Today I am providing my English translation of an article by Hakan Illatikdi, originally in Italian and published on ComeDonChisciotte.org on Thursday 15th January 2026.
(All formatting original).
What we are experiencing is not a crisis that disrupts order, but an order whose raison d’être is the permanent stabilisation of a crisis with no clear way out. The categories with which politics, economics and history have been thought about for centuries – direction, progress, sovereignty, subject, project – continue to circulate in public discourse, but increasingly as semantic residues. They name a world that no longer exists with the effectiveness they once possessed.
The problem is not only empirical, technical or moral. It is ontological and linguistic. We continue to describe reality through a grammar designed for a type of world that is now exhausted: a world in which actions could be attributed to identifiable subjects, in which conflicts produced historical directions and in which the future appeared as a contestable horizon.
The dominant language, structured around the subject-predicate scheme, forces the attribution of will, intention and responsibility where distributed dynamics, cumulative automatisms and structural inertia operate. The result is not only a descriptive error, but functional blindness: by personalising the structural, it becomes possible to administer deterioration without questioning its root causes.
Contemporary politics is trapped in an individualising grammar that prevents us from thinking about systemic dynamics; so-called “leadership” does not direct, but translates, cushions and administers closure; in the Spodocene [author’s first article translated here], practicable politics is no longer historical direction, but habitable persistence.
The grammatical trap
The main difficulty in understanding contemporary socio-economic and political dynamics lies not in a lack of information or technical complexity, but in a structural blindness produced by language itself.
Dominant modern languages are organised around the subject-predicate pattern, a grammatical architecture that privileges individual agency, conscious intentionality and personalised causality.
This framework is adequate for narrating specific actions, but becomes deeply misleading when attempting to describe complex systems – global markets, environmental contamination, systemic diseases, increased social aggression and crime, human trafficking – in which effects emerge from distributed interactions without a central author. Such interactions are not anomalies: they are the mechanisms through which the system manages to continue functioning even when its material conditions of reproduction begin to exhaust themselves, producing unexpected outcomes.
This grammar generates a systematic distortion: it personalises the structural, moralises the dynamic and attributes will to processes without an author. Systemic blindness is therefore not an individual cognitive deficit, but an ontological effect of inherited language, functional to the continuity of the system in conditions of increasing deterioration.
1. From grammar to politics: the machine of imputation
The subject-predicate scheme not only organises everyday thinking; it shapes the political arena.
By imposing the question “who did this?”, language pre-structures the assignment of blame, responsibility and expectations of correction, shifting attention from structural dynamics to identifiable actors.
A paradigmatic case: the 2008 financial crisis
The collapse was explained as the result of the greed of certain bankers or poor political decisions. While this narrative contained elements of truth, it shifted attention away from the systemic architecture – global interdependence, opaque financial innovation and automatic feedback mechanisms – and towards the morality of individual actors.
What this explanation omitted was that financialization was not an external anomaly or a simple excess, but a functional response by the system to the exhaustion of productive accumulation. By shifting the reproduction of capital towards financial circulation, the system managed to defer its material collapse, albeit at the price of greater structural fragility.
Moral imputation thus functioned as a device for reducing complexity: it preserved the intelligibility of the system by personalising its effects, while modern politics did not correct this blindness, but rather institutionalised it and managed it as part of the mechanisms that allow for its continued operation.
2. Beyond the sovereign subject: the systemic leadership instance
Faced with this limitation, a radical shift is needed: a systemic approach. The question of power is reformulated. It is no longer a question of “who is in charge”, but of what function a given position performs within a system without a sovereign centre.
In this context, we introduce the concept of systemic leadership instance, which designates a functional position – occupied by institutions, technical devices, media and regulatory bodies – whose task is not to “lead” in the classical sense, but rather to:
reducing complexity so that the system can be processed;
organising attribution schemes that stabilise expectations;
coupling opaque systemic dynamics with socially intelligible narratives, enabling the continuity of the system in conditions of structural deterioration.
These instances are not defined by wealth, status or declared intentions, but by their operational function:
ability to set the agenda: establishing what constitutes a “problem” and what is treated as “noise”;
translational power: converting complex data into communicable political formulas;
management of accountability: personalising successes and failures, diverting attention from the structure.
3. What it is not: the limits of classical theories of power
Thinking of this instance as a “ruling class” in the Marxist, Weberian or elitist sense reintroduces the ontology of the subject that is being questioned here. A class presupposes stable common interests, direct causal power over the structure and conscious coordination with historical direction.
The instance of systemic leadership does not structurally meet these requirements. Its decisions are conditioned, selected and limited by dynamics that it does not control. It does not produce historical direction: it administers inherited trajectories as a means of supporting the reproduction of the system in the absence of expansive horizons.
4. Fundamental operations
The governing body performs coupling and translation functions through three main operations.
a) Translation
It converts systemic complexity – economic, ecological, geopolitical – into processable narratives and institutional decisions. It does not generate dynamics: it makes them expressible and, therefore, politically tolerable.
b) Reduction of complexity
It selects priorities, hierarchises conflicts and defines the boundaries of the “realistic”. Every reduction implies an exclusion: making something visible simultaneously means making something else unthinkable.
c) Containment of symbolic overflow
In crisis contexts, its main function is not to resolve material collapse, but to avoid a collapse of meaning that paralyses the system and compromises its ability to continue operating in a degraded state.
5. The instance in the Spodocene
The Spodocene – an era of structural saturation and normalisation of ruin – marks the historical limit of directionality. In this context, the instance of leadership can no longer promise progress or plan for an open future. Its function shifts towards the administration of deterioration: normalising ruin, fragmenting responsibilities and lowering collective expectations.
This administration of deterioration is not a deviation from the system, but the specific way in which it manages to prolong its existence beyond its structural limits. It does not lead towards a horizon: it manages the habitability of a degraded present.
6. Frequent objections
Linguistic determinism? No. A structural tendency is indicated, not absolute closure. New languages and practices can put this orientation under strain.
Denial of political agency? No. Agency is redefined: no longer as control of the system, but as interruption of functions, dispute of frameworks of meaning and institutional experimentation.
Quietism? On the contrary. Dismantling the illusion of the “Great Subject” requires a more precise politics, oriented towards functions and devices, not just people.
The systemic leadership instance does not direct or control the system in a strong sense. It reduces complexity, organises imputations and manages deterioration. In Spodocene, it is not the engine of collapse, but a symbolic cushioning device that allows the system to persist without transforming itself.
The decisive political question therefore ceases to be “who is in charge?” and becomes: who defines what can be said, what must remain unmentionable and what appears to be individual responsibility in a system that no longer promises a future?
Marxism as a contrasting horizon
Thinking alongside Marxism is enlightening because it represents the most rigorous formulation of a certainty that Spodocene dissolves: history conceived as the narrative of collective subjects endowed with causal capacity. Classical Marxism constitutes the apex of an ontology of historical directionality, in which conflict structures the very possibility of systemic reorientation.
This contrast delimits, by difference, the nature of epochal change. Marxism operated in the expansive phase of industrial metabolism, when the system still appeared contestable: its contradictions generated antagonistic subjects endowed with material density and tangible historical potential. Class was a visible causal operator, and history retained the appearance of an arena of conflicting projects.
The Spodocene begins where this condition ends. Contradictions and conflicts do not disappear, but they lose their reorienting power. Systemic dynamics are no longer decided in the clash between collective projects, but unfold as structural inertia, a trajectory that conditions all actors – including those in positions of apparent dominance – towards the management of deterioration.
From this perspective, the instance of systemic leadership emerges not as a failed “ruling class”, but as a symptom and functional position of administration of this historical closure. Marxism, with its analytical lens for identifying interests and projects, allows us to see clearly what this instance is no longer, nor can be: a historical subject with a plan. Its power is paradoxical and positional: the ability to translate systemic inertia into symbolic governability within increasingly narrow margins.
Marxist language, even in its most radical critique, encounters its constitutive limit here. It continues to formulate the question of the subject of transformation in a context in which agency has been redistributed into techno-economic networks, ecological feedback loops and institutional automatisms. Criticism retains its moral force, but loses its ontological adequacy when it continues to seek authors where there are only functions, and projects where there is only the administration of trajectories.
This is not a theoretical failure, but a sign of a historical limit. Marxism illuminates with great analytical power the logic of a world that is disappearing – that of expansion, dispute and faith in reorientation – and, by contrast, allows us to recognise the logic of the world that is emerging: that of limits, of managing collapse and of closing horizons.
The Spodocene does not invalidate resistance; it relocates it. No longer in the epic terrain of conquering the future, but in the austere space of habitability among the ruins. Critical lucidity no longer consists in identifying the driver in order to take his place, but in understanding that there is no cockpit and, despite this, introducing local frictions or partial misalignments in the systemic functions that transform deterioration into normality.
The question of emancipation dissolves in its classical formulation and is reformulated as a question of positioning and practice within closure. It is no longer “who will take history to its next station?”, but: from what positions and through what practices is it possible to hinder the translation of deterioration into governability, and make closure visible as one of the decisive political facts of this phase?
It is in this silence – after the exhaustion of the great directional narratives – that critical thinking, stripped of the certainty of the redeeming subject, finds its most demanding point of departure: thinking and acting without the promise of institution, and against the machine that transforms this impossibility into stability.
Summary
They do not lead the system: they are led by it while administering it.
The systemic leadership instance does not direct, control or design the system. It translates complexity, reduces uncertainty, organises accountability and manages deterioration. In the Spodocene, it is not the engine of collapse, but a central device of symbolic cushioning.
The decisive political question ceases to seek a driver and shifts towards mechanisms of translation: who defines what can be said, what must remain unmentionable, and what is recorded as individual responsibility in a system that has closed its horizons for the future?
The political task is no longer to identify the helmsman or to contend for control of the system. Far from leading to quietism, this conceptual shift opens up another field of action: politics understood as the ecology of persistence, oriented towards the fragmentary construction of habitability on the margins of decaying systems. It is not a question of contending for the helm of a rudderless ship, but of developing practices, knowledge and forms of coordination capable of sustaining life, meaning and cooperation where the system only administers its own exhaustion.
The political possibility no longer lies in a total project for the world, but in the gradual constitution of habitable nuclei, initially fragmentary and weakly connected, capable of sustaining life, meaning and cooperation where the system only administers its own exhaustion.
A historical example: the network of bishops integrated into the Eastern Roman Empire
After the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, no new order emerged either through conscious replacement or political defeat of the previous system. What happened was the rearticulation of functional remnants capable of sustaining social continuity where imperial administrative capacity was weakening: a network of bishops.
This network did not compete with the empire, did not attempt to overthrow it, nor did it propose to replace it. It inhabited its decomposition. In a context of State weakening, fiscal crisis, territorial fragmentation, and loss of administrative capacity, this network began to perform basic functions where the imperial system no longer reached:
organising basic care;
ensuring minimum normativity;
ensuring symbolic continuity;
enabling forms of local coordination in territories increasingly disconnected from the centre.
Its action was not in response to a historical project or a desire for leadership, but to the pragmatic need to sustain life and meaning in conditions of structural deterioration. What emerged was something else: the rearticulation of the functional remnants of the decaying order, oriented primarily towards social survival.
It organised assistance for the poor, the sick and the displaced; it upheld a minimum of normativity when Roman law became inoperative; it guaranteed symbolic continuity in a world that was losing its common references; it made possible forms of local coordination in territories increasingly distant from the centre. All this took place without contesting sovereignty or claiming to lead history.
They were not a historical subject in the classical sense.
They did not plan for the future.
They did not plan for a transition.
They were infrastructure for survival
Only in retrospect can we recognise that these practices contributed to the gestation of a different order. In their time, they operated as devices of persistence, not as avant-garde. The new order was not born of a decision or a conquest, but of the functional availability of forms capable of maintaining habitability when the previous system was no longer able to do so.
This example accurately illuminates the central thesis of Spodocene: the beginnings of a new order are not founded against the dominant system, but on its functional remains, initially oriented towards survival and not towards historical direction. Politics, in phases of collapse, ceases to be leadership and becomes the ecology of persistence. It does not inaugurate the future: it keeps the present habitable until another, unplanned order can emerge.
The systemic approach does not close the search for meaning, but makes closure visible; it does not promise a future, but attempts to clear the ground for thinking about what forms of existence remain possible when the projectable world has ceased to exist. This gesture – critical, uncomfortable and necessarily partial – is the central gamble of these pages.
It reminds me of dandelions growing between the cracks of stonework. It's what we have to do as the system collapses.
Thanks for this thought provoking article, Ismaele.