Sara Baranzoni

This article analyses some of the governmental issues at stake in contemporary institutional politics in its confrontation with the challenges of digitalisation. Through notions such as algorithmic governmentality (Rouvroy and Berns), platformisation (Bratton, Stiegler), extractivism, and the affect theory (Massumi), and following a symptomatologic method, we will try to establish and discuss some key points that could be useful in order to update certain concepts regarding micro- and biopolitics (Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault), the public sphere, and the management of social and individual bodies. Finally, we will try to understand how the manipulation of affects via the staging of possible catastrophic futures (Parisi) is used as a powerful neurosensory weapon, with performative effects for governing and modelling behaviours. If contemporary capitalism is capable of abstracting and extracting affects, of accumulating them and of creating value through this, which policies should we apply in this situation of uncertainty and of the manipulation of affectivity? Is there any place left for public institutions, or is the market the sole political actor left?

This paper aims to think the Anthropocene from a perspective that goes beyond geological questions of periodisation, but one that also challenges and places into question a wide range of contemporary thinkers and discourses, including anthropology and philosophy. In so doing a vocabulary is introduced that crosses contemporary science and cosmological thought, and that responds to a neologism invented by Claude Lévi-Strauss, when, in the final pages ofTristes Tropiques, the celebrated anthropologist claimed that rather than anthropology, we should refer to entropology. There are many links between Lévi-Strauss’ entropology and the geological period that since 2000 we call the Anthropocene, about which the following pages try to show the necessity of preparing our escape, into what might therefore be called the Neganthropocene. This means revisiting the questions of entropy and negentropy from a perspective that is not simply scientific. Conversely, for reasons that stem from and contest Lévi-Strauss’ perspective, this involves moving from anthropology to a neganthropology that takes as essential the technical dimension of life and the use of tools to construct artificial environments whose function is to stave off entropy.

This paper aims to diagnose the weakness of the recent writings on accelerationism, which try to develop a new narrative for the Left. Following Franco Beradi Bifo’s direct criticism of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politic, and Stiegler’s broader organological perspective, we argue that accelerationists do not take into account many symptoms of subjective and collective disease within digital society. Through Bifo and Stiegler we show that these symptoms, caused by neo-liberal ideology and technological infrastructure, are directly tied to the conditions of possibility for a political future of the Left and of human kind in general, which seems fully proletarianised. For these reasons we come to acknowledge that accelerationism is too hasty in its project of inventing a new future and does not take into account the relations between individual, technical and social elements that compose our society.This situation could be thought as a contemporary apocalypse, whose image for Stiegler is that of the Anthropocene. For him, assuming this term means to situate in a perspective that goes beyond geological questions of periodisation, but that rather allows us to conceive the various stages of general proletarianization, up to the annihilement of every kind of knowledge, will and future. While, the only way to “escape” could be to begin a process of deproletarianization, by revisiting the questions of entropy and negentropy from a perspective that is not only scientific, but philosophical and political.

The paper aims to give an insight on various concepts created and developed within the Caribbean literary context, in order to find some strategic elements capable of allowing us reframe the idea and meaning of locality. The necessity of such an operation lies in the urgency of rethinking the political dimension of locality due to its reactionary and repressive use by alt-right and fascist movements, in particular in Europe and the US. In this vein, concepts such as “polyrhythm”, “metaarchipelago”, “tidalectics”, “poetics of relation”, “creolization”, “transnation” and “commonplace”, become of strategic use as a way of opening up the idea of locality, which we aim to conceive precisely as a kind of social openness. Beside this conceptual reframing of locality, developed through the analysis of Benítez Rojo and Kamau Brathwaite’s rhythmical concepts, the reader can find, on the one hand, the concept of performance as the very engine of such a reframing, and, on the other end, an attempt to show how the concepts we analyse are deeply intertwined with those of Deleuze and Guattari, in particular multiplicity, difference and repetition, and rhizome. This article has been produced in the context of the International Research Project Real Smart Cities, which has received funding from the European Union Marie Sklodowska Curie Action, program RISE/Horizon 2020, agreement n. 777707.

Deleuze and Guattari's concept of “dividual”, as the result of a process of individualization and the digital codification of social life within societies of control, is one of the most discussed concepts in this first part of the 21st century. According to Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouv- roy, a new form of power and control is emerging, “Algorithmic Governmentality”, which causes several theoretical problems for earlier perspectives on politics and technology, and in which the dividual amounts to a symptom, felt by individuals as an an-aesthetization of both sensibility and thinking. Taking care of this symptom means taking care of the whole of contempor- ary philosophy and its “process of individuation”. The article, which starts from Montani's last works on bio-aesthetics, aims to describe the relationships between Berns and Rouvroy's theory and Stiegler's analysis of what he calls “Automatic Society”, focusing attention on the concept of the dividual as it is developed in both these cases.