Conjure Utopia

Slop dominates the present. Difference is required to sell, because it doesn't make sense to buy the same information twice. This is true in entertainment, business, social life, and also in politics, to some degree. Alterity is abolished because it's hard to predict, it's hard to reduce to language, and it's hard to control.

Yet, exactly because of its scarcity, alterity is sought for. If everything around you is slop, alterity becomes authenticity, an escape from the misery of the present. Who's good at doing this? Who's the best? Yes, our beloved Donald J. Trump. An empty container, a symbol of anti-establishment alterity in which many can project their aspirations for the future or their rejection of the present. Elected Emperor not because he's good, skilled, or charming, but because he's radically other than what came before, irreducible to the traditional categories of reactionary thinking.

With the neoliberal order collapsing, alterity is a fundamental prerequisite for successful politics because it can offer the promise of salvation from a crumbling present. Alterity alone is not enough: skillful execution in the construction of power is still a dominating factor, but doing so without wearing the clothes of alterity makes it much, much harder.

Trump is fulfilling his project embodying alterity with difference, in particular difference from other American politicians: he looks different, he speaks differently, and he has a strong identity in open opposition to the establishment. He's so different from the other politicians that an unemployed meth addict from Oklahoma could look at him and think: “Trump is so different than the other politicians and they are so different from me that this guy must be really exactly like me”.

Analysts won't fail to remind you that Trump can do this because his interests align with the interests of Capital, or because something something “Fascism is Capitalism's last resort”. They would be focusing on the Difference, missing the Alterity completely.

Progressive politics cannot afford to operate at such a level of difference, because any affirmation of difference is met with suppression. Having an oppositional identity immediately puts a target on your back and triggers systemic dynamics that either dissolve or defuse the political momentum.

There are, today, two major modes of progressive political production in the West: the Manichean Left and the Augustinian Left. I appropriate the language of Rodrigo Nunes even though he introduced this distinction on a completely different axis. Nonetheless, the two sides still overlap closely, in the real world, with the distinction we want to make here.

The Manichean Left operates through difference without alterity: they are in frontal opposition to the hegemonic order; therefore, they are perfectly subsumed by it. The identity, message, modes, and forms of the Manichean Left are completely deactivated and countered. The Manichean Leftists are different, because they are not conservative, but they are not Other: they are familiar, playing the part expected from them on the political stage. If a fascist gets elected, they protest. If a squat gets evicted, they protest. If the Empire commits a genocide, they protest. Everything according to the script, nobody is surprised.

Occasionally, they repackage old ideas into a more palatable language and get some decent electoral results. It works exactly because they have been so predictably uninteresting for so long that a crumb of novelty is welcomed like a revolution. Political mudlarking.

The Augustinian Left, instead, operates through alterity without difference. If alterity is required, but difference is penalized and suppressed, the only strategic option is to maximize the former while minimizing the latter. Any other approach is doomed to remain stuck in the status quo or be countered by the environment. A new system is born when you can afford to operate according to a new logic while completely disregarding the old. You operate as if your system is already hegemonic.

The Augustinian Left is a hyper-object: its effect can be seen, but the object itself cannot be described. Why? Because the absence of difference renders it impossible to construct a shared identity. If you are playing the game, you understand that you shouldn't say you're playing the game. Even more so, it is not possible to talk about the game beyond the fact that there's a game going on, which is what I'm trying to do here.

Now, the impossibility of wearing your alterity as an identity doesn't mean it's impossible to recognize other players in the Augustinian game. Doing so is still necessary, in a certain measure, to construct meta-systems able to aggregate relevant amounts of power. Individualized or small-scale bottom-up agents can only get so far. It is harder, though. That's the reason why 0-layer discursive politics is still practiced despite its complete ineffectiveness.

The mechanism of recognition is fundamentally different from the Manichean Left, in which peers are recognized by their statements, their values, their morals, or more often than not, by their aesthetics. For the Augustinian Left, the test is post-hoc: you're part of it based on the impact you have on the world. What you declare about yourself, what you state about yourself, and what you do are instruments to perturbate the psychoinformational sphere, but they should never be taken at face value. In the Augustinian Left, we recognize each other experientially: real recognizes real. At the same time, disguising yourself in front of society, in front of the Manichean Left, and in front of reactionary powers is fundamental to being able to operate effectively and maintain your alterity, which is ultimately what enables you to create Change.

“But wait a minute, Adriano, isn't this misleading? Do you want us to lie about our beliefs? Do you want us to deceive the public, and other progressives? How can we say we are better than the right-wing then?”. That's right, cutie pie. We must immediately stop being better than them. The time for cosplaying rational politics is over. Fascists are in power. A genocide is going on. Deception is just the beginning. And anyway, what do you want to talk about? There's nothing to talk about. It's radical alterity: dialogue is impossible. There's only impact. Don't talk about politics.

The idea of practicing politics with alterity without difference is all but new. As pointed out by Erica Lagalisse in Occult Features of Anarchism, progressive politics, first Liberal and then socialist, never shied away from operating in secrecy, even at a large scale. If today secrecy on the Left is a prerogative of that portion of Manicheans obsessed with dismantling others' power, back then it was a valuable tool for those willing to build their own power. The Charbonnerie, the Way of the Eight Trigrams, or the Sublime Perfect Masters are all valid examples.

In our hyper-surveilled world, the proposition of maintaining secrecy seems unviable. Yet, any system of surveillance is designed to recognize what can be conceived and talked about. What lies beyond the grammar of a given system cannot be recognized and can therefore be free to act. Yeah, I'm talking about you, sweetie. You only need to get good at this game.

If secret societies in the 19th Century could afford a degree of physical and relational secrecy, today those dimensions seem fully colonized by the Eye of the Master. Several corporations and, on request, several governments can know where you are, who you meet with, what you think, what you feel, and what you masturbate to. That goth catgirl works for the government, don't trust her.

Secrecy is no longer about escaping the vision of the system, but its brain. You're under constant scrutiny, and you should learn how to live with it and, at the same time, escape it. The monstrous control system must look at you and think: “What a great citizen!”. The people you want to bring on board should recognize you as one of their peers, with your ideas being presented as coming from the in-group, rather than being foreign concepts brought by a stranger from the out-group.

Become a false negative.
The difference? Null.
The alterity? Uninterpretable.