Spilled chalices,storming leopards and the apostates of capital

Abstract

Kafka's aphorism of the leopards tells us that no temple is spared of a visit of these surprising animals. However, when the leopards suddenly spill the chalices of the temples of capital and drink the wine over and over again they become part of the capitalist ritual. Their presence becomes noticeable, and the surprise effect of their profanity becomes predictable, calculated, instrumentalised, appropriated as part of the ceremony. However, the parable of the leopards may tell us more about Critical Theory than Political Theology. Such a parable can be seen as a method in itself to question complicities and co-options of Critical Theory in the very survival of capitalism. In the face of the ongoing collapse of earth ecosystems and unresolved global crises, the temples of capital may run dry on wine. What would it mean, then, to apostatise from the religious cult of capital?

It would be tempting to say that Marcuse's (2007: 98) denunciation of the triumph of positivism in One-Dimensional Man that thrives on the ‘functionalized, abridged, and unified language … of the one-dimensional thought’ is still relevant today. As a negative thought that refuses the metaphysics of administrative procedures, often presented as Social Science, one of Frankfurt School's lasting contributions has been, for that reason, the critique of the capitalist means of knowledge production (Saladdin, 2023). Marcuse (2007) already alerted us to the ritualistic language of positivism where instrumental reason becomes an all-encompassing metaphysics, and academic institutions lack reflexivity on their knowledge production mechanisms. In such a scenario, one would easily drift into teaching how to control and make things work, and how to prevent critical thought from generating social change. Doing sociological enquiry would increasingly demand from us an obedient one-dimensional acceptance of the financial imperatives of the neoliberal university. Social Sciences departments would be too comfortable with having teaching programmes without Critical Theory or with its tokenistic weeks in social theory modules. Critical theory would no longer be seen as a transformative practice in itself but, in the best case scenario, something to be added to a chapter of a thesis as a ritual that has lost its original fierceness and passion for poetic and proudly hermetic thought. Such would be the place of Critical Theory in the total administration of the liberal order thriving on collapse and permanent war, demanding crude forms of procedural empiricism, where the economy finally becomes second nature (Danowski and Castro, 2017).

On the 100 years of Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research the question that I would like to pose in this critical intervention is whether the bleak picture described above holds water or whether, on the contrary, it still resists complicity precisely in the continuum of theorists being in-between academia, of refused unconventional doctoral dissertations, nearly nonexistent academic posts in theory, unpublished texts waiting for condescending publishers, poverty and precarity in low-paid jobs, exiles and a stubborn refusal of institutionalised logocrats (a paradox within Critical Theory itself when it aspires to become no more than a hermeneutical museum). Thus, I would like to propose reading such a conflict between co-option and resistance as a parable of Critical Theory itself that tell us something about the ceremonial and ritualistic pacification of critique in post-secular societies and, more importantly, the present melancholic impasse of critical Social Science. Thus, this intervention will claim that persisting in the critique of forms of positivist research and teaching remains crucial for the emergence of new means of knowledge production that can challenge emerging forms of one-dimensional thought.

But, firstly, it would be important to unfold what such a melancholic impasse means by retrieving the concept of melancholy, not a strange territory in Critical Theory through its grounding in psychoanalysis. Freud (2005) defined melancholy as an extremely painful experience of a loss, similar to mourning, but without the consciousness of the origin of what was lost in the first place, thus making the mourning of that loss impossible. For Freud (2005), the inability of the melancholic to mourn for an unnamed loss reverberates in endless self-reproachments alongside a painful inhibition of acting in the outside world. Arguably, the impasse of positioning oneself within or engaging with Critical Theory today leaves us in such a melancholic impasse (especially after major political catastrophes that followed the establishment of the Institute of Social Research). In this sense, to borrow Freud's terms (2005), we may ask: what is it that is lost when Critical Theory vanishes from academic institutions, or retreats to the margins, without an Institute for Social Research to fund independent Critical Theory autonomous from the managerial criteria of research impact and research excellence?

No stranger to Benjamin (1969), Kafka's parables have the benefit of helping us to think about such a melancholic impasse as they precisely rely on an impasse too: that of teaching without a doctrine. Whilst a parable is an inherent pedagogical machine, my stance is that Kafka's (1961) fragment of the leopards can be read as a parable of the melancholic impasse of Critical Theory, a persistent tension between the unruly leopards and the surveillance gaze of the ceremonial priests that resolves itself into ritual:

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony. (Kafka, 1961: 93)

Kafka's leopards confront their readers with a dead-end of disillusion of the defeated event, the loss that stems from the ritualisation of the leopards in the ceremony of the temple. Something unnamed is lost when the leopards become part of the ritual that generates melancholia, not of the event itself, but of what profaned the ritual of the temple in the first place. The event itself has been sacralised, the act of profanity having lost its own power and integrating itself in a securitised place and temporality of prediction. ‘Drinking to the dregs’ (Kafka, 1961: 93) finally acquires meaning within the ceremony but at the cost of losing the feral event for good.

Benjamin's messianic materialism may help us release this dialectic of profanation and sacralisation from the synthesis of predicting feral events that leave us melancholically stuck and co-opted in the total administration of society. However, Benjamin's redemptive end of history, its apokatastasis, is as materialist as theological, the tension remaining unresolved between the two and perhaps impossible to distinguish one from another (Jay, 2023), thus reproducing the very impasse of the parable (unless the leopards have finally succeeded in abolishing the ceremony). In the meantime, an instantiation of this parable underlying the rituals of prediction can be anecdotally exemplified by Musk's (2023) tweet on AI chatboxes: ‘It's a new world. Goodbye homework!’. In all their banality, these two short sentences tell us more than the arrival of the new spirit of AI capitalism when skipping homework with ChatGPT prompts. The parody of a whole ‘new world’ of AI that says goodbye to the old world of ‘homework’ through an AI revengeful eschaton suggests that there are many ends of the world and not necessarily the materialist messianism of Benjamin's (1969) Theses on the Philosophy of History. The question thus lies in melancholically persisting to look the leopards in the eye without tragically falling into the latest plans of saving capital with appeals to ancient motherlands and fatherlands, or AI techno-dystopias without the barricades and the unhealthy cities of revolt.

The conflict between the leopards and the invisible calculators, as Geddes (2018) astute commentary of this aphorism names the gaze of the other who calculates ‘in advance’ the appearance of the leopards, can also be read as the very parable of capitalism. Consider the revolutionary leopards in 1789, 1848, 1917, 1919, 1974, 1977 and so many other revolutionary events that followed these. See how the wine of the chalices has been profaned by the feral messiahs in the temples of capital just to rescue capital's endless expansion to every corner of the earth, a reactionary Spinozan god where endless commodity exchange dispossesses subjectivities without Francis of Assisi or Thomas Müntzer's common use of the earth but with plenty of liturgy and security. It seems that these leopards keep reappearing from time to time, unexpectedly as messianic events, only to end up reinvigorating the dialectic of sacralisation and profanation.

The parable says something about capital's cynical eschatology, its endless drive towards a salvific collapse, deepening the hopeless circularity of the critique leopards–ceremony–leopards–ceremony ad infinitum and from which the profanation of communism can no longer ‘abolish the present state of things’ (Marx, 2000). Undoubtedly, the leopards or, one may also say, the Franciscans without an order yet and the enthusiasts of the Peasant's War, have the tremendous audacity of rejecting philosophical systems, the liturgy of reified concepts, conducts, the property of the earthly lords, and thus resisting the instrumental reason of land but also mind surveyors. The feral event, though, becomes securitised in preventive rituals of urban revolts, a new governmental problematisation that Foucault (2007) traced back precisely to the emergence of positivist thought and security that responded to the counter-conducts of the Peasant's War and Müntzer's Anabaptists. Critical thought can be repressed as much as co-opted.

So, messianic violence may precisely reside right at the heart of the temple of capital when the event of the leopards resolves itself in the permanent synthesis of rituals of exchange and value production. Marx's (1991) Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF) in Capital's Volume 3 offers clear contours of messianic hope in the collapse of capital. As soon as maximum labour productivity reaches its climax after a long and painstaking investment in constant capital (e.g. machinery), surplus value will meet its deadlock. The apocalyptic event will then arrive when profit becomes impossible given that quantities of labour time will no longer add value to the production of commodities. In other words, the most decisive and untamed leopard could be capital itself. However, the prolonged side effect of this capitalist messianic hope will be the exponential increase of the relative surplus population, the industrial reserve army of capital's relentless struggle to reduce the costs of labour that paradoxically engenders a crisis-prone cult which, to the present day, presents itself with unnerving counter-tendencies that keep delaying the collapse of capital (Marx, 1991). Whilst the LTRPF finds in Luxemburg (2008) a fidelity to the event of the revolution against Bernstein's reformist compromise, it is no surprise that Marx work has been positioned as a towering moment in the continuum of revolutionary eschatology (Taubes, 2009). In a foundational work of Christian eschatology, Taubes (2009: 186) concludes Occidental Eschatology by proposing to read Capital as a ‘socioeconomic apocalypse’ where the Christ proletariat plays a decisive role in accelerating such an apocalypse.

In a less faithful tone, decolonising authors, such as Mbembe (2019), offer clearcut examples of the ongoing devastation of the capitalist messianic violence, in the sense of lawless exception that generates ever more surplus populations. Such a messianic capture crowns the Western metaphysical project through Christian eschatology, colonial violence, and the ‘techno-positivism’ of big data and AI (Mbembe, 2019: 96) in a biopolitical enterprise. Taubes (2009) proletariat Christ fell too into algorithmic calculations – Christ's Second Coming becomes part of the ceremony too. The experience of the defeated and sacralised leopards is always a melancholic one, a black bile that blocks the mourning of the death of the proletarian Christ (Traverso, 2021a).

However, the surplus populations may bring the collapse of historical time to the streets and expose the naked lawlessness of global governance. Such is the messianic temporality of the revolutionary leopards, the verticality of the crisis of the oppressed against the endless terminal crises of capital. It is no surprise, then, that revolutionaries tend to shoot at the time machines to end historical time (Traverso, 2021b). To go back to Kafka's parable, there is little we can do when the leopards shamelessly drink from the vessels as if there is no time or place to recognise beforehand. The leopards have been storming our so-called secular societies and either capital cynically accepts them into the ceremony or it eventually falls prey to them.

But we seem to slip again into the parable's capture of profane sacrality or the sacred profanation. The leopards remain feral beings who storm the temple either as the messianic oppressed or as co-opted oppressors – a ritual that has been repeating itself for too long. As Geddes (2018: 619) nicely suggests in their reading of Kafka's parable/aphorism (albeit the possibility of refusing the theological in the parable being left out of the discussion), the profane and the sacred manifest themselves in the ostensible visibility of the leopards but more importantly, on the domestication of the felines by the ‘invisible calculators’:

As Kafka's aphorism shows, what is taken for granted, or what is not initially paid attention, may be the very thing from which we are being distracted at our own peril. We may overlook the insidious power of invisible calculators by being dazzled by more visible actors; we may misread power structures by not looking more closely.

In other words, it becomes a question of how to tame instrumental reason rather than the feline beasts. Against the total administration of life under the unredeemable religious cult of capitalism (Benjamin, 1997), there is not much left to be done but to apostatise from the temple of capital as a way to resist the positivist metaphysics of the total administrative society. To do this, the abandonment of the rigid dialectic between the sacred and the profane, fundamental to the capitalist mode of production in the commodification of life, demands a break from one's rapport with unwanted repetitive ceremonies. Such a rupture goes beyond the heresy of denying or being accused of profaning the temple. One is simply unrecognisable and actively unrecognising the messianic violence of the leopards and the totality that co-opts or bastardises that same violence into more ritualistic oppression. In this sense, no dialectical synthesis can be achieved after the leopards have invaded the temple. The leopards will invade the temple but the faithful have gained historical consciousness of their defeat. In this sense, we are far from a political theology of abandonment: the leopards can effectively drink the last sacrificial chalices, but the chalices no longer contain blood but mere wine – use value. The invisible calculators can compute whatever they wish to but the invisible calculators can only perform algorithmic rituals for as long as the faithful fetichise and are willing to believe in the ceremony of the domesticated leopards.

Thus, if we are aiming to overcome the melancholic impasse of Critical Theory, refusing to recognise capitalist messianic violence entails refusing the heretical will to be metamorphosed into a leopard and be cannibalised by that same messianic violence. Hence, the nuanced distinction between heresy and apostasy. Being a heretic against the ritual domestication of the leopards still relies on the referent to co-opted messianic power. This distinction can be seen in the very dichotomy between conduct and counter-conduct in Foucault's genealogy of the Peasants War (Foucault, 2007). Whilst clashing with the princes and the Catholic Church, Müntzer and the Anabaptists were heretics but not apostates. So, the invisible apostates might be the other invisible personae in the parable of the leopards alongside Geddes (2018) invisible calculators. For it cannot be excluded that apostates read the parable of the leopards and fall short of believing in the very ritualisation of the feral messiahs and the positivist science of calculation that neutralises the event of the leopards. Kafka (1961: 11), however, warns us of the hermeneutical power of the parabolic discourse ‘On Parables’:

… A man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid yourself of all your daily cares.

Another said: I bet that is also a parable.

The first said: You have won.

The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.

The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.

The danger of reading parables is that of one becoming a living parable, a caged leopard (even if one can get rid of all our ‘daily cares’). For one will never exhaust the infinity of the parable to capture the entire finitude of human experience. Only a conscious act of apostasy from the parable itself by the apostate reader escapes from its capture because in the parables we always lose, that is, we always surrender to the endless ceremony of the temples of capital. The parable always escapes a definite and decisive interpretation. After all, we are not that far from Foucault's 1978 lecture What is Critique (1997: 29) when his genealogy of critique reveals a crisis in Christian conduct precisely from the emergence of a sceptical reading of the Scriptures from those ‘not wanting to be governed quite so much’.

Thus, it remains important to revisit the legacy of Critical Theory as a field of resistance where apostasy refuses the prevailing metaphysics of positivism. The a-critical stance on this well-funded, cherished positivist cult, perpetuated by the states of security with mass allocation of resources to salvage us from catastrophic horizons, may only accelerate and materialise such catastrophes. Resisting the complicity between the leopards and the invisible calculators, as the apostate readers of the parable do, may enable the long awaited mourning of the defeated leopards by uprooting the ‘left-wing melancholia’ from Freud's pathologisation, as hinted by Traverso (2021a: 45), so the ‘mourning process’ may finally start and, we could add, overcome the melancholic impasse between resistance and co-option of critical thought. We may then attempt, yet again, to ‘abolish the present state of things’ (Marx, 2000). Whilst Kafka's parables hardly leave any of us untouched by their hermeneutical capture, may the parable of the Frankfurt School haunt us with the possibility of mourning past and present catastrophes so other utopias can start to materialise against the barbarism of the remaining temples of capital.