Capitalism with a Transhuman Face, by Ana Teixeira Pinto

If we try to analyze the contemporary state of art criticism, for convenience we can distinguish two branches or directions: ideological-aesthetic and political-economic. In the tradition of now classical critical theory, in the texts of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, the main emphasis was placed on how the categories of the beautiful and the sublime are transformed in modernism; how these categories turn into conditions of their own impossibility. However, these writings hardly take into account the economic structure of the art world. Historically, the participation of contemporary art centers and museums in the global economy increases after ’89, which makes a critical-economic analysis of this sphere necessary. This turn can be found in the writings of Angela Dimitrakaki, Suhail Malik, and others. They discuss the impact of global financial capitalism and the position and role of large museums and galleries. But, simultaneously with this trend comes a digital economic system built on blockchain, NFT and a libertarian Internet culture. The primacy of political and ideological work is important in shaping this trend. Many researchers have emphasized that the spread of libertarian ideas after World War II passed through a ramified system of think-tanks that captures the very notions of a possible future. One might suggest that ideological conviction plays a special role in the formation of platform capitalism, becoming a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. This makes a return to the aesthetic and ideological attitudes of critical theory unexpectedly important.

Ana Teixeira Pinto’s texts are precisely trying to analyze a world in which cybernetics, behaviorism becomes pure ideology, and artificial intelligence, the singularity, becomes an eschatological quasi-religious concept. I would like to suggest a text by Ana Teixeira Pinto, Capitalism with a Transhumanist Face. This text works with what Frederick Jameson called the “structural shift” of artistic techniques. He believed that all the postmodernist techniques-appropriation, collage, irony, the multiplicity of narratives-could be found already in modernism. What makes the “culture of late capitalism” special is the place that certain methods and techniques begin to occupy in a new constellation. Today, we can assume that we are living in a moment of another structural redistribution of aesthetic means. The artistic and academic milieu, defined by a certain inertia, accepts anarchist arguments, confusing them with anarcho-capitalist ones. Cyberlibertarianism makes active use of methods of subversion, transgression, and appropriation, which since the 1950s have been associated with a critical, leftist position. Now these practices work to reinforce an anarcho-capitalist ideology, moving directly into the world of neo-reaction and fascism.

Similar research can also be found in the work of Angela Nagle. She explores the “right-wing Internet” and the reactosphere. But her book Kill All Normies has rightly sparked a debate about whether we are right in fully identifying contemporary post-irony and transgression with the right-wing political spectrum. In doing so, we might forget that early British pop art, transgressive rock and punk, for example, were connected to proletarian culture, to the proletarian public sphere. This tells us that we need a more nuanced view of the pragmatics of aesthetic means. Thus, in his critique of Nick Land’s ideas, Mark Fischer points out that the idea of transgression, which became the basis of the neoreactionary turn, has a fundamentally different genealogy-it goes back to the politics of desire, derived from William Burroughs and the Beatniks. Whereas proletarian transgression comes from what might be called the “constructivism” of desire or the engineering of desire.

But Teixeira Pinto, in this text, very accurately describes the problematic fields of ideological and historical controversy – conspiracy theories, the ideology of the Artificial Intelligence Basilisk, irony and post-irony, behaviorism and cybernetic culture. She also highlights the particular role of disgust and the use of “swampy,” Lovecraftian imagery and how this imagery framed the panic of the right over the loss of white supremacy of Western culture. This is an overview text, written from a very broad perspective–but that makes it programmatic in contemporary debates, including those in Russia.

Boris Klushnikov chooses the text by Ana Teixeira Pinto, Capitalism with a Transhuman Face: The Afterlife of Fascism and the Digital Frontier. Published on Third Text, Volume 33, 2019 – Issue 3: Anti-fascism/Art/Theory

Here´s an excerpt:

On May 31 1988, during a visit to the USSR, President Ronald Reagan gave an address at Moscow University. Standing in front of a mural of the October Revolution, Reagan spoke of a different revolution: the digital revolution. ‘Like a chrysalis,’ Reagan argued, ‘we’re emerging from the economy of the Industrial Revolution – an economy confined to and limited by the Earth’s physical resources – into, as one economist titled his book, The Economy in Mind, in which there are no bounds on human imagination and the freedom to create is the most precious natural resource.’ Invoking the ‘ancient wisdom’ of the Bible, the President concluded: ‘In the beginning was the spirit, and it was from this spirit that the material abundance of creation issued forth.’

Roughly two decades later, on 23 July 2010, a user named Roko posted a meandering speculation on the online forum LessWrong, a Bay Area-based blog, run by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky is also the cofounder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), an organisation whose motto is ‘Think like a machine’. In his post, Roko hypothesises that a coming AI – the entity which later became known as the Basilisk – once in existence, could develop the desire to accelerate its own inception, and hence have an incentive to retroactively punish the humans who, deliberately – this would include anyone reading Roko’s post – chose not to contribute to its creation. In order to exact his vengeance, the Basilisk would recreate the minds of those he wishes to punish virtually, then proceed to torture them to eternity.

You can read it here.