Enchantment and Alienation. On the limits of the body, capital and technology
Enchantment and Alienation. On the limits of the body, capital and technology
David Cronenberg’s latest film, Crimes of the Future (2022), shows us a not-too-distant future in which, as a result of evolution of the species, humans are able to generate new organs with novel functions. This morphogenic property of the body is an organic version of the aesthetics of the self: just as in ancient medical treatises the shape of the body of the infant was thought to depend on the maternal imagination, which was thought, voluntarily or involuntarily, to alter the epidermis or bone structure of newborns, so, in Cronenberg’s film, art has become a byproduct of evolution and surgical techniques.
The limits of the body are overstepped by the limits of imagination, and this dangerous mutation must be controlled by a human security system, to use an expression of Nick Land. Reflection on the barriers of the body and the aestheticization of mutation cannot but resonate with the increasing polarization of political discourse around the policing of gender and the control of the maternal body. That people can freely dispose of their bodies, deciding to have an abortion if the pregnancy turns out to be unwanted, or to change gender if the one assigned at birth is perceived to be wrong, are needs that law should protect.
In Cronenberg’s film, body alterations, whether the product of organic imagination or surgical alteration, have become a new way of conceiving human enjoyment and art.
The most interesting aspect of Cronenberg’s film is its depiction of the ambiguity of the relationship between art, capital, and politics: on the one hand, art is conceived as an enterprise of individual imagination, risk, and discovery; on the other hand, it is judged to be dangerous and in need of restriction, to the point of requiring the establishment of a bureaucratic system to control new mutations. At the same time, it seems that organic mutation constitutes a universal attractive, to which even police systems themselves succumb.
The ambiguous romance of capital with art must be further investigated. According to Nietzsche, art is what makes tolerable a life otherwise destined to the simple replication of events of birth, labor and death. And yet, what we call ‘art’ is but the fragment of a larger picture that includes image production and the technologies of enchantment, to use an expression of British anthropologist Alfred Gell.
Enchantment is a magical patina, a kind of ornamental veil that envelops the daunting materiality of the real, transforming it into something exciting and utopian, or, removing the alienating aspects, playful. In this sense, art has to do with politics and technology, as it seems to covertly govern the ends of any collective life project, imagining a materialized Eden, a place in which experimentation with the body, with love, with politics and technology has the features of a great innocent game.
Socialism and anarchism, evolutionary psychologists and economists inform us, are mere utopias, destined to clash with the cognitive and social limits of the collective imagination. Beyond a certain gradient of complexity, the intrusion of hierarchical, impersonal and repressive systems, as well as the emergence of spontaneous orders, seems to be inevitable. Yet, I wonder, if all of this happened without a higher, imaginative and ultimately anarchic purpose, what would become of the psychic life of people immersed in these systems?
This is the nineteenth-century problem of the relationship between poetry and capital, perfectly exemplified in the works of the Symbolist poets such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud and on the ambiguous relationship established between Surrealism and advertising. The utopian and anarchic core of revolts and revolutions is the desire to apply the arbitrary and the possibilities expressed in art in the realm of politics. However, in order to make a human society ‘manageable,’ it is necessary to operate a restriction and channeling of imaginative impulses within a limited sphere, a kind of magic circle that envelops the mechanisms of production, reproduction and government.
One of the most ambiguous features of capitalist realism is the simultaneous denial of political anarchy and submission to artistic anarchy. It is no secret that, in addition to having a high monetary value, works of contemporary art are often politicized. One reads this politicization in an extremely reductive sense: neoliberalism appropriates criticism and resells it as art. Radical political philosophy feeds this market, selling unrealizable models as artistic experiences. And yet, I wonder again what would happen if we decided to remove this imaginary layer that envelops production and government. What would become of political programs without the ideological constructions that underpin them? What would motivate us to buy goods purged of the advertising magic that surrounds them?
Schumpeter asserts that the foundamental core of capitalism is located in the entrepreneurial function, that is, in the continuous innovation of productive mechanisms introduced by a figure who identifies novel possibilities, focusing on risky but potentially more profitable operations than existing ones. Without the entrepreneurial function, capitalism would slide into stagnation and cyclical fluxes; without imagination, arbitrariness and risk, the pulsing heart of growth would stop beating.
I wonder, however, how the concrete relationship between this exceptional individual who is the entrepreneur and the rest of the population works. As in the partition between audience and performer in a concert or play, the entrepreneur casts his vision against a potential mass of buyers, hoping that someone will take the bait. However, if the entrepreneurial function were redistributed, that is, if we assume a society in which all people set out to innovate, what would happen to the sustaining mechanisms? What would happen to all those spheres of production that have to proceed without constantly innovating? What would happen to the immense sphere of care work that sustains society?
Just as the anarchic sphere of imagination must be restricted within the confines of artistic activity, advertising and ideology, similarly the entrepreneurial function cannot exist except as a restricted property that characterizes a limited number of people ‘elected’ by luck or talent.
The restriction of political, technological and artistic imagination creates a society in which huge monopolistic platforms narrow the scope of individual possibilities — something Schumpeter would have described as a process of economic planning with the maintenance of private property.
At the same time, the Edenic image of a plurality of interconnected metaverses shows us the ultimate outcome of the attempt to narrow the sphere of the imaginable to what we might name an aesthetics of customization and a gamification of drives.
As academic research and work become fragmented into increasingly localized, bureaucratized and purposeless tasks, the sphere of the imaginable is being canalized into similarly capillary systems of channeling imagination.
Contrary to what one might think, the sphere of ritual does not continually replicate the same archaic structures learned from tradition. Ritual is also the site of genuine innovation carried out sometimes authorially, sometimes anonymously. And a ritual is more alive as its structures are constantly varied, like those of a language.
If in today’s neoliberalism the energies of art are being parasitized by a mechanism of separation and subsumption, it is possible to observe that in genuinely revolutionary moments, art and life dissolve into each other, leaving open the glimmer of a momentary instant of restructuring of social orders.
However, it is worth stating, lives that are not alienated or subsumed within a state and capitalist mechanism exist by parasitizing the resources of production and care produced within capitalism, or by existing in a narrow, episodic mode, separated from the great flow of history. But is this really the case?
One of the qualities of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything is absolute faith in the possibilities of the human imagination. This is an anarchic field where the perimeter of art is dissolved into that of political innovation: there are orders that fall apart and are recreated seasonally, a mode of production that confuses play and toil, where dominant roles that last the time of a party.
All this is highly speculative, less so the fact that, arguably, in the absence of the imaginary anarchy that gives fire to capital, life would be a meaningless bureaucratic wasteland. The same is true of scientific discourse purged of its irrational deep motions, of the sci-fi impulses that move even the driest research.
We can think of today’s capitalist realism as a balanced system that has made an unholy bargain by selling off the infinite possibilities of political imagination in exchange for greater social security and a process of continuous growth. And yet, it seems that such balance simultaneously produces disasters, bullshit jobs, speculative bubbles with irrational motives.
Climate change only widens the extent of the desert of the real, inviting us to take on increasingly burdensome tasks of limiting existences, but, at the same time, it shows us as enchanted islands those cultures that have not entered into the unholy pact that sells out individual freedom and autonomy of imagination in exchange for widespread energy and security.
Often, to deride communism, we refer to the economic impossibility of living in a system in which labor is constantly reimagined. True. But how do we justify living on a planet rendered essentially uninhabitable by the pursuit of a single ontological-political model? Perhaps if we opened the circle of creative mutations now chained in the artistic sphere we would have better solutions.
