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What then, oh Ivo, wise one? Tell us what we should do! That attitude of giving up power to experts or gurus (whether Buddha or Boris Johnson) to save us, is more modern malware. True, this age is screaming out for wisdom and it is there, but wisdom schools are often insular, generally unconcerned with social issues and often stuck in tradition. And teachings and practices are primarily focused on the individual’s suffering and realisation. That’s fine, but it is limited and excludes deep inquiry into other realms, the ontology of social reality for example. On the other side, the social sciences generally lack this deeper ontology, is either materialist or constructivist, and mostly reasons through linear-causal views of reality, seeing issues through modern mental-rational frameworks. The change-the-individual-to-change-society-approach leaves out both the elephant in the room and much of the room itself – the social imaginary and its causal powers. When it comes to changing, we’re generally no match for it. The imaginary ‘has us’. Spiritual warriors who come back from retreat know all too well the experience of re-entry into society and the rapid loss of whatever state of expanded identity was acquired. Give it a day and we’re back to our old self. Retreat spaces and monasteries are set up for this reason, so you are out of the social imaginary with its pressures of entrainment. These spaces are designed on a principle of functional ignorance, so other perceptions can foreground themselves in consciousness. It works, but it’s analogous to doing science in a box. As soon as we leave the closed retreat system and enter the open one of society, the blissful results of our spiritual experiments prove unsustainable. So alternative approaches are needed to step into the practice gap of social ontology and to inquire into the structures, our agency and effect of our culture’s narratives. I do not see that work as spiritual, it merely relies on methods and insights that are found in spiritual traditions. Nor is the aim individual realisation, but merely to become a better perceiver of the real when we are trying to effect change in the world and to prepare people that they will be changed by doing it. Thus, it demands we drop our self-obsessed neoliberal work-on-ourselves stance, or our spiritual trophy hunting and go straight into what I call The Messh – the entangled, extended, enacted, embedded, embodied, nondual and nonlinear dynamic totality. That may sound overwhelming. But, says the independent scholar Bonnitta Roy:[xxxvii] ‘we are not so much working for greater systemic reach or to identify all the links in an enormous causal chain; rather we need to closely examine the metaphysical operating system of our minds, and participate in the creative emergence of a new structure of consciousness.’ She adds that the metamorphosis needed is driven by pressures that run counter to the modern mind’s ‘upward path’ and argues that: ‘it operates through what David Chandler calls “counter systemic approaches” which destabilise the modern imaginaries of “progress”, “civilisation” and “development” while challenging our “fixed and empty framework of time and space with ourselves at the centre”.’[xxxviii] Roy brings much together here. Just as we can’t work purely on ourselves, we also can no longer continue to work ‘on’ the world. That means further widening the infamous subject–object divide, placing humans further away from others, matter and nature. It means fueling the mechanisms that are driving the Meta-crisis. It also means that we need to reimagine what we consider to be a human being. This imagining cannot be done rationally. It must be done experientially, reflexively and iteratively; and without self-concern. As Octavia Butler said: ‘All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.’

Subject formation ? As I proposed above, our society is avoiding reality by keeping our awareness fixed within a social imaginary that is no longer taking cues from the Real, but mostly from within itself. It has become a collection of memetic bubbles; a mix of comforting stories, misinformation, cognitive dissonance, bias, magical and tribal thinking, confusion, habits of mind, social conventions, constructed illusions and ideology. It recycles tons of bullshit[x] thrown at us, primarily by politicians, pr-companies and advertising. It’s not hard to imagine that this symbolic load on our minds has only increased with the advent of the internet, the appearance of the smartphone and our cultural shift online. Our lives are increasingly mediated by screens and algorithmic governance. Have a look at the amount of worldwide. Today it is 50-fold of what it was in 2010 and is set to almost double again between 2022 and 2025. A large portion of that data is behavioral and used to train bots that send us targeted, personalised advertising to turn us into perfect consumers or the right kind of voter, if the goal is to swing an election.[xi]The social imaginary, powered by invasive technology, using insights into our behavior and a convergence with capitalism, has become a powerful teacher of desire. Some commentators have called this total system, in which culture, technology and capitalism have merged, The Machine.[xii]This name captures it quite well if we realise that the invasive nature of the system has turned our own bodies and minds not only into machine parts, but also into its fuel and product. Our minds and imagination, and therefore our approaches to change and visions for the future are its products too. To free ourselves, it seems like we’ll have to dismantle our inner machine – the internalised version of the imaginary of late-capitalist modernity that commodifies our attention, steers our behaviour and constrains our imagination. Why do I keep dropping the term social imaginary? Why not just say culture? Because culture is still kind of in your face, whereby the imaginary is more in the background and out of view, but it has real causal impact. It’s the difference between weather and climate, or emotion and mood. The imaginary is more temporally extended and colours our lives with a diffuse sense of meaning, helping us to make sense of and to ‘feel’ situated in our lifetime. It employs grand narratives such as ‘progress’, and allows for a host of social practices that uphold these narratives and our faith in them. Before moving on it’s helpful to ground the notion of the social imaginary, using some quotes from influential thinkers who developed the term in various ways. The German sociologist Jurgen Habermas wrote of: ‘the massive background of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld. Lifeworld contexts that provided the backing of a massive background consensus’.[xiii] The sociologist and philosopher Charles Taylor wrote extensively on the social imaginary, mostly from a social practice perspective: ‘Our social imaginary at any given time is complex. It incorporates a sense of the normal expectations we have of each other, the kind of common understanding that enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice. Such understanding is both factual and normative; that is, we have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice.’[xiv] The Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis arguably has done the deepest work on developing the notion of the social imaginary: ‘The imaginary of the society creates for each historical period its singular way of living, seeing and making its own existence’. And: ‘The central imaginary significations of a society are the laces which tie a society together and the forms which define what, for a given society, is “real”.’[xv] An imaginary affords us to act and collaborate more easily, by offering a consensus view of what reality is and what a shared future should be. It mediates our sense of time and the rate of cultural change, while giving the experience of continuity, predictability and familiarity. It is the reason why we walk through life thinking we know what the world is and how we should act in it. It is energy efficient and it makes belonging easier too – by adopting a ready-made story about reality and not having to debate daily with your tribe members about what is true, real and important. If you did propose new views, it often meant losing your head. These descriptions of the social imaginary already feel as though they are from a different age, when imaginaries really were backgrounded, quietly holding human societies together. The Italian cultural critic and media theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi does a good job of capturing the feeling of conditioning and sense of agency the modern Western imaginary brought about. (Note also his reference to the linear temporics we’ll explore later) ‘The future of the moderns had two reassuring qualities. First, it could be known, as the trends of human history could be traced in linear directions, and science could discover the laws of human evolution, which resembled the motion of the planets. Second, the future could be transformed by human will, by industry, economic technique, and political action. The emphasis on the future reaches its peak when economic science pretends to be able to foresee human action, its conflicts and choices. The twentieth century trusted in the future because it trusted in scientists who foretold it, and in policy makers able to make rational decisions.’ He continues: ‘My generation grew up at the peak of this mythological temporalization, and it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it, and look at reality without this kind of cultural lens. I’ll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality, no matter how evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling its social planetary trends. These trends seem to be pointing toward the dissipation of the legacy of civilization, based on the philosophy of universal rights.’[xvi] Bifo’s lament gives a good sense of what it means to be the product (or hostage?) of an era and of the deep-rooted effects an imaginary has on the formation of our individual and collective subjectivity. ‘In short’, says the Italian philosopher Chiara Bottici, ‘if imagination is an individual faculty that we possess, the social imaginary is, by contrast, what possesses us.’[xvii] We are immersed in it. It is becoming clearer that we are not at all like Kuhn’s scientist. The opposite is the case: we didn’t change the paradigm while the world remained the same – we are in another world and are failing to change the paradigm. With the material world reasserting its existence, the denial of the Real by our solipsistic imaginary is now an existential threat. The idea that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet is perhaps the best illustration of our solipsism – an imaginary divorced from the reality and truths of matter. But we’re failing to install the Anthropocene upgrade because our Wi-Fi connection is busy downloading TikTok marshmallows. Some have accepted the new reality of entanglement and are giving words to the emergent paradigm and its implications. Thinkers on the Anthropocene, such as Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour and Isabel Stengers, have argued that what was once experienced as background, such as climate, is now presented to us as foreground. The canvas upon which our experience happens, that of time and space, has collapsing into immediacy. Everything is here, happening now – in your face. It turned out that we’d never conquered nature as moderns, nor were we ever separate from it. We just retreated into our minds and the imaginary, entranced by the belief that our mental models were somehow more powerful than reality itself. Now we’re forced to live the ‘Revenge of the Real’, as media theorist Benjamin Bratton coined our harsh waking up to the reality of biological bodies and viruses sharing the same space with us during the Covid-19 pandemic. It turned out that a virus is not a mental construct.[xviii] We find our cozy imaginary bubble increasingly being punctured by the reality of floods, wild fires or heat waves, whose increasing occurrence are firmly anchoring a dystopian narrative in our minds.[xix] As the Real keeps mercilessly breaching through the veils of our modern solipsism, it forces us to perform frantic mental (as well as economic, financial and political) patchwork to keep despair at bay and our identities intact in the hopes of remaining comfortably held by modernity’s master narratives, such as progress and development. No, we won’t give up our familiar ways of control just like that. We’ll double down on more of the same failing action-logics like top-down control, more growth or financial innovation, be wowed by the latest technosolutionist promise to clean up the mess from the party we just threw. It won’t work. The party’s over. The hangover called Reality is here. Zak Stein, in his seminal piece ‘A War Broke Out In Heaven’, drives the point home: ‘Socially constructed realities are exactly what begins to slip away when biology obliges you to enter the liminal. Living between worlds means dealing (again) with reality itself, which is not some featureless totality of oneness, but a complex non-dual whole in which every choice counts and has causal impact.’[xx] Entering the liminal means living unfoldment, always honoring the reality of entanglement and change. It marks the end of the dualistic logic: the separation of mind and body, human and nature, between cause and effect, distance and linearity. It is the end of modernity as we know it. The entire edifice of the metaphysics of separation on which this modern worldview was built is crumbling. The Anthropocene is the age of entanglement and immediacy and we are called upon to give up our addiction to comforting teleologies like progress and development that allows us our spiritual bypassing.

The tech world uses the term ‘technical debt’, which means that a legacy system has grown so large and dysfunctional over time that it no longer pays to keep patching it up. At some point it is better to build something completely new. The same principle applies to our imaginary and structure of consciousness as its operating system. We don’t need another quick fix upgrade, or ‘a new story’ as many insist, but a new architecture that is built out of a different matter altogether. Julian Reid is onto this: ‘How to navigate the relation between the imaginary and the real? A politics of resistance to liberalism, today, requires more than ever a psychopolitical subject capable of transcending the biopolitical horizons of liberal modernity; one that will free us from its biologisms, and enable us to dream and imagine in ways that are proper to the human psyche. But in order for an imaginary to continue with enough persistence such that it produces a revolutionary manifesto with a new literary constitution, for it to be more than the vacuous pastime of poets, the imaginary must find its matter, its reality. A material element must give the imaginary its own substance. Note it is not the question of which material precedes the imaginary, but how the imaginary finds its material, such that it is able to realise itself.’ I think his insight is profound and is pointing in the direction we need to be headed. We are still largely living in a materialist imaginary – yet to culturally integrate the insights of quantum sciences and what it tells us about the reality of matter. There is the obvious kind of physical matter, whose depleting resources and resulting constraints will play a leading role in shaping our new subjectivity. Then there’s our quest to discover new matter from which to crystallise our new imaginaries. To avoid falling back into the solipsism that arises from our sense of separation from the real, whatever its qualities or symbolic interface we use, I propose to call the material Reid speaks of ‘Subjectmatter’. I see it as a pragmatic imaginal move in service of deepening care for our inner states, heeding the truths of entanglement and co-enactment of reality we engage in as conscious agents. Enacting new imaginaries can’t be limited to work on ‘ourselves’ as we saw. We’ll need to expand our focus; not just go ‘in’ to work on our personalities, but get real and look ‘out’ at our entanglements with matter, beyond the surface and include the ‘in-between’ of our interpersonal relations, including interspecies ones. Then identify which constructions turn out to be mere Demi-real illusions (such as colonialist white supremacy, patriarchy, anthropocentrism etc.), rid ourselves of them and finally perform the alchemy on the material of our social structures. Practicing in this reflexive way means forging a bodymind capable of accessing the deeper processes of reality, all the way from the surface of our fixed egoic, mental-rational perspective to Origin, including different kinds of nonduality. Only from deeper places, like the imaginal, will you be able to participate in its unfolding so it can manifest in new ways. In my opinion, it is the only way we can be truly novel and start from scratch to build , a , or a new system that replaces the old, as Buckminster Fuller instructed. Cynthia Bourgeault points to the attitude it requires to enter into the liminal and not immediately run the familiar modern malware of control when things feel a little uncertain and shaky: ‘The first step is the hardest. Lean into the emptiness! Don’t immediately rush to fill up all the available space. Lean into the darkness and let your eyes adjust. Little by little you’ll discover that you’re actually seeing a new landscape, seeing in a slightly different way. The deeper clues of connectedness begin to fill in for you, announcing their presence in small and often surprising ways. As your imaginal vision gains strength, that strength flows back into the web, and the web itself gains strength and presence enough, eventually, to begin to hold healing and even prophetic force within its collective atmosphere.’

While similarly drawing on (both to embrace and move beyond) the work of Antonio Negri as well as the radical thought of others in the 1960s and 1970s Italian Workerist (Operaismo), Autonomist and Compositionist movements, Franco “Bifo” Berardi resists a rhetoric of productivism and questions the political potency of the concept of the multitude. In both The Soul at Work and After the Future, Berardi explores the affectual effects of post-Fordist modes of production and communication (SemioCapitalism) on our individual and social psyches. In doing so he not only diagnoses the toxic effects of neoliberalism, but also elaborates a politics and poetics of the refusal of work. The unproductivity on offer by Berardi exposes the affectual and ethical issues raised when we remain within the logic of productivism, even that which claims a revolutionary and counter-imperial stance. According to Berardi (2009: 21), SemioCapitalism “takes the mind, language and creativity as its primary tools for the production of value”. Under SemioCapitalism the soul is not left out of work, but rather becomes the very mode of production and thus the tool of its own estrangement. Hence, while the resistance to alienation through the reassertion of the importance of one’s mind and soul was at the heart of organizing workers on the factory floor, under post-Fordism acts of resistance must take on a different character. The goal of autonomy or what Berardi rewrites as out-onomy becomes not how to overcome alienation, but rather how to increase the estrangement between the soul and capitalist labour relations. As Berardi notes:¶ The working class is no longer conceived as a passive object of alienation, but instead as the active subject of a refusal capable of building a community starting out from its estrangement from the interests of capitalistic society … Alienation is then considered not as the loss of human authenticity, but as estrangement from capitalistic interest, and therefore as a necessary condition for the construction—in a space estranged from and hostile to labor relations—of an ultimately human relationship.(Berardi, 2009: 23)¶ To become increasingly estranged from labour relations involves for Berardi a multistep process: first, we must understand the way in which SemioCapitalism has redefined value; second, we must identify the affectual effects of SemioCapitalism on our individual and social psyches (effects that Berardi names as exhaustion and depression in After the Future and the panic-depression cycle in The Soul at Work); and third we must engage Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis as a political therapy that helps us to reorient the field of desire and thus reframes the concept of wealth, re-engaging us in authentic human relationships. Each of these steps happens not through reasserting our productive capacity, but rather through refusing to participate in the systems of production on offer by SemioCapitalism’s labour relations.¶ Under SemioCapitalism value has been divorced from all referent points. When Richard Nixon cancelled the direct convertibility of the US dollar to gold the referential logic of value was discarded in favour of what Berardi (2009: 148) calls “generalized indeterminacy”. From a radical theological point of view a sense of generalized indeterminacy may sound ideal in that, like radical theology, it denies a determinate telos. It might resonate, for instance, with Robbins’s call for a radical democratic resistance to all forms of hegemony that will come by way of an immanent exodus, one that, Robbins notes quoting Negri, is an “exodus from obedience, that is to say, from participation in measure, i.e., as the opening to the immeasurable” (Robbins, 2013: 191). Or it might resonate with the indefinite or infinite eschatology proposed by Crockett (2011: 102). Yet as Berardi notes, the indeterminacy of value and the process of economic deregulation brought on by SemioCapitalism did not result in anarchic freedom. It remains tamed and obedient to a certain eschatological vision: “Deregulation does not mean that society is freed from all rules, not at all: it is instead the imposition of monetary rule on all domains of human action. And monetary rules are in fact the sign of a relationship based on power, violence and military abuse” (Berardi, 2009: 148). In other words, as Philip Goodchild (2009: 188) has noted, neoliberal deregulation has trapped us in the eschatological shadow of money, within which spending time is subordinated to saving it. While this eschatological promise may be indeterminate because money no longer refers to a stable referent, it serves not as a source of freedom, but rather as one of entrapment. To counter this mode of violent entrapment Berardi (2009: 140) redefines wealth as time (or in Goodchild’s framing, spending time): “time for pleasure and enjoyment”, which includes time to travel, learn and make love. This wealthy time is not a time that asks, “What have you done for me lately?” Rather it is unproductive time, it is a time to be lazy, to be pleasured, to just be. It is not discipleship in action; it is not worth in productivity; it is not a man who is a worker or nothing at all; rather, it is a soul who is wealthy because she is much more and much less than her labour. To be sure, there is political work to be done to democratize the availability of this wealth of time,6 but by reorienting wealth and worth away from work, indeed in finding it in the refusal of work, Berardi rejects hegemonic structures of value.¶ Both SemioCapitalism’s rejection of wealth as time and its degradation of unproductive time lead to a mental and soulful breakdown in individual and social psyches. Berardi diagnoses this breakdown as a panic-depressive cycle (Berardi, 2009) and exhaustion and depression (Berardi, 2011). Acknowledging Baudrillard’s prescience, Berardi (2009: 179) further notes that “The dominant pathology of the future will not be produced by repression, but instead by the injunction to express, which will become a generalized obligation”. The constant demands to be expressive and productive combined with the overwhelming flow of information and signs without stable referents lead to panic, which eventually leads to depression. Elsewhere, Berardi (2011: 135–138) marks the panic-depression cycle with Baudrillard’s concept of exhaustion. Exhaustion sets in because, “In semiocapitalist hyperreality, the brain is the market. And the brain is not limitless, the brain cannot accelerate indefinitely” (Berardi, 2011: 136). Rather than, or perhaps as both counter and supplement to, an emphasis on the plasticity of the brain (an emphasis embraced by followers of Catherine Malabou),Footnote4 Berardi asks us to look to the limits of the brain—to our exhaustion—for the rethinking of how we might come to be differently.

Cultural perspectives on law are a growing part of contemporary legal scholarship and, in particular, semiotics has been argued in interdisciplinary legal scholarship on IP to be helpful in illuminating some of the intractable issues encountered in the laws governing copyright, trademarks and the right of publicity. The use of semiotics to interrogate IP laws is a relatively new concept that caught the attention of mainstream legal scholarship just over a decade ago when Barton Beebe published his seminal article ‘The Semiotic Analysis of Trademark Law’ in the UCLA Law Review.2 Prior to this, other legal scholars such as Rosemary Coombe, Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss, Keith Aoki, and Michael Madow have applied a cultural studies critique to IP laws, but had not distinguished semiotics as an independent perspective in their writings.3 More recently, there is a healthy trend in US law reviews and the International Journal of the Semiotics of Law publishing articles that apply a semiotic approach to IP laws.4

Semiotics is fundamentally the study of signs.5 Semiotics seeks to understand the operation of a given system or process by observing the function of signification, expression, representation, and communication.6 Generally, semiotics has followed two independent lines: the ‘linguistic’ tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure, and the ‘logical’ tradition of Charles Sanders Peirce.7 The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, widely credited as the most influential scholar in the field of semiotics, emphasized the nature of the sign as the coded association of a material signifier, such as the sound of a word, with a signified or preconceived meaning.8 The purely linguistic formulation of a sign is best illustrated in de Saussure’s dyadic model where a linguistic sign comprises two parts: a concept (signified) and a sound-image (signifier). For instance, the word ‘cat’ is a signifier; when it is spoken, it triggers the signified in the listener’s mind, namely the mental image of a cat. According to the Peircean conception of the sign, a third subsign element is adopted to complete Saussure’s model: the referent. In situations where language is used to alert the listener to a specific physical object, a triadic model is necessary. Thus, in the above example, the word or sound ‘cat’ is the signifier, the mental image evoked is the signified, and the actual cat being discussed is the referent.9

One of the show’s early episodes, “The Entire History of You” (2011), imagines a world in which almost everyone has a “grain” implanted behind their ear. This grain has the capacity to transform human eyes into cameras that record reality and projectors that can reproduce it, thereby amalgamating lived experience, memory, and image. In a later episode, “Be Right Back” (2013), a woman is able to revive her dead partner with a program that rebuilds him—first his writing habits, then speech patterns, and eventually his very self via a cloned, synthetic body—solely from the proliferation of information he uploaded on the internet when he was alive. The deathless and bodiless information, images, and signs—the inert map of a life—becomes embodied by an avatar that exists in actual, not virtual, reality, and that has the (albeit limited) capacity to exist and interact directly with humans. In the episode, the fabrication of subjectivity from data—which implies the automatization of subjectivity—foreshadows the relationship between determinist automatisms and cognitive activity, which, according to Franco Berardi, is the core goal of the Google Empire: to capture user attention and to translate our cognitive acts into automatic sequences. The consequence is the replacement of cognition by a chain of automated connections, seeking to automatize the subjectivities of users (Berardi, 2014, paras. 21‒23. Aside from the fact that images and data are taking the place of or giving form to experience, automating our will and thought, they are also transforming things into signs by welding together image and discourse, bringing about Visuality conditions under the Anthropocene a tautological form of vision. With the widespread use of photography and digital imaging, all signs begin to lead to other signs, prompted by the desire to see and to know, to document and to archive information. Thus, the fantasy that everything is or can be made visible coexists with the increasing automa- tion of cognition, which, following Franco Berardi, is the basic condition of semiocapital (the valorization and accumulation of signs as economic assets) (Berardi, op. cit., par. 3). In the pilot episode of Black Mirror, “The National Anthem” (2011), an alleged terrorist group kidnaps a nationally beloved British princess in the early morning hours. In order to free her, the anonymous group demands that the prime minister have sex on live television with a pig at four o’clock that same afternoon. The video in which the princess announces the “price” of the ransom goes viral and the whole nation pressures the prime minister to fulfill the kidnappers’ demands. At the end of the episode, postcoitus, it is revealed that the kidnapping was a singular artist’s gesture, intended in its successful implementation to point critically to the obscenely inflated role the media has in shaping public opinion and official policy. The artist’s action, in other words, illuminates the highly visceral shift in power brought on almost instantaneously by the ransom video’s circulation in the infosphere. Insofar as the episode unfolds montages of the whole nation glued to televisions in the pub, workplace, and waiting room at four o’clock, the artist highlights how connec- tive interfaces actually govern, as they have the direct capacity to manipulate and coordinate behavior on almost every level (Berardi, 2012, p. 15). Under the conditions of semiocapitalism, images and signs acquire value and/or power by means of being seen, largely through “likes” and retweets. The fact that sign-value has supplanted exchange-value means moreover that we no longer consume material things, but rather swallow cognitive signs embedded in and around them. Aside from consuming “experiences” or “moods,” we buy immaterial commodities (in the name of lifestyle and branding) and consume signs for “equality,” “happiness,” “wellness,” and “fulfillment.” In Don Delillo’s White Noise (2002), Jack Gladney describes a trip to the supermarket and makes clear how the signs found in the brands and labels of products that he and his wife buy have the power to relieve them of the mysteries and anxieties brought about by everyday life: It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening. (Delillo, 2002, p. 20) What becomes evident in this paragraph is Baudrillard’s assertion that objects are no longer commodities whose message and meaning we can appropriate and decipher, but rather, tests that interrogate us. For him, commodities are a referendum, the verification of a code, circularity as well as sameness and homogeneity: here the commodities bring a well-being that reflects the well-being of the consumer and his or her lifestyle (Baudrillard, 1976). Furthermore, the acceleration in proliferation of cognitive signs since the time of Delillo’s novel is another of the features of communicative capitalism’s subjugation, submitting the mind to an ever-increasing pace of perceptual stimuli, and in so doing generating not only panic and anxiety, but also destroying all possible forms of autonomous subjectivation. Under communicative capitalism, images transformed into signs embody the current concatenation of knowledge and machines—that is, the technological organization of capitalism to produce value. With the enabling of the visualization of data by machines, images have become scientific, managerial, and military instruments of knowledge, and thus of capital and power (Bratton, 2013, para. 16). In this context, seeing means the accelerating perception of the fields of everyday experiences, or rather, the field of trivial visual analogies of experience: a kind of groundless, accelerated tautological vision derived from passive observation. This is for Berardi another of communicative capitalism’s forms of governance, as this kind of vision generates technolinguistic automatisms by carrying information without meaning, automating thought and the will (Berardi, 2012, p. 41). Images circulating in the infosphere are also charged with affect, exposing the viewer to sensations that go beyond everyday perception. Hollywood cinema, for instance, delivers pure sensation and intensities that have no meaning. In Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), the main characters try to survive in outer space by solving practical and technical problems. The movie repudiates a point of view and a ground for vision in favor of immersion, transforming images into physical sensations mobilized by the visual and auditory (espe- cially in its 3-D version), and thus into affect. The becoming-affect of images derives from communicative capitalism’s ruthless conversion of sensation and aesthetic experiences into cognition: its transformation of these experiences into information, sensations, and intensities without meaning is precisely what enables them to be exploited as forms of work and sold as new experiences and exciting lifestyle choices (Shaviro, 2010, para. 14). One of the problems that arises is that affect cannot be linked to a larger network of identity and meaning. Gravity also presents itself as a symptom of the normalization of a groundless seeing brought about by modernity’s decentering of the subject parallel to our Visuality conditions under the Anthropocene 291 exposure to aerial images (for example, Google Earth). The hegemonic sight convention of visuality is an empowered, unstable, free-falling, and floating bird’s eye view that mirrors the present moment’s ubiquitous condition of groundlessness (Steyerl, 2011, para. 6). According to many thinkers, this groundlessness characterizes the Anthropocene. The current fragmentation and transience of sociopolitical movements attests to the fact that we are first of all lacking ground on which to found politics, our social lives, and our relationship to the environment. Second, as Claire Colebrook put it, with the Anthropocene we are facing human extinction, as well as causing other extinctions, thereby annihilating that which makes us human. We are thus all thrown into a situation of urgent interconnectedness, in which a complex multiplicity of diverging forces and timelines that exceed any manageable point of view converge (Colebrook & Wolfe, 2013). In this context, criticality is both in trouble and spinning on its head. Many questions arise: How do we redefine the ground of deterritorialized subjectivation beyond the subsumption of subjectivity by the modes of governance of accelerated tautological forms of vision and communicative capitalism? How can we transform our relationship to the indeterminacy of deterritorialization and the multiplicity of diverging points of view in order to provide a heightened sense of place, giving way to the possibility of collective autonomous subjectivation and thus a new sense of politics and of the image? In an era of ubiquitous synthetic and digital images dissociated from human vision and directly tied to power and capital, when images and aesthetic experience have been turned into cognition and thus into empty sensations or tautological truths about reality, the image of the Anthropocene is yet to come. The Anthropocene is “the age of man” that announces its own extinction. In other words, the Anthropocene thesis posits “man” as the end of its own destiny. Therefore, while the Anthropocene narrative keeps “man” at its very center, it marks the death of the posthuman and of antihumanism, because there can be no redeeming critical antihumanist or posthuman figure in which either meta- physics or technological and scientific advances would find a way to reconcile human life with ecology. In short, images of the Anthropocene are missing. Thus, it is necessary to transcend our incapacity to imagine an alternative or something better. We can first do this: draw a distinction between images and imagery, or pictures. Although it is related to the optic nerve, the picture does not make an image (Daney & McMahon, 1999). In order to make images, it is necessary to make vision assassinate perception; it is necessary to ground vision, and then perform (as in artistic activity) and think vision (as in critical activity) (Didi-Huberman, 2007, p. 17).

The transformation of intellectual property law from an esoteric legal subject to a topic of daily conversation and debate has occurred in a relatively short span of time. Over the past few years, the aggressive expansion of property claims into every domain of knowledge and cultural practice has interpellated almost everyone, from the academic to the musician, into the heart of the debate. No account of the contemporary moment would be complete without an examination of the dominance of the copyright sign or the effect of the small print of the trademark notice on our lives. In many ways, the mere act of looking at, reading, listening to, making, understanding or communicating any objects that embody thought, knowledge or feeling is as fraught with danger and anxiety today as the appropriation of material wealth or trespassing onto private property were through much of human history (Bagchi et al. 2005: vi).

The anxiety and conflict are certainly not restricted to a set of geographical locations, but the nature of conflict gets configured differently as we move from the United States and Europe to parts of Asia and Africa. In the United States, the crisis is represented in terms of the shrinking of the public domain and of the commons by the extension of copyright, the linking of file sharing and peer-to-peer activities with the global war on terror, and the emergence of a new breed of criminals in the form of students sued by music companies for downloading MP3s online. In South Africa, the government is bulldozed by pharmaceutical corporations who have attempted to prevent it from declaring statutory licenses that will make AIDS drugs more accessible, and in many parts of Asia, the proliferation of cheap technologies of media reproduction creates a parallel economy that threatens the monopoly of old media players (Cullet 2001). The concern over the expansionist tendency of intellectual property has also motivated a rearticulation of the importance of the commons of knowledge and cultural production. This is exemplified by various phenomena among the increasing popularity of non-proprietary modes such as free software and open content. A number of these concerns historically have emerged from the experience of Europe and the United States. But when one attempts to translate the terms of the intellectual property debate into the contemporary experience of countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa, it is difficult to locate any easy indexical reference to ideas such as ‘the digital commons’.

Scott Phillips: I guess in the context of that then I wanted to ask you about sort of some of the, the, I guess you wouldn't call them political projects, but what Afropessimists recommend that people do instead of sort of engage in liberal civil society. So I guess kind of a famous one, they use the quote from Césaire and Fanon about ending the world, or sometimes they say like burn it down. So I guess what, what do you think is the reason or the set of rationale for why sort of like engaging in sort of, I guess more traditional political struggle is meaningful/I guess why not try and do something and that sort of like more radical outside the system? I guess in kind of talking about this, I'm thinking about, in one of the books, you edited on African American studies. There's an exchange between Gates and Marable about how African American Studies departments should relate to the political system and trying to like kind of avoid the way academics can be sort of trapped within a only focusing on what's good for kind of government policy making problems. So like what, what is the effective way to be political while avoiding that kind of trap?

Lewis R. Gordon: Well, you know, these aren't [inaudible]. It always trumped me that people who have never really lived through violence and struggles romanticize it. You know, the people who did, a lot of people are calling for burning down are really saying for somebody else to do it, but they want the benefits of, of what happens when people build things up. They don't want to do with the hard work of building, look the problem with those kind of arguments is they're reactionary. What I mean by reactionary is this, it's a lot like what you see in the, the, the, the, the kind of arguments in which people throw people into a false dilemma. If you remember in the Black Panther movie the kill monger character kept saying, it's either conquer or be conquered. Now if you believe reality is only about if reality really is ontologically about being a conquerer or being conquered, then there really is only one thing you should do, conquer, so burn it down and dominate people. However there's another. But the problem with those is those are lies. There are other ways to do things. The other way to do things, to fight against a world that is structured according to conquerer and conquered. Now, if you're going to do that, that means then you got to say, wait a minute, maybe you're giving me a false dilemma. You see the issue isn't about you got to go via liberal and work in the system or you work completely outside of the system. You may there, there, there's a third option which is that one ultimately can work with a “both and” and what I mean by “both and” is, for instance, if you get up in the morning and you want to get somewhere what you may want, you may, you may use certain technological resources, but there are other things you may you could do. If one is trying to build a better society. The problem is you can't get A to Z without crossing B, C, D, E, and F, and that means that if you only look at Z, if you only look at the top of the mountain, you're failing to see the steps you'll have to go to get there. And if your response to get to the top of the mountain is to blow the mountain up, then you're then ultimately you go nowhere. The fact of the matter is, is that those kind of arguments have the same fallacy. That's in the recognition argument and those, in other words, the recognition argument tells black people there's only one way to be black and that's negative. Well, similarly, those kind of arguments basically say that there is only one way in which in which, one can, one, one, one, one can, one can, one can, can, can have a future, and that is one can have the future, if one can eliminate it completely the present, the problem with that is then that would put one in a position of a form of historical amnesia. Now, here's the problem with historical amnesia. If you ultimately really start completely over and you try to erase history, then you can also end up repeating the same mistakes of history. The more, the more mature position is to be able to have a relationship to history in which you know what you want and what you don't want. And that means in fact beginning to use the creative force of building something different. And the fact of the matter is, the kind of problems we're trying to deal with, particularly if we're thinking about revolution only makes sense within the context of the history we have. So, the response I would argue with those arguments is they're adolescent, they're naïve. They absolutely have no understanding of what political reality’s about. It strikes me that ultimately what we're going to have to do is to set the conditions in which we actually disempower the forces that are blocking the capacity to build something different. Now, here's something where Fanon was rather rather rather insightful and [inaudible name], and others worked too because you see the era they point out that's made is that at the moment of independence or at the moment in which it's what is poised for social transformation. There's often a willingness to be creative, synthetic and relational at the aesthetic level, but not at the level of the institutions of power. And what I mean by that is if you look at, for instance, many African states or many, many, many, many, many Caribbean states or many, many, many parts of the world in which independence emerged. The first thing that people do when they become independent is they start trying to connect to the rest of the world in terms of creating their own form of contemporary music, foods, and cultural production. However, at the moment of independence, what they don't do is to bring that creativity that unique way of building new forms of concepts to their political, educational, economic institutions, and so what you end up having in say if you If you pick a country like South Africa or if you pick quite a few other countries, not in the African continent, in the Caribbean. Their post-independence moment pretty much has the same education system they had in a colonial moment and what they fail to understand is that education system was designed for colonialism. So, if you're going to have a post-colony, if you're going to be, If you're going to transcend colonialism, you need to develop a radically different kind of education system. Similarly, if you look at a lot of these societies their legal systems tend to be almost identical to the colonial one. I mean, you see post-colonial states with people in tropics walking around with white wigs and robes in court rooms. That's nonsense. You see a similar thing, not only the educational, legal and political level, you see a similar thing happened at the economic level because in the end, even though they said they they're no longer colonies, the economic system that's maintained in the post-colony is pretty much the economic system that was in a colony and then we could look at it their religious systems. That's pretty much the same, when we go down the line. Now Fanon noticed something. It's not just those levels, but it's even at the level of the organization of architecture and civil planning. So, for instance, the very notion of the Metropole, the center, the capital city, that was also part of the colonial system, but it's possible to have a different conception of city, a different organization of power across a particular country or a society that may actually be more suitable to the society one lives in. And so, the creativity he was talking about was far more radical than simply than what many people may think. I think we see this a lot in science fiction, if you look at a lot and also very in in, if you look at things ranging from like Robin Hood and a Merry Men all the way to Star Wars and all of that stuff, they go to fight against the emperor. They burn it down. Then they have a big party outside, but what do they do afterwards? Then they go in and they build a society that in almost every respect look exactly like the thing they were trying to burn down. In other words, they fail to get to the question, the crucial question of how to build a world in which freedom can, can, can, can substantially and belong, and that requires being at home in, in, in very different kinds of human relationships than the ones that are governed by the system they began with. So that means then that if they are properly critical of society, they're trying to transform, they need to have a coherent conception and they need to work towards something they want to build. But I have to add a very important proviso and this was something Fanon noticed, but not only Fanon, there are many others who noticed this and what they noticed is this, if you're going to build a future, you know that point where I said that you are, if you're committed, you have to understand it's not about you. Well, it means if you're going to build a future, you have to understand it's the future premised on freedom, but the kind of people who will inherit it and the kind of people they may even become may be radically different than what you envision. The people who fought for our freedoms today, for instance, never thought of a world of trans people and different kinds of racial formations and political relations and religious formations. They never imagined that, but the fact of the matter, if they're committed to freedom, it means that we have to find and build a world in which we can live because the world, we can live in is a world that for them is not livable.

Most discourses on Blackness in the United States and the Caribbean locate themselves in the history of the Middle Passage, linking our cultural practices and expressions, our politics and social sensibilities, to the historical experience of slavery in the Americas and the struggle to achieve full human suffrage in the West. These histories are both constructed and phenomenological: they are a chosen arrangement of historical events (spaces and times) perceived to be the defining moments of collective Blackness. At the same time, for the purposes of this theoretical analysis of Blackness, it is important to underscore that these are not so much histories as epistemologies: narratives of knowledge that are taught, learned, relayed, exchanged, and debated in discussions on the “facts” of Blackness. These historical-cum-epistemological events are usually linked by or narrated under the theme of overcoming obstacles through struggle (or “uplift”), with the defining aspect of contemporary Black collective histories focusing primarily on slavery (Middle Passage histories), European colonization (postcolonial histories), or the dominance of ancient African civilizations (Afrocentric histories). These themes create either a linear progress narrative or, when reversed (as in Afropessimism), a reverse linear narrative indicating that no Black progress has been made because of the continual oppression by white Western hegemonies that began with slavery, moved through colonialism, and now deploy an array of cultural, political, economic, and military power through social and governmental technologies to keep Blacks not only as subalterns—those who are subordinated by power—but also as the (white) Western Other. The question of defining Blackness has become more urgent as the collectives that perceive themselves through these multiple histories find themselves encountering each other more frequently. As recent anthologies such as The Other African Americans show, many Western nations are now (and in many cases have been since the postwar era) receiving Black African immigrants whose histories, while certainly tied to Atlantic slavery, more often narrate themselves through colonialism or postwar socioeconomic changes than through the Middle Passage. These two collectives of historical and ancestral Blackness, while most certainly intertwined (and at times also often facing the same kinds of racist violence) nonetheless understand themselves differently. Denoted simply as “Black” almost anywhere outside of Africa, their encounters must negotiate their differences even as Blackness enjoins them to work together toward the common goal of racial uplift. In short, they have experienced differences that these linear progress narratives of Blackness strongly encourage them not to discuss, perhaps not even to see, much less acknowledge. However, in many of these moments, experienced or expressed, the phenomenological aspects of Blackness subvert even the most eloquent construct of collective unity. In other words, perceived differences will be expressed, but because most dominant constructs of Blackness cannot understand differences within, difference is often expressed as a dichotomy between “Black” and “not Black.” In “Colorblind,” her 2007 opinion piece from Salon.com, conservative Black columnist Debra Dickerson produces a cartoonishly distorted imagining of those differences that nonetheless reflect some of the greatest reservations some Black collectives harbor about others. Obama isn’t Black. “Black,” in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. Voluntary immigrants of African descent (even those descended from West Indian slaves) are just that, voluntary immigrants of African descent with mark- edly different outlooks on the role of race in their lives and politics. At a minimum, it can’t be assumed that a Nigerian cab driver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won’t bother to make the distinction. They’re both “Black” as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally Black, as we use the term.8 Like most arguments seeking to separate some Blacks from Blackness, Dickerson’s plays fast and loose with history and in doing so also reveals (unwittingly) temporal and spatial gaps that belie the notion of the linear progress narrative. While most scholars of contemporary African immigration would take issue with her qualifier of “voluntary”9 (when one’s family is faced with death by starvation, violence, etc., is emigration truly born of free will?), it is her focus on the differing “outlooks” of the Harlemite and Obama/Nigerian cabdriver that bear the greatest scrutiny. Under this logic, histories not only uniformly shape collectives in the “now”; they are also unbroken, passed perfectly from one generation to the next.10

These ideas have a long history in anti-colonial thought. Fanon (1963:314–315) critiqued Europe’s growthist model, lamenting that Europe had “shaken off all guidance and all reason” and was “running headlong into the abyss.” “Let us be clear”, he wrote: “what matters is to stop talking about output, and intensification ... Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation.” Gandhi (1965:51–53) noted that the industrial growth of Europe and the US depended on plundering the South. He called for Southern countries to collectively refuse this arrangement, thus forcibly reducing the “surfeit” of rich countries. He rejected growthism and argued that production should be organized instead around human needs and sufficiency, enabling people to pursue the “art of living nobly” rather than “a complicated material life based on high speed”. Julius Nyerere (1960s) and Thomas Sankara (1980s) likewise championed a sufficiency-oriented approach to devel- opment, which they saw as key to national self-reliance and thus to throwing off neo-colonial power.

The critique of growth was in large part pioneered by thinkers in the global South, including Rabindranath Tagore, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and the economists Radhakamal Mukurjee and J.C Kumarappa (Gerber & Raina, 2018). These perspectives have been developed further by figures such as Amin(1987),O ̈calan(2015),Shiva(2013),Shrivastava and Kothari (2012). Critiques of growth are represented in the envi- ronmental justice movement (Martinez-Alier, 2012), within movements such as the Zapatistas and in Rojava (Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019), in the buen vivir movement (Acosta, 2020), in the food sovereignty movement (e.g., Campesina, 2018), and in the broader post-development literature (e.g., Escobar, 2015; Kothari et al., 2014; Kothari et al., 2019), all of which have their roots in the global South. Degrowth scholarship and activism is aligned with these movements, with demands directed spe- cifically at the North. It is the sharp edge of anti-colonial struggle within the metropole.

Evidence that Implicit Biases Are Malleable¶ Scientists have developed a body of empirical evidence that implicit biases are malleable over the past quarter century. The empirical record is now well established and offers strong evidence that implicit attitudes are neither inaccessible nor inescapable; they are not impossible to control; they are not out of reach. In fact, implicit associations can be influenced both by the individual who unconsciously holds these stereotypes and prejudices and by external factors. Researchers have reported and reviewed numerous studies that put two important misconceptions about implicit biases to rest. First, the evidence demonstrates that unconscious implicit attitudes are responsive to the deliberate choices and influences of an individual even though that person is not consciously experiencing the bias. Second, implicit biases are not impervious to relatively short-term change even though they arise from social knowledge that was acquired slowly, and over a lifetime. In fact, the evidence reveals that learning can continue to take place and alter social group knowledge, after initial attitudes and associations are formed. Take, for example, a person who developed bad driving habits over time and subconsciously incorporated those habits into driving behavior for many years. If this person chooses to be mindful of improving his or her driving, either out of a conscious decision to do so or in response to external influences, those bad habits can be altered. External authorities may incentivize improvement through a media campaign, new rules of the road, prosecution for reckless driving, or a driver's education class. Thus, malleability describes an ongoing learning process in which people with old, objectionable implicit biases learn to respond to newer, more appropriate attitudes and beliefs. Put another way, longstanding and unconscious thinking can change.¶ This understanding of malleability is called the “connectionist" model of implicit bias. Unlike the prior notion that implicit associations are static and inaccessibly fixed, the empirical record reveals that stereotypes and prejudicial beliefs to which we may adhere at any given time are “states” of thinking that form based on past experiences and current inputs. Biases can be revised depending upon current informational inputs gathered and weighed with each new encounter. This flexible view of stereotyping replaces an outdated rigid one and allows for the evidence that individuals can constantly update the stored group knowledge that produces implicit biases. The connectionist model ex. plains that a stereotype is merely a pattern of activation that, at a given point in time, is jointly determined by current input (i.e., the context) and the weight of the new information’s connection to existing and underlying beliefs. Psychologists now conclude that “stereotypes are quite elastic and thus any individual could hold and even change an infinite number of representations of social category's members, when viewed across time and place?”¶ The connectionist model contrasts with early theories of implicit bias, which focused on their automaticity. ‘Automaticity' refers generally to the way that individuals make associations without any awareness, without intentionality, and without responsibility for the influence the associations have in directing their conduct and choices.“ Early researchers concluded that automaticity meant inevitability. For example, one researcher said, “a crucial component of automatic pro~ ceases is their inescapability; they occur despite deliberate attempts to bypass or ignore them.”7 This view is no longer correct. Over the past twenty years. researchers have collected a strong record to contradict this notion that implicit attitudes change slowly, if at all, simply because they develop slowly over time. This idea has been replaced by what Dr. Irene Blair has called “the now-bountiful evidence that automatic attitudes and self-reported attitudes-~are sensitive to personal, social, and situational pressures." Blair points out that “the conclusion that automatic stereotypes and prejudice are not as inflexible as previously assumed is strengthened by the number and variety of demonstrations. . . . The fact that the tests were conducted in the service of many different goals, and by the similarity of findings across different measmres."9¶ The importance of understanding that implicit biases are malleable cannot be overstated. First, malleability means that interventions may be strategically introduced to provide current inputs that alter implicit biases. Thus, we can expect that implicit biases can be reduced. To say that biased attitudes may be “reduced” is to say that current informational inputs can be adjusted so that the resulting stereotype patterns to longer conform to traditional, discriminatory, or inequitable stereotypes, but instead lead individuals and institutions to more equitable judgments and more equitable conduct. Furthermore, malleability also leans that the discriminatory impacts that result from implicit biases so maybe reduced. The research that gave rise to the connectionist mode has provided important insights concerning the several methods available to individuals and institutions wishing to ameliorate the discriminatory impact of decisions and conduct informed by imme biases, stereotyping, and prejudice. Finally, by demonstrating that even subconscious racial biases are within reach and control, researchers have provided a sound basis for holding individuals and institutions responsible for reducing implicit racial and ethnic biases and for reducing the discriminatory harms caused by unconscious racism.

In this essay, I offer a critique of Afropessimism, both as a theory of black oppression and as a political project. I make the following claims. First, Afropessimism incorrectly centres the experiences of people of African descent that were enslaved within the U.S. This results in the homogenisation of the experiences of peoples of African descent, and, equally importantly, mischaracterises and belittles the oppression of non-African colonised subjects. While I agree that anti-blackness is a central structural feature of global white supremacy that emerged with the mid-15th-century Iberian slave trade, I argue that it is not the only critical structural feature that historically defined white supremacy. Further, the ontological centring of the experiences of people of African descent in the U.S. radically and incorrectly homogenises the history and conditions of the peoples of Africa and those in the African Diaspora.   Secondly, I argue that Afropessimists overemphasise the continuities in the black experience in the U.S. While Afropessimists are correct that there are structural continuities across time that continue to contribute to black oppression—not the least of which is a continuing vitriolic and violent global anti-blackness—they underemphasise the achievements of black freedom struggles. Even Wilderson’s own biography is a testimony to critical changes in the black experience in the U.S. The positive changes that are elided in the work of many Afropessimists—such as the formation of modern black civil society and a great expansion of a robust and often revolutionary black politics— serves to erase the often heroic struggles of black activists; struggles that often tragically failed to bring substantial progress, but that also sometimes achieved victories in the struggle for black liberation.

Nonetheless, the fact that the main current of Afropessimist thinking runs counter to all of Black political history and tradition thus far; the fact that the foundational thinker for this perspective, Frantz Fanon, came to completely opposing conclusions with respect to the nature of politics and solidarity in struggle; the fact that the theory often appears to evade scrutiny or contestation by proclaiming itself “meta-theoretical” and “ontological”; the fact that it asserts a “mandate” for which no empirical evidence is provided and in the face of overwhelming evidence that it constitutes at best a minoritarian and class-specific position — all of this has to be reckoned with by those who want to take Afropessimism to heart.

Perhaps it’s worth reminding ourselves that when he was murdered, Fred Hampton was encouraging poor whites to analogize their position to that of poor Blacks. At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X was embracing and actively seeking to incorporate a cross-racial coalition into his new organization. Ella Baker actively encouraged the deepening of organizational ties and activist links across different communities by emphasizing common struggle and common oppression. What evidence do we have, on the other hand, that the power behind the status quo is quaking at the thought of Black folk gathering in isolation to mourn the end of the world?

The challenges Afro-pessimism poses to the affirmation of Blackness extend to other identities as well and problematize identity-based politics. The efforts, on the part of such a politics, to produce a coherent subject (and movement), and the reduction of antagonisms to a representable position, is not only the total circumscription of liberatory potential, but it is an extinguishment of rage with reform—which is to stake a claim in the state and society, and thus anti-Blackness. Against this, we choose, following Afro-pessimism, to understand Black liberation as a negative dialectic, a politics of refusal, and a refusal to affirm; as an embrace of disorder and incoherence;10 and as an act of political apostasy.11 This is not to categorically reject every project of reform—for decreased suffering will surely make life momentarily easier—but rather to take to task any movement invested in the preservation of society. Were they not to decry every action that didn’t fit within their rigid framework, then they might not fortify anti-Blackness as fully as they do. It is in the effort to garner legitimacy (an appeal to whiteness) that reformism requires a representable identity and code of actions, which excludes, and actually endangers, those who would reject such pandering. This also places undo faith in politicians and police to do something other than maintain, as they always have and will, the institutions—schools, courts, prisons, projects, voting booths, neighborhood associations—sustaining anti-Blackness.

Afro-pessimism can also be used to critique prevalent liberal discourses around community, accountability, innocence, and justice. Such notions sit upon anti-Black foundations and only go so far as to reconfigure, rather than abolish, the institutions that produce, control, and murder Black subjects.12 Take for example the appeal to innocence and demand for accountability, too frequently launched when someone Black is killed by police. The discourse of innocence operates within a binary of innocent/ guilty, which is founded on the belief that there is an ultimate fairness to the system and presumes the state to be the protector of all. This fails to understand the state’s fundamental investment in self-preservation, which is indivisible from white supremacy and the interests of capital. The discourse goes that if someone innocent is killed, an individual (the villainous cop) must be held accountable as a solution to this so-called injustice. The structural reality of anti-Black violence is completely obfuscated and justice is mistook as a concept independent from anti-Blackness. Discrimination is indeed tragic, but systematic dispossession and murder is designedly more—it is the justice system—and no amount of imprisoned cops, body cameras or citizen review boards will eliminate this.

Since the establishment of the Bretton Woods system in 1944, the US dollar has been the global reserve currency. Even when the United States terminated convertibility of the dollar to gold, effectively bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end and making the greenback a flat currency, the dollar's global hegemony continued.

Since 1971, the dollar's hegemony has been based mostly on one fact: almost all commodities in the world, especially oil, are traded in the dollar. Despite the growing economic problems of the US, including the stagnation of the income of the middle class, increasing inequality, and the ballooning of the country's national debt, the US has maintained its position as the largest economy in the world with high per capita GDP.

How far is the talk of de-dollarization going to proceed? Probably not very. The US has the world’s deepest and most liquid financial markets, and they remain relatively open, in spite of some restrictions on Chinese investment in industries sensitive for national security. There are strong reasons to have a dominant currency in international markets, just as there are strong reasons for having a dominant currency in domestic transactions within the US. Liquidity for a currency begets further liquidity, whether at home or globally.

With the dollar estimated at 88% of all international transactions, the euro at 31% is only a modest competitor (since a transaction may involve two currencies, the total may exceed 100%). The euro, unlike the dollar, will never be tied to a single national government, and the European Union does not come close to the military might of the US.

The information explosion based on public opinion surveys in China in the past thirty years has left a few cracks in the empirical foundation of some of the classic theories of political science that were first developed in the West with limited firsthand evidence. For example, the classic theory of civic culture was developed from survey data in only five countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Mexico. Today, the World Values Surveys cover more than eighty countries in all continents with human inhabitation. Among these countries, China stands out as an outlier and does not fit the theoretical predictions of Western political science. As discussed in the above mentioned “surprises”: (1) the Tiananmen protest in 1989 was an anti-reform movement, but it was expected to be a pro-democratic movement; (2) the Chinese regime enjoys strong public support even though many in the West expected it to have collapsed already; (3) social capital in China is among the highest in the world, despite political science’s expectation that its authoritarian political system would produce public distrust; (4) the authoritarian government is (perceived to be) highly responsive while the theory of democracy predicts otherwise; and (5) Chinese citizens are politically active and enjoy a strong feeling of political efficacy even if they are expected to be politically apathetic. One problem in the existing political science literature is the rigid (and black-and-white) definition of democracy. For example, in the rankings of democracy and freedom by Polity25 and Freedom House,26 both highly respected organizations whose annual rankings are widely used in political science teaching and research, China has been consistently ranked at the very bottom in terms of freedom and democracy. Yet in the World Values Survey in 2012, more than 60 percent of Chinese respondents said they felt free, which was higher than in many democracies. Yes, the Chinese may have extremely low expectations, but they do feel free, and that feeling matters because unhappy citizens can cause political disruption. The problem of measurement error is not only limited to China. In fact, when comparing the subjective feelings in public opinion surveys with the “objective” measures of democracy in the rankings assigned by Polity and Freedom House, public opinions throughout the world show a negative correlation with the democracy rankings. This negative relationship between the subjective and the “objective” measures of democracy can be clearly seen in the chart below, based on the Global Barometer Surveys (2010–2015) covering more than seventy countries and regions. The respondents in these surveys were asked about their opinions regarding the following six questions related to the levels of subjective democracy in their societies: (1) The level of democracy is very high in my country; (2) The democratic system in my country is functioning very well; (3) Ordinary people in my country can freely express their opinions; (4) I trust the media in my country; (5) My government responds to what people need; and (6) I am satisfied with my government’s performance. These six items are combined into a single index of subjective democracy. When this index is compared to the Polity scores of “objective” democracy in these same countries and regions, the correlation coefficient is a statistically significant –0.51! In other words, democratic citizens feel less democracy and freedom in their societies than authoritarian citizens. One way to solve the inconsistency between the subjective and “objective” measures is to slightly stretch the concepts in the political science literature. Concept stretching may carry a negative meaning because it may result in the diluted explanatory power of a theory. Yet overly rigid definitions can limit the scope and effectiveness of political analysis. Some of the key concepts in political science can be stretched (or enriched) by the available public opinion surveys. For example, the traditional study of authoritarian politics can include both elites and masses, and formal and informal politics;27 social capital can incorporate both civic trust (trusting strangers) and community-based interpersonal trust. More importantly, the traditional definitions of democracy, freedom, government responsiveness, and political legitimacy that are derived from institutional designs (objective measures) can be enriched by including public (not elite) perceptions of these concepts (subjective measures). Those who only focus on the institutional design of democracy but discount the importance of public perception of democracy run the risk of political arrogance. Finally, a further barrier to understanding China’s authoritarian resilience is ideological bias. While people outside China take it for granted that academic research in China is ideologically limited, it is also true that China is frequently judged with ideologically tinted glasses by some media organizations and scholars in the West. According to these ideologically tinted views, the authoritarian political system in China is inherently bad; supporting such a system is unhealthy; civic trust is the only type that can qualify as interpersonal trust and social capital; government responsiveness is due to Chinese citizens’ “extremely low expectations,” and so on. These value judgements prevent researchers from understanding what is working and what is not working in the Chinese political system, regardless of whether it is good or bad.

China’s persistent expansion into the South China Sea is the most concerning security concern for the Philippines as its congress is set to approve an expanded basing deal with the U.S., Manila’s ambassador to Washington said on Thursday. “We’re more concerned about our big neighbor to the north,” Philippines ambassador to the U.S. Jose Manuel Romualdez said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We’re not going to give one inch of our territory,” Romualdez said. China continues to ignore an international tribunal’s ruling against its territorial claims in the South China Sea. He expected the Philippine Congress to approve an extension of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, or EDCA, that grants the United States access to four more sites for operations. Negotiations over use, equipment to be stationed there and fees are underway. In May in Washington, Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos said: “We have made it very clear [to the Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang], the bases we have opened up under the original [the 2014 Extended Defense Cooperation Agreement] with the United States is really because of the effects of climate change.” China condemned the new sites, saying they threaten the peace and stability of the Indo-Pacific and are aimed directly at Beijing. On Thursday, Romualdez added that the Philippines is committed to modernizing its armed forces. Manila believes these steps “contribute to deterrence and are bumping up our defense posture.” While welcoming support from other nations in this program, “we will not let any other country tell us” how to do what best fits Philippine needs. In the latest move to bolster Manila’s maritime security, the U.S. is transferring four patrol boats to the Philippines that will likely get used for maritime interdiction and search and rescue. A Chinese frigate nearly collided with a Philippine Coast Guard cutter in late April when it and a companion cutter were on patrol near the contested Spratly Islands. Beijing has built artificial islands for civilian and military use in the Spratlys, which Vietnam also claims. “We need to have peace and security” to allow the Philippines’ economy and other countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ [ASEAN] economies to develop and grow, he said. Romuldaez said Manila wants to be a leader in ASEAN by spurring regional economic growth. He acknowledged that China, which is an ASEAN member, remains the Philippines’ largest trading partner and said it had no quarrel with Beijing in those matters. He noted several times in the discussion that the U.S. is its sole treaty alliance partner, but that Manila is working on shared security issues with like-minded nations such as Japan and Australia. “What’s driving these changes [in American military posture in the region] is China,” said Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Countries are feeling threatened” by China’s aggressive behavior against other large trading partners, like Australia, India, Japan and self-governing Taiwan. Beijing has targeted Australia economically with tariffs and embargoes and Taiwan militarily by repeatedly probing defenses, and interfering in domestic politics in the Solomon Islands, Malaysia and other Pacific nations. China has also interfered in the domestic politics of the Solomon Islands, Malaysia and other Pacific nations. Lindsey Ford, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for South Asia and Southeast Asia, took sharp exception to a question over whether America’s expanding network of partners had set off an arms race with China. “The United States military has been forward and present in the Indo-Pacific for decades,” she said. The reason for a shift in force positioning, like converting the 12th Marine Regiment to the 12th Marine Littoral Regiment and the rotating fighter and bomber formations going to Australia, is the changing security environment. “We’re responding to that demand signal” from treaty allies and partners. She pointed to expanded military exercises with the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia as examples of how others value U.S. training military presence. Cooper and Ford both pointed out the benefits nations are already receiving from an expanded network for maritime awareness in controlling fisheries and secure mineral deposits. In opening remarks, Ford said the administration has actively sought to build “action-oriented security networks,” not a NATO-like “one size fits all” structure for Indo-Pacific stability. While succeeding in security matters, economic development and trade are areas where the administration’s efforts in the Indo-Pacific are falling short, said Cooper. While “political Washington,” his term, concentrates its regional support on competing against China militarily, nations there are looking for American engagement in broader issues like an investment. “We are ready to talk to everyone,” Romualdez added.

While Israel has indicated there are “red lines” regarding Iran’s nuclear program, the question that should be asked is whether Iran would ever risk a war with the United States or Israel. So far, the evidence indicates that Iran prefers the kind of propaganda stunts the IRGC carried out in the Gulf of Oman — hijacking a tanker, but not fighting the U.S. Fifth Fleet. This is because Iran can’t risk a real, conventional war. Iran hasn’t fought a major war since the 1980s when it fought Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Iran’s government is poor and its regime is relatively weak under sanctions. The only real card that it holds is its nuclear blackmail, which it uses to score points diplomatically. It also arms dangerous proxies around the Middle East, in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.

Iran’s real strength, therefore, lies with its proxies, the militias that receive Iranian drones and missiles. Iran has used drones to attack U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria and targeted a tanker off the coast of Oman in July. These types of attacks give Iran plausible deniability. It never says it carried out the drone attacks. The U.S. has shown evidence of Iran’s role in Yemen, but trafficking parts for missiles or gyroscopes for drones isn’t exactly how a country prepares for a major conventional war.

In the wake of the U.S. attack that killed Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force, many are concerned yet again about the potential for escalation between the United States and Iran to a general war.

In June, after tensions spiked following attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman that the United States blamed on Iran, we laid out the case for why the two countries were unlikely to fight a general war. We drew on similar arguments in 2018, when we explained why war between the United States and North Korea was unlikely despite the fears of many analysts at the time.