Where Lies the Problem?

The article addresses the relationality of automation and the political-libidinal literacy of citizens. After contextualising the problem of reactive subjectivity in the Global Northwest of a perpetuating Enlightenment dialectics, the role of technology in the political-libidinal mereology is revaluated. Drawing from Bernard Stiegler’s notion of tertial retention and Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic theory, the milieu is reconstituted as a plane of transversal desire production and collective anticipation. In times of intensifying multiscalar automation, a lacking attunement to surroundings and responsibility, and general proletarianisation, the article argues for the localisation and sense-ablisation of problems to produce didactic environments for trans-individuative politics. Drawing from an ethics of care as a relational mode of thinking-acting, acts of maintenance are investigated in their potential to modulate the increasing imbalance of investment and passivity in urban subjects to foster de-proletarianisation. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, processes of un-doing and re-doing are argued to deterritorialise and schizophrenise over-concretised automatons, opening up material conditions to participatory, creative appropriation and repair (collectively referred to as ‘alter automation‘) to reintroduce critical reflection and political negotiation into our milieus.