Thermodynamics of Necrocracy

“[A]nyone who believes that he can draw a blueprint for the ecological salvation of the human species does not understand the nature of evolution, or even of history – which is that of a permanent struggle in continuously novel forms, not that of a predictable, controllable physico-chemical process, such as boiling an egg or launching a rocket to the moon.”^[1]

Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen

Klatka z reklamy Jeepa Grand Cherokee z 2011 roku. Zródło: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WfDTykTcM8, (c) FCA

On the brink of the Anthropocene – the epoch characterized by the planetary impact of the human species on the Earth’s geology – it seems that no crisis is profound enough to wipe out the dominant regime of extraction, production, distribution and consumption, responsible for the immense ecological crisis of our times. Instead of that, the old lies of human mastery over nature are being reintroduced to prevent the critical analysis of the given socio-economic system of late capitalism. However, as this rich mesh of organic and inorganic matter packed into the shape of a globe is being overheated and destabilized by anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, it is becoming clear that the future environment will be outstandingly hostile to any organized form of human society and economy. Capitalism thus strives to achieve a new quality of resilience, and as it evolves its peculiar protective system, it also generates new cultural and political logic regulating individual as well as collective security – the general individualization of responsibility and the privatization of security under late capitalism. The most striking example of this “securitization of society” is probably the proliferation of gated communities worldwide. At the end of the 1990s, they could be find in all the major metropolitan areas in United States;^[2] today, they have spread from Brazil and Mexico through Africa to India and China.^[3] These settlements geographically re-enact and consequently further fortify social, political, and economic divisions, responding to existing tensions or crises and securing status as well as privileges for their inhabitants.^[4] Thus they are also straightforwardly related to the distribution of risk and security in the planetary assemblage of humans and non-humans. In this respect, private anti-nuclear bunkers represent an extreme version of the gated community. The fetishization of similar security solutions can be interpreted as an effect of the phenomenon once labelled in the context of United States as G.A.P.S. – the Great American Potency Syndrome: “[T]he need to have more than is needed, just in case…”^[5] The end of the world may not happen in your lifetime – but in case it does, you will watch other people dying from your safe concrete shelter buried deep under the ground. In other words, we are encouraged to cover ourselves in a series of protective shells that filter out the odds of being trapped and eaten in the coming jungle of social, economic, and ecological turmoil. But resilience-driven securitization under late capitalism also has another face – solutions that are no longer static and large-scale, but dynamic and pervasive ones, based on mobility and robust design. The emblematic form of such an exo-somatic envelope^[6] – offering increased mobility and guaranteeing personal security – is Sports Utility Vehicle, or simply SUV. This essay will use its metaphorical power to direct our attention towards the nature of relation between contingency, entropy, power and death in the age of historical articulation of capitalism and climate change.


1. From SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle) to FUV (Fuck You Vehicle)

Long ago, sociologists observed that SUVs have become a vehicular version of a gated community.^[7] They originally evolved from military vehicles, specifically from the US Army’s Jeeps, whose modified “civil” versions enjoyed mass popularity among middle-class families in the decades after WWII.^[8] However, its precursors can be traced back to the inter-war period, when Chevrolet introduced its first generation of Suburban model, developed for the US National Guard and Civilian Conservation Corps. It was built on the truck frame and offered versatility as well as (limited) off-road mobility – hence it satisfied the technical definition of a modern SUV. The military origins of SUVs are visible also in the history of Land Rover – the British version of the American Jeep – and they are even further amplified with the introduction of the Hummer, the civilian version of the Humvee used by US troops in the first Gulf War. For this reason, some authors have recently suggested that these models of automotive vehicles are emblematic manifestations of a new discourse on security – latently present in class consciousness of the upper and middle classes since the post-WWII period, and explicitly re-formulated after 9/11.^[9] The question of personal security in automobility has transcended the simple interest of preventing death and injury, tending towards the idea of a general protective shell that minimizes one’s reliance on his/her/its surrounding social, economic, and ecological networks.^[10] This discursive shift is clearly visible in the car manufacturers’ advertisements. Their pivotal analysis, conducted by Nicole Shukin in her essay about the mimesis of organic life in the automotive industry, suggests as the central images of the cultural representation of SUVs the animality and predatory qualities of both the vehicles and their owners.^[11] She focuses on a newspaper ad of the bestselling Saturn Vue, an SUV sold by General Motors. In the front of an Arctic landscape, we can see illustrations of various inhabitants of polar regions: wolves, rabbits, bears, reindeers and – of course – also the mighty Saturn Vue. Shukin writes that “by equating automobility with the biological ignition of animal life, the Vue discourse mythologizes the motive power of the sport utility vehicle and conceals the economy of power regulating a carnivorously capitalistic relation of nature and culture.”^[12] This becoming-animal of automobile industry functions as a mimetic solution to the crisis of all kinds of environments – social, economic as well as “natural.” Consider another example. The Kodiak (Ursus arctos middendorffi) is the largest living brown bear, inhabiting the island in Southwestern Alaska of the same name. Slightly modified, it is coincidentally also the name of the biggest vehicle manufactured by the Czech car company Škoda. Kodiaq is its flagship SUV, advertised as “Driven by something different” – marking that its libidinal economy “reconnects” with ecosystem processes and mobilizes the powerful natural capital for the sake of the car’s user(s).^[13] This is made fully explicit in recent advertisements of the Volkswagen Tiguan. In the TV ad featuring a jumbo, King-Kongish gorilla-balloon, the slogan assures the audience that Tiguan is “The New King of the Concrete Jungle.”^[14] The second slogan is even more straightforward: Tiguan is “The Top of the Food Chain,” similarly as its owner/driver.^[15]


This strong emphasis on traces of animality and roughness in the cultural representation of SUVs points towards recent shifts in the strategies of power and control associated with late capitalism. Facing the possibility of immense crisis generated by the combined effects of climate change, environmental degradation, geopolitical instability, civil unrest, or the pauperization and precarization of large masses of people, capitalism engages with strategies that can lead to the adaptation of increasingly chaotic conditions. Aside from the aforementioned privatization of security and individualization of responsibility, the most important and ostensible aspect is the widespread militarization of state control coming together with cultural para-militarism as a response to the increased (and unequal) distribution of risks in society.^[16] As an example of such a fundamentally conservative and risk aversive tendency,^[17] one can mention a diminishing gap between police and military tactics and technologies, primarily used to tackle street riots or criminality in ghettoized neighborhoods.^[18] For instance, a Slovak manufacturer of military technology Božena introduced its first police-armored vehicle “BOZENA Riot” a few years ago, based on the design of its “popular” de-mining system.^[19] Functioning as a remotely controlled mobile fence, it is presented as the “ultimate anti-riot solution,” enabling riot police to kettle streets and prepare positions to disperse crowds. Similarly to the massive water cannons used in Hamburg during last G20 summit, these machines execute force not only by their direct functionality, but also by their aesthetic effects.^[20] On the other hand, from the individual point of view, the major case of paramilitaristic tendencies is the public demand for less strict legal control of guns ownership, which in case of Czech Republic resulted in unprecedented constitutional amendment allowing every Czech citizen who legally possess a gun to legitimately use it for the defense of “national security.”^[21] Unfortunately, there is no further legislation that defines what “national security” means, and the amendment is thus opened to interpretation. In future, these rules can lead to catastrophic scenarios, where guns possessors feel legitimized in tackling minorities, refugees or other disliked groups on their own.


Taking these militaristic tendencies into account, we can easily get the feeling that SUVs ultimately play a role of a special kind of urban battering ram, smashing all “eco-cycle-terrorists” and “hostile migrants” in an excluded neighborhood. The owner of the SUV navigates herself safely throughout risky territory, acquiring a magical feeling of superiority by the overall physical appearance and driving features of the car (e.g. the driver is seated significantly higher than in an ordinary vehicle, so she can observe other members of the traffic as subordinated to her gaze).^[22] As Lauer puts it, “the height and weight differential between SUVs and cars puts the occupants of cars at a significant disadvantage. In the event of a side impact collision with an SUV, car occupants are 16 times more likely to die.”^[23] Thus, it is no exaggeration to change the name of SUVs to FUVs – Fuck You Vehicles – to better represent their underlying social ethics, as New Republic columnist Gregg Easterbrook suggested back in 2003.^[24] On top of that, SUVs also function as markers of class division in contemporary society.^[25] However, with the recent surge in popularity of small and affordable SUVs, these cars cease to sharply represent familiar patterns of Veblenian conspicuous consumption, as they transform themselves into general articulation of pervasive social paranoia.^[26] The source of this paranoia may partly lie in neoliberal precarity of individual life and work, which is also reflected in SUVs versatility – the same car can be used for leisure (sport) as well as for work (utility) purposes.^[27] One can thus conclude that SUVs stand for the perfect representation of the material culture of fear and anxiety. But what kind of fear are we talking about? My suggestion is that this fear is not sufficiently explicable as collective or individual anxiety or xenophobia – it can be traced back to our deep and intimate relation to death and extinction. As I will try to show in the following sections, the SUV can be re-interpreted as an exo-somatic shield that facilitates the economy of death and living; its culturally coded animal qualities merge with its thanatotic drive to transform fossilized corpses of dead organisms into a spark that ignites the motive power of the vehicle. Ultimately, it is a negentropic processor that maintains the life of its operator in exchange for the decay of the surrounding organic and inorganic environment. The truth of extinction is the higher Idea hardwired into the robust body of these magnificent vehicular media of social and economic segregation for the 21^st century

Zdjęcie SUVa przy posesji, dookoła której trwa remont, Brno, (c) Archiwum Miriam Kolarovej. Dzięki uprzejmości artystki.

2. Entropy and extinction

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud developed his conception of the death drive and the energetic model of the nervous system, which provided a solid ground for the speculations of contemporary thinkers like Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani or the sadly famous Nick Land. In the original Freudian picture, every organism is conceived as a kind of superject – an index of interiority standing for a temporary organic scission from inorganic exteriority.^[28] An inorganic exteriority (i.e. death) is the initial as well as the terminal stage of the organic life. As Freud puts it: “the aim of all life is death" and looking backwards, that "inanimate things existed before living ones.”^[29]


For this reason, Ray Brassier speaks about death as the anterior posterity of every living being, and he further generalizes his philosophical assertion to the level of equating death with the ultimate horizon of the cosmic existence as such. Similarly, as solar death ramifies the existence of life on Earth, the heat death of the universe marks the limit of every spatiotemporal being.^[30] The truth of extinction demarcates the fundamental nature of being-in-the-world.^[31] An organism survives only thanks to a temporal separation from the outer environment. It acquires a protective shield of inorganic matter, which functions as a membrane that facilitates the material-energetic metabolism representing a communicative flow between exteriority of the world and interiority of the life.^[32] This leads to a thermodynamic interpretation of the economy of life and death (and consequently also being and nothingness) in Freudian psychoanalysis, since we can generalize from this particular idea of a “protective shell” or “sphere” and begin to speak about the thermodynamic notion of a negentropic system instead. These systems behave in such a way that they attempt to maintain their internal entropic state on a similar level throughout a given time span.^[33] This however results in disturbing the entropic state of the environment in which the given system is embedded. Ecological economist Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen refers in this respect to Erwin Schrödinger’s observation that “... life seems to evade the entropic degradation to which inert matter is subject. The truth is that any living organism simply strives at all times to compensate for its own continuous entropic degradation by sucking low entropy (negentropy) and expelling high entropy.”^[34] And we can of course add that similar behavior is displayed not only by living organisms, but also by large compounds of living and non-living matter, such as socio-economic systems or planets. Life and being turn out to be nothing but torturous and costly diversions from the state of peaceful dissolution; temporary contractions of energy and matter that subsequently dissolve into higher-entropic states.^[35] Matter is an index of interiorization of cosmic abyss, organic life is an index of the interiorization of inorganic matter.^[36] The continuous evolutionary differentiation of organic and inorganic matter thus can be viewed as a long-lasting process of reaching more complex and higher entropic states of being, transporting everything from qualitive intensity to quantitative extensity.


Since the second law of thermodynamics binds the organic matter to a necessarily dissipative trajectory, it seems that there is no escape from the infinite regression in being. However, Negarestani points out that “[t]he traumatic scission from the inorganic or any precursor exteriority brings about the possibility of life which consists of energetic opportunities.” These opportunities can be consumed to sustain the living activity. Here Negarestani sees the possibility of participation – the question how to consume and distribute these energetic opportunities is in fact of an open, political-economic nature.^[37] In this regard, he approaches Land’s nihilistic and inhumanist conception of capitalism, which he criticizes for ignoring the opportunities that can configure the exact lines of organic decay. According to Land, capitalism represents a dissipative tendency that facilitates the regression of organic matter towards inorganic exteriority.^[38] It is an alien and inhuman tendency, a perfect storm of absolute deterritorialization.^[39] He celebrates this aspect as an ultimate goal of the unfolding capitalistic accumulation, which he takes as the only possible realization of inhuman emancipation. However, Negarestani counters this solution as reactionary and conservative, since it ignores possible lines of flight from the pre-determined trajectory of decay inherently given to the individual organism via the possibility of participation that can stimulate combinatorics of unprecedented political economies of energy and matter.^[40] Capitalism thus stands for an inherently unimaginative and boring way to die and let die (i.e., to live and let live). Negarestani calls this regime necrocracy, which suggests “that the organism must die or bind the precursor exteriority only in ways that its conservative conditions or economic order can afford.”^[41] It subordinates the death drive to energetic opportunities inherent in the organism itself, denying any transcendental practice that could multiply the pool of affordable stocks and flows suitable for individual life sustainment. Under capitalist necrocracy, we all live and die alone. In the next section, we will finally see how SUVs contribute to the further proliferation of this necrocratic regime.


3. Contingency management

The capitalist abandonment of intra-worldly transcendentality resulting in horrific solitude of being (and dying) mystifies the political and technological aspects of necrocracy. Hence in relation to capitalism, we can speak of necropolitics and necrotechnics, as does for example Achille Mbembe or Marina Gržinic.^[42] While Foucault correctly observed that life is socially constructed under given biopolitical regime, Mbembe and Gržinic do the same with death – the ways of dying are fabricated, and their differences conform to the social, economic, and environmental inequalities of the epoch. Some people are not naturally exposed to death more than others – they are made so. The key necropolitical principle is an unequal distribution of risk and uncertainty.^[43] Living in a poor neighborhood with bad public infrastructure increases your chances of dying in a lethal accident. And as Mbembe points out, these necropolitical patterns frequently follow the lines of racist discourses and segregatory practices.^[44] Subsequently, these political remarks can direct our attention to technological settings that allow such modes of necrocracy to flourish. Brassier in this respect turns our attention towards an “originary synthesis of techné and physis,” since there is no natural realm that can be clearly distinguished from artificial, technological one.^[45]


The technical organization of capitalist necrocracy predominantly offers only those solutions that function as prostheses which progressively encapsulate individuals in aforementioned protective shells, turning them into their own masters and managers of risk and security. On a supra-personal level, this pattern of securitization is repeated with gated communities guarded by private security companies and insurance products that directly guarantee compensations for less than more likely future events. On a personal level, my contention is that SUVs similarly function as a symbol of this necrotechnical regime. They are predatory machines sucking low-entropy fossil fuels and combusting them into high-entropic heath, enacting necropolitical economy of decay – some die for the sake of the living. In other words, they secure the life of the owner/driver to the detriment of others. One can interpret this practice of securitization as contingency management,^[46] which differs from risk management to the extent that while the latter is inherently pre-emptive and mitigative, the former tends not to prevent certain outcomes, and it rather engages in preparing scenarios of response. Instead of avoiding catastrophic events, it is deliberately (and positively) inhabiting the plane of catastrophes.^[47] Thus ontologically speaking, contingency management proceeds with covering large enough space of simultaneously deployed alternative states of given entity, thus filling its horizon of future possible states of affairs and securing a preferred path to be paved throughout the medium of contingency. An entity professing such a procedure thus occupies several parallel territories at once that represent its entire set of possible histories. It operates transworldly and transfinitely – that aligns our understanding of contingency with that of Quentin Meillassoux or Elie Ayache.^[48]


The ultimate terrain of SUV is the field of pure contingency. The vehicle secures the symbolic position on top of the entropic food chain, rendering resilience to its user(s). In terms of contingency, resilience can be understood as a capacity to withstand destructive planetary or cosmic excesses, i.e., as an ability to fill the gaps in the fabric of contingency that could let the catastrophic storm enter the scene of slow and conservative destitution of the organism. Regarding SUVs and the contingency-resilience link, the Jeep Cherokee magazine advertisement is more than telling: “OK, it’s massively over-engineered for the school run. And the problem with that is what, precisely?”^[49] We are thus coming back to our original point of departure – the collective syndrome to have more than needed, just in case the accident occurs. The fortification of bodies in hi-tech capsules is in fact a managerial technique bending the medium of contingency so that the actor has secured an advantageous position that ensures its possibility of future existence in a large enough set of future states of affairs. The point is not to avoid death, but to pile up the number of corpses large enough to provide a differential between the decay of the privileged individual organism and the decay of its surrounding. In the end, contingency management thus can be viewed as an opportunistic maintenance of existing power structures, as well as of social, economic, or environmental injustices. The circle between death, entropy, contingency, and power is thus finally made fully explicit. SUVs are symbolic expressions of the neofeudal secession under way in planetary structures of capital and power,^[50] articulating the resignation to the possibility of collective contingency management that would secure the dignity of living and dying to all the critters on this cosmic rock called Earth.


4. P.S. Let’s die together!

The emancipative strategy against this conservative decay would mean thinking inhuman outside of capital, as Negarestani suggests.^[51] Death as a radical alterity disenchanting world of every meaning can be approached either by means of subordination to its alienating power, or by means of cheerful play, i.e. from the standpoint of the speculative exercise in fabricating novelty. To cease to be human might by precisely the way out of the Anthropocene. The accompanying trends of scientific disenchantment and rationalization can be also viewed outside of the debilitating storm of capital – they can be hallmarks of participatory opportunities that allow to transcend the necrocratic horizon of capitalism with new forms of life and death. Solar death is inevitable, but the continuation of the regime of capitalist necrocracy resulting in heating the planet up to the point of mass extinction is not. We can die either alone, or together. And what the heck to do with all those shiny SUVs? Just burn them – for the sake of the living and dying together.



BIO

Lukáš Likavčan is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Environmental Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic), and works as the environmental editor of the online daily A2LARM. He studied philosophy at Masaryk University, and sociology at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. He was a visiting researcher at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien. His work is in materialist, post-Marxist and post-structuralist philosophy, the philosophy of technology, political economy, and ecology. His dissertation project is about the political-technological imagination of post-capitalist societies.