Recensão

Rui Alexandre Grácio [2025]

Eis o resumo do artigo:

In this intervention Achille Mbembe reflects on the modalities of planetary living, interlacing what he calls three mega processes: early 21st -century corporate sovereignty, the computational speed regime, and the dialectics of entanglement and separation. In contrast to a certain fluidity of our contemporary age, Mbembe sees a logic of contraction, containment, incarceration and enclosure, whose result is the worldwide erection of all kinds of walls and fortifications, gates and enclaves as a way to manage risk, grant security, and safeguard ‘identity’. Such practices of partitioning of space, of offshoring and fencing off wealth, of splintering territories, of fragmenting spaces, are ‘borderizing’ bodies. As a result, borders are no longer merely lines of demarcation separating distinct sovereign entities. Increasingly, they are the name we should use to describe the organised violence that underpins both contemporary capitalism and our world order in general. The border is no longer just a particular point in space, but both a technology and the moving body of undesired masses of population. Africa and Europe urgently need to confront each other over the issue of human mobility, a key dimension of the planetary shifts that are under way.

Os destaques que aqui são apresentados, referem-se sobretudo ao regime da velocidade computacional e à redução do real ao computável..

Aqui ficam as passagens:

"A key feature of our times is therefore the extent to which all societies are organized according to the same principle – the computational. “ p. 7

"But, what is the computational? The computational is generally understood as a technical system whose function is to capture, extract, and automatically process data that must be identified, selected, sorted, classified, recombined, codified and activated. Yet we shouldn’t forget that the computational is also a force and energy of a special kind, a speed regime with its own qualities and infrastructures. It is a force and energy that produces and serializes subjects, objects, phenomena; that splits reason from consciousness and memory, codes and stores data that can be used to manufacture new types of services and devices sold for profit. Whether operating on bodies, nerves, material, blood, cellular tissues, the brain or energy, the aim is the same, i.e. the conversion of all substances into quantities; the conversion of organic and vital ends into technical means; the capture of forces and possibilities and their annexation by the language of a machine-brain transformed into an autonomous and automated system.
But the computational is also the institution through which a common world, a new common sense and new configurations of power, of perception and of reality are nowadays brought into being. The globalization of corporate sovereignty, the extension of capital into every sphere of life and technological escalation in the form of the computational are all part of one and the same process.” pp.7-8

"what precisely is at stake in the extension of the biometric border into multiple realms of social life and, in particular, the human body?” p. 9

"As a result, we are witnessing a gradually extending intertwinement of individual physical characteristics with information systems” p. 9

"In this sense, biometric technologies should perhaps be best understood as techniques that govern both the mobility and enclosure of bodies (see van der Ploeg 2003). They are perceived as infallible and unchallengeable verifiers of the truth about a person – the ultimate guarantors of identity. They are supposed to produce the identification of a person beyond question, and lend authenticity and credibility to all of the data that are connected to that identity. According to this logic, the world would be safer if only ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty could be controlled. These technologies are assumed to provide a complete picture of who someone is, to fix and secure identity as a basis for prediction and prevention, leaving people to dispute their own identity.” p. 10

"Everywhere it institutionalizes the risks inherent in the misfortunes of reality.” p. 10

"Life itself is more and more taken as something that can be calculated and recombined rather than merely represented.” p. 10

"Security now matters more that freedom. A society of security is not necessarily a society of freedom. A society of security is a society dominated by the irrepressible need for adhesion to a collection of certainties.” p. 11

"The aim of a society of security is not to affirm freedom, but to control and govern the modes of arrival.” p. 12

"Perhaps more than at any other moment in our recent past, we are increasingly faced with the question of what to do with those whose very existence does not seem to be necessary for our reproduction; those whose mere existence or proximity is deemed to represent a physical or biological threat to our own life. Throughout history, and in response to this foundational question, various paradigms of rules have been designed for human bodies deemed either in excess, unwanted, illegal, dispensable, or superfluous.” p. 12

"human beings are embedded in increasingly complex technostructures. (…) technologies are becoming more and more tied in complex networks of extraction and predation, manufacturing and innovation.” p. 13

"The integration of algorithms and big data analysis in the biological sphere does not only bring with it an increasingly greater belief in techno-positivism and modes of statistical thought. It also paves the way for regimes of assessment of the natural world, and modes of prediction and analysis that treat life itself as a computable object. (…) The belief today is that everything is potentially computable and predictable. In the process, what is rejected is the fact that life itself is an open system, non-linear, and exponentially chaotic.“ p. 14

"Today, reason is on trial in two ways. First, reason is increasingly replaced and subsumed by instrumental rationality, when it is not simply reduced to procedural or algorithmic processing of information. In other words, the logic of reason is morphing from within machines and computers and algorithms. The human brain is no longer the privileged location of reason. The human brain is being “downloaded” into nano-machines. An inordinate amount of power is gradually being ceded to abstractions of all kinds. Old modes of reasoning are being challenged by new ones that originate through and within technology in general and digital technologies in particular, as well as through the top-down models of artificial intelligence. As a result, techne is becoming the quintessential language of reason.
Furthermore, instrumental reason, or reason in the guise of techne is increasingly weaponized. Time itself is becoming enveloped in the doing of machines. Machines themselves do not simply execute instructions or programs. They start generating complex behaviour. The computational reproduction of reason has made it such that reason is no longer, or is a bit more than, just the domain of human species. We now share it with various other agents. Reality itself is increasingly construed via statistics, metadata, modelling, mathematics. Second, many are turning their back to reason in favour of other faculties and other modes of expression and cognition. They are calling for a rehabilitation of affect and emotions for instance. In many of the ongoing political struggles of our times, passion is clearly trumping reason. Confronted with complex issues, feeling and acting with one’s guts, viscerally rather than reasoning, is fast becoming the new norm.” pp. 14-15