Being Singular Plural: Between the Ingenium of the state and the Ingenia of Individuals in Spinoza

 

Mysterious Island

When I was in undergrad at Hampshire College one of my professors, Meredith Michaels would refer to certain books as "worker bee" books. The term was not pejorative. Worker bee books were the books that did the work, traced the development of a philosophers thought, or the connection between different philosophers. They were patient and methodological. They were not the kind of books to be read on a whim, but they were the books that you were very glad existed when you did your research. The work they did laid the foundation for other claims and ideas. Incidentally they were the kind of books that were primarily bought by research libraries, which is to say as we lose research libraries, or as their budgets are cut or put towards online co-learning centers, we are losing some of the basic infrastructure of thought. The worker bees build the hive. 

The Becoming Real of Abstractions: In Memory of Paolo Virno

I just learned this morning that Paolo Virno has died. Virno's work has been a huge influence on both my writing and my teaching. In my class on work we regularly read the chapter "Labor, Work, Intellect" from Grammar of the Multitude for the way it updates both Arendt and Marx for the late twenty-first century. Of all of the post-autonomist turns to the transformations of labor, his is the most engaging. His influence on my writing is even stronger. His investigation of the concept of transindividuality is second only to Balibar's in getting me to write a book about it. What follows is an excerpt from that book. 

The Affective Constitution and Reduction of the Political

 The following is the text from a presentation at the Radical Philosophy Hour. It also takes up a question that I posted about years ago. 

You Would Make a Great Cop: On Lezra's Defective Institutions

I had the opportunity to respond to Jacques Lezra's book Defective Institutions: A Protocol for the Republic at SPEP's virtual conference this year.  There is much to talk about in the book, but I decided to focus on his discussion of the police, partly because it allowed me to stitch together some thoughts about the police in the current political moment. My remarks are below.

Interpreting a Changing World: Labor Power in Virno and Macherey

 At first glance, the only thing that Pierre Macherey and Paolo Virno have in common is that they are, in my opinion, underrated as philosophers. They are both the less well known member of a school, or orientation that is primarily identified with other figures more often discussed; Macherey is often seen as one of the names associated with Althusser, but not referenced as much as Etienne Balibar or even Jacques Rancière and Virno with autonomia or post-operaism, but less famous than Antonio Negri and less infamous than Mario Tronti. Macherey is barely translated into English, but thanks to Seagull books, most of Virno's work is available. The other, more interesting thing that they have in common, is that they have both turned to the concept of labor power as a philosophical concept. 

Profane Existence: Capital Goes from Woke to MAGA

 In the US every presidential election is treated as a transformation of the nation, of the zeitgeist, like Brecht's line about the government electing itself a new people made true. This is especially true of the chattering pundit class who have greeted every election from Obama to Trump as a transformation not just of government but the nation. There is no small irony in this given low voter turnout, small margins, and anti-democratic institutions like the electoral college. What is often a small shift in numbers is treated as a major shift in values and ideals.

Capitalist Dogs II: Or, What Habit Makes in Smith and Marx

I remember a friend in graduate school saying that our task, at least when it came to writing dissertations, was to write something that a database could not produce. He was a bit ahead of the curve, this was sometime around the late nineties early two thousands. Databases could not write books then, but they are getting closer to it. Or, more to the point, a particular kind of academic monograph, the sort the traces the development of a concept in a single author oeuvre or a comparison of two thinkers, seems to be increasingly the kind of thing that a machine could write. That is the bad news. The good news, is that such monographs seemed useful to write, but never that fun to read in the first place. What if we could leave such books to the machines that generate them and consume them. What kind of writing should we do in the age of (seemingly) intelligent machines?

Fighting for Infection as if it were Wellness: On the Anti-Vax Moment

There was a moment in the beginning of the COVID pandemic when I thought to myself that surely this would be the end of the anti-vaccination movement. It is one thing to be against vaccines when diseases are rare, and pandemics a distant memory, but another to be against them in the midst of a pandemic in which tens of thousands were dying each week in the US alone. The anti-vax position always seemed like a luxury position, a position of privilege, an individual refusing vaccines is taking advantage of the fact that others are vaccinated around them and cases are rare. Like many things in US politics and culture, individual autonomy is made possible by the existence and occlusion of collective action. It is for that reason that I thought such a position would collapse in the face of an actual pandemic.

Everything is a Weapon if You Hold it Right: On Weapons

 

The titles of Zach Cregger's films are more riddles and interpretations than descriptions. One could conclude that the "barbarian" of the first film's title refers to the character of the mother, after all she is the one that smashes heads, but, as I said earlier, I think that misses the point that the film is a far deeper reflection on barbarians and civilization. In a similar way, we could conclude that the word "weapons" in the title of the recent film refers to the weaponization of the hypnotized individuals, as is stated in the dialogue.  (Oh, yeah, spoiler alert)

Just a Dog: Immediacy and Mediation at the Movies

Watching Superman at the drive-in with Bento (below)

I took my dog to the drive-in, something he loves, and this got me thinking about the status of dogs in contemporary films. James Gunn's Superman is, among many things, the first live action film to depict Superman's dog Krypto. The dog features prominently in the film, in its advertisements, and in its afterlife in memes and. jokes online. 

Lordon (and Lucbert) Vs. Deleuze (and Guattari): On Pulsion

I am going with images of conflict for this one 

As I have remarked here earlier, and in a published piece, one of the things that it is surprising about Frédéric Lordon's work on the organization of desire in capitalism is that he does not mention Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. The omission is striking because of their shared problem, the organization of desire under capitalism, and even their shared reference, Spinoza. As I wrote in the piece in the Affect Theory Reader 2:

Our Brand is in Crisis: The Summer of the Requel

 

This summer, well at least July, is the summer of the requel, to use the term coined by the Scream films. Jurassic World: Rebirth, Superman, and Fantastic Four: First Steps are all in different ways attempts to do the work of both a sequel and a reboot. They are entries in a series that also attempts to reset it and restore it.There is a phoenix like quality to the modern intellectual property franchise; when an individual film crashes and burns, like Jurassic World: Dominion, Justice League, and F4ntastic Four (or whatever it was called), it only adds fuel to the fire, to a desire to get the film right next time. Of the three only Jurassic World is a straight up sequel, the two others, Superman and Fantastic Four are less sequels to the existing films of that series, but the stakes are even higher, they are an attempt to restore not just one entire series, but an entire cinematic universe, which is to say an entire brand.

Being Illegal: Ideology and the Law

For the past fifteen years I have been teaching a class on work. This class has undergone many changes throughout the years. Readings have circulated in and out. I always try to add something new, whether this be Elizabeth Anderson, Sarah Jaffe, or Jason Smith and Aaron Benanav.  Somethings remain a constant, like John Locke, Adam Smith, Marx, and Kathi Weeks.  The things that change the most are the movies that I pair with the class. I have taught Office Space, Clockwatchers, Sleep Dealer, Sorry to Bother You, and The Assistant to name a few. 

A History of Violence: Or A Guy Walks into A Bar...

   

In the past few weeks I have rewatched two of my favorite movies on the Criterion Channel, Odds Against Tomorrow and Bad Day at Black Rock. What struck me in watching them in close succession was the one thing they had in common, besides Robert Ryan excelling at being a racist bastard, is they both introduce elements of martial arts as something new, as something that changes what it means to fight and who could win. 

Interpretation or Innovation: On Macherey's La Chose Philosophique

Photos from Galarie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie comparée

in Paris

I am going with these pictures in honor of Macherey's Histoires de Dinosaurs 

Last March I visited Paris for the first time in years. I had a great time, presenting my book The Double Shift at Chantal Jaquet's Spinoza Seminar at the Sorbonne, and discussed Marx, Spinoza, and Deleuze with Etienne Balibar at the American University of Paris. I also looked for books, and while I did find a few good ones at Librarie Vrin, I also learned that Pierre Macherey had recently uploaded his recent book La Chose Philosophique to his website, La Philosophie au sens large.  I am a huge fan of Macherey's site; for those who can read French it is the best site for learning about contemporary philosophy, basically the lectures from all from Macherey's classes for free. 

The Work Image II: Three Scenes on their way to a Concept

I recently gave a short presentation at the ACLA on the idea of the work image, a concept that I wrote about on this blog and in my book, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work. Some of this is just a summation and citation of what I wrote there, but I did manage to say a few things about some other television shows, like The Bear.  Here is most of what I had to say.

Don't Praise the Machine: AI and the Destruction of Three Ecologies

 

I was asked to speak at an AI and Ethics panel at my university. What follows is the outline that I am using for my talk.

The Miasma of Science and Ideology: A Postscript on the New Episteme

 

Of all of the various regressions under Trump 2.0 the anti-vaxx aspect seems to be the most perplexing. As disturbing as Trump's racism, nationalism, and everything else are, at least you can say that they were there since the beginning. Trump's political career began with calling for the death penalty for the "central park five" and his run for President began with nativist hostility to immigrants. The anti-vaccination stance seems new. The initial COVID vaccines were even developed under Trump, and one can imagine that he could take credit for them, since he loves taking credit for things, even for things that he had nothing to do with, or that have not happened. As Plato noticed, however, demagogues find themselves controlled by the same mob that they seem to control. I have not subjected myself to that much of coverage of Trump's rallies, but the only time I have ever seen Trump's mob ever boo him is when he mentioned vaccines.

Under New Management: Capitalism from Utopia to Dystopia

Inspired by this image, I am going with a giant donut theme for this post.

While I do not use the phrase much myself I have always been intrigued by the phrase "take as read" to refer to something that is assumed or taken as axiomatic rather than established. In academic contexts it can sometimes be useful to assume a particular interpretation rather than establish it, to lay out a baseline of understanding in order to move onto other things. In this particular case I am tempted to say, because I do not want to go into it here, that we can take as read that contemporary democratic society gets its image of the good life and its justification from capitalism. Capitalism provides us our image of "freedom, equality, and Bentham," to use Marx's phrase. Freedom is understood primarily as the freedom to purchase what we want; equality, understood as equality in the face of the same commodities, the McDonalds I eat is the same McDonalds that Donald Trump eats, and Bentham because we are all motivated by self interest. 

Do Your Own Damn Research: The New Episteme of Trump 2.0

I have been thinking a lot about the resonance between the current moment and this book

I am going to state this as clearly and as succinctly as possible. This is my thesis: the administration of Trump 2.0 is attempting to institute a new episteme, a new standard and idea of truth. This can be seen in the assaults on the funding and institution of higher education, on the cuts to funding scientific research through NIH and NSF, and in the undermining of vaccines and public health through RFK jr.'s management of Health and Human Services. All of these actions not only undermine the existing episteme, with its layers of expertise and legitimacy, but effectively enshrine a new one, a new practice of what constitutes truth and how it can be found and established. 

Faking it and Making it: On Leigh Claire La Berge's Fake Work

 

This past week I was fortunate to be on a panel at Red May about Leigh Claire La Berge's book Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke. I have posted my comments, as well as the whole panel (which included Leigh Claire, Sarah Jaffe, and Madeline Lane-McKinley) below. 

Leigh Claire La Berge and I had a somewhat similar trajectory, we both graduate from Hampshire College, we both studied primarily post-structuralist thinkers there, and we both developed an interest in Marx afterwards in graduate school. I wish I could say that my post-college work had something to do with that interest, but I only worked in the mailroom of a law firm in San Francisco for one summer before going straight to graduate school. 

Logic of Alternation: Spinoza’s Prehistory of Ideology (and its Marxist History)

 

Of all of the different trajectories and intersections that frame the relation of Marx to Spinoza, one recurring motif posits Spinoza as a precursor with respect to a specifically Marxist concept, that of ideology. Spinoza’s investigations of the imagination and superstition, the illusions that people are subject to, and their role in sustaining political authority and power, are the precursors if not the preconditions of Marx’s theory of ideology. Spinoza is an odd precursor in part because many of the thinkers who have turned to Spinoza for a theory of ideology have done so on the basis that as much as Spinoza comes before Marx chronologically, his understanding of ideology goes beyond what Marx wrote, in the way that constructs a theory that encompasses not just ideas, but affects, not just the thoughts of the mind but the striving of the body, and not just knowledge but imagination. The extent to which Spinoza goes beyond Marx has to be combined with the extent to which he falls short. There is nothing like a theory of not only the capitalist mode of production in Spinoza, but, aside from a few suggestive remarks the constitution of political bodies through common affects, there is nothing like a materialist theory of social relations in Spinoza. In some respects Spinoza goes beyond Marx, while in others Marx goes beyond Spinoza, this movement is less a back and forth, a vacillation, than it is a circle in motion because in between the proper names of Spinoza and Marx and their respective histories and conjunctures there is the question of the relation between the social order and the order of thoughts and desires, to put it in Spinoza’s terms, or the mode of production and the production of subjectivity to put it in Marxist terms. This is no stationary object of contemplation, but an ongoing transformation. We are perhaps as far from nineteenth century idea of ideology as the ruling ideas of the ruling class as Marx was from the question of superstition in the seventeenth century, but in the relation between the two we can perhaps make better sense of the world that produces us, and how it can be produced differently.

The World is a Vampire: On Sinners

I am going to get to Sinners but before I get there I need to say a little about my own particular history with the music known as the blues. 

The Spectacle Goes to the Movies: The Pop Life of Debord

 

As someone who teaches philosophy at a regional public university, which is to say a school without a lot of students who could ever imagine majoring in philosophy, I have never found a pop culture reference to philosophy I did not like. I have talked about Breaking Bad and work, Fight Club and alienation, and Get Out and W.E.B. Dubois to name a few. I have never done anything with The Matrix though. I have never shown it or screened it. 

Workers of the World, Divide! Work and the Constitution of the People

 

Pictures from Princeton (where this paper was presented)

This might be the worst place to begin, but in February Marjorie Taylor-Greene stated the following about the Department of Government Efficiency's cuts of the jobs of government workers across a broad swath of office and programs, from USAID to the NOAA, “Those are not real jobs producing federal revenue, by the way. They're consuming taxpayer dollars. Those jobs are paid for by the American tax people, who work real jobs, earn real income, pay federal taxes and then pay these federal employees." This is a terrible place to begin, because as is often case during the Trump years, we have a statement which seems so outlandish, so beyond the pale of what generally counts as political discourse, that it is tempting to discount it entirely as hyperbole if not insanity. However, I would like to argue that this extreme point can be situated in a broader logic that is at the core of right wing populism, both here in the US, and elsewhere. This core is what I would call “right workerism,” a claim for the virtues of work, for both the individual, people are worthwhile because of their ability to work, and as the constitution of the people, the people, the nation, is defined as a nation of workers. I am calling this right workerism, to contrast it , in the sharpest terms possible with left workerism, in which work, labor, functions as a point of antagonism between workers and capitalists. Work no longer functions as a point of division, between capitalists and workers, exploiter and exploited, but draws new lines of demarcation between “true” and “false” workers. I will return to this point, but first I would like to situate Representative Greene’s statement within this a larger logic, offering both a historical genesis and a conceptual genesis of right workerism.

The Work of Philosophy: Spinoza, Hegel, and Macherey on Theoretical Practice

 

I wanted to illustrate this post with images of simple machines,

but couldn't find any I liked. I then remembered the great collection of records 

that Simple Machines put out. 

Althusser and the students and collaborators who made up his circle have perhaps never been forgiven for developing the concept of “theoretical practice.” Their critics have argued that the concept attempted to grant an importance to philosophy, seeing it as immediately practical and effective, without the need of organization or materiality. Thus reversing Marx’s famous dictum, that “philosophers have only interpreted the world.” Philosophy became a practical act in itself. To dismiss such a concept is to not only misread what is at stake in Althusser’s attempt to the think philosophy as a particular practice, as something which is both limited, as all practices are, but as something which has effects, even if these effects are only on philosophy. One of the central threads running through Pierre Macherey’s thought is an attempt to think through both the implications and conditions of theoretical practice. The problem of theoretical practice, of what philosophy is and does, runs through all of Macherey’s research from his writing on Spinoza, to the question of literature, and the history of philosophy. It also defines his particular practice, his teaching through the seminars on Philosophie au sense large, and the books on utopia, everyday life, the university, and the essay, all of which are defined by an attempt to think the conditions and limitations of philosophy as a practice. Furthermore, this reflection on philosophy as a transformative activity can be found in one of Macherey’s earliest philosophical works, Hegel or Spinoza. Read through Macherey’s later work it is possible to see Hegel and Spinoza as two different ideas of theoretical practice, of what it means to do philosophy.

It's the Economy (of) Stupid: Or, Destroying the Economy to Save its Image

 

Cops in Chicago, defending private property while devaluing the brand. 

In some of the most rhetorically dense passages of Capital, passages that I have cited again and again, Marx puts forward the idea that the economy, or at least market relations produce their own image, their own spontaneous ideology. As Marx writes,

Post-Orwellian: From 1984 to Project 2025

 

Apple's famous 1984 ad

Etienne Balibar titled one of his first essays on Spinoza to appear in English, "Spinoza, The Anti-Orwell." George Orwell is not really discussed in the essay, and the title is only referenced once in the final paragraphs. Balibar writes, 

Living in a Mythocracy: Projecting 2025

From the comic Undiscovered Country

If one looks at the Executive Orders passed by Trump in the first week of his second presidency, and manages to look past the horror, one can see their utter consistency in terms of their vision of government, history, and society. This consistency makes up a universe, what could be called the Fox News Extended Universe. In this universe undocumented immigrants, or "illegals" as they are called, are illegal through and through, the laws they broke to get or stay in this country puts them outside of any law. They can only be harbingers of crime. In this universe DEI, or really any attempt to address this country's history of racism since the civil rights act, can only be understood as racism. To mention race is to divide by race, and the true victims of this racism are the white men and women who have lost jobs, or at least social standing, by having to treat others as equals. In this universe, public health can only be a secret grab for power, and the CDC, WHO, etc., are nefarious tools of domination. In this universe the federal government spends too much money on foreign countries, pointless research, and, as The Simpsons put it the "perverted arts."

The Death of Cool: Silicon Valley and Cultural Capital

 

There is no small irony in the fact that the Communist Manifesto, a text that, as the title suggests, is meant as a political progra, is read more for its description of the cultural logic of capitalism than for its program for a communist revolution. "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned," is a line that is remembered and cited, made the title of books, essays, and panels, long after everyone forgot Marx and Engel's policy on the nationalization of industry. The flowing prose of the first section will always outlast the programatic statements of the latter section (and to be fair even Marx thought that they were dated by 1871, after the Paris Commune).

Nothing Less: On Death, Knowledge, and Affects

 

We all know Spinoza's famous line, "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death." (EIVP67) I have turned to the line again and again, in graduate school it draw a line of demarcation if not a line in the sand between Heideggerians and neo-Spinozists, and, as I have argued, made possible different ways of thinking of finitude.  It makes for a great slogan, but, as they say in graduate school, let's unpack that.