In the spotlight Eduardo Altheman C. Santos
What were your first thoughts when you saw the call for applications for the fellowship?
My first impression was that I could not believe such a place existed! An advanced center for interdisciplinary, critical inquiry that places our most pressing existential issues at the core of its concerns—this was definitely a welcome surprise, especially in a time when the Humanities are increasingly underfunded and critical thinking is seen as a relic of bygone days. The fact that the German Department of Education and Research decided to foster (and gladly continues to do) such a Center is not minor. It shows us how deep down we are in this rabbit hole and how terribly we need to address issues such as climate breakdown, social inequality, all forms of exploitation and oppression, war, and nuclear power in a less cynical fashion.
What does the apocalypse and/or post-apocalypse mean for you?
The apocalypse represents a rupture process during which we are compelled to radically question what went wrong. What choices—often made not by us but for us—led to the end times? What (non-)answers continue to be provided in the vain hope that we can just patch up a leaking damn and pretend nothing is happening? The most critical elements of our cataclysmic scenario have been experienced in the daily lives of many people around the globe. Genocide, repression, subjugation, expulsion, violence, torture, famine, extinction – these extreme elements have manifested many times before, contingent upon where in the globe you live, your gender, race, class, and sexuality. It’s long overdue that we stop seeing them as isolated, exceptional issues and acknowledge that this is our civilization’s very foundation. Only then can the apocalypse acquire true meaning and signify not the end of the world per se, but the demise of a form of unlife that needs to perish.
What is your fellowship trying to achieve?
My fellowship at CAPAS aims to dissect the ideological responses to the apocalypse that present themselves as solutions but only contribute to deepening and intensifying the problems they were supposed to address in the first place—to which even some with the best progressive intentions may adhere. I am especially interested in investigating the intersection between technology, labor, sociability, and subjective formation in labor platforms, which is one of the manifold faces of our ongoing apocalypse. This is one particular area where we seem to outsource our creative capacities to black-box corporations and cross our fingers that they altruistically decipher all our troubles and fix everything that is wrong with the world.
How does the fellowship project build on or connect to your previous career or biography?
In my master’s and PhD, I conducted theoretical investigations into the works of Michel Foucault and Hebert Marcuse, especially the former’s lectures on neoliberalism and the latter’s concept of one-dimensionality. So, I’ve always been interested in critical theory, ideology critique, analytics of power, and the connections between objective power relations and subjective formation. In my postdoc, I decided to carry out empirical research in the field of platform labor studies. Since 2019, platforms have become Brazil’s largest job providers, meaning millions of people become “employed” by some faceless platform overnight. This novel situation of a working class comprised primarily of platform workers intrigued me. I wanted to understand how tech-entrepreneurialism played a significant role in reshaping how extremely impoverished workers from a global South country saw the world and themselves. That’s how I got here to investigate the relationship between utopia and dystopia, dream and nightmare in platform capitalism.
What do you hope to take with you from the project and its results?
My objective is to write a book based on my empirical findings in which I develop a broader theorization of platform capitalism and the entanglements between neoliberal ideology, class domination, and tech-optimism that characterize this milieu. The book focuses on the distortions and inversions that take place when tech apparatuses and societal projects designed by the 1% in the global North are assembled in global South settings.
To get some practical advice: What would be the three things you would definitely need in a post-apocalyptic world?
If we are serious about the proposition of the apocalypse not as the indefinite negation of all forms of life, but of the existent and dominant ones, we can grasp the post-apocalyptic world as this realm where all ideas become possible, even those we cannot begin to fathom in our present state of affairs. In one of the most beautiful excerpts of One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse states that the radical rupture with this world “would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where [they] would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know [the]mself (or rather the negative of [the]mself) and [their] society,” thus impelling them to “learn [their] ABCs again.” So, in a post-apocalyptic world, I would need pencils, paper, and rubber to help devise a new collective alphabet—though I hope we will come up with another way to write that does not require cutting down what is left of our forests.
What are some of your favourite pop culture references to the/an (post)apocalypse?
I am terrible when it comes to pop culture references, but here are some related to the topic of my research: The Circle, by Dave Eggers; QualityLand, by Marc-Uwe Kling; and The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin; Adam Curtis’ All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace; Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.
Eduardo Altheman C. Santos is a post-doctoral fellow in Sociology at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. My research interests include the Frankfurt School, critical theory (broadly construed), platform capitalism, Marxism, critical neoliberalism studies, ideology critique, and the work of Michel Foucault and Herbert Marcuse. His fellowship at CAPAS runs from June 2024 to February 2025.
