AGAINST UPTOPIA &
DYSTOPIA :
THE EARTHLY, A
POST-UTOPIC VISION

**Words are quotes have been noted here from a few of Achille Mbembe’s
spoken seminars, and what different platforms are saying about the work. I have compilled together here as a reference**

BORDERSPACE

‘Mbembe discusses who will define the threshold or set the boundary that distinguishes between the calculable and the incalculable, between that which is deemed worthy and that which is deemed worthless, and therefore dispensable. He asks whether we can turn these new instruments of calculation and power into instruments of liberation. In other words, will we be able to invent different modes of measuring that might open up the possibility of a different aesthetics, a different politics of inhabiting the Earth, of repairing and sharing the planet?

Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is the author of a.o. Critique of Black Reason (2016), Necropolitics (2019) and Brutalisme (2020).’ - Lab for New Media

THE IMPOVERISHED REAL

The impoverishment of the real (ref. Lacan) is a philosophical concept describing how symbols, digital media, economic metrics, and abstract systems replace direct, lived human experience, stripping away raw, unmediated existence.

Key aspects include simulation, instrumental rationality, and commodification, describing how modern systems—such as mechanical science, market capitalism, or digital technology— disintegrate the rich, qualitative texture of direct human experience, replacing physical and historical reality with abstract data, numbers, or simulations.


The Three Registers and the Real:

1. The Real: Raw, impossible, and untouched by words. (direct experience)

2. The Symbolic: Language and rules that structure our human world. (interpretations of)

3. The Imaginary: Images, ego, and the illusion of a whole self. (the-coming-into-being, the-not-yet)

The ‘impoverishment of the real’ as Mbembe contextualises it in post digital landscape, also means to include the Neo Liberal fantasy of watching oneself. (panopticon, surveillance body)


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WHERE IS THE FUTURE?

**the following was noted directly from Achille Mbembe’s speech in the video above**

We have lost our future for all kinds of reasons. Failing superstructures, having robbed us of our future. The future is beleived to reside in the past. So goes the discourse, if we want to recapture it.

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Go back to the past, Metaphsycial disposition.

Celebrate the fact that human reason has reached its limits.
Considering it to be a major capital event.

Expressed in algorithmic thining of machines of all kinds, of technomilitarisation.

Automated reasoning. By machines.

Practice automated reasoning. We can delegate responsibility to make decisions.

We are finally released from the burden of enlightenment.

Which forced us to stand on our own feet, through our capacity to reason.
Outsourcing reason.

This is the metaphysical dispositions of our times.

The future fundamentally opens to nothingness. There is nothing to expect from it.

If it opens to anything, it opens to destruction.

Since what is coming will destroy us all anyway. Many are asking why wait?

The times are propicious for Negative Messianism.


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‘Messianism’

Where resides the full force of the term?
The force is drawn in, through the concept of redemption.

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The purchasing of the slave by god. The core is becoming God’s property.
The slave is no longer the property of the master, the slave is the property of God.

Negative Messianism has either let go of the idea of redemption, or has been reduced to a crude beleif in sacrifical death. The saving power of bloodshed. Erecting wars, genocidal colonialsm, wage wars against relation.

The beleif that we are free, if we have no relation to the other.
We deem to not owe anything to the other.

Calls for the abolition of any idea of debt.
Of owing something to eachother.

Paving the way for the universalisation of ‘The Becoming Black’ of very large swathes of humanity - by systematically destroying livihoods.

Even the willingness to sacrafice somebody or even be willing to be a sacrafice. To an angry god, bent on vengeance and punishment. rather than caring and repairing.

The task of the political is to elicit what it is we owe to eachother.

This puts us in relation of mutuality and reciprocity.

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REPAIR;

Exacting mending the ties that have been broken

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RETURN TO ANIMISM*;

To move from our Monopolistic Agency - humans operating holding exclusive control

* Achille Mbembe does not necessarily beleive we are to return to ingidenous knowlegde systems because it seems he thinks it also can be easily instrumentalised and co-opted.


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WHAT OF A DEMOCRACY TO COME?:

We do not know its name. But whatever it is, it will be delinked from the tragic histories of Necropolitics.



Read more....

e-flux Architecture; The Earthly Community, Achille Mbembe



#futuretemplate #postdigitalbody #democraticobject #borderspace #soulloss