do if the apocalypse we live through lies in its perpetual construction ?
Its never ending textures of transition were once supposed to be captured by us, enemies of the state, into radical subjectivities, yet creativity seems to no longer fuel our cosmos. It’s an entirely sex-drive type of relationship that the radical has towards the feelings of doom. It’s this inescapable butchering of one’s self admitted knowledge that makes us realize the actual state of the world.
With how we handle objectivity, it is no wonder there are thousands out there extinguishing intensities and pure creativity for the sake of clearly approachable politics.
How very practical has everything become, with everyone seeking more efficiency yet denouncing those who theorize the evils of it. Everyone seeks further speed in the prevention of the appocalypse but fail to recognize the dangling hemoragia that it causes upon thought.
“A civilization which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress”, said Whitehead, proposing an aesthetic capture of a world that cannot be reduced to cancellation and acceptance. With a backup logic of creativity the explanation of all subjectivities (and hence feels) becomes a political project of unbound radicality.
No matter what kind of positivity it is given to the social order, the concept of its crumbling can only be resolved by the total rejection of non-practical, non-lived philosophy of hope, of abstract rationality.
In his own metaphysical way, Whitehead proposes the equal footing of usually residual aestheticism ; the capture of a world in decay no longer goes from a data driven realization, but from the FEELING it creates. These captures of experiences end up moving philosophical projects much more than any attempts at (wrongly) making pragmatic systems of thought.
A world of pure creativity implies the hellish task of recognizing the entirety of its process, devoid of abject causes of derivative abstract “information“ we may have secure around a manufactured consent of oppression.
All of these logics love to be reclaimed by the positive and vitalist thinkers of our world, but anything is yet to come out of all this.
The end of the world was first proposed to be resolved through the magnificent programmatic early communist project. And where are the constructors of the immediate pockets of communism destined to disrupt the psychological impositions of the industrial world ?
We were promised an equitable and clean, bright green and floral positive ontological liberation from technology with solarpunk. And where are those beautiful futures of alternative Biopower in the age of anglo-fascism ?
The capture of the end of the world needs to create a project that does not just give a neon bright appearance to positive non-happenings. It is not about construction from hopefulness ; it’s the materialist conviction to feelings as becomings.
Tell me ; what does industry FEEL like ?
Culture has told us that sensorial overwhealming, displeasure and coercion seem to be the sensorial ties to industry, but we cannot take this already stylized understandings of the object organizer of the world without first seeing the contradiction in these logics.
It is easier to understand what industry entails than what it IS.
Apocalypse is much more about understanding the capture of the state of Industry, the very concrete aesthetic category over the moral one created from abstraction of political economy, and how we construct a world around that same diagnosis.
it is quite curious how the category of Industry, in all it represents vulgarly, is the closest to the fictionalized versions of apocalypse. And even in more existing theory, apocalypse seems to be exclusively tied to Industry, through ecocide and nuclear feels (considering the nuclear as the most aggressive version of industrial desecration). All of these creations lead to a treacherous view of industry as already lived apocalypse, as the end of the pockets of the world who touch, where as no area of Capital has been sanitized and pacified as much as Industry.
So much disconnect with its content, our capture of industry is already a capture of doom. The eternal object that differentiates these dreading suppositions are defined exclusively by historicity ; how many times have we actually lived the images of the terroristic smog that Capital forces upon the world ?
Industry henceforth is the litmus test for the image of capture. All of these representations work as butchery for poets and activists worldwide that care not for the abolition of the category of industry itself, but for a mild reduction in the reocurence of negative captures of Industry. All the world wants is not an, ironically, apocalyptic end to the Capital-Industry complex, but a negation of it. This is precisely the prohibition of the apocalypse ; the start of the cannibalistic-accumulation.
In my precedent article the diagnosis of politics, its state and our position during diverse crisis of equal origin is as important as the praxis we wish to push forward ; it is in itself the construction of a movement realizing its environments.
The aesthetic capture of the apocalypse does not constitute a real division in the episteme, a theoretical boiling point for reactiveness. It does not create a new simulacrum, contrary to what Baudrillard’s heritage has taught us.
We need to be utterly pessimistic ; the end is coming, communism is at the muddiest position it has ever been and we all lie in the shadows, devoid of visibility.
The world is not ending, we capture the doom of the world based on our will for it to cease to exist, to vanish, to simply disappear without dealing with the “monsters“ that are created in its decay, as Gramcci would describe it.
It is here where I take a brave stance ; we have not been grotesque enough about our adulation for the apocalypse. because it seems like the only way to capture those who fail to do so is to show ourselves, not in naked brave Phenomenological dresses, but in the most obtuse of ceremonial robes.
This is the gutting of the earth and we are here to be seen comprehending the axis of the blade, the depth of the cut and the angle by which we rationalize our disciplinary passivity.
As Baudrillard would put it :
”If the world were to disappear completely, there would be no one left to note its disappearance. It would therefore not have taken place”
This, is the greatest of ills. And our task is to be overwhealmingly visible. To hell with tactics of effectivity ; the affective apocalypse is here, and it is grayscale, horrifying, banal, daily and utterly embraced.
What about affirmation ? It would seem as if all i wish for is a model of crumbling that can only exist through alienation. Why adulate a non-existent end of the world if the movement is built on adherence to personalized political goals ?
If you would please refer to the manual (Baudrillard) :
“We are no longer in the drama of alienation, but in the ecstasy of communication”4
We simply reject what proposition anyone has to accommodate a sweeter version of our current crisis. No moralist will ever replace the value of pure materialist capture.
This is all for the most materialist goal of them all : to seek a change in the world, one that leads us to an existence so gray, the end of the world might as well be desirable.
We need to represent the affective tie to the apocalypse as much as possible ; we need to embody it with our discourse, with our opposition to institutions, with our presentation, with our relationships and politics and all that is tied to our terrible communities.
We need to give an image of fog, of shades of brown and lightened dark greens. It is an imperative that we seek a visibility based on the cruelest of realist paintings, of gothic presentation of the non-human as fertilizer for vivid humanism. We need to embody a world that has been stripped of the capture of its colours.
We don’t seek danger as it has already realize. We simply wish for Capital to become the saddened witness to us bringing upon the possibility of the end.
At the end of the day, the end of the world comes easier than the end of Capital, and our visibility should shed light on our attempts to live an emancipated communistic life. If communism is already a project to end the present state of things, why have such disdain for the explicitation of its apocalyptic character ?
And so, why not start our grotesque politics there ?
”Nous n’avons que le choix entre deux crimes : celui
d’yv participer et celui de le déserter afin de l’abattre” - Comité Invisible
The Order of Things, 1966
Reference to Baudrillard’s The Agony of Power, 2010
Maintenant, Le Comité Invisible, 2017
The Ilusion of the End, Jean Baudrillard, 1992