Undercapital Redux: Economic Design ‘Underneath the World’
Sous le monde réel, il existe un monde idéal, qui se montre resplendissant à l’œil de ceux que des méditations graves ont accoutumés à voir dans les choses plus que les choses. -Victor Hugo
Undualing is a means of preparing ground. -Austin Wade Smith
Protocol Undergrounds and the Force of the Virtual
Our project at OPRG began (and remains) an investigation into a structural analogy between open protocols of the web and the open cultural and technical protocols that drive and sustain underground cultures. That research is fundamentally mechanistic: despite its journeying into provocatively illegible corridors [1] - s&m dungeons, underground free parties, LSD - it was never intended to be a mysterian project. On the contrary, just as our friends in web3 have demystified money as a sacred category and brought it down to the plane of technical tweaking and practical revision, the protocol undergrounds are characterized by non-mysterian, empirical engagement with forces that often rule institutions from a hidden seat.
The variations of this model are many. If sex and libidinous power go unspoken in institutional settings, underground critique suggests, it only underwrites the extent to which they often dictate institutional behavior. Schools, offices and prisons pretend a neutral non-aesthetic that barely conceals the great aesthetic power of those settings. Messy vibes and extitutional forces prevail - all the more readily when their privilege is concealed. The task of the underground, free from the compulsions of institutional life, the positivistic grammars that are so often used to obfuscate a fundamental relationship of control and extraction, is to materialize and democratize these forces. Replacing the anti-empiricism of institutional protocols, the open protocols that animate the undergrounds are realist, even and especially if in some conditions that means commerce with dimensions of reality that are, to borrow a phrase, “real but not actual.” [2]
The Undercapital essay attempted to illustrate how one such force - or maybe a metacategory of many such forces - could be understood as a major feature of economics and governance in extitutional settings: the virtual. As we argued, there are mechanistic social structures in non-institutional life for which a model of the virtual offers unique explanatory power. And yet, if we hope to contribute to the open protocols with their assertive memeticism, we have to grapple with the obscurity of that term, which begs confusion with VR or the colloquial term for the digital realm (even while its true referent is more of a philosophical dialogue (Deleuze-Bergson-Plato) than a straightforward definition). The term is obscure, but this obscurity is functional.
Brian Massumi, likely the strongest commentator on the virtual since his Parables of the Virtual (which weaponized both Deleuze and Bergson’s use of the term to wildly exploratory ends), writes here of the inherent difficulty of the term:
The virtual is a slippery concept. It is by nature elusive. I call it “recessive.” It does not expend itself in its effect. It withdraws back into itself, constituting in the same stroke the just-past of that effect, and the to-come of the next. It is always in the gaps between chronological moments, in a nonlinear, recursive time of its own: just past-yet to come; future-past. When the virtual withdraws back into itself in the gaps in the actual, it has no “place” to go. It goes only in its own return. [3]
In the spirit of demystification and practical efficacy, we will avoid this slippery game for now and describe an encounter with the virtual as “a generative experience of nondual potentiality.” Why these descriptors? First, it involves a breakdown of subject-object boundaries - it is, to use Massumi’s language, “intensive” rather than extensive or extrinsic, meaning it deals in qualitative, affective, processual, pre-representational, raw experience.
This nondual character of the virtual, to distinguish from certain religious experiences, is not quietist: it invites into action, disjoints the time and the categorical rule, and gives permission to ways of inhabiting the world unthinkable to a given representational regime. As noted in the original Undercapital essay, the common report from certain events and parties, or sometimes radical moments of romantic/sexual intimacy, “that night it felt like anything was possible” is a perfect encapsulation of the generativity and potentiality of the virtual.
To survey the protocol underground is to survey an expanse of economic and organizational artifices developed around this experience of nondual possibility as a practical asset. It is recessive, yes - those nights of possibility are scarce and fragile - but the practicalism of the underground asserts this nondual experience is not supernatural, not something to be quarantined into place where it can be a site of collusion, a source of arbitrary authority. Instead, it should be encountered, poked, engaged - directly. It is (as we are) material: despite its reclusiveness or agential capacity [4] to withdrawal at will, it is available to us.
Does the Virtual Animate Landua’s Eight Forms of Capital?
Undercapital was originally posed as an expanse of economic activity made legible once we include virtual capital as a ninth term in Gregory Landua’s seminal Eight Forms of Capital.[5] This includes not only the opportunity for the multiple forms of money (unit of account, means of exchange, store of value) to be applied to the diverse interests of the eight forms, but also the tendency of the forms to recede into themselves in corridors of value which express their virtual life. Even financial capital has a perverse ecstasy of arbitrary quantification which leads to a generative vision of the nondual, [6] but one can picture the spectrum: cultural capital felt in its pure network value, beholden to nothing else; psilocybin or other mindful retreats of the nondual as corridors into living capital as an end in itself. Who among us hasn’t felt the lazy-stoned-day comfort of immersion into what those on the extensive plane would call social capital (i.e., friendship)? How many industrial traffickers of quartz or bauxite have been touched by the profound in-itselfness of material capital? No mere means, but an end.[7]
The virtual can be thought of as the silent partner of capital itself - that oft-obfuscated presence that permits and sustains the normal workings of capital in its quantification and valuation. Undercapital is what happens when this silent partner is acknowledged, freely socialized, invited in the room to have a seat, have a say in the matter. Where capital thought it convenient to make of the virtual either an unattainable end (to be desired) or a qualitative Other (to be feared), undercapital sees something that is immediately available for the minor but compounding transfigurations of a creative and open life.
In magical or religious literature, in military hymns or national anthems, even corporate mythology, this intersubjective becoming is posed as a cartoon of absolute solemnity, unreachably profound or sentimental and more often than not conflated with death. If its power, its ability to inject substance and momentum into a system cannot be ignored or filtered out, it can at least be made distant and untouchable by the pseudoreligious (or sometimes religious) systems of institutional propaganda. In the underground, on the contrary, the direct encounter with it is an every day activity. It is not anything ultimate: it does not give anyone powers of omnipotence, it does not defeat the day to day fluctuations of awkwardness and belonging, discontent and relative happiness. The term is not abstract, it just refers to another regime of material experience.
And this demystification as well calls for prying out the socialized virtual from the exceptional and often youth or class-contingent experiences where we are most familiar with it. Undercapital says: There is a viable engineering space of processual, nondualist design that undergrounds are only a hints of. We see them circulating protocols, constructing how-to guides, develop best practices not for the end of accumulation, not for remote ends at all, but to locate an in itselfness felt in its direct, unmediated presence. The ethos thrives in the world of art and dance. It can thrive too in the world of food production, medicine, economics, co-living. The challenge of the underground and of undercapital says: We have to start thinking of social organization in terms of public management and private obfuscation of wells of nondual experience.
We have to start thinking of social organization in terms of community management and private obfuscation of wells of nondual experience.
The virtual, then, is a bridge to another regime of experience, one which has immense creative power subjectively, and a core structural or logistical power inasmuch as it is able to move bodies. The legibility and democratization of these nondual states is an immensely consequential problem inasmuch as concealment and capture of virtual energies is a vector of control, just as mutual knowledge and horizontal social engagement with the virtual is a passage of collective liberation. Demystification and personalization of this experiential realm which is known to moves masses is a pressing issue of our time, all the more so for its invisibility to well-meaning rationalists, scientific positivists, and all those who either deny or place in divine exile the plain presence of the nondual as an aspect of the material world.
But nondual experience is not deterministic, and visitation to the realm of undercapital is not terminal. Beyond demystification and socialization, there is a pathway of reciprocity and exchange between the structural and the processual, inasmuch as nondual engagements with material singularities are also sites of neuroplasticity capable of deprogramming destructive or zombie dependency on regimes of knowledge which have ceased to serve their purpose. Through immersion in this process space - once called “the Mauve Zone” by a certain occult practitioner - one finds potential for ontological regimes that are tolerant of different kinds of agencies, be they distributed cognitions, ecological agents, animals, plants, mycelia, protozoa, even living concepts and “colors out of space.“
’Undualing’: Nature as Parallax
The array of potential minds is vast, their presence potential ubiquitous. Our mobility between structural hierarchies of agency - regimes that might afford, in their multiplicity, the full spectrum of what lives and thinks - depends on our access to mauve zones of plasticity that allow for travel between them. The virtual should not be instrumentalized to an external end, but it does constitute a resource beyond its immanent experience inasmuch as recognition of the broader fields of reality is key to our survival.
The intended end of this essay was the work of Austin Wade Smith, whose “Undualing” unlocked for me a more legible approach to the Undercapital question (with its semantically slippery “virtual” core). If these wells of nondual experience have ethical consequence in their functionality - the temptation of elites and central bodies to capture, conceal and manhandle processual experience to the ends of population control - they might have greater consequence in their role as tunnels or wormholes to alternative regimes of reciprocity: “Rather than a world co-created by a multitude of players, locations, and timelines,” AWS writes, “the dualism at the heart of modernity is a retreat from a diverse set of “worlding” practices to one universal world, centralized across time and space… Undualing is the invitation to thicken the cast of characters which create value and sustain planetary livelihood. It is the practice of reanimating lifeworlds against forces of singularization. It resists the collapsing of many to the few.”
Within the undual multitude, we find a whole panorama of regimes of experience, all negotiating the structural and the processual. Moreover, each of these regimes is calibrated to recognize and to elaborate upon different orders of entities. It would be an insult to call this panoramic entanglement and multiscale intelligence of the plane of nature “extitutional” - rather we should say that institutional life is defined by stubborn and crystallized modes woefully bereft of the plasticity and fluency needed to encounter natural intelligences (including ourselves) in their inherent multiplicity.
The virtual, with its vision of parallax or superposed potency, is the very vehicle for traversing between these lenses - as well as the tether that holds them in enough mutual coherence to remain grounded and socially coherent. If the fate of undercapital is to leave the special autonomous zones of the underground and weave this potent force of undualing into the procedural realms of economic organization, governance, and social production, it will need wild technical frameworks.
Conclusion: Toward Vagabond Technologies
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari invoke a “protogeometry that addresses vague, in other words, vagabond or nomadic, morphological essences.” These are different than the structural and enclosed categories of institutions life; they are “distinct from sensible things, as well as from ideal, royal, or imperial essences. Protogeometry, the science dealing with them, is itself vague, in the etymo- logical sense of “vagabond”: it is neither inexact like sensible things nor exact like ideal essences, but anexact yet rigorous (essentially and not accidentally inexact)… It could be said that vague essences extract from things a determination that is more than thinghood (choseite), which is that of corporeality (corporeite), and which perhaps even implies an esprit de corps.” [8]
The text is discussing the same question is subjugating, concealing or foregrounding the virtual that is the subject of this piece, and proposes the internal coherence of a nomad science of vague essences, of potent corporeality beyond thinghood. Given the context of open web protocolization and technologically aided experimental governance, the grabbing back of categories of money and legitimate statefulness into the realm of technological experimentation from which the undercapital thesis emerged, the way forward must assert a technological optimism that is also nomad, a vagabond technology, adequate to the blurry in-betweens of the many regimes of things.
This project will continue with three candidates for vagabond technologies that offer paths forward for undercapital design:
- Intent centric web3 applications (of the kind explored by Anoma)
- Feral Computing a (a kind of practice of applied technological undualing being developed by Austin Wade Smith - further entries in this project will explore feral computing in greater detail)
- Field Ontology Method (a personal prototype for instrument-based encounters with nonhuman ecologies under pluralistic knowledge regimes).
Undercapital’s technological optimism is one of ethical creativity, but it’s equally about the subversive power gained when social bodies assert the naturalistic immediacy of liminal and nondual states - not as sacred or remote, but as an inherent feature of the dynamism of the plane of nature.
Stay tuned.
Notes
[1] By illegible here we mean in the James S Scott sense of legibility before administrative bodies, the eyes of the State.
[2] “But let a noise or a scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self, which seemed — had perhaps for long years seemed — to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated as it receives the celestial nourishment that is brought to it. A minute freed from the order of time has been re-created in us, to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And one can understand that this man should have confidence in his joy, even if the simple taste of a madeleine does not seem logically to contain within it the reasons for this joy, one can understand that the word “death” should have no meaning for him; situated outside time, why should he fear the future?” Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time VI, Time Regained, 265.
[3] Brian Massumi, Couplets.
[4] The virtual has a non-determistic, temperamental quality that makes for a kind of proto-animism common in protocol undergrounds: everywhere one finds lore about the vibe and its tendency to come and go at will.
[5] The yield from the insight of the eight forms is uncountable. Support intellectual capital - buy this book!.
[6] The perversity was never the ecstasy itself, but its concentration in the halls of coercive power: one could imagine festivals of quantification that celebrate the uncanny infinities of the analogue in relation to social digitization.
[7] Industry experts in whatever form of capital is most valuable to a given channel of institutional extraction must always hazard undercapital: rogue agents that ride too deep into the expanse of whatever territory you are grabbing and discover a nondual state. Commodity becomes in-itselfness, and commerce becomes secondary to the pure creative act, the flowering and peristent expression of that nondual multiplicity; see Phantom Thread.
[8] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 367.