Mbembe: Nanoracism and Narcotherapy

For Felix Guattari, already at the beginning of the age of digitalized mobility in the 1980s, it seemed clear as daylight that large parts of the population, which today we call the global surplus population, “are assigned a corner on the planet, which has become a global factory, to which forced labor or extermination camps the size of entire countries are constantly added. (Guattari) Topically, then, Achille Mbembe can state that never in history have there been so many camps as there are today. In his book Politics of Enmity he writes: “The camp, it must be said, has become a structuring component of global life. It is no longer perceived as a scandal.”

Following Hannah Arendt’s and Günther Anders’s remarks on the camp, sociologist Christian Dries has brought into play the hitherto little-noticed term “world as extermination camp,” a world that is successively approaching a state that can be described – in distinction to the system of Nazi concentration camps as the world state camp, a largely unplanned, unintended successive development, “in the course of which the world is arranged in such a way that it takes on the character of an extermination camp encompassing the entire globe”, whereby the boundary between inside and outside, which was still constitutive of the Nazi camp, implodes, so that the camp, no longer has an environment and the world becomes “an unimaginable ‘Ab-ort'”, a “cesspool of man”, a “disposable world””.

This ab-ort is flooded today in Europe, but also elsewhere, by fuels that come from paranoia and condense into a mass phenomenon that Mbembe calls “nanoracism,” a paradoxical form in which frenzy and narcosis enter into an ominous union to finally discharge into spasms. With the concept of spasm (convulsion), which Guattari used in his last writing Chaosmose, he wanted to point to the excessive and compulsive acceleration of the rhythms of the economic and the social, to a forced vibration of all rhythms in the everyday spaces of social communication that do not leave the subject unscathed. In the catastrophic, even at times apocalyptic visions of Baudrillard, Kroker, or Bifo Berardi that followed Guattari, one might recognize a way of rethinking the current processes of subjectivation: turning away from an energetic-affirmative subjectivation that had still inspired the revolutionary theories of the twentieth century, and toward a theory of implosion that refers to processes of subjectivation that culminate in depression and exhaustion. In such times of paralyzing slackening, then, Mbembe argues, nanoracism is perhaps the best narcotic, to which, it must be added, doses of a frenzied and stimulating adrenaline must always be mixed in if individual and collective bodies are not to succumb entirely to stupor.

For the narcotic prejudice, which is not only linked to skin color, as Mbembe believes, but wants to eradicate or embed what is disturbing about it, must at times also be mobilized, flow into the strictly ordered channels of the streets and social media, in order to circulate there and give free rein to the intended malice. “Let them stay at home, they say. And if they absolutely want to live with us, among us, then only with bare bottoms and pants down. The age of nanoracism is really that of dirty racism, filthy and resembling the spectacle of pigs wallowing in the mud.” (Mbembe)

Gilles Châtelet has written a book entitled To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies. First of all, forgive the animals. And what maxim, which calls for a different life instead of a piggy one, does Châtelet refer to in his book? The answer is relatively simple: always unfold a space that gives justice to all and that reinforces your own inclinations. The taking up of an inclination, or as Tiqqun say, a forme-de-vie, concerns not only this itself and the knowledge of it, but it concerns thinking, its differentiation and enhancement. He who does not understand anything of this maxim lives like a pig. The neoliberal pig wants, if possible, to arrange everything in such a way that a more jumps out; it wants to have everything exactly labeled, priced and consumable, and finally all its desires, strategies and projects are directed to the increase of the productivity and the profitability of its own life. (Which is still misjudged as freedom, because it is capital as a system that sets the constraint of profit maximization through competition). To live differently means for Châtelet to discover unknown dimensions of existence, or as Rimbaud says, to define the vertigo (of the system).

Far from this, nanoracism, in its imperial spaces, not only wants to preserve the barren existing that flows along like this, without any sensation, goal or conciseness, in its feel-good oases, but it wants those whom it has humiliated, enclosed and exploited for centuries and who are now making their way to the feel-good oases, where they are quite unwanted, best to deport them right away, and if that is not possible, at least expose them to unbearable living and camp conditions, warehousing them day in and day out, subjecting them to repeated racist beatings and controls, and leaving them in a state of lawlessness. The nano-racism is a banality like no other, which fits to the dumb-machines, the automation of the mind and even the remains of the educated citizen like gears meshing.

Digital automation short-circuits the deliberative functions of the mind with systemic stupor, and this now affects every actor without exception, from consumers to speculators. Systemic stupor has been enforced since 1993 with a series of technological shocks, the result of which are the hegemonic corporations on the Internet, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. The descent of the “psychic value” reaches a peak point: it affects all thinking and feeling, indeed it affects thinking as such, its consistency, and thus also all sciences, their models and methods. Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno have described these processes as rationalization, which clearly lead to nihilism, which is also constantly concerned about the maintenance of its racisms.

We all become more or less stupid, indeed we become plagued and harried beasts who find little to nothing wrong with the fact that this “buck-footed pile of excrement, i.e., Negroes, Arabs, Muslims – and, of course, the Jews, who are never far away -,” (Mbembe) are dealt daily blows to the abdomen, garnished with endless streams of commands and demands, words and gestures, symbols and stereotypes, which further fuel the racial (r)war. The stultifying mechanisms of the hyper-industrial epoch were already casting their shadows when Deleuze spoke of the societies of control, when disciplinary norms gradually lost their efficacy and the media were transformed into a machine of total regulation. The mind was automated and left to the analytical power of algorithms, operationalized by sensors and actuators through formal instructions.

For Mbembe, nanoracism is the inescapable complement of a state-based racism that he calls “hydraulic racism,” the racism of the institutionalized micro- and macro-dispositives of the state apparatuses and the media. A racism “that produces clandestines and illegals by any means, that dumps the scum on the edges of cities like a pile of useless objects…” (Mbembe). All appeals to humanism, universalism, and justice – euphemisms of the highest order, which, as Baudrillard already knew, circulate like oil and capital – have something of a put-off, or even more of a trivialization, and this can be found even in the “appeal to a certain decrepit feminism that today equates equality with the obligation to force veiled Muslim women to wear thongs and bearded men to shave. As in colonial times, the pejorative interpretation of the way blacks or Muslim Arabs treat “the women” has something of a mixture of voyeurism and lust-the lust for the harem.” (Mbembe)

Yet contemporary racism is not so much an object of consumption, of design, nor does it take place only on the new street events of the right, where it draws on the resource of banal emotion, brutality, and lechery; much more: it migrates into the drive equipment of the neoliberally economized subject. When it reaches the reactivation of the mania for destruction, it is not only a reaction of the losers, of those whom the game for the exploitation of one’s own life leaves behind as debtors, no, it is even the winners of the game, the creditors, who possess the access to the financial markets and the assets and who afford racism as that harmless luxury, as that accessory with which one can easily and deprecatingly entertain oneself and with which one escapes for minutes from the rampant boredom or, alternatively, from the rampant stress. This nano-racism comes along at times quite anti-authoritarian, – exuberant and squeaky-clean, drunk and exhilarated, it amuses itself in exemplary ignorance about its allegedly harmless jokes, outbursts and funny stories, boisterously and effervescently at times it demands the “right to stupidity and its underlying violence – that is the spirit of the times” (Mbembe).

And could it not be that this nanoracism is part of the drive equipment of a new burgeoning social character, the functional psychopath? Today, the financialized risk subject introjects a new social character that replaces the narcissistic type by transcending, expanding, and transforming it, namely the functional psychopath, which, however, must not be confused with the clinical image of a psychopath, although especially the representatives of the ruling class (managers, lawyers, brokers, politicians, doctors, etc.) now come dangerously close to it. Thus the observation of Götz Eisenberg is to be agreed quite well that today most psychopaths are not in any way in psychiatric institutions, but run around freely in the world history and can prove to all (un)luck also still special successes in their occupations. They operate mostly very efficiently and possess characteristics like focussedness, exaggerated egocentricity, the incessant tendency to optimization and unscrupulousness, they mobilize the sympathy of others as a privilege lent by them to the following, which serves purely the own benefit optimization and the endless striving for singularity, which in turn is cribbed from the offers of the marketing industry for the earners of higher incomes; they live the insincerity and the imperious appearance to the tips of their hair, and this happens in the intoxication of complete spontaneity, whose reality made flesh roughly represents the art product Hitler-Trump. In the White House, not even the inner circle knows what Trump will tweet in the next moment; pure decision prevails as a chance for clownish narcissism and racist insincerity, which promotes inner growth, the abundance of that self that knows itself as the native and wants the Other, the enemy, to be far away, although it lurks everywhere and nowhere as the virtual enemy, which is why all the state-worried (yes, with violence) drone attacks, massacres, attacks and slaughters alone do not ignite, that nightmare lurks again and again in the capitalized houses of the oases of well-being, “to wake up one morning in the black skin of the Negro or the tanned skin of the Arab, not far away in the colonies as in former times, but – and this is the peak – here, at home, in his own country” (Mbembe). translated nby deepl.

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