Introduction

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism (p. 2). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Inventiveness is everywhere but nothing matters. More financial ingenuity, more consumerist whims, more technological genius. All bring more convenience, more distance from basic needs, and greater freedom from friction and constraint.

But, for all the inventiveness, nothing changes. We invent, turn on the invention, and criticise it in order to find a way to invent again. Over and over again. We criticise everything for the sake of more inventiveness.

Animal populations collapse. We criticise the science.

Mental distress stalks the young. We criticise their resilience.

Financialisation co-opts everything. We criticise anti-capitalists as nostalgic.

Digital surveillance grows. We criticise opponents as scaremongers.

Constant criticism chips away at seriousness. Nothing can be taken seriously. Nothing matters.

Nietzsche had a name for it. He called it the eternal return of the same. See yourself and the universe repeating eternally in all its great and shameful details. Endless repetition removes seriousness. Meaninglessness looms. In response we affirm life. But in the name of what? Nothing serious.

How do you escape the eternal return? Accept that, rather than infinity and immortality, life is finite, you are mortal and everything worthwhile has its time and comes to an end. Become an artist and live your life as a work of art. A work of art is an act of defiance and escape from capitalist realism.

In short, become a virtuoso.

This website is a public resource. It introduces you to virtuosity, one remedy to the eternal return from the Western philosophical tradition, and sets you on the way to mastering the microtechnologies of virtuosity. Virtuosity is an artistic act that forces an event. It is a difference that makes a difference. It is an act of activism, political, economic, social, civic. As a virtuoso you open up a new space for meaning. You live as an artist. Microtechnologies of the self are techniques that individuals can apply to themselves to affect their own ways of being to attain happiness. For three millennia, philosophers have discovered or invented different technologies that, in each case, promise freedom for individuals from whatever discursive regime prevails at the time.

The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism (pp. 80-81). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The Dance of Virtuosity

Any way of life is vulnerable. When the very way in which we understand our world and our place within it is threatened, we are in the midst of the experience that existential phenomenologists call death. At its extreme, nothing makes sense and no possibilities to go forward show up. Coronavirus has given some people a taste of the intense anxiety and depression that existential death engenders.

An existential situation is one in which one’s particular form of life is at stake. In an existential situation one’s actions matter ultimately to one’s ongoing flourishing. The actions that matter most will be those which one is drawn to take by being the particular self one is. In near-death situations, where one senses the end of one’s particular way of life, choices matter most. We sense a demand to respond to the situation with actions that are viable, that are expressive of oneself and that accomplish maximum integration of one’s past and future selves. Virtuosity is simply having the capacities to go on again and find a way forward that is at the same time, expressive, meaningful and viable. Virtuosity is an artistic practice so essential to human life that we introduce it as a basic escape route.

References

We focus on virtuosity as our home metaphor for escape routes. For a wider survey of different artistic practices for producing subjectivity in the techno-capitalist age see Simon O’Sullivan (2012) On the production of subjectivity: five diagrams of the finite-infinite relation. O’Sullivan sketches the artistic subjectivity practices of Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche, Foucault, Lacan, Guattari, Deleuze & Guattari, and Badiou and more briefly considers also those of Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Paolo Virno, Antoni Negri, and speculative realism. In addition to O’Sullivan’s accounts of we add the following :

Neo-Alchemists: Bill Torbert, Ebert/ Culkin/ Blake Accelerationists: Negarestani, Taleb, Ayache Speculative Realists: Meillassoux, Brassier, Harman, Hamilton Grant