Excerpt: ‘The Revenge of the Real’ by Benjamin Bratton

In The Revenge of the Real, Benjamin Bratton envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognizes that governance is literally a matter of life and death. He argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention. Strelka Mag publishes an excerpt from The Revenge of the Real. 

The book was published by Verso in 2021. You can acquire it here.

It began as part of the “Revenge of the Real” project of the Terraforming think tank at the Strelka Institute in Moscow. Admissions to the last cycle of the program are open until November 7. Learn more and apply.​

WHAT IS THE POST-PANDEMIC?

The revenge of the real continues on its own schedule. As I finish this manuscript, Europe is going into yet another lockdown and the United States has just voted a new president into office, bursting (perhaps temporarily) at least one reality bubble. Meanwhile, Chinese cities are mostly open and back to normal, even without a Mandarin version of the term “social distancing” ever entering into common usage. It was not needed because the strict early lockdowns and enforcement made such behavioral half-measures unnecessary. Looking forward, it is far from clear how much of a difference any of this—all the deaths and suffering—will make for post-pandemic political culture. A different biopolitics is not only possible but available, but that does not mean it is anywhere close to realization.

The counter-revenge against the revenge of the real proceeds apace, until it doesn’t. Peak schadenfreude was registered when Trump himself contracted the virus, perhaps during an unwisely unmasked ceremony celebrating the nomination of a radically conservative Catholic Supreme Court justice. The body of the sovereign had been attacked, not decapitated mind you, but the membrane was broken by the alien virus. In the following days, the full portfolio of presently available biomedical treatments was deployed upon his body, leading eventually to his recovery and a few days of TV stagecraft celebrating this miracle: proof of the sovereign’s cosmic power, by his word and by his person, over the contaminant.

The ignominious end of the Trump administration culminated in the grotesque spectacle of hundreds of weaponized loonies storming the US Capitol demanding death to tyrants, the suspension of a formal procedure necessary to affirm electoral votes, as well as more clicks and subscribers. Their rage was matched only by their confusion. Many seemed perplexed as to what to do with themselves once there. To take selfies was the eventual decision of many who were not busy brutally attacking guards.

Despite the horror, perhaps the “Stop the Steal” riot cannot be defined exactly as political violence. To do so would be to presume that the assembly was contesting a political reality that actually exists. Given their steady diet of conspiracy theories and high-resolution alternative worlds, it is clear that their insurrection was taking place in a fantasy epic scenario situated in a United States of their own imaginations. The forms and formats of “the political” are key tropes of this epic, but whether power as it really exists was being directly contested is another matter. Can there be politics, as such, between those who not only disagree as to the proper form of society, but between those who accede to reality and those who do not? One can suppose that “all politics is ontological” if also willing to see that maxim through to the end, and if so, then in the case of the Capitol attack, in the dock was not just the reality of power but also the limited power of reality.

And, yet, if this event is understood as a crescendo of the populist-Right biopolitics that animated the ascendence of Trump and the eventual coalition between anti-maskers, anti-lockdowners, conspiracy schizo-politics, and armed racist militias, then it may be clearer which reality and which “power” they thought they invoked in their insurrection. The “Y’all Qaeda coup” and the populist movements for which it was a twisted spearhead were and still are based in the effervescence of sovereign power: that power is held in the body of the king and his word, in flags and symbolic centers. This is how it is possible for the leader’s word to decide the (un)truths of the virus, its cultural significance, the phantoms of voter fraud, and, ultimately, the reality bubble in which they live and fight (at least until it pops). To play “capture the flag” in the Capitol building therefore makes sense until they realize that is not where power actually resides. Oops.

The power of a positive post-pandemic biopolitics exists instead in an incipient biopolitical stack: hardware, software, wetware. It is comprised of technologies, processes, policies, and parameters from different actors in a highly contested multipolar geopolitical condition. It is built of sensors, chips, simulated genomes, needles, and sterile wipes and realized by the labor of millions of people. Its planetarity—its future—is, however, in doubt. There is nothing inevitable about its coalescence or its success. Its foothold is tenuous at best.

Its realization depends on many things. It depends on an economics that enables universal availability and inclusive co-immunity regardless of geographic clustering and arbitrary population subdivisions. It depends on trusted data and models. It would distribute risk such that collective and individual exposure and responsibilities are aligned; it would be granular, cutting across different scales, in many of which the single human is not always central. The images of self-identity reflected in its interfaces would be well calibrated to that alignment, fixed by neither a heroic nor a carceral over-individuation. Perhaps most importantly, its functioning would not be dependent upon the moral performance of its participants nor upon the unpredictable reasonability, superstition, competence, or ignorance of whoever occupies a particular formal government.

This list of parameters seems at once both quite possible and quite impossible. There is no technological miracle necessary to accomplish this; the means are at hand. But the international coordination necessary seems from another planet. The online grumblers asking, “Why can’t Amazon handle the vaccine rollout?”—a question posed, I think, without love for that corporation but with grudging respect for its logistical efficacy—suggest to me a general recognition that the tragically clumsy government administration of the pandemic response in the West is unnecessary and unacceptable. The massive state investment in vaccine and biomedical research—over years, not months—that produced several almost instant candidates for testing shows the power of states to mobilize capital and direct it for the general welfare. The contrast with all the subsequent calamities is then only more pronounced. What institutions can work then? A viable planetary positive biopolitics requires a restructuring and redefining of the role of the state as well as the expected responsibilities of private platforms subordinated to the dictates of public reason.

I maintain that history suggests that the geopolitics to come is more likely to be an effect of geo-technologies than their cause. That does not mean that those geo-technologies will just magically happen on their own. At this point, what is needed is not just a push toward “invention” but also a shift in the purpose, function, and rationale of existing geo-technologies toward more rational and equitable ends.

That shift will require not the entrenchment of traditional national and regional coalitions into a recovered sovereignty from global influence but rather the realization of planetary-scale political parties, programs, platforms, and policies (the 6 P’s if you like). From Steve Bannon’s tendrils to the various Green New Deals we see some initial versions of this, sometimes denounced and sometimes celebrated. Right-wing populists organized a global coalition and funding structure to support multiple nationalist, traditionalist, isolationist programs, whereas left-wing populists organized multiple local coalitions and funding structures to support internationalist, progressive platforms. I ask, sincerely, which strategy is more absurd?

Diverse movements, theories, and plans of recent years, originating from West and East, have imagined not just an expanded role for top-down governance but, more importantly, a vision for a society capable of composing itself through long-term megaprojects. Sometimes that “governance” means states and sometimes not. In the United States, Medicare for All is one such example, and, as suggested, various Green new deals are even more ambitious. Both align with a positive post-pandemic biopolitics, which takes as its subject matter not individuals but entire, integrated and interdependent populations. Whereas these two megapolicies preserve the state ’s role as a primary actor, others may plan for a rather different dynamic of public and private, centralization and decentralization.

Nevertheless, what relates all these to one another is a view of politics shifting from law to biology, from voice to organism. For example, the various national and regional Green New Deals all imply a shift in the role of what governance sees, knows, does, and is for. Instead of just reflecting the general will or popular voice, the function of governance is now also the direct management of ecosystems, understood as inclusive of human society.

However, seeing this as just a new mandate for what existing nation-states can do may not go far enough. Coordinated transnational planning encourages investment in infrastructures predicated on long-term recuperative cycles of energy and material flows. Fortunately, much of the most interesting work in the theory of planetarity, ecology, and planetary-sensing has been generating alternative foundations for years. Tweaking the knobs here and there is insufficient. Mobilization of resources toward foundational goals is necessary. For example, a planetary-scale mobilization, state-driven or not, should also include the now yet more painfully obvious link between robust public health systems and economic and ecological viability. It would forego nationalism on behalf of coordination, foreground core research, and delink culture-war romanticism from ecological participation and administration.

These priorities take the intrinsically “artificial” reality of our planetary condition as the starting point. Refusal to engage and embrace that artificiality and accept the accountability of consequences, on behalf of a return to nature or a return on investment, has led to catastrophic denial and neglect. To properly engage doesn’t just mean XXL project interventions, but is better defined by planetary-scale effects. We know this. We are one of the effects. Global programs to deliver free vaccines, for example, are only one way that humans have been artificially directing the course of our own evolution.

At the same time, the philosophy of technology has not always kept up as it should. Conventional distinctions between “society” and “technology” (like “nature” and “culture”) may be dismantled over and over again, and yet still proposals that leverage technologies operating at the scale in which society wants to intervene are sometimes dismissed as “technological determinism,” as if the technical were not the social, and vice versa. A good reason for this is that at least as often as not many such interventions naively presume a simple correspondence between what we might want a technology to do and what it actually does.

Still, the inverse, an adamant social determinism (or worse, an aesthetic determinism) that seeks to “de-technologize” transformation on behalf of a delinked cultural realm makes the same mistakes but in an opposite fashion, unlearning the lessons of social and technological entanglement and presupposing a direct path from wish to outcome. Once more, competency does not demand omniscience, nor does it presume fantastic new technologies to suddenly align just right by deus ex machina. It demands, foremost, the realized potential of what we already know and are now learning.

To emphasize the point further, this commitment to scientific materialism and geo-technological biopolitics is not because they provide mastery but because our uncertain entanglements with one another are not separate from our entanglements with technology. We are aligned with Stanisław Lem’s admonition that what is most interesting about technology is how unpredictable it is, and how its most interesting effects are never reducible to first intentions. The winding history of architecture, computation, vaccines, masks, anesthesiology, microbiology, antibiotics, and more attests to this.

Post-pandemic positive biopolitics will not be “solved” by technology as such, but neither will it be realized without a robust sensing layer, model simulations of an epidemiological view of society that are able to govern what they represent, the mediated automation of social integration, the technical abstraction of the medical gaze, the ethics of the object, and the resilience of steering planetary-scale computation away from the mirror of individuation.

The path is comprehensible, but it is not linear. As the RNA code of COVID-19 hacks our cells, it starts a domino effect of consequences, not only altering the movement of people, but affecting planetary cycles of energy, materialization, expenditure, and waste. This is the ecological principle of trophic cascade, by which the agency of one form of life sets in motion changes with an outsize effect. The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park changes, indirectly but decisively, the course of its rivers. To stop the spread of COVID-19, Danish veterinarians find themselves culling minks. The conclusion to be drawn is not that global interconnection is dangerous, but that it is intrinsic and runs deeper than normally realized.

For that reason, as the planetary metabolism has been distorted by the exuberant liberation of carbon and heat, the composition of the needed alternatives can’t rely on turning a single master knob in the right direction, “growth” or “degrowth.” Our thinking and our interventions must instead be based on an understanding of cyclical interrelations and physical economies, from scales of viral infection to intercontinental circulation and back again.

The composition of post-pandemic biopolitics entails then not just the reorganization of institutions to fill the void left by the current anarchy of international geopolitics but, by definition, that we reconceive and remake ourselves. It is to intervene on what should be immune from what, what might evolve in relation to that immunity, and so is ultimately to decide over and over the uneven boundary of the human itself. The co-immunity that any biopolitics produces cleaves not just which of us is in and which of us is out, but also what parts of the biological flux are human and what parts are, artificially, excluded.

What does governance then mean for post-pandemic biopolitics? We should not assume that its institutional model is a collage of the past, nor that it will get us so far to restage a surrogate debate framed as centralization vs. decentralization. “Governance” as I have defined it, as the ability of a society to model and act back upon itself, is not limited to the traditional state, nor is it exclusive of the state. It does mean that experiments in the future of governance all across the board should be watched carefully for what works well and can be repurposed for a viable post-pandemic biopolitics, even if the purpose to which it is put today is unlikable. It seems certain that whatever those are, the distinctions between technology, politics, and economics will become increasingly less clear and perhaps less relevant. The “calculation problem” isn’t made any easier because of this, nor is the more difficult problem of “what is it that should be calculated at all.”

Even if the capacity for model-driven recursive composition is pervasive, it is not therefore strictly speaking centralized or decentralized. There is no central “immunological processor” in biology; the function is distributed all throughout the body, and my assumption is that post-pandemic biopolitical co-immunization would be similar. For we humans, in the Global North and Global South, that distribution would include the formal ability to form model abstractions from different points of view and to activate or curtail them accordingly. Whether the intelligence functions of this modeling and simulation must be “centralized,” as, roughly speaking, they are in our brains, also remains an open question. What matters is that they must be able to act at the scale of relevant events and phenomena, not that the means to do so must itself be a planetary-scale singularity. It may be and it may not.

If governance is finally not just in the law but in the decision, then decision also lives in the automation of processes both big and small, machinic, protocological, linguistic, and cognitive. The automation of decision making in response to conditions also sets other things in motion allowing them to resolve, cohere, and provide according to plan. For this, as always the “plan” is less the rigid total master program than a name given to the ability of any complex system in which we are included to comprehend and compose itself deliberately. A positive biopolitics is to be found in the agency of the non-subjective, in abstraction, in externalization, and in different relay points within these, not just at an origin point of anthropomorphic sovereignty. The automation of provision of care at the scale of a human population is a machine with multiple path dependencies; it is a million little things falling together or apart in just the right way. The agency in the system is not just whoever hits that first domino but how the falling cascade is set up to reverberate agency along the whole relay of causes and effects.

As always, the best path is not the most likely one to be taken. Yet, as said, what is most absolutely likely to happen rarely does. The near future that we will inhabit if a positive biopolitics does not materialize will seem nothing if not normal. In a way, that is what I am actually most worried about. That normality is what will clear the ground for the next planetary catastrophes.

It isn’t hard to visualize that new normality. We are soaking in it now. The COVID-19 pandemic made everyone into an epidemiologist by choice or by force. The mainstreaming of the epidemiological view of society will induce contradictory responses in how people understand their own personal bodies, the bodies of humans in general, and the hypothetical and real experiences of touch and being touched. Synonyms for “contagious” and more obscure vernaculars of risk will appear and disappear in uneven rhythms.

Our long-term responses to the crises (biological, social, economic) of the pandemic will grow around each other like vines. Some people will cultivate sociopathic technologies of distanciation, while others will manifest equally delusional compulsions toward flamboyant commingling. As a whole, they will retrain our mental faculties to the value of biological self-disenchantment but also mobilize many of its least intelligent implications. In uncertain times, stupidity adapts. Stupidity evolves.

What will the middle of the next decade show? The hour-by-hour quantification of the status of bodily fluids—heretofore the purview of diabetics and hypochondriacs—will be standard preoccupations of everyday life. Waves of biomedical startups will offer specialized platform diagnostics for targeted psycho-demographics, and private delivery services will have to develop new protocols for physically handling the tons of spit, blood, and piss that they carry from home to lab. Jurisdictional controversies over interstate biocommerce will see the location of many such labs in northern Mexico: maquiladora-scale facilities micro-processing the excretions of the subscriber classes.

Vaccine paranoia will mutate and speciate. Canonical Truther strains will compete with more acceptable centrist Sino-phobia after China succeeds in developing alternative second and third waves of medicines, policies, and platforms. Who does and does not “take” the vaccines will become increasingly contentious, as the annual cycle of flu shots graduates from a procrastinative errand to an overt political act, full of congratulations or carefully nuanced compromise.

Increased reliance on automated delivery services will bring an arms race between struggles for better labor conditions for workers and the rebranding of their work as super-essential or easily replaceable, or both. Long-distance remote robotics will allow for manufacturing and service industries in US cities to employ persons on other continents as easily as call centers do now. In response, robots will be abused for diverse political motivations: nativism, technophobia, or, more likely, both.

Automation will recompose the home’s interfaces to the urban exterior. Urban architecture will grow new prostheses dedicated to the principles of touchlessness, and design schools will continue to convene studios of serious aesthetic interest to debate this plan or that. Today’s improvisational accommodations will give way, on the one hand, to more precise apertures and, on the other, to the only-seemingly more pluralistic open commons accessible only to permanent residents.

Apple Mask (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Nike Filtron (NYSE:NKE) will capture the biggest shares of the smart masks market. Apple ’s platform integration of built-in sensors, tracking user breath and external air quality on their phones, will be later to launch because of an antagonistic FDA approval process. However, its tidy integration of predictive metrics with other personal health–related streams suggests that its position is better for a wider market (including China), whereas Nike ’s array is superior for serious athletes, owing to its real-time blood oxygenation analysis and other key performance indicators.

Per the usual gravitational slouch of history, most of the changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic to our homes, houses, and morals will not be named as post-COVID permutations but simply as the normality of the day. Those who are able to will attend to themselves with renewed abilities, and those who can’t will provide attention as a service to the former or risk becoming themselves the un-attendable. Eventually, the epidemiological dispositions will not be an emergency any more than luggage scanners at airports, counting calories, saying “thank you” to your fellow passenger for using the hand sanitizer, or getting your shots.

Fortunately, however, better plans and paths are also available to us.

Final thought: last month, a reporter asked me with suspicion if I am a “globalist.” I said, “Yes, but in a way that is well beyond your worst fears.”

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Benjamin Bratton

Benjamin Bratton is Program Director of The Terraforming at Strelka Institute. He is Professor of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego, and Professor at European Graduate School and Visiting Professor at NYU Shanghai and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Bratton is author of several books that span Philosophy, Computer Science, and Urbanism, including The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press) and The Terraforming (Strelka Press). Twitter: @bratton​

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