Text page
New Asceticism
"New Asceticism" treats capital as an abstract process of mutation and escape rather than as a merely managerial or institutional system.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central claim is that capital should be understood as an inhuman process of abstraction rather than a humanly steerable institution. Meltdown names the way this process outpaces moral or political containment.
These texts work by describing markets, media systems, and social life as channels for accelerating abstraction. Capital behaves less like a policy object than like a self-intensifying circuit.
That matters because the section is trying to show how deterritorialization becomes historically real rather than remaining a philosophical slogan. The page belongs here when abstraction is presented as an operative force.
How to read this text
Read for the vocabulary of abstraction, escape, and process first. The page usually becomes clearer once capital is treated as a circuit rather than a classically economic object.
Notice where the argument leaves institutional critique and starts describing systems that exceed human command. That turn is the hinge of the section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Chris Wilbert New asceticism Jim McGuigan, Cool Capitalism, Pluto Press, London, 2009. 282 pp., £50.00 hb., £15.99 pb., 978 0 74532 640 5 hb., 978 0 74532 678 8 pb. The problem that Jim McGuigan’s impressively wide- ranging book addresses – capital’s capacity to incorpo- rate dissent – is an old one.
Definition · paragraph 2
Whilst conceding that Marcuse’s thought was in the end too ‘totalizing’, McGuigan defends Marcuse from the common criticism that he was a ‘cultural elitist’. This kind of dismissal of Marcuse is of course typical of the flattened out ‘democratization’ which is very much a part of the new spirit of capitalism, and which has successfully smeared Marxism at the same time as it has denigrated intellectualism.
Definition · paragraph 2
This kind of dismissal of Marcuse is of course typical of the flattened out ‘democratization’ which is very much a part of the new spirit of capitalism, and which has successfully smeared Marxism at the same time as it has denigrated intellectualism.
Definition · paragraph 2
Even as they excoriated bourgeois mores, the bohemians depended on the bourgeoisie for money, and the way that a series of art movements – realism, naturalism, impressionism, cubism – first of all challenged and then were absorbed into the dominant culture is the paradigm case of the process of rebellion and recuperation which has characterized capitalist innovation.
Stakes · paragraph 1
This book may aid these linkages and connections, helping to produce a more philosophically engaged politics of human–animal practices. Chris Wilbert New asceticism Jim McGuigan, Cool Capitalism, Pluto Press, London, 2009.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.