Science can keep imagining the future and we will be outside afterwards critique it or like constantly problematize it. I think that's the problem. So denying philosophers to do that or denying the category of politics to do that and allowing the market or even the science to do that, this whole separation. So like allowing the scientific image to do it while the other one will critique it. So I think it's not like they completely reject it. It's just that it's been outsourced to the bad people who are good at doing the bad stuff, and the good people will do the good stuff, which is the critique. Who's outsourced the, you mean the- Yeah, so like the Western Marxism after World War II, sort of like this, I mean, I could be like wrong, but I'm just suggesting that like, could be this type of like unwritten agreement
that like the task of imagining future is outsourced to the capital and to maybe science, which is funded by capital, and then the task of the philosopher or like the critic is to look at what's being done and constantly problematize it and critique it rather than participate in imagining the future. Yeah, but I mean, I mean, I'd say, I guess the one, yes, I mean, I think the pro, okay, look, I mean, there's a kind of, you know, You get this kind of thing, the prohibition on any positive characterization of utopia in late Adorno. I think that's understandable. In other words, he doesn't want to... What I admire about Adorno is his resistance to the lure of false reconciliation.
and what's good about Adorno is this the claims that you know reconciliation is always deception okay so like you know the point about affirming the unreconcilable but it seems to me that there's a kind of resignation which is itself a kind of reconciliation you reconcile yourself to the unreconcilable by saying there's nothing to be done and saying there's nothing to be done and if you try to do anything you'll just bring about the worst is a kind, it's tragic resignation, which is just another, it's a very, it might be an ethically superior form of reconciliation, but I don't want to be reconciled. I don't believe in reconciliation, which is why I'm interested in, you know,
reactivating this program of practice because otherwise it's too easy to kind of, you know, you disrupt the danger of reconciliation by reopening some kind of possibility of some kind of intervention, however kind of dangerous and kind of problematic it might be. I just wanted to follow up on the question about the relationship between Marxism, or actually Marx, and Prometheanism. And I wonder to what extent the theme of Prometheanism is determined by its, I mean, obviously it is historically, but by its antagonism to a particular form of abstract domination, which is religion.
So, hypothetically, I mean, I think it would be possible to somewhat periodize Marx's own relationship to the question of Prometheanism in a way that builds on what you've said, but might render it a little more complex. So if you take the Prometheanism of the very early Marx as being in a mold of fairly straightforwardly radical Enlightenment, Young Hegelianism and so on, then I think the question becomes very peculiar when you pass from the criticism of heaven to the criticism of the earth. And you have the manifesto where, of course, the subject of Prometheanism is a bourgeoisie. That's where you already get this very peculiar ambivalence.
The one subject which up to now has mutated, transformed the world is not clearly the working class. It's not species being or humanity as such. It is this, you know, world-oriented agent. By the later marks that's dropped out as well because actually the bourgeoisie is a fairly miserable and fractious entity and therefore it becomes to an extent capital as a automatic subject that's the you know so when you get to the to the Grundrisse the the concentration of science the transformation of the world is not of course it's based on the theft of labor and theft of workers knowledge and so on but the subject is the the subject of the transformation
is in a sense, in a complex sense, capital. And that puts Prometheanism in kind of a bind because you're not simply trying to undo the abstract domination of a force like religion or the state or politics for the sake of human knowledge. You're stuck in the dialectical recognition that the subject of world transformation is in a complex and, you know, in a complex manner, the alienation of people's work itself. Which then, you know, has put a lot of Marxists in a bind, because of course, it's put Marx himself in a bind, because then it's like, you know, the great works of humankind end up being also
simply the byproducts, the excrescences of capital's logic of accumulation. They're not, because human beings have, you know, reached for the stars and for enlightenment. So I was wondering what you thought about it, because I think it's quite complex mode. And then the second thing is just a bit of a corollary, because I know you're very interested in the work of Sebastiano Timpanado, and I wonder if there isn't a different lineage, not maybe anti-prometheism is probably not the right term, but a way of criticizing a certain conception of infinite mastery or what have you, without referring to finitude in a Kantian, Heideggerian transcendental sense, but in a much more naturalist sense. So Timpanado's sort of pessimistic, Leopardi meets Marx.
Naturalism is something for me, I don't necessarily find it entirely precise, but it's something I think is quite different than that Dupuy line. And it's an old, it's a kind of ancient, ancient Greek materialist and very Enlightenment inspired. So I was wondering what you thought about that, other... Okay. Well, regarding the first question, yeah, I mean... This involves, like, having to kind of, you know, confront all these... You know... sophisticated accounts of the fact that capitalism's status as this kind of...
You're not going to want to say that capitalism is a subject of history, but it has become of the motive force of contemporary. Like it's no longer kind of the motive force is no longer associated or kind of at the level of anything that you... It's as if human beings have relinquished their kind of practical and kind of their agency to some level to the agency of this kind of abstract machinery. I mean obviously that's correct. That needs to be, and I think that's the biggest challenge to this reassertion of Prometheanism, is the claim that, well, what if it's too late?
What if there's kind of the conditions, the social and historical conditions under which some kind of transformative praxis could be elaborated, are just not available anymore? So I mean, I acknowledge the kind of the accuracy. I mean, I take this stuff very, very seriously. And it's stuff I need to kind of engage with. And I don't have, right now, I don't have a kind of a response to it. But it seems to me that there's a problem. What becomes of Marxism as kind of famous, you know, if...
I do think you have to be careful about recognizing kind of the complicated dynamic between kind of system, kind of, you know, systemic agency and the kind of the, you know, agency at the kind of the human level. If there's a complete or radical dissociation, and, you know, if capitalism is the only subject, if capitalism is now the transcendental subject, then obviously there's not much... Then it seems to me that the danger is kind of melancholy, defeatism. All you can do is expose this. But it seems to me it's very different. But then what has become of the connection between theory and practice,
the claim that thinking is itself a kind of activity? Because once you've diagnosed the fact that this machinery is now so powerful, so all-consuming that there's no room for us to kind of, and which is actually true. I mean, this is why, you know, the rejoinder to any kind of naive kind of voluntarism or spontaneous, I mean, is necessary. But I think you can't, it can't be used. I mean, the problem, I think, is the problem of subjectivation. If the proletariat is no longer kind of, it seems incredible to try to kind of, you know, characterize the proletariat as the kind of, you know, the locus of kind of human species being which will kind of, you know, challenge the hegemony of capitalism,
then, you know, you need to kind of, well, I mean, maybe you don't, but it seems to me that you would need to kind of, if you're trying to kind of come up with an alternative account of subjectivation. and this is what I'm really interested in the relationship between system and subject between capitalism and system and subjectivity but without one that doesn't kind of simply say you know it's the proletariat but neither does it simply say does it kind of say well they're just these but I don't want to accept an evental account where they're just these evental and so I don't have a theory of the subjects but I think you need one for emancipatory politics and I think the weakness of this kind of systemic analysis is that, or no, it's not a weakness, it's not an analytical
weakness, it's an incredibly powerful analytical system. But then, as you know, the kind of it can also kind of accommodate itself to a kind of politics of a very dubious, you know, logic, well, this is the best we can hope for, like, you know. And just a quick word about the second question, which was about, sorry, just remind me what this. Tim Panaro, yeah, I love Tim Panaro. But the thing, I'm more of an idealist than he is. That doesn't mean to say I'm not materialist. I'm an idealist because I really like thinking. And I really, I'm interested in the possibility that there's more things to think and discover. Which is why there's a kind of, again, I mean, I respect.
There's a kind of really admirable kind of pessimism. You know, materialist pessimism. But again, I'm very wary of the lure of resignation. And I'm unwilling to resign myself to anything that's where I suspect that, well, you know, maybe there's more to discover about this. Or we don't quite, the facts, you know, the facts of the matter are not all in about this. And about our biological nature, I think that that is particularly true. I just wanted to pick up, I guess, on this question of a set of somewhat unspoken, things sort of co-locations that are here which have to do with the relation between a sort of resignation a historical period which you could call something like Western Marxism or a certain term and then the question let's
say of relatively complicated scientific practice understood also as things that only capital funds and you know this is a problem that I find a lot of that stuff that people want to talk about is accelerationism which I find crap totally and I find it crap for a number of reasons but one of which is that it it basically, it sets up a false link between a certain form of the resignation of, so to say, Promethean processes, right, with negativity. And then the other hand, it has something like, if we intervene, it'll look like social democracy, right, and it's kind of sounding like a TED talk to become stewards of advanced processes of capital, which is alarmingly unaware of ongoing critiques of technological objectivism. You get this in the Italian tradition, you get this much earlier in terms of Luxembourg's critique of Bernstein, etc. And what it misses
that you could imagine a Promethean labor of negation that has nothing to do with resignation, but you know, a way to understand the tradition of let's say Western Marxism you were grasping, I mean all the thinkers seeing this moment, this seeming kind of closure, the tautology of capital to itself, which is a material process, what they're recognizing is simply that it's harder and harder to fathom building a counter system within the same space of the built world because you can't separate, so to say, the abstractions of capital from its material edifices. So while While we have an Adornian take on the one hand, you can also imagine another tradition that says that what we've hit is a moment where Promethean labor will not be that of the development of more productive forces, but a profoundly creative and massively organized process of the dismantling of that world towards other ends.
So I just want to stress that I think there's sometimes a false association with something like a very rationally directed hostility and antagonism towards capital, which is important. There's often an automatic link between that and certain forms of nanotech, biotech, etc. And I think this misses the fact that we would understand that you could equally fathom a Promethean work of very serious disruption of, let's say, flows of capital and the further kind of filling of the world. So that's... Okay. So I'm not suggesting that simply kind of...