Rob Wilkie (Bio)

Writing in Fragments, Thinking in Totality: Class, Alterity, and AI

The dominant mode of “left” writing on capitalism is “fragment writing.” As Deleuze and Guattari observe in Anti-Oedipus, “We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits,” and we no longer believe fragments can be reassembled into an original unity. This is especially true in the age of AI. In “an algorithmically fragmented reality” (Joque, Revolutionary Mathematics), built upon the introduction of AI and the end of traditional forms of material labor, it is said we need a new political grammar: writing in fragments for fragmented subjects, disassembling the social into incommensurable alterities.

“Fragment writing” portrays the world as incommensurable differences without totality. To write in fragments is to resist closure—whether rhetorical or grounded in class analysis—and to disrupt theories of social totality. The fragment is therefore celebrated as the rhetorical embodiment of a post-class “multitude,” a new alterity that “consistently and decisively reject[s] traditional, centralized forms of political organization,” including “hierarchical party structures, vanguard organizations, and even electoral and representative structures” (Hardt and Negri, Assembly).

In this paper, I propose the depiction of the world as “fragmentary” reflects the reification of thought and the labor relations which produce it. As Georg Lukács writes, “The capitalist separation of the producer from the total process of production, the division of the process of labour into parts at the cost of the individual humanity of the worker, the atomisation of society into individuals who simply go on producing without rhyme or reason, must all have a profound influence on the thought.” Analyzing Negri’s reading of Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” in the context of AI, I argue for the necessity of totality and that the embrace of “fragment writing” obscures the fundamental exploitation of labor that is the source of surplus value under capitalism.