Always original, multifaceted, poetic and ambitious, Agustín Fernández Mallo (La Coruña, 1967) has just published his Eugenio Trías award-winning essay, ‘The shape of the multitude’ (Galaxia Gutenberg), a book that analyzes the impact of data that emerge from our steps and our devices and have created unprecedented forms of identity. Our data forms dusty clouds that hold part of our identity and are part of an economy beyond our control. From civilization, philosophy and science, he traces his writing to bring clarity to a topic that is difficult to stand on today. The book is subtitled ‘capitalism, religion, identity’ to give the reader some clue.
-What was the spark of this rehearsal?
-The first is the idea of how identities are formed today. There are spaces in which our identity is created without us being very aware of it. On the internet, parallel selves are being created with fragments of ourselves that we cannot control and that we do not even see, but that somehow operate as if they were us. Behind all this is the idea that individual identity and also collective identity (people, nation…) is never defined by us. We think so, but it is defined by those outside, whether they are people or algorithmic entities that manage our data.
-What are we then?
-A negotiation between the self and those who are outside. The human being is losing things and as he loses them he is dispersing throughout the planet in fragments that we do not know.
-Capitalism is omnipresent in the book.
I see three types. One is money capitalism, which I barely get into. But there are two more that go unnoticed. One is new, really new, which is what I call infinitesimal time capitalism. It is operating in networks through such small times that we cannot control.
-For example?
-The bots that manage the stock market and our data, our purchases, everything, in times that we cannot perceive. That opens a new anthropological perspective. For the first time, the human being operates unintentionally through a self that does not manage and works in milliseconds, that is, outside the human scale.
-Why capitalism and not another name for that system?
-Because there is an economic exchange. The example is the 2018 stock market crash caused by bots. Add to that the fact that today’s financial economy is an absolute fiction.
-He says that the credit card is more of a faith card.
-Money has always been a faith, a credit that we give. Giorgio Agamben treats him very well. I have faith that the 20-euro bill will be worth 20 euros, something that really isn’t there.
-You talk about emocapitalism, why?
-When capitalism realizes that it can no longer be coercive to operate with us, it has to look for emotional methods. Nowadays, to sell you a car, they don’t talk about horsepower, but about sensations, like saving the planet.
Are there no arguments?
-The sciences have been based on rationality, on arguments that can be validated or refuted. Public opinion today is based on sensations. If someone has a sensation, well, the mere fact of having it seems to be an argument from authority, it is the most anti-scientific, the most anti-rational thing there is.
-There will be those who seek in the book the definitive slap on capitalism or anti-capitalism, or on identities.
It wasn’t my intention. I try to analyze a dynamic. It does not make any sense today to say that one is anti-capitalist or anti-Marxist. These are dynamics that have had both positive and negative consequences. I can’t make an anti-capitalist book with a credit card in my pocket.
-Are you trying to reduce polarization?
-As public opinion is a religion, whatever you say people are going to want to polarize it. For, against. Black White. Well, what I try with this book is precisely to say that not everything is white
nor black.
-Why do you talk about anthropological capitalism?
-Human beings lack something, and for this reason they have to be negotiating with their environment all the time to obtain that something that they supposedly lack. What happens, the trick, let’s say it like this, is that this lack can never be supplied.
-And we look for what he calls a prosthesis.
-They are a prosthesis of the lack, but it is a lack that can never be supplied. That is why this anthropological capitalism is infinite and it is not utopian, that is the key.
-Because?
-Systems like communism, religions like Christianity, believe that some lack can be supplied and we can reach a more or less stable state. Anthropological capitalism, as I see it, is the one that says no, that the trick is precisely that this can never be replaced, why? Because we are a complex system, and the rest are a bit final dreams that will never be verified.
-And you say that the opponents of capitalism are actually moments of capitalism itself.
-That’s how I see it: Christianity, Marxism, communism, liberal capitalism itself at all costs, all of this is then subsumed by a more real capitalism or by dynamics of real exchange, which have nothing to do with those utopias.
-So, how do you define anthropological capitalism?
-It is having faith in things that are not utopian, because utopia does not exist by the very definition of the word itself. We are talking about utopias, but when one goes back to the origin, he begins to study seriously and says, let’s see, what about? Utopia of what? And something we haven’t talked about, the shape of the crowd.
—We negotiate with more things, no?
“All human language tries to get out. That’s why we create metaphors, art. An animal never lacks for anything, nor does it ever have anything left over, like a stone. It is always in absolute harmony with its environment. Precisely for this reason they are more deficient than us, because they do not have that aspiration to negotiate with the environment and go further, and for this reason a dog, or a stone, or a plant, does not have a language in itself.
-What is the shape of the crowd, then?
-A crowd is unrepresentable, ontological. It is a paradox. How can a politician say that he represents a crowd? It is impossible for an ideology or any mechanism or system to represent a multitude. There will always be someone else. The only way to represent it is statistics. For me this was a key thought. Any policy is the way of handling statistics, counting a population and extracting statistical consequences from there to take them to one side or the other. Because a piece of data can be handled however you want, that is to say: it can be interpreted.