Dear friends, readers, and people who ended up here by poorly formulated search terms:
In order to complete a long overdue book project I will put my blog on hold for at least the remainder of the summer. As much as I would love to offer reviews of summer blockbusters, the various books that I have read, and weigh in on current economic and political crises, all to the delight of dozens, I have to focus my writing energy and time on the book. So, for the summer I am eschewing the digital and its short term gratifications for print and its long term frustrations. My tentative schedule is to return at the end of Breaking Bad, because I really cannot resist writing about that. Thanks for reading. In case you are curious, I have posted a somewhat dated version of the prospectus of the book, which I am completing for Historical Materialism, below.
Relations of Production: Transindividuality between Economics and
Politics
Etienne Balibar
has argued that the classical problem of the relationship between individual
and society is generally split between two antithetical perspectives,
Contemporary conceptions of society are torn between individualist conceptions
of society that take as their starting point the self-interested individual,
understanding society to be nothing more than the sum total of individual
actions; and organistic, or wholistic, conceptions of society that start from
some organic or functional totality, positing the individual as nothing more
than an effect of this totality.[1] As
much as the origins for this opposition can be found in the history of
philosophy, in the opposition between the ancient, Aristotlean idea of man as a
political animal, as part of the polis, and the modern, Hobbesian idea of the
state of nature, which places the individual struggle for existence, the battle
of all against, the opposition itself has only be intensified by philosophy’s
long cold war, which pitted liberty against equality, the right of the
individual against the demand of collectivity.[2]
This division is thus as asymmetrical as it is antagonistic, the first,
individualistic conception has become dominant in politics, social sciences,
and ontology. In contrast to this, the second position, the idea of some kind
of totality, is increasingly seen as not so much a position within sciences and
political philosophy, but as something to be cast in the dustbin of history,
along with the historical crimes of totalitarianism and Nazism.[3] In
political philosophy the ascendancy of the individualist conception of society
can be seen in the dominance of not only human rights, as a politics founded on
the moral status of the individual, but on the general predominance of the
ethico-political, the articulation of ethics and politics, over and above any
conception of the socio-political, of the connection between politics, and the
social relations, or the economy.[4]
What, if anything, is wrong with
this shift? Why not see it as simply the ascendancy of a correct model over and
above a model that has proven faulty, or incorrect, or even morally and
politically suspect? Is this not how progress takes place, the displacement of
old models by new models of thought? Two fundamental problems stand in the way
of question for this model of intellectual progress. First, individualist
accounts of social relations and social structures do not so much explain the
social as wish it away, reducing the social to nothing more than the sum total
of individual actions, reducing politics to nothing other than the hashing out
of various competing interest claims. What is eclipsed, or refused, is
precisely what is supposedly invoked by that little word, social; that is the
intersection, interrelation, and effect of multiple relations, relationality as
such. The limitations of this division are not limited to the individual pole
but stem from the very division between individual and society. The other pole,
the wholistic perspective or perspective of totality, is equally problematic
when it comes to thinking this relational dimension. This is in part due to the
fact that, unlike the individualistic perspective, which is a specific ontology
and methodology, it is not at all clear that the wholistic perspective is an
actual philosophical position; it is a particular interpretation of the works
of Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, et cetera, under the influence of an opposition
between individual and collective, the aforementioned philosophical cold war.
It is in part due to this, that the wholistic, or functionalistic, perspective
does not so much engage with a thought of relations as it reduces all relations
to effects of something larger, to a subject writ large, to society, the state,
or spirit. It is possible to argue that what is eclipsed in both the
individualistic and wholistic ontologies of the social is any rigorous thought
of relations, of relationality, of the relations between individuals and
society, constituting them both. What these two conceptions give us is the
first term, the individual or society, with little or no thought of what passes
in between. Words like society or collective, not to mention spirit or state,
reify collectivity, or worse yet, they displace the individual subject only to
make the totality itself the subject:
phrases such as “society requires…” and
“the state transforms” make the totality the grammatical and philosophical
subject of social processes. Even that word, “social,” participates in such a
reification, a reification that is perhaps is all the worse in that the
“social” lacks institutional or historical specificity, it is neither the
economy nor the state, taking on a putative consistency that exceeds
institutions and politics.[5]
This impasse is thus an
impoverishment of an adequate conceptual vocabulary, an adequate ontology,
which could conceptualize, and grasp collectivity. However, that does not in
itself explain why this is a problem: why must collectivity be thought? The
first, and most immediate, response to this question is that politics by
definition requires some concept of collectivity. The assertion of a
fundamental connection between politics and collectivity might seem to be
redundant to the point of being tautological. However, the multiple invocations
of the “ethico-political” in theoretical discussions, and the turn to a
politics of human rights, would seem to underscore the importance of revisiting
and reexamining this connection. Which is to say that it must be reexamined as
a connection; the current opposition between individual and society poses a
zero sum game in which every gain in equality is paid for in terms of a loss in
liberty and vice versa. This excludes the possibility of thinking their
relation, of thinking about forms of collectivity that encourage individual
flourishing, and vice versa. Which is to suggest that the impasse at the level
of theory is linked, as some combination of effect and cause, with the
limitation at the level of politics. The second response, the second reason, as
to why collectivity remains a pressing question, in need of conceptualization,
is more difficult to answer. It can be approached by way of another axiom, more
obscure but no less important than the previous axiom asserting the connection
between politics and collectivity. This
axiom is as follows: there is no general problem of collectivity, no way to
address the collectivity as such, without addressing a specific collective, a
specific social formation. There is no essence of collectivity which could be
lost or realized only specific instantiations of the social. Viewed in light of
a general problem of a social ontology, such an assertion fundamentally alters
what is meant by ontology in this context, ontology can no longer be foundational
in the strong sense of the word, but must be a constitutive ontology, made and
remade through practices.
If this is true, and, up to this
point, it remains a hypothesis rather than an assertion, than something must be
said about the current conjuncture. First, as I have already indicated, this
conjuncture can be provisionally defined by the dominance of “individualistic”
conceptions of society and social relations, and thus by a lack of politics as
I have defined it here. However, such a picture is itself incomplete unless one
brings to light the social dimensions, the economic and technological
conditions through which people relate and interact. An examination of these
conditions brings to light an important point of contrast to the political conjuncture:
as much as politics is defined by the image of possessive individualism,
society, in its economic and technological dimensions, can be characterized by
relations, by an irreducible and expanding collective dimension. This is in
part what is indicated, vaguely so, by the term “globalization,” which
expresses, at some fundamental level, the increased interconnections of people
all over the world. However, these connections are not just global in scope,
one could also describe daily life, in terms of production and consumption, by
the myriad ways of being connected and related. The contradiction between these
two dimensions calls to mind Marx’s description of social relations under
capitalism. As Marx wrote in the Grundrisse:
Only in the eighteenth century, in
'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the
individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity.
But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual,
is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this
standpoint, general) relations.[6]
Marx’s
description critiqued the “Robinsonades” of political economy as hopelessly
anachronistic, placing a seventeenth-century individual at the origin rather than
the end of society, shipwrecking a modern individual outside of society. Marx’s
criticism is not limited to such a denunciation, however, it also presented
another account of the economy, one predicated not on the isolated individual
but on the constitution and dissolution of modes of production in which the
individual had to be seen as a product of history as a social individual.[7]
This second conception did not displace the first, in the sterile opposition of
true to false, but encompasses it, explaining how it has come about that the
most developed relations produce the isolated standpoint. In the end it does not simply critique the
first, the isolated individual of political economy, but shows how the
interconnectedness of relations produces this standpoint of isolation.
As important as the general strategy
of Marx’s critique is today, a critique that just not just oppose the
historical to the ahistorical, materialism to idealism, but explains the
genesis of the latter from the former, we would also have to acknowledge that
the contradiction he has outline has only deepened since the middle of the
nineteenth century. The “Robinsonades” of political economy have been replaced
by the pieties of neoliberalism, which have posited individualistic competition
as the sole rationality, the sole rule, defining all of existence. These
theories and ideas, intimately related to policies and practices, take place
against a backdrop of a production process that encompasses not just the works
of individuals, but of networks of cooperation that encompass disparate and
disconnected individuals working throughout the world. Marx’s contradiction has
only deepened in the current conjuncture: the individual is no longer the
individual of classical political economy, but an individual for whom every
action can be considered an investment, can be calculated in terms of a cost
and benefit, and the developed social relations no longer encompass the economy
of the nation, or the productive forces of the factory, but exceed both.[8]
There is a fundamental foreclosure of
collectivity at the level of politics and economics. Or, more precisely, there
is a particular foreclosure of collectivity at the level of the political, even
if, or perhaps, because, collectivity continues to function at the level of the
economy. This foreclosure must be critically examined in the manner outlined by
Marx’s critique of the Robinsonades. It is not just a matter of proposing how
the world should grasped, of espousing some collective or communitarian ideal,
but of recognizing that collectivity is less an ideal, a norm, or a project,
than it is a condition: the unavoidable relational nature of our existence.
Isolation, fragmentation, and alienation are not opposed to society, but are
themselves a particular mode of social relations. Thus, a critical conception
of collectivity does not so much propose an ideal, but seeks to comprehend the
practices and relations, economic and political, that produce different
subjectivities, different collectivities and individualities. It is critical
not in terms of an ideal to be realized, but in terms of a materialist genesis
of what already exists. The fundamental problem is not to affirm collectivity
against individuality, but to escape the false binary that poses “individualism”
and “collectivitism” as opposed values. Thus, ultimately, the critique cuts
both ways, revealing the collective in the individual, and the individual in
the collective. Such a focus moves beyond the reified substantive of the
collective, of society, as much as it moves beyond the false atom of the
individual, moving beyond the tendency to posit the collective as if it is a
thing, something other than practices and relations. Lastly, and as succinctly
as possible in the outset, it is a matter of relations, of an ontology, an
economy, and a politics of relations. Relations which can only be examined in a
singular case, in a specific situation.
Transindividuality
The concept, or problematic, from
which I will examine this fundamental problem of relations is
transindividuality. The term “transindividuality” is developed with the work of
Gilbert Simondon, but my interest here is not restricted to the work of one
philosopher. The concept or problem of transindividuality extends to those who
have been influenced by Simondon, such as Gilles Deleuze, Paolo Virno, and
Bernard Stiegler, as well as those who have pursued a fairly independent
articulation of the concept, most notable in this second category is Etienne
Balibar, who has suggested that the concept can be applied to certain figures
in the history of philosophy, such as Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, all of whom
escape the binary of individual or collective referred to above. Rather than
start with the individual or the totality as the primary term, transindividuality
can be understood as an attempt to think the relation, the point of
intersection where different individualities are constituted and different
collectivities are formed. It is the point of articulation, of relation and
separation of the production of subjectivity and the constitution of
collectivity.
In Simondon’s thought
transindividuality, the mutual production of subjectivity and collectivity, is
developed in light of an ontology that thoroughly reexamines the centrality of
individuality in philosophical thought. This examination exceeds the
interrogation of the binary of the individual and society, to include the
genesis of multiple forms of individuality, physical, biological, and psychic,
from the preindividual relations that constitute them. With respect to a
political and social ontology, these preindividual relations comprise language,
habits, and productive relations. They are called preindividual because in each
case the aspects that we are dealing with are less things, discrete entities,
than relations that define a shared field of differential possibilities.
Language has been often described as a series of differential relations, and
the same thing could be said of habits, and even productive comportments, which
serve as the basis for the constitution of different collectivities, different
individualities. Which is to say that there is always already a relationship
between the preindividual and transindividual, between the conditions
constitutive of subjectivity and the constitution of collectivities. This
relation exceeds a strictly ontological examination of the production of
subjectivity to encompass its economic, political, and cultural constitution.
Thus as much as I will pursue an
exegesis of the transindividuality, the project exceeds a discussion of the
various interpretations of the concept. The philosophers who are situated here
as either precursors of transindividuality, or as interpreting concept, do not
constitute a tradition, or a school of thought. Rather, the different versions
of the idea are also different attempts to simultaneously develop and displace
the idea, recognizing that as much as transindividuality entails a rethinking
of ontology, of the fundamental presuppositions of every being as a being, as an individual, it also makes
possible a reexamination of the economy, society, and politics. First by
exposing the ontology of individuality underlying the work in each field, then
by examining the way in which each specific area, each specific dimension of society
can be understood as a production of subjectivity. I will argue that the
concept can only be completed by displacing it onto these different fields:
ontological inquiry reveals the limitations of our existing conceptual
vocabulary, but this transformation is then put into work in different fields,
which is less an application of ontology to politics, or the economy, than a
continued problematization, of one by the other.
Short Circuits: The Social-Political
As I stated at the outset, this
project is in part framed around overcoming a division between individual and
society, a division that is as much political, which is to say ideological, as
it is conceptual. The ideological dimension can be seen in the moral and
political overcoding that tilts this division towards the individual as the
only legitimate political and epistemological subject. The concept, or set of
problems, that cuts through this particular division is transindividuality, but
transindividuality as it is being explored here, as both concept and
problematic, cuts through other divisions as well. As I have alluded to above,
rather than argued, the focus on the constitution of subjectivity (and
collectivity) that underlies a transindividual ontology, also cuts through the
divisions between politics and economics, between the constitution of
subjectivity in the quotidian relations of work and the events of political
transformation. Transindividuality as it is developed here, through the work of
Simondon, contemporary interpreters of Simondon, and the transindividual
thinkers of Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, also entails rethinking the division
between history and nature, between the fundamental aspects of human nature,
the capacity to speak, to feel, and to act, and the articulation, and production,
of these aspects in any given social formation.
Transindividuality is not simply a
matter of culture in the anthropological sense, of language, habit, and
traditions; nor is it simply a matter of the economic structures of daily life,
of work and consumption (although I will argue that both Hegel and Marx
understood the economy to be the transindividual constitution of
individuality); nor is it finally, the collective in the overt political sense
of the term, the conscious communities from ethnic belonging to political
communities that people identify with, and constitute through their
identifications. The operative word in each of these cases is “simply,” the
putative reduction of the transindividual to one of these senses: it is all
three, or at least all three, encompassing the social, economic, and political
constitution of subjectivity and collectivity. Which is also to say that it
includes the effects that these different dimensions have on each other. These
effects could be considered a political or economic domination of one
collectivity, one form of subjectivation over others. As I have suggested
above, the current “neoliberal” era of capitalism could be described as the
dominance of the economic constitution, or a specific economic constitution of
subjectivity, generally modeled after the market or competition, rather than
labor, over the constitution of other individuations or collectivities. It also
can take on a relation that could be considered antagonistic, or dialectical,
as the constitution of one subjectivation is in tension or contradiction with
another. (The term dialectical is used here in deference to Hegel, whose Philosophy of Right is in some sense a
model of viewing institutions, the family, civil society, and the state, as
different productions of subjectivity). Thus, transindividuality, as I have
articulated it here entails a rethinking not just of the relationship between
the individual and society, but of politics and society.
There is thus a fundamental
“short-circuit” between the economic and the political: the economy and
politics are not discrete spheres, or distinct fields, of social existence, but
continually intersect through power, structures, and, most importantly, through
the constitution of collectivity and individuality.[9] To
extend this idea, or metaphor, of the short circuit, we could argue that there
are multiple short-circuits, between the individual and society, politics and
economy, and lastly reason and the imagination. It is for this last reason that
Spinoza is a crucial thinker for the transindividual “tradition,” (the word
tradition is used here in the broad sense, since it is composed of a series of
overlapping problems rather than a direct relation of influence or descent.)
While Hegel, and the dialectical tradition is perhaps the most well known
conception of transindividuality, of an intersubjective concept of
subjectivity, this concept is caught between a contradiction between
misrecognition and recognition, in which misrecognition always gives way to recognition.
This binary between misrecognition and recognition and its particular telos has
been extended into the Marxist tradition in the form of the class in itself and
for itself, the distinction between ideology and truth (or science). My point
here is not to once again bemoan the influence of Hegel on Marx, or to reduce
Marx to these few often repeated slogans, rather it is to argue that to the
extent that transindividuality has entered into philosophical thought it is has
been dominated by the sharp divide between rationality and irrationality. As I
will argue, Spinoza is perhaps an exception to this rule, in Spinoza’s thought
reason and imagination, affects and common notions, are all equally
constitutive of collectives and individuality. They are equally transindividual
conditions. The reading of Spinoza proposed here is not to suggest that he
somehow got transindividuality right, but rather the open up other ways of
thinking collectivity, as simultaneously imagined, affective, and rational.
These various short-circuits, from
economics to politics, from imagination to reason, is not a simple application
of the concept of transindividuality to these different fields, but is a
fundamental extension and displacement.[10]
It as this point that the concept of transindividuality in Simondon, and its
precursors in Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, must be extended beyond the field of
philosophical speculation into engagement with politics, technology, and
economy. It is for this reason that the works of Paolo Virno and Bernard
Stiegler are important to their project, for them transindividuality has to be
located within the transformations of consumption and work in the contemporary
economy. These texts are important for connecting transindividuality to the
transformation of the practices of production and consumption, illustrating the
point that there is no transindividuality, no collectivity, in general, only
specific practices, specific articulations of transindividuality. Which is not
to say that it is only with respect to these thinkers that we depart from the
realm of ontological speculation, an engagement with politics and economics
defines, in some sense or another, defines every engagement with
transindividuality, from Spinoza to Simondon. Rather it is a matter of
connecting this line of inquiry, simultaneously ontological and economic,
philosophical and political, with both the defining characteristics of the
current situation and recent debates, which have engaged with the question of
the social.
The Common
This
project begins with the current conjuncture, the current situation, as its
initial provocation. Thus, it makes sense that it would end there, but in doing
so it transforms it, providing new concepts and new understandings of this
conjuncture. Now the current conjuncture is not just the vague, but persistent,
presence of conceptual divisions, between individual and society. The current
conjuncture has to be understood in terms of particular depth and conceptual
specificity regarding not just transindividuality, but its economic, political,
and social articulation. I have already indicated the name, or one name, of
this particular articulation, neoliberalism, which is a particular
interpretation of the political, reduced to the economic; the economic, reduced
to market relations; and society, reduced to a series of individual choices. A
critique of this articulation requires a different conception of politics,
society, and the economy, one grounded in different theories and different
practices. This alternative could be called the common.
The common, a term initially
associated with the political and economic struggles at the birth of the
capitalist order, has received much attention as of late: denoting both a new
economic arrangement and a new social order. Without enumerating all of the
myriad invocations of the common, ecological and technological, economic and
political, I will say that what makes the common interesting, and perhaps an
adequate figure for contemporary politics is precisely the way in which it
mingles subjectivity and objectivity, politics and economics. The common is
both a relationship between people and a relationship with things, a politics
and an economics. As such it is inseparable from another thought of sociality,
from another thought of collectivity, other than either individualism or
wholism. Moreover, since the common includes not just resources and the
environment, but also knowledge, language, affects, and emotions, any
discussion of it returns political philosophy to that initial connection
between any definition of humanity, of the fundamental attributes and
activities of human existence, and political life, to the link between mankind
as a speaking being and a social being that was at the foundation of political
thought in the west.
Despite this classical invocation
the ultimate goal of this project is to develop a new way of thinking through
the intersection of ontology and politics, philosophy and economics, one
predicated not so much on the grounding of one on the other, but, as I have
indicated, on their perpetual short circuit. Which is to say that ontological
investigations open up new politics possibilities and politics provoke new ways
of thinking about the fundamental nature of social relationships. The same
chiastic formulation could be applied to the intersection of politics and
economics, in which political categories make possible an interrogation of
economic relations, and the transformation of economic and social structures
make possible a rethinking of political relations and practices. Hence, in
closing, the emphasis on relations, this is not just a matter of developing a
relational ontology, although it is
that, but a relational thinking in which ontology itself is placed in relation
with politics and economics.
[1] Etienne Balibar, Spinoza: From Individuality to
Transindividuality pg. 9
[2] The term “philosophy’s cold
war” is taken from Alberto Toscano’s Fanaticism:
On the Uses of a Notion. He uses the term, without expanding on it, to
refer to the particular transformation philosophical concepts underwent as they
were (and continue to be) refracted through the ideological conflicts of
capitalism and socialism.
[3] “The idea that the human
person and community are contradictory categories has grown up with the coming
to power of the bourgeoisie.” Agnes Heller Everyday
Life pg. 39
[4] Franck Fischbach, Manifeste pour une philosophie sociale
pg. 50.
[5] Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations pg. 13.
[6] Karl Marx, Grundrisse. pg. 223.
[7] Ibid., pg. 705.
[8] “The only problem is that
extreme liberalization of the economy reveals its opposite, namely that the
social and productive environment is not made up of atomized individuals…the
real environment is made up of collective individuals.”Antonio Negri,The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for
the Twenty-First Century, trans. by James Newell (Oxford: Polity, 1989),
206.
[9] The term “short-circuit” is
derived from work of Etienne Balibar, who derives from an interpretation of
Marx’s understanding of the relationship of economics and politics, a
short-circuit of the economic and political. As Balibar writes with respect to
Marx and Foucault, “Discipline” and “micro-power” therefore represent at the same time the other side of economic exploitation and the
other side of juridico-political class domination, which they make it possible
to see as a unity; that is to say, they come into play exactly at the point of
the ‘short-circuit’ which Marx sets up between economics and politics, society,
and state…( Étienne Balibar, “Foucault and Marx: The Question of Nominalism”
pg. 51.)
[10] This method could be called
displacement, following Antonio Negri’s remarks in The Savage Anomaly, in which shift in Spinoza’s writing, from the Ethics to the Theological Political Treatise is paired with Marx’s remarks about
research and presentation to create a method of inquiry, whereby ontology is
continually situated into history. As Negri writes, “After the development of
such a radical pars destruens, after
the identification of a solid point of support by which the metaphysical
perspective re-opens, the elaboration of the pars construens requires a practical moment. The ethics could not
be constituted in a project, in the metaphysics of the mode and of reality, if
it were not inserted into history, into politics, into the phenomenology of a
single and collective life: if it were not to derive new nourishment from that
engagement” (The Savage Anomaly pg.
84).
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