CartRoad to Neofeudalism:
Technology, the Left, and the Politics of Defeat Instructor: Korinna PatelisDate: April 23, 30Time: 14:00 ET
This roundtable offers a critical intervention into the rising discourse of “neofeudalism.” We argue that neofeudalism is less a coherent theory of a new social order and more an enchanted, neo-conservative project—a political imaginary where, to paraphrase Gillian Rose, “mourning has become the law.” This framework establishes the defeat of the collective subject, turns its back on epistemology, and suffers from a basic digital market determinism. From the symbolic ground of Greece—the romanticized cradle of Western rationality—we challenge the pressure to ‘call it a day’ on collective struggle. Using the Greek leftist concept of “aristerometro” (the “measure of the left”), we will dissect the politics of radical posturing and explore how this neofeudalist horizon forecloses alternative futures. The roundtable questions this status quo by (1) critically diagnosing the “neofeudal capture” of leftist thought and (2) surveying conceptual “lines of flight” that could meaningfully exit this politics of defeat.
Session one: WTF is Neofeudalism? / This Session is organised around the required reading this article on Neofeudalism. The article is very dense in an interdiscplinary fashion, so we will start with a short lecture on dominant approaches to tehcno/virtual/neo/name it feudalism, focusing on epistemology, romanticism, neoclassicism, and the collective subject. Greece is involved not only cause Korinna Patelis is Greek but also modern Greek is a unique natural language difficult to proccess (NLP). So we take a look at why technology and its mediations are treated as a societal ill—a black box whose workings remain unexamined. Metaphysical considerations are absent, whether approached in isolation or tied to temporality and events. This lack of engagement with technology’s philosophical and empirical dimensions reflects a wider crisis in epistemology due to pivotal shifts (e.g., AI, and so on). From then, each of the participatns need to have identified one dimention of the argument they are ambivilent about and try to counter it. So you present, and then file your counter argument in any form.
Key Questions: Is “neofeudalism” a useful metaphor or just melancholy defeat? Do media/tech giants enforce serfdom in a different way then before? Are the epistemologies and binarisms embedded in neofeudalist discourse, notably West/East, Rationality/Irrationality, Natural/Digital the problem?
Reading: Patelis, K. (2025). “Have I Got News For You: The Road to Neo-Feudalism”. Media Theory Journal, 9(1). [URL: HYPERLINK
Session Two: “Aristerometro” and “Calling it a Day” / Our second Session is about the future and how radical politics could be designed. We will have already talk about how many collectives you wan to form in answer…..We are using a “gauge” for thinking about the future! The Greek leftist concept of “aristerometro” (from “measure” and “left”). We shall explore why we are all being told “it’s over”—and, even worse, how we measure each other’s radicalness as a politics of defeat. Enclosure: The pressure to ‘call it a day’ in the neofeudalism debate and no only —the idea that history is somehow calling on us—is deeply problematic. Dialectics are excluded from this debate, replaced by an urgency and manufactured temporality promoted by neofeudalist authors.
Key Questions: How does aristerometro (the “measure of the left”) expose the politics of radical posturing? Why does neofeudalism demand we “call it a day” on collective struggles?
Reading: Patelis, K. (2023). “Aristerometro: Measuring the Unmeasurable in Greek Leftist Praxis” [unpublished manuscript]. (To be provided)
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