The Pataphysics of Capitalist Experience

21. VI 2023

Underneath all reason lies delirium. Reason is a region cut out of the irrational. The rational is always the rationality of an irrational. (Felix Guattari)

Alfred Jarry was a nineteenth century French symbolist, poet, playwright and connoisseur of the grotesque in the turn of the century Paris. After his short and turbulent anarchic existence (he died at the age of 34 in 1907), marked with self-conscious buffoonery, substance abuse, and illness, he left a legacy which, according to many, has paved the way for the emergence of the Theatre of the Absurd half a century after his death. Celebrated (posthumously) for his Ubu Roi, Jarry also published stories, novels, and poems, but the brilliant imagery and wit of his works usually lapse into incoherence and meaningless and often scatological symbolism[1]. Out of that apparent incoherence emerged pataphysics as the idea that envelops his opus. It was originally conceived as the “science” of imaginary phenomena governed by the laws of exception intended to liberate concepts from the confines of their strict meaning. Concerned with the world which is superimposed onto our reality, pataphysics relates to metaphysics the way metaphysics relates to physics.

From a pataphysical angle, a concept is determined by the boundaries of its absurdity and exists within those boundaries without necessarily being uniquely defined. Instead of the epistemological inaccessibility of their unique semiotic assignment, concepts exhibit ontological fuzziness. The consensus meaning is just one of many points on the manifold of possible interpretations inside the space inscribed by the boundaries of absurdity, determined by the context, zeitgeist, or political utility of the moment, and can vary as these factors change.

Impossible exchange

Capitalism is a phenomenon that demands a pataphysical framework. Its pathologies are the symptom of its normal functioning, an indication of what is wrong with its underlying premises. Capitalism cannot be both complete and self-consistent at the same time. It is absurd if it is either too successful or if it fails. Its most prominent feature is the unusually flexible and efficient adaptability. If it encounters obstacles to its survival, capitalism will mutate and find a way to overcome them (irrespective of costs). If the impediments resist the change, it will destroy everything along the way, even its own blood supply, only to preserve its technical consistency in the short run. These aspects outline the contours of its boundaries of absurdity. Everything inside these boundaries can be capitalism at one time or another.

Capitalism is a self-cannibalizing, antisocial project. It systematically generates excess population – people who fall through the cracks and cannot be reintegrated into the normal functioning of society. In capitalism, everything – economics, politics, law, religion, language, aesthetics – gradually converges towards this self-cannibalizing mode of functioning. Capitalist economy does not describe the real world but, instead, creates its own reality where society is treated as a diseased body and people are threatened with recession, depression, unemployment, or inflation if their behavior does not align with capitalism’s diktat.

Capitalism breathes inherent non-equivalence and, with time, it loses track of any external points of reference and becomes fully self-referential. It will aspire to account for all of reality, ultimately extinguishing our ability to imagine capitalism’s end, the world without capitalism, or any possible alternatives.

Capitalist uprising (Extending the boundaries of absurdity)

So, what happens when a capitalist system has come to an end, when self-cannibalization had been completed and there is nothing left to cannibalize anymore? When all possibilities inside the existing boundaries of absurdity have been exhausted and all defensive strategies used up and no longer working, the system will desire to liberate itself from the tyranny of facts and truth. The rules of the game will have to change and the boundaries of absurdity extend in order to make room for novel self-serving narratives.

In critical times, which demand social changes, any prospective alternative system is supposed to offer a way of imagining the crisis. There will be a public contest for the most plausible narrative that explains it. However, at that point, our imagination will have been reduced to possibilities defined by the existing system and we will no longer have a language to express alternatives.

The recent global shift to the Right has been a response to the crisis of capitalism consisting largely of the well-known tried-and-failed narratives and stillborn ideas already rejected by history. This mission was designed to rescue capitalism from itself and as an experiment intended to test the validity of alternative forms of social organization. As much as they like to pretend otherwise, the political center has effectively remained committed to preserving the basic tenets of capitalism at any cost. They have remained remarkably consistent with their past modes of functioning and continue to do what they had been doing all along, i.e. making their constituents governable.

In the times of rapid disappearance of the middle class and its precarization, the two centrist wings were forced to reprioritize. The Left Center has embraced the rapidly growing minority groups, people who have been systematically marginalized through the entire American history, never fully accepted to the mainstream of society, but have now grown to become an important factor in the ballot box. Conservatives, on the other hand, have taken under their wing the more recent capitalism’s rejects, the unintended victims of neoliberalism and collateral damage of capitalism’s global triumph, the white underclass, which represents the core of the excess population whose growth has been remarkable in the last decades. Their discontent and ressentiment due to loss of their historically enjoyed privilege and subsequent downgrade on the class hierarchy was seized by the Conservative Right, their rage capital invested and converted into the main currency of Right-wing politics.

What the Left Center saw as a civil rights battle, Conservatives transposed into a culture war. In this regressive maneuver, the symbiotic union of enterprisers and moralizers reignited the nostalgia of the premodern Zeitgeist, their predatory politics reflecting capitalism’s return to the scene of its original crime.

Over course of its evolution, capitalism has systematically produced a growing stock of excess population – people who fall through the cracks and can no longer be reintegrated into normal rhythms of society. Their size currently exceeds the managerial capabilities of the planet[2]. Capitalism now sees them as a lever arm in a struggle to prolong its existence — its only chance for survival is to recycle the people it had already disposed of. This is an act of both desperation and atonement, at the same time. The project, which started some 50 years ago, is based on the absurd idea that the values and interests of the American underclass could (and should) be aligned with those of the billionaires and that the effects of capitalism’s self-cannibalization can be overcome by articulating the class struggle in displaced mode as the culture war. What can be more absurd than that? In many ways, capitalism has followed the evolutionary pattern of all other bad ideas. Unlike bad products which go away spontaneously, driven by their market inferiority, bad ideas don’t necessarily go away by themselves if people believe in them. They create circumstances that make them true by constructing institutions and ways of living that are consistent with these ideas[3].

Cross-dressing the status quo: The United States of Absurdistan

And so, here we are. Capitalism, now in its late stage, is functioning in a recycling mode, a social equivalent of coprophage in the animal world: They can survive (and prosper) by feeding on their own “excrement”. However, unlike primitive organisms like virus, which is intrinsically self-destructive because it ultimately kills the body on which it feeds — in cytology, such organisms/cells are referred to as infantile — capitalism possesses mature/adult malignancy. It can adjust to and even benefit from its own adversity. It can generate renewed support for itself even as it slowly extinguishes the life of its host. When taken to its final consequences, through all its adaptations and adjustments, capitalism inevitably converges towards its fixed point of excrement-management system.

For more than half a century, the boundaries of absurdity have been extending, capturing an ever-growing terrain, with social division and fragmentation crystallizing as the most promising and, ultimately, the only remaining strategy for maintaining the governability and cohesion of the Union (yet another superbly absurd idea). Things must change so that everything remains the same – the culture war must go on in order to preserve the status quo and provide a lifeline for capitalism. This has remained the mantra of American conservative politics since the last decades of the 20^th century. Persistent tensions are the key factor and the main part of the political design in this project of split governmentality. Every dispute and confrontation have to be squeezed to the last drop until the next divisive issue appears. For this to go on, neither side should be allowed to win or become too weak if the fragile balance is to continue to hold.  The two sides of the political spectrum are locked in a cooperating mode and the government effectively functions as a single party system where the two versions of reality, served by the two wings of that party, reinforce the need for their coexistence.

Each subsequent stage of politics, thus defined, consists of doubling down on the previous strategy. Through this approach, society becomes the battleground where division is the tool of cohesion and where the culture war remains the dominant political engagement. Unsurprisingly, in the last fifty years, the cold cultural war has been gradually heating up. Through its machinery, the main victims of social vulnerability of thus divided constituents remained permanently confronted with each other, their precarity transposed into irreversible antagonism, while the essential status quo remains in place.

Phenomenology of the end

The inevitable death spiral of adherence to division and culture war is an example of the Tainter’s law[4], a general pattern whereby unconditional investment in a single strategy (complexity, in Tainter’s terminology) sooner or later generates decreasing marginal returns for the systems that use it. Insisting on that same strategy, even when it no longer make sense or has ceased to work, sets a civilization on track to collapse.

In general, a culture/civilization/movement forms when, as a consequence of cooperation, some benefit accrues from greater complexity. In the case of American conservatism and the emergence of its Right-wing extremism, we must return to its inflexion point. In the aftermath of the Waco episode in 1993, inspired largely by the negative publicity of its FBI’s handling, previously fractionalized cells of aspiring self-proclaimed sovereign citizens, fueled by the fairytales of second coming, fantasy of government resistance, and fusion paranoia, became mutually connected and developed complex networks of cooperation and synchronized action. This marked the rise and subsequent shaping of the community of like-minded men whose cohesion was reinforced by the common social vulnerability. This was a de facto declaration of cold civil war.

Tainter’s Law: The cycle of culture wars and the future of the Right-wing uprising

In the initial stage, the benefits of increasing complexity, brought about by the reinforcement of their common resistance to the government and the underlying fusion paranoia, rose. However, during their subsequent evolution, the system spontaneously began to generate endogenous mechanisms of self-sabotage in the way complex systems generally do. The primary source of self-obstruction were the new protagonists that emerges on the scene. They came in different shapes and forms:

Culture war entrepreneurs (paramilitary advisers, talk-show hosts, think tanks, freelance debaters, televangelists…); mercenaries (various local militias and resistance groups like Proud Boys, Oath keepers and the like); foot soldiers (armies of hopeless and gullible precariat, self-declared sovereign citizens, anti-vaxers and deniers of all flavors, conspiracy theorists and various cult members). Increasing resources have gone into the machinery that maintains their functioning and efficiency as such, e.g. political rallies and events, merchandise selling, air time purchase in media, paid advisers, building of the Wall and various other embezzlement schemes, unnecessary tax cuts, and outright sabotage of the political process ultimately forcing suboptimal compromises and allocation of funds towards unproductive goals, while depleting the budget for common social projects, leading to further atrophy of productivity growth and government institutions, and general pillage of the social landscape.

These actors, the self-proclaimed guardians of the new paradigm, championed their vision and method as the main and, ultimately, only strategy. As they extorted their cut through persistent obstruction and sabotage, they created additional burden on the budget which, together with other aspects, gradually depleted reserves intended to deal with stress, causing the system’s erosion of resilience to shocks and increasing its fragility. Generally, the marginal benefits of thus developed complexity eventually begin to decline. Beyond a certain point, their intensification produces less additional benefit, putting its beneficiaries to more and more stress. All this reinforced the already existing problems and deepened the precarity of its constituents – people who started it are now worse off than they were before, largely as a consequence of their own doings.

As the community/organization/political system now only knows how to use a single strategy, a superstructure is in place that cannot be gracefully abandoned. As the benefits of additional complexity taper off, vast resources need to be invested in entirely unproductive ways, such as desperate attempts at regime legitimization[5]: The competitive monument building, or the lavish “parades”,  furtherreduction of taxes for the richest segment of society while abandoning the infrastructure programs and obliterating the welfare of the majority in mind, obstructing constructive political actions for the sake of political posturing, or further reinforcement of self-sabotage by creating crises where they do not exist and paying high costs for their resolutions.

In the environment of proliferation of increasingly divisive and absurd political narratives, aimed at mobilizing deeper commitment of the political base, the expense of maintenance can only increase – as narratives become more detached from shared reality, political costs must rise. Stakes become higher with each election as they threaten to tip the scales. Consequently, the costs of election, which generally tend to be inversely proportional to the plausibility of the underlying political narratives, skyrocket.

The cost of the US elections has skyrocketed in 2020

Compared to 2016, when self-destruction was not yet so manifest and eluded consensus, the costs of the 2020 election more than doubled. This is a clear sign of panic in the face of the inevitable realization that divisiveness cannot be a unifying principle and that the absurd is just absurd and not a political program. Eventually, the burden of culture thus defined will exceed any benefit it provides and the existing system, in its present form, will have to collapse.

The vanishing point

Capitalism is logically absurd and yet it can work very well sometime. It is a pure short-termism addicted to its own self-destructiveness, ready to conform to any particular irrationality as long as conditions for its technical short-term logic are preserved. While, on the one hand, it possesses remarkable adaptability allowing it to adjust to and even benefit from the most adverse environments, it, on the other hand, remains always a prisoner of its own logic, paradoxically inflexible and incapable of helping itself.

The anti-social self-sabotage of capitalism has been eloquently summarized by the developments in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, by exposing the chronic problems of its underlying premises condensed in the decades-long programmatic dismantling of welfare, education, and knowledge in general as a consequence of its unconditional profit maximization and short-termism. The negative shock to labor supply, which started already in 2018, was made worse by the pandemic as travel and visa extensions for foreign workers have been made more difficult. The problem is that the US service economy depends on imported skilled labor in an essential way because nobody in America goes to study sciences and engineering anymore (another gift of globalization and labor arbitrage). This also applies to low-wage labor as a consequence of skill set and preference biases. Because of the labor deficit, businesses now have to pay American workers higher wages to fill in the empty positions and wage inflation has to rise.

This is where conservative strategies have already encountered their own self-sabotage. With corona tapering, the flow of labor should have improved, but it hadn’t because the Right-wingers, the self-proclaimed capitalism whisperers and its biggest protectors, would never agree to an easing of immigration or tightening of the fiscal policy through higher taxes, extinguishing, therefore, any hopes that the issue will encounter a meaningful resolution. This creates political and social stalemate and reinforces the status quo in which the system becomes consumed by its own greed, unwilling to give up even a fraction of the surplus value to those who produce it in order to survive in a long run, just because it would violate the short-term technical requirements of market rationality.

The residual imbalance highlights the fundamental absurdity of capitalism in its late stage: When you start paying people fair wages, the system gets a seizure – the economy can’t take it because inflation spirals out of control. It is addicted to easy access to cheap labor and chronically underpaid workers and will resist any correction in that respect. This exposes the dark core of the entire ideology: In a system which is based on a systematic devastation of everything that refuses to submit to the profit of the strongest, poverty automatically becomes an essential part of politics and policy and not an unfortunate outcome of meritocracy and competition. The absurdity of commitment to this policy is that if the engine of growth (and progress) is based on picking the pockets of the poor, this plan cannot be sustainable in the long run. And neither can be the political response to it – by denying reality to the facts, reality will not change, no matter how far boundaries of absurdity are stretched.

There is an unmistakable feeling that the final stage of market capitalism as we know it has already arrived, and that this idea is rapidly penetrating consensus. What we are experiencing in real time is a triumph of capitalism’s self-cannibalization taking place in an accelerated mode.

This is the final phase of a long process, which originated at, what Elias Cannetti calls, the vanishing point when mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn’t notice[6]. We managed to leave reality by achieving the escape velocity through persistent acceleration fueled by technology and media-driven modernity as well as the speed of economic and political exchanges that have set loose a tempo of liberation, whereby we have become removed from the spere of reference to [reality][7]. We have left the horizon where the Real was possible because the gravitational pull of self-reflection was no longer strong enough for things to remain in its orbit.

Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we don’t have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction. The question is: Are we prepared to emancipate ourselves from the toxicity of acceleration and fallacies of free market dogmas, and confront our addiction to the absurd?

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[1] Manuel L. Grossman, Alfred Jarry and the Theatre of the Absurd, Educational Theatre Journal Vol. 19, No. 4 (Dec, 1967), pp. 473

[2] Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Polity (2003)

[3] This observation, I believe, is due to David Graber

[4] Richard Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press (1990)

[5] Ibid.

[6] Elias Cannetti, The Human Province, Seabury Press (1978)

[7] Jean Baudrillard, L’illusion de la fin: ou, La greve des evenements, Galilee (1992)