A reflection on the necessary uselessness of radical thought-practice, published with Lobo suelto! (11/08/2025)
Produce or die is the motto of the West.
Pierre Clastres
They want to force us to govern, but we will not fall for that provocation.
The Invisible Committee
We may be of this world, but we are certainly not for it.
Andrew Culp
The social sciences and humanities have long been under attack for their ‘uselessness’. The social pact with the Masters of the World — on which their scientific legitimacy rested — has been broken, but this is nothing new. The rupture has manifested itself in many ways over the last few decades, and today it is particularly visible in the global reduction of public policies aimed at funding them. In Milei‘s Argentina, the scenario is moving towards a progressive and radical dismantling. Although this phenomenon could be interpreted as an obvious —and increasingly marked— anti-scientific stance in the world, that is, as a regression of human thought itself, it actually reveals something deeper. More than a decade ago, Fabián Ludueña Romandini already warned us about this: the brutal intensification of the cosmological conditions of the model of exploitation and accumulation in which we live, which demands, among other things, the abandonment of the concessions that at one time allowed the emergence of critical thinking within state science.
As Bruno Latour points out, the original pact fully incorporated new scientists as part of the front of Western modernisation. The social sciences and humanities took on a prominent role in providing the knowledge and tools indispensable for the administration of order — urban and colonial — in the nascent nation-states. Despite this infamous origin, and the exhaustive critique that they themselves developed of their history and responsibilities, a relationship remains that has never been sufficiently eroded: the segregation between the “useful” and the “useless”, which marginalised the latter to the realm of charlatanism and turned the former into fools. Scientific identity continues, in this sense, to be deeply colonised by its origin.
“Foolishness”—that figure highlighted by Isabelle Stengers—is nothing more than our active forgetting that usefulness was the garment we were forced to choose as the only costume for doing science. We decided to forget that usefulness, even at its best, rests on a conviction: that this world—the one offered by the marriage between modern states and capital—is the only one possible, and that our task is to identify its cracks and repair them, cooperating in the management of the fallen that its reproduction demands.
This tacit agreement is now a thing of the past. The oppositions on which we were born are no longer operative for the world to come, and the boomerang is coming back to us: we are all charlatans. And while this has a more obvious impact on the social sciences and the humanities, let no one be fooled: the “hard” sciences will also be hit. Despite this, since the first media and political attacks in Argentina during the Macri administration a decade ago, the predominant defence strategy has always been the same: to oppose accusations of uselessness by highlighting what we “serve” (serve: from the Latin servire, “to be of service to”, “to be a slave”). This counterattack, as we know, has not had—nor does it seem to have—much effect. Everything happens as if we were clinging to the rubble of a world whose end we refuse to see, or, worse still, as if we believed that it still deserves to be resurrected. In either case, we remain the fools.
The fact that usefulness and uselessness are part of the same logic is confirmed by the fact that one term can be transformed into the other. The show is set. Through an evolutionary progression, the marginalised hone their tools to show themselves to be “necessary” and thus earn a place at the centre of the stage, competing for the space of the useful. The progression takes different forms: exploiting our profitable sides to seduce funding agencies—public or private—; disputing “from within” the very concepts of “usefulness”, “success”, or “service” to convince ourselves that they can mean something else; embracing knowledge hierarchies and defending basic research as a generator of inputs for applied research, under whose shadow it would be possible to survive; or producing talks, meetings, videos, conferences, articles and dissemination materials that explicitly ask, “What are we good for?”, in an attempt to persuade society that our reflective work should be a shared interest.
Of course, it could be argued that, in the face of dispossession, any weapon is valuable. But is that really the case? The rules of the game for scientists belong to the World’s Owners, from start to finish. If this were not the case, Milei’s government would not currently be dismantling institutions of indisputable “public utility” (INTI, INTA, Vialidad Nacional), without distinguishing between its own and others, as the original pact assumed. Faced with these situations, and following Leonor Silvestri, we must say that the fantasy of immunity that sustains our strategies is, at the very least, enigmatic.
There is, however, an additional point of utmost importance for why the banner of utility cannot be waved without further ado. By once again seeking a place in the pact with Power, we are merely expanding the sacrifice zone that, we imagine, would allow us to continue supporting Science in the current Model. We refer specifically to our collaboration in the multiplication of the Fallen: that is, all those who cannot be included in the lists of achievements that attempt to convince us of the importance of their existence; those who cannot fit into a prioritised list of worthy causes; and those who, even trying in the desperation of dispossession, cannot find filters through which to pass. Continuing to bet on the vindication of a useful identity has the effect of immediately abandoning the fragile: cooperation—voluntary or involuntary, that distinction matters little now—in the sacrifice of those who will never be able to play the game (our colleagues, but also retirees, the “disabled”, indigenous people). This is the trap of the useful.
If these strategies are ineffective as defence mechanisms, it is because they are based on that original distinction, which is a poor way of thinking about and diagnosing what we are doing and could do; and, above all, a terrible cure for the poison of the hierarchies that we have learned to accept as inevitable. Would it not be better, instead, to convince ourselves that the promise that distances us from charlatanism—that is, the “privilege” of being scientists—is in fact the obstacle that prevents us from identifying ourselves as precarious workers, as scholarship holders have been insisting on for years? Otherwise, the paralysing foolishness with which we protect our scientific identity will continue to feed the moral tranquillity of our contradictions (“I do science, but I don’t like the system”, forgetting that it is impossible for one to exist without the other) or even repeat disciplinary discourses (“if you don’t like it, do something else”, “be grateful for what you have”).
Stubbornness here reveals shows its resignation —although always disguised as a critical spirit—and blocks the possibility of cultivating any pragmatism capable of establishing new relationships and possible worlds. Rather than trying to repair the original dichotomies that constitute us, let us take the opportunity to tear them to shreds and flee from them as far as possible.
Counter-Utility
Several decades ago, Pierre Clastres demonstrated that indigenous thought could not be determined from a Western perspective, which classified “primitive” peoples as “stateless”. Instead of describing them within the framework of an evolutionary progression—that is, as possessing a deficiency that could eventually be overcome—he insisted on the need to listen to them from their own self-determination. They are peoples, he argued, who are “anti-state”: opposed to the emergence of hierarchical forms of centralised power, such as those that characterise the Masters of the World. This rejection is defined positively, as a valuable and powerful micro-political force that, as Marcio Goldman points out, we can also find and reactivate among ourselves: it points towards a pragmatic resistance, directed simultaneously against operations that tend to concentrate power and against the internalisation of hierarchical mechanisms. This last aspect should urgently challenge us today, because it is through this introjection that we are delegated the task of segregating between the useful and the useless.
The power of the Masters of the World, we know, is not only embodied in the businessmen and politicians who ensure that capitalism, increasingly brutalised, reproduces itself infinitely. It also flows through the moral requirement to obey them. As has long been pointed out, the Masters no longer even assume responsibility for managing exploitation: it is we who must do so. The Usefulness-Uselessness binomial, within the framework of the ontology of auditing, is the device that allows us to get rid of everything that does not actively contribute to its own exploitation. If this were not the case, what are we doing when we defend the importance of our services, knowing that some—or part of us—will inevitably be left out? How can we carry out this sacrifice without operationalising, from within our communities and practices, the hierarchies that govern us? When we say that the enemy attacks us from outside, we become incapable of recognising that the Model is organised—today more than ever—through us.
And what can we do? Every time we try to cut off the flows of obedience and hierarchies, the question of “what to do” imposes itself forcefully. We must not answer it, for it carries with it the belief that all criticism must be “constructive”: one that proposes solutions to repair what is broken and thus allow everything to continue functioning—albeit agonisingly, a little longer. Produce or die (and let die), again. These kinds of questions speak the language of the Owners and contain the trap of the useful, which urges us to replace one kind of production with another, as if there were no other possibility than to continue doing the same thing over and over again.
Counter-Utility, on the other hand, is defined as a conspiracy against this type of action. It is not constructive criticism, but destructive. That is its “proposal”. It does not express resignation, but a profound non-conformity. It calls on us to take responsibility and assume our role in the relationships that brought us here, and it helps us to describe the hole we find ourselves in. Counter-Utility asks us to stop: to stop doing (not doing more of the same), to abandon (not holding on to what little remains), to interrupt (not continuing as if nothing were happening). To refuse to collaborate: to withdraw our bodies and our words from the Power that subjugates us.
The constant effort to cling to the language and practices that make us useful as scientists is equivalent to the effort we could devote to establishing Another World. We must convince ourselves that the energies are there, that our creative capacities have never left us—even if only virtually. The problem is that we have put that power at the service of the Owners of Everything, trapped in the idea that only this world, and no other, deserves our efforts. At this point in the tragedy, all that remains is to let ourselves be overwhelmed by the rage and shame of what we were forced to choose, in order to rediscover what we forgot also inhabits us: the spectres of the possible.
What does it mean to stop, then? Stopping is not about becoming immobile, but rather reactivating our creative powers, and that requires a destructive act. It is not about knowing “where to go”; Counter-Utility is not a new identity to claim or a recipe to evangelise. We know this well: every time someone claims the right to decide “what to do”, the division between those who command and those who obey, as well as the choice to do incessantly, reappears. This world and all possible updates of Capitalism will not allow anything different to emerge unless its constitutive relationships are radically dismantled. The act of stopping, then, refers to the cultivation of the conditions for the emergence of something unprecedented, which we cannot anticipate. The speculative principle of Counter-Utility, its “not knowing”, is what can help us inhabit the uncertainty of that Other World, which presupposes the abandonment of any prefabricated “direction”. It is not the sure purchase of any better future. In any case, it warns us, as Andrew Culp affirms in recovering punk ethics, that “the only future we have will come when we stop reproducing the conditions of the present”.
The Utility-Uselessness dualism is one of the declinations of the original pact, perhaps the most powerful one today, which indicates what is worthy of existence and what is not. Counter-usefulness operates from the outside, avoiding this differentiation, because it knows that it will not take us anywhere different. The way out is outside what we know, in the possibility of forming alliances with individuals and collectives who refuse to “produce’” and who make this self-determination a tool to resist subjugation and evoke the unknown forces of Another World. Are these not the forces that make Power tremble when the “useless”, exiled from “production”, decide to stop, block and shout “go away, all of you!”? We can be infected by the rejection set in motion by indigenous groups who refuse to transform the gods of the Earth into resources for development; we can let ourselves be possessed by the rage of the fumigated peoples who are not willing to sacrifice their health; we can viralise the insurrection of pensioners and disabled people who refuse to justify their existence. Reactivating our creativity means delving into and reclaiming our non-colonised parts in order to call for disobedience from there.
Disobedience, widely recovered by contemporary philosophy as the privileged space for ceasing to act, finds its device par excellence in the strike. The strike allows us to resist Power by blocking and interrupting the semiotic-material flows of Capital. Counter-Utility accompanies the force of this call, with the conviction that this world will only stop if we are the ones who stop. However, and this point is crucial, it extends this notion to the very internal mistake that we inhabit as scientists.
It is worth insisting on what it means for us to disobey: to become incapable of fulfilling the sacrifice demanded of us. The disobedience we demand is, then, an act of indiscipline directed towards our practices and bodies, aimed at stripping us of everything that constitutes us as part of that Science. In these times of extreme job volatility, where home-office work threatens forms of collectivisation and makes us carry the System on our backs, internal disobedience seems to be the first step for whatever may come next. Counter-Utility reminds us again and again: we are not just what they have made of us! We can revitalise our non-colonised fragments and, from there, try out new alliances and voices.
Right now, as we write and read these words, the embodied force of the Owners is surely trying to take over our voices and thoughts. It will try to convince us that any gesture that does not serve utility “is childish, a utopia”; or, in any case, it will respond cynically that “we know there is something better, but it is too late to change”, “these are the rules”.
We know the effects of these ideas very well. It is time to disobey them and try others.
Francisco Pazzarelli and José María Miranda Pérez
Spectra. Laboratorio de Antropología Especulativa
July 2025. Córdoba, Argentina
Suggested parallel reading:
Ahmed Kamal Junina, “‘Too hungry to think, too weak to sit upright. Concentration slips away’: the struggle to stay focused as an academic in Gaza”, The Guardian, 19/08/2025.
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