The CAPA project (Consejo Agonista de Políticas Anticipatorias) articulates itself as a methodological, epistemological, and symbolic device born from the exhaustion of consensual knowledge production and the saturation of discursive economies in late-network culture. Emerging from curatorial practice and relational art, CAPA assumes agonism not as conflict for its own sake, but as a productive tension that reactivates thought across disciplines. Drawing from Mouffe’s political agonism while weaving together Bourdieu’s theory of fields, Foucault’s dispositifs of power, Deleuze’s structural multiplicities, Žižek’s narrative ideologies, and Marx’s expanded notion of capital, CAPA positions itself as a post-curatorial apparatus. It abandons the exhibition as a terminal form and replaces it with conversation, rotation, and derivation. The emphasis on symbolic and social capital—now hyper-accelerated through digital prosumption—situates CAPA squarely within a condition where every subject is both emitter and commodity. Against this backdrop, CAPA proposes slowness, synthesis, and selective visibility as counter-strategies. The council becomes a regulating intelligence, deciding what layers of complexity become public and what remain internal, thus resisting the compulsion toward total transparency. This balance between silence and noise is not merely tactical but epistemic: knowledge here is not accumulated linearly but cultivated through fallow periods, rotations of leadership, and the deliberate friction of antagonistic positions.
At the core of CAPA lies a radical rethinking of authorship and intellectual property, modelled explicitly on open-source software culture. Ideas are produced as layered derivatives—CAPA 001 to CAPA 999—each emerging from hybrid conversations between philosophers, scientists, ideologues, and artists. Authorship is distributed, credited, and expandable, privileging complexity over ownership. The proposed BRAIN system, a non-linear, rhizomatic cloud of references and derivations, operationalises Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux within a practical research environment. Knowledge is not archived as memory alone but activated as a navigable topology, allowing agents to enter, exit, and re-route ideas without hierarchical sequencing. This structure directly challenges academic hermeneutics grounded in lineage and authority, replacing them with a dynamic ecology of micro-texts and micro-ideas. The micro-essay becomes CAPA’s primary artefact: concise, didactic, and experimental, yet embedded within a dense referential field. In this sense, CAPA is less a think tank than a thinking organism, where theory is constantly applied to alien fields as a stress test. The insistence on agonistic exchange prevents the crystallisation of dogma and maintains the system in a state of productive instability.
Equally significant is CAPA’s insistence on visual epistemology. The development of a synthetic graphic system—conceived as both mnemonic device and conceptual interface—positions design as an active agent in thought production rather than a supplementary layer. Referencing Alighiero Boetti’s conceptual schemata, the graphic identity of CAPA functions as a pre-text: a visual condensation of the micro-essay’s conceptual architecture. This strategy acknowledges the contemporary condition of attention, where ideas circulate primarily through images before texts are read. Yet CAPA resists pure branding; its graphic syntax is cumulative, legible, and pedagogical, designed to grow alongside the theoretical corpus. LAPIEZA’s role as graphic and relational dynamiser underscores the project’s commitment to transdisciplinary literacy, where form and content co-evolve. Dissemination follows a logic of scarcity rather than abundance: selective publication, rhythmic release, and strategic silence. In an economy oversaturated with discourse, distinction becomes an ethical stance. CAPA understands visibility as a form of power that must be modulated, not maximised. The project thus reframes communication as an agonistic practice in itself, negotiating between internal complexity and external legibility.
Ultimately, CAPA proposes itself as both method and artwork: an ephemeral yet reproducible structure designed to be replicated, mutated, and localised by other groups beyond the culture–science divide. The periodic opening of the forum—through conversations rather than conferences—further destabilises academic ritual, privileging transversal encounters over disciplinary coherence. Deconstruction, in the Derridean sense, becomes a generative tool, allowing fragments from philosophy, art, science, and media to be recomposed into new syntagms. While rooted in philosophy, epistemology, and conceptual art, CAPA’s horizon extends toward anthropology, urbanism, sociology, and mass media, acknowledging the hybrid realities of contemporary knowledge. The final crystallisation into a book or manifesto does not signal closure but a temporary fixation—a snapshot of a historical layer after two decades of networked life. CAPA’s relevance lies precisely in this temporal consciousness: it is a structure attuned to its moment, aware that its value will be measured not by permanence but by resonance. As such, CAPA stands as a critical response to the neoliberalisation of knowledge, offering instead a model of shared, antagonistic, and situated intelligence.
Lloveras, A. (2016) CAPA: Consejo Agonista de Políticas Anticipatorias. Available at: http://antolloveras.blogspot.com.es/2016/05/capa-consejo-agonista-de-politicas.html
