tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-317836282024-03-18T13:48:01.811-04:00Unemployed Negativityunemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.comBlogger511125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-81475422517074544292024-03-12T19:43:00.001-04:002024-03-13T11:22:06.330-04:00The Racial Division of Labor: On Sylvie Laurent's Capital et Race<p> </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV6unXAJAsEINnFogAipifDzm0mNti5A4iT3ieOl0907qqi_GhGh5NH-HekB8ptlrhuMd1WEC4ertBr5IuRW4Ipqz8CfsyXhjN0pzKBGMWDEbM0nutWZFd1JziionslDrUaqzFZKkhn14vHKi7oAOI16AkDtqq9u2NbKhXJFeiVG2n-3IkgkwX_Q/s1630/Screen%20Shot%202024-03-11%20at%201.15.16%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1630" data-original-width="1078" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV6unXAJAsEINnFogAipifDzm0mNti5A4iT3ieOl0907qqi_GhGh5NH-HekB8ptlrhuMd1WEC4ertBr5IuRW4Ipqz8CfsyXhjN0pzKBGMWDEbM0nutWZFd1JziionslDrUaqzFZKkhn14vHKi7oAOI16AkDtqq9u2NbKhXJFeiVG2n-3IkgkwX_Q/s320/Screen%20Shot%202024-03-11%20at%201.15.16%20PM.png" width="212" /></a></div><br /><p>In <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2012/02/hegel-famously-proclaimed-that-owl-of.html">Kathi Weeks' </a><i><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2012/02/hegel-famously-proclaimed-that-owl-of.html">The Problem with Work</a> </i>she makes an argument about the way in which work produces and reproduces gender. As Weeks writes:</p><p style="text-align: justify;">"To say that work is organized by gender is to observe that it is a site where, at a minimum, we can find gender enforced, performed, and recreated. Workplaces are often structured in relation to gendered norms and expectations. Waged work and unwaged work alike continue to be structured by the productivity of gender-differentiated labor, including the gender division of both household roles and waged occupations...Gender is put to work when, for example, workers draw upon gendered codes and scripts as a way to negotiate relationships with bosses and co-workers, to personalize impersonal interactions, or to communicate courtesy, care, professionalism, or authority to clients, students, patients or customers."</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Lately I have been thinking about the way in which we could also think about the way in which work is also organized by, and organizing of, other social hierarchies including race. How is work organized by race, or how are racialized codes and scripts put to work in the workplace?</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;">This is to some extent the question of racial capitalism. It is possible to say, following Weeks, that there is an emerging awareness that capitalism was not just about the creation of the working class, a creation of a class of people with nothing but their labor to sell, but also the creation of the housewife, of unwaged labor in the home, and all of this was made possible in part by slavery, by the unwaged labor of people who were themselves commodities. Capital was born in the bloody intersections of gender, race, and class. Understanding these overlapping intersections is a matter not just of understanding the past, but of understanding the present This question is also in some sense the central question of <a href="https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/capital-et-race-sylvie-laurent/9782021498882">Sylvie Laurent's <i>Capital et Race: Histoire d'une Hydre Moderne.</i></a></p><p style="text-align: justify;">One way to think about the intersection of race and wage worker is to argue that the former affects the latter only in and through the racist ideas and conceptions of employers. In this conception, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/04/go-figure-on-lordons-figures-du.html">which is developed by Lordon</a>, the general tendency of dependency on the wage relation is the general condition through which the specific hierarchies of race are lived. In other words, it is because one needs to sell their labor power that one is then subject to the various racist attitudes of employers. Such a dual systems account of race and capital makes the former individual, even psychological, and the latter structural. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Part of the merit of Laurent's book is that she focuses on the structures of racial capitalism, seeing it not as the attitudes of individuals but as something materialized in practices and institutions. Her book is am investigation of the hydra of race and capitalism considered according to its "heads," the institutions (plantation, academy, multinational, colonial contract), stories (most notably Robinson Crusoe, but also the story of progress through the development of commercial society told by Adam Smith), and practices (primitive accumulation, colonialism, neoliberalism) that intertwine capitalism with racism. Race is not an idea, not just an idea that would reside in the heads of individuals, it is also institutionalized in different practices, or, more to the point, it is the intersection of practices and ideas. </p><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6dXRzdhg2Rc?si=dnooYpOoCmUn7LNs" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There is a lot to think comment about in Laurent's book, but I am less interested in thinking about the role that race played in the formation of capitalism. I know that a great deal has been written, and continues to be written about the intersection of slavery and the formation of modern capitalism. In a similar way there has been a lot written about the continuation of racial logics of division and hierarchy in and through the age of Jim Crow. The challenge it seems to me is to continue to think about the intersection of race and capital into the age of Charles Mills calls "de facto racism" (as opposed to de jure racism) without lapsing into seeing it as a purely individual attitude or prejudice. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The contrast with gender is useful. Even after the destruction of the housewife as the personification and naturalization of unwaged work, gendered scripts continued to exist in the commodification of care work, emotional labor, and sexualized work, in the school teacher, waitress, and sex-worker. The gendered division of labor continues even within generalized wage labor. One could make an analogy of sorts with race on this point. There is a racial division of labor that we see everyday in restaurants, with a predominantly white waitstaff and largely latino and black staff bussing tables, and other industries from hotels to hospitals, in which the hierarchy of jobs often overlaps with a racial hierarchy. However, this is just an analogy, an anecdotal one at that; it is hard to say that these jobs are performing racialized scripts even if they are sometimes perceived that way for the people who consume it. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/01/the-imaginary-institution-of-society.html">I have been thinking a lot one what one could call the "mediated immediacy" of race, as a hierarchy produced and sustained by a long history that includes slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining, is perceived as a natural way of the world by a person who passes through a hotel or restaurant. </a>One does not see the history of this production, just the hierarchy and exclusion it has made possible, and since that hierarchy corresponds with the physical appearance of race that appearance is taken as its cause and condition. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Laurent draws on Moishe Postone, Hylton White, and Harry Chang, to draw a connection not between race and the everyday experience but between race and the structural conditions of capitalism. These structural conditions are the two defining abstractions, that of capital, of surplus value, and of its opposite and condition, that of the laboring body. As Laurent writes:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"The black body is thus the perfect projection of an organism without capitalist labor, what Fanon rightly identified when speaking of the fetish of blackness as the embodiment of “the untamed biological.”If the Jew of antisemitism is the human body of money, the Black of anti-black racism is the human representative of brute biological bodilyness. The Negro represents essentialized biological and chaotic power, demanding its domestication. Its incapacity to discipline itself by labor condemns it to be an energy without object. Objectified, it is itself reduced to exchange value, incorporated into the commodity to become one with it, just as the Jew becomes one with capital." </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Laurent connects race not with the apparent hierarchies of capitalism, the racial division of labor in workplaces, but with its mysteries and metaphysics, the abstraction of value and the potential of labor. Or, more to the point, race, the race that structures contemporary racism, is always both immediately apparent, and unnervingly hidden, and it is formed at the intersection of these two aspects. </div>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-80422989687071342362024-03-04T15:15:00.004-05:002024-03-15T11:20:32.660-04:00Requiem for a Training Montage: Or, Everyone's Crazy for a Self-Made Man<br /><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi30Av0FQwyH8P7HnOJTesE-5B5XvJsINv9L1ixaSAQ0whc3XsDFmuG6NVHnC20A19t7rGjgko5t_cL5V4nuPvxX_w_CrJeifKSZ2JU33Bj_f130qPNTXVfwDoj1XXoS1_qKKBFzgD9xFz4D2Cd7CNxOkBh4OlzogzlSObrDR8knNtiSfQZRfIoZQ/s1144/431312661_10110013543480449_6272710615912219963_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="956" data-original-width="1144" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi30Av0FQwyH8P7HnOJTesE-5B5XvJsINv9L1ixaSAQ0whc3XsDFmuG6NVHnC20A19t7rGjgko5t_cL5V4nuPvxX_w_CrJeifKSZ2JU33Bj_f130qPNTXVfwDoj1XXoS1_qKKBFzgD9xFz4D2Cd7CNxOkBh4OlzogzlSObrDR8knNtiSfQZRfIoZQ/s320/431312661_10110013543480449_6272710615912219963_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />The other day, out of a combination of nostalgia, insomnia, and tribute to Carl Weathers I decide to watch <i>Rocky III. </i>I am not sure why I picked this one. Perhaps because it is one of Weathers' best as he goes from rival to partner, it is also where Rocky goes from scrappy seventies film to full on eighties excess, a process that would be completed in <i>Rocky IV. </i>It also got me thinking of training montages.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In <i>Rocky </i>films the training montage is not something before the big fight. They are the real fight, the real battle, the battle with oneself, one's doubts, and one's body; what happens in the ring is just the conclusion of this battle. We know how Rocky's first fight with Clubber Lang is going to go because we have already seen it play out in the montage: we see Clubber angrily sweating it out in the dirtiest gym and Rocky turning his workout into an extended publicity tour. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cvgw2lp7FHU?si=1WK4hwHL3XZqKi5D" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">We also know how the second fight will go when we see Rocky find an even dirtier gym to train in and more, importantly, find a new mentor in his old nemesis, Apollo Creed. In the Rocky films the darker, dirtier, and more desperate the gym, the better the training. This starts in the first films where Rocky's training used the immediate situation of his working class life, pounding on sides of beef and chasing chickens. In subsequent films he will need recreate his own hardscrabble roots in a Machiavellian return to first principle, remake himself as the underdog by stripping away luxury and technology. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4WDb2NkcZBg?si=YYWYCYv9iWIR071Y" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe> </div><div style="text-align: justify;">This trajectory reaches its apotheosis in <i>Rocky IV </i>in which Rocky eschews a gym altogether for training via agricultural labor. Rocky's workout of sawing wood and hauling rocks is intercut with Drago's scientifically monitored and artificially enhanced workout. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/03/operation-blue-thunder-or-first-time-as.html">It has been said before that the dream of American movies of the eighties was to be the Vietcong, to defeat a technologically superior enemy by fighting harder and, to some extent dirtier;</a><i> Rocky IV</i> does this one better by making Rocky the true heir of the Russian Revolution, the peasantry storming the Winter Palace of Soviet Technology.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/A_hLdPRsssE?si=r1adf97Wo128xsIF" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As someone who teaches Gilles Deleuze's film books I am often caught between what montage meant at the beginning of the history of cinema. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2010/06/revenge-of-children-of-marx-and-coca.html">Deleuze’s theory of montage was developed in relation to efforts by pioneers of early cinema, such as D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, to transform our very perceptions of action and time. </a>That is not what my students think of when I say the word montage though. The montage lives on in Hollywood in a mostly bastardized form in which it is generally used to compress time, to suggest by a series of images a longer transformation, such as the training montage in boxing and martial arts films. (<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2016/04/the-work-image-montage-in-better-call.html">In the general shift in which much of the movies has moved to television, <i>Breaking Bad </i>and <i>Better Call Saul </i>are one place in which the montage still takes prominence</a>). Gilles Deleuze argues that montage is an indirect image of time, as the different images and sequences present an overall temporal transformation.The images and sequences of individual acts add up to a larger transformation of the whole situation that exceeds them. Montage is a visualization of the process by which quantitative change becomes qualitative change. </div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Montage is often an image of work. In the case of the training montage this work is necessarily collective. It takes a gym to make a boxer, a dojo to make a fighter. It is from this perspective that we can chart the decline of the training montage in contemporary film. This chart takes two paths. One is through the superhero film. While some of the early entries in the genre such as Raimi's <i>Spider-Man </i>and Nolan's <i>Batman Begins </i>had their montages, and it even returned in <i>The Marvels, </i><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2019/04/becoming-spider-man-deleuze-and.html">for the most part the collective labor of training is not need when powers and abilities come bottled in a serum or via a mechanical suit</a>. I realize that Iron Man had its montage of construction and testing,<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2010/05/iron-man-versus-masculinity-or-writing.html"> but this was very much a solo effort of a self-made man.</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OrzgxUhnYjY?si=t-Hy985BbKARO0xv" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The second path is mapped out by <i>The Matrix </i>in which training is replaced by downloading. <i>The Matrix </i>can be considered in some sense a montage about the end of the montage, as disks replace dojos, downloading replaces training. I think that <i>The Matrix </i>has to be understood as an anti-work film in the broad sense, with all the sort of contradictions that it implies: <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/12/get-meta-with-me-on-matrix-resurrections.html">it is both about escaping the confines of the cubicle, of a life free from the particular matrix of an office layout</a>, and about escaping the constraints of work altogether, a dream of radical transformation that comes at the push of a button. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KWvvRaoWkoc?si=aWjrsaaeXZjw8UJ_" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">]</div>All of which brings me to my final point, John Wick and before him Jason Bourne, are two figures in the action film who come to us fully formed, the product of a training that we never see. It is clear that Keanu Reeves has put in the work, in the dojo and shooting range, to become John Wick but that is only seen in the behind the scenes videos. Keanu Reeves commitment to the work is perhaps why he has the unique status in contemporary film of being the only actor to portray to different action heroes with very different martial arts backgrounds, various styles of kung fu in <i>The Matrix </i>and Jiu Jitsu, judo, and aikido in <i>John Wick</i>. In the films we only see the result, not the work. Moreover given that John Wick's skills come from styles in which training comes with a partner, in aikido we say you get good by working with people who are better, John Wick's legendary status as a kind of Babayaga of the Russian underworld comes from effacing the very conditions that have made him possible. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AqK92bFZ3Aw?si=_SaIRB-qj_tRFwHI" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If the training montage was a representation of work, and of collectivity, in the Reagan era that tried so hard to deny it, what then do we make of its effacement in current action films? Have our action heroes become the self made men (and women) that we are told to consider ourselves to be, or am I reading too much into it? </div><br /><br />unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-31869557443059688122024-03-01T13:44:00.001-05:002024-03-01T17:20:12.008-05:00The Production of Ignorance: Ideology or Agnotology?<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibajogsMBIqQ1b97M2jiHQaiqKZtW0coHejrVkbtsNOi2GGEh7EyxGw49BGpsTA8bHBqZWYVOskhz6i2vgxsbfTJzMop81i105WoJIoYAER81jjZJwuapApXCkzBSiyWpJHgw4tHVkWqMWntwKp8-gAn1LuvMR7K42rK-zW0tN09doXYLwWuVUiQ/s1550/429654760_18423728770057850_5131405774501774266_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1550" data-original-width="1240" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibajogsMBIqQ1b97M2jiHQaiqKZtW0coHejrVkbtsNOi2GGEh7EyxGw49BGpsTA8bHBqZWYVOskhz6i2vgxsbfTJzMop81i105WoJIoYAER81jjZJwuapApXCkzBSiyWpJHgw4tHVkWqMWntwKp8-gAn1LuvMR7K42rK-zW0tN09doXYLwWuVUiQ/s320/429654760_18423728770057850_5131405774501774266_n.jpg" width="256" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Bento and books</div><p style="text-align: justify;">With all of my writing and translating about Spinoza and Marx as of late I am embarrassed to admit that there is a moment of their encounter that I have overlooked. The passage in question is in Chapter Eleven of Volume One of Capital (and I am indebted to Nick Nesbitt for pointing it out). In that passage Marx writes, </p><p style="text-align: justify;">"Vulgar economics, which like the Bourbons 'has really learnt nothing,' relies here as mere semblance as opposed to the law which regulates and determines the phenomena. In anthesis to Spinoza, it believes that 'ignorance is a sufficient reason."</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;">In the original:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Die Vulgärökonomie, die 'wirklich auch nichts gelernt hat,' pocht hier, wie überall, auf den Schein gegen das Gesetz der Erscheinung. Sie glaubt im Gegensatz zu Spinoza, daß 'die Unwissenheit ein hinreichender Grund ist".</span></div></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div> The notes to the Penguin edition points towards the Appendix to Part One of the <i>Ethics </i>as the source to this reference<i>. </i>If we followed that recommendation, and that is and "if" we might look at the following passage. <p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">"<span style="font-family: inherit;">Nor ought we here to pass over the fact that the followers of this doctrine, who have wanted to show off their cleverness in assigning the ends of things, have introduced-to prove this doctrine of theirs-a new way of arguing: by reducing things, not to the impossible, but to ignorance. This shows that no other way of defending their doctrine was open to them. For example, if a stone has fallen from a roof onto someone's head and killed him, they will show, in the following way, that the stone fell in order to kill the man. For if it did not fall to that end, God willing it, how could so many circumstances have concurred by chance (for often many circumstances do concur at once)? Perhaps you will answer that it happened because the wind was blowing hard and the man was walking that way. But they will persist: why was the wind blowing hard at that time? why was the man walking that way at that same time? If you answer again that the wind arose then because on the preceding day, while the weather was still calm, the sea began to toss, and that the man had been invited by a friend, they will press on-for there is no end to the questions which can be asked: but why was the sea tossing? why was the man invited at just that time? And so they will not stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, that is, the sanctuary of ignorance.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Similarly, when they see the structure of the human body, they are struck by a foolish wonder, and because they do not know the causes of so great an art, they infer that it is constructed, not by mechanical, but by divine, or supernatural art, and constituted in such a way that one part does not injure another. Hence it happens that one who seeks the true causes of miracles, and is eager, like an educated man, to understand natural things, not to wonder at them, like a fool, is generally considered an impious heretic and denounced as such by those whom the people honor as interpreters of Nature and the gods. For they know that if ignorance is taken away, then foolish wonder, the only means they have of arguing and defending </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">their authority, is also taken away."</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A great deal could be said about this connection of the critique of political economy and the appendix. One could connect this point to capitalism as religion, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/06/theological-breaks-tosel-on-marxs.html">or the religion of daily life as André Tosel puts it</a>, but it is also worth pointing out that Marx's emphasis on ignorance is very different than thinking of ideology as having some sort of epistemic content, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2017/11/conscienta-sive-ideologia-spontaneity.html">even if it is a distorted one</a>. I think that Althusser has probably gone the farthest in positing ideology not as a set of ideas, but as some sense a relation to those ideas through the subject, an idea which is of course indebted to Spinoza. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I would like to suggest a different direction of this particular intersection of Marx and Spinoza, one oriented not towards a theory of ideology, but of agnotology, towards a study of ignorance. I realize that the division between ideology, often defined as a kind of false knowledge, and what agnotology studies, ignorance. Moreover agnotology is a relatively niche and undeveloped area of inquiry. <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=11232">Much of the work that does is exists is oriented towards empirical contributions to the sociology of knowledge</a>, <a href="https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/">such as the work on the famous campaigns by tobacco companies and oil companies to foster doubt in the carcinogenic effects of cigarettes and the reality of global warming.</a> Posing the problem of agnotology through Marx and Spinoza suggests a way to think the production of ignorance not through the campaigns of public relations, but the way in which social relations produce ignorance of their own conditions. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2018/04/wave-of-mutilation-marx-and-spinoza-in.html">Franck Fischbach's little book on Marx follows a suggestive examination in this direction. </a> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As Fischbach argues, Marx and Engels' <i>The German Ideology</i> can be understood to be a text about the fragmentation of knowledge with the division of labor: the order and connection of ideas follows the order and connection of things. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2016/11/nexus-rerum-spinoza-and-marx-again.html">Framed in this way it is possible to see continuity from the concept ideology the theory of fetishism.</a> Capitalist society is one in which there is increasing division between production and consumption. As Marx writes, "the taste of the porridge does not tell you who grew the oats, no more does this simple process tell you of itself what are the social conditions under which it is taking place, whether under the slave-owner’s brutal lash, or the anxious eye of the capitalist, whether Cincinnatus carries it on in tilling his modest farm or a savage in killing wild animals with stones." </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This ignorance is not just a lack, thought as much as nature abhors a vacuum. The absence of knowledge of the real conditions becomes the basis for the projection of all kinds of qualities, from the commodity's value to its meaning and importance within the semiotics of consumer society. As Deleuze and Guattari write, elevating Marx's comments about porridge into a general epistemological thesis:</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Let us remember once again one of Marx's caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of the wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and relations of production. The product appears to be all the more specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends."</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Or, as Spinoza argued, our ignorance about the causes of things is refracted through our awareness of our own desires so much so that we "take our desires for reality," to twist an old May '68 slogan. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/02/reduction-to-ignorance-spinoza-in-age.html">Our own perceptions become the basis for truth</a>. As Marx states above, appearance replaces reality. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The danger of making such a direct connection between social division and epistemic fragmentation is that such theses often imply a restoration of some kind of wholeness, a dream of a society without divisions and fragmentation which would also be a restoration of knowledge. Such a society has not existed since some went to hunt and others went to gather, if ever. The passage about porridge from Marx even makes this clear, fetishism might have begun with the commodity form but ignorance of the conditions of production are much older. If there can be no return to wholeness, some restoration of our knowledge, ourselves, and society, then knowledge must be a construction. The question is how to structure society so that the divisions and diversity of tasks and productive activities necessary for human survival become the basis for an increase of our knowledge rather the condition for the production of stupidity. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></span>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-58342726263984188382024-02-23T18:03:00.007-05:002024-02-23T23:03:22.896-05:00Master and Commander: Or, Must Love Dogs II<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsqhZ1Wo02quSMvDzTuATtrDk86RMaRXpcYibJIkuIuvutgpPUf7Mk59vUQBCdb9Qp04yRC_FmLH77GPi1gk-0ktvfpiXxN2XkiZSp59MTWenXmNHoGZCRv5KmIgHfMUqRV_hPwUvSymztv2Q3abIF0LAXG2sN7av9Zs113rA6w8fZjnAuVPLQxA/s3248/Screen%20Shot%202024-02-23%20at%204.37.34%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2238" data-original-width="3248" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsqhZ1Wo02quSMvDzTuATtrDk86RMaRXpcYibJIkuIuvutgpPUf7Mk59vUQBCdb9Qp04yRC_FmLH77GPi1gk-0ktvfpiXxN2XkiZSp59MTWenXmNHoGZCRv5KmIgHfMUqRV_hPwUvSymztv2Q3abIF0LAXG2sN7av9Zs113rA6w8fZjnAuVPLQxA/s320/Screen%20Shot%202024-02-23%20at%204.37.34%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Commander </div><p style="text-align: justify;">In undergrad I got really into theory, all of it, reading Baudrillard, Deleuze, Debord, Foucault, etc., most definitely etc, all the time. My theory fascination was a byproduct of reading zines and little semiotextes, the more polemical, the more outlandish its claims, the more I loved it. One little book I particularly loved was <i><a href="https://autonomedia.org/product/first-last-emperors/">First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot</a></i> by Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi. It is an odd little book, a reading of the Reagan/Bush years framed as much by the legalist philosopher Shang Yang's <i>The Book of Lord Shang </i>as it is by the expected references to Deleuze and Guattari. (Brian Massumi of course translated <i>A Thousand Plateaus). </i>That odd idiosyncratic nature is precisely what I loved about it. I dreamt of writing something similar, not on Reagan and legalism but something which brought together a variety of disparate references to think through a specific problem. <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/products/2920-the-double-shift">I guess my book which talks about Spinoza and Marx along with <i>Breaking Bad </i>and <i>Better Call Saul, </i>might be an attempt to realize that wish. </a></p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOknKwl3xM8q1QGW_02_32c3TWA9cO3gZ4i-zpybAUMEiEjT6H4LyhcfI-8Q-UDizwJMuPjDyVRDY5eeLOVyqq7d73dypuPo1jeOAVr_hnvLgvArWZdBwonCuFHC0B39XsLN27r9qbqAZSh-fwy67fSYIj8sjwesPp9oAudH9pVH598vn-fkv-8A/s2014/Screen%20Shot%202024-02-23%20at%204.32.16%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2014" data-original-width="1298" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOknKwl3xM8q1QGW_02_32c3TWA9cO3gZ4i-zpybAUMEiEjT6H4LyhcfI-8Q-UDizwJMuPjDyVRDY5eeLOVyqq7d73dypuPo1jeOAVr_hnvLgvArWZdBwonCuFHC0B39XsLN27r9qbqAZSh-fwy67fSYIj8sjwesPp9oAudH9pVH598vn-fkv-8A/s320/Screen%20Shot%202024-02-23%20at%204.32.16%20PM.png" width="206" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;">It does not talk about dogs though, which brings us to this post. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/us/politics/secret-service-commander-dog.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Xk0.rP-K.RHoHxISkHl9S&smid=url-share">I read with horror and interest the story of Biden's dog Commander and the number of times that he has bitten secret service agents. </a>Part of this has to do with my own history. People who follow me on social media probably have seen my dog Bento. What people who only know him online do not know is that Bento is what some refer to as a reactive dog, or in other terms, he is fear aggressive, mostly towards humans. This pretty much fits Plato's definition of dogs in the <i>Republic, </i>he loves the people he knows, not just love, he adores them, but if he does not know you he is at least suspicious of you, if not openly hostile. He loves meeting new dogs, but is not really interested in meeting new people. He is generally distrustful of peopel. This is something I imagined he learned on the mean streets of Memphis (where he came from before I adopted him in Maine). In turn I had to learn how to deal with it and manage it. I have gone through three different behaviorists, eventually taking him to work with the behaviorists at Tufts, who I cannot recommend more highly. (Yeah, I spent a lot of money). What they taught me is that this is a condition than can be managed but never entirely changed. We do manage, mostly this just means that anyone coming to the house has to go through a lengthy introduction process; he wears a muzzle to the vet, and we mostly keep our distance from people out in the world. If you ask "Can I pet your dog" (and by all means you should always ask) the answer is always "No, sorry, but thanks for asking." On some immediate level reading about Commander was reading one of my worst nightmares. To be clear, Bento has never bit anyone. Like I said, we manage his reactions. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTPvUJwBIy9g8RyaEmmO45lIwhsyyYhyphenhyphen7Ynvo2s27ImYLHiEY25i7w_FQ0tJhrm0ef9BqcBwcc5LWTDWzOks_jzwS1mqyHNTY6WZ9s0qR6y5XFvdH4MpcY2YVFziAX4MqT20HwLNsYO4qD7R40VK2p7wTBPbww2PQwpx0GNjp4WsMTr4INE2PdzA/s2484/Screen%20Shot%202023-04-02%20at%2010.16.29%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2484" data-original-width="1868" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTPvUJwBIy9g8RyaEmmO45lIwhsyyYhyphenhyphen7Ynvo2s27ImYLHiEY25i7w_FQ0tJhrm0ef9BqcBwcc5LWTDWzOks_jzwS1mqyHNTY6WZ9s0qR6y5XFvdH4MpcY2YVFziAX4MqT20HwLNsYO4qD7R40VK2p7wTBPbww2PQwpx0GNjp4WsMTr4INE2PdzA/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-04-02%20at%2010.16.29%20PM.png" width="241" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Bento at his daycare where he has many dog and human friends </span></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">My nightmare was always what would happen if Bento bit someone. I could only imagine a string of events which ended with Bento going to an "undisclosed location," but in his case the undisclosed location in question would be a euphemism for the final undisclosed location we are all heading towards. I guess that is what separates me from the President. The sovereign is he who decides the exception, and in this case that includes a dog that can bite people repeatedly without legal ramifications. However, it got me think of the politics of dogs again, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2019/11/must-love-dogs-animals-and-racism-in.html">something that I wrote about briefly with Trump. </a> The fabricated image of Trump putting a medal of honor on a dog stands in sharp contrast with Biden's dog taking a chunk out of secret service agents arm. One is a fabricated image of command and authority, and the other is one of a force out of control.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">This brings me back to Dean and Massumi's little book. In that book they draw a sharp distinction between Reagan who functions as a kind of figure of transcendence, a despot in Deleuze and Guattari's term, who manages to appropriate all of the various functions of the nation and and the state to embody them. Reagan became America. This stands in sharp contrast to Bush. As Dean and Massumi write:</p><p style="text-align: justify;">"Old Glory's magic dust didn't stick to Bush's lapels. Try as he might to pledge himself to it, if fell from his shoulders like dandruff. Whenever he drew attention to himself, it was in a way that highlighted his inability to rise above, or even remain seated--to maintain his presence at all. For example, Bush could never garner for himself the kind of political capital Reagan did with second-hand war stories, even though he had a true one to tell. Bush actually was a fighter pilot in World War II. The story he tells is about being shot down. It ends with him floating aimlessly in a little yellow raft thinking wistfully about his family as he waits for rescue. In his hour of danger, a raft away from death, the thought of family did not unify the Bush substance(lessness) with that of the nation, as if had for Reagan reminiscing about his birth; rather, it led him to reflect on "my faith, the separation of church and state." Church/state...mind/body, spirituality/materiality, self/other. This split, which Reagan tried to hard to overcome, was a given for Bush, his "faith." It was his ultimate element, his destiny, it was to Bush what the sea was to his doomed fighter plane."</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXJ93A7OtEBAY8GdtZKa0jR_JU9q7lr5PSXnUKBaa5nz5ZbxcY1yKF5-uIgWlTvVejvPqmNrBddvhNVWxmQED0eWes7CYJM17VsctQLha2eRXteCBlnfSo-H5a2tCSVGPriOrI_qarYFxuoUOlAvrJ9ft78hsxlZ7Hdu0ikExPH4UJerRNGD78Fw/s1700/IMG_1129.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1700" data-original-width="1700" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXJ93A7OtEBAY8GdtZKa0jR_JU9q7lr5PSXnUKBaa5nz5ZbxcY1yKF5-uIgWlTvVejvPqmNrBddvhNVWxmQED0eWes7CYJM17VsctQLha2eRXteCBlnfSo-H5a2tCSVGPriOrI_qarYFxuoUOlAvrJ9ft78hsxlZ7Hdu0ikExPH4UJerRNGD78Fw/s320/IMG_1129.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;">Whereas Reagan could appropriate the various machines of the state to the point where everything American seemed to emanate from him, Bush constantly lived the division between his person and his power. This is seen most immediately in the first Gulf War, in which the power of the state's war machine was split between Bush and his generals, most notably Schwarzkopf. It is tempting to read Biden as embodying a similar division, one that Commander exemplifies. It is not the division between the president and his power, but between word and actions. The story linked to above is riddled with statements from the Biden's about their concern. As the piece states, "<span style="font-family: inherit;">A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter said the president and first lady were “heartbroken” over what had happened, had apologized to those who were bitten and had even brought flowers to some of them." </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This division between the deep concern and the sheer number of attacks, brings to mind another, more pressing division: the division between Biden's repeated statement of deep concern for the situation in Gaza coupled with his continued support, actual military and financial support, for Netanyahu and Israel. I do not know how the Secret Service agents felt about getting flowers, but it is increasingly clear that the words of concern and heartbreak many very little to the people in Gaza, and the people in the US who want a ceasefire. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Dean and Massumi theorized Reagan and Bush as transcendence and immanence, unity and division. Looking at Trump and Biden through dogs gives us another division. One between an ersatz toughness that is somehow convincing, and gestures of concern that are less so. A president who gleefully identifies with the Machiavellian beast of the state and one who does not even now how to appear to be of the people, out of touch with what it means to live with a dog, and, more importantly, with how the very voters he would count on feel about an ongoing genocide. The simulacrum of power or a division between sentiment and action, these are the choices that voters are facing. </span></p>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-73674067816971945372024-02-16T16:33:00.000-05:002024-02-16T16:33:07.296-05:00Ahead of its Time: On Clockwatchers <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX9LCJO-BRq6-J7rnTEN0dk4gseRqQqAKH526TNL22lm4L2e9DIFw-mTbygmdToPQ81NKDX768tHYazrobU-eMi38N4UNmHt1m4ssV11Wj_-OVyzBseExw3PPwUi5luXLwJoc01QiW5Ct0NZ4smDDBUsx2OzJi7DT6CwmfOqgQQCaPL_Qwe7Ra9Q/s1324/Screen%20Shot%202024-02-16%20at%201.08.07%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="726" data-original-width="1324" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX9LCJO-BRq6-J7rnTEN0dk4gseRqQqAKH526TNL22lm4L2e9DIFw-mTbygmdToPQ81NKDX768tHYazrobU-eMi38N4UNmHt1m4ssV11Wj_-OVyzBseExw3PPwUi5luXLwJoc01QiW5Ct0NZ4smDDBUsx2OzJi7DT6CwmfOqgQQCaPL_Qwe7Ra9Q/s320/Screen%20Shot%202024-02-16%20at%201.08.07%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><i>Clockwatchers </i>is an underrated film. Perhaps it came out too early, missing the slew of films critical of work and cubicles by at least a year. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2018/02/work-like-it-is-1999-year-of-refusal-of.html">1999 was the year of </a><i><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2018/02/work-like-it-is-1999-year-of-refusal-of.html">Fight Club, Office Space, American Beauty</a>, </i>and <i>The</i> <i><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/12/get-meta-with-me-on-matrix-resurrections.html">Matrix,</a> </i>which all dealt with an escape from the confines of the cubicle. Or, and this is probably closer to the point, a film focusing on the working lives of four women would never touch the same points of cultural resonance as <i>Fight Club </i>or <i>Office Space, </i>which were as much about the crisis of masculinity as it was about work. It also never had the same afterlife as those films, which gained most of their audience through fancy boxed DVDs and endless repetitions on cable. Luckily the film was made available through streaming on the Criterion Channel, which makes it possible to rectify its status as an overlooked classic.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><i><br /></i><p></p>
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EEviG8HfUkU?si=UkXYg-jLSepz_PL2" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The film deals primarily with temp workers. In the forgotten nineties when this film was made the temp was in some sense the figure of precarity, an interchangeable worker whose fate was almost entirely tied up with the fluctuating needs of various offices and enterprises. To be a "temp" was to be "of the workplace, but not class of the workplace," to paraphrase Marx. As a temp your work was necessary, maybe even vital, but because you were a temp you were not included in the social dimension of work. People barely managed to learn your name. I should say that I worked as a temp for several summers during the nineties. In the nineties "the temp" was both the best illustration of the alienation of the white collar workplace and a sign of what was to come. This prediction both did and did not take place, mutating in the form of the gig worker and other technologically mediated forms of precarious and part time labor. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What is perhaps most striking about the film now is less is vision of the nineties as its examination of what I have called "<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2011/05/affective-composition-of-labor.html">the affective composition of labor</a>." The way in which work is a management and articulation of affects, hope, fear, frustration, and joy, both in society and within the particular workplace. Understanding these affects helps us understand both our attachment to work and the possibilities for transforming it. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The film begins when Iris (Toni Collette) arrives for her first day as a temp in an unspecified credit agency in an unspecified city. We do not learn much about Iris, but she is portrayed as lonely, living with her father, and her job at the temp agency is seen as just a brief stop off on the way to better and brighter things. There are references to a letter of recommendation and an upcoming interview with a big company. Iris' time at the credit agency is both alienating, on her first day she is left to wait for hours before anyone even tells her what to do or where she should be, and oddly rewarding. She is introduced to Margaret (Parker Posey) and then to Paula (Lisa Kudrow) and Jane (Alanna Ubach). The four bond over their marginalized status in the workplace and soon become friends. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is of course commonplace even a cliche to say that work is alienating; the question is from what. T<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/07/the-use-and-abuse-of-alienation-for.html">here are philosophically sophisticated answer to this, as in Marx, that invoke species being and our unique status as humans.</a> Sometimes a simpler answer will suffice. What <i>Clockwatchers </i>illustrates is that people want to be recognized, to belong to something, but that they want to belong as individuals, to be seen as who they think themselves to be. With respect to the former, the film shows how work promises some kind of community, but constantly frustrates it, as the friendship between the four women is eventually destroyed by the antagonisms of work. With respect to the the later, individuality, each of the four women have an identity that is not so much formed through work but opposed to it. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Paula claims to be an actress who will be in a new play; Jane is going to be married soon, and the job is just a day job to her planning; Iris, our narrator, is documenting everything that happens in her journal; and even Margaret is working only to get a coveted letter of recommendation to another job. These strategies are in some sense fictions or doomed to fail, Paula is not really an actress and Jane marries a man that she knows is cheating on her, but they at least offer the promise of being something other than just a temp. A pretend actress and a failed marriage is better than just being an employee. Work frustrates community by promising to realize it, and individuality by leaving no time for it. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">With respect to the letter of recommendation, the one that Iris has and the one that Margaret wants,<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2019/11/we-are-all-servants-on-class-struggle.html"> they all serve to illustrate Paolo Virno's point about the increasingly servile nature of contemporary work</a>. The more on works with others, the more one's labor is a managing and participating social cooperation, the more one is subject to the individual and arbitrary power of others, even if they do not remember your name. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Lastly, it would be remiss to overlook the figure of Cleo (Helen Fitzgerald), the full time worker who starts after Iris. Her status as outsider solidifies the group, proving that <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2013/08/negative-solidarity-towards-definition.html">negative solidarity</a> and solidarity are often thoroughly intertwined and inseparable. Denied any real community, any connection, she maintains her individuality through subversion. She is the office thief whose theft of assorted tokens of individuality, treasure mugs and knick knacks, drives the company into an increasingly repressive lockdown. Her story illustrates that friendship, community, and identity are themselves like the office supplies we take back home with us; they are at the workplace but can only ever be stolen from it. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-8471266092180105612024-02-04T11:41:00.010-05:002024-02-06T20:06:27.750-05:00Everybody Gets to be a Fascist: Or, What Taylor Swift Taught Me About Fascism<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0TOB5SyFHB-oo-WYbyeR-iGTosHFMIpPTCqp9R1escEwHMH4CpQyY7-eQGyVA9p4CM5ldQALjdOoQJqZ0YN5sdVe1FGcIvTPQobJs5WGfN1qpibUgqyRyogLHjU4Aq-VF27Tcc7KDMq9JXZAxQxlIruMNBT2pzpNHvqgTvNV2P0ar56grtV3Clg/s1198/Screen%20Shot%202024-02-03%20at%201.22.37%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1188" data-original-width="1198" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0TOB5SyFHB-oo-WYbyeR-iGTosHFMIpPTCqp9R1escEwHMH4CpQyY7-eQGyVA9p4CM5ldQALjdOoQJqZ0YN5sdVe1FGcIvTPQobJs5WGfN1qpibUgqyRyogLHjU4Aq-VF27Tcc7KDMq9JXZAxQxlIruMNBT2pzpNHvqgTvNV2P0ar56grtV3Clg/s320/Screen%20Shot%202024-02-03%20at%201.22.37%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">The Best Joke in <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/08/barbies-amongst-themselves-or-what.html">Barbie</a> </div><p style="text-align: justify;">Years ago I remember encountering Félix Guattari's little essay, <a href="https://www.revue-chimeres.fr/IMG/pdf/everybody-wants-to-be-a-fascist.pdf">"Everybody Wants to be a Fascist." </a>At the time its title seemed more clever than prescient. (Although it is worth remembering how much fascism, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2016/07/reading-deleuze-and-guattari-as.html">and the encounter with fascism was integral to Deleuze and Guattari's theorizing</a>, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/08/fighting-for-subjection-as-if-it-was.html">well beyond the reference to Reich</a>). Now that we are living in a different relation to fascism the problem posed by Guattari (and Deleuze) of desire seems all the more pertinent and pressing. </p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;">One of the problems of using the word fascism today, especially in the US, is that it is hard to reconcile our image as a politics, a politics of state control of everything, and the current politics of outrage aimed at M&Ms, Barbie, and Taylor Swift. How can fascism be so trivial and so petty? This could be understood as the Trump problem, although it is ultimately not limited to Trump. There are a whole bunch of pundits and people getting incredibly angry about the casting of movies and how many times football games cut away to Taylor Swift celebrating in the expensive seats. The Fox News Expanded Universe is all about finding villains everywhere in every library or diverse band of superheroes. It is difficult to reconcile the petty concerns of the pundit class with the formation of an authoritarian state. I have argued before that understanding <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2017/05/dialectic-of-donald-or-not-trump-again.html#more">Trump, or Trumpism, means rethinking the relationship between the particular and universal, imaginary and real</a>. <a href="https://s0metim3s.com/2015/12/17/fascism-from-fordism-to-trumpism/">Or, as Angela Mitropoulis argues, the question of fascism now should be what does it look like in contemporary captitalism</a>, one oriented less around the post-fordist assembly line than the franchise. Or as she puts it, "<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: left;">W</span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: left;">hat would the combination of nationalist myth and the affective labour processes of the entertainment industry mean for the politics and techniques of fascism?"</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.versobooks.com/products/2627-late-fascism">It is for this reason (among others) that Alberto Toscano's <i>Late Fascism </i>is such an important book. </a>As he argues in that book fascism (<a href="https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-86-fascism-with-alberto-toscano/">as well as in an interview on Hotel Bar Sessions</a>) fascism has to be understood as kind of license, a justification of violence and anger, and a pleasure in that justification. We have to give up the cartoon image of fascism as centralized and universal domination and see it as not only incomplete persecution, unevenly applied, but persecution of some coupled with the license to persecute for others. Fascism is liberation for the racist, sexist, and homophobe, who finally gets to say and act on their desires. As Toscano argues, "...what we need to dwell on to discern the fascist potentials in the anti-state state are those subjective investments in the naturalizations of violent mastery that go together with the promotion of possessive and racialized conceptions of freedom. Here we need to reflect not just on the fact neoliberalism operates through a racial state, or that, as commentators have begun to recognize and detail, it is shaped by a racist and civilizational imaginary that delimits who is capable of market freedoms (<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/11/other-scenes-balibar-and-tosel-on-class.html">Toscano is not referring to Tosel, but that is an important part of Tosel's work</a>) We must also attend to the fact that the anti-state state could become an object of popular attachment or better, populist investment, only through the mediation of race." </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Toscano's emphasis is on race in this passage, but it could be argued to apply to sexism, homophobia, etc., to the enforcement and maintenance of any of the old hierarchies. As Toscano cites Maria Antonietta Macciochhi later in the book, "You can't talk abut fascism unless you are also prepared to discuss patriarchy." <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/09/return-to-doppelgangerland-naomi-kleins.html">Possessive includes the family as the first and most vital possession.</a> At this point fascism does not sound too different from classical conservatism, especially if you take the definition of the latter to be the following: </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; text-align: left;">“</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; text-align: left; text-decoration-line: none;"><a href="https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservatives-frank-wilhoit.html">Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: </a><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/04/broken-brains-on-etiology-of-present.html">There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”</a></span><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/04/broken-brains-on-etiology-of-present.html"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; text-align: left; text-decoration-line: none;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;"> </span></a>However, what Toscano emphasizes is the libidinal pleasure that comes with this, it is not just a matter of who is in and who is not, who is protected and who is not, but in the pleasure that one gets from such exclusion, a pleasure that is extended and almost deputized to the masses. While conservative hierarchies and asymmetries passed through the hallowed institutions of the state and the courts, the fascist deputies take to the streets and the virtual street fights of social media. As Toscano argues, pitting Foucault's remarks about the sexual politics of fascism in the seventies against Guattari's analysis,</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;">"For Foucault, to the extent that there is an eroticization of power under Nazism, it is conditioned by a logic of delegation, deputizing and decentralization of what remains in form and content a vertical, exclusionary, and murderous kind of power. Fascism is not just the apotheosis of the leader above the sheeplike masses of his followers; it is also, in a less spectacular but perhaps more consequential manner the reinvention of the settle logic of petty sovereignty, a highly conditional but very real 'liberalising' and 'privatising' of the monopoly of violence...Foucault's insight into the 'erotic' of a power based on the deputizing of violence is a more fecund frame, I would argue, for the analysis of both classical and late fascisms than Guattari's hyperbolic claim that "the masses invested a fantastic collective death instinct in...the fascist machine' --which misses out on the materiality of that 'transfer of power' to a <i>'specific </i>fringe of the masses' that Foucault diagnosed as critical to fascism's desirability."</p><p style="text-align: justify;">I think that Toscano's analysis picks up an important thread that runs from discussions of fascism from Benjamin to Foucault (and beyond). As Benjamin writes in the <a href="https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf">Work of Art essay </a></p><p style="text-align: justify;">"The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life."</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Today we could say that the right of expression includes a deputization of power and the pleasure in exercising it. In a capitalist society, in which the material conditions of existence must belong to the capitalist class, the only thing that can be extended to the masses is the power and pleasure to dominate others. Real wages keep on declining, but fascism offers the wages of whiteness, maleness, cisness, and so on, extending not the material control over one's existence but libidinal investment in the perks of one's identity.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif247-WGJmZ-xzX8ejRnX9qeqjJJMA8Eqc3ewR_McBDxWdjKxq2EYzpAjsif4OWcWYrCUjcbSKQa8cxy3T93e7HSjvKsMZ74unwsP_KtU7iy7hOISg15UqG7PkBGY4Bewv4xp7Weffscy0MSYPa3LEzACsWdazGG9X0kV1Ci1VSgd1PI1djmdLNg/s1280/Screen%20Shot%202024-02-04%20at%2010.57.36%20AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif247-WGJmZ-xzX8ejRnX9qeqjJJMA8Eqc3ewR_McBDxWdjKxq2EYzpAjsif4OWcWYrCUjcbSKQa8cxy3T93e7HSjvKsMZ74unwsP_KtU7iy7hOISg15UqG7PkBGY4Bewv4xp7Weffscy0MSYPa3LEzACsWdazGG9X0kV1Ci1VSgd1PI1djmdLNg/s1280/Screen%20Shot%202024-02-04%20at%2010.57.36%20AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="728" data-original-width="1280" height="182" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif247-WGJmZ-xzX8ejRnX9qeqjJJMA8Eqc3ewR_McBDxWdjKxq2EYzpAjsif4OWcWYrCUjcbSKQa8cxy3T93e7HSjvKsMZ74unwsP_KtU7iy7hOISg15UqG7PkBGY4Bewv4xp7Weffscy0MSYPa3LEzACsWdazGG9X0kV1Ci1VSgd1PI1djmdLNg/s320/Screen%20Shot%202024-02-04%20at%2010.57.36%20AM.png" width="320" /></a></div></div><p style="text-align: justify;">All of which brings me to Taylor Swift. I have watched with amusement and some horror as the fringes of the Fox News Expanded Universe have freaked out about Taylor Swift attending football games and, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/learning/taylor-swift-and-the-nfl.html?unlocked_article_code=1.S00.mExU.xKY1Jx1ce9U4&bgrp=c&smid=url-share">occasionally, being seen on television watching and enjoying the games. </a>It is hard to spend even a moment thinking about something which has all of the subtlety of the "<a href="https://youtu.be/0OTYdizres8?si=a17eV-WGniair41b">He-Man Woman Hater's Club</a>," but I think that it is an interesting example of the kind of micro-fascism that sustains and makes possible the tendency towards macro-fascism. Three things are worth noting about this, first most of the conspiracy theories about Swift are not predicated on things that she has actually done, but what she might do, endorse Biden, campaign for Biden, etc., <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/02/reduction-to-ignorance-spinoza-in-age.html">I think that this has to be seen as a mutation of conspiracy thinking from the actual effects of an action or event, Covid undermining Trump's presidency, to an imagined possible effect. </a><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/07/making-up-guy-to-get-mad-at-completely.html">One of the asymmetries of contemporary power is treating the fantasies or paranoid fears of one group as more valid than the actual conditions and dominations of another</a> group. Second, and to be a little more dialectical, the fear of Swift on the right recognizes to what extent politics have been entirely subsumed by the spectacle fan form. (<a href="https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-111-fan-culture/">Hotel Bar Sessions did a show about this too</a>) Trump's real opponent for hearts and minds, not to mention huge rallies, is not Biden but Swift. Lastly, and this really deserves its own post, some of the anger about Swift being at the game brings to mind <a href="http://www.katemanne.net/down-girl.html">Kate Manne's theory of misogyny</a>, which at its core is about keeping women in their place. I would imagine that many of the men who object to seeing Swift at their games do not object to the cutaway shots of cheerleaders during the same game. It is not seeing women during the game that draws ire, but seeing one out of her place--someone who is enjoying being there and not there for their enjoyment.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">I used to be follow a fairly vulgar materialist line when it came to fascism. Give people, which is to say workers, actual control over their work, their lives, and their conditions and the appeal of the spectacle of fascist power would dissipate. It was a simple matter of real power versus its appearance. It increasingly seems that such an opposition overlooks the pleasures that today's mass media fascism make possible and extend to so many. It is hard to imagine a politics that could counter this that would not be a politics of affect, of the imagination, and of desires. Libidinal economy and micro-politics of desire seem less like some relic from the days of high theory and more and more like necessary conditions for thinking through the intertwining webs of desire and resentment that make up the intersection of culture, media, and politics. I think one of the pressing issues of the moment is the recognizing that all of these junk politics of grievances of popular culture should be taken seriously as the affective antechamber of fascism while at the same time not accepting them on their terms; <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/04/woke-capital-and-twilight-of.html">there is nothing really to be gained by rallying to defend corporations and billionaires. </a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-88860308529499530872024-01-29T15:32:00.004-05:002024-01-29T16:53:23.753-05:00How to Do Things with Hegel: On Gray and Johnson's Phenomenology of Black Spirit<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkRVkaUd7DyLsCPn4xlZSHk4nyMDuNGM8BRM05mK8JMN5cSDogA1sombOlzUcyw1mwMBNWhQ7OqUGPH3aBp9RXL7lgsRKdLwaBzWxXXuKCODBz_1PEksjeBVqIQE665kApXmXa_UEXgxB7idR9jUzEc7RyHyLFpDTlcoIYZ3F4x6pf1upi-LUy5Q/s1434/Screen%20Shot%202024-01-28%20at%2012.55.31%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="946" data-original-width="1434" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkRVkaUd7DyLsCPn4xlZSHk4nyMDuNGM8BRM05mK8JMN5cSDogA1sombOlzUcyw1mwMBNWhQ7OqUGPH3aBp9RXL7lgsRKdLwaBzWxXXuKCODBz_1PEksjeBVqIQE665kApXmXa_UEXgxB7idR9jUzEc7RyHyLFpDTlcoIYZ3F4x6pf1upi-LUy5Q/s320/Screen%20Shot%202024-01-28%20at%2012.55.31%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Because actual history is rarely linear, let alone teleological, I read the repudiation of Hegel before I ever read Hegel. I had read arguments and polemics against Hegel in Althusser, Deleuze, and Foucault long before I had every cracked Hegel's books. A funny thing happened once I started reading, writing, and teaching Hegel, is that I started to warm up to him. It was not the idea of spirit that appealed to me, or even the dialectic as some overarching logic, b<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2012/01/finite-dialectics-hegel-in-balibars.html">ut the more limited, finite dialectics of the different figures and moments of consciousness. </a></p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;">If you need an example of what I am talking about just think of the famous dialectic of master and slave, <a href="https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-105-the-master-slave-dialectic/">the hit single of the </a><i><a href="https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-105-the-master-slave-dialectic/">Phenomenology of Spirit.</a> </i>This passage has been separated from the progression of spirit to take on a life of its own as a way to discuss everything from desire to anti-colonial violence. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2011/01/in-body-if-not-in-spirit-butler-and_6182.html">However, hit singles have a way of overshadowing the whole album.</a> I have often thought that Hegel's <i>Phenomenology </i>and <i>Philosophy of Right </i>offer more than just that famous struggle, the figures of the stoic, sceptic, unhappy conscious, the struggle of culture and alienation, faith and enlightenment, could be liberated from the development of spirit, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/10/the-dialectic-of-conspiracy-and-trust.html">to become ways of thinking about the current state of spirit,</a> <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2019/07/what-deleuze-and-guattari-get-wrong.html">which appears less and less as a culmination of progress than a motley accumulation of everything every believed. </a></p><p style="text-align: justify;">It is for this reason that I was delighted to learn of <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-phenomenology-of-black-spirit.html">Biko Mandela Gray and Ryan Johnson's <i>Phenomenology of Black Spirit. </i></a>One aspect of this book is an attempt to put the figures of Hegel's <i>Phenomenology, </i>to work; the master and slave, but also the stoic, sceptic, and unhappy consciousness become critical figures of subjectivity, and not just moments of the development of spirit. It puts these figures to work in relation to figures of black struggle and thought from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, reading what could be called "the black radical tradition" as something more than a series of political contestations and positions, to see it as having its own intellectual foundation and development, even as counters the trajectory that Hegel charted. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Gray and Johnson sometimes contrast Hegel's figure with the reality and history of black struggle. This can be seen clearly in the contrast between Douglass' struggle for freedom and Hegel's concept of the master/slave struggle. As Gray and Johnson write, "The lord' and the 'bondsman,' then are logical (dis)positions, figures who are both more and less than the historical people who were enslaved and who were exercising domination. 'The slave' had names. 'The master' did, too. And these names make a difference. They make differences." Logic and history connect and part ways. In Hegel's account the bondsman condition begins with fight, a struggle for recognition, and ends in work, work providing a sense of recognition that could not be found in struggle. Douglass' history inverts this order. As Gray and Johnson write,</p><p style="text-align: justify;">"With American chattel slavery, however, work was not the way out of slavery but the brutal institutions very engine. The more a slave worked, the stronger was the institution...In chattel slavery, work will never set you free. Work reinforces the chains and sharpens the sting of the whip. Douglass worked had and long, and saw himself in the fields, landscapes, ships and other objects into which he put his transforming labor. Yet freedom never came to him from work. The only way for him to set out on the path out of slavery and into freedom was to turn away from the object. on which he worked and face the master in order to fight."</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2013/09/brutality-today-brief-remark-on.html">Gray and Johnson's analysis here cites and joins Chamayou's discussion of slave hunts, in which the historical inquiry calls into question the conceptual logic</a>. Work cannot function as the basis for recognition in a system based on reducing human beings to their capacity for work. It is only the fight, the struggle that can break this logic. If Douglass deviates from Hegel's figures of subjectivity other historical moments would seem to not only confirm it, but Hegel's thought provides the concept that is otherwise missing. Booker T. Washington's ideas of individual freedom, merit, and self-reliance realizes Hegel's idea of stoicism more than even Hegel. The history does not contradict the concept, but confirms it and makes a case for its relevance. As Gray and Johnson write, </p><p style="text-align: justify;">"Here is a new form of recognition. It is not the recognition of another self-consciousness, directly in the form of self consciousness, but that of future self-consciousness, a higher form of self, or perhaps the promise of being recognized by a truly fair, just, and impartial form of subjectivity, above and beyond any particular determination of race, gender, age, etc., "No man whose vision is bounded by color can come into contact with what is highest and best" ( Washington, <i>Up from Slavery) </i>The recognition that the stoic seeks is not simply another person's recognition, not just recognition from this white man or Black man, but a general recognition from an ideal person. It is recognition of a hard earned merit that is <i>mine."</i></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Reading Washington through Hegel makes it possible to see how the stoic appears not just once, as a figure of progression, but again and again, as a turn inward for recognition when the world becomes unreliable. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/09/reworking-hegel-philosophies-of-work-in.html">It also makes it possible to see that Hegel's attachment to work, to work as an ethical ideal is less a matter of his own system, than the grey on grey of a philosopher reflecting the general norms of his time.</a> It also makes it possible to see in Washington not just a specific figure from one period, but something more of a refrain as stoicism, self-reliance, and merit, appear again and again as a conservative response to racism. The conservative attempt to reduce Martin Luther King Jr. to some future date where people would be judged only by the content of their character, to merit, is really an attempt to turn King into Washington. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Speaking of King, it is with respect to King that we can see the real strength of Gray and Johnson's reading. As much as Hegel gives us figures of individual consciousness, stoicism, scepticism, etc., that can be seen not just once in the linear progression of history but appearing again and again, his real goal was to think something other than the individual, to think spirit as <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2016/12/you-incomplete-me-marx-and-hegel-in.html">universality</a>, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2010/07/confessions-of-minervas-owl-notes-on.html">sociality</a>, or even <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2010/11/transindividuality-as-critique-spinoza.html">transindividuality. </a>In Gray and Johnson's reading of the black radical tradition this problem of collectivity appears again and again as the struggle of the individual, King, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis, to transcend individuality in their very individual struggle. This is what Hegel's unhappy consciousness makes it possible to think. As Gray and Johnson write:</p><p style="text-align: justify;">"Here is where the trouble lies: sacramental work is, undeniably the individual's work, in this case King's work. Put differently although this working is supposed to deny the self and attribute everything to God, it actually reaffirms the essentiality of the finite self, while God is reduced to a superficial element. At best, sacramental work and desire is done <i>in the name of God</i>. The same failure to to renounce and surrender oneself also applies to labour as a form of gratitude. The 'entire movement,' writes Hegel, 'is reflected not only in the actual desiring, working, and enjoyment, but even in the very giving thanks where the reverse seems to take place in the <i>extreme of individuality' (Phenomenology of Spirit). </i>The reason: we are the ones working on and changing things, while God is just a fictional idea, a fancy name, that contributes nothing to our work. <i>We </i>are the ones working, day in and day out; <i>we </i>finite persons change the world; no one and nothing but <i>us. </i>The individual self tried to overcome itself through work, to act merely as an instrument in God's handmade plan, but it inevitably ends up emboldening itself."</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Unhappy Consciousness returns from the medieval world of Christianity to become the dialectic of the modern movement and leader. The more the leader devotes him or herself in works, the more that devotion and dedication becomes the work. As Gray and Johnson argue the figures of the sixties and seventies, King, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis eventually give way to collective movements, to the Panthers, and Black Power as a new figure of reason (in Hegel's terminology), or collective consciousness, in ours. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">I have picked three moments from Gray and Johnson's book to illustrate the different relations between concept and history at work in the book, three different ways that it thinks the relation between its two different topics, Hegel and the black radical tradition. The relation between Hegel and the black radical tradition is sometimes one of negation, as the history of struggle in the case of Douglass negates the concept of struggle in Hegel; sometimes one of affirmation, as the philosophical concepts reveal and illustrate what is at stake in the political position of Washington; and ultimately it is one of transformation, as the dialectic of philosopher and history, contemplation and contestation, individual and community, pushes towards something else, pushes us to think through the limits of the civil rights era with its larger than life figures. As a last word I will cite a line that Gray and Johnson write with respect to Angela Davis' idea of coalition politics, but I think that such an idea can be used to describe the book's own strange coalition of Hegel and politics. "Difference, conjunction, and contradiction generate, rather than impede, political momentum." </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-63975606239781921322024-01-19T10:59:00.003-05:002024-01-29T20:34:59.172-05:00Our Cultural Revolution: Or, the Enshittification of Culture <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiY9xwIzgyFmRtv74MlQRF2eVdXthSgbndHZjzxN2-75LM5IJa47MzpSHervVKs50neItTp15oRug1ZFLpCsHggELsTyKklQM5Lyi2FjxoWdfCyJsc87FWh0fIul1RGVfse1HoeGAURxgD5ADx5H-oV_viFWBSQ7Cx2zQxqBMmUwonoflB0Ejv7g/s1798/Screen%20Shot%202024-01-19%20at%2010.17.30%20AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1724" data-original-width="1798" height="307" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiY9xwIzgyFmRtv74MlQRF2eVdXthSgbndHZjzxN2-75LM5IJa47MzpSHervVKs50neItTp15oRug1ZFLpCsHggELsTyKklQM5Lyi2FjxoWdfCyJsc87FWh0fIul1RGVfse1HoeGAURxgD5ADx5H-oV_viFWBSQ7Cx2zQxqBMmUwonoflB0Ejv7g/s320/Screen%20Shot%202024-01-19%20at%2010.17.30%20AM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Thanks to Ron Schmidt for this image </div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In John Maynard Keynes essay "<a href="http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf">Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren</a>" one can find the following formulation of the cultural transformation of post-capitalism:</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;">"I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and
traditional virtue-that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love
of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who
take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the
good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day
virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things,
the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; white-space-collapse: preserve;">For a least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair, for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Keynes formulation of course draws from a long history of the virtues of vices stretching back to Mandeville and Smith, in which it is vice not virtue, selfishness not selflessness, that drives social change and progress. Where of course he differs from both is in seeing this as an unfortunate state of affairs, a necessary evil, and a temporary one. Keynes prediction has proven to not come true, not for the grandchildren of his era at least, and we are no closer to his cultural revolution than we are in the fifteen hour work week he envisioned.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I would like to even go a step further and suggest that not only has Keynes prediction not come true, that the foul gods of avarice and usury not only continue to reign, but also that they have deposed any other rival ideals. In order to understand how this is true, it is necessary to extract a descriptive dimension to Keynes' pronouncement. We can argue that much of the twentieth century, at least in capitalist countries, there was something of a split between two cultures, one that could claim the name culture in the pursuit of art, literature, and philosophy, and the other dedicated to profit. The divide between these two can be seen in multiple places. In the university for one in which the real divide is not between science and the arts, but between the majors that have an immediate practical and profitable application and those that will always elicit the question, "what are you going to do with that?" This includes the sciences especially in their more research oriented and fundamental dimension, biology, physics, astronomy, zoology, etc., The divide can also be seen in popular culture, especially in film, which oriented around a calendar divided between blockbusters and prestige films, between films that make money and films that win awards. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This divide between doing good for oneself, in the financial sense, and being good, divided knowledge and culture, i<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/05/put-your-halo-on-marxs-critiques-of.html">mposing, as Marx put it, two separate yardsticks, two measurements. </a>To go back to the college example, the person who pursued the ideals of "truth and beauty," to put it in the classic sense, would always have to answer the question of how they were going to make a living, and the person who pursued making a living might, upon reflection, have a nagging sense that they are missing out on something more. If this example does not hold up then think about the world of movies, split between the person who enjoys blockbusters and the person who enjoys not only prestige films, does anyone really like blatant Oscar bait, but what we used to call "art films," the category encompassing foreign and independent movies. This is also a split between two different yardsticks, two different measurements, one is assessed in terms of profit and the other in terms of some artistic merit. (<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2019/07/what-deleuze-and-guattari-get-wrong.html">If one wanted to put this in more sophisticated terms, those of Deleuze and Guattari, we could say that it is a matter of axioms and codes, but I will leave that aside for now</a>)</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Contradictions have a way of resolving themselves and one of these two standards had to give (a very un-Deleuzian point, I know). What we have seen, contra Keynes, is not the return of the lilies of the field but the mowing down of everything in terms of profit. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/08/welcome-to-bizarro-world-part-two.html">The rise of the Marvel movie is not just the dominance of a new genre, that of superhero films, but of a new standard in which box office is the only tool of evaluation. </a>I remember reading somewhere that Disney was at one point unique among film studios in that it did not have a prestige division, a Sony Searchlight or whatever. Why bother releasing prestige films in December to possibly get an award that no one cares about when you could make more money releasing a new Spider-Man or Star Wars movie? I also think that the current conflict over the university is one of the revenge of the business majors against the rest. It is an attempt to impose one standard on the university, that which makes a profit, removing anything that would be concerned with anything else. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is hard to finish this line of thought without mentioning Trump, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/04/woke-capital-and-twilight-of.html">who stands out among Presidents in his absolute disinterest in anything resembling art or truth. </a>Part of Trump's appeal to his voters is in his constantly saying again and again, who cares about art? who cares about literature? just stupid, and un-American nerds, as the following clip makes clear. (Oh, and for the record, I doubt he has seen <i>Gone With the Wind, </i>but he knows enough to know that it has the right nostalgia, and the right racial politics to appeal to his audience)</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/04/woke-capital-and-twilight-of.html"><br /></a></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/suIT517IBmg?si=XeCQkzgk9Ij_ngJ7" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Trump does very well among a particular class of capitalists, <a href="https://jacobin.com/2018/10/donald-trump-lumpen-capitalist-class-elections">what some call lumpen capitalists</a>, the small business owners, franchise owners, and, more significantly, entire fringe industries that border on scams. With respect to the latter, I just finished reading this book, <i><a href="https://atlantic-books.co.uk/book/get-rich-or-lie-trying/">Get Rich or Lie Trying</a>, </i>and the chapter on Trump University was truly shocking. I knew it was an multilevel marketing company, but I did not expect it to be such a transparent scheme. Ultimately, this might bring us to an economic explanation of this particular cultural revolution, what has made the business class more brazen and more transparent. I think we have to see this as a particular kind of class composition, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2009/06/class-composition-in-reverse.html">not, as in the classic version aimed at the working class, at understanding its technical and political composition,</a> but at the ruling class, or at least a segment of it. (Our current cultural battles over DEI and the like are really conflicts within the ruling class, between those companies that need to expand their customer and employee base, and thus their interest in diversity and those that see all such things as challenges to their regional control and fiefdoms.) A full analysis of the intersection of economy and culture in this transformation is more than I have space for, it seems enough now to say that we are in the grips of a different cultural revolution than the one Keynes predicted, and our lives, and those of our grandchildren, are possibly all the worse for it. </div></span>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-6642684896124058362024-01-07T22:11:00.003-05:002024-01-07T22:11:58.092-05:00It is All Subjective: Marx, Spinoza, and Subjectivity<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg89p51fJWnBe4jrHCOy3sCejti-soMEDGYnIre-vBW77E7LJpS7eUFb1H8XZsz6N533aRnhmVOylcZYBa4VGllZ0E1qq9ryTQxBqndDrWh7Kjs17nDY25wIBm5kJdfthtJ91rE_NfYeYcZdHNcSQdrcLjDksFZYsuXaGlYs9IN58kS7NJYoPxqbg/s1250/Screen%20Shot%202024-01-07%20at%201.03.04%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1106" data-original-width="1250" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg89p51fJWnBe4jrHCOy3sCejti-soMEDGYnIre-vBW77E7LJpS7eUFb1H8XZsz6N533aRnhmVOylcZYBa4VGllZ0E1qq9ryTQxBqndDrWh7Kjs17nDY25wIBm5kJdfthtJ91rE_NfYeYcZdHNcSQdrcLjDksFZYsuXaGlYs9IN58kS7NJYoPxqbg/s320/Screen%20Shot%202024-01-07%20at%201.03.04%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;">Anyone who has ever taken or taught a philosophy class is familiar with the claim "[Blank] is subjective" in which the [Blank] in question could be anything from literary interpretations to ethical norms. This response effectively ends any and all cultural and philosophical discussion, which is why it is so aggravating. One response is to argue against this claim, to point out that not every interpretation of a poem, novel, or film, is authorized, that there are better or worse interpretations, with respect to cultural version. With respect to the ethical or political arguments it is tempting to point out that the very existence of ethics, of society, presupposes norms that are shared as well as debated and challenged.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;">What if we took a different perspective? Instead of arguing against this view, ask the question of its conditions. To offer a criticism in the Marxist sense. By Marxist sense I mean specifically the criticism that Marx offers of idealism, of philosophy, in <i>The German Ideology. </i>In that text Marx gives the conditions of how it is that the world appears so upside down that ideas and their criticism rather than material conditions drive and determine history. So we could ask a similar question, how has subjectivity, subjective opinion and perspective, has come to appear as so prevalent and powerful. How did we come to live under the reign of subjectivity?</p><p style="text-align: justify;">In a move that will surprise no one who has read this blog that I find a useful starting point for answering this question Frank Fischbach's book <i>Marx with Spinoza. </i><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/12/red-spinozism-ii-lordon-vs-fischbach.html">In that text Fischbach argues that rather than seen alienation as an alienation from subjectivity, a reduction of a subject to an object, it is subjectivity itself that is an alienation, an alienation from objectivity, a privation of the world. </a> As Fischbach argues:</p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"The reduction of human beings, by this abstraction, from natural and living beings to the state of ‘subjects’ as owners of a socially average labour power indicates at the same time the completion of their reduction to a radical state of impotence: for the individual to be conceived and to conceive of itself as a subject it is necessary that it see itself withdrawn and subtracted from the objective conditions of its natural activity; in other words, it is necessary that ‘the real conditions of living labour’ (the material worked on, the instruments of labour and the means of subsistence which ‘fan the flames of the power of living labour’) become ‘autonomous and alien existences’"</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And also: </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="separator" style="background-color: white; clear: both; color: #444444;"><span style="text-align: left;">"This is why we interpret Marx’s concept of alienation not as a new version of a loss of the subject in the object, but as a radically new thought, of the loss of the essential and vital objects for an existence that is itself essentially objective and vital....Alienation is not therefore the loss of the subject in the object it is the loss of object for a being that is itself objective. But the loss of proper objects and the objectivity of its proper being is also the loss of all possible inscription of one’s activity in objectivity, it is the loss of all possible mastery of objectivity, as well as other effects: in brief, the becoming subject is essentially a reduction to impotence. The becoming subject or the subjectivation of humanity is thus inseparable according to Marx from what is absolutely indispensable for capitalism, the existence of a mass of “naked workers”—that is to say pure subjects possessors of a perfectly abstract capacity to work—individual agents of a purely subjective power of labor and constrained to sell its use to another to the same extent that they are totally dispossessed of the entirety of objective conditions (means and tools of production, matter to work on) to put to effective work their capacity to work."</span></div></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At the basis of subjectivity, of subjectivity understood as an abstract and indifferent capacity, there is the indifferent capacity of labor power. Behind the figure of the subject there is the worker. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/07/which-marxwhich-spinoza-on-althusser.html">I have already argued elsewhere on this blog that this reading of the Marx/Spinoza connection could be understood as one which reflects and critically addressed our contemporary situation in which </a>subjecitivity, a subjectivity understood as potential and capacity, is seen as the condition of our freedom rather than our subjection. What Fischbach suggests through a reading of Marx and Spinoza that such capacity, capacity abstracted and separated from the material conditions of its emergence and activity, can only really be impotence. Just as a worker cut off from the conditions of labor is actually poverty, a subject cut off from the conditions of its actualization is impotence. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What now I find provocative about this analysis is that if we think of it as a general schema in which an objective relation, a relation to objects but also others, is transformed into a subjective potential or capacity it is possible to argue that the constitution of subjectivity through labor power is only one such transformation, and that the current production of subjectivity is itself the product of several successive revolutions in which subjective potentials displace objective relations. One could also talk about the creation of subjectivity as buying power, as a pure capacity to purchase. I know that criticisms of consumer society from the fifties and sixties today seem moralistic and often passé. I am thinking here of Baudrillard, Debord, Lefebvre, and of course Horkheimer and Adorno. It is worth remembering, however, that some of the early critics were less interested in moralizing criticisms of materialism as they were in this kind of constitution of subjectivity. As Jean Baudrillard wrote in <i>The Consumer Society</i>, </span><span style="text-align: left;">‘It is difficult to grasp the extent to which the
current training in systematic, organized consumption is the equivalent and extension, in
the twentieth century, of the great nineteenth-century long process of the training of rural
populations for industrial work.’</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">One person who continued such an an analysis is <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2020/08/the-interruption-of-individuation-some.html">Bernard Stiegler</a>. Stiegler even uses the same word, "proletarianization" to describe both the loss of skills and knowledge by the worker and the loss of skills and knowledge by the consumer. As I wrote in <i><a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1027-the-politics-of-transindividuality">The Politics of Transindividuality</a>:</i></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"At first glance, the use of the term proletarianisation to describe the transindividuation of the consumer would seem to be an analogy with the transformation of the labour process: if proletarianisation is the loss of skills, talents, and knowledge until the worker becomes simply interchangeable labour power, then the broader proletarianisation of daily life is the loss of skills, knowledge, and memory until the individual becomes simply purchasing power. Stiegler’s use of proletarianisation is thus simultaneously broader and more restricted than Marx, broader in that it is extended beyond production to encompass relations of consumption and thus all of life, but more restricted in that it is primarily considered with respect to the question of knowledge. The transfer of knowledge from the worker to the machine is the primary case of proletarianisation for Stiegler, becoming the basis for understanding the transfer of knowledge of cooking to microwaveable meals and the knowledge of play from the child to the videogame. Stiegler does not include other dimensions of Marx’s account of proletarianisation, specifically the loss of place, of stability, with its corollary affective dimension of insecurity and precariousness. On this point, it would be difficult to draw a strict parallel between worker and consumer, as the instability of the former is often compensated for by the desires and satisfactions of the latter. Consumption often functions as a compensation for the loss of security, stability, and satisfaction of work, which is not to say that it is not without its own insecurities especially as they are cultivated by advertising."</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qM4zMofsI7w?si=zzNSqwH7v5hC3657" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For the most part Stiegler considers this deskilling to take place in the automation of the knowledge and skill that makes up daily life. Everything from cooking to knowing how to navigate one's own city is now more or less hardwired into precooked meals and the ubiquitous smartphone. Other cultural critics have pointed to the general deskilling of daily life through the decline of repair, tinkering, and mending. The effect of all this is to change the consumer from someone who buys things based on knowledge and familiarity to a pure expression of buying power, an abstract potential. Just as the worker is separated from the means of production, from the objective conditions of their labor to be the subjective capacity to work, the consumer is separated from the knowledge to consume to become a personification of buying power. As with work the conditions to realize this buying power are outside the control of the consumer. We do not decide what to buy based on our knowledge of our needs and desires but on what is advertised to us as a need or desire.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As much as the worker and consumer are opposed, making up two sides of economic relations under capitalism, they are unified, connected in the tendency to transform work to abstract labor power and consumption into abstract buying power. While abstract subjectivity is how these two sides of the capitalist economic relation function it is not how they are lived. They are lived as profoundly individual, subjective in the conventional sense of the word. What one does for a living is in some sense considered to be one's identity: "What are you?" is in some sense equivalent to "What do you do?" If for any one of the myriad reasons what one does is inadequate to constitute an identity, remains just a day job, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2010/07/confessions-of-minervas-owl-notes-on.html">then consumption or the commodity form steps in to supply the necessary coordinates for an identity. </a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">From this perspective we can chart not only the historical progression of the two identities, but also the structural similarities. With respect to the first, consumer society, consumption, and the myriad possibilities to construct an identity through consumption, comes after the worker, after the formation of capitalism. Any attempt to read Marx's <i>Capital </i>for consumer society, for the common sense understanding of commodity fetishism as the overvaluing of commodities, is going to have a hard time navigating the dull world of linen, coats, corn and coal. The consumer comes after the worker. However, it is also possible to see a similarity of a structural condition. In both case subjectivity is abstracted from, or separated from, objectivity, from not just objects, but objective spirit, in Hegel's sense, institutions, norms, and structures. This abstraction is lived as a highly individualized identity, in some sense work and consumption form the basis of individuation as such. However, it only has effects, only functions in the aggregate. As a worker one only has effects, both in terms of the creation of value, and in terms of any disruption of exploitation, as part of a collective. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/05/put-your-halo-on-marxs-critiques-of.html">The same could be said for consumerism, even though it is through consumerism that we are encouraged to believe that we can have ethical effects as individuals, green consumerism, cruelty free products, etc. </a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I am wondering if one can see a similar structure of abstract/individual subjectivity in other aspects of society. I am thinking of politics, in which individuals are abstracted from any real connection to their communities and societies only to be constituted as "voting power," an abstract aggregate that is lived as a highly individualized identity. I will have to think more about that one. My point here is to connect the often asserted claim "that everything is subjective" back to its material conditions, to the production of subjectivity in both work and the reproduction of everyday life, production and consumption. It is not just a matter of a bad reading of Nietzsche, although it is often that as well, but an effect in the sphere of ideas and discussion of what is already at work in the sphere of production. The thread running through both is connection between power and impotence. If everything is subjective then I can offer any interpretation, create my own moral code whole cloth, live as I prefer, but if everything is subjective then I can do very little, nothing at all to alter or change anything. This is the fundamental point of intersection between Marx and Spinoza, subjectivity, individual subjectivity, is not the zenith of our freedom and power, it is the nadir of our subjection. </div>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-74203809956501063992023-12-25T19:50:00.003-05:002023-12-26T10:26:43.463-05:00Philosophy and/as Politics: In Memory of Toni Negri <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrewqdXwnA4nhWrG-oC3Kzjazy8P0-w6w1jSs3qMPbnuI9nRqLPtHEzwMfp-uFUig8r5DrK5m_xMJmJTt_11xUwNFfaaxOEGbfLKZWXdBrHvIsTWFwyalQ17SQ1abgWrRbxYT1dJHq_rK-wAB3SaOfai2mhz5Db9Ugok66z8pR2FAwGnjhERyEYQ/s1440/411428145_10232039559627898_5932551138631921558_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1440" data-original-width="1440" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrewqdXwnA4nhWrG-oC3Kzjazy8P0-w6w1jSs3qMPbnuI9nRqLPtHEzwMfp-uFUig8r5DrK5m_xMJmJTt_11xUwNFfaaxOEGbfLKZWXdBrHvIsTWFwyalQ17SQ1abgWrRbxYT1dJHq_rK-wAB3SaOfai2mhz5Db9Ugok66z8pR2FAwGnjhERyEYQ/s320/411428145_10232039559627898_5932551138631921558_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Like so many I was saddened to learn of the death of Toni Negri. I never really knew him as a person, only very awkwardly meeting him once, but he was someone who fundamentally shaped and transformed philosophy for me. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110622115845id_/http://www.nd.edu/~remarx/rm/contents/v11/i2/pdf/rmsi_one.pdf">I wrote my first published paper on Negri,</a> a paper that, as is the case with most seminar papers, was an attempt to make sense of the two books I had read, <i>The Savage Anomaly </i>and <i>Marx Beyond Marx. </i>That it was published is not the important part, really a product of grad school hubris, the important part was that I am not sure if I would have stayed in grad school had I not written it, or found someone willing to read and discuss it with me, shoutout here to Bill Haver. Negri made it possible for me to conjoin doing philosophy and engaging the world politically, to see these as two sides of the same process, the same practice of philosophy. I should mention that this was before <i>Empire, </i>but just barely. I am not saying that to claim that I was into Negri before he was cool, but just that my first encounter with Negri was in some sense with an outsider. He was rarely talked about in classes, and his books were more associated with the para-academic presses of Autonomedia and Semiotexte than the presses that were translating and publishing the big names of theory, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, etc.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">With the news of his death I started to think about Negri again for the first time in awhile. I had not read anything by Negri in years (<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2011/03/still-anomalous-after-all-these-years.html">the little book on Spinoza was probably the last</a>), nor really engaged with his writings in a long time. Philosophers still have their effects, still shape our thought long after we stop directly reading and writing about them. It just so happened the day that I learned of Negri's death was the day that we met for the Spinoza and Marx seminar. <a href="https://culturepowerpolitics.org/2023/12/23/spinozas-philosophy/">We spent part of the time talking about the importance of Negri's reading.</a> He was not the first Marxist/Spinozist, but Marx-Spinozism would be fundamentally different without him. This is because Negri puts the intersection of metaphysics and politics, ontology and history at the center of his reading of Spinoza </p><p style="text-align: justify;">It is well known that Spinoza interrupted his writing of the Ethics, a book he had worked on for years, to write and publish anonymously the <i>Tractatus Theologico-Politicus</i>, as political intervention. For Negri this interruption is also a fundamental transformation: Spinoza’s engagement with politics and history, with the historical force of the imagination, with the politics of affects, and the reality of power, transforms his understanding of imagination, affects, and power in the <i>Ethics</i>. As Negri writes in a passage that I have cited more than once, and returned to again and again. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">"After the development of such a radical <i>pars destruens</i>, after the identification of a solid point of support by which the metaphysical perspective re-opens, the elaboration of the <i>pars construens</i> 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."</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">Negri effectively inverted our image of Spinoza, and with it our image of philosophy, it was no longer a matter of detaching oneself from history and politics in order to contemplate the world, of thinking sub specie aeternitas, but of plunging oneself into the historical moment in order to transform philosophy.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;">In a piece I wrote on Negri that was recently republished in <i><a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2061-the-production-of-subjectivity">The Production of Subjectivity: Marx and Philosophy</a> </i>I described this transformation as follows:</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"While the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Theologico-Political Treatise</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> constitutes a fundamental displacement of the problems of the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Ethics</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, from order as metaphysical problem to the historicity of the organization of human desires and beliefs, it does not complete this process. The </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Theologico-Political Treatise</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> does not supplant the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Ethics</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">. Negri argues that the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Treatise</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> does not follow through on its most radical insights. It begins with the materiality of the imagination, with the power of constitutive praxis, but it ultimately crashes upon the universals of ‘natural right’ and the ‘natural light of religion’, universals which undermine the constitutive process. The contract subordinates the powers of society to a transcendent order and a pre-constituted end, thereby limiting the constitutive process. However, the results of the Treatise are fundamentally ambiguous: as much as the contract is introduced as an ordering structure of society, it is modified by the idea of power. As Spinoza writes, ‘Nature’s right is co-extensive with her power’. This redefinition of right as power fundamentally undermines two of the constitutive dimensions of natural right that philosophy exemplified by the contract, ‘the absolute conception of the individual foundation and the absolute conception of the contractual passage’. In place of the absolutely individualistic foundation that paves the way for the absolute authority of the sovereign, Spinoza introduces a new theoretical object, the ‘passions of the body social’. Right is coextensive with power: there is no natural state of power nor a final goal, only the historicity of its various organizations. There is thus no transfer of power, no actual passage from potentia to potestas, there is just the organization of potentia, of the striving (conatus), desire (cupiditas), and affects of the multitude. It is precisely this organization that is examined and developed in what Negri calls the ‘second foundation’ of the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Ethics</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, Parts III and IV which develop the logic and sociability of the passions. This second foundation does not only develop the idea of conatus as the essence of each individual (EIIIP7), it also develops the logic of the affects as the determination of this desire. The affects begin with the most immediate, and simple, determinations – pain, pleasure, love and hate – and gradually unfold to encompass the constitutive conditions and constitutive power of subjectivity, which is not an autonomous starting point but is immersed in the power of affects. ‘The nexus of composition, complexity, conflictiveness, and dynamism is a continual nexus of successive dislocations that are neither dialectical nor linear but, rather, discontinuous’. Thus, as much as the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Theologico-Political Treatise </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">disrupts the remnants of a metaphysical order, its provocation that the historicity of desire and affects are constitutive of the world, it demands a renewed ontological speculation. It is not the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Theologico-Political Treatise</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> or the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Ethics </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">that makes up the foundational book of constitutive power, but rather the movement, the displacement, from the one to the other. In Negri’s book on Spinoza this movement continues to a reading of the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Political Treatise</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, thus passing from metaphysics (the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Ethics</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">) to politics (the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Theological Political Treatise</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">) only to return to politics (Political Treatise) which in turn informs a new metaphysics (the ‘multitude’ as a concept produced in the interstices of the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Ethics</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Political Treatise)</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, while at the same time stating that ‘Spinoza’s true politics is his metaphysics’. This statement should be read not as a choice, placing Spinoza’s metaphysical works over his political writings, but as a slogan of displacement. Constitutive power as praxis is developed through a practice of philosophy as a continual displacement that moves from metaphysics to politics and back, and this movement continues beyond a reading of Spinoza."</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;">One can find a similar trajectory of movement in Negri's thought in his reading of Marx in which it is the same concepts, most specifically "living labor" that traverse a line from economics, to ontology, and then to politics. Negri reading of Marx, especially in the book known in the US as <i>Insurgencies, </i>but in the rest of the world as <i>Constituent Power</i>, reads the early Marx's idea of democracy back into the latter Marx. Marx's politics is his metaphysics, is labor as the constitution of the world. As Negri writes, </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">"As long as we follow the political Marx, political revolution and social emancipation are two historical matrices that intersect on the same terrain—the constitutional terrain—but still in an external manner, without a metaphysical logic of this intersection being given…This necessity resides at the core of Marx’s theory of capital, where living labor appears as the foundation, and the motor of all production, development, and innovation. This essential source also animates the center of our investigation. Living labor against dead labor, constituent power against constituted power: this single polarity runs through the whole schema of Marxist analysis and resolves it in an entirely original theoretical practical totality."</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">What I have tried to focus on here is what I have called, following Althusser and Balibar, is Negri's practice of philosophy, his way of doing philosophy (this was also the focus of the essay cited above). It is a trajectory which constantly moves from history and politics into ontology and from ontology into politics and history without ever, it seems to me, using a historical moment to criticize an ontology or developing an ontology that would ground a politics. It is a trajectory of displacement and transformation in which history, politics, and economics transform philosophical speculation, ontology and metaphysics, while at the same time philosophical speculation transform and reimagine the possibility of political practice. It would seem to me that this is the fundamental orientation that defines Negri's thought, and it is this orientation which is eternal, which continues to live, even after the concepts produced by that trajectory pass away, as they would have to being products of a given historical moment. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">(Here I have to recommend Roberto Nigro's little book <i><a href="http://www.editionsamsterdam.fr/antonio-negri-2/">Antonio Negri: Une Philosophie de la Subversion</a>, </i>which I read in the week since Negri's death. Nigro reminds us that the question of the historical relevance of particular concepts, was in some sense the central political and philosophical trajectory of not just Negri's thought but of what is called autonomist thought or post-autonomist thought. Concepts like the mass worker, the social worker, general intellect, and multitude are not just different theoretical positions, but also attempts to make sense of the shifting and changing nature of capitalism itself.) </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">What Negri proposed for philosophy is not easy, and I would even argue that not even Negri always did it well. (<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2012/08/is-it-simple-to-be-philosopher-in.html">In some sense this is a specific version of the general problem of doing philosophy after Marx</a>). It is easy to err on both sides, to simply let a historical, economic, or political transformation stand in for a philosophical analysis, or, on the other side, t<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2011/07/million-blooms-tiqqun-and-negri-on.html">o dissolve the specificity of a historical moment into a general ontological concept</a>. However, as Spinoza wrote, "all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare." When it is done well such a method of displacement, of pars destruens/pars construens, promises a transformation of both philosophy and politics. (I would say that Negri's <i>Savage Anomaly, Marx Beyond Marx, </i>and the book on constituent power to name a few are nothing less than models of this method). What Negri proposed in his readings of Spinoza and Marx (among others) was nothing less than a transformation of philosophy, to borrow Althusser's formulation, a transformation that would make philosophy radical and materialist--a transformation that is still ongoing, still striving to produce its effects. It is that aspect of Negri's thought which transformed, and continues to transform my approach to philosophy. </span></p>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-43651825740364927982023-12-15T10:05:00.000-05:002023-12-15T10:05:36.679-05:00Commonalities: on Pascucci's Potentia of Poverty <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis5XfuHDuvaf6-4UACGOuzeEfGuaZbOjThhJroE3MpVKYy6HMu2PoWzkzPhLcPFr6vpxtrXmVEryIzSzy_DNtFeiFNrrIUWzNaKwkRkAhqoyDepiHatA4DTyphQsbduN4BsyWsb_K4y4OApR4nw9A9alCAL66r1roYNGTtQwH_ov6QISZBf2irYQ/s674/Screen%20Shot%202023-12-13%20at%209.12.03%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="674" data-original-width="398" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis5XfuHDuvaf6-4UACGOuzeEfGuaZbOjThhJroE3MpVKYy6HMu2PoWzkzPhLcPFr6vpxtrXmVEryIzSzy_DNtFeiFNrrIUWzNaKwkRkAhqoyDepiHatA4DTyphQsbduN4BsyWsb_K4y4OApR4nw9A9alCAL66r1roYNGTtQwH_ov6QISZBf2irYQ/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-12-13%20at%209.12.03%20PM.png" width="189" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">There are many different answers to the question of what Marx and Spinoza have in common, theories of <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2017/11/conscienta-sive-ideologia-spontaneity.html">ideology</a>, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/07/what-does-it-mean-to-be-materialist.html">materialism</a>, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/08/fallen-kingdom-living-in-anthropocene.html">naturalism</a>, and so on, to name a few that have been discussed on this blog. To this list Margherita Pascucci adds that perhaps what Spinoza and Marx have in common is the common itself. This is is claim put forward in <a href="https://brill.com/display/title/39505?language=en"><i>Potentia of Poverty: Marx Reads Spinoza </i>(part of the Historical Materialism series, currently it is only out as a hardcover, but it will be out from Haymarket in the Spring). </a></p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;">In making such a claim Pascucci focuses on the intersection of not just Marx and Spinoza, but the way in which they both assert in different ways, the primacy of the epistemology and ontology of relation. As Pascucci writes, </p><p style="text-align: justify;">"The commodity in Marx and the <i>common notion </i>in Spinoza are both defined through an other. This 'other' which defines them is the common among two or more things. In the case of the commodity, this common has a character of abstraction--it disappears at a certain point; in the case of <i>common notions, </i>this common is something material, that which, common to a body and other bodies, brings the trace of relation and allows for knowledge."</p><p style="text-align: justify;">As they used to say in graduate school, lets unpack this claim. First, we have the common notion in Spinoza, the second kind of knowledge, beyond the imagination. As Spinoza writes in Proposition 37 and 38 of Part Two of the <i>Ethics:</i></p><p style="text-align: justify;">P37. What is common to all things, and is equally in the part and in the whole, does not constitute he essence of any singular thing.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">P38 Those things which are common to all, and which are equally in the part and the whole, can only be conceived adequately. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Common notions are understood in terms of both their genesis and their logic. In terms of their genesis let us begin with the simple and most basic encounter, walking around in the house in the dark I bang my shin against something, I do not know what. This is an encounter marked by pain and confusion, by the affects of sadness and hate. Those affects give shape to what could be called the inadequate ideas in which how something affects me and what something is are confusedly muddled in my scream of "ow, shit! what the fuck?" In that encounter there is still something in common, something that can be conceived adequately, I know something about my body, its materiality, and about whatever I ran into in the dark. I know that it is matter too, it has density and hardness. This commonality is incredibly general, but it is the basis for the construction of other common notions. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Later, in Proposition 40, Spinoza contrasts common notions, which do not define the essence of any singular things, with the universal. The universal is attempt to define the essence of a singular thing, to understand what quality defines humanity, as rational or political animal, or even featherless biped. However, the problem with this particular essence is precisely the variability of particulars. As Spinoza writes, </p><p style="text-align: justify;">"But it should be noted that these notions are not formed by all in same way, but very from one to another, in accordance with what the body has been more often affected by, and what the mind imagines or recollects more easily. For example, those who have more often regarded men's stature with wonder will understand by the word man an animal of erect stature. But those who been accustomed to consider something else will form another common image of men--for example that man is an animal capable of laughter, or a featherless biped, or a rational animal."</p><p style="text-align: justify;">In contrast with a universal burdened with an often unstated particularity we have the common as that which is common to all and particular to none.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Okay, what does this has to do with the commodity? Here one only has to think of Part One of <i>Capital. </i> Value can only be expressed in relation. This is the point of all those formulations about linen and coats. As Marx writes, "The value of linen as a congealed mass of human labour can be expressed only as an 'objectivity' [<i>Geganständlichkeit</i>], a thing which is materially different from linen itself and yet common to the linen and other commodities." </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKgBt3w1L1VTxRAYuH0cmVVjRpWnmUdqvdyjeRSZgq8ywB95EX9vFomvWbPr40Jm9qB_-Y1C3ALvqhNUMawcHMBOXptbk1E71YGg3WXdT8_h8DM6mkFjIMTyybvIyJB8rn8GLrrO93Ye83UywHzuT3YPLOunVMN7jmLE5MaXkQLTdjrYcCnEkHIQ/s710/Screen%20Shot%202023-12-15%20at%209.21.26%20AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="372" data-original-width="710" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKgBt3w1L1VTxRAYuH0cmVVjRpWnmUdqvdyjeRSZgq8ywB95EX9vFomvWbPr40Jm9qB_-Y1C3ALvqhNUMawcHMBOXptbk1E71YGg3WXdT8_h8DM6mkFjIMTyybvIyJB8rn8GLrrO93Ye83UywHzuT3YPLOunVMN7jmLE5MaXkQLTdjrYcCnEkHIQ/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-12-15%20at%209.21.26%20AM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">There are a lot of jokes, and memes, about the laborious process Marx goes through to show two things: first, that the value of a commodity cannot be shown through itself, a coat is worth a coat is tautology, and that the value any commodity can be expressed through any other commodity. As much as this section seems to go on a bit too long, and with unnecessary precision, its fundamental point, a point that comes out in relation to Spinoza, is worth stressing, and that is that the common, the relational is there even at the heart of capitalism. In capitalism commodities relate even if we remain isolated as subjects of freedom, equality, and Bentham.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">This brings us back to Pascucci's point, that the difference between the commodity and the common notion is that while the common notion is common to all and in the part and the whole, both my shin and the end table (or whatever I ran into) have extension and mass, value of the commodity is not common to all materially, but is abstracted from it. This abstraction underscores the brief, all too brief discussion of money that takes place in <i>Capital </i>between the general form of value and the famous section of commodity fetishism. Money is of course the general equivalent, it is why we do not go around expressing the value coats, tea, and corn, in the form of linen. Money is the materialization of the abstract idea. As Balibar writes in his <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/products/1514-the-philosophy-of-marx">little book on Marx</a>, </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">"Money is then constantly reproduced and preserved by its different economic uses (unit of account, means of payment, being hoarded or held in 'reserve' etc.) The other side of this materialization is, then, a process of constant idealization of the monetary material, since it serves immediately to express a universal form or an 'idea."</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">Here is the difference this difference makes. I often think of the opening section of <i>Capital </i>as Marx asking a question that we do not ask in daily life: how are two disparate and different commodities equivalent? We do not ask this question because it presents itself as already answered. Money is the answer. Money is the condition of the equivalence of the disparate and distinct. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2016/11/nexus-rerum-spinoza-and-marx-again.html">This is another reason as to why I think that Marx's commodity fetishism section covers the same problem as the Appendix to Part One of the <i>Ethics</i></a>. In other words, the common, the commonality of labor is obscured in the fetish of the money form. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">This is not a consideration, much less a review, of the entirety of Pascucci's book. I have not even gotten into the discussion of poverty and subjectivity, parts that I have some serious questions about, but her reflections on the common in Spinoza and Marx not only sheds light on a different commonality between the two, one that ultimately sheds light on the common itself. </div><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-90028477931044299562023-12-03T11:56:00.006-05:002023-12-05T12:43:40.944-05:00What the Nose Knows: On Chantal Jaquet's Philosophie de L'Odorat <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii2a-J_kO8BHpUWGqCDhxlAE2o0b2bfZMBSsFs0t4bjH7P_iWVbu1IcbeUKoGg2axMuO_yb10onWPcnoDE5FieUnUj8mP6YlBNItLgKElp0gbOZ2ZY7CH8C-5uE8NURFMSA1w1TMRegCl9JeHMTV_Q9V3I8wLmKm_XKYZjjehUkzZBv6pp_Ux1fA/s2368/Screen%20Shot%202023-12-05%20at%2012.37.37%20PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2368" data-original-width="1892" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii2a-J_kO8BHpUWGqCDhxlAE2o0b2bfZMBSsFs0t4bjH7P_iWVbu1IcbeUKoGg2axMuO_yb10onWPcnoDE5FieUnUj8mP6YlBNItLgKElp0gbOZ2ZY7CH8C-5uE8NURFMSA1w1TMRegCl9JeHMTV_Q9V3I8wLmKm_XKYZjjehUkzZBv6pp_Ux1fA/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-12-05%20at%2012.37.37%20PM.png" width="256" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="text-align: justify;">I am a follower of Chantal Jaquet's work. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2018/10/logic-of-alternation-from-mind-and-body.html">I have read her works on Spinoza with great interest,</a> <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2015/01/the-class-struggle-at-home-jaquets-le.html">and have also been a big fan of her work on the concepts of transclass</a> and nonreproduction. I have also read her little book on the body. In short, have read most of what she has written, but I have been very reluctant to pick up her book on smell, <i>P<a href="https://www.puf.com/content/Philosophie_de_lodorat">hilosophie de L'odorat</a></i><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="https://www.puf.com/content/Philosophie_de_lodorat">.</a> </span>I met her once, and we talked about her book, her interest in the arts and aesthetics of smell, and all I could think was that I was glad that she was interested in it, but I could not imagine being interested. I just did not find smell that interesting."You do you," I thought as I listened to her explain Kôdô, the Japanese arts of scents, secretly wishing she was writing another book on Spinoza. </p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;">I was less than a hundred pages into her book when I started to change my mind. The first thing that strikes one about Jaquet's book is its utter thoroughness, a consideration of smell in history, philosophy, and literature. Smell may be overlooked in our culture, but Jaquet has not overlooked any reference to smell. Since there is little written about smell, even in philosophical books dedicated to the senses and sensory knowledge, Jaquet begins with the question of that omission. What can we conclude from the absence of smell as an object of philosophical inquiry? A beginning of an answer looks to the history of the marginalization. The most classic example, found in antiquity, is that smell is excluded because it is inferior in humans. As Aristotle writes,"<span style="text-align: left;">We have next to speak of smell and taste, both of which are almost the same physical affection, although they each have their being in different things. tastes, as a class, display their nature more clearly to us than smells, the cause of which is that the olfactory sense of man is inferior in acuteness to that of the lower animals, and is, when compared with our other senses, the least perfect of Man's senses." The idea that smell is not important because we as humans lack it as a sense repeats again and again in the history of philosophy, eventually even gaining its evolutionary explanation in Darwin and Freud. Smell ceases to matter as human beings stand upright and away from the world of scents.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">Jaquet raises two objections to this claim. First, the inferiority of the sense does not justify its exclusion. Human beings have worse hearing than dogs, and worse sight than hawks, but that does not lead us to dismiss those senses. Moreover, as is often the case with humanism, the concept of the human is situated at once above and below animals. Human beings are said to be deficient in smell, unable to smell what a dog notices, but are also in some sense above other animals in their appreciation of smell. Only humans have an aesthetics of smell, have flowers and perfumes. Which brings us to Jaquet's second objection, it is not entirely clear that our smell is entirely deficient. Human beings are unique in that we can smell and and taste at the same time due to the connection of nasal passages to the throat--connecting two senses and transforming our experience of both. It is possible that the dismissal of smell is as much of a cultural issue as a natural one. For this second point Jaquet looks to different cultures </span><span style="text-align: left;">where smell is not devalued</span><span style="text-align: left;">, and even the infamous example of the wild child of Aveyron. Children raised outside of our society demonstrate abilities of smell that we would think impossible. Viewed from this perspective the human sense of smell is not so much a natural deficiency but a cultural one. Humanity's sense of smell is not naturally deficient, but much of culture, especially in the modern west is predicated on a denigration of smell.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivlt2QKMng4cWmfFRM0DkNdBqo3L0EXOP4YWzyux9iIJDuQy3BLgGSYEsohguJfG4E5dtyIX-Slfip9fuvJM6DYwc_thGA8gD3rYKbuNixfYreLorYPUHmpdVQxhetUxSZ-Cs1ObeBM644EPdAhyTjwW_nIBQyQ468CtbV1cgIeCE1ev83nvHsEw/s1528/Screen%20Shot%202023-12-03%20at%2010.53.48%20AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1396" data-original-width="1528" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivlt2QKMng4cWmfFRM0DkNdBqo3L0EXOP4YWzyux9iIJDuQy3BLgGSYEsohguJfG4E5dtyIX-Slfip9fuvJM6DYwc_thGA8gD3rYKbuNixfYreLorYPUHmpdVQxhetUxSZ-Cs1ObeBM644EPdAhyTjwW_nIBQyQ468CtbV1cgIeCE1ev83nvHsEw/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-12-03%20at%2010.53.48%20AM.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">As a true Spinozist Jaquet spends time investigating the relationship between infants and smell. Infants are at the border between the natural and cultural dimensions of smell. Children do not naturally have the same tastes and judgements regarding smell as adults. This leads to one of the most amusing paraphrase of Spinoza's remarks about the relative nature of aesthetic judgement. As Jaquet writes,</p><p style="text-align: justify;">"The categories of dirt and stench, cleanliness and a good smell, are pure social constructions, ingrained habits which are not however unbreakable. The dirty and the clean, the fetid and perfume, are an effect of fictive ideas which do not express the essence of things but our manner of being affected...Spinoza underlies the relativity of these categories which are not part of the properties of things, but of modes of thinking which emerge in the comparison between the different ways that things touch and act on each other, which varies according to the difference of bodies, the constitutions and encounters. The proof this is, as Spinoza says, "For one and the same thing can be, at the same time, be good, and bad, and also indifferent" (IVPref), he gives the example of music but it can be transposed to smell. Thus the odor of excrement is good to infants, bad to adults, and to the anosmic neither good nor bad." </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">Smells and the sense of smell, are often a border phenomena, placed between human beings and animals, but also placed at the divisions within humanity. Colonial accounts are filled with discussions of the foul smells of the other, racial hierarchies and divisions often entail smell as a regime of disgust and disdain, and even gender has its own economy of smell. Jaquet has some amusing passages in which she discusses the asymmetrical gender expectations of smell, women are construed to be in need of perfumes in order to be considered attractive or even feminine while men are pretty much allowed to stink. Smell is a marker of exclusion and power. As Jaquet writes,</span><span style="text-align: left;">"All of these olfactive figures of racism, of sexism, and of xenophobia demonstrate that odor functions as principle of discrimination and exclusion to the extent that acceptation and integration of the other pass through deodorization as a kind of purification." </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;">I am not going to try to sum up much the rest of Jaquet's massive book on smell which covers everything from literary representations of smell, in Proust, the history of the aesthetics of smell, from Kôdô in Japan, and the perfume industry in the west, and philosophers on smell from Condillac to Nietzsche. What emerges is a philosophical consideration of smell as precisely that border between nature and culture, identity and difference, self and other, passivity and activity. Reconsidering smell then makes it possible to rethink what it means to be human and what it means to be social, drawing our attention to the relational aspect of our identity and subjectivity. </p>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-80956276914368317692023-11-26T11:09:00.003-05:002023-11-26T13:30:49.093-05:00Demarcations and Determinations: on Hijacked by Elizabeth Anderson<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhplqwejGOOf1qR_M3uWuNsmEa3-LZh_rrSyQqNlsecDkI4hjmnFwIB3T3PqXgsZZdTIAjWcvwLuux0BC-J-LsGc4PNlt-uGEZeZpXx4py1gY0ta06wo9kuz7LN8IrGIoDyKjp4yOidWBGyLh7MgjAXGyAZM7nIGraDsOYLfWMghTmEN_pAG-aIKQ/s726/Screen%20Shot%202023-11-24%20at%2010.56.35%20AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="726" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhplqwejGOOf1qR_M3uWuNsmEa3-LZh_rrSyQqNlsecDkI4hjmnFwIB3T3PqXgsZZdTIAjWcvwLuux0BC-J-LsGc4PNlt-uGEZeZpXx4py1gY0ta06wo9kuz7LN8IrGIoDyKjp4yOidWBGyLh7MgjAXGyAZM7nIGraDsOYLfWMghTmEN_pAG-aIKQ/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-11-24%20at%2010.56.35%20AM.png" width="212" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;">Elizabeth Anderson is always an interesting author for me to read because as much as we are both concerned with the same issues, namely, the politics of work, and the domination of the work ethic over our lives, we approach these issues from fundamentally different philosophical perspectives. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2018/01/dead-ideas-live-on-on-elizabeth.html">Anderson is for the most part working on these issues from within the liberal tradition</a>, construed broadly, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/10/coming-soon-well-soonish-double-shift.html">while my approach is framed in large part by the traditions of Marxism and Marxist Spinozism</a>. Determination is negation, as Marx cited Spinoza as saying, and it is through reading Anderson that I get a deeper sense of my own philosophical commitments and perspective.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/hijacked/E7E4A7D850C1E7289BA7AAF910455136">Anderson's latest book</a> is, as the title and subtitle make clear, about the work ethic and how it has been reworked by neoliberalism. Her critique is in some sense an immanent one, demarcating a division between a progressive and conservative work ethic. In some sense this division draws a line of demarcation that can be traced back to such thinkers as John Locke. It is a question of asking who or what was being referred to when Locke argued that, “God gave the world to men in common…He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational (and labor was to be his title to it) not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.” Where the quarrelsome and contentious that Locke was arguing against the lower classes, the rabble, who begged rather than worked, or were they the landed gentry and aristocratic classes, that lived off of their inheritance rather than laboring? Anderson makes the claim that it is as much the latter than the form, that the central line of demarcation in Locke's writing is between idle and industrious and this line of demarcation cuts against the wealthy as much as the poor. As much as Locke can be understood as arguing for inequality and the accumulation of a few, it is only because those few are proven to be more industrious. Anderson rejects the interpretation put forward by C.B. Macpherson and others that Locke is developing the philosophical foundations for capitalism. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/03/althusser-effects-philosophical.html">For her the line "turfs my servant has cut" is less a symptom of an emergence of wage labor than a residue of the disappearing world of indentured servitude. </a></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Locke is positioned as a starting point of a division between the progressive and conservative work ethic, a disagreement "within economic liberalism," as Anderson puts it. As she argues, "The progressive work ethic includes the virtues of industry, saving for investment, and prudential planning. As a secularized ideal, it aims to bring the rewards of following the work ethic from the next life into this one." In contrast to this the conservative work ethic focuses on work itself as a source of discipline primarily for the poor and working classes. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">The meaning of the work ethic does not end or begin with Locke. After Locke it continually vacillates between its progressive meaning, critical of the idle rich as much as the unemployed, and its conservative meaning, focused on the idleness of the poor. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2012/02/hegel-famously-proclaimed-that-owl-of.html">Caught between these two interpretations is the question of how unemployment is understood, is it structural, an effect of the capitalist division of labor, or is it an individual issue, a failure of resolve, dedication, and industriousness? </a>As Anderson writes, </p><p style="text-align: justify;">"Poor law reforms at turn of the seventeenth century had been drafted partially in response to the discovery of a large class of poor who were neither the impotent deserving poor (unable to work) nor the able-bodied underserving poor (unwilling to work). This third class of poor--the "laboring poor" for whom Adam smith had great sympathy, and Burke such contempt--consisted of the involuntary under- and unemployed."</p><p style="text-align: justify;">In other words, namely Hegel's (cited above) the problem of capitalism is that of the rabble. By and large the response to the rabble, to those able to work but unable to find work, has been to double down on the "ideology of the conservative work ethic." Anderson defines ideology as follows, </p><p style="text-align: justify;">"By 'ideology' I refer in part to a set of explicit beliefs that rationalize some social or political ideal and its associated institutions and policies. I also refer to a system of representations, cognitive biases, attitudes, emotional and epistemic dispositions, and values embodied in the social practices associated with those ideologies."</p><p style="text-align: justify;">In the conservative work ethic it is work itself that becomes the central ideology. Work, wage labor, is ideological when it is in excess of its economic function. As Anderson writes, </p><p style="text-align: justify;">"British welfare reform and famine-relief policies in the nineteenth century reflected the key features of poverty policies informed by the conservative work ethic. They offer extremely stinting levels of relief, typically insufficient to enable recipients to escape poverty, and sometimes even to survive. They observe the principle of "less eligibility," insuring that recipients, even if blamelessly unable to work, are worse off than the lowest paid worker. They prefer to condition relief on the performance of wage labor, even if the recipient's activities would better promote social welfare directed to education, self-employment, or dependent care. Work requirements are often imposed without regard to their interference with recipient's ability to fulfill duties provide direct care for dependents."</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Following Anderson's understanding of ideology, it is possible to say that the conservative work ethic is attached to the idea of work as discipline and virtue, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/09/reworking-hegel-philosophies-of-work-in.html">what Hegel understood as the ethical and formative dimension of work. </a> In some sense this ideological dimension is at tension with the economics of work, as workhouses and even modern work programs prove to be more costly than just giving people what they need to survive. It is not always in tension, however, and the overall emphasis on work as discipline and virtue has proven to be a beneficial tool of discipline and control--this is part of what Anderson means by neoliberalism. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">As with her earlier book on the corporation, one is left wondering where Marx fits into this divide between progressive and conservative work ethics. In some sense Anderson sees Marx as the most radical of the advocates of the progressive work ethics, "from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs" can be understood as a statement of a general imperative of productivity and industriousness. Marx went further than Mill and other advocates of the progressive work ethic in that he thought that a realization of this ideal would mean eliminating private property and markets. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/06/production-and-labor-two-alienations.html">Anderson generally interprets Marx through the lens of Lenin and even Stalin rereading the young Marx discussion of labor as a human activity as a testament to productivity as an ideal. </a> Her exclusion of any other aspect of Marx, of an anti-work Marx gets the strangest dismissal. As Anderson writes,</p><p style="text-align: justify;">"This view draws inspiration from nascent attempts of revolutionary workers to spontaneously organize society, as in the Paris Commune of 1871, and the soviets (workers' councils) of Russia's February Revolution. However, these attempts were rapidly crushed wherever they appeared. For this reason I shall set it aside."</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht5JmwUAq4jGvw25IO-hKyb8AaX5cSU4kFjyE4ICj1JXg7Aca1O0vFIGE6cD_Wy70ef0dhInTaf4EZc7De6ULe1mfPzF6_CpJGuTEPF0xn7ZlnUXPhEFGZ6OGek3Q3ulDOLuQkE2Ax9hW6s4O1Z3gMtu2wT0BEVdaCg5rBaGFX_dc1rb1vfMRhAg/s1566/Screen%20Shot%202023-11-26%20at%2010.55.35%20AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1554" data-original-width="1566" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht5JmwUAq4jGvw25IO-hKyb8AaX5cSU4kFjyE4ICj1JXg7Aca1O0vFIGE6cD_Wy70ef0dhInTaf4EZc7De6ULe1mfPzF6_CpJGuTEPF0xn7ZlnUXPhEFGZ6OGek3Q3ulDOLuQkE2Ax9hW6s4O1Z3gMtu2wT0BEVdaCg5rBaGFX_dc1rb1vfMRhAg/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-11-26%20at%2010.55.35%20AM.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">It is a strange formulation, and if I wanted to follow through with the symptomatic reading of Locke linked to above (<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/09/reading-menu-symptomatically-on.html">and expanded upon here</a>), one could argue that she takes repression, a historical and political process, to be a refutation, a philosophical argument. <a href="https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-107-the-subversive-seventies-with-michael-hardt/">It is a confusion of defeat and failure, to draw on a distinction made by Michael Hardt in his latest book. </a> When it comes to all of the other positions considered, from Adam Smith to the Levellers and Diggers, Anderson considers their argument, how they understand work, its value, and its ethic. When it comes to Marx, or at least a strain of Marxism understood as a radical critique of work, another factor is introduced, how they were defeated. There arguments and positions are refuted not in theory but in the practice of history. Of course one could argue that such a dismissal of the revolutionary tradition is almost required to be discussed in the circles of the New York Times, NPR, etc. Lest that seems too harsh I should add that I appreciate Anderson's attempt to revive the reputation of Eduard Bernstein, to at least be open on her commitment to Marx as part of liberal project of reform even if, at the moment she makes that choice, she sets aside the radical tradition of Marxism for the odd reason of its repression. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">More could be said about this, much more, but in closing I would like to say that she misses perhaps the most important aspect of Marx's critique of capitalism and his most important point about ideology. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2018/08/conscious-organs-toward-and.html">The true "highjacking" of the work ethic is the idea of capitalist productivity itself in that it identifies as productive, as valuable, primarily that which produces surplus value, and not that which is aimed or oriented towards human needs. </a>What Anderson calls the "progressive work ethic" is predicated on the idea, often unstated, that work, wage labor, always fulfills some social need. Capitalism refutes this daily, not just in dismissing the important work of care, as Anderson acknowledges, but in elevating pernicious and harmful work to value creating activity. A work ethic presupposes a connection between work as an activity and some social good as a result, and that does not exist under capitalism. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-37432003659408764192023-10-01T11:45:00.001-04:002023-10-01T11:45:22.825-04:00The Prison House of Emotional Labor: On Red Eye <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxu35f0TRbV8ap9_ekmNhZshDbUwvVTaJxTiV5rvLgUiBseztyYMWZGSwCk97GqFo6rrleXGQjTKdSt5mfcV-MXVjV2HrPqnmJlPLXezXJR4x-z7O3rWttdbP4vLMDAsOjuQ7SYorAoOi7pZ2OPyvdSWU2v5NwvJUUAnqih103akGkm1w5WAcpEw/s978/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-30%20at%205.17.10%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="978" data-original-width="676" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxu35f0TRbV8ap9_ekmNhZshDbUwvVTaJxTiV5rvLgUiBseztyYMWZGSwCk97GqFo6rrleXGQjTKdSt5mfcV-MXVjV2HrPqnmJlPLXezXJR4x-z7O3rWttdbP4vLMDAsOjuQ7SYorAoOi7pZ2OPyvdSWU2v5NwvJUUAnqih103akGkm1w5WAcpEw/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-30%20at%205.17.10%20PM.png" width="221" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><i>Red Eye </i>is destined to always be something of a footnote. Everyone involved in the film will always be known for something else, Wes Craven for the <i>Nightmare on Elm Street</i> movies, and the entire cast from Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy to Brian Cox will always be known for other films. Moreover, its premise, which spends over two thirds of the film not just on a plane, but on two seats of a plane--a sort of bottle episode of a movie--seems hard to imaging being made today in which it is always bigger spectacles that get audiences. </div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GoXQZyNpeIk?si=JCSpDfxJHYID7-RQ" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">All of this is unfortunate, because it is not only a decent film, but one which has more to say than it would first appear. Most of this has to do with emotional labor. This is not just that the film takes place on a plane, the locus classicus of emotional labor since Arlie Hochschild wrote her monumental study, <i>The Managed Heart. </i>In that book she focused in part of the flight attendant a a kind of vanguard of emotional labor. Much of the work of the flight attendant has to do with performing and maintaining the right mood and and attitude, first with themselves, cultivating a warm smile, and then with the passengers. It is a labor that utilizes an emotion, or at least the display of an emotion, to produce an emotion, to create calm passengers and happy customers. Hochschild's study was written over forty years ago, and not only has flying changed since then, caught between the profit squeeze that has undermined the conditions of emotional labor and a post 9/11 regime that adds security and surveillance to the emotional labor of "service with a smile." Emotional labor has changed as well. It is no longer reserved for a vanguard of flight attendants, bartenders, bill collectors, and others; it is now distributed throughout the workforce, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2013/11/economies-of-affectaffective-economies.html">even those workers who never interact with customers are expected to smile and appear to be professional.</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When we meet Lisa (Rachel McAdams) she is shown to be adept at both waged and unwaged emotional labor. While in a cab returning from her grandmother's funeral she juggles two phone calls. One is from a coworker dealing with some difficult customers at the hotel where she works. She reminds her coworker that there are "no difficult customers, just customers with special needs." The other call is from her recently divorced father, who is struggling with insomnia and an empty nest. That Lisa is returning from a funeral suggest that she has some emotional needs of her own, but we never really hear or see them. Even her father's offers of support, which include the gift of a Dr. Phil book, are more about placating him than helping her. Lisa embodies the selfless care and concern that is situated at the intersection of waged and unwaged emotional labor. As she puts it, "That's me, people pleaser 24/7." </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Lisa is not just a seller of emotional labor; she is also a consumer of it, as we all are, as she arrives at the airport to find that her flight is delayed and she is part of a group of frustrated and tired travelers now being managed by a airline representative. There is solidarity of sorts between emotional workers; Lisa is quick to intervene when one man takes out his frustrations on the airline representative. This leads to Lisa meet Jackson (Cillian Murphy) another passenger on her plane. Their airport meeting could be considered a kind of "meet cute" and one might think that they are watching a romantic comedy at this point, if it was not for the opening scenes of stolen wallets and smuggled rocket launchers.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">After Lisa and Jackson board, and end up seated next to each other, we learn what connects their airport meeting to the rocket launcher and theft. Their meeting was no accident. He is there to make sure she uses her hotel connection to move the Deputy Director of Homeland Security to a room with an ocean view. The better to target him with a rocket launcher for a dramatic. These days apparently even international mercenary groups have need for emotional labor. He refers to himself as a manager, however, in that his role is not so much to perform his own emotions but to manage the emotions and perception of others. His job is to be threatening and menacing with Lisa, telling her that her father will be killed if she does not do what he says, while at the same time convincing every else on the plane, including the flight attendants, that nothing is wrong, that Lisa is just being emotional. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At this point Lisa finds herself desperately trying to express her need, to tell someone the truth, in order to save her father and the Deputy Director of Homeland Security. This pits emotional laborer against emotional management as Lisa tries to get the word out about what is happening, and Jackson tries to keep her in line. He has an advantage, however, in that part of the emotional labor of patriarchy is claiming that one does not have emotions, making women seem to be emotional, and relying on "facts and logic" as he puts it. He is also not above using a quick head butt when the situation calls for it. Lisa's struggle is as much with herself, with overcoming the desire to be a people pleaser, to think of others first, as it is with Jackson. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I won't give the rest of the plot away, only point out that my focus on emotional labor is in some sense legitimated in the final scene of the film when Lisa tells the difficult customers at the hotel to shove it up their ass. Wes Craven is no doubt most famous for the <i>Nightmare on Elm Street, </i>a film which posited that monsters could follow us into our dreams and kill us there; <i>Red Eye </i>shows us that our jobs, what we do for a living, follow us into the very core of our being, making us "people pleasers." Sometimes we have to kill the manager in our head (or at least stab it in the throat). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-67623568501798797452023-09-29T09:47:00.002-04:002023-12-22T10:48:04.219-05:00Differences and Differends: One More Note on the Politics of Education<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8zU_45Vou91VJQChbszBTOwiZ-XDdPVLZ-2IqoBF_9JREtfDi_W359czI72GUkKjqmQJ54nZrxYQHzSjsJwrcWdLA0ArVwOtMol8OHYXHr3jLZUvm7OH57hoifZW0h1_mLBDMQmOJWn_kv6KXgekH22Y-XSY8TVM9jLuJ95uJcATuLbYSzWZ6Bg/s1196/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-27%20at%2011.04.23%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="990" data-original-width="1196" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8zU_45Vou91VJQChbszBTOwiZ-XDdPVLZ-2IqoBF_9JREtfDi_W359czI72GUkKjqmQJ54nZrxYQHzSjsJwrcWdLA0ArVwOtMol8OHYXHr3jLZUvm7OH57hoifZW0h1_mLBDMQmOJWn_kv6KXgekH22Y-XSY8TVM9jLuJ95uJcATuLbYSzWZ6Bg/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-27%20at%2011.04.23%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I know that I should not even bother to engage with such things, but I saw someone retweet this from Christopher Rufo on X-Twitter. I think that it is revealing about two fundamental different ways of thinking about diversity and differences in a university. First, as Judith Butler states in the video posted below (11:49), that classes in women and gender studies are filled with debate and discussion. This is something that I think anyone who has been in a classroom would probably agree with. I would argue that it extends that it goes beyond gender studies to other subjects of supposed indoctrination such as critical race theory or even Marxism. Christopher Rufo's response to this is to focus not on what happens in such classrooms, he has probably never been in one, but to cite some supposed fact that faculty in gender and interdisciplinary studies are 100% left. I am not sure what he means by that, or if he is including all interdisciplinary programs, but I am going to assume that the left he is referring to is voting patterns, since that is an obsession of many critiques of higher education. </div><p></p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p><br /></p>
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WcEOde-LhyA?si=24VsdD9WktjICaOD" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">One could say if one wanted to be generous that what we have is two different ways of thinking of what difference means. Butler focuses on the differences internal to the classroom, the debates and discussion of issues of gender and sexuality, and Rufo focuses on voting, on what happens outside of the classroom. If one wanted to be generous one could call this a differend, in Jean-François Lyotard's sense, a disagreement about the terms of disagreement itself, about what it means for something to be the same or different. That is too generous, however, it is more like a bait and switch. The right's critique of indoctrination in the classroom often uses activity and speech outside of the classroom as a supposed indicator of internal classroom dynamics. Voter registration of faculty is supposed to be an indicator of what and how people teach. Or, to take another example, a faculty members activity outside the classroom, a tweet or protest, is taken to be an indicator of their bias in the classroom. I have even had this happen to me in which my blog, this one, was offered as evidence of my supposed bias in teaching. Just to be clear, if your argument about faculty bias or indoctrination looks to such evidence as faculty voter registration, tweets, political engagement or other activity outside of the class as evidence then you have not proven what you claim to prove. That does not stop people from using this standard. I even know of faculty who have internalized this standard, who curtail their own political activity so as not to appear biased, to be objective. I have heard of political science professors who refuse to register with a party or donate to candidates for fear of appearing biased. <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/academic-freedom-and-freedom-speech">Academic freedom and free speech are confused enough to curtail each. </a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The focus on electoral politics also explains one of the ongoing obsessions of the right wing pundit sphere. There is a whole niche publishing market of books arguing that liberalism, Marxism, postmodernism, critical race theory are all <i>THE SAME. </i><a href="https://www.vox.com/23811277/christopher-rufo-culture-wars-ron-desantis-florida-critical-race-theory-anti-wokeness">I believe that Christopher Rufo even wrote such a book. </a> Such a claim is demonstrably false from the perspective of the respective histories, ontologies, and epistemologies of different political ideologies. It does, however, make sense on one level and that is the one thing that all these different politics and philosophies have in common is that they are not likely to vote Republican. All of these shoddy, intellectually dishonest, and often anti-semitic books about the secret history of Cultural Marxism and <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/06/florida-man-part-ii-what-is-so-critical.html">Critical Race Theory</a> are all attempts to give an intellectual basis to a rather Schmittian distinction of friend versus enemy, to prove that everyone who is against you is actually part of the same conspiracy. That your enemies are enemies of freedom and rationality itself. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The focus on voting registration or party affiliation also seems to carry an odd assumption that the political makeup of any activity, any institution, or group, should reflect the overall division of the US. That unless a college major, or discipline, is roughly thirty percent Republican and Democrat, with forty percent unaligned or uninterested in the whole thing, it must be because of indoctrination. It seems odd to suppose that every part of society should function as a microcosm of the society. Would one also assume that all rifle clubs, churches, country clubs, and so on must reflect society at large? Which brings me to the last assumption of this overanalyzed tweet, and that is a causal one. It is assumed that the uniformity of voting or party affiliation, or whatever other paltry measure, of a department of discipline is an effect of what happens in the classroom. That is the supposed indoctrination. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/02/reduction-to-ignorance-spinoza-in-age.html">As Spinoza argues, however, one of the fundamental aspects of imagination, of what we could call ideology, is confusing effects for causes.</a> I can only speculate here, but I can imagine that maybe the students who sign up for a gender studies course, or women studies, might already have a politics that corresponds with their interest. The same thing could be said for a course on global warming or the history of civil rights or any other issue seen as indoctrination, the students are already educated, already engaged, before they enter the classroom. To put it bluntly, a party that has made ending abortion rights (not to mention in Florida the persecution of gay, lesbian, and trans people) part of its central platform should not be surprised that a women studies or gender studies course has no members in it. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">All of this obsession with the political make up of different major and disciplines is happening at the same time that one party is openly declaring hostility towards knowledge about science (climate change, Covid), history (slavery), society (gender), and even current events (the 2020 election). I stress open hostility, because the other party, the Democratic Party might declare that climate change is real, but that does not mean it is going to do anything about it--<a href="https://itself.blog/2011/07/29/active-and-passive-nihilism/">active nihilism versus passive nihilism</a>. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/05/florida-man-war-against-higher-education.html">Universities seem ill equipped to deal with this assault</a>, maintaining their standard neutrality towards "both sides" of any issue, but this neutrality towards politics on part of the institutions of knowledge is being confronted by a politics that is anything but neutral with respect to knowledge. </div>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-63951130049388321112023-09-24T09:34:00.004-04:002023-09-24T10:10:46.011-04:00Return to Doppelgängerland: Naomi Klein's Mirror World<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilAzYXxkJ88sGQY42zuANMML1rJTKSF3_sD-GYJ6DSk1nI7O1JpSyEzLOD3FYycjJybBJLhsGStBbq3zijT66fIpa4kPP4W-IdAhVXUmlN3-wk4pCwck6bTgaRKrR7zjrP1RgeLRA6mYPyvUKdxjIQRIo-tdCYDg0sdpqmWPpQW2DOuB7ClicaHw/s1958/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-22%20at%2010.07.32%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1104" data-original-width="1958" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilAzYXxkJ88sGQY42zuANMML1rJTKSF3_sD-GYJ6DSk1nI7O1JpSyEzLOD3FYycjJybBJLhsGStBbq3zijT66fIpa4kPP4W-IdAhVXUmlN3-wk4pCwck6bTgaRKrR7zjrP1RgeLRA6mYPyvUKdxjIQRIo-tdCYDg0sdpqmWPpQW2DOuB7ClicaHw/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-22%20at%2010.07.32%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Enter the Dragon</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="text-align: justify;">When I first read that Naomi Klein wrote a book about being confused for her doppelgänger, Naomi Wolf, I was initially amused. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2019/06/doppelgangerland-year-of-double.html">I had written earlier about the doppelgänger as the monster of our times</a>, and it seemed that Klein was confirming that thesis. Klein dealing with Wolf seemed like it might be a fun distraction, but as I read the book, I was immediately struck with the fact that Klein is taking on more than a particular case of mistaken identity. Her book <i><a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610326/doppelganger">Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World,</a> </i>is in some sense an attempt to make sense of the world we are living in a world dominated by social media doppelgangers in which the work of political and social criticism has its own dark doppelganger in the world of conspiracy theories. </p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;">It is not just that Naomi Wolf gets confused with Naomi Klein, both are women who wrote mainstream "big idea" books, <i>The Beauty Myth </i>and <i>No Logo, </i>have similar physical appearances, and their husbands are even both named Avi, but that this confusion reveals another doppelgänger, another double, our online or virtual self. As Klein writes, we live in "a culture crowded with various forms of doubling, in which all of us who maintain a persona or avatar online create our own doppelgängers--virtual versions of ourselves that represent us to others. A culture in which many of us have come to think of ourselves as personal brands, forging a partitioned identity that is both us and not us, a doppelgänger we perform ceaselessly in the digital ether as the price of admission in a rapacious attention economy." Klein's struggle with being confused with Wolf is also a recognition, that Klein, the author of <i>No Logo,</i> has another double, her "brand." This is what most people know her as, the author of critical books on the culture, politics, and economy of capitalism. Klein is aware that it is ironic to point out that the author of <i>No Logo </i>has a brand, but such a brand, an identity, are increasingly indispensable factors of living and working as a writer. As she puts it, the idea of a personal brand seemed like a dystopian future when it was proposed in the late nineties, but now it is a dystopian reality, anyone with a social media account has a double, a brand, that they can manage, and some need this brand to survive. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoWSx4MV3zV5LbJmxXUHHOCQNDkZOVyWxxJhkRrVAZ2H-XgMCgj6WpWU5Z-lcMW3ZxsYYZqJYSTESvv3-LedhQE90n2txsJg2iygYgHx8ePvA4fvyvnKPgWVjmx58db_76RlV5aSZEStmjzjAul4rzaqLBBVIxotpYwPijYuaB-N-sqUVg43AxMQ/s1454/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-22%20at%2010.05.02%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="934" data-original-width="1454" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoWSx4MV3zV5LbJmxXUHHOCQNDkZOVyWxxJhkRrVAZ2H-XgMCgj6WpWU5Z-lcMW3ZxsYYZqJYSTESvv3-LedhQE90n2txsJg2iygYgHx8ePvA4fvyvnKPgWVjmx58db_76RlV5aSZEStmjzjAul4rzaqLBBVIxotpYwPijYuaB-N-sqUVg43AxMQ/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-22%20at%2010.05.02%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">The Lady From Shanghai </div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;">Klein's book is not just about Wolf usurping her digital identity, but about Wolf's own descent into what Klein calls the "mirror world." the world of conspiracy theories, especially those that have metastasized in American culture since Trump and Covid. Wolf's descent into this world is very much a dive of the deep end. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/05/naomi-wolf-banned-twitter-spreading-vaccine-myths">Wolf has tweeted about vaccinated people losing their smell, they no longer smell human, about the risk of the feces of the vaccinated contaminating drinking water, and most famously about vaccine passports and contact tracing being the end of human freedom</a>.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"> It is easy to mock all of this, but Klein does not play this for the laughs, she tries to understand the causes and crises underlying the paranoid fantasies. One common retort to the paranoid fears of contact tracing, vaccine passports, and even microchips hidden in vaccines is to simply say, "wait until they hear about cellphones," to point out that the surveillance that is feared is already here and for the most part broadly accepted. Klein supposes instead that they, those who spread such theories, already know about cellphones, already know about surveillance and the loss of a certain kind of anonymity and freedom. It is this awareness that appears backwards and distorted in the fears of vaccines laden with nanotechnology to monitor and control us. Their fears about vaccines, about being tracked and monitored, is in some sense a fantasy that they can do something about this increase of surveillance. They can refuse the vaccine, and thus opt out of what many of us find it impossible to opt out of, a world where our every motion, every transaction, is monitored. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Klein's concept of a mirror world is both a reflection and refraction of our existing world. In some sense it reflects our world, but through a kind of distortion, shaped by our illusions and fantasies. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/12/the-spontaneous-ideology-of-conspiracy.html">Conspiracy theories are right to point to the control of a powerful elite, but wrong in thinking that this elite is secret, or that its motives are anything other than daily life under capitalism.</a> As Klein writes, </p><p style="text-align: justify;">"There was no need for histrionics about how unvaccinated people were experiencing "apartheid" when there was a real vaccine apartheid between rich and poor countries, no need to cook up fantasies about Covid "internment camps" when the virus was being left to rip through prisons, meat packing plants, and Amazon warehouses as if the people's lives inside had no value at all."</p><p style="text-align: justify;">The fears of the Covid alarmists of a dark future to come are the reality of existing life under Covid. What Klein proposes is in some sense a <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/09/reading-menu-symptomatically-on.html">symptomatic reading</a> of conspiracy theories, finding their points of reflection and refraction of the existing world. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzTfDkkEhkqC9x6jzMjimbdtgWVCnlbldExX1pcnxJ90F9F8c69jqb6tAtZsxZdSHh2AKnfI8wbXU37Cac4zeO_rRGnUOP6QeAw_fo1I4U3aIVbqogu2hJEWtzBwlDk5m75tsvLxROBB9Lq22QYg3FQJdokTOnma_ViRZfylVuUkQNjlCgpPci5A/s2352/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-23%20at%209.02.34%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1300" data-original-width="2352" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzTfDkkEhkqC9x6jzMjimbdtgWVCnlbldExX1pcnxJ90F9F8c69jqb6tAtZsxZdSHh2AKnfI8wbXU37Cac4zeO_rRGnUOP6QeAw_fo1I4U3aIVbqogu2hJEWtzBwlDk5m75tsvLxROBB9Lq22QYg3FQJdokTOnma_ViRZfylVuUkQNjlCgpPci5A/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-23%20at%209.02.34%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">The Man With the Golden Gun</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">(In case it is not clear I am illustrating this with Hall of Mirrors scenes from films)</div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;">With respect to the latter, the refractions and distortions, reading <i>Doppelganger </i> it is possible to find three causes or conditions underlying the distortions of the mirror world. Three aspects of existing ideology that distort and warp the way that this world responds to actual crises and problems. First, is idea of the individual, of the autonomous individual. This belief in autonomy and self reliance is the common core that connects the "wellness industry," yoga instructors, gym gurus, etc., who deny the need for vaccines and even masks for healthy people, with survivalists, who see them as an imposition by the state. Both insist on a purely individual response to a collective condition. Of course in doing so they are only acting on the basic premise of a capitalist society, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2010/06/methlab-of-democracy-more-on.html">which privatizes every social problem into a commodity. </a> During Covid many doubled down on this, insisting that one could get through the pandemic with everything from Vitamin D supplements and essential oils to horse medicine. Yoga instructors, vegans, and Fox News audiences might seem to be politically opposed, but they all are different expressions of what Klein calls hyper-individualism, responding to social collapse with individual responses of wellness and self-protection. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/08/year-three-four-ideological-conditions.html">As absurd as all of these homegrown cures and remedies were they were perhaps not as absurd as the notion that the US as a society could shift its entire economy and ethics, transforming all of those people we do not think about, the people who grow, ship, make, and deliver our food into essential workers.</a> As Klein writes, </p><p style="text-align: justify;">"With no warning, the message from much of our political and corporate classes change diametrically. It turned out that we were a society after all, that the young and healthy should make sacrifices for the old and ill; that we should wear masks as an act of solidarity with them, if not for ourselves; and that we should all applaud and thank the very people--many of them Black, many of them women, many of them born in poorer countries--whose lives and labor had been most systematically devalued, discounted and demeaned before the pandemic."</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Many embraced conspiracies rather than adjust to this new concern for essential workers, the elderly, and the sick, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2018/12/its-competition-all-way-down-on.html">but in doing so they followed to the letter the dominant image of our society, a society founded on isolation, self-interest, and competition.</a> As Klein details, often suspicion of things like free vaccines stemmed from a deeper internalization of the fundamental idea of capitalism. Why would a society that charges for a visit to the emergency room give away a life saving vaccine?</p><p style="text-align: justify;">This idea of the individual has its own little doppelgänger, the child. A great deal of the opposition to vaccines, mask mandates, and shutdowns was framed as protecting children from the supposed threats these things supposedly represent, spectres like "learning loss" rather than the reality of a pandemic. These threats all stem from a particular idea of a child, a child as extension of the self, and possession of their parents. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">"So many of the battles waged in the Mirror World--the "anti-woke" laws, the "don't say gay" bills, the blanket bans on gender-affirming medical care, the school board wars over vaccines and masks--come down to the same question: What are children for? Are they their own people, and our job, as parents is to support and protect them as they find their paths? Or are they our appendages, our extensions, our spin-offs, our doubles, to shape and mold and ultimately benefit from? So many of these parents seem convinced that they have a right to exert absolute control over their children without any interference or input: control over their bodies (by casting masks and vaccines as a kind of child rape or poisoning); control over their bodies (by casting masks and vaccines as a kind of child rape or poisoning); control over their minds (by casting anti-racist eductions as the injection of foreign ideas into their minds of their offspring); control over their gender and sexuality (by casting any attempt to discuss the range of possible gender expressions and sexual orientations as "grooming")."</p><p style="text-align: justify;">If the focus on individual health and the wellbeing of one's offspring sounds like eugenics, that is not accidental. This brings us to the third condition for distortion, race. As Klein argues Naomi Wolf, like many of the anti-vaccination movement, regularly invoke the holocaust or the civil rights struggle in their rhetoric. Wolf has even had her own sit-ins opposing vaccine mandates at lunch counters, her term, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/08/year-three-four-ideological-conditions.html">even as she singles out Black owned businesses</a> for her protests. Throughout the mirror world there is a desire to appropriate the signs and images of ethnic exclusion, (<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nashville-hat-shop-promotes-anti-vaccine-yellow-star-david-badge-n1269106">remember the store that sold yellow stars that said "Not Vaccinated</a>?" ) and racial justice, from sitting in at lunch counters to using Eric Garner's famous cry "I can't breathe" to protest mask mandates. In the mirror world it is white people who are both the true victims of discrimination and the real protagonists of social justice.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/08/year-three-four-ideological-conditions.html"><img border="0" data-original-height="1566" data-original-width="3808" height="132" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEharzcdoTnYzUFUv6puX24Iuz0tiLrF5nGKmXQFCGMc7QFHwLwTHINhRSmpf0um1hS0TvoC9b1751Fs42rx4e7L32Ld8SehVCFMaN4F6LV0Z57acQZ-Hlf-UovSjtTGk1Dj3BPGcnGQXe-WL1eb1VjMAYKQNVN_b5O8HizNVBnEY4OUOndWfL5vfQ/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-09-23%20at%209.01.23%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Us </div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;">This appropriation of the terms and history of racial justice is coupled with an absolute indifference to its current status. The year of shutdowns and mandates was also the summer of some of the largest protests of the "Black Lives Matter" movement. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">"If you were a person concerned that Covid marked the dawn of a new age of CCP inspired mass obedience, surely it would be worth mentioning that the largest protests in the history of the United States happened in the Covid era, with millions of people willing to face clouds of tear gas and streams of pepper spray to exercise their rights to speech, assembly and dissent. Come to think of it, if you were a person concerned with tyrannical state actions, you would also be concerned about the murders and mass denials of freedom to incarcerated people that drove the uprising. Yet in all the videos Wolf has put out issuing her dire warnings about how the United States was turning into a nation of sheeple, I have seen her acknowledge neither the existence of this racial justice reckoning nor the reality that if a Black person had pulled the same stunt that she did at the Blue Bottle or Grand Central Station, they very likely would have ended up face down in cuffs--not because vaccine rules were tyrannical, but because of systemic anti-Black racism in policing, the issue that sparked the protests she has so studiously ignored. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">I would argue that while Naomi Wolf might not have mentioned Black Lives Matter, she definitely noticed it. Her "lunch counter sit in" at a Blue Bottle Cafe would seem to reveal that.<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/04/broken-brains-on-etiology-of-present.html"> It was definitely noticed by the larger mirror world for which the site of millions of people in the streets protesting racism when they could not go to the gym or to a restaurant was a wrong, a violation of the order of the world, that they could not tolerate. </a>As Klein argues much Mirror World thinking is an attempt for white people to rewrite the history of the present--making them the true victims of repression and the true heroes. The real struggle was not in the streets fighting against police repression but screaming at the hostess at the restaurant asking for proof of vaccination. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">As much as Klein draws the lines of demarcation between "mirror world" thinking, between conspiracies and critical thought, any such division is going to be an unstable one. In the end it is not just that Naomi Wolf is confused for Naomi Klein but that theories about microchips in vaccines or vaccines rewriting our DNA are confused for criticisms of contemporary surveillance and the pharmaceutical industry. Naomi Klein's <i><a href="https://tsd.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine.html">Shock Doctrine</a> </i>has been appropriated and reappropriated by everyone from Second Amendment activists arguing about "false flags" to those that argue that global warming will produce a new global surveillance state. Klein's book ultimately is not just about her own struggle with a doppelgänger, but how any critical thinker, anyone on "the left," for lack of a better word, will always confront a doppelgänger. Every critic of the invasion of Iraq has to deal with "truthers" who claim that 9/11 was an inside job, every critic of the failure of the US to respond to the pandemic will ultimately have to deal with claims of microchips and genetic engineering. What starts out as one persons struggle with a very singular condition of mistaken identity ultimately is a story about all of us. We are all in the hall of mirrors now. Klein has also charted something of a path out, by showing the ideologies of individualism, the family, and the race, that distort any awareness of our conditions into its mirror world opposite. Lastly, Klein like Bruce Lee before her knew that you have to smash a few mirrors to escape a hall of mirrors, and this includes, for Klein, giving up on one's own image, one's brand, learning to think and act collectively rather than individually. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RBnIbqW6ZhM?si=T5EE9Y_x9o4NH-VQ" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-44888676016462492522023-08-30T11:27:00.008-04:002023-11-17T12:12:47.262-05:00Nostalgic for Nothing: Industry and Affect<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_5_IOAPsnp1Wbh0QSTUxWVMl1CoGoqca_Fh7ikOMz2PQqSoFEZBRClTxjDHxoiLfTR7B42RMwICvYjmqOM8G1WJTsBNdmzMQyYS-zZ-0zTN-IyU-UF07SyuP7GgkT71fmNi8GA1GsduX5te-0PydNC9b72m_fev9tJmI_m2Hi2R5SZuRER7rKMg/s700/369697713_805095928070299_5219427731649688761_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_5_IOAPsnp1Wbh0QSTUxWVMl1CoGoqca_Fh7ikOMz2PQqSoFEZBRClTxjDHxoiLfTR7B42RMwICvYjmqOM8G1WJTsBNdmzMQyYS-zZ-0zTN-IyU-UF07SyuP7GgkT71fmNi8GA1GsduX5te-0PydNC9b72m_fev9tJmI_m2Hi2R5SZuRER7rKMg/s320/369697713_805095928070299_5219427731649688761_n.jpg" width="229" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">this is not a picture of me</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">The dominance of intellectual property in film is driven by one central affect, or affective composition, nostalgia, the sense that something about the past was once better. It is unclear, however, if this mood is oriented towards <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2015/09/genysis-of-new-film-form-reflections.html">the actual films of the recent past</a>, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2009/06/industrialization-of-nostalgia.html">or childhood itself. </a>What is it we are nostalgic for? </div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">In asking this question I am taking a Spinozist definition of an emotion, an affect, that affects tell us something about ourselves, our bodies and capacities, and something about the object that has affected us, but they do so in a confused and jumbled way, making it difficult to understand which is which. If one wanted to offer a Spinozist definition of nostalgia, since none is offered in the definitions of the affect, at least directly, then one could say that it is joy with the idea of an absent cause. This makes it especially ambivalent, since it is not clear if the cause is only momentarily lost or gone for good. Is it possible to experience it again, to regain that joy or does it become an object of sadness. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2018/06/the-primitive-accumulation-of.html">The reign of intellectual property depends on the confusion regarding the object of desire and the ambivalence of the affect, making us believe that it is the intellectual property of the past we desire, want to see again and again, when it might just be childhood itself. </a> How can we come to form an adequate idea of this nostalgia, understand its true causes?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">My answer to this question are framed between two half remembered statements. The first, from wayback in graduate school, was something that Max Pensky said in a class on Walter Benjamin. That was over twenty years ago, and I cannot recall it exactly, but it was something to the effect of nostalgia is often a memory of a prior stage of commodification. The second is something that Boots Riley once said in an interview, that so many decisions made by the people with money, producers, studios, etc., are predicated on real ignorance of music, movies, etc. that they are producing. To put it in Spinozist terms, they only know the effect, that it made money. Boots Riley said this in explaining why his own unapologetically communist agitprop group The Coup got a record deal. The record label wanted to sign another group from Oakland. That is just one example, but there are more. The massive success of <i>Star Wars</i> in the seventies is often cited as the explanation for so many science fiction films, <i>Alien</i>, <i>Outland</i>, hell, <a href="https://theoutline.com/post/4325/felix-guattari-a-love-of-uiq-screenplay">even Félix Guattari got a meeting for his science fiction screen play</a>. Of course this list also includes films like <i>Krull </i>and <i>Lazerblast.</i> To put it back in Benjamin's terms, this mad grasp for money coupled with a poor understanding of the success of <i>Star Wars</i> explains one of the weirdest toys from my childhood, the <i>Alien</i> action figure my brother got one Christmas. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8CJgc-o_WkY?si=F7MIAEBmOnUdS-Ui" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Making a toy from an R-rated movie, that scared the hell out of me as a kid, makes sense only if you think in terms of effects and broad categories. <i>Alien</i> is science fiction like <i>Star Wars</i>, and <i>Star Wars </i>toys made a lot of money. It seems unimaginable to us now because it would not happen today. The same is true of another object of misplaced nostalgia, <i>The Star Wars Holiday Special. </i>The reason that it is such an object of nostalgia despite being by every account terrible is because it would not happen today: no studio would waste valuable intellectual property having on a TV special in which the characters that were being marketed as everything from toys to bed sheets made space for a musical number with Bea Arthur. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6hH8rxarVG8?si=Jpjpije-ho-clb24" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Film studios have in some sense gotten better at managing their intellectual property. The <i>Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas Holiday Special</i> is less a strange mashup of space opera and variety TV than it is a moment in cross platform synergy, drawing attention to the Disney channel and keeping interest for the next installment of <i>Guardians of the Galaxy Film. </i>We should be clear what success means in this context, it means return on investment, and not some other criteria, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2020/07/the-use-and-abuse-of-blockbusters-for.html">exchange value not use value. </a> The period of the highpoint of the IP film, from roughly 2008 until now, is a period of consistent return on investment. Which is not to say that all of these films predicated on Intellectual Property are guaranteed success, even the MCU, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2012/05/avenge-me-avengers-and-new-auteur.html">in which every movie is a commercial for the next movie,</a> <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/10/the-end-narrative-incompleteness-in-age.html">is breaking under the contradiction between brand synergy and narrative closure</a>. <a href="https://www.avclub.com/ghosted-director-cut-opening-sequence-streaming-quote-1850387565">Even the contemporary forms of data extraction which know not only what people watch, but for how long, and when they binge, cannot create a guaranteed model for reproducing success</a>. It produces copies. The current culture industry is aimed more towards making <i>Krull </i>than <i>Alien, </i>of extracting a few things that work, space princes, cool weapon, quest, monster sidekick, etc., into another film than gambling that the popularity of a space opera would translate into a horror movie about an alien <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2012/06/corporate-imaginations-in-praise-of.html">and an evil corporation</a>. The existence of Barbenheimer can in some sense be understood as a celebration, not of failure or even originality, but the inability for the culture industry to program everything. It turned a moment of counter-programing into a cultural event. Part of the joy of it was the feeling that there will not be another event like it, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/aug/02/saw-patrol-will-this-horrifying-double-bill-be-as-big-as-barbenheimer">Saw Patrol notwithstanding.</a> It was made by the audience and not the industry. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What is true, however, is that the failures are less interesting than they used to be. In the summer of ninety eighty-two <i>The Thing </i>and <i>Bladerunner </i>were released on the same day, both flopped, but transformed their respective genres to become classics. That is what I am nostalgic for, for failure. I do not think that kind of failure is coming back. So in that way nostalgia is for me a sad affect, a memory of a phase of commodification that seemed more creative, more uncertain, if only because it is measured against the current real subsumption of creativity under property. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I will let <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2007/10/lance-hahn-1967-2007.html">J-Church</a> play us out. I am also nostalgic for an earlier day of punk rock, but that is a different story. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_shk9mqNGuA?si=lEMx6Q5VwrUU4AMO" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-63565717064106348382023-08-21T09:11:00.001-04:002023-08-21T09:11:35.490-04:00Year Three: Four Ideological Conditions for the Covid Crisis<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjojtTJD6VQT8w-mxheZhHj7s4SkR3DIc9RrprLMUQcNS0Zk1u5aIjbqQHOykv8U-JkTTatuiE3mKxYqSi5VyCgXENTapBQ-YxNcyYnFYC-1glkxQke237gNHHnJKLqqlvQiJbZ3hx8Ckdehj6OVxMqfAVlHYVD-SRrxliGyDgdrhDL7vx1BH6BuQ/s1670/Screen%20Shot%202023-08-01%20at%208.50.51%20PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1582" data-original-width="1670" height="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjojtTJD6VQT8w-mxheZhHj7s4SkR3DIc9RrprLMUQcNS0Zk1u5aIjbqQHOykv8U-JkTTatuiE3mKxYqSi5VyCgXENTapBQ-YxNcyYnFYC-1glkxQke237gNHHnJKLqqlvQiJbZ3hx8Ckdehj6OVxMqfAVlHYVD-SRrxliGyDgdrhDL7vx1BH6BuQ/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-08-01%20at%208.50.51%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Picture of me practicing<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2006/08/secrets-of-aikido-or-how-to-love.html"> aikido</a> in a mask </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">(seemed appropriate)</div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">As we look at another surge, another variant, and another school year of Covid, it might be worth thinking about the conditions that made this situation possible. The conditions are, as is so often the case, multiple, including the nature of the virus itself, technological, and economic conditions. What I would like to focus on briefly are the ideological conditions, or the way in which the virus took advantage of social contradictions as much biological weakness. </p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">1) Exceptions. Some of the first news that came out about COVID stressed that some percentage, as high as about 60% would be completely asymptomatic. This news was sometimes meant to spread caution, to let people know that they could feel fine and still infect others, but for many this meant that there was a good chance that the disease would not affect them at all (I realize that asymptomatic and not being infected are not the same thing). The odds for many people seemed good. I think that this is particularly true for a country like <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/03/althusser-effects-philosophical.html">the US were the ruling ideology is often about seeing oneself as an exception to a general rule</a>. We are told that most will not make it rich, but believe that we will, or, a little closer to home, that most entering graduate school will not find tenure track jobs, but we believe ourselves to be the exception (or, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2008/09/essence-of-ideology.html">in the words of <i>The Wire, </i>a "smart ass pawn."</a>). COVID just become another general pattern that we see ourselves as exceptions to, something that happens to other people. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">2) Essential Workers. The early year or so was in part defined by an increased awareness of how our lives were made possible by all sorts of workers, in food service, trucking, retail, logistics, all of whom produce distribute, and sell the goods we rely on. There was also an awareness of how we are dependent on teachers, nurses, and hospital staff in more ways than we imagined. It suddenly became clear that schools were not just for people who had children, but also for people who needed people who have children to show up to work; one thread in an otherwise invisible web of dependency and connection. There was a brief recognition of this fact; some of it was <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2020/11/solidarities-negative-symbolic-and.html">symbolic</a>, banging on pots pans and impromptu airshows, but some of it was material as well, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/09/reading-menu-symptomatically-on.html">increased wages for essential workers. </a>However, this fundamental fact of life became increasingly awkward as time went by, and there was a concerted effort to return to the normal state of not thinking about how the food got to the table or who the person behind the counter was as a person. First, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2020/04/the-procession-of-monstrosities-on.html">there was the ghoulish demand that lives would have to sacrificed to start the economy.</a> Then, there was just the <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/03/between-micro-politics-and-mute.html">mute compulsion of everyday</a> life, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/01/despair-and-indignation-inevitable.html"> the gravitational pull of normal. </a>Our entire way of life is predicated on not thinking about other people, on seeing ourselves as kingdoms within a kingdom, separate from nature and from our dependency on others. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">3) The Mediasphere. I am no conspiracy theorist, and do not really care if COVID came from a lab leak or not (unless the lab also has an antidote, then I do not see how this changes anything), but I cannot imagine a virus more capable of taking advantage of the current economy and ecology of attention than COVID. Part of this goes back to the first point. There are radically different experiences with COVID from a person who is affected so slightly that they do not even know they have it to someone suffering from a set of chronic life altering conditions that have come to be known as long COVID. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/02/reduction-to-ignorance-spinoza-in-age.html">Combine this with a predominantly anecdotal way of thinking about the world, a focus on individual stories, situations, and perspectives and you have competing stories, which, thanks to social media, become competing realities, different worlds.</a> Any attempt to create a dominate narrative, a collective consensus about what was at stake was hindered from the get go, first by a general distrust in government by some, which saw every precaution as a conspiracy of control, and then eventually by others, as the CDC and government gave in <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/12/the-spontaneous-ideology-of-conspiracy.html">to the open conspiracy of capitalism</a>, which needed us to return to work and consumption as soon as possible. The final situation of all this is almost one in which there is no consensus, no dominant view, but only competing divergent views with their own standards and sources of information. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2008/09/know-your-place.html"> I do not want to sound like Plato</a>, but it seems to me that one of the benefits of living in a society is that we should not have to "do our own research," to learn a little about virology, vaccines, epidemiology, airflow, etc., just to go about our lives in a pandemic, we should, at least on some level expect that scientists and other experts to do that for us. </p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">4) The future. I do not claim to know or understand everything about this virus, but if at least some of what I have read about its long term effects are true then we are all looking at a bleaker future, of getting sick more often, and with that decline in the quality of life there is a decline in quantity as well, post COVID heart attacks and strokes cut lives short. I do not know what people will make of this, but my fear is that it will become accepted just as we have accepted longer working hours, worsening pay, and a general decline in the quality of life. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/08/fallen-kingdom-living-in-anthropocene.html">Add to this the impending climate collapse and it seems like we have two options, either come to accept that things are going to be a lot worse or choose to start making things better.</a> It is clear to me that COVID was a "civilization or barbarism" moment, and for a brief second it seemed like we were choosing the former, choosing to support each other collectively. That moment was short lived, and we went back to barbarism, even doubled down on it, but I have some hope, even now, that the cost of that choice will still help us choose differently in the future. The other thing I learned from COVID is that events, even crises, have limited efficacy on their own. They change things, but how they do so is not determined. They make the conditions for history, but what happens in those conditions is up to us. </span></p><p><br /></p>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-20744300955728378192023-08-14T16:57:00.000-04:002023-08-14T16:57:37.318-04:00Other Scenes: The Ideology of the Economy/The Economy of Ideology<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtkhXuftfuybymh4kDxZ_Vx6adqmnrK7A3Bw2Da-KrCzmSFM5GbxmIC4owFGw0afS61oNzRQ6bcLNn6vY8pTS1r5ZQR6c3haR-vv9qDkKLRmCS_TZw5gnGfYsI_FnPnCe4FeB0df9kiChS8V19wGGZjyzM14d0UwwFtd7YhegoPcgAA__u07pNVQ/s1138/Screen%20Shot%202023-08-14%20at%204.14.40%20PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1138" data-original-width="986" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtkhXuftfuybymh4kDxZ_Vx6adqmnrK7A3Bw2Da-KrCzmSFM5GbxmIC4owFGw0afS61oNzRQ6bcLNn6vY8pTS1r5ZQR6c3haR-vv9qDkKLRmCS_TZw5gnGfYsI_FnPnCe4FeB0df9kiChS8V19wGGZjyzM14d0UwwFtd7YhegoPcgAA__u07pNVQ/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-08-14%20at%204.14.40%20PM.png" width="277" /></a></div><p></p><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">One of the most pernicious effects of the Marxist schema of base and superstructure is that it posits the economy and ideology as two separate and distinct levels. The base is where the economy does its work, silently and materially, and the superstructure does its work reproducing the relations of production by remaining entirely separate and distinct from the economy, by addressing morals, religion, the nation, everything but economic necessity. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/03/between-micro-politics-and-mute.html">This rigid division makes it difficult to think of the ideological dimension of the economy and the economic dimension of ideology. </a></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2019/07/what-deleuze-and-guattari-get-wrong.html">I have written before on what I could call the ideological dimension of the economy</a>, t<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2020/05/right-workerism-or-class-struggle-in.html">he way that work, wealth, and capital function not just as economic relations but are coded are moralized, made into statements of virtue and worth</a>. I am not taking credit for this idea, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2012/02/hegel-famously-proclaimed-that-owl-of.html">it can be found in Hegel</a>, and, more critically, in <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2017/05/the-original-sin-of-accumulation-trying.html">Marx's discussion of primitive accumulation</a>. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/10/coming-soon-well-soonish-double-shift.html">I have a whole book coming out which discusses the way that work does a "double shift" as both a fundamental aspect of economic life under capitalism and a central term in capitalist ideology</a>. Beyond that, I think that it might be useful to think of similar double shifts, where the economy functions as ideology, and ideology works in the economy. </div><p style="text-align: justify;">First example, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-is-west-virginia-u-making-sweeping-cuts">in analyzing the much discussed, and hopefully fiercely fought cuts at West Virginia University one point comes up repeatedly.</a> Which is that humanities courses like languages and literature, generally bring in more money than they cost. Humanities professors are cheaper than faculty in other departments, such as business, and generally courses involve less costly technology than courses in STEM. There have also been suggestions that other aspects of the university, like its football team, are not only more expensive, with something like fourteen assistant coaches, but cost more than they bring in. I am not sure about that last point, however, and am honestly not going that deep into the matter. There are also larger points about the general decline in state funding for higher education. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2010/05/de-te-fabula-narratur-reflections-on.html">I am not suggesting that one make an argument defending education primarily in terms of costs and returns--far from it. </a></p><p style="text-align: justify;">My main point here is that eliminating language programs is not the result of a simple cost/benefit analysis, a comparison of revenue in and out, but from what could be considered the ideology of economic rationality. Languages, culture, and even puppetry just seem to be extravagant even if they are not. While an instrumental calculation tells us that courses in such departments bring in more revenue, more students, our idea of what is economically rational tells us that they are expensive and not essential to whatever we think a university is, increasingly a job training center. Economical is often a representation of calculation, an idea of what is worthwhile or expensive, rather than an actual calculation based on costs and revenue. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Second example: <a href="https://itself.blog/2023/08/13/market-forces-are-made-out-of-people/">and this comes from Adam Kotsko's post about streaming</a>, streaming services, like other app based transformations such as Uber and Airbnb, seem to be the very model of market efficiency. They have effectively eliminated the middle man, the cable provider, television network, or video store, bringing more profits directly to the studio and more choice to the audience. I am not going to get into the failure of the latter (better reserved for another post), but the truth of the matter is that streaming has not been profitable with most services working at a loss for years. Nonetheless, streaming seems profitable and a model of what it means to be successful capitalist enterprise. So much so that when my university was cutting programs a few years ago a member of the board said that he wanted the university to be like Netflix not Blockbuster, by which I assume that he meant efficient, new. and online. It is the idea, or ideal of disruption, of change and obsolescence that, explains the interest in streaming services and not their actual profitability. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2020/12/waiting-for-robots-benanav-and-smith-on.html">Of course it is possible to say that part of the fetishization of apps has more to do with the long game, with the role they play in deskilling work and making working conditions more precarious in order to replace employees with workers with even less security and lower wages.</a> The long game, the overall social effect, is something that capitalist from Adam Smith to Milton Freeman have argued companies are not supposed to not consider--their only concern should be immediate self-interest (or in Freeman's case shareholder interest). </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Third example, by now you have probably heard of the viral online hit “<a href="https://youtu.be/sqSA-SY5Hro">Rich Men North of Richmond</a>" by Oliver Anthony. I am not going recommend the song as a song, but I have copied some of the lyrics below to discuss it as a cultural moment (albeit one probably forgotten by the time you read this). </p><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Livin' in the new world</div><div style="text-align: center;">With an old soul</div><div style="text-align: center;">These rich men north of Richmond</div><div style="text-align: center;">Lord knows they all just wanna have total control</div><div style="text-align: center;">Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do</div><div style="text-align: center;">And they don't think you know, but I know that you do</div><div style="text-align: center;">'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end</div><div style="text-align: center;">'Cause of rich men north of Richmond</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">I wish politicians would look out for miners</div><div style="text-align: center;">And not just minors on an island somewhere</div><div style="text-align: center;">Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eat</div><div style="text-align: center;">And the obese milkin' welfare</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Well, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 pounds</div><div style="text-align: center;">Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds</div><div style="text-align: center;">Young men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground</div><div style="text-align: center;">'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them down</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I am going to skip right over the Qanon part about islands of minors and go straight to the representation of the economy. First, we get the usual demon of the right, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2011/03/teachers-are-new-welfare-queens.html">the welfare queen or king</a>, the song doesn't give us gender just height and weight. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2011/12/let-me-tell-of-time-that-something.html">That this fiction persists long after the end of "welfare as we know it" is a testament to its power as a myth.</a> To quote <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324006497">Jeff Sharlet,</a> "You can't fact check a myth." Along with this myth that welfare is an incredibly easy life we get one of the other persistent themes of the right, the strange obsession with exactly what poor people consume, in this case fudge rounds, the Little Debbie snackcake that retails for less than three bucks for a nine ounce package. A cheap vice, all things considered. The song seems to suggest that at some particular body mass ratio it would be acceptable for the state to provide these snack cakes, but it is unclear where the cut off is. If you ask me we would be better worrying about the consumption habits of the wealthy than the poor: the former are going to private jet the planet to death while we are drawing cut off lines for snack cake consumption, but I digress.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The real line that strikes me in this passage is "Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end." This passage is often cited as the real working class pain that is at the heart of this song. It is hard to deny the first part, the past few years of inflation have driven the buying power of the dollar down. The second part, however, is more dubious. There is no tax increase that explains that decrease. Rates have gone down nationally, but that varies by income bracket, and Virginia (where I assume this is coming from) has remained in the middle range of state income tax with a top rate of 5.75%, West Virginia is slightly higher at 6.50%. However, I would argue that as much as taxes cannot be the true cause of the economic anger at the core of this song, they are its necessary false cause. (To cite Spinoza, "inadequate ideas follow from the same necessity as adequate ideas)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">To discuss inflation, wages, and so on as causes of the decline of the dollar, of working class conditions, is to criticize capitalism, albeit obliquely. Capitalism, the economy, is not something one can critique, not because it is beyond reproach, held sacred, but because it is seen as a fact of life, the way of the world. To criticize capitalism would be to acknowledge it as an institution, as a human creation. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2016/04/necessity-passing-as-contingency-and.html">Instead the critical force is reserved for politicians, for those rich men North of Richmond, who have imposed taxes. </a> Of course it is unclear why they would do this, the profit motive is a fairly clear motivating force for exploitation,<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/12/the-spontaneous-ideology-of-conspiracy.html"> taking it off of the table often means coming up with even more baroque explanations as to why the rich men are doing what they are doing. </a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">To some up briefly, my point here is not that there is nothing like economic determination, or material conditions and causes, but just that even material causes cannot be separated from their representation, how we grasp or image them. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2014/08/dialectics-of-other-other-scene-on.html">The economy, the other scene of politics, has effects only in and through that scene, and vice versa. </a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-58147367951884521742023-08-06T05:30:00.008-04:002023-08-06T13:15:15.778-04:00Barbies Amongst Themselves: Or, What Happens When You Make a Film about a Commodity<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbyFmrGSXu7HEHvq1ISaZLoUp37F6lXFU9tTv9WtftPUJK0LY3aJZMTKNjKNPZbkdlydK9djkE2BpdRRd0Euhh7J8MT6eyhYiSgei7r1p8lW7i1P8IbDtRfPWANaG7yedifiIHLktQ5FwxYrPokMcTGF9DSUagtVuKscmGtB4kVaivVi2Lr4FgZQ/s1327/Prides%20Corner.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1243" data-original-width="1327" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbyFmrGSXu7HEHvq1ISaZLoUp37F6lXFU9tTv9WtftPUJK0LY3aJZMTKNjKNPZbkdlydK9djkE2BpdRRd0Euhh7J8MT6eyhYiSgei7r1p8lW7i1P8IbDtRfPWANaG7yedifiIHLktQ5FwxYrPokMcTGF9DSUagtVuKscmGtB4kVaivVi2Lr4FgZQ/s320/Prides%20Corner.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="text-align: justify;">Watching Barbie reminded me of two essays that I had not read in a long time, Luce Irigaray's "<a href="https://joaocamillopenna.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/irigaray-women-on-the-market.pdf">Women on the Market </a>" and "Commodities Among Themselves". In those essays Irigaray considers to what extent Marx's theory of the commodity form can be used to make sense of the status of women in society. Irigaray's texts takes as its start the idea of a society founded on an exchange of women, an idea integral to structural and psychoanalytic theories of kinship. From this it is possible to posit that relations among women would have the fantastic character of Marx's brief foray into describing the world of commodities amongst themselves. </p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;">It is precisely such a world, Barbie Land, that Barbie: The Movie opens. The only difference is that women, Barbies, in this world do not so much exist as things to be exchanged, as daughters to be given away as wives, but are defined by their use value, or, more to the point, their concrete labor. It is a world of Barbie doctors, presidents, supreme court justices, and so on--a Barbie for every career and full employment for all Barbies. Greta Gerwig's film taps into an aspect of Barbie that often falls beneath the image of the Barbie stereotype, or, in the world of the film, Stereotypical Barbie, and that is the myriad number of Barbies that have been manufactured with different careers, from veterinarian to astronaut. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">The Barbie stereotype of blond hair, impossible proportions, and pink, well everything, dominates our image of Barbie, it is what adults think of when we think of Barbie, so much so that we forget that for a lot of girls (and boys)<a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexalisitza/list-every-job-barbie-had"> who play with her she that is less a supermodel than the model for every kind of activity and career.</a> Whatever you want to be they have a Barbie for that. I remember once watching a relative's kid play Barbie and it was less a foray into a world of beauty and fashion than it was an hour of being a large animal veterinarian, giving check ups to horses. A far cry from the image of fashion and beauty that comes to mind when you say Barbie to an adult. The two sides of Barbie, the blonde and pink stereotype that adults think of and the various different Barbies of every career and hobby that kids play with, are the central contradiction of the film.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAhbA3f-9lZcWzStHQe1q_0NE_60rBUt-mpdmTuKK-hGM2vzBBh2h71w0L3K0U-OxD9cImDOlbAhiDyvkv_4u2bAp22GTRdqIGAuzW22dFoTM0QPjr6ZdEaUcZscPi372ZSCaYNARpM2iRoqbnqTKFkw2SERXqW00UpbIas9GyvMIIefGbxYNe5w/s1192/Screen%20Shot%202023-08-05%20at%205.05.31%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1098" data-original-width="1192" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAhbA3f-9lZcWzStHQe1q_0NE_60rBUt-mpdmTuKK-hGM2vzBBh2h71w0L3K0U-OxD9cImDOlbAhiDyvkv_4u2bAp22GTRdqIGAuzW22dFoTM0QPjr6ZdEaUcZscPi372ZSCaYNARpM2iRoqbnqTKFkw2SERXqW00UpbIas9GyvMIIefGbxYNe5w/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-08-05%20at%205.05.31%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">The Barbie pet care center</div><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Barbie Land is that imaginary place where Barbies amongst themselves can be anything or anyone. There are Kens in this world too, but since this world is the world of children playing, no one really knows what Ken is for. Ken is more sidekick than boyfriend. (<a href="https://www.e-flux.com/notes/552445/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-the-phallus-but-were-afraid-to-ask-barbie">Pietro Bianchi has offered a great Freudian reading of this world of innocence</a>). The Barbies in Barbie Land are aware of the real world, that it exists, and as far as they are concerned they have fundamentally altered it. An imaginary world where Barbie can be anything must in some sense produce a reality where kids can be anyone. It is the logic of meritocratic role models taken to its logical conclusion. All the world needs is the right role models for the world to change.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pBk4NYhWNMM" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe> </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Trouble begins when stereotypical Barbie (played by Margot Robbie) begins to have some very un-Barbie thoughts, like of death, aging, and cellulite. These intrusive thoughts must be the product of the kid that is playing with her so she has to go out into the "real world" to find this kid and fix things. This brings us back to the commodity form. The commodity, as Marx tells us, is both an exchange value and a use value, it is both something with its own properties, or in the case of labor, capacities, and with a value, a capacity to stand in for other commodities, to be exchanged. In the world of the film we get two sides of Barbie, there is the Barbie Land Barbie in which there is a Barbie that can do anything, and there is the real world Barbie, where Barbie is defined not by her capacities, what she can do, but by her appearance, what she looks like. It is on arriving in the real world that Barbie finds herself not as an object of little girl's dreams, but the object of male fantasies. (<a href="https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/who-was-barbie/">As A.S. Hamrah points out in this great roundtable discussion of the film, the patriarchy that Barbie is subject to is incredibly mild and gentle, more befitting a cartoon world than the real world</a>). If I wanted to add another grad school reference, namely Jean Baudrillard, I would say that Barbie's conflict is less between use value and exchange value as it is between use value and sign value, between what Barbie can do and what she signifies, what blonde hair, impossibly long legs, and gravity defying curves signify. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">To put it back in Irigaray's terms, her capacities might define what she is capable of, but her appearance for men defines her place in society. As Irigaray writes, "just as, in commodities, natural utility is overridden by the exchange function, so the properties of a woman's body have to be suppressed and subordinated to the exigencies of its transformation into an object of circulation among men." Use Value/Exchange Value, the two sides of the commodity are dominated by exchange value just as women in society are dominated by the demand to be seen, and exchanged, by men. <br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Upon arrival in the real world, Barbie and Ken learn that making Barbie role models for every career has not ended patriarchy. Barbie and Ken react differently to the persistence of patriarchy. Barbie is horrified and confused. Ken is happy and excited. Ken finds himself being respected just because he is a man. He immediately hatches a plan to bring the patriarchy to Barbie Land with the help of some books checked out from the library. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">(I thought for a long time about what this particular plot point reminded me of, a story where two characters have opposed reactions to the new world they are transported to, and eventually I thought of <i>Time after Time, </i>The film in which H.G. Welles and Jack the Ripper end up time traveling to the seventies. Welles is horrified of the lack of social progress while Jack the Ripper revels in the violence of the twentieth century. For sake of this digression, and because I really love that film, I include the following clip.)</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PvYoTPlTwpE" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Back to the film in question, and skipping several plot points, by the time Barbie discovers the source of her angst, an adult playing with Barbies and returns to Barbie Land it has been transformed. The Barbie dream houses have all been remade into Mojo Dojo man caves for Ken and the Barbies have abandoned their various careers as veterinarians and the President to dote after their Kens, bringing them snacks and beer. The spell of patriarchy is broken, however, when Gloria (America Ferrara) , the adult from the real world who has brought anxiety to Barbie, spells out the contradictions of being a woman. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2023/07/barbie-movie-america-ferrera/674781/">This speech is the thematic and emotional core of the film.</a> Since I found the whole thing online, I post it in its entirety below. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">"It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong.
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people."</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">"You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining. You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood.
But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful.
You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It's too hard! It's too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don't even know."</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The speech is a long list of the "too contradictory" situation of women in the real world. In the film this bit of wisdom from the real world restores Barbie Land, frees Barbie from the rule of Ken. However, the film does not connect the contradictions of the real world to the contradictory unity of Barbie as a commodity, a commodity with use value, all of Barbie's various careers from doctor to president, and an exchange value, her appearance. In the film there are two worlds, Barbie Land defined by Barbie's capacities to do anything, and our world, where Barbie is defined by her appearance, but it never really reflects on the contradictory unity of those two worlds, on the fact that while Barbie dolls can do anything they still have to look like Barbie. Making a movie about Barbie is strange endeavor because the logic of Barbie is the logic of Hollywood. It is a world where women can be scientists and superheroes, at least some of the time, but in doing so they still have to look like at least one of the varieties of Barbie. Ability is subordinated to appearance, use value to exchange value.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The film presents Barbie Land and the real world as two different realities, one dominated by the different abilities of Barbie and the other by the circulation of her appearance, but the reality of the commodity, of capital, is that use value and exchange value exists side by side even as they contradict each other. As Isabelle Garo puts it, </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"The originality of Marx’s approach attaches to the dialectical nature of his analysis of contradictions, which is no mere juxtaposition of opposed tendencies: the capitalist labour process is not alienating in one respect and emancipatory in another, but it interweaves these two tendencies at the very heart of the labourer’s individuality and of social relations."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Or, to put it back in the terms of the film, it is not that one gets to choose between a land where Barbies are recognized for their abilities and one that they are reduced to their appearances but they are always both. This is the too contradictory situation referenced in Gloria's speech. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The fact that the film does not connect these dots connects brings us back to the question the film asks but does not answer, why has a Barbie Land where dolls can be anything not transformed our world where women are all too often reduced to being dolls? That the film has no reflection on the failure of its own world of role models is its real limit. All Barbie the movie can do is diversify Barbie Land, adding a few different body types and a little more diverse product line, but it cannot address the question as to why all the positive role models in the world have not changed patriarchy. Perhaps that question is for the inevitable sequel. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-2654218558080815352023-08-01T13:55:00.011-04:002023-12-19T10:23:52.021-05:00Fallen Kingdom: Living in the Anthropocene with Spinoza and Marx <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP76EIqH84MMmubwRV_eWy5sR1tpbNqiMtSZGDUtSJoy_v3DAQvGej50UIvmcnIBaIQtYLy1yEe8XQ5stpMfOWl7ihndR8qJmdPSI3i06tX7W4QJ6cfBrmHLfgj0B-koeVOPHYeepPOKZRFPAu6iW3lrBUzVF9Lf_kOciKN3EXdxuHzsCcW8s87A/s1080/13490873_10103095943042179_1853588228937325407_o.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP76EIqH84MMmubwRV_eWy5sR1tpbNqiMtSZGDUtSJoy_v3DAQvGej50UIvmcnIBaIQtYLy1yEe8XQ5stpMfOWl7ihndR8qJmdPSI3i06tX7W4QJ6cfBrmHLfgj0B-koeVOPHYeepPOKZRFPAu6iW3lrBUzVF9Lf_kOciKN3EXdxuHzsCcW8s87A/s320/13490873_10103095943042179_1853588228937325407_o.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Bento in the Anthropocene </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Humanism, and the debates for and against it, is less a perennial philosophical question, returned to again and again, than a moving target, one that reflects the different political, cultural, and economic situation of the moment. The humanism of the renaissance is not the same humanism that was at the center of debates about Stalin and Marx in the sixties. Moreover, I would argue that the question of the human now is profoundly transformed by the Anthropocene, by the awareness that human impact has had an ecological and geological impact on the planet, transforming it for the worst. This does not mean that old debates and discussions of different humanisms in the history of philosophy are relegated to the dustbin of history--just that they take on a different sense and meaning today. Spinoza and Marx's debates with the humanism of their time take on a different sense today. </p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">One of Spinoza's central critical statements is against the tendency, shared by rationalists and romantics, philosophers and theologians, to view ourselves as a "kingdom within a kingdom." As Spinoza writes, </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;">"Indeed they seem to conceive man in Nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of Nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself. And they attribute the cause of human impotence and inconstancy, not to the common power of Nature, but I know not what vice of human nature, which they therefore bewail, or laugh at or disdain, or (as usually happens) curse. And he who knows how to censure more eloquently and cunningly the weakness of the human mind is held to be godly."</p><p style="text-align: justify;">First, a few words about this passage, filled with the rhetorical fire of the scholia, Spinoza weaves together two forms of humanism, two ways of being a kingdom within a kingdom. The first is that of superiority, of humanity as something more than another thing in the world; the second is that of something less, of something fallen from its place in the natural world. These two ideas, humanity as more than nature and humanity as less, rational virtue and depravity, are two sides of the same coin. What would seem to be opposed in the various oppositions of rationalism to romanticism are closer than they would appear. This image of humanity is as much a philosophical position as it is a matter of everyday common sense. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2017/11/conscienta-sive-ideologia-spontaneity.html">It is a spontaneous ideology. </a>It stems from our basic tendency to be conscious of our desires and ignorant of the causes of things. These two things, desires and causes, become two different things, different kingdoms, one governed by causes and the other by our supposed free will. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">It is primarily as an ideology, an inadequate idea that Spinoza critiques this humanism. It is a way of thinking that makes it difficult to grasp not only what is true, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/07/what-does-it-mean-to-be-materialist.html">that we are part of nature</a>, but most beneficial. It is only by understanding ourselves as part of nature, as determined like all other things, that we can actively change and improve our condition, rather than alternatively celebrate and bemoan it,<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2019/09/modes-of-materialism-spinoza-and-marx.html"> by seeing ourselves as part of nature we can transform our nature. </a></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikuqpZssAy_8qLyvrGuh0zKE0eCIBT-515V7Aq3I-LCvTukiNt8DuJsgn0lndfu_J4fZFQZPolK7ojnCdTVtc3BFm4TIgXNXiFHA0bUqOsvCAQkfJSk1INpIyFdvO-xd-P0701c6uQuQkvLWJJE4stWGDduNZgHTdAYicVHUONybkwEdRmHMdIvQ/s1440/71638856_10106215255085839_416141026281914368_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1440" data-original-width="1440" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikuqpZssAy_8qLyvrGuh0zKE0eCIBT-515V7Aq3I-LCvTukiNt8DuJsgn0lndfu_J4fZFQZPolK7ojnCdTVtc3BFm4TIgXNXiFHA0bUqOsvCAQkfJSk1INpIyFdvO-xd-P0701c6uQuQkvLWJJE4stWGDduNZgHTdAYicVHUONybkwEdRmHMdIvQ/s320/71638856_10106215255085839_416141026281914368_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/03/two-great-tastes-part-two-introduction.html">As Franck Fischbach has demonstrated</a>, the idea that we are part of nature, and, with it, the notion that it is by seeing ourselves as part of nature that we can increase our capacity to act on it, is a fundamental point shared by Spinoza and Marx. Moreover, as Fischbach also argues, this idea takes on a particular valence in Marx, as Marx often refers to "man's inorganic nature." This idea appears first in the <i>1844 Manuscripts </i>but continues up through <i>Capital. </i>It is in the latter that we get the formulation "...nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, which he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible." I assume the second part refers to the divine image of man, and, if one wanted to continue the Marx/Spinoza connections, this could be considered Marx's criticism of the anthropocentric universe and the anthropomorphic god. Marx's overall emphasis, however, is on the way in which the history of humanity is constantly adding organs to itself, transforming the limitations and shape of the human body. We add to our own feet the wheels of the railroad, to our own ears the power of the telegraph, and, all in in all, to our own mind, the power of the general intellect. To quote Marx, </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #444444;">"</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are the products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge objectified [vergegenständlichte Wissenskraft]. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect."</span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We could add that in capitalism this process of extension of our inorganic body, as tools and machines extend our capacities and actions, is coupled with its opposite, with as Marx also says in the <i>Grundrisse </i>the reduction of human beings, of human labor, to conscious organs of the machine. The formation of industry is both an increase of our capacities, our ability to see, hear, move, and act, and, in current conditions, a reduction of our capacities. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2018/08/conscious-organs-toward-and.html">That is a matter for another discussion. </a></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I would like to tie Marx and Spinoza's criticism together, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2014/07/men-without-qualities-spinoza-marx.html">not by stressing their shared ontology or anthropology</a>, but by instead arguing for the historical intertwining of these two processes, the tendency to see ourselves as a kingdom within a kingdom and the tendency to transform nature and our natural existence. I would say that it is precisely because we extend our capacities beyond our body and mind that we are able to see ourselves, to misrecognize ourselves as kingdom within kingdoms. In other words, it is through our transformation of nature that we are able to see ourselves as separate from nature. We live a dual lives, in our conception of ourselves we see ourselves as something distinct from nature, as a unique being, but in our practical lives, we endlessly act on and transform nature. The famous two cultures, science and the humanities, is as much an anthropological division as anything else, a division between our two sides--one that transcends nature materially, producing a world outside of its rhythms and another that transforms nature conceptually, producing an understanding of ourselves as something apart from it.</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I know that this is not necessarily a shocking point, but I still think that it is worth pausing over all of the technological transformation and devices that make it possible for us to remove ourselves from natural limitations, cycles, and events. Electric lights make me indifferent to the cycle of day and night, heat and cooling make me indifferent to the seasons, and, now thanks to containerization and shipping, I am unaffected by the climates and conditions that dictate and determine the seasons of food production. I am able to see myself as a kingdom within a kingdom because humanity in general has transformed its inorganic body. Nature still has its effects, the occasional storm that disrupts power or snow day that shuts down a city, but for the most part humanity, especially those within the elite in the global north, live in an artificial kingdom untouched by nature, as a kingdom within a kingdom. </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This transformation has its effects on nature as well as society. In part we could call the Anthropocene as the period in which our transformation of nature begins to have its unintended effects. It turns out that make nature the background of our little human kingdom entails burning a great deal of fossil fuels, among other transformations, and the end result is a different, more volatile and active nature. It is thus harder and harder to see oneself as a kingdom within a kingdom as heatwaves take hold of entire regions, intense storms become more and more frequent, and <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/01/despair-and-indignation-inevitable.html">even the air we breathe is filled with viruses that did not exist earlier. </a> The nature we are a part of, that our kingdom collapses into, is not the nature that we left, it is one thoroughly transformed by industry and technology. It is going to be harder and harder to see ourselves as a kingdom within a kingdom. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2016/11/nexus-rerum-spinoza-and-marx-again.html">Spinoza and Marx would both remind us, however, that old illusions die hard,</a> a change of circumstances does not entail a change of conception, especially when this idea, of humanity as a kingdom within a kingdom, is how we are governed and ruled. </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Since I illustrated this with pictures of Bento on our walks. I will tell a brief anecdote that is part a recounting of the initial provocation that became this piece. Walking Bento is a big part of my life, and a bigger part of the summer, where the walks become an excuse to explore local trails and parks. </span></span><span style="background-color: white;">I used to only think about nature before going on walks by checking the temperature and seeing if I needed a raincoat or sunblock. This summer has been different, an</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"> abnormally wet June and July has made so that I have to plan our walks around flash flood warnings that threaten the local rivers while also avoiding the beaches that have been contaminated due to storm runoffs</span><span style="background-color: white;">. The warmer summers also mean that ponds are now contaminated with toxic algae blooms that used to be foreign to this state. It is not just travel to such places as Greece, beset by forest fires, or Spain, experiencing record high temperatures, that has been changed, but the simple act of walking the dog has been transformed as well. I find myself having to think about nature in a way that I did not before, being aware of risks that previously did not exist or at least where marginal. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">The idea of nature as the background noise of our artificial lives is transforming, being replaced with something that is harder to ignore. The question is, will we recognize this, change ourselves and our understanding, or will we go on living in our kingdom even as it collapses around us. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4_zdjLvWrftJKRerKEgRZIol8D84k9D1oBE4xgKRurrsI5S67MK_3qKNLUIuTIK2qmqn_zf7J_421dU92LNgOyqUhoJo-rlXmJvkmM9D41jcOefXO0_hdzD0gDPOSVyUGdwqOYtRmeEEJOucE2QWeF2Q4wBcttZKGQttyX3a_BxAPP7rJLRKtAA/s4032/IMG-1501.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4_zdjLvWrftJKRerKEgRZIol8D84k9D1oBE4xgKRurrsI5S67MK_3qKNLUIuTIK2qmqn_zf7J_421dU92LNgOyqUhoJo-rlXmJvkmM9D41jcOefXO0_hdzD0gDPOSVyUGdwqOYtRmeEEJOucE2QWeF2Q4wBcttZKGQttyX3a_BxAPP7rJLRKtAA/s320/IMG-1501.jpg" width="240" /></a></div></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-5687737400795151382023-07-25T11:12:00.011-04:002023-07-25T20:53:36.394-04:00A Useful Tool: Trolling History <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwhnM7HS9D4BY817lKlT6boNu18BGZVISbaidhar9_dXliMb7Z3Qi4CrRGAGikUtRfAY0SC30agyrOMkj7bsYq5_w5CVg37vVYzwxxc9zFIfyrWW7oDmuta-U6SgareDyQxquDZ050CLyQL3eqEFZwrpV82PwXr68oEQxhW20pfnmLxCcUuj_OOw/s1406/Screen%20Shot%202023-07-25%20at%2010.36.14%20AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="582" data-original-width="1406" height="132" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwhnM7HS9D4BY817lKlT6boNu18BGZVISbaidhar9_dXliMb7Z3Qi4CrRGAGikUtRfAY0SC30agyrOMkj7bsYq5_w5CVg37vVYzwxxc9zFIfyrWW7oDmuta-U6SgareDyQxquDZ050CLyQL3eqEFZwrpV82PwXr68oEQxhW20pfnmLxCcUuj_OOw/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-07-25%20at%2010.36.14%20AM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Troll is a fairly entertaining movie (but that is not what this post is about)</div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/01/everybody-is-troll-to-somebody-on-chris.html">To repeat something I have said before, </a>if, as it has often been claimed, philosophy begins with Socrates then it also begins with its particular antagonism, its particular anti-philosophy in the sophist and sophistry. It seems to me that if one wanted to read the history of philosophy in this way, with a founding event and founding antagonism, then one might want to consider who is our anti-philosopher today, who is the contemporary equivalent of the sophist? The answer would seem to have to be the troll. </p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;">This is my preamble to what is now becoming an ongoing discussion of <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/05/florida-man-war-against-higher-education.html">Florida's vanguard fight against knowledge and reason</a>; or more to the point, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/06/florida-man-part-ii-what-is-so-critical.html">destruction of knowledge and truth in order to preserve whiteness. </a> As it was revealed recently, the new curriculum of black history in Florida teaches middle schoolers that <span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/21/us/desantis-florida-black-history-standards.html">“slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”</a> There is so much to unpack about this claim, as they say in grad school. First, there is the assumption that the people captured from Africa had no skills, no knowledge, no history, nothing but their bodies and skin. Such a claim not only follows from the mythology of a Dark Continent, outside of civilization and history, it confuses an effect from a cause. The people who became slaves were stripped of their knowledge, culture, and social relations. What <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674986909">Orlando Patterson</a> calls a social death was also the reduction of a person to pure labor power, to a capacity to work and nothing else, an animate tool, as <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2016/10/philosophy-at-work-few-notes-on-agamben.html">Aristotle put it</a>. Second, as the architects of this change doubled down on this claim, since that is what trolls do, providing a list of individuals who gained "valuable job skills" during their "unpaid internship" on a plantation, they provided a list of mostly false claims, listing <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article277595898.html">individuals who were never enslaved, or, in the case of Booker T. Washington, learned literacy and other skills after their emancipation. </a>This "feel good" story about slavery is, like so many feel good stories about history, just not true. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Of course there might be a case, or even a few, of people who learned a valuable skill during slavery--it could have happened. That does not defend the claim, or, more importantly does not defend its inclusion in a curriculum. It is, I would argue, an example of exception trolling, in which an isolated case or incident is used to obscure or confuse a general or structural tendency. Focusing on these isolated or unique cases, which often appeal to an anecdotal way of thinking that is predominant in our culture, is used to obscure what is generally the case. I would argue that part of gaining knowledge, part of thinking, is understanding the difference between an exception and a rule. Once, when I was in sixth grade, I think, I had the job of feeding the school's snake, a python or boa constrictor. I dropped the live rat in the tank with the snake, watched the snake coil and strike, and saw the rat bite the snake in the eye, blood spurting everywhere, eventually killing it. (<a href="https://www.snakesforpets.com/pros-and-cons-of-feeding-live-rodents-to-snakes/">This is probably why feeding live animals to snakes is no longer recommended. Not only is it cruel; It is also potential risky</a>). This happened, I saw it with my own eyes, but I would still say that snakes kill and eat rats, and not the other way around. Exceptions exist as do rules, and the former does not negate the latter. Exception trolling is a persistent strategy of trolling, in which exceptions are made to obscure or conceal rules.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">I should say, as something of an aside, that this exception trolling has one of its conditions the transformation of all knowledge into discrete bits of information, facts, that can be found, cited and circulated independent of context, conditions, and larger implications. Joseph Vogl's book <i><a href="https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=capital-and-ressentiment-a-short-theory-of-the-present--9781509551811">Capitalism and Ressentiment </a></i>does an interesting job of charting the history of the current regime of contextless and thoughtless information, but that is for another time. (I just finished a review of that book.) In this reduction of all knowledge to isolated facts and bits of information any discussion of meaning or significance of this or that fact, its place within history or a system of values is impossible. As the clip below makes clear, anyone arguing against the claim that slaves learned skills is either an idiot or lying. Meaning, significance, and importance disappear in the absolute binary of facts. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2015/03/exceptions-that-prove-rules-lordon-and.html">One exception is all that it takes to disprove any claim about systemic discrimination, exploitation, or marginalization.</a> This is why the exception troll has a well stocked set of links and tabs of these exceptions, "reverse racism," false claims of sexual harassment, happy slaves, etc., It is not facts and logic, as is often claimed, but the logic of the (singular and isolated) fact. </p><p style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/48ilhuIjrJA" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p><p style="text-align: justify;">This raises the question, what goal does this trolling serve? I think that trolling has to be understood as not just a failure to think, to distinguish exceptions from rules, but as itself the articulation of its own logic. In other words, trolling must be <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/03/althusser-effects-philosophical.html">read symptomatically</a>. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/09/reading-menu-symptomatically-on.html">It is necessary to see what is being said in what is not being said, or what is not being said by being said. </a>In some sense these remarks about the virtues of slavery, and, if you watch the clip above, the holocaust could be understood as the culmination of "<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2013/08/negative-solidarity-towards-definition.html">negative solidarity</a>." Even the slave, the denizen of the concentration camp, cannot complain, they are gaining valuable job training, they just have to make themselves useful and everything will turn out fine. There is nothing to criticize, nothing to complain about. (I see culmination because I cannot imagine something worse than someone saying "slavery was not that bad, they were gaining job skills," but what I can imagine and what monstrosities history can produce are two different things). As such it also can be considered the culmination of "<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2020/05/right-workerism-or-class-struggle-in.html">right workerism."</a> Work is the ultimate meaning and justification of existence, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2017/03/sidekick-no-more-horkheimer-on-work.html">those who do not work not only do not eat</a>, but do not have a right to exist. The arguments about slavery and the holocaust are not just horrible distortions of a horrible past, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2017/05/the-original-sin-of-accumulation-trying.html">they are alibis for a darker future.</a> One in which the worst possible jobs, or unpaid internships, are seen as building valuable skills, or, if there are no skills involved, developing a solid work ethic. Anyone who praises slavery is preparing for you to become a slave. </p>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-26075773622520268152023-07-16T12:16:00.003-04:002023-07-16T20:49:14.309-04:00Who Can Criticize Capitalism: Or, When Can We Eat Salmon Mayonnaise? <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM3z1jpvW9-i2pII4lExi6_EvrszXESJ_kiItzCLXGv2lbVC4_tY2u6E3syEUnvyw9GAmETv-XnEywp8QinO3P9AnuxwAKMkGL118MDA_PqJvh--YP_npFPzmSBJRUhI5t39ea2SC1F-ZNy8SwSZBzKO8MssMkYJ8uT23yj3QSJpPMJFIBmaO4Jg/s2104/Screen%20Shot%202023-07-16%20at%208.45.22%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2104" data-original-width="2032" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM3z1jpvW9-i2pII4lExi6_EvrszXESJ_kiItzCLXGv2lbVC4_tY2u6E3syEUnvyw9GAmETv-XnEywp8QinO3P9AnuxwAKMkGL118MDA_PqJvh--YP_npFPzmSBJRUhI5t39ea2SC1F-ZNy8SwSZBzKO8MssMkYJ8uT23yj3QSJpPMJFIBmaO4Jg/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-07-16%20at%208.45.22%20PM.png" width="309" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Given that Bob Iger is in the news (and maybe the executive named below)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I thought that I would use this image from the <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/kipw/sets/72157594477322717/">Disney Strike of 1941</a></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="text-align: justify;">One of the strange contradictions of living in a country where union membership is so low, something like six percent in the private sector, is that some of the professions that we associate with fame and fortune are unionized; major league baseball, NFL, and actors and writers for Hollywood all have unions. This combined with the fact that there is very little labor reporting in this country means that most people will no more about strikes of the (supposedly) and famous than any other labor actions--an entirely different sense of labor aristocracy. </p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">So when <a href="https://youtube.com/shorts/EcdvuV81F_M?feature=share">Ron Perlman went viral with a video</a> responding to a statement by an (unnamed) studio executive that the strike would come to end when writers and actors started losing their houses and running out of money, it was only to be expected that there was a response pointing out how much money Perlman makes, or actually, his net worth (which is not the same thing). I should say that I do not know anything about Perlman's politics, aside from this line and that he has a cameo as himself in Ken Loaches <i>Bread and Roses</i>. That is beside the point. I shared the first clip and mocked the second post because I believe in speaking out about exploitation and mocking bootlickers online. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEzFV3IkWr9KHikm3zBS8WG1B6s0cigPnDjMk3vHE7KjVnW4u2pelglGxQ5mmoLQfqGkq5zHnIoetAWd3SstUcHaHnGhpy4V9X_De4PlauFbTFc7zdH9QiQh1yOQyxZZvrJfgjfr4i3sIasZpRg3nymL_3921yzKeeovp8KicaNjwbRhZc86Exzw/s2374/Screen%20Shot%202023-07-16%20at%2011.39.06%20AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2374" data-original-width="2278" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEzFV3IkWr9KHikm3zBS8WG1B6s0cigPnDjMk3vHE7KjVnW4u2pelglGxQ5mmoLQfqGkq5zHnIoetAWd3SstUcHaHnGhpy4V9X_De4PlauFbTFc7zdH9QiQh1yOQyxZZvrJfgjfr4i3sIasZpRg3nymL_3921yzKeeovp8KicaNjwbRhZc86Exzw/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-07-16%20at%2011.39.06%20AM.png" width="307" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;">A lot can be said about this, and has been said. First, there is the assumption, almost axiomatic, that people should only struggle for their own personal interests. That only racialized groups should care about racism, women about feminism, LGBTQ people about homophobia and transphobia, and so on. Politics is nothing other than a series of interest groups clamoring for their individualized interests. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/05/one-amendment-to-rule-them-all-notes.html">Such a conception of politics is not only anti-social it is ultimately anti-political. </a>What it excludes, I would argue without sounding too Badiouian, is the very idea of a principle, of an idea, such as justice, universality, or equality, the thing which is the very matter of politics.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">However, there is another all too common aspect of this criticism, which I imagine that we will hear more of as actors and celebrities join picket lines. The claim that every wealthy, or well off, person who criticizes exploitation in capitalism is a hypocrite, biting the hand that has fed them so well, is mirrored by the opposite claim, that every poor or less well off person criticizing capitalism is a bitter and sore loser. Of course this second aspect of the criticism is a consequence of the first: it is because all of politics, all of life, has been reduced to individuals striving to maximize their own interest than any criticism of capital is suspect. The wealthy cannot criticize capitalism because it has served them so well and the poor cannot criticize it because it has failed to, or, more to the point, because they have failed it. The end result is that no one can criticize capitalism.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">I am reminded of one of the jokes Freud recounts in <i>Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. </i></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">An impoverished individual borrowed 25 florins from a prosperous acquaintance, with many </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">asseverations of his necessitous circumstances. The very same day his benefactor met him again in a </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">restaurant with a plate of salmon mayonnaise in front of him. The benefactor reproached him: "What? You </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">borrow money from me and then order yourself salmon mayonnaise? Is that what you’ve used my money </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">for?" "I don’t understand you", replied the object of the attack; "if I haven’t any money I can’t eat salmon </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">mayonnaise, and if I have some money I mustn’t eat salmon mayonnaise. Well, then, when am I to eat </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">salmon mayonnaise?"'</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Like the salmon mayonnaise in the story, which honestly sounds gross, the critique of capital becomes an impossible object. The wealthy should not do it because they have benefited from it and the poor should not because they have not. I will say by way of a conclusion that this reinforces my idea that when it comes to the critique of ideology Freud's discussion of jokes has more to offer than any metapsychological theory of human nature or humanity. Ideology, like the unconscious, does not know contradictions. Its ultimate logical model is that of the borrowed kettle, multiple and contradictory arguments for the same thing, in this case, for the idea that no one, rich or poor, employed or unemployed, should criticize capitalism. </p>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-32305565330739633202023-07-11T08:12:00.006-04:002023-07-11T09:44:43.302-04:00Which Marx/Which Spinoza: On Althusser and Fischbach<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi64FZCkaZhc7bGOWwVPoaJc8r2WtTyZ2lNcvcQdc7mWMliiJqVvymuRL954IogFfQeNT_nWnePwCmFRoPVZSj8lcZG5Un6x1eI6m7RlBiCa0A3_AZ6l_luNQVJsnU8vD7igp8B4DtbV9vJ-RM0uHurpe3c5LJTp14mCBzBMTRpkB6frpmbHeR8ag/s1024/357711363_10109576363602429_5930544540863808256_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="736" data-original-width="1024" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi64FZCkaZhc7bGOWwVPoaJc8r2WtTyZ2lNcvcQdc7mWMliiJqVvymuRL954IogFfQeNT_nWnePwCmFRoPVZSj8lcZG5Un6x1eI6m7RlBiCa0A3_AZ6l_luNQVJsnU8vD7igp8B4DtbV9vJ-RM0uHurpe3c5LJTp14mCBzBMTRpkB6frpmbHeR8ag/s320/357711363_10109576363602429_5930544540863808256_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">How it started/how it is going</div><br /><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Louis Althusser is most known for his argument regarding an epistemic break between the young and mature Marx. According to Althusser the works of the eighteen forties, most significantly <i>The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844</i>, are burdened by a humanist and idealist conception of history that Marx inherited from Feuerbach and Hegel. In this conception capitalism alienates humanity from his or her productive essence. Marx breaks with this influence over the course of the eighteen fifties, eventually developing his own, anti-humanist and materialist philosophy in <i>Capital</i>. Marx broke with his focus on humanity and the human essence to focus on capitalism as a system of relations of exploitation. Althusser in part borrowed this notion of a break, a division between ideology and science, from Spinoza’s understanding of the division between the first and second kind of knowledge in the <i>Ethics</i>. Althusser equated the first kind of knowledge with ideology, with the imagination, and the second (and third), with science. That Althusser relied on Spinoza’s epistemology to drive a wedge between the young and the old Marx has, as its perhaps unstated corollary, that Spinoza is to be identified with the late Marx, with <i>Capital</i>.</div><p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><a name='more'></a></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The connection is not just Spinoza in general, but the <i>Ethics. </i>It is from the <i>Ethics </i>that Althusser would draw most of his central arguments, not just the epistemic break, but also <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2017/11/immanent-cause-between-reproduction-and.html">immanent causality</a> and the theory of <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2017/11/conscienta-sive-ideologia-spontaneity.html">ideology.</a> The Spinoza/Marx connection in Althusser is most of all a connection between the <i>Ethics </i>and <i>Capital, </i>those two completed works of maturity. Two recent works on Althusser and Spinoza have not so much questioned this connection, but complicated and expanded it. <span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop's <i><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/04/if-althusser-was-spinozist-on-juan.html">Althusser et Spinoza: Détours et Retours</a>, </i>cites an interview from 1966 in which Althusser states, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">"the </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">Tractatus Theologico-Politicus </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">is the </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">Capital </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">of Spinoza, because Spinoza is preoccupied above all with history and politics." This point is further developed in Jean Matthys' <i><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2023/05/the-spinoza-effect-on-matthys-althusser.html">Althusser Lecture de Spinoza </a>. </i>Matthys shows that the connection between Spinoza, Marx, and Althusser is the problem of reading. Spinoza reads scripture in order to reveal the hidden text of obedience, its politics; <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/09/reading-menu-symptomatically-on.html">Marx reads political economy in order to find the politics it necessarily cannot admit</a>; and Althusser reads Marx to find the philosophy that he never developed. This is not to discount the emphasis of the <i>Ethics </i>on Althusser's thought, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2011/03/still-anomalous-after-all-these-years.html">or to argue for some kind of break between the TTP and the </a><i><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2011/03/still-anomalous-after-all-these-years.html">Ethics</a>, </i>but to insist on not only different theoretical stakes and objects, such as the theory of reading, and as Matthys argues, a different idea of what it means to do theory, not a grandiose system but a specific intervention (<a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2014/08/dialectics-of-other-other-scene-on.html">I should add that this model of theory makes it easier to trace a direct connection to the conjunctural interventions of Balibar and Macherey</a>). </span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">I make this connection only to make a different suggestion, a very un-Althusserian one, as I have mentioned, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/06/production-and-labor-two-alienations.html">again</a> and <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/12/red-spinozism-ii-lordon-vs-fischbach.html">again</a> on <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/03/two-great-tastes-part-two-introduction.html">this blog,</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADTVvJ60ESs&t=17s">on social media</a>, to random people on the street, I recently translated Franck Fischbach's <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2007/05/spinoza-and-marx-two-great-tastes-that.html" style="font-style: italic;">La Production des hommes: Marx avec Spinoza</a>, now out in English as <i><a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-marx-with-spinoza.html">Marx With Spinoza: Production, Alienation, History</a>. </i> One of the many merits of this book is that it argues for a connection between Spinoza's <i>Ethics </i>and Marx's <i>Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. </i>In doing so it makes a case for a post or non-humanist reading of the <i>1844 Manuscripts. </i>In doing so he joins Gerard Granel and, more obliquely, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/01/looking-back-in-mirror-of-production.html">Deleuze and Guattari</a> in arguing for a nonhumanist reading of that text. I will say, as something as an aside, that one of the strange things about the argument about the humanism of the young Marx is that it is rarely contested; it is more or less accepted as either a good thing, Marx is a humanist, Yay!, or a bad, thing, Marx is a humanist, Boo!. In philosophy, where everything is a Kampfplatz, and nothing is settled once and for, it seems odd that this point has remained mostly uncontested.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">Fischbach does not directly contest this claim about the young Marx, but transforms it through the engagement with Spinoza. Fischbach's own particular strategy of reading is to use Spinoza as an agent, a developer, to bring to light the philosophical dimension of Marx's thought. Following this we can say that if for Spinoza the formulation of humanism is to treat man as a "kingdom within a kingdom," as something that breaks rather than confirms nature's laws, then Marx's assertion in the <i>1844 Manuscripts </i>that man is a part of nature is consistently Spinozist. To quote Marx,<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm">"</a></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm"><span style="text-indent: 1em;">Man</span><span style="text-indent: 1em;"> </span><em style="text-indent: 1em; word-spacing: 0.2em;">lives</em><span style="text-indent: 1em;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 1em;">on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature."</span></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: inherit;">As Fischbach writes, summing up this connection.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">"What exactly does this affirmation of man as a being of nature, as a part of nature, mean for Marx, because after all, he could or could not give these formulations a literal spinozist sense. It means first of all that man is “objective, natural, and sensuous” that is to say a finite mode amongst an infinity of other such modes. The determination of humanity as a objective being would be returned to by Marx again and again up to and including </span><i style="text-align: left;">Capital</i><span style="text-align: left;">, where he writes that, “the human being itself, considered as a pure existence of labor power, is a natural object, a thing, certainly living and conscious of itself, but a thing—and work properly speaking is a reification of this force.” Adopting the point of view according to which the human being is first of all a being in nature, a thing in the world, is exactly to adopt the spinozist point of view according to which humans must first be grasped as a finite mode: to start, as does Spinoza, from the double fact, to know that on one hand that “man thinks” and, on the other, that “we feel that a certain body is affected in many ways,” it being understood that these two traits are at the same level and of equal importance..."</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is not to say that this is a simple identity, humanity is nature, Marx is Spinoza. All of these strategies of the "sive" from Spinoza's Deus sive Natura to "man is nature" are transformations as much as they are identifications. If humanity is part of nature, then that also means that nature and history are not opposed but part of the same process of transformation. As Fischbach writes, </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">"What preserves Marx from a hypostasis of historicity is, as we have already seen, precisely his Spinozism. Because if there is a philosophy that does not know
the opposition between nature and history and which resists positing their separation, it is the philosophy of Spinoza. Not just because there is for Spinoza no real difference between nature and history, but also because with Spinoza it is difficult to even hope to understand history if one isolates it from the general order of nature. If the actors of history are certainly the peoples and states, the latter nonetheless are first and foremost made up of natural individuals, subject as such to natural necessity. If history is the history of states, and the history of a state is the history of its formation, its development, dissolution, and disappearance is made by internal dissensions and other seditions. In other words, there is for Spinoza in the <i>Political Treatise</i> a knowledge of nature that makes possible the understanding of history, a nature that makes history intelligible. History is made up of nothing other than the natural effort that human beings expend in order to create their collective power, to create the conditions that increase this power, and from the causes (equally natural) which contradict this effort and return human beings to their native impotence. We can therefore say, as Etienne Balibar argues, that with respect to Spinoza “nature…is nothing other than a new way of thinking about history, according to a method of rational exegesis that seeks to explain events by their causes.” Historical knowledge cannot be of a different order than natural knowledge for the reason that actors of history are themselves nothing other than things in nature, parts of nature."</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgKtc8lTsvbJqaBKJ_32AnNlnvGlGzaaLquT3qGH1MAIB7qKSv20rOa109kLzJnNbWQgzwXXROeJcHw2PIUwFitNs9rxRySkSlSE5ClKKzn3d7M25To7lcgHgXO_EzbfyvJIA1Vdfs0VyNcCf23emsMxKIv0hjibMaHbgik59jDMoFAVOwbHIFAw/s1336/Screen%20Shot%202023-06-28%20at%201.29.27%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1336" data-original-width="1194" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgKtc8lTsvbJqaBKJ_32AnNlnvGlGzaaLquT3qGH1MAIB7qKSv20rOa109kLzJnNbWQgzwXXROeJcHw2PIUwFitNs9rxRySkSlSE5ClKKzn3d7M25To7lcgHgXO_EzbfyvJIA1Vdfs0VyNcCf23emsMxKIv0hjibMaHbgik59jDMoFAVOwbHIFAw/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-06-28%20at%201.29.27%20PM.png" width="286" /></a></div><br /><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">Lastly, to add one more sive to the list, as the passage above indicates the relation of human beings to nature, of nature and history, is all because of another relation, equally important and equally overlooked, and that is humanity to society: humanity, that is society. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/07/what-does-it-mean-to-be-materialist.html">We are nature and historical beings because we are social beings.</a> Of course this sentence could be rewritten in multiple ways, we are social because we are natural (our needs met by society), or we historical because we are natural, and so on. Part of nature, part of history, part of society. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/12/red-spinozism-ii-lordon-vs-fischbach.html#more">This conception underlies one of Fischbach's most important theoretical interventions, a redefinition of alienation, not as the loss of the self, the subject in an object, but a reduction to subjectivity,</a></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">"This is why we interpret Marx’s concept of alienation not as a new version of a loss of the subject in the object, but as a radically new thought, of the loss of the essential and vital objects for an existence that is itself essentially objective and vital....Alienation is not therefore the loss of the subject in the object it is the loss of object for a being that is itself objective. But the loss of proper objects and the objectivity of its proper being is also the loss of all possible inscription of one’s activity in objectivity, it is the loss of all possible mastery of objectivity, as well as other effects: in brief, the becoming subject is essentially a reduction to impotence. The becoming subject or the subjectivation of humanity is thus inseparable according to Marx from what is absolutely indispensable for capitalism, the existence of a mass of “naked workers”—that is to say pure subjects possessors of a perfectly abstract capacity to work—individual agents of a purely subjective power of labor and constrained to sell its use to another to the same extent that they are totally dispossessed of the entirety of objective conditions (means and tools of production, matter to work on) to put to effective work their capacity to work."</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">This is one merit of rereading the <i>1844 Manuscripts </i>today, a new definition of alienation, one that is well suited to a world in which we are encouraged to see our existence as "kingdoms within a kingdom," separated from nature, history, and society, as our liberation and freedom. Fischbach shows how the reduction to pure subjectivity, a subject without nature, history, or society is subjection, not liberation. However, I would like to close with a different justification, that in the age of the collapse of the three ecologies, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2011/08/live-every-week-like-it-is-shark-week.html">to borrow Guattari's term</a>, natural, social, and psychic, we need to take up the problems of the <i>1844 Manuscripts </i>in a nonhumanist way, to rethink what it means to be part of nature, history, and society. This is a different sort of theoretical intervention than what Althusser called for, more philosophical, even metaphysical. </span></div></div>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31783628.post-38309426500211861482023-07-06T07:45:00.002-04:002023-07-06T09:17:13.453-04:00The Franchise Lives On: Scream and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBZFLR6aN5QvGtOKoKeHFYaFZUy7gvuca6OAhNXUCvdKP5-PvwQdENZ4ivsBXWGNE5SDYYI7gJBHemfzPJrh4b3SR1mOd11Lm37xot87a4sIze9Asn0IlpPxpP7N15xoYNu1ob430zVldw-FAamcEI0s6o2HeV63zPGkB7mlGkvbcDQwJO3dRjdg/s992/Screen%20Shot%202023-07-06%20at%207.48.33%20AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="710" data-original-width="992" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBZFLR6aN5QvGtOKoKeHFYaFZUy7gvuca6OAhNXUCvdKP5-PvwQdENZ4ivsBXWGNE5SDYYI7gJBHemfzPJrh4b3SR1mOd11Lm37xot87a4sIze9Asn0IlpPxpP7N15xoYNu1ob430zVldw-FAamcEI0s6o2HeV63zPGkB7mlGkvbcDQwJO3dRjdg/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-07-06%20at%207.48.33%20AM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">I will begin with a story. When I was in graduate school I returned to <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2019/03/boiling-frogbooks-hampshire-past-and.html">Hampshire</a> twice to teach as part of the Jan Plan. The college was interested in elevating its January term, which up until then had been a free for all of student led courses. I was looking to get out of Binghamton for a few weeks. Even in the bitter cold of January, Amherst has more to offer than Broome County. I saw the first <i>Scream </i>during one of those Januarys, and the next January I taught it.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: justify;">My course was meant to be fun. We read some of Lawrence Grossberg's <i><a href="https://archive.org/details/wegottagetoutoft0000gros">We Gotta Get Out of this Place</a>, </i>some of Steven Shaviro's <i><a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-cinematic-body">The Cinematic Body</a>, </i>some Jameson, and probably some of <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691166292/men-women-and-chain-saws"><i>Men, Women, and Chainsaws </i>(</a>Basically books that I thought were cool). My approach to <i>Scream </i>was ambitious. I assigned some of Paolo Virno's writings on opportunism and cynicism as the prevailing attitudes of modern life, and tried to make a connection, albeit an uncertain one, between his description of cynicism and the self aware nature of <i>Scream. </i>The basis of this connection is the way in which the cynic is aware of both the arbitrary and binding nature of nature of certain rules, norms, and protocols. As Virno writes:</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"The cynic recognizes, in the particular context in which he operates, the predominate role played by certain epistemological premises and the simultaneous absence of real equivalences. To prevent disillusion, he forgoes any aspiration to dialogic and transparent communication. He renounces from the beginning the search for an intersubjective foundation for his practice and for a shared criterion of moral value … The decline of the principle of equivalence, a principle intimately connected to commerce and exchange, can be seen in the cynic’s behaviour, in his impatient abandon of the demand for equality. He entrusts his own affirmation of self to the multiplication and fluidification of hierarchies and unequal distributions that the unexpected centrality of knowledge in production seems to imply."</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This awareness of rules seemed to apply to the self aware nature of the <i>Scream </i>films which attempt to both recognize the conventions of the slasher film, "there are rules for surviving a horror movie," and keep those conventions in place as the basis for the film. (It is worth noting that the <i>Scream </i>films never offer a justification for a convention, never goes the route of later films, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2012/04/choose-your-apocalypse-cabin-in-woods.html">like <i>Cabin in the Woods </i>that ground the conventions of one genre by explaining them by way of another</a>, in this case cosmic horror/government conspiracy). The <i>Scream </i>films both acknowledge the cliched nature of the rules while simultaneously using them as rules, saying that "You will be right back" is a sure guarantee that you won't, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2015/08/liminal-for-life-on-it-follows.html">engaging in sexual activity is a death sentence. </a>(it demands both a knowing wink and a terrified scream).</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This put the <i>Scream </i>films in a difficult position, of constantly commenting on while utilizing the conventions of slasher films, a task made more difficult by the fact that that specific sub genre of horror is subject to its own cycles of exhaustion and renewal. The recent <i>Scream</i> films, the one just called <i>Scream</i> and the recent sequel, that resumes the sequence with the number VI, have offered their own meta-commentary on the genre, and the current state of the culture industry. Scream coined the term "requel,"</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> a sequel that is also a reset or reboot of the series. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HB68-c8GAiA" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Usually such requels attempt to right a series which has lost its way, or its audience.The requel brings back a major character or original director as an attempt to restore continuity and trust. A list of such requels includes the recent Halloween films with Jamie Lee Curtis, <i><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2020/02/when-sequels-become-self-aware-on.html">Terminator: Dark Fate</a>, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/06/two-versions-of-extinction-prehistoric.html">Jurassic World: Dominion</a>, </i>and <i><a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2012/06/corporate-imaginations-in-praise-of.html">Prometheus</a></i>. All films that reboot and restore a series. It could be argued, however, that the <i>Scream</i> films have never needed such a reset. The original cast, Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette, have been in all of the films, and there has been no diversion from the formula that needed correction just the exhaustion brought about by repetition. This tension between the concept and the film is resolved in <i>Scream (5) </i> by having <i>The Stab </i>series, the films within the film, lose sight of the slasher premise of the earlier films. The reference here seems to be to such series wrecking deviations as the Friday the Thirteenth in space, <i>Jason X </i>and the convoluted mythos of the later <i>Halloween </i>films. <i>Scream </i>is oddly a better work of film criticism than a film. The film is fine, for what it is, but it follows its own predictable set of rules, rules not mentioned, opening with a menacing phone call and a killing, and ending with a revelation of who is wearing the Ghost Face mask this time and why. The better the films get at commenting on the unwritten rules of the culture industry the more glaring there own unwritten rules stand out. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">The latest installment, <i>Scream VI </i>continues this odd trajectory in which the commentary and plot increasingly diverge. The commentary now focuses on the idea that the killers are building a franchise. A franchise has its own rules, most importantly legacy characters can now be killed off in order to further the franchise. The intellectual property is the real main character. Such a description fits such films as <i>The Force Awakens </i>and <i>The Last Jedi, </i>which bring back Han Solo and Luke Skywalker only to kill them off so that the franchise could live on. Once again this is a point of criticism that does not exactly describe the latest <i>Scream </i>film. David Arquette's Dewey character was killed in <i>Scream (5)</i>; Courtney Cox's Gail Weathers character is attacked but seems to survive this film, and Neve Campbell's Sydney character does not even appear in the latest installment, <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/08/neve-campbell-says-her-scream-6-pay-wouldnt-be-an-issue-if-i-were-a-man">but that is because they did not offer her enough money. </a></p><p style="text-align: justify;">The tension between intellectual property and actor is one of the defining characteristics of modern filmmaking. It is a conflict between an old world of marketing movies based on bankable stars and a new world of carefully managed franchises, and in this interregnum CGI monsters are born. This can be seen in the MCU, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2019/04/becoming-spider-man-deleuze-and.html">which as much as it hides actors behind interchangeable digital masks</a>, putting out three different Spider-Men, three Hulks, and countless Batmen, still has to make an entire film about the death of one of its stars, Chadwick Boseman, and struggles to draw audiences after the departure of Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2022/10/the-end-narrative-incompleteness-in-age.html">Although that last point has to do with another tension, the tension between serial repetition and narrative closure</a>. To cite the MCU once again, <i>Avengers: Endgame </i>felt like an end to a story spanning dozens of films, and when the story comes to an end people are not immediately ready to just jump back in. </p><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eQfMbSe7F2g" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The recent <i>Indiana Jones </i>movies are defined between both of these tensions, between actor and property, brand repetition and narrative closure. There is no small bit of irony to the second tension. At the level of structure the films revival an older serial form, that of Saturday adventure serials that is completely at home in the modern serialization of intellectual property. One gets the impression in watching the films that they could have made a ton of these movies, there are always new treasures to find <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2017/08/pop-nazi-history-and-repetition.html">and Nazis to punc</a>h. Residual meets the emergent, old serials meet the serial form of the sequel. The moment to do that has passed, however, and now the recent films struggle with Harrison Ford, the aging bankable star beneath the IP hat, and <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2008/05/indiana-jones-versus-general-intellect.html">the sense that the last film ended</a> with the closest thing to a happily ever after the series offered--Indy and Marion are married and Shia LeBeouf does not put on the hat. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny </i>resolves the first issue, that of Ford's age, with an extended opening sequence set at the end of World War II made possible by the combination of old film stock and modern AI imaging. What we get is not so much a young Harrison Ford, <a href="http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2015/09/genysis-of-new-film-form-reflections.html">but at least a reminder that he existed</a>, somehow his charm eludes CGI reproduction. The opening sequence devolves into the weightless cartoon world of so much modern digital effects. With respect to the later we learn that Shia LeBeouf's Mutt died in Vietnam and the grief of his loss destroyed Indy's marriage. All of this means that he is off an another adventure again with a young god daughter, played by a (hopefully more bankable) Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The film follows the rules of an Indiana Jones film. There are chases, horse chases, car chases, plane chases, some version of creepy crawly creatures, this time eels, and ancient booby traps, all of which are punctuated by jokes about how old Harrison Ford is this time out. The film is slightly better than the last, but, in the final scene, when Marion and Indy are not only reunited but they repeat there "where doesn't it hurt" flirtation from the first film, you get the sense that the directors are searching for their own dial of destiny, a device that could turn back time and make a half dozen Indiana Jones films between nineteen eighty and eighty nine, back when the IP was fresh and Ford was bankable. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As I began this piece with my own bit of nostalgia. In the nineties, I tried to make a connection between the Scream film's self aware commentary on the rules of its genre and Virno description of the cynic as the prevailing attitude of postmodernism. I remember saying to the class, "we see these films because we are aware of the rules, the cliches, but we still want to enjoy them." I would add now that in the age of Intellectual Property we are aware that all of these films are made to build, and capitalize on the brand, the IP, but we want to pretend that they are driven by something else, by something more compelling. The task of modern filmmaking, of the contemporary culture industry, is to make what is driven by market forces feel like it is made for our enjoyment. This task appears to be harder to pull off than digitally deaging an old movie star. </div>unemployed negativityhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01251742512967070290noreply@blogger.com0