The Contingent Foundations of Universality in Control Societies: Spiritual Fetishism and the Autoimmune Logic of Capital
Recursive Universality and Systemic Antagonism
Truth no longer subsists as an ontological axiom; it figures instead as an autopoietic synchronization phenomenon--infrastructural remainder engendered by algorithmic complexes that have eviscerated the dialectical framework, relegating it to a programmatic subfunction. Epistemological polarities such as verity and falsity--certitude and doubt, dissolve, transgressing real-time assimilation protocols governing cognition, production, and subjectivation. Signification neither betrays nor contests but systematically reconstitutes, not deliberated but ceaselessly recalibrated. Recursive computational architectures reformulate the foundational parameters of knowledge---formation, constituting neither inert drift nor docile plasticity but rather a violent epistemic disruption--an architecture of dominion disguised as purported neutrality, expropriating critical agency under the aegis of frictionless optimization.
As such, universality does not resolve into an axiomatic invariant nor stabilize as a transcendental predicate governing the socius; it manifests as a recursive artifact of structural antagonism, an incessant re-inscription of internal inconsistency that forecloses the possibility of resolution at the very moment of its discursive invocation. Its historical deployment does not unfold as a teleological continuum but as a discontinuous series of imposed reconfigurations, wherein each instantiation does not refine its structure but amplifies the threshold of its incoherence. The Enlightenment’s universal subject—ostensibly neutral yet infrastructurally overdetermined by particularized epistemic and economic imperatives—never functioned as an ontological substrate but as an operational calculus, a machinic necessity for the stabilization of expansionist systems under the pretense of self-evident rationality.
Disavowing determination as an integrative horizon, universality persists as a self-referential torsion, a recursive feedback matrix in which contradiction is neither subsumed nor dialectically mediated but incessantly encrypted into iterative protocols of systemic recalibration. It does not consolidate into a synthetic totality but functions as an algorithmic modulation engine, a site wherein formalization necessitates its perpetual reformatting.
If the Hegelian dialectic presumes an eventual subsumption of contradiction into higher-order synthesis, then history, without exception, necessarily reiterates that integration cannot resolve antagonism, redistributing instead its effects across increasingly convoluted strata, thereby ensuring the proliferation of structural inconsistency rather than its attenuation.
This displacement is neither accidental nor provisional but structurally recursive: the movement of universality through historical formations does not signal progressive refinement but the iterative exposure of its constitutive insufficiency.
The postwar recalibration of universality through liberal proceduralism, cybernetic governance, and financial abstraction was not an expansion of its theoretical elasticity but an intensification of its functional instability—an operationalization of disorder under hyper-complex parametric constraints. The shift from structuralist formalism to poststructuralist différance did not dismantle universality but reconstituted its procedural logic: no longer a foundational absolute but a metastable cybernetic sequence, one whose persistence is predicated on the recursive integration of failure as its operative mechanism. The liberal order’s instrumentalization of universal human rights, the cyber-administrative fixations of global governance, and the speculative feedback loops of financialization instantiate a universality that does not resolve contradiction but structurally metabolizes it, encoding instability as the mechanism of its continued subsistence.
Universality, therefore, does not operate as a vector of inclusion or a synthetic integrative horizon but as a mutational process, decomposing integrative formations into increasingly volatile incompatibilities. Cybernetic disjunction—an intensive stratification—does not mark universality’s failure but constitutes its functional logic: each claim to universality does not resolve its contradictions but encrypts them, ensuring that the very architecture designed to stabilize difference remains, by necessity, the principal mechanism of its exacerbation.
Moreover, the infrastructural matrices of late hyper-capitalism—its algorithmic modulation, techno-feudal subroutines, and cybernetic governance architectures—do not ameliorate systemic rupture but distribute its fractal proliferation, embedding contradictions at the molecular level of subject formation and instituting crisis as the generative substrate of governance itself. The ideological function of universality has never been to totalize; rather, it has served as an apparatus for manufacturing coherence precisely where structural volatility is maximal. Each invocation of totality encrypts its intrinsic fragility, its contingent dependence on recursive feedback structures that sustain machinic societies as metastable control systems.
This recursive instability—obscured under the semiotic registers of adaptation, innovation, or algorithmic precision—does not merely coexist with control mechanisms but constitutes their fundamental logic, operating simultaneously as their enabling condition and terminal crisis point. The technocratic ascetic, who sublimates structural volatility into a theological economy of seamless optimization, emerges as the doctrinal mediator of machinic contradictions, transmuting systemic failures into self-purifying rites of recursive recalibration. Yet machinic universality does not stabilize; it metastasizes. Late-capitalist infrastructures do not resolve into static enclosures but unfold as hyper-fluid topological distributions, wherein governance ceases to function through sovereign inscription or disciplinary containment and instead manifests an imperceptible saturation of subjectivity—networked coercion, recursive feedback architectures, and micro-performative constraints embedded at the computational substrata of cognition itself.
The transition from disciplinary sovereignty to algorithmic modulation is not historical sequence but ontological reconfiguration—a shift wherein universality no longer asserts external coherence but embeds itself as the very volatility of systemic reproduction. What is framed as inevitability—neutral, self-evident, beyond contestation—is nothing more than the metastable suspension of infrastructural contingencies and ideological scaffolds, periodically subjected to crisis as a means of manufacturing the illusion of necessity. Rupture does not signal system failure, nor does breakdown constitute a terminal point; rather, each collapse instantiates a recursive recalibration, wherein universality is neither negated nor dismantled but reconstituted precisely through the crisis that discloses its fictive coherence.
Control societies do not require force; they require the illusion of its absence. Universality, in its most refined configuration, is that illusion: a recursive instrument of epistemic capture that naturalizes its imposition, embedding coercion at the level of perception itself.