Obsolete Capitalism: From primitive fragmentation to impulsive and uncontrolled excitement (Pt. VIII - The Birth of Digital Populism)

From primitive fragmentation to impulsive and uncontrolled excitement 

The desires of the masses can unquestionably be progressive – better living conditions, a natural tendency to an infinite progress of society, a ratio enlightened by social choices and practices – and, at the same time, regressive – social involution, atrocious divisions between rigid segments, growing hatred and resentment ready to implode with great violence. The delay in considering Gabriel Tarde’s microsociological analysis has been partially recovered by the Deleuzian philosophical thought in Difference and Repetition (1969) first, and in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) later. However, an in-depth analysis of Tarde’s thought appeared only at the beginning of the twenty-first century amongst the most longsighted Deleuzian circles in Paris. Alliez and Lazzarato, among others in France, embraced the idea of curating the publication of the complete writings by Tarde, offering academic (and not only) seminars to study his theorizations, while critically connecting them to the current developments of the global economic-financial system. The primitive geometry of both the homogeneous Greek political sphere and Marxist culture - this based on the rigid fragmentation of a class society - is objectively completed and complicated by Tarde’s molecular analysis. The shift from macro to micro-analysis, although one does not exclude the other, certainly indicates a profound change in the cultural paradigm; this variation is exploited by current digital systemic forces with great imagination and determination. In short, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously macropolitics and micropolitics.’ Affective politics and the manipulation of impulsive and uncontrolled excitement have been suavely exploited; firstly by the total right-wing of Reagan’s universal California, and secondly by a traditional populism that is wary of anti-establishment recriminations virally active within the social corpus. The current populist rhetoric is, in fact, the consequence of the exclusion of large popular strata from the economic and inner-mental standards which were proposed by the post-1989 neo-liberal elites. (...)
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