Wild Prometheus: A Strategic Primitivism and the Question Concerning Technology

The article is devoted to the elaboration of conceptual trajectories of strategic primitivism against the background of today’s projects of undermining capital by acceleration (accelerationism) and overcoming modernity through modernity (cosmotechnics/technodiversity) — the projects converging on the mythological figure of Prometheus. Prometheus of accelerationism is the guarantor of the possibility and mediator of reaching another world, whereas on the way to cosmotechnical diversity, Prometheus’ universalism is recognized as an obstacle that must be overcome. However, in both cases we are talking about a “Prometheus in chains,” a titan bound either by a dialectical absolute or a moral law. Starting from the problems of the non-human and myth, strategic primitivism reveals the image of a wild Prometheus, repressed by both Prometheanism and anti-Prometheanism. Wild Prometheus as a figure of the “repetition of the titanomachy” becomes a conductor of the line of strategic primitivism towards the question of technology and the problem of locality, of place. In the article the question concerning technology is resolved in terms of technical perspectivism, which considers technology — outside of its anthropocentric definition — as a synecdoche of culture. In this capacity, technology appears as an elementalia of doubling, which all living beings who use the same technology in different natures are endowed with — along the line of the unbridled humanity of the wild Prometheus, all the way down. The second (the problem of locality) is revealed within the framework of the conception of “a world without other” and finds expression in the concept of an uninhabited pre-cosmic place — island and forest where the lines of strategic primitivism converge, forming its nodal conceptual dream. The surface here becomes “deep,” culture — “wild,” and wildness — “technical.”