why war?, the original work is available through ill-will
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observation 1:
synkar’s review:
lazzarato gives as an analysis (cultural study) of the united states after its speculative finance empire centralized in power, which is theoretically limited in its first iteration, of which i will successively fill each iterative gap with the theoretical supplementation to his researched prerogative. lazzarato is correct to note that the state functions as an organ within financial accumulation rather than as a diverse actor that is able to dictate not just welfare but social values and organizations. the synkarian ultra-machine, a civil-influenced layered structural social compound that works as a hyperstitional vechile for value production, which merges consumer practices, corporate advertising, automized and genocidificatory lifestyle practices (compounded, holistic, linear and increasingly qualitatively limited living that is adjacent to, or otherwise a product militarization, where the urban territory itself is compounded into a cafo-esque architectural simulation) is itself a product of the way in which biopower interacts with necropolitics and the way in which militarization doesnt actually only serve to innovate technology but serves to mediate its outcome.
in a kittlerian fashion the acceleration of war technology creates spheres of militarized lifestyle practices as a result of the feenbergian design argument for technological suppression, such as altering the fundamental way that sociotechnical assemblages alter and shift spatiotemporal mental configurations, or the way in which the demand for cars, phones (cloud connectors) and transactions shape actual regime altercations. regimes themselves dont just stack pouissance and intensify opressive cascades endlessly, they require the input from the machinic assembladge to actually specualte on future foregrounding, the regime calculates power and interlaces it into the lattice of expected regimification, it doesnt suddenly thrust the world into only deeper forms of subjugation.
the sloterdijkian monosphere (in its realized abstraction not conceptual development, the capitalist orders fantasy of a global order encapsulated through its monostaticization of territory) encapsulates all anthropotechnical flow-logics under a terraforming in monetary governance that poisons recursivity through mortonian dark ecologies (ethics irreversably grounded in entanglement over purity), essentially so that all encoded values are alternated based upon an everchanging vision of capital's dominion over the form-of-life.
however, militarization isnt the sole cause of financialization as a prerogative, genocide is a call of order that instrumentalizes not just the order of assemblages but their speed, the cleansing metaphor is to be taken literally, whereas war is not terror or porn but purely a simulative practice when it comes to financialization empires, the death and torture is literal but its actual function is not a war of affect, but a war of regulation, stratification itself produces war as a realized abstraction. america is nowadays not just reporpusing failed industry (where graeberian bullshit jobs and digital economies proliferate over technocratic equipments of the past) but repurposing war towards financialization.
the problem, other than lazzarato's conceptual underdevelopment within his own analysis, is that he has to accept that if financialization, speculation, interest, and the debt-chain are proliferating violence, they must be doing it in a way that disables readings of war as chaotic processes, where regulation itself encapsulates the logic of the ethically disabling function of war so much, that either partisanship itself has to be dropped, or war has to be reconsidered away from mobilization as a planetary threat that isnt just an economic metaphor. the central lazzaratian point mind you that financialization itself stems from not unsustainable annuity-continuations and the ontological greed of the american populice is true, but undermines the way in which financialization itself makes use of war, and in the following geneological manner:
war passes from archaic warfare (werra) which is immunological and affective and representations regulation, into classical (bellum) which is juridicial and represents borders and limits upon conquest, or codification, into modern war (marrum) which is about how production is mobilized into being a metaphor for abstraction, or for technocracy's mediation over machinic assemblages, into semiotics (samulum) where media and deterrance are integrative fields for simulations for wars, and back into capital itself (farria), which stratifies economic foams by constantly reassesing limits through these annuities that produce recursive and centralizing circulations of risk, debt and credit through the system of speculation and its guardian, interest.
you may be wondering why in lazzarato, if command is the architecture through which modern monetary theory offsets america's internal debt by treating it as a fluid regiment, why then does he insist on a classical analysis of economy, as if it isnt simply back to being about what people want again (d&g)? if its about what people want, then commands themselves are targetted, not their mechanisms of deployment, however, commands are abstractions of desire, where their stieglerian epiphylogenesis re-enters their deployment as evolutions of material relations rather than semiotic or structural constructs, where capital, labor, debt and value themselves become actual proxial functions of the construct of the financialization machine or its ultramachinic deployment capacity.
in financial markets, quantitative easing concentrates wealth and inflates asset prices at the benefit of increasing liquidity and lowering interest rates, which causes not only centralizatioin of power, but turns money into a speculative currency that doesnt map value as an influx of commodities, projection of possession or as a mediator of symbolic or productive exchange, but as a stake on future assets, as a meta-asset, an asset that controls the power of stocks and bonds from the perspective of accumulation itself, so that money, more specifically national money like the dollar, becomes a metaphor for acceleration and proprieterization that forces mobilization as its body-double, wherever accumulation causes mass scarcity as a result of intense concentration, mobilization occurs as an ontological surplus that results both from scarcity of lack and from lack of goods to begin with. seigniorage is also a total de-currentification of money, where the symbolic worth of money is tied to an emanation rather than an abstractive dearticulation of power, signification is re-posited as influence over affluence, and it itself is the signal of a higher proprietification, the americans propreitize better, they yield conditions of finance under higher scrutiny, dollarification serves their goals because their goals themselves serve themselves better than yours.
the problem to lazzarato is that the indebted man himself becomes a financially speculative unit that depends on welfare as a basis not for security but survival, where security is actually the ability to be unsecured for longer, to trade security itself for survival and promises of future security specifically in already insecure states, so that security is weaponized as a tradable commodity itself rather than the basis under which commodities are used to define securities limits or expand its abilities. survival itself also is a speculative arrangement to a degree, where often times the preconditions for it are tradable securities as well.
even though all lazzarato does in this article is confront the merging of finance, war and sovereign security, i believe he underestimates how much yuk huian technodiversity actually leverages compromises in between which zones of conflict become translatable meta-surpluses on top of existing conflicts, versus which serve as simulacrums that maybe even offset the actual damage of tertiary conflict regimes. that isnt to say that financialization isnt syphoning all forms of specualative organicity into the world-interior of capital (terresterialization), but it is to say that financialization, even though it is becoming the evident world-paradigm of a new regulatory system of brattonian computationalism, isnt a regulatory framework that exclusively produces precarity through desire-as-externalized-command-function, but that there is a latourian diplomacy - a constant negotiation among ontological regimes that cannot possibly totalize metaphysics, which can only heighten its paranoia.
the only thing that makes financialization worse than usual is that it is less diplomatic precisely because its metaphor of speculation through interest is itself a leveraging of its own position through terraformialist conspiratorialism.
habermas evokes the catch-up-revolution as an example of balkanization and contradictory peripheries preventing actual ideological realignment as a geospatial condition. this fits into the way in which conceptual overriding happens at the level of the abstraction of competition, where the stakes themselves arent articulated inside their own inward ideological current, but as a meta-battle between forces that require a development that supercedes all previous transformations, and in this sense, lazzarato's ontology is dialectical and hyperbolic in its structurization of world history.
lazzarato envisions monopoly as a subset of multimonopoly itself, where monopolized units, literally envisioned but limited totalities (likavcevican/brattonian nodes that operates as contradictions not within networks but within overlapping stacks or constalletations, entities that envision themselves as globalizatory universal actors as a operizationally apriori or subsumed axiom rather than literal realized abstraction/motive) act on one another to stake conquest over a pre-envisioned plan (such as thelian projects of financialization and so on).
lazzarato turns volatility into valorization, sequential speculation claims the lives of financialized subjects by passing them through the subsumptive complex of capital, abstraction acts on labouring subjects, proliterianizing their ability to act confidently on the world in the stiglerian sense, then acting on them as speculative units themselves, assteification, stock turned property turned asset in a game of work, where labour and war are simulations of financialized property, of the ability to accumulate command-centers that require full predictive and securitized capacity to operate, to actually enact soveirgnity itself as a geopolitical race to conforming to an order that requires annuity to sustain its own political order. at some point, the american lifestyle becomes the model human through a simple process of expenditure as a metaphor for life, americanization enables proliterization which enables financialization of security which then creates precarity on top of security itself, which is nothing but the precarity that enables contemporary conditions of life-as-regulation to actually be managed, to be thought of as a framework.
but this also means that conflict itself has lost all remnants of confusion that originally characterized it, where the proliferation of realized abstractions actually turns into the speculative commodification over total capture, where capture itself is an abstraction that serves the goals of the sustainability of the form-of-life. regulation and repression become equalized, and the subject is staking his claim to be allowed to exist in an extremely wide and complicated economic juxtaposition, proliterianization allows for all conditions to be subsumable to a wide network of consumer practices, the total act of any agent in the system conditions and enables all other nodes directly once again, individuation is literally lost under the process of a strenghtening of forces which create an equalization of lower dependencies, that conflate dependencies extralinearly.
thus also, power today is redefined as escaping financialization by being able to act organically upon the world, power unlocks a non-currency of action, this time not through symbolic capital but through enacted capital, activated currents of bond-debt relations that serve as a machinery for influence itself, where the seeds of debt finally spring into fully realized commands, the command for the first time becomes autothelic yet external, it has a purpose that is fully functionalized and externalized, yet its operational function changes from being a latent and mediated affect of postemption to pre-emption, the command is structured as a limit of the intersection in the middle of desire and capacity, not just of desire or capacity. the paralysis that occurs at the end of the command begins at the moment where speculation allows for tradability itself, where lazzarato imagines the private field as not just the ability to envoke, but as ability itself, the domination of ability over capacity.
the paradox in lazzarato's understanding of war is that, as industry plumments and turns into military complexes that sustain precarity through force (where value itself has reached the state where it must fight its own borders in order to expand past its own inner collapse of accumulative potential) and create annuity regimes, the public is drained of all its properties, rights and capacities to sustain a form of economic domination that prevents the collapse of the regime, at the expense not just of their actual abilities within the economic machine, but to be labelled as minorities within a global system of exchanges of force that perpetuate class conflict on top of international conflict as a regime of sustainability, but also the impoverishment of the majority itself transforms vulnerability into exploited exposure to demarcation and wartime. however, i think lazzarato's vision secludes the idea that financialized appropriation of value is also the westerner's greatest luxury under a closed system where the values of finance are projected as the values of the lived experience itself, and the axiomat rules over the axiom itself.
essentially, the reappropriation of regimes is the exact same process as the terraforming, the violence happens at the post-genocidal level where the movement of the anthropotechnical regime itself fluctuates based on metrics that determine ideological alignment, meaning as positions shift and values are hit by these fluctuations, actual social conflict emerges as a procedure of regulation rather than a contact with ideology itself. this means that system maintenance is itself the host of disaster, and therefore disaster itself is only a condition and no longer a teleological necessity itself. this annuity-appropriating regime positions all subjects, even opressed ones, as regulators of their own conditions of playing the game of economic metaphysics, statused subjects under expropriative conditions where expropriation is no longer exactly aligned with emancipation, even though i absolutely do still think it should.