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.
Machinic Operations and the Specter of Universalism
The universal no longer proclaims itself as given; it operates as the only conceivable horizon, its contingency sutured beneath layers of algorithmic inevitability, its precarity woven into the logic of its reinforcement. What appears as dissolution is but a recalibration; what manifests as fracture is merely a reintegration at a higher resolution. Universality does not collapse under crisis—it metabolizes it.
The illusion of self-evidence is not eroded by catastrophe but rather reconstituted through the negative space left in its wake. It is not that history repeats, but that repetition itself has become history as a recursive machine wherein the breakdown of order is indistinguishable from its reproduction, where even entropy is scripted into the architecture of control.
The fiction of agency collapses. Recursion does not require intentionality. It does not legislate, does not declare; it emerges as the logic of a system that no longer needs to coerce when it can calibrate. The post-disciplinary age is not one of domination but of automated acquiescence—not of subjugation but of seamless subordination. The subject is neither ruled nor repressed but preconfigured in advance, its range of motion already computed, its negations already accounted for, absorbed, and repurposed. The dialectic is suspended in a permanent state of capture—antagonism processed as raw material for further stabilization.
If the panopticon was the primitive diagram of modern control, today’s cybernetic apparatuses function as an omnidirectional recursion—an infrastructure whose dominance lies precisely in its indeterminacy, its ability to dissolve into the molecular grain of subjectivity. Whereas Bentham’s model of surveillance depended on the spectacle of visibility, the contemporary system perfects itself by vanishing. Algorithmic governance, machinic finance, and real-time behavioral modeling do not merely predict action; they precondition it, enclosing thought within the parameters of statistical probability. Late capitalism has no need for justification, no need for legitimacy—it operates without the pretense of consent.
The market does not ask; it configures. Capital no longer represents; it functions. The machine is neither novel nor anomalous—it is the culmination of a centuries-long genealogy of capital and control. In the 19th century, Marx diagnosed capitalism’s viral tendency to dissolve every prior order to ensure that “all that is solid melts into air.” The market universalized itself, enforcing “universal interdependence of nations,” consuming the world and refashioning it in its image. Expansion was never purely economic—it required a corresponding infrastructure of control. As Foucault’s genealogies of power reveal, the rise of industrial capitalism necessitated an architecture of discipline: the factory, the school, the prison—all engines of normalization, designed to produce bodies that functioned, obeyed, and conformed. Capitalism does not stagnate; its control mechanisms evolve. By the late 20th century, Deleuze had already sounded the alarm: the disciplinary enclosures were disintegrating, giving way to societies of control, where power no longer needed to confine when it could modulate. The modern enclosure—the cell, the classroom, the workstation—dissolved into an open-ended, mobile matrix of financial abstractions, algorithmic evaluations, and predictive assessments. Control ceased to be spatial and became temporal, intervening before an act could be committed, before a decision could be made, before thought itself could diverge from what had already been accounted.
Late capitalism extends this diagram of control into diffuse, cybernetic architectures—monitored not by watchtowers but by self-regulating circuits of surveillance, behavioral prediction, and algorithmic filtration. The market promises liberation from old feudal bonds even as it imposes new determinations. Every expansion of individual “freedom” is immediately converted into data, processed, and fed back into a system that reconfigures the subject’s range of possible action. In Hegelian terms, the universal (capital’s global network) realizes itself only by absorbing and negating particulars. Every contradiction is suspended, every rupture preemptively neutralized. The subject is both emancipated and enclosed, liberated and categorized, atomized and subsumed.
Foucault was clear: “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” Today, power is not merely everywhere—it is everything. It is woven into the digital, financial, and logistical networks that mediate existence, governing through the modulation of probabilities, incentives, and constraints. The market does not compel; it arranges. The subject does not resist; it recalibrates. Nevertheless, this control is not a command issued from above—it is a cybernetic loop, a self-replicating sequence of incentives, deterrents, and normativities. Individuals are not ruled; they are processed.
Far from signifying failure, contradiction is the engine of late-capitalist persistence. Hegel reminds us: “Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality.” Nevertheless, late capitalism has learned not to resolve contradictions but to weaponize them. Every crisis, every rupture, every insurrection becomes an opportunity for further refinement, further stabilization, further expansion. Capital does not fear crisis; it requires it. It thrives on it. It ensures its survival not by eliminating turbulence but by rendering it operational, by incorporating it into its recursive loops.
Marx and Engels observed that bourgeois society perpetually generates crises of overproduction that would appear absurd in earlier eras—society is thrown into chaos “because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.” Crisis, however, is not a failure; it is a function. The system does not merely recover from collapse—it metabolizes it as part of its self-correcting mechanism. Boom and bust cycles, financial crashes, “creative destruction”—these are not anomalies; they are necessary recalibrations, ensuring the metastable equilibrium of capital’s feedback loops. The recursive system does not merely survive crisis—it demands it.
Gilles Deleuze’s insight into the “societies of control” is crucial here: “In the disciplinary societies, one was always starting again... In the societies of control, one is never finished with anything.” Education, work, leisure, identity—everything is subject to continuous monitoring and recalibration.
Capital has learned to metabolize its data: consumer preferences, dissenting opinions, subcultural resistances—each is instantly processed, mapped, and re-integrated into the circuits of production and marketing. Nothing escapes capture. No act, no thought, and no deviation remain external to the system. Control is recursive. It adapts to every feedback, tightening or loosening its grip to ensure equilibrium. The spectacle of surveillance—ubiquitous CCTV cameras, data-mining algorithms, social credit scores—does not merely watch; it normalizes. The observer is no longer external; it is internalized. The system does not discipline; it conditions. The subject does not obey; it conforms. Resistance is neither crushed nor eliminated; it is rebranded, commodified, and reintroduced as an aesthetic. The dialectic flickers: a contradiction so violently sustained that it appears motionless, a zoetropic system so recursive that it becomes indistinguishable from the world itself. The subject no longer stands in opposition to capital because the subject is capital—optimized, tracked, predicted, and modulated. The last illusion to fall is that of negation itself. Late capitalism has no enemies; it has only inputs. Every opposition is data. Every revolt is a variable. Every insurrection is another function in the recursive algorithm of control. The system does not suppress its antagonists—it runs on them.
Deleuze’s concise yet prescient text “Postscript on the Societies of Control” amplifies Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary enclosures—prisons, schools, factories—by suggesting that these sites of confinement have mutated into open-ended circuits of data extraction and feedback. Whereas disciplinary power aimed to train subjects, control power modulates them, producing a fluid continuum of surveillance and regulation. The upshot is the emergence of a new universal: not the Enlightenment-era universal anchored in Reason or divine logos, but an immanent one forged in real time by predictive analytics, biometric databases, and logistical infrastructure. In sociological terms, this universal is operational: it exists only insofar as it can be computed, optimized, and constantly updated.
Central to this operational universality is a latticework of devices and platforms—from cloud computing architectures and predictive policing algorithms to high-frequency trading software—whose technical operations function as the hidden scaffolding of power. Borrowing from Maurizio Lazzarato’s concept of “machinic enslavement,” We can see that subjects become node-like participants in networks designed to capture and repurpose their behaviors, desires, and affects. This infrastructural substrate claims neutrality yet encodes historically specific logics: the commodification of labor, the extraction of surplus value, and the normalization of data-driven forms of life. When these assemblages falter, whether through hardware malfunctions or crises of legitimacy, the partiality of this so-called universal reveals itself as a precarious patchwork rather than an ahistorical absolute.
Spiritual Fetishism: From Commodity Form to Algorithmic Affects
Building on Marx’s foundational insight that the commodity mediates social relations, we witness an advanced stage of commodification wherein spiritual and affective dimensions—traditionally posited as transcendent or non-economic—become fully assimilated into late capitalism’s circuits of exchange. This process extends Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism: not only do objects become animated by social relations, but experiences of “spiritual fulfillment” (meditation apps, wellness retreats, mindfulness products) are also rendered into discrete, purchasable units. In psychoanalytic terms, this shift recasts spiritual longing as a surplus affect, a new fetish-object promising existential resolution without challenging the fundamentals of capital’s exploitative logic. The consumer thus “buys” tranquility, authenticity, and transcendence in the same manner one might purchase a luxury commodity. As Sadie Plant suggests in Zeros + Ones, immaterial forms of labor and desire, often feminized or marginalized, are reterritorialized and commodified in digital culture, further underscoring how ephemeral, affective, and bodily processes become exploitable resources.
Slavoj Žižek conceptualizes ideology as an unconscious fantasy structure that sustains our reality through disavowal: “I know very well, but still…” Applied here, “spiritual fetishism” allows subjects to engage in consumerism under the pretense of moral or spiritual elevation. The ethic of personal “mindfulness” can thus become a mechanism of system-wide mystification, displacing systemic critiques onto the individual’s quest for inner peace. In short, the fetish conceals the autoimmune dimension of capital’s expansion—obscuring the contradictions that repeatedly generate crises, and rebranding them as personal failings remediable by commodified introspection or self-help.
The Contingent Foundations of Universality in Control Societies: Spiritual Fetishism and the Autoimmune Logic of Capital
Autoimmune Capital and the Logic of Self-Undermining
Transposed from immunology, Jacques Derrida’s concept of “autoimmunity” captures the paradox wherein a system attacks the very conditions of its own survival.
Late capitalism exhibits precisely this self-undermining dynamic: the intensification of extraction leads to ecological disasters, financialization spawns economic meltdowns, and the relentless push for productivity fuels mental health epidemics. Yet these catastrophes do not herald capitalism’s collapse. Instead, as Mark Fisher argues in Capitalist Realism, each crisis amplifies the sense that no viable alternative exists, ironically reinforcing capitalism’s hegemonic claim to inevitability.
Crucially, crises form the engine of late capitalist reinvention. The 2008 financial crisis catalyzed new financial instruments and further consolidation of power among top institutions. Ecological breakdowns spur expansions in “green capitalism,” carbon trading schemes, and corporate-led conservation efforts. Even the privatization of mental health solutions (e.g., therapy apps, pharmaceutical interventions) recojminfigures crises of subjectivity as markets for digital platforms and venture capital. In each case, the autoimmune function is cyclical: capitalism “destroys” aspects of its host environment only to commodify the wreckage, forging additional pathways for growth.
The Contingent Foundations of Universality in Control Societies: Spiritual Fetishism and the Autoimmune Logic of Capital
Spatial Theory and the Psychopolitical Unconscious of the City
Cities have become incubators for machinic control, harnessing vast arrays of surveillance, infrastructure, and data analytics to regulate everyday life. “Smart city” initiatives, often lauded for their promise of efficiency and sustainability, embed neoliberal logics into urban policy, intensifying a form of algorithmic governance that purports to be neutral. Henri Lefebvre’s seminal premise that “(social) space is a (social) product” illuminates how these infrastructures not only organize flows of capital and labor but also mold collective fantasies and libidinal attachments.
Freud’s model of dreamwork—condensation, displacement, distortion—helps conceptualize the “dream-architectures” of contemporary urban environments. Gentrified districts displace marginalized groups to peripheral zones, while proliferating surveillance cameras function as the superego of the city, internalizing discipline into the psyche of its inhabitants. Splitting (in psychoanalytic terms) is also evident in stark class divides, with “exclusive” neighborhoods forming enclaves of securitized luxury, effectively denying any shared responsibility for urban inequality. The city thus materializes unconscious processes of repressed anxieties (about crime, disorder, the poor) and projected desires (for status, sanitized public space), thereby reproducing capital’s autoimmune dynamic on a spatial register.
The Contingent Foundations of Universality in Control Societies: Spiritual Fetishism and the Autoimmune Logic of Capital
Operational Universality and Its Discontents
Control societies contrive a universalism that presents itself as frictionless and inevitable. In fields as diverse as logistics, public policy, finance, and healthcare, algorithmic systems claim objectivity, while in fact embedding certain normative assumptions—efficiency, competition, perpetual growth—constitutive of capital’s hegemony. As Emily Noether’s theorem in physics and mathematics demonstrates, symmetrical conditions often imply conserved quantities; analogously, the appearance of neutrality in these systems conserves capitalist imperatives, with each symmetrical data-analytic gesture (risk assessment, pattern recognition) quietly reinforcing the priority of commodification.
While “universality” often risks flattening particularities under hegemonic norms, the theoretical task is not to abandon universal claims altogether, but to reconfigure them. Étienne Balibar’s concept of “equaliberty” suggests a universalism that emerges from democratic struggles rather than abstract principles imposed from above. Likewise, universal feminist praxis—akin to the Women, Life, Freedom movements—foregrounds solidarity as a political imperative that contests exploitative infrastructures. In such a formulation, difference is not erased but becomes the substrate through which a genuinely emancipatory, polyvocal universal might arise.