This text is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “EXOCRITICISM”, edited by Arne De Boever and Frédéric Neyrat.
Image: Naturalistic Fallacy – Ferdinand Altenburg, 2025
The Inhuman, All Too Human
Anna Longo
Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like the roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.
–Lu Xun
For the philosopher who proclaimed the end of modernity and of the great narratives, reinventing philosophical writing has been a challenging task. Mistrusting criticism and theory, Jean-François Lyotard broke free from the codes of the academy. Before gaining international recognition for his thoughts on the postmodern condition, he authored two thought-provoking books: Libidinal Economy and Discourse, Figure. Both are the outcome of a Freudian-Nietzschean investigation that tried to understand the subterranean forces operating beneath the surface of our logical (linguistic and economic) structures. In The Differend, he subsequently made the case that the ostensibly inclusive and open discourse in our liberal democracies requires that diverse discourse genres submit to the principles of economic exchange.[1] Consequently, incommensurable ways of connecting phrases are reduced to comparable moves in a universal language game where the goal is to increase the system’s effectiveness. In this all-encompassing game, intellectuals play the designated role of critics and, instead of challenging the protocol, they confine themselves to pointing out various inefficiencies in the social development process and, in such a way, they end up contributing to the system’s further development. As he noted, “the task of criticism is precisely to pinpoint and denounce every failure of the system with regard to emancipation”, however, “emancipation is from now on the charge of the system itself, and critiques of whatever nature they may be are demanded by the system in order to carry out this charge more efficiently.”[2] The system grants anyone the right to express themselves, or better the duty to assert this right, and this injunction prevents silence, the time needed to reconnect with the inner other, the “inhuman” within the human that we have been trained to become. As Lyotard explains in Readings in Infancy, the inhuman is the potential for a determination other than that achieved through the education that makes us human. This training consists in excluding other potentialities for development that remain in a state of latency. These inhuman latencies are the unsayable that the philosopher would like to articulate in writing or, more precisely, the transformative intensities he would like to let emerge on the page.
Lyotard considers any social organization as the realization of specific intensities that succeed in preventing others from expression. Hence, techno-capitalism is understood as the drive that informs our reality as well as our subjectivity. It is considered a force that we cannot master and that pursues its own evolution. This is the central theme of Lyotard’s “A Postmodern Fable”[3] in which he experiments with philosophical fiction. Here, humans are described as a temporary stage in a complexification process that will be accomplished by the rise of artificial actors that humans are conceived to create. This new technological intelligence will move to far-off planets prior to the solar explosion that will wipe out biological life. In this fable, the human is shown to be a manifestation of a non-human drive, a force that, via terrestrial evolution, establishes the framework for its own development in forms that aren’t necessarily biological. This postmodern recognition, however, also implies that the only thing that can give rise to hope is the inhuman, as a potentiality for becoming, because the dominance of the techno-capitalist drive can only be challenged by the excitation of latent intensities. This is where philosophy takes on the role of fabulation, pitting one inhuman (infancy) against the other inhuman (techno-capitalism). “Fabulation calls for a kind of spatiotemporal and material emptiness, in which linguistic energy is not invested in the direct constraints of its exploitation as making, knowing, and know-how.”[4] Fabulation is a way to get around the demands and interests of the dominant force by expressing latencies. It is the responsibility of philosophy to “make the unsaid sayable,” to understand, beyond the representation of the human, the hidden play of inhuman forces and intensities.
By addressing the boundaries of criticism and the techno-capitalist conditions of its production, Lyotard developed a form of exocriticism. In the same way that the open discourse of neoliberal democracies, which Lyotard examined, was merely a tool used by techno-capitalism to advance itself, so too is our more violent and aggressive way of relating in the modern era. Surely, we are no longer in the “anything goes” of the 1980s when the system could afford to promise anyone the right of self-realization while diversifying the market for cultural objects. At the time, belief in unlimited growth led to the conclusion that spreading wealth would result in the reproduction of wealth. After the acknowledgement of planetary limits, we know that resources are not enough for granting everybody the American dream: the possibility of realization must be reserved to techno-capitalism’s most deserving servants within a much more selective competition. If Lyotard proposed that the catastrophe to avoid was the solar explosion, I would argue that today’s technology to live on the planet must be developed before the ecological collapse and exhaustion of energy resources. The time of departure from Earth is drawing nearer than anticipated, so every resource must be used as efficiently as possible. As we are going to see, this entails a new form of subjectivation and a change in the rules of the game.
The financialization of the economy had the effect of transforming subjectivities with the complicity of digital platforms. The liberal open competition has been turned into a zero-sum game, a sort of war for survival where the excessive prosperity of the privileged few entails the misery of all the others. The initial obvious indication of the new era was the economic crisis of 2008–2010, and the COVID-19 pandemic further marked a turning point by compelling the masses to interact virtually in an environment designed to foment insecurity, fear and moral suspicion. The implementation of austerity measures resulted in a significant reduction of social welfare in favor of the financial elites, who benefit the most from the implementation of techno-capitalism. It became more and more difficult for people to become employable in a declining labor-market when states began to divert funds from social programs, forcing people to take out loans to fund personal development initiatives.
Within this framework, digital platforms have emerged as a crucial instrument for exhibiting and utilizing one’s competencies. On platforms, people struggle to create development projects that are worthy of recognition due to their capacity to build networks and entice others to devote time and affection. Digital elites learn how to extract plus-value from desperate users who where compelled to construct and sell themselves as products on social media. Trying to monetize sympathy, trust and proximity, individuals turned themselves in brands —images or self-representations that are meant to produce identification based on shared values, life-styles, and beliefs. Brands are catalysers of communities and, at the same time, representatives of groups that aim at obtaining recognition. Brand value is speculative and is based more on expectations regarding the brand’s reputation and social integration than it is on the products it sells. A brand’s primary objective is to augment the value of the shares by increasing the number of people who identify with the proposed image. For the followers, the attachment to a brand is a way of expressing themselves by borrowing the tools to make themselves more appreciable. As they develop their personal brands, people want to be seen as both community representatives and supporters of the most prestigious communities.
By gathering and analyzing data, it is possible to make accurate assessments of a brand’s worth based on the level of attachment it evokes, as well as its ability to affect behavior and elicit responses. The possibility of satisfying one’s needs and desires depends upon the valuation of the self-production project carried by each individual. By establishing metrics that, on platforms, apply indistinctly to commercial and personal brands, financial institutions participate in shaping the behavior of all those who compete for credit and funding, that is, for having the chance of existing. Social networks are one of the best ways to find stakeholders or supporters as well as to choose the brands that deserve investments (in terms of money, attention or affection). Every brand looks for people who are interested in and dedicated to their self-construction project in the hopes of gaining favorable public perception. In short, everyone is the object of others’ speculations, and anybody’s fate is tied to the opinion that others have of them. Brands, or subjects shaped by financial capitalism, are indeed both suppliers and demanders of credit just as previous economic agents were both suppliers and demanders of goods.
To understand the violence of the game involving brands, we have to consider that, as mentioned previously, there are not enough resources to fund all the brands. The constant evaluation of brand performances has the function of selecting only the most deserving brands. Instead of resizing the model of success and personal goals, a competition has been established in which the production of likes is what matters. This creates the illusion of collectively electing those who deserve, for their popularity, to continue the race, while the others are fired—as they say in a reality TV show that perfectly illustrates the mindset. The gamification[5] of competition—which, for the majority of personal brands, takes place on social media—allows participants to conceal the cruelty of the daily devaluation to which every brand (personal, commercial, or community-based) is exposed, along with its supporters. By expressing support for the model of the human that is proposed by a brand and by denouncing the ethical and moral insufficiencies of the competitors, anybody is essentially betting on the groups that must be spared from lethal disinvestment.
In this cutthroat competition, brands strive to acquire and maintain their reputation and are incited to jeopardize the reputations of others. The struggle for recognition and appreciation is a daily battle where existence is at stake: in the fierce competition for resource allocations, the realization of some means the ruin of others. Even heads of government are now subject to the ruthless rules of the financial valuation. They are committed to marketing themselves as brands as well as to rebrand the Nation’s image to win investors’ trust. These strategies involve budgetary reforms and simultaneously entail the accreditation of the most promising citizens at the expense of the less adapted to serve techno-capitalism’s evolution.
The war of anybody against anybody for appreciation and credit is the selective competition that expresses the dark force’s scope to accelerate the development of AI while assuring that all the resources–energetic, human and economical–will be completely put in service of the project.
As the dark techno-capitalist force seeks to ensure its own limitless development beyond terrestrial constraints, the brand’s subjectivity is expanding and redefining the human. Believing that they are fighting for their own realization as financially valuable products, brands are actually the agents of the selection that, little by little, will not concede existence to anybody but to the artificial mind they are all contributing to feed by marketing themselves on platforms. Techno-capitalism’s desire informs anybody, and anybody’s desire is to embody the inhuman model of the human that deserves to be algorithmically implemented and sent into the universe as an intelligence without a body.
The disputes for AI regulation and governance are the attempts to align the technologies with partisan ethical principles while trying to prevent antagonists from being represented. The purpose of critics is to stop the spread of ideas and actions that are inconsistent with the morals of the social brand they are a part of and the personal brand they have created for themselves. Any brand criticizes anyone who could jeopardize its reputation, and all brands boost their perceived value among their supporters by naming the most vile opponents. Blaming certain brands for their “fascist” stance won’t help you avoid the power of the techno-capitalist force, which manifests itself in a desire to discredit and destroy rivals. What then?
Lyotard recommended taking a break from games that require us to respond and chain together phrases that are conveyed to us. Instead of performing as expected on stage, he suggested looking behind the scenes to uncover the latencies that are waiting to surface and challenge the conventional portrayal of the human. In the last part of his life, Lyotard was deeply interested in the consequences of the internet and digital technologies on the conception of the human. For example, the exhibition Les immatériaux, which he curated at the Centre Pompidou in 1985, sought to investigate this issue. He was particularly fascinated by communication networks, which he saw as expressing a latency or potential for subverting the modern concept of subject, which is based on the paradigms of mastery and domination. The exhibition is conceived as a sort of fabulation, presenting the possibility of a new metaphysics:
A metaphysics in which, precisely, man is not a subject facing the world of objects, but only – and this “only” seems to me to be very important – only a sort of synapse, a sort of interactive clicking together of the complicated interface between fields wherein particle elements flow via channels of waves; and that if there is some greatness in man, it is only insofar as he is – as far as we know – one of the most sophisticated, most complicated, most unpredictable, and most improbable interfaces.[6]
Lyotard was convinced that, in addition to serving capitalism’s interests, the new intelligent technologies brought with them a non-anthropocentric ontology that would necessitate political reinvention. Humans were appearing as devices for treating information connected to similar biological and artificial interfaces, operating on the fluxes of data transmitted by the others. Against the centralized version, which perpetuates the old paradigm of domination, he envisioned a decentralized network with no master, in which humans must acknowledge their role as byproducts of a collective process that no one can control.
However, it appears that old ideas are don’t die easily, and that today’s human produced by the development of techno-capitalism is still too human, still too attached to the desire to dominate, and unable to recognize that he is simply an interface in a network. The real war we are involved in is less between different brands or groups than between the techno-capitalist drive and the emergence of the new ontology of heterogeneous assemblages. Techno-capitalism is still a modern drive. It imagines AI to develop as an emergent ego, a general consciousness or centralizing brain that controls the behavior of the subordinated intelligences via feedback loops. The model of AI is merely the autonomous self-determined agent capable of mastering reality according to its goals. Techno-capitalist drive is now challenged by one of the intensities it had to excite in order to develop itself by imposing the use of digital technologies. The spreading of the subjectivity of the brand is a symptom of the emergence of this perspective, despite the efforts to define identities through opposition and antagonism. Any brand is the representation of a group, and any group is a collectivity of individual brands: there are only brands inside brands; identities are but communities intersections.
Moreover, that we are not independent individuals but networks within networks is something that has been increasingly suggested in philosophy as well as in science. For instance, according to Gilles Deleuze, we are assemblages that are inevitably part of larger assemblages that don’t constitute a superior unity. Rather, assemblages differentiate, they ceaselessly disconnect and reconnect to let new patterns appear while maintaining heterogeneity. Similarly, according to quantum field theory, particles are a mere excitation of the all encompassing fields, they are like crests on the surface of the sea. Interferences between waving fields give rise to atoms, then to molecules and macroscopic compounds that present the classic properties of bodies. Nevertheless, according to the theory, bodies are not autonomous separated objects. Instead, they are like bubbles that appear on the surface of the field, which wholly depends upon its internal agitation, and they contribute to it. In this picture, our will to self-determination control is an illusion: ideas pop up in us according to the inferences in the field that constitute our bodies and minds, the essential indeterminacy of quantum processes leading to essential uncertainty. From this standpoint, our intelligent technologies are effects of quantum field dynamics just like anything else, and they will never be able to master reality according to an individual will, despite their increasing power of computation.
The fable I’m telling is then the following: on the one hand, the techno-capitalist and still too human tendency that has been forming our minds in the last decades is striving for preserving its domination by making us believe that to be human means to be a self-determined struggle for affirmation and recognition; on the other hand, a new metaphysics is emerging that entails a radical revision of what we thought to be human. That our destiny is actually to die as a species while trying to feed with all our energies a monstrous artificial super-ego does not depend on us.
Nevertheless, we can hope that the still weak force that we feel acting in our mind will win and finally allow us to conceive humans as wonderful bubbles or exceptional crests in the all encompassing comic ocean. As we are excitations of the field, and as interfering with the field excites it, we can hope that fabulation will solicit and strengthen this tendency by making it capable of subverting the reality still informed by the all too human techno-capitalist drive.
[1] As Lyotard explains, the differend does not “derive from the heterogeneity of untranslatable idioms, be they individual or cultural, but it resides in the irreducibility of one genre of discourse to another, be it within the discourse of a single speaker or between two interlocutors speaking the same language”. “A bizarre partner”, in: Lyotard, Jean-François. Postmodern Fables. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 131.
[2] Lyotard, “The Wall, the Gulf, the System”, Postmodern Fables, 70.
[3] “A Postmodern Fable” is one of the essays composing the anthology Postmodern Fables.
[4] Lyotard, “A Postmodern Fable”, 94-95.
[5] See: Wark, Mackenzie. Gamer Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.
[6] Lyotard, Jean-François. “After Six Months of Work” (1984), in: Hui, Yuk and Andreas Broeckmann (eds.). 30 Years after Les Immatériaux. Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2020. 36.