the problem is that in a world thoroughly hominised, in this inhospitable and even inhuman ‘anthropocene’, a totalising politics, capable of envisioning collective control, is an indefeasible requirement for emancipation. Withdrawal, secession and mere interruption—that is, revolts conceived not as inexorable moments but as an end in itself—will barely register on the radar of domination.

We live in an epoch which despairs of the possibility of a better life, of (re)constructing a more just society, or having a vision of society as a whole.

This is what Alberto Toscano calls Prometheanism. But despite the dominant Zeitgeist, he argues we need it.

Alberto Toscano:

“In a world where mankind has truly become a geological agent, enjoying (and suffering) levels of logistical integration and technical capacity that would have made the shock-workers of old blanch, we may wonder whether a diffuse anti-Promethean common sense expresses a dangerous disavowal rather than a hard-won wisdom. The problems of anti-Prometheanism are rendered particularly acute if we consider its promotion as the ideological complement to an ambient catastrophism. The irony of our present predicament is nicely conveyed by the conjunction between, on the one hand, a diffuse rhetoric that we must learn to live within our means, that progressivism and productivism must be abandoned, and, on the other, the proliferation of practices and proposals for planetary governance, regulation and control—though of the kind that are invariably delegated to the functionaries of an imposed consensus, those tasked with changing everything so that nothing will change (or, if the Copenhagen fiasco is any indication, of changing nothing so that everything will change…). The widespread notion that we are acting under the pressure of time, goaded from expedient to emergency by time’s arrow, reinforces, in subtly pernicious ways, the abdication of the very idea of collective control. On the side of established powers, it perpetuates a practice of crisis-management, which from toothless moratoria and pollution credits to road maps and peace processes, is among the chief components of catastrophe. Among the forces of opposition, when it doesn’t council ecological compromises even more rotten than the historical compromises of old, it fosters anti-political survivalist fancies or misplaced hopes in the post-political virtues of ‘civil society’.

Whether in economics, ecology or geopolitics, this numbing state of anxious and impotent mobilisation serves to further entrench all of the structures of power and accumulation that perpetuate and feed off crisis, demoralising and depoliticising a disenfranchised populace that can at best acquiesce to prohibitions, recycle and adapt. But a legitimate scorn for the modern Leviathan has meant that, within oppositional cultures, the sense of emergency has counseled either a desperate hope in the vivifying virtues of collapse or a retreat into enclaves intended to prefigure the very future they are powerless to bring about. But barbarism is an even less likely catalyst for emancipation than those parties and states whose own barbarities now shadow every call, however mild, for organisation and centralism. And though small may occasionally be beautiful, defeat and insignificance aren’t.

“Withdrawal, secession and mere interruption…
will barely register on the radar of domination.”

While the anti-Prometheanism of the right conspicuously disavows the ballooning power of money, class and finance, together with the political concentration and centralisation of this power in crucial pivots, that of the left reifies the historical context and content of control. Borrowing from the feebler end of the nineteenth century critique of religion it rails against the State, Technology, Progress, and History, as if to repudiate them with the same rush of righteousness with which one could once deny God, and all, again, for the sake of an ill-defined freedom and singularity. But the problem is that in a world thoroughly hominised, in this inhospitable and even inhuman ‘anthropocene’, a totalising politics, capable of envisioning collective control, is an indefeasible requirement for emancipation. Withdrawal, secession and mere interruption—that is, revolts conceived not as inexorable moments but as an end in itself—will barely register on the radar of domination.

A new Prometheus need not take the form of the ‘Modern Prince’, the party, if the latter is regarded as a commanding height and centre supervenient on any other council, association or organisational form. Collective control must involve the control and ‘recall’, to use that important slogan of delegation in communes and soviets, of its inevitable instances of centralisation. But whether the horizon be one of radical reform or revolution, a systemic challenge cannot but take on, rather than blithely ignore, the risks of Prometheanism, outside of any forgetful apologia for state power or survivalist, primitivist mirage. Most significantly, the unreflected habit of associating power’s corruption with certain seemingly intractable contents—the possibility of violence, the proliferation of bureaucracies, the mediation of machines—needs to give way to an engagement with the social forms and relations of control. Warning against the menace of Prometheanism at a time when the everyday experience of the immense majority is one of disorientation, powerlessness and opacity—that is, one where knowledge, scale and purpose are rent asunder—is simply to acquiesce in the exercise of power in the usual sites and by the usual agents, in that particular mix of anarchy and despotism that marks the rule of and for capital.

For better and for worse, the world we inhabit is an immense accretion of dominations, the living labours of centuries mortified into the massive infrastructures that channel our daily lives, natural processes at once subsumed and refractory, and a vast accumulation of ends, endings and extinctions heterogeneous to original plans, when plans there were. In this regard, any politics today which is not merely a vapid accompaniment to dispossession and degradation, whether it claims the legacy of painstaking reform, desperate conservation, or comprehensive revolution, cannot but confront the ‘Promethean’ problem of articulating action and knowledge in the perspective of totality. To the extent that we regard Prometheus as ‘the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar’, emblem of servitude refused to abstract and alienated powers (God, State, Money, Capital), then Promethean should be a proud adjective for those who consider revolution not as a passionate attachment to some flash of negation or other, but as a process of undoing the abstract social forms that constrain and humiliate human capacities, along with the political agencies that enforce these constraints and humiliations.”