Unemployed Negativity

Finite Dialectics: Hegel in Balibar's Citoyen Sujet

2012-01-15T00:15:00.000-05:00

As I have noted elsewhere, Balibar includes Hegel in his list of transindividual thinkers, but as such he is something of an exception to the list that also encompasses Spinoza, Marx, and Freud. The latter three are foundational to Balibar’s project, appearing as early as Lire le Capital, albeit some between the lines, and have been the subject of books and essays. Hegel has always been an outlier in this sequence, the enemy of Althusser’s early project and only occasionally showing up in later works. This has changed a bit as of late.

Citoyen Sujet et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique, Balibar’s latest contains two essays on Hegel, on the Phenomenology of Spirit specifically. Both of these essays are dedicated to the transindividual dimension of Hegel’s thought, and a centered around a reading of a particular phrasing of this relation. .

The first is dedicated to Hegel’s formulation of “Ich das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist,” a sentence that could be translated as I that is a we and we that is I. Balibar is interested in the particular grammar of this formulation, and its repetition; it is a repetition of other formulations, such as Ich=Ich and the history of the first person, and is repeated throughout the Phenomenology. It is a formulation of Spirit, of transindividual recognition. Balibar’s second essay is also dedicated to a particular formulation in Hegel’s text, one that is repeated. This formulation “is the work of all and each,” (“das Tun aller and Jeder”), which is also a formulation of Spirit considered in its active dimension. As with the first formulation, its particular repetition throughout the Phenomenology is one of a transformation, each repetition in the different figures of Spirit is an approximation of this ideal.

What is interesting is how these two different formulations intersect. The first frames spirit in terms of the universal, in the recognition of the individual in the universal and vice versa, while the second does so in terms of the common, in the work of the community. The contradiction between universality and community, or the common, defines each historical moment in the history of spirit. Balibar argues that it negates and preserves the contradiction of certainty and truth that drives the first section of the Phenomenology, moving the epistemological conflict over knowledge into a conflict over the nature of social belonging itself.

Balibar draws a few interesting, and heterodox conclusions from this relation. First, he says every historical moment as caught in this conflict. There is no universal of the universal, no meta-language of social belonging itself. Which is why this very problem cannot be stated as such, in some kind of logical formulation, but must be given through the well known historical moments that color the dialectic of spirit, Antigone’s conflict, the Roman World, the Enlightenment, the Terror, etc. Second, there is a tragic dimension to this conflict, the more a given historical moment sees itself as universal, expressing everything in the language of duty to the city, law, reason, etc., the more it comes into conflict with itself, with its unstated commonality. It turns out that there is an irony to every community. Balibar even goes so far to argue that this makes the Phenomenology one of the grand enterprises of ideology critique: it recognizes the constitutive misrecognition of every society of every historical moment, which grasps itself as absolute.

About that absolute, Balibar points out that Absolute knowledge is not given in the form of a community, there is no community of sages. It is because of this, because of the form of absolute knowledge provided without content, that there has been so much confusion and debate over the “end of history,” which would be a community of the universal.

Balibar’s reading of Hegel is strikingly similar to Jameson’s on at least points. First, and without any real reference to Mao, there is the idea of the dialectic itself dividing into two, into a dialectic of recognition and a dialectic of action, two dialectics that never quite match up in the relation of the universal to the common. Second, because of this division, they both argue for a Hegel without an absolute, a Hegel of finitude but not the finitude of death, of Kojève’s Heideggerian struggle, but of the finitude of every social formation, or ideology. It is a Hegel for post-Hegelian times, I will leave the Hegelians (or Zizek’s forthcoming magnum opus) to explain why this is not Hegel at all.

In the meantime here is a review I wrote of the translation of Macherey’s Hegel or Spinoza.

Futures Past: Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol and Hugo

2012-01-03T00:01:00.000-05:00

Two quick capsule reviews/analyses:

The Mission: Impossible films come closest to realizing the ideal of a film franchise. They are barely sequels, with minimal narrative threads connecting them, and cannot even be considered remakes or reboots. They are the same basic formula, international intrigue and high tech gadgetry, offered to a series of different directors, DePalma, Woo, Abrams, and now Bird, who become regional managers, adding their own panache and style to the central brand.

The most recent film models itself after a James Bond thriller, complete with neo-Cold War tensions, and a mad man seeking to destroy the world in a nuclear baptism (how many times have we seen this before?). In order to stop this plot the men (and woman) pursue this villan across the world, from Moscow to Dubai and India. The film lacks the battle of wits and witty banter that took place between Bond and the nemesis of the moment, not to mention the romantic subplot. This is perhaps due to Tom Cruise, the franchise's only constant feature, and persistent handicap; he lacks the personality of even the worst Bond and overcompensates by running and straining earnestly. He is less a human being than a gadget, competent but devoid of character, like something designed by Apple. The film just follows him from high strung set piece to high strung set piece. It is as if it wants to keep him or us exhausted.

What is striking about the latest film, however, is how much the threat of nuclear armageddon functions as a kind of "screen memory," concealing a deeper fear. In the Bond films the exotic locales, Japan, Haiti, Monaco, were either the playgrounds of Europe, or places off of the beaten path, the perfect locale for a hidden fortress. In Ghost Protocol, the fourth Mission: Impossible film, however, a similar path of exotic locales is traced, but what is striking is how they begin to suggest another globe, one outside of American (or European) influence. Dubai is presented as the home to the tallest skyscraper, a financial and business center in its own right, and India is shown to have its own TV production, its own media moguls. Combine this with a second narrative element from the film, the Ghost Protocol of the film's title, which separates the secret agents from American support and technology, and we get the film's true nightmare. It is nightmare of American decline, of a world centered on other nations. It is film of an empire in decline, "a cinema of hegemony unraveling." What is perhaps curious about this last point is that I saw this film after reading Simon Pegg's essay on Star Wars in Nerd do Well (a remnant of his academic work). He reads the film against the post-Vietnam malaise of American culture, arguing that its "galaxy far, far away" is the minimal distance for the US to imagine itself anew as a rag tag group of rebels fighting an evil Empire, complete with British accents. I could only wonder what Pegg, arguably the best human part of the film, thought of his recent Imperial fantasy.

While M:I4 is situated by its cold war pretense and globalized fears, between past and future, Hugo is a film entirely framed by such temporal displacements, between the origins of cinema and its 3-D, digital instantiation, between Scorcese's own life as a fan of cinema and that of its protagonist Hugo, between the children's book and the grown filmmaker. There is much to say about all of these, and the first is actually quite effective. However, there is another temporal displacement that is not discussed as often and that is between the film's technological setting and its technological imaginary. The film is set in the early thirties, against the backdrop of film, but its technological fantasies are decidedly older. It is set in a train station, Montparnasse, and even stages by way of a dream the famous crash that took place there at the end of the nineteenth century.

If one examines the film by the way of Manuel Delanda's history of the various abstract machines, clockwork, motors, and computing, a point that he develops in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. This point, which has been reduced to a simple thumbnail by writers such as Hardt and Negri, and it really is the caricature I am dealing with here. The central point of which is that different ages are characterized by not only a different technical machine, clockwork, steam, but a different way of thinking, the mechanism of clockworks, the conflict that drives the steam engine of history, etc. In this sense Hugo is firmly situated in the age of the mechanical machine. This is seen not just in its wind-up toys, clock tower, and automaton that is its MacGuffin, but in its explicit philosophy voiced by Hugo. As Hugo states, "I'd imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn't be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason."This is the central idea of the film, it explains Hugo's quest, and George Méliès' despair, they are all parts without a place, parts whose happiness depends upon finding a place in the machine.

I could not help but think about how this idea, this clockwork fantasy that is as much Platonist as it is mechanical, of everyone in their place, was received by the film's contemporary audience, many of whom may have lost their place in the great machine, or at least fear doing so. More to the point, however, this idea of everyone in their place, of society as one big machine, seems to contradict the film's central visual idea, the power of movies to provoke imagine, to displace people from their roles in society. More could be said about this, as I have already hinted, it is core of Rancière's entire reading of Plato, and perhaps his entire philosophy, but I am going to conclude by simply indicating that this conflict between the power of the imagination and the celebration of the existing order defines more than anything else the role of film today.

“Let Me Tell You of the Time that Something Occurred”: On Yves Citton’s Mythocratie: Storytelling et Imaginaire de Gauche

2011-12-23T11:44:00.003-05:00

Before approaching the idea of “storytelling” that is at the center of Citton’s book, Mythocratie: Storytelling et Imaginaire de Gauche it is important to situate his position with respect to some of the dominant strands of Spinozism.

The works of contemporary interpreters of Spinoza, especially those translated into English, can be roughly divided into two perspectives. First, there is Althusser, who wrote little on Spinoza, but whose "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" employed Spinoza as the “matrix of every possible theory of ideology.” Althusser’s used not only the Appendix to the Ethics, to articulate the subject constituted in his subordination to a Subject, but Spinoza’s distinction of the three kinds of knowledge to make ideology the entirety of quotidian experience. Althusser’s Spinoza is first and foremost a theory of human bondage, of subjection. In contrast to this, the Spinoza of Negri and Deleuze is a theorist of immanence, of potentia, in which the imagination is not ideology, but part of the creative powers of the multitude. The imagination is understood to be entirely subordinated to transcendent Power (potestas) or entirely created by immanent power (potentia).

Citton (and Lordon, who is cited here) attempts to square this circle. To think the way in which the immanent powers of desire create and maintain their own subjection, fighting for it as if it were salvation. It is not enough to simply assert, as many readers of Spinoza (and Foucault and Deleuze have) that everything is immanent, that power flows horizontally. The immanent forces are not individuals, but are the transindividual affects and ideas that constitute both individuals and collectives. The real task is to understand how these horizontal flows create and sustain their own “transcendent effects,” their own images of verticality, images that have very real effects. The predominance of what Citton calls “soft power,” mass media and public relations make this problem even more pressing. Power is sustained by the control of attention and affects more than anything else.

An interest in narrative and Spinoza might surprise Anglo-American readers who think primarily of the geometric method, or of Spinoza’s critique of scripture. Citton cites Proposition 10 of Part Five of Ethics, which refers to the minds power of ordering the “affections of the body according to the power of the intellect.” This reordering of affections and ideas is the power of narrative. Or, as Citton writes, paraphrasing another idea from Spinoza, we still do not know what stories are capable of.

Combining Spinoza with such diverse sources as Lazarrato’s idea of noopolitics, work on mirror neurons, Stiegler, Diderot, Sun Ra, Wu Ming, and traditional theorists of narrative such as Riceour, Citton argues that attention and affects are shaped, channeled by stories, which in turn attune us to be receptive to the same stories. There is a certain plasticity to consciousness, to the conatus, that makes us receptive to the same narrative elements. This is one way of looking at the intersection of the transcendent and immanent, of the meta-conduct and conducts: we often shape our stories and narratives according to dominant frames. The contemporary media provides us multiple examples where the immanent horizontal powers (potentia) are actually structured by (potestas), from the crude, the editing of “man on the street” interviews; the crass, reality television; to the difficult to perceive, Wikipedia. What interests Citton about the latter, Wikipedia and Google, is there ability to render the filters and frames invisible. In Google “we produce knowledge in searching for knowledge” and channel attention through our attention. This makes the production of attention, of the stories that seem important, all the more important. (This is something that I tried to write about using sharks)

As the title suggests, Citton is primarily interested in storytelling from the left, from a politics committed to equality. He argues that the right has been quite good at constructing such stories, stories which structure political and personal narratives, such as Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” which dominates narratives in politics for thirty years. That Citton cites this, a thirty-year old narrative from the US in a book written in France, is testament to its power. Power which stems from its ability to channel feelings of frustration at an inchoate sense of exploitation and racism. The story functions by channeling these frustrations, but then becomes the frame for future frustrations. The “welfare queen” demonstrates the intersection of the interests of he dominant powers and the affects and desires of the dominated.

It is because the narratives of the right are so dominant that Citton argues that the task of any narrative politics is “disqualification of the given,” the naturalness and unquestioned nature of the given political and economic order. Spinoza’s task may have been the “disqualification of sovereignty” and Marx may have had his task the “disqualification of appropriation,” but the contemporary task is that of the given itself. Citton argues that this can be seen though out contemporary thought, from Badiou’s idea of the event, Deleuze’s idea of the virtual, and Rancière’s distribution of the sensible. Citton, like Stevphen Shukaitis turns to Sun Ra, rather than these thinkers, to pose a politics of disruption and experimentation of narratives.

I was partly influenced by Citton, which I had read the first few pages of, when I wrote that OWS could be understood as a disruption of the dominant narrative regarding inequality. It is from this perspective the one can perhaps chart the limits and possibilities of this disruption. No sooner is the given disrupted, exposed in its contingency and construction, then it is patched up by the existing order. Occupy Wall Street has almost been incorporated into the larger narratives of law and order and lazy "Welfare Queens" and "Hobo Kings" camping in the parks. It seems to me, and I don’t think that I am in disagreement with Citton on this point, that the task of a politics is neither to simply disrupt nor construct a new narrative, a narrative with the multitude as its subject, but to subject the very production and circulation of narratives to the power of the multitude.

I also would like to thank Citton for finally getting me to read Diderot's Jacques le fataliste et son maître.

Reproducing Relations: On Communization and its Discontents

2011-12-10T17:49:00.001-05:00

This is not intended as a review of Communization and its Discontents. If I were to write a review of the book it would simply be: it is a good book, you should read it (hell, you can even downloaded it for free, so there is no excuse not to). This is intended instead as a series of provocations for further reflection.

I think that it might be useful to situate the book alongside previous waves of translation and adaption. As with previous generations, namely Post ’68 thought and Autonomia we are dealing with European thought, primarily French in terms of the work of Théorie Communiste, Gilles Dauvé, Tiqqun, etc., framed in its own particular struggles and politics, being imported to Anglo-American contexts. There is a crucial difference, however, and that is the fact that the case of the first two this translation was primarily academic. This is particularly the case with the first, Post ’68 thought from Foucault to Rancière has transformed the academy, constituting Theory as a new object or method, but this transformation could only wax nostalgically over the barricades that created it. While Autonomia existed for a long time as a para-academic field, traveling through reading groups and issues of Semiotext(e) (until the publication of Empire, which made it part of mainstream academia, for better or worse), it was still the case that actions such as auto-reduction, the strategy of refusal, and pirate radio were read about rather than enacted. Communization has a different trajectory, as much as it can traced to the publication of a new round of Semiotext(e) publications its history also encompasses a series of actions, most specifically the occupations of campuses in California and New York in the 2009-2010 academic year. It would perhaps be an overstatement to say that Communization is the only, or even the only recent, intellectual import to have political effects, but it might be accurate to say that it is one that had political effects prior to its academic effects.

When the history of Occupy Wall Street is written it will include Santa Cruz and Berkeley alongside Trahrir Square and the actions in Spain and Greece as its prehistory. This is not to say that Occupation is synonymous with Communization, but there are distant echoes of the latter in the former, which can be glimpsed in every refusal to offer demands, in every insistence that the Occupation, with its distribution and circulation of the basic conditions of existence, food, shelter, and libraries, is its own politics. This raises an important question of translation, not just the translation of words and terms but practices and politics. One shared idea of the various trajectories and traditions of communization is the rejection of any “identitarian” basis of politics, of the working class as an identity for radical struggle. It is argued that any program based on such an identity can only reaffirm what it seeks to transform. The goal is not to affirm the worker identity, but to destroy it as a fundamental pillar of the reproduction of capital. Not to be too dialectical, but such strategies look very different without the backdrop of the worker’s movement and traditional parties. As Alberto Toscano asks in his contribution, “But what is it to be a theoretical heretic after the political death of orthodoxy?” There is a tendency to continue to fight old battles, and if one looks hard enough, it is always possible to find yet another representative of the orthodoxy, standing around selling papers. However, focusing on this risks missing entirely the new oppositions and recuperations that take different paths. It seems that we are already seeing some of the pitfalls of this, as the Occupations become subject to new age, individualistic, and populist recuperations. Translating a politics must create new arguments against new opponents.

If Autonomist Marxism’s shift from the focus on the dynamics of capitalist exploitation to focusing on the antagonism of the working class as the determining factor of capitalist development can be described as a kind of Copernican Revolution, fundamentally reorienting the direction and locus of struggle, then perhaps Communization can be understood as a kind of general relativity, the focus is on neither capital nor the working class, neither identity or pole of the relation, but on the reproduction of the capitalist relation itself. Capitalism is understood to be first and foremost a relation, or a series of relations, the selling of labor power, the commodity form as the form of all needs, and so on. This shift to the capitalist relation itself makes it possible to see other relations, gender relations and educational relations—to take two examples from the book, as equally integral to the production and reproduction of capital as the exploitation of wage labor. Moreover, these classical relations, the relations of class, of wage labor, are no longer dominant as unemployment and precarization cast individuals out of the work place, and finance and debt create new strategies of accumulation. The capitalist relation permeates all of society, displacing traditional divisions of production and reproduction. As Jasper Biernes writes of students, “Students confront the crisis of reproduction directly, as the cost of job training (tuition) increases, and as the value of such training decreases. Students are a proletariat in formation, denied a middle-class future, indebted like the rest of the working class but indebted before they have begun to earn a wage full time.” The focus on the capitalist relation, in the broad sense in terms of everything that produces surplus value, has a great deal of advantage in terms of encompassing struggles beyond the site of production. (This is part of Occupy as well, as much as it could be considered anti-capitalist it is an anti-capitalist movement of debtors, students, and those outside of what used be called the working class, but not outside of capital. This is why the spaces that are being occupied are not factories, but schools, parks, and quasi-public spaces, such spaces correspond to the diffuse nature of exploitation) However, in the case of much of the communization theory, the expansion of the definition capitalist relation is still conducted in fairly economic terms, gender relations, educational relations, are included insofar as they provide the basis for capitalist accumulation.

Reproduction of the relations of production is not, as it was for Althusser, considered in terms of the ideological dimensions, the reproduction of subjectivity. (Although there has been suggestive work lately bridging these two radically different dimensions of Marxism). It seems to me, and this might just dovetail with my previous point, that such work is necessary as well, as much as it might be avoided for its association with orthodoxy and the academization of the Marxist project. If the current occupations are going to become something other than symbolic protests against capital, or invocations of “Americans taking care of Americans,” then they must confront the ideological as well as the material basis of the reproduction of the class relation. The latter remain long after the former have dissolved: the wage and persistent employment may have been displaced as economic relations, but they are still "in force," as Paolo Virno argued, still fundamental for the reproduction of subjectivity, if not the reproduction of capital. That is why every Occupation, every nascent communization, is immediately met with the cry "Get a Job!"

Horrors Old and New: Remaking Reality

2011-12-02T17:23:00.001-05:00

"Horror consists in its always remaining the same—the persistence of 'pre-history'—but is realized as constantly different, unforeseen, exceeding all expectation, the faithful shadow of developing productive forces."—Theodor Adorno

I read somewhere, I do not remember where, that Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game is the most frequently filmed, and remade, story. The story, which was first made as a film in 1932, is so simple that it is more of a template for remakes than a story. A man, a hunter, is shipwrecked on an isolated island, where he encounters a even greater hunter, an aristocrat in self imposed exile. The aristocrat shows his new guest his estate, including his trophy room, and eventually proclaims his boredom with hunting. He has hunted all of the world's game, and has come to the conclusion that man is the most dangerous game, the only one that provides sport. The hunt then begins, the aristocrat, the great hunter pursuing the lesser hunter. The tables are eventually turned and the hunter becomes the prey (again). Like I said, it has been remade dozens of times, and has been used by countless tv shows. (of course in some variations the hunter is an alien, but the basic idea holds.)

My personal favorite is the mid-nineties Ice-T version.

Like much horror, the story works from the basic premise that true horror is being treated like an animal. Cannibalism, the slaughter house, and vivisection is the stuff of so many celluloid nightmares. Beyond that the story offers a kind of pop-Nietzscheanism (and its eventual subversion). It explains the world as divided into two classes. As the protagonist in the film states, "This world's divided into two kinds of people: the hunter and the hunted. Luckily I'm the hunter. Nothing can change that." He states this before it is changed, before the roles are reversed only to be reversed, or righted, once again.

The story works best if the hunter, the one who hunts man, is some kind of aristocrat or a wealthy man with the affections of wealth. (Surviving the Game, the Ice-T version adds race to this equation). He is as much of perversion as a realization of the natural order. As much as he seeks to be sporting, seeks the most dangerous game, he does not arm his prey equally. Technology is on his side. His defeat is the restoration of a natural order, the victory of man over machine, knowledge and skill, over technology. It is class struggle as adventure tale. If only ruler and ruled where to meet mano a mano, then the rule of wealth and technology would be displaced. The great white hunter's desire for true sport is inverted into the protagonists desire for a natural equality.

If it can be read as an allegory of class struggle, then it is one in which class is not defined in terms of exploitation or even domination, but in the "pathos of distance," in the feeling of being superior. The hunt is an act of surplus cruelty, a staging of superiority. As much as hunting can be given a a pseudo natural justification, animals hunt and kill after all, the hunt itself, and its symbols and trophies, is a cultural staging of this natural conflict. As a symbol of mankind's victory over the animal it can easily become symbolic of the various hierarchies within humanity. Thus, in the case of the film, Darwinism, the survival of the fittest, is transformed into social Darwinism, the idea of mankind's natural superiors, only to be restored to Darwin in the last act. The appeal of the story is in this last reversal, in the idea of a kind of popular Darwinism.

I am prompted to write this by two recent events. First, there is the story out of Ohio, which alleges that two men used a craigslist ad to lure men to a farm in order to shoot them. Details are sketchy, and there is nothing to suggest that these men were given a tour of a trophy room before being hunted. However, what is striking is not just, as the Time's piece suggests, how calculated the ad was to take advantage of the most desperate jobseekers, offering $300 a week for someone willing to surrender all connections for a job, but how desperate and relatively poor the "hunters" were in this case. They did not even own the land where the hunt, if it was that, took place. In any case they took advantage of people only slightly more desperate then themselves.

Which brings me to my second point, or provocation, I happened to listen to an interview with Cory Robin on Against the Grain. He was speaking about his new book, The Reactionary Mind. I have not read this book, but he did say two things which are important. First, conservative thought, conservative politics, needs to be taken seriously in terms of its immense appeal, affective as well as ideological. Second, part of this appeal has to do with what he calls "democratic feudalism," the popular support that conservatism gains by extending the right to dominate others, whites over nonwhites, men over women, adults over children. I have often said that capitalism does not spread the wealth, just the idea that anyone can become wealthy; to which Robin would appear to add that conservatism does not distribute power, just the idea that anyone can dominate.

I do not offer this as an explanation of the events of Ohio, but as a provocation for any future remake. Rather than search for new images of aristocracy, or the great white hunter, or displacing this unto aliens (all of the Predator remakes and sequels) perhaps it is time to remake the film, as the New York Times piece suggests, as a desperate attempt to hold onto superiority by those on bottom. Such a remake would be timely.

Debt Collectors: The Economics, Politics, and Morality of Debt

2011-11-13T03:16:00.003-05:00

Any philosophical consideration of the politics of debt must perhaps begin with the fact that the entire rhetoric of debt, owing and paying one’s debts, is at once a moral and an economic vocabulary. This point is related to, but opposed to, Nietzsche’s well-known argument in the Genealogy of Morals. Whereas Nietzsche argued that morality, guilt, was at its basis, debit, a payment in suffering for those who could not pay the price, an examination of debt reveals how much paying ones debts, paying one’s bills, is a moral imperative as much as an economic relation.

As David Graeber argues even from the standpoint of standard economic theory the positing of debt as some kind of moral duty, as something which can never be dispensed with, runs counter to not only the justification of interest, which is supposedly a compensation based on risk, but the immense apparatus dedicated to the assessment of risk, discerning good and bad risk.The idea of paying one’s debts is nothing other than a moral idea, and idea of an absolute moral obligation transposed into the realm of economy. One could consider this morality to be a slavish one, in that keeps everyone paying their mortgage for a house that is underwater, and paying their student loans without ever getting the job promised by such an education. It would seem then that the political task is a matter of simply separating the morality of obligation from the economy of debt. The knot is a little more tangled than just tossing aside the language of debt entirely, since debt, is the predominant way of expressing social obligations. Graeber has argued that the prehistory of debt, the prehistory that explains the etymology of economics and morality, is based on the obligations that sustain society, between parents and children, husbands and wives, etc. However, these obligations were not monetized. To take a contemporary example, we owe a debt to our parents, but could never pay this back with a check, or doing so would seem offensive. For a long time these non monetized debts sustained social relations and individuals. The recent history of debt is one in which this dependency, at least partially recognized in terms social rights, rights to education, care, etc, have become social debts, entitlements, which are in turn privatized and individualized. The primary sources of debt, especially in the US, are education, housing, and healthcare, are expressions of need, our radical lack of self-sufficiency as human beings. Untying the knot of economics and morality is not a matter of just throwing out the language of debt, but of subtracting dependency from the economy of debt, or in Graeber’s terms, the human economy from the economy.

How is this to be done? How is it possible to draw a line between economics and morality? This is a question not just of words, of the same words for debt and obligation but of the interrelation of different practices and comportments, of the mode of production and the mode of subjection. Marx’s commentary on James Mill offers an interesting examination of these questions. As Marx writes with respect to credit,

… A rich man gives credit to a poor man whom he considers industrious and decent. This kind of credit belongs to the romantic, sentimental part of political economy, to its aberrations, excesses, exceptions, not to the rule. But even assuming this exception and granting this romantic possibility, the life of the poor man and his talents and activity serve the rich man as a guarantee of the repayment of the money lent. That means, therefore, that all the social virtues of the poor man, the content of his vital activity, his existence itself, represent for the rich man the reimbursement of his capital with the customary interest.

What Marx dismisses here as the “romantic” and “sentimental” aspect of political economy, is the personal relation of individual to individual. It is perhaps striking to juxtapose this text, written in eighteen forty four, with another passage from the same period, “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society.” In this text, Marx holds out the possibility of a relation between individuals unmediated by money. In such a society, Marx writes, “Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life.” In that text the abstraction of money, its power to dissolve all social qualities displacing them with its social power, is opposed to a human relation, a relation of individual to individual. In contrast to this, the passage on credit suggests that such human evaluations, the estimation of a man’s worth that form the basis of Horatio Alger myths and rags to riches fantasies, are at best an exception to the rule of money and at worst its realization. The credit relation is not a moment of unmediated relation and evaluation in a world dominated by the abstractions of money, but only the complete penetration of money into all of life. As Marx writes,

Within the credit relationship, it is not the case that money is transcended in man, but that man himself is turned into money, or money is incorporated in him. Human individuality, human morality itself, has become both an object of commerce and the material in which money exists. Instead of money, or paper, it is my own personal existence, my flesh and blood, my social virtue and importance, which constitutes the material, corporeal form of the spirit of money. Credit no longer resolves the value of money into money but into human flesh and the human heart. Such is the extent to which all progress and all inconsistencies within a false system are extreme retrogression and the extreme consequence of vileness.

Credit and debt is not some moment of personal evaluation outside of the economy, some moment of values in the calculation of value, but the complete penetration of calculation of value into all of life. There is no longer an opposition between money as an abstract and quantifiable power that renders everything interchangeable and human relations which are always relations of particulars, of particular qualities. Credit and debt are completely particular, complete individuated, but this individuation is not outside of the abstraction of money, but its complete subsumption of the most intimate area of subjectivity. The human economy, the economy of obligations and actions, does not exist as something underneath or beyond the economy of debt, but is thoroughly subsumed by it.

As much we could read Marx’s text as a yet another prophetic text by Marx, one that appears to have foretold the era of credit agencies scanning social media sites and Wal-Mart taking out insurance policies on its employees, the important difference is that the penetration of such estimations into the inner details of credit and existence does not take place by an personal evaluation, by a creditor evaluating the cut of a debtor’s jib, but through impersonal and unseen calculations. Do you know your credit score? Or whether your employer has taken out an insurance policy on your life? As much as credit and debt renders everything calculable, converting subjectivity into a nothing other than a series of assets and risks, it does so behind one’s back (to echo Marx’s formulation about the constitution of abstract value).

This suggests another division, another duality, not between the economics of debt and the ethics of obligation, or between the abstraction of money and the direct personal relations, but between two different relations to money. As owners, possessors, and exchangers of money it appears as something that we use, something subject to our own choices, ideals, and values, as much as those ideals and values are restricted by the quantity of money available and the money form itself. At the same time, however, as debtors, we have a different relation with money, one that passes through us without us knowing it. In La fabrique de l'homme endetté: essai sur la condition néoliberalé, Maurizio Lazzarato describes these two aspects as follows:

Money/debt implicates subjectivity in two heterogeneous and complementary manners: “social subjection” operates by a molar operation on the subject, taking its conscience, its memory, and its representations, while the “machinic control” operates by a molecular level, the infrapersonal and preindividual elements of subjectivity, which passes neither by the reflective conscience and its representations, nor by the self.

When it comes to our wages, to the money in our pocket, we are interpellated as individuals, as consumers who can spend and realize our buying potential, but when it comes to debt, to the money that we are rather than possess, we are not individuals, but dividuals, divided and dissembled into constitutive acts and qualities, acts and qualities which are in turn grouped into larger aggregates and collections. The individual makes use of money, but at the preindividual level, the level of the dividual, the same person, or its component parts, is used by money.

Despite the fact that debt is more or less deterritorialized, broken down in relation to abstract actions, qualities, and projections, and then assembled in collections, or securitized, does not mean that it does not reterritorialize itself in terms of concrete effects and relations. These effects are located most directly at the level of actions and choices, what Lazzarato refers to as the specific labor on the self demanded by the regime of debt. To take one example: student loans are relatively indifferent to the particular major or course of study one takes, an indifference made possible by the force of the state, but this does not keep the abstract quanitity of debt having an effect on an individuals concerned. Anyone who teaches at a University is perhaps aware of the chilling effect that student debt has an intellectual inquiry and education. Students do not ask themselves the questions: what interests me? And what discipline or field do I show talent for? But ask instead: what will get me a job? What will the market demand? Debt is the future acting on the present. Debts might be calculated at the level of preindividual actions, and transindividual collections, but it is internalized at the level of individual actions and decisions.

As forgiving student debt, or the idea of an organized mass default of student debt circulates amongst members of the Occupy Wall Street movement, there are the seemingly inevitable invocations of responsibility. It is argued that those who took out student loans took their risks, decided to major in art history or philosophy, or, whenever offering relief to mortgage debt is proposed, it is argued that those who took out mortgages on houses they could not afford should not be rewarded. Debt is reterritorialized on the objects of nation and community, and subject to a hierarchy of acceptable objects and goals. The morality of debt is fundamentally anti-egalitarian: it is not just that there a debtors and creditors, but everyone has taken their chances, equality contradicts the morality of risk and reward. Debt is a mutation of homo economicus: it is no longer, as Marx argued, the subject of “freedom, equality, and Bentham,” but the subject of obligation, inequality, and Becker. As Lazzarto argues, the entire economy of debt is implicated within a work on the self, in which the individual is governed by the idea of maximizing value and managing risks in a series of choices that are radically individuated, but what he does not mention is that the perception of these risks crosses the terrain of thoroughly moralized ideas of hard work, national, and communal belonging.

It is precisely this moralization that any politics of debt, of debt refusal and debt, must actively refuse and combat. It must refuse it not simply as an ideology, as a set of ideas and representations that can be dispensed with, but as what Lazzarato refers to as a production of subjectivity. Debt and the calculation of life and activity in terms of risks and benefits are not just a set of ideas, they are a way in which subjectivity is produced and governed. Debt is not just a set of ideas one has about obligations, but an experience, a suffocating experience of what is possible or desirable. It “is a collective phenomenon suffered individually.” To say that it is a collective phenomenon does not mean that it constitutes a collectivity. It is difficult and tenuous to say “we debtors.” This is not just because of the moralizing divisions between homeowners, citizens, and students, but because the collective phenomenon is constituted more at the level of the preindividual dimensions of existence, patterns of risk, consumption, and other factors that do not constitute an individual. Debt is individualized at the level of guilt, but its collective conditions remain dispersed and disparate. Collective action requires a minimum of social solidarity, which is perhaps provided by the occupations of campuses and public spaces. As much as we might be critical of the spurious divisions between “Wall Street” and “Main Street,” financial capital and middle class, the very constitution of this movement suggests an inchoate awareness of a new antagonistic collectivity. Moving beyond the immediate connections formed by these actions, connections that still risk dividing debtors into good or bad debtors, will require a critical constitution of this collectivity.

The starting point for the politics of debt is the current crisis, a crisis which undermines much of the conventional wisdom of the twentieth century, wisdom which claimed that consumer society would forestall any revolution in the developed capitalist countries. Debt, specifically housing debt, was initially, at least in the US constructed around an ideal of a nation of homeowners and college graduates, individuals who would be invested, both psychically and economically in the existing order. Debt works to conceal the shrinking wages and declining support of private education by postponing the due date to the future. Now, it has begun to create its opposite, a mass condition far more precarious than wage labor. Debt affects not just working conditions, or the possibility of finding work, but living, shelter, and ultimately, especially in the case of the student loans, the possibility of any future.

In this uncertain future it is possible to glimpse two other things, which function as the basis for a politics of debt. First, is that debt is not just some way of affording a home, an education, a car, without cash, but it is the exploitation of these various needs, a way to make profit off all spheres of life and all relations. Second, debt exposes the idea of a neutral state, dealing with competing interests: it is not just that the state is on the side of the creditors, guaranteeing loans and garnishing wages, it makes their very existence possible. Thus it is possible to argue that as much as debt cuts transversally across the various transindividuations of citizen, student, and worker, it undermines two of the individuations that have forestalled political action: the consumer, too placated by mass marketed desires to act politically, and the citizen, caught up in the fictions of neutrality and equality before the law. Thus, while it is true that it is difficult to articulate the collectivity of debt, a difficulty made possible by its abstraction, it has perhaps cleared away the residue of the past. All that remains is the most persistent and difficult residue to dispense with, that of the responsible and isolated subject. The task of constituting collective refusal will be difficult, crossing the line between the abstractions of debt and concrete repression of the state, but one thing is clear the morality of debt, with its ideas of individual responsibility for a collective condition, must be refused at all cost.

Forgotten History: Finally Got the News

2011-11-08T10:23:00.001-05:00

I do not have much to say about this, but I had to share it far and wide. It is a clip from Finally Got the News, a film about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. It is inspirational and a reminder of how much we, all of us who are protesting Wall Street, are perhaps finally getting the news. These guys were critiquing Wall Street before it became cool to critique Wall Street.

The whole video is available here:

Constituent Comics: Antonio Negri Illustrated

2011-11-04T21:26:00.000-04:00

One of the first texts that introduced me to the Italian political traditions of Operaismo and Autonomia was Italy: Autonomia, Post-Political Politics published by semiotext(e). I found my copy at Moe’s books in Berkeley, and for years it was the pride of my little library. This was years before it was reprinted. I would show it to friends, and offer to make copies at work for whoever was interested, my personal act of auto-reduction and sabotage. I poured over the writings of Negri, Tronti, Bifo, and Virno, struggling to make sense of concepts that would change me over years to come. At the end of this book there is a comic by B. Madaudo Melville, detailing the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. This was immediately legible, brought to life in slashes of ink that immediately suggested a tumultuous time with thick strokes of ink.

Semiotext(e) was a transitional publisher for me, connecting the world of anarchist zines with philosophy. The comic at the end of the issue on Italy added comics to bridge the gap. It brought together insurrection, imagination, and intellect, a difficult combination that is the foundation of revolution.

I am reminded of this story in reading Antonio Negri: Illustrated, Interview in Venice by Claudio Calia. It has the unique honor of being the second comic to detail the Italian Seventies to appear in English. It seems more accurate to trace its lineage to this early comic than to place it alongside the various Introducing [Blank] or [Blank] for Beginners comics which promise introductions to Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc. Those books are at best whimsical cliff notes, aimed at struggle students. Antonio Negri: Illustrated is more inspirational than pedagogical.

Antonio Negri is an illustrated interview. There are panels and pages dedicated to the hot autumn and “years of lead” with the requisite images of ski masks and prison cells, but most of the pages are dedicated to the interview itself. It opens with Claudio (the interviewer) finding Negri’s apartment and Venice and details the books and posters that decorate Negri’s walls as the two discuss the history and politics of autonomia.

At first I thought this was something of a waste of the medium. It was perhaps my vivid memory of the earlier comic that led me to expect pages and pages of meticulous illustrations of mass strikes and masses storming grocery stores and train cars. However, as I sat with the comic reading and rereading its pages, I warmed to its art and style. It conveyed a conversation in a way that a written text could not. You see not only the words but also the gestures, the offers of tea and the interrupting phone calls. This intimacy at the level of form is duplicated at the level of content as Negri tries to answer the most difficult question of all: how does revolution happen, how do revolutionary subjectivities emerge out of exploitation.

Negri's answer returns to the years of misery that followed the war, and traces the pleasure, the socialization in and against work, that begins to expand the imagination and the horizon of what is possible. As this pleasure confronts the force of exploitation it explodes into a movement. Perhaps one of Negri's most important concept is constituent power (potentia) the ontological, political, and economic affirmation of the creative power of desire, imagination, and labor as something which exists prior to, and in excessive of, its institutionalization or exploitation. This concept is articulated through The Savage Anomaly and Insurgencies. What Antonio Negri: Illustrated sheds light on is the quotidian dimension of this concept, constituent power begins in the generosity of a conversation and an offer of tea. Negri's descriptions of the early years of Operaismo and the illustration of the conversation itself reminds me of the following passage from Marx.

When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need – the need for society – and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together. Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.

If I understand the project of Antonio Negri: Illustrated correctly, it is an attempt to not only illustrate the formation of the needs and desires that the existing order cannot meet but to produce them as well. It is not the illustration of the thoughts of a Negri as much as it is an attempt to illustrate the moment where those thoughts become meaningful and important.

The Social Individual: Collectivity and Individuality in Capitalism (and Marx)

2011-10-31T14:11:00.001-04:00

This is the video of a talk I gave at Utah Valley University in September. It was aimed at an audience of undergraduates, so it is very pedagogical and unfortunately a bit dry.

Text of the talk, which I did not exactly stick to, is after the break (for whatever reason the endnote links do not work).

The Social Individual: Collectivity and Individuality in Capitalism (and Marx)

Jason Read

Utah Valley State College

Draft for Presentation

The term “social individual” is not generally or immediately associated with Marx. It appears primarily in the Grundrisse as a new understanding of wealth and productive activity. As Marx writes:

In this transformation [the worker] is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, not the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body—it is in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.[i]

Although the term “social individual” is perhaps unique to this formulation, the general sentiment here is not: the general idea of the mutual constitutive nature of the individual and the collective, “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” recurs throughout Marx’s writing, and if you add to it, species being, the mutually constitutive relation with nature, then we have the normative basis of Marx’s early critique. However, my intention here is not to turn this passage backwards, to Marx’s early writings, but forward, towards contemporary reflections on the problem of individuality, specifically the concept of transindividuality.

The term “transindividuality” has emerged from the work of Gilbert Simondon to describe precisely this mutual constitutive relation of individual and society, the way individuals can only be individuated in the midst of society. Individuation for Simondon is a process, a process that passes through multiple individuations, physical, psychic, and collective, in which each functions as the raw material, the preindividual conditions, of the next individuation. To briefly illustrate this, psychic individuation, the individuation that constitutes personality and subjectivity, is developed from the individuation of the species, the capacities, drives, and affects that make up humanity, everything from the capacity to language to the gestures that define our ambiguous biological inheritance. Individuation, the constitution of subjectivity and collectivity, is the process by which these capacities and potentials, these preindividual conditions, are stabilized and organized in definite habits, comportments, and idioms. Simondon’s concept offers a way out of longstanding binary in western political thought: a binary in which one either begins with the individual as an atomistic building block of society, constructing with contracts and interest, the formation of society, or, one begins with society, the totality, and understands individuals to be nothing other than its functional requirements.

It is possible to understand Marx as a transindividual thinker, and this has drawn many Marxist thinkers, such as Etienne Balibar, Paolo Virno, and Antonio Negri to the term. However, if this is the case then it is important to stress that in Marx’s thought, transindividuality, or transindividual individuation, functions not just as a social ontology, as a description of the way things are, or even as a normative standard, as an ideal in which everyone lives according to mutual assistance, but that it also functions as a critical concept, in which the process of individuation is examined. What is meant by critical can be illustrated with another passage from the Grundrisse.

Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a “political animal” not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

As much as marx criticizes the “robinsonades” of political economy, the idea of isolated autonomous individuals, as the basis of all of history, he does not simply oppose this idea as the true to the false, but situates it in history, as a product of history. It is not enough to simply denounce the philosophy of possessive individualism, but it must be shown how it emerges from history, how it is the product of the most developed relations.

One of Marx’s earliest texts, “On the Jewish Question,” already begins to foreground the critique of political economy as a critique of individuation. From this text onward it is possible to see this problem of transindividuality in Marx’s thought. While the text’s stated topic is the status of Jews in Prussia, it begins to lay a groundwork for a critique of civil society and the state based on their respective individuations. The connections of this early text with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right are immediately clear, both texts deal with the split between the state and civil society. However, as much Marx works from this basic distinction between civil society, understood as dominated by particular and egotistical interest, and the state, as the universal, a split between man and citizen, he changes the parameters of this problem. The parameters are changed by examining the limits of political emancipation, the extent to which the state can liberate society from the conflicts and hierarchies of civil society. Political emancipation, the emancipation of politics, of the state, from birth, rank, education, and occupation does not dispense with these divisions and hierarchies, but lets them continue to exist in a private manner; they are still the basis for exclusion, they have simply been privatized, left to society. This is in some sense a progressive step, especially compared to the feudal state, which gave official political status to such differences of birth and rank, but it has intrinsic limitations. These limitations manifest themselves not just in the partial nature of the solution, in which the state partially emancipates man, but in the split that the state manifests in collective life. As Marx writes,

Where the political state has attained its full development, man leads not only in thought, consciousness, but in reality, in life, a double existence—celestial and terrestrial. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers. The political state, in relation to civil society, is just as spiritual as in heaven in relation to earth.[ii]

There is once again a split between particular and universal, reason and imagination, but each are constitutive of existence, or thought and life. However, Marx argues that this dual existence is not equal or harmonious. It is not, as it was with Hegel, a matter of the particular interest eventually recognizing the its limited grasp of social relations, the need for a perspective beyond that of the contingent intersections of individual self striving, but of the particular remaking the universal in its image.[iii] Marx subjects the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789” to a critical reading in which the individual of civil society, and the importance of private property, reveals itself to be the subtext underlining and undermining the ideals of the citizen. While Article Six of the declaration states: “Liberty is the power which man has to do everything which does not harm the rights of others,” Marx declares its implied content as, “…liberty as a right of man is not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man. It is the right of such separation. The right of the circumscribed individual, withdrawn into himself.” All of this culminates in security, which Marx argues “…is the supreme social concept of civil society, the concept of the police.” At the heart of the “Declaration” Marx finds an inversion: rather than individual life, the private life of the bourgeois citizen, functioning as a means to political life, life in common and relation with others, becomes a means to individual life. The subject of the declaration of rights is not humanity, or even the somewhat circumscribed figure of the citizen, but the property owner. As Marx writes,

The matter becomes still more incomprehensible when we observe that the political liberators reduce citizenship, the political community, to a mere means for preserving these so-called rights of man; and consequently, that the citizen is declared to be the servant of egoistic “man”…[iv]

Political liberation is thus hardly a liberation at all: all it does is create an idealized state, an image of citizens as so many beautiful souls, souls who are put to work for the particular interests of civil society.[v]

Marx contrasts this limited political emancipation with human emancipation, an emancipation that does not just declare the social difference of rank, birth, and occupation to be politically invalid, but actually overcomes those very distinctions. This requires the destruction of the abstract citizen, but more importantly when man “has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power.”[vi] In a word, man must become “species-being” [Gattungswesen]. Species-Being here designates less a supposed essence, some definition of man as the being who makes his species his object, than a project, a project in which one directly lives one’s collective and individual powers, rather than externalize them into a state.[vii]

“On the Jewish Question” articulates the three basic components of Marx’s critical account of transindividuality. It is a critique of the bourgeois individual, the isolated subject of civil society, as is well known, but it is also a critique of the state, of the abstract universal. These are not two separate critiques for Marx, but are part and parcel of the same critique: it is because society is divided, fractured between competing and hierarchical social interests, that the state can emerge only as “illusory communal life.”[viii] It is also because of these very divisions that communal life can, at this stage, only ever be illusory, at best a kind of earthly heaven for beautiful souls, and a worse a universal which is nothing other than the cover for the interests of a particular class. Its terms are in some sense drawn from Hegel, but what it contests is precisely what Hegel takes for granted: the idea that one can pass easily from civil society, from an individuality constructed in terms of self-interested market relations, to the universality of the state, a universal which would be concrete, the recognition of the constitutive nature of social connections.[ix] The path from the particular interest in civil society to the universal of collective belonging is always broken for Marx: it can only be traversed by a transformation of the entire social order, by a revolution. This is because of the third term in this relation, the social dimension, which here, in this context, is ambiguously conceived as either civil society, or species being. In the first instance, civil society, this social dimension is one of division, a division between particular interests and an abstract and illusory universal, divided between individual and state. Overcoming this division, a division between the universal and the particular, entails transforming this social dimension, making species-being a collective and individual practice. It can only be overcome by addressing the way that it in terms of both thought and reality, the existing social order and the images and representations of that social order. As Marx’s thought develops, and the critique of the egoism of civil society becomes the critique of political economy, this attentiveness to the representation of collective life, economic and political, the way that social relations are thought as well as lived becomes central, underlying such familiar concepts as ideology and fetishism.

These terms, the critique of the reduction of social relations to individuals, and the constitution of illusory representations of collectivity continue through Marx’s thought. In the Economic Philosophical species-being, appears not as a task, as part of a genuine human liberation, but as a capacity unique to humans. Animals reproduce themselves as individuals and engage with a specific aspect of the natural world, but only humans engage with the universality of the species, It is this potential that is lost, alienated, by wage labor, by the engagement in on particular task: “Life itself appears only as a means to life.”[x] The picture that Marx paints in the Manuscripts is one in which alienation is a restriction to one specific mode of activity, to one job, and thus a loss of the universality and indeterminacy constitutive of human sociality. There is also a restriction at the level of consumption, private property does not just lead to the alienation of one’s activity into one particular activity, but also the alienation of the world into what can only be possessed. “Private property has mad us so stupid and one sided that an object is only ours once we have it.” Stupidity and one-sideness reflect the reduction of activity and the world to wage labor and private property, a reduction that underscores Marx understanding of species-being as a connection with all of mankind and all of nature. This connection can be transformed by history, as needs and potentials are redefined. The private individual, the individual with only her labor to sell and only her commodities to relate to the world, is not the zenith of freedom but the nadir of alienation, cut off from the species, from nature, and her own potential.[xi]

The critique of the isolated individual is given its most definitive, or at least most polemical formulation in the first volume of Capital. As Marx writes,

The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labor-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, equality, and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say of labor power, are determined by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law…The only force bringing them together, and putting them into relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interest of each.

In this context it is not “civil society,” that is being critiqued, but the capitalist mode of production, or, more precisely, the sphere of circulation. It is in this sphere, the sphere of commodity exchange, where buyer and seller meet as isolated individuals that we get the free trade vulgaris’ conception of society.[xii] Where Hegel had identified civil society with one single idea and attitude towards social relations, that of isolated individuals pursuing their own social interest, Marx argues that capitalist mode of production has to be understood as divided between two different spheres, each with their corresponding idea, their corresponding individuation: there is the sphere of exchange and the hidden abode of production.

Initially, the difference between these two spheres is between a sphere of equality and a sphere of difference. In the sphere of exchange individuals confront individuals as equals, isolated and separate. In contrast to this the hidden abode of production, where capital is made and labor power is sold, is defined by a fundamental asymmetry. These asymmetries make up the bulk of Capital: the laborer must sell his labor power in order to live, there is the reserve army of the unemployed, not to mention the flexibility of capital, all of which make the selling of labor power the exception to the general equivalence of the exchange of commodities.[xiii] Marx’s passage illustrates this inequality graphically, the worker has “brought his own hide to the market and now has nothing to expect but--a hiding.”[xiv] Understood prosaically this “hiding” is the extraction of the maximum amount of labor, the maximum value, from the labor power once it is purchased. In the sphere of circulation capitalist and workers, meet as equals, as buyer and seller, but this very equality, that worker and capitalist are each entitled to the equal rights of commodity exchange, demands that they come into conflict. The capitalist, the buyer of labor power is motivated to get the most for his money, while the worker is trying to get the most for the commodity. The fundamental problem is that what the worker is selling is not a thing at all, but labor-power, time, and thus this conflict is not some kind of haggling or search for bargains in the sphere of circulation, but a conflict over labor within the hidden abode of production. “There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides.”[xv]Force is the domain of class struggle, and all of its effects on the labor process, political, technological, and social. The transition from the sphere of circulation to the sphere of production is the transition from the domain of equality to the domain of asymmetries of force.

The difference between equality and force does not exhaust the difference between the sphere of circulation and the abode of production. They are also distinguished by their specific transindividual individuation. Marx follows Hegel in seeing civil society as the domain of individual self-interest, but increasingly introduces a historical dimension to this identification. Capitalism’s particular individuation has to understood in relation to the institutions of money, and the destruction of the practices of belonging that defined the older, pre-capitalist societies.[xvi] Money dissolves all of the old ties that would connect me to others, dissolving with it the qualities that connect individuals to individuals. As Marx argues in the Grundrisse, it is only in the modern age, in the age dominated by money, that we have anything like the isolated individual.

In the money relation, in the developed system of exchange (and this semblance seduces the democrats), the ties of personal dependence of distinction of blood, education, etc. are in fact exploded, ripped up (at least, personal ties appear as personal relations); and individual seem independent (this is an independence which is at bottom merely an illusion, and it is more correctly called indifference), free to collide with one another and to engage in exchange within this freedom; but they appear thus only for someone who abstracts from the conditions, the conditions of existence within which these individuals enter into contact (and these conditions, in turn, are independent of the individuals and, although created by society, appear as if they were natural conditions, not controllable by individuals). [xvii]

The isolated individual is a historical and not a natural condition.[xviii] Moreover, it has to be understood as social, despite all appearances to the contrary.[xix] Marx is somewhat ambiguous as to whether this a matter of a transformation of individuation itself, of new individuations no longer constrained by personal relations of dependence, or a transformation of how individuation appears, as a kind of false consciousness.[xx]This ambivalence as to the actual or imagined nature of individuality, even in its bourgeois form, relates to two fundamental problems. First, there is the problem of the specific institutions of capitalist society, the wage and the commodity, all of which relate individuals without relating individuals, bringing individuals in necessary contact with the labors and desires of others, but through objects and forms. As Marx writes of fetishism, “…the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour.”[xxi] The mention of fetishism brings us to the second point, the ambiguity of “appearance” itself: to say that individuals appear isolated and disconnected in market relations is not necessarily to pose that this appearance is false, rather it must be judged in terms of its effects in how human beings act and interact. These two problems intersect around a certain fundamental tension: individuals of the market are and are not related, it is both an appearance of something which actual is, and a false appearance at the same time.

The individuation of the market is contrasted with the increased socialization of production. Capitalism does not just destroy the feudal relations of dependence and title, but it also destroys the isolated producer and farmer. As capitalism develops through large-scale industry and the division of labor, the hidden abode of production demands even more connection and relation. As Marx writes in the section on “co-operation”:

Whether the combined working day, in a given case, acquires this increased productivity because it heightens the mechanical force of labor, or extends its sphere of action over a greater space, or contracts the field of production relatively to the scale of production, or at the critical moment sets large masses of labor to work, or excited rivalry between individuals and raises their animal spirits, or impresses on the similar operations carried on by a number of men the stamp of continuity and many-sidedness, or performs different operations simultaneously, or economizes the means of production by use in common…whichever of these is the cause of the increase, the special productive power of the combined working day, is under all circumstances, the social productive power of labor, or the productive power of social labor. This power arises from cooperation itself. When the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of this species [Gattungsvermögen].[xxii]

The reference to species being, or species capacities, sets up a different relationship between these capacities and labor than the one first proposed in the 1844 Manuscripts. It is no longer a matter of the alienation of these capacities, of being cut off from their potential, as existence is channeled into a specific kind of labor. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that in this case these capacities are exploited rather than alienated, made productive for capital. Marx’s fundamental point is that cooperation, the work of multiple individuals in the same space or at the same task, is always more than the sum total of its parts, than the work of different individuals.[xxiii] The individual of the sphere of circulation may be the isolated individual of freedom, equality, and Bentham, but the individual of production is a “social individual,” an individual whose capacities and abilities can only come into being with the necessary presence of others. The cooperation of these individuals constitutes a particular kind of surplus, a social surplus above and beyond the difference between necessary and surplus labor. Moreover, this surplus is obscured by the dominant representation of capital, by the images produced by the sphere of production, which present only isolated individuals contracting in their mutual interest. To the extent that this surplus appears at all, it appears as the power of capital, its miraculous capacity to produce surplus, what Marx refers to it as a “free gift to capital.”[xxiv] Thus, the sphere of circulation becomes a truly miraculous power, it generates the image of society made up of isolated individuals, and appropriates whatever exceeds this, by making it appear as capital itself.[xxv]

The question of appearance returns, only now it is not just a matter of the ambiguous appearance of individuality, but of the appearance of social relations, social relations that appear primarily as the quality of objects, as in commodity fetishism, or as the effect of capital itself. Between the sphere of circulation, which is made up of isolated individuals, and the sphere of production, which represents their cooperative relations as the power of capital, transindividuality, everything that exceeds the individual, cannot appear. This fetishism, of commodities and of capital itself, is precisely why the Hegelian passage from the particular to the universal is interrupted. There is no education of the particular, its eventual recognition of its connection with others in the state, instead there is a bifurcation of transindividual individuation. On the one side there is the isolated and competitive individual of the sphere of production, while on the other there is the cooperative social individual of the hidden abode of production. However, this second individual does not appear, does not see itself in institutions and structures, instead what is immediately visible is the fetishism of commodities, money, and the power of capital itself.[xxvi] Between the two, sociality, what Marx refers to as the social individual, cannot appear.

This defines capitalism in general, from the nineteenth century, however, what does this concept of transindividuality reveal about the current historical moment. Contemporary capitalism, what some could call real subsumption, is an increased exploitation of the transindividual and commodification of the preindividual. This division between production and consumption defines to some extent the paradox of social existence under contemporary capitalism: never have human beings been more social in their existence, but more individualized, privatized, in the apprehension of their existence. On the one hand, the simplest action from making a meal to writing an essay engages the labour of individuals around the world, materialized in commodities, habits, and machines, while on the other, there is a tendency to transform everything, every social relation, into something that can be purchased as a commodity. In the Grundrisse Marx offers perhaps the most succinct definition of the paradox of this relation of individual and collective in the early stages of capitalism. The materialization of collective intelligence in machines produces new effects of isolation—‘individualizing social actors in their separate automobiles and in front of separate video screens.’[xxvii] Transindividual relations, the cooperation of multiple minds, bodies, and machines produce individuated and isolated perceptions.

This paradox can be seen throughout contemporary political life and social life, a stranger gregarious isolation, people doing the same things, watching the same things, in utter isolation. There are fantasies that this common activity, common action, can itself become the basis for social change, the ideal of the twitter revolution or facebook revolution. Such fantasies overlook the fact that solidarity is necessary for revolution, for change. There is no shortage of nostalgia for some kind of community, for some connection, but these fantasies are often for some national or even racial unity. Framed in terms of transindividuality, they take particular conditions of individuation as the necessary conditions for any individuation: this language, these religious texts, these moral codes, are requirement for civilization, society in general. As much as we criticize capitalism for its current fragmentation, it is also important to remember one of Marx’s central celebrations of capitalism: capitalism rendered all that is wholly profane, destroying all motley feudal ties. Or, once again translated into a different philosophical vocabulary, capitalism exposes the artificial nature of transindividuality, the things that individuate me, my language, desires, and tastes, are the products of labor, of action. The task then is to produce a society that is neither the fragmenting of individuality or a totality against the individual, but one in which transindividuality is an active production, not an ossified tradition or an indifferent market.

[i] Karl Marx, Grundrisse pg. 705.

[ii] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” pg. 35

[iii] Marx’s basic criticism of Hegel, at least at this stage, is that the passage from civil society, from particular interest, to universal interest, cannot take place so easily, is one of the central themes of the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Much of Marx’s criticism focuses on the “universal estate” and the corporation, the pivots between the particularity of civil society and the universality of the state. Marx argues that Hegel fails to see how much the particularity and self-interest will affect the supposed universality of the state, proposing that it will result not in the generalized bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the universal estate caught up in its particular rules and the particular interest of its participations. “The corporations are the materialism of bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy is the spiritualism of the corporations.”[ Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right pg. 45]

[iv] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” pg. 43

[v] Marx’s argument, which sees the rights of egotistical man behind every citizen is paradigmatic of the critique of politics from the standpoint of political economy. As Rancière argues, “In a word, Marx turns a political category into the concept of the untruth of politics.”[Jacques Rancière, Disagreement pg. 82.]

[vi] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” pg. 46.

[vii] Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State pg. 223

[viii] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology pg. 53.

[ix] Etienne Balibar, Violence et civilité pg. 172. Balibar agues that this interruption makes possible a reading of Marx’s entire corpus. As Balibar writes, One might go even further and assert that the nature of a great philosophy is not only to incomplete itself but to incomplete others, by introducing itself or by being introduced in their writing: thus from the “Manuscripts of 1843” up to Capital, Marx prodigiously incompleted Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” [Etienne Balibar, The Infinite Contradiction pg. 146]

[x] Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844 pg. 113.

[xi] Franck Fischbach has argued that what links Marx and Spinoza is a shared sense of alienation, alienation not as the loss of self, of one’s particular identity but of a loss of connection to nature. [Franck Fischbach, La production des hommes: Marx avec Spinoza pg. 14]

[xii] The way that the market, or the mundane acts of buying and selling, produces its own ideology of free and autonomous individuals meeting only through their self-interest, challenges the very idea of ideology, as a concept dependent on a division between base and superstructure. As Jameson writes, “…the ideology of the market is unfortunately not some supplementary ideational or representational luxury or embellishment that can be removed from the economic problem and then sent over to some cultural or superstructural morgue, to be dissected by specialists over there. It is somehow generated by the thing itself, as its objectively necessary afterimage; somehow both dimensions must be registered together, in their identity as well as their difference.” [Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism pg. 260]

[xiii] Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology pg. 22. As Zizek writes, relating this exception to Marx’s critique of Hegel, “This is also the logic of the Marxian critique of Hegel, of the Hegelian notion of society as a rational totality: as soon as we try to conceive the existing social order as a rational totality, we must include in it a paradoxical element which, without ceasing to be its internal constituent, functions as its symptom—subverts the very universal rational principle of this totality. For Marx, this ‘irrational’ element of the existing society was, of course, the proletariat, ‘the unreason of reason itself’ the point at which the Reason embodied in the existing social order encounters its own unreason.”

[xiv] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy pg. 280

[xv] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, pg. 344.

[xvi] Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One pg. 16

[xvii] Karl Marx, Grundrisse pg. 164

[xviii] Marx makes this distinction even in such early texts as The German Ideology. As Marx writes, “The difference between the individual as person and what is accidental to him is not a conceptual difference but a historical fact.” [Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology pg. 194]. This leads to the possibility of what Balibar refers to as the historical modes of individuation. [Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital pg. 283]

[xix] Karl Marx, Grundrisse pg. 156

[xx] Hervé Touboul has argued that there is tension in Marx’s thought between a sort of nominalism, in which the individual is primary, seen most clearly in The German Ideology in which “real individuals” are identified as the premise of all history, and an emphasis on social relations, in which individuals are merely bearers. [Hervé Touboul, Marx, Engels et la question de l’individu pg. 30]. While this tension can be seen in the extreme division of such interpretations as Michel Henry and Louis Althusser, it overlooks the transindividual dimension that I am attempting to bring out here.

[xxi] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, pg. 320.

[xxii] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, pg. 441

[xxiii] Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital pg. 54.

[xxiv] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, pg. 451.

[xxv] This idea of capital as a miraculous power has been given is most forceful albeit cryptic interpretation by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “…the forms of social production, like those of desiring production, involve an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element of anti-production coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius. This socius may be the body of the earth, that of the tyrant, or capital. This is the body that Marx is referring to when he says that it is not the product of labor, but rather appears as its natural or divine presuppositions. In fact, it does not restrict itself merely to opposing productive forces in and of themselves. It falls back on [il se rabat sur] all production, constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed, thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi-cause.” [Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus pg. 10]

[xxvi] This idea of a society split between individuals who are isolated, cut off from relations, and an increasing massification of their powers, into something alien, can be traced back as far as The German Ideology. As Marx writes, “Thus two facts are here revealed. First the productive forces appear as a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from the individuals, alongside the individuals: the reason for this is that the individuals, whose forces they are, exist split up and in opposition to one another, whilst, on the other hand, these forces are only real forces in the intercourse and association of these individuals. Thus, on the one hand, we have a totality of productive forces, which have, as it were, taken on a material form and are for the individuals no longer the forces of the individuals but of private property, and hence of the individuals only insofar as they are owners of private property themselves. Never, in any earlier period, have the productive forces taken on a form so indifferent to the intercourse of individuals as individuals, because their intercourse itself was formerly a restricted one. On the other hand, standing over against these productive forces, we have the majority of the individuals from whom these forces have been wrested away, and who, robbed thus of all real life-content, have become abstract individuals, but who are, however, only by this fact put into a position to enter into relation with one another as individuals.” [Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology pg. 190]

[xxvii] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Harvard, 2000, p322.

Getting to 99: Between #OccupyWallStreet and Mic Check!

2011-10-16T15:12:00.004-04:00

Signs I made for my local Occupation

The potentials and contradictions of the OccupyWallStreet movement are far too many to enumerate. They are nothing other than the potentials and contradictions of the current historical conjuncture. We should not be surprised that is has shown itself to be racist and patriarchal in places, after all we live in a racist and patriarchal society. Moreover, we should not be surprised that its anti-capitalism is highly ambiguous if not out an out contradictory, with cries of “capitalism not corporatism” coexisting alongside “Abolish capitalism.” We perhaps should be surprised that it exists at all.

Or should we? Given the high level of unemployment, foreclosures, and debt, perhaps we should be surprised that this has not happened sooner. For the past three years, since the collapse of the housing market crisis, we in the US have been living in a kind of “Bizarro” world, or an inverted world, if you prefer Hegel to Superman: people have been taking to the street, but they have been protesting excesses of taxation and government spending, not to mention a “socialist” president, demanding more austerity. Statistical studies showed that these “Tea Parties” were not, at least for the most part, movements of the unemployed or foreclosed, they were movements of the middle, of those with jobs and retired, desperately holding unto their status. Meanwhile, the rest of the world, especially Europe and Latin America, saw massive protests against the economic crisis and the austerity measures that followed it. The US is just catching up.

The US lags behind the rest of the world not just in terms of the massive protests in the streets, and the occupation of squares, but also in terms of what people are occupying for. This is most clear in the case of education and health care. Public support for higher education in this country has been whittled away to the point where it exists in name only, with students taking out massive debts to fund their education. Health care is also thoroughly private, and a source of massive debt. The cuts that some are struggling against have already take place here. The US is, as Marx wrote, something of an anachronism, if we negate powdered wigs, we still have unpowdered wigs to contend with. (I realize that that last bit does not really help, I have just always wanted to use that quote).

Much could be said about this lag, both in terms of the long history of the US and in terms of the current moment. However, I am less interested, and capable, of doing this here. I am more interested in thinking through this moment and what is possible.

As I have mentioned before what is perhaps most interesting about the movement is the use of direct democracy in the general assemblies and multiple occupations. This breaks with a long tradition of large, hierarchically organized demonstrations, the various Marches on Washington, which always had their support demonstrations. Those demonstrations only viewed people as numbers, as something to be counted, hence the squabbles and debates with police over crowd numbers. The various occupations allow people to be something other than a number, a vote or a number in crowd, and that is a big part of their appeal. They offer people a chance to participate in their own lives, even if that life is just a few feet of tarp.

Even the New York Times has noticed the way in which the immediacy of place and contact has sustained this movement. The “Mic Check” or “Peoples Megaphone” is an immediate instantiation of solidarity, of speaking with one voice. Alongside these immediate and local occupations there is also the hashtag #occupywallstreet, which some people have used as a shorthand for the movement itself. The movement is not just a about people directly speaking to one another, but it is also about twitter and livefeeds. There is a combination of the low-tech and high-tech, of people meeting and talking and posting and sharing.

There is interesting potential in this combination of the local and the global, but also tension. First, it is possible that these different occupations will begin to take on different characteristics, even different tactics, shaped and transformed by the individuals that get involved as well as the history of the different regions. This has already started to take place, with some groups reacting differently to their police and local governments. Direct democracy demands this difference, but can the movement sustain it. Secondly, there is the tension between the tenor of face-to-face conversations and that of facebook comment threads. Can temperature checks coexist with flame wars?

There is an interesting contradiction between this ideal of direct democracy, a democracy without leaders or representation, and the slogan of this movement, “We are the 99%”. I have even heard this chanted as "We are the 99%, You are the 99%" as marchers attempt to address (and interpellate) those they pass as part of the same movement. The reference is to the top 1% that control something like 43% of the wealth. This number has an obvious populous appeal and it would seem to reflect a view that it is a matter of all of us against the 1%, against the parasite of financial capital. This particular division could be contested, especially since the 99% includes many of the wealthy managerial class and some very wealthy people. I for one would not mind seeing it lowered a bit. However, my point here is not to squabble over numbers, the real tension, and real problem has to do with this particular representation of class, if it could be called that.

One second thought, it probably can't be called that, the 99% is a way of thinking class, without thinking class, of addressing inequality without thinking about exploitation. It is inclusive to a fault, rather than deal with the antagonism of class it presents a society against a 1% seen as the epitome of greed and wealth.

Even at the level of 99% there are a great many people who would fit in that category but do not identify with it. This can be seen in the case of the ridiculous “We are the 53%.” As is so often the case with the right, this shifts the discussion of exploitation to that of taxation and the spectre of lazy people living off of "our hard work." As ridiculous as this particular meme is, however, it must be taken seriously. Many Americans identify with the 1%, or the 10%, or whatever, the entire media, entertainment, and political establishment is practically dedicated to such an idea. The entire Ideological State Apparatus, is caught up in one chorus, singing a song that tells everyone that they too can and will get rich. For the 99% to become the 99%, for it to become at the very least a broad popular basis for change it must confront the entire ideological underpinning of our society, the underpinnings which make it possible for the poor to identify with the wealthy. As one recent blog post points out, this underpinning is not just ideological but affective as well. Anyone who has lost a job, who has been downsized, understands the shame that this carries in our society.

Confronting this ideology, this imaginary identification with the interest of the wealthy, means confronting racial privilege as well as the ideology of the middle class. The question then is how to use the combined tools of direct democracy, the occupations and the power of face-to-face conversations, as well as the global internet, to change the way people think (and feel) about privilege and power.

The Politics of Composition: A Few Thoughts on Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-09T13:54:00.003-04:00

Photo from Maximum RocknRoll's Facebook feed

Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s After the Future opens with a question, a question that defines the current political moment. As he writes:

“Why, Why did the largest demonstration in human history, the antiwar Global Action that the movement launched on February 15, 2003, fail to stop the bombing of Baghdad?

Why was conscious collective action, although massive and global, unable to change things? This is the question I’ve been trying to answer for the last ten years…

I’ll say here, in short, that the answer is not to be found in the political strategy of the struggle, but in the structural weakness of the social fabric.

During the 20th century, social struggle could change things in the collective and conscious way because industrial workers could maintain solidarity and unity in daily life, and so could fight and win. Autonomy was the condition of victory, because autonomy means the ability to create social solidarity in daily life, and the ability to self-organize outside the rules of labor and exploitation. Autonomous community was the condition of political strength. When social recomposition is possible, so is collective conscious change.”

I will leave aside Bifo’s long answer to this question, a response that involves the technological and social transformation of labor. However, I will say that some version of the question of the relationship of political movements to the social structure, and social media, has been the dominant question of the last eight years. With every new occupation, every new protest, from the UK’s winter of discontent to Arab Spring to the summer of protest in Spain and elsewhere the same question has been asked or answered again and again: What are the possibilities of revolution in the new forms of social connection and social media? The answers run the gambit from technological utopianism, the “twitter” and “facebook” revolutions, to dystopia.

However, Bifo’s question is worth restating now and the emergence of another social movement, the Occupy Wall Street movement. Once again, as with the massive demonstrations of February 15, 2003, we see a population, the US population, long dismissed as passive and fragmented, acting and taking to the streets. There is optimism, but this optimism is tinged with two things that limit it. First, there is the lingering memory of February 15, a memory that leads to cynicism. Second, there is the fact that this movement has offered no demands. I actually think that these two things are related. I think that Occupy Wall Street, and the occupations around the country, are an attempt to build the social composition that are the precondition for action. They are the emergence of a problem that politics as usual works to suppress, the massive exploitation that is capitalism, and thus the emergence of politics adequate to address it. At this stage they are the connection of people, ideas, and machines, the creation of assemblages that might build something.

This response differs greatly from the response of Paul Krugman and the New York Times, who have both argued that it is OK that the movement has issued no demands because it is the job of politicians to articulate demands. The people are always an inchoate mass, who can only speak the affects of anger and frustration, it is the job of politicians to articulate this, to give form to matter. Krugman et als response, while it claims to be sympathetic, completely fails to see what is happening at General Assemblies across the country, people are running their own lives, dealing with the media, and discussing what is to be done without politicians. There is no need to wait for politicians to articulate demands, to make politics possible. As Krugman states elsewhere in his column:

“Bear in mind, too, that experience has made it painfully clear that men in suits not only don’t have any monopoly on wisdom, they have very little wisdom to offer. When talking heads on, say, CNBC mock the protesters as unserious, remember how many serious people assured us that there was no housing bubble, that Alan Greenspan was an oracle and that budget deficits would send interest rates soaring.”

The men in suits, those who are dismissing the current movement, have no wisdom to offer. True words, to which I would only add "Pundit, listen to thyself." This is exactly why the Occupy Wall Street movement cannot just become the inchoate rage that pundits, politicians, and economists can translate into policy. It must become a new way of articulating intelligence, of composing society.

That is the upside, an occupation that is really an education in direct democracy, in the solidarity necessary for action. However, at this moment, these “Occupations” are occupations in name only. The territory that they hold is done so with tacit or open support of the cities and police. There are indications that the police and cities are running out of patience. What happens next depends on what is being built now.

Updated 10/13/11

Some of the same points, but on YouTube:

And Bifo's latest piece, which coins the unfortunate term Finazism but is otherwise very interesting.

Viral Morality: A Few Remarks on Contagion

2011-09-28T19:45:00.002-04:00

Let us begin with a few often repeated arguments about horror films. These are not so much theories, but things that "everyone says," statements that appear occasionally in film review without justification or citation. First, horror films are the way in which a society or culture confronts its fears. Although confront is not quite the right word, since the whole point is that these fears appear only in a mediated form, masked by monsters and aliens. Godzilla is a stand in for atomic war, body snatchers for communism or McCarthy conformism, vampires for sexuality, zombies for consumption etc. Second, horror movies, as well as disaster films, allow the audience to play God, to view some people as fit to die and others to live. This dimension of films is highly moralistic and often racist (the black guy dying first is almost a meta-cliche), as the final credits close on the surviving virgin or restored family. We might call these two things the "spontaneous philosophy of the horror film."

Contagion breaks with this first point. The film presents the scenes of horror that we have seen countless times, military lockdown of city streets, empty urban spaces strewn with garbage, people raiding grocery stores and their neighbor's home for food and weapons, but they are not responding to a zombie invasion or alien attack. They are responding to a contagious virus, the very thing that all these other monsters were allegories for in the first place. Thus, one could argue that Contagion is the "return of the repressed," the very thing that we are afraid of made manifest. It is horror unmasked.

Things change a bit, however, if we remember our second bit of spontaneous philosophy.The film's patient zero is Beth Emhoff, an international executive played by Gwyneth Paltrow. One of the film's many plot threads deals with the World Health Organization and Center for Disease Control's attempt to trace the emergence and spread of the disease. In the context of this we learn that she was in China to see the groundbreaking of a new factory and that she had an affair while on a layover in Chicago on her return. These two things set her apart from her husband, played by Matt Damon, who is shown as the dedicated husband, staying at home with the kids. Moreover, there is the suggestion that doing business in China and cheating on her husband are almost the same thing, a betrayal of nation and family. She spends part of her trip at a casino in Hong Kong, and her every action at the casino has been recorded. The footage of the surveillance camera provides us with a visual record of contact and contagion.The film pauses, freezes, and focuses on every touched hand, ever infected cocktail glass, and casino chip. Benjamin's argument about film opening up new worlds is realized in a kind of cinema of contagion: every close up is ominous, every frozen frame is a death.

[Spoiler Alert] The film closes with two different sets of images. First, we see Matt Damon, the husband who is immune from the disease and spends most of the movie protecting his daughter from infection. This attempt to protect the daughter from the disease largely takes the form of protecting her from her boyfriend. Contagion and sexuality are equated once again. In the final scene, after vaccine has been developed, Matt Damon buys a prom dress for his daughter and gives her the prom she never had. These images of home and wholesome teenage fun are followed by the revelation of the origin of the disease. We see Gwyneth Patrow, long since dead and dissected, posing flirtatiously with the chef who recently touched an infected pig.

As much as the film presents us with "the real," with a painstaking realistic image of the horrors of a worldwide pandemic, it turns out that this presentation is mediated or refracted. It is not refracted by the zombies, Mayan prophecies, or invading aliens, but by morality. It associates contagion with promiscuity, both cultural and sexual, and immunity with the home, nation, and family. Its fantasy is not that the dead will walk the earth, but that viruses will mainly infect bad people.

I Owe You an Explanation: Graeber and Marx on Origin Stories

2011-09-21T16:30:00.000-04:00

The story of so-called primitive accumulation is well known to readers of Marx. This story was political economy’s way of understanding the origins of capitalism, explaining how the world was divided into workers and capitalists. The story is a kind of grasshopper and ant tale, of those who save and those who squander, although Marx gives it a different literary spin. As Marx writes:

“This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past. Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one the diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal elite; the other lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread by the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins.”

Marx argues that this story is inadequate to account for the origin of capital. It is not enough to simply save money, because the accumulation of money does nothing to produce those with nothing to sell but their labor power. In order to get workers a huge population must be separated from the means of production, cast off the land and out of the commons. The origin of capitalism is not a moral story of thrift, but a bloody story of expropriation; a story which eventually encompasses the whole history of slavery, colonialism, and even the reformation.

Marx ended Volume One of Capital with this critique, David Graeber opens his book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years with a critique of another contemporary fable. This fable concerns the origin of money. This story, which can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle, begins with an economy based on barter, but, as anyone who has brought their cow to the market and came back with magic beans can tell you, barter is incredibly inconvenient. Money, the story claims, then comes into existence to solve the shortcomings of barter, the difficulty of bringing objects to the market, and the time spent waiting for someone who had what you wanted and wanted what you had. Most importantly, money is an affair of equals, grounded only on convenience and interest. This is why this story is so popular with Adam Smith and contemporary economic textbooks.

Graeber argues that there is one thing wrong with this story: it never happened. He uses a great deal of archeological and anthropological evidence to argue that this smooth transition from barter to money never took place. All of this historical evidence is based on one simple problem: barter presupposes a kind of sociality of people who are entirely disconnected, without bonds, but not engaged in direct conflict. Marx would say that it presuppose bourgeois subjects, subjects connected only by self-interest. What Graeber argues is that history, or rather anthropology, has documented all sorts of ways in which goods circulate, but this circulation is usually one in which bonds of all sorts, friendships and debts, circulate as well.

Graeber gives more credit (I actually don’t know if I intended that pun or not) to a different account of money, primordial debt theory, which argues that money emerged from the taxes, from the state’s need to generate money. This theory begins with a fundamental asymmetry, not an equivalence, an asymmetry that is often founded on religion, on the sense of debt owed to the world. (Readers of Deleuze and Guattari will recognize a great deal of this emphasis on the primordial debt running through Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus).

As Graeber summarizes this dichotomy of these two viewpoints as follows:

“This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine that we all start out as individuals who don’t owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it’s a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue to exist without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.”

What these two accounts illustrate is that debt is always a combination of equality and hierarchy. The false dichotomy of the account of the origins of money presents them as alternatives, but that misses the fact that they are always intertwined in debt. To quote Graeber again:

“Debt is a very specific thing, and it arises from very specific situations. It first requires a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of being, who at least potential equals, who are equals in those ways that are really important, and who are not currently in a state of equality—but for whom there is some way to set matters straight.”

Graeber spends much of the book analyzing the history of this particular logic of hierarchy and equality, hierarchies that determine who is expected to pay their debts and who can hold onto them. This hierarchy continues to the present, to the current moment of bailouts for some and austerity for others. However, Graeber’s book is not a history; yes, it covers the five thousand years of debt, slavery, the gold standard, and the fiat system are all discussed, but primary as different transformations of this logic. Graeber is primarily interested in the way in which monetized debt intersects with, and separates itself from, social bonds and obligations.

At the core of this anthropology is the following axiom about human society:

“In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible. There is always an assumption that anyone who is not actually an enemy can be expected on the principle of “from each according to their abilities,” at least to an extent: for example, if one needs to figure out how to get somewhere, and the other knows the way.”

Graeber’s point is well taken, there is much to be said for this communism of everyday life, the way in which cooperative relations permeate our daily actions. It is important to contest the anthropology of neoliberalism, the claim that we are always and naturally engaged in cutthroat competition, seeking maximum gain for minimum expenditure. Such an anthropology simply does not account for all of our tendencies to offer aid in all sorts of ways. It fails to describe actual daily life, even in capitalism.

As a somewhat abrupt conclusion let me say that I paired Graeber with Marx for two reasons, two reasons that have nothing to do reviving some anarchism versus communism debate. First, I think that the fantasy of barter, of money arising from barter, is just as a false and pernicious ideology as the moral story of so-called primitive accumulation. These stories are pernicious not because of what they say about the past, but what they do in the present. The moral idea of the thrifty capitalist and shifty worker continues into our contemporary discussions of “job creators” and lazy unemployment recipients, just as the idea of money as egalitarian underwrites the ideal of the free market as a social relation without subordination. Graeber’s critique of barter needs to be placed alongside Marx’s account primitive accumulation. However, and this is the second reason, I read Marx’s critique of so-called primitive accumulation to also be a critique of an explanation of history based entirely on human motives and intentions. Capitalism is not a matter of thrift, waste, or greed, it is a matter of surplus value, labor power, and other real abstractions. Thus, communism may be the foundation of all sociability, but capitalism is often indifferent to the sociability, or, worse still, exploits it.

As a topic of inquiry debt crosses back and forth from the economic to the moral, and thus it is tempting to locate its history in attitudes and ideas, but a true history of debt needs to also examine the structure that are indifferent to those ideas.

Primer for the Post-Apocalypse: The Hunger Games Trilogy

2011-09-05T13:39:00.004-04:00

Up until now I have avoided the trend of adults reading young adult fiction. I have never read a single Harry Potter book, but I have seen a few of the movies, and I have avoided Twilight as much as possible. (Of course it is nearly impossible to completely avoid such mega-media events, I find myself picking up references to these things, to “Team Edward and “Team Jacob” by sheer cultural osmosis.) This avoidance of young adult fiction came to an end with The Hunger Games. I picked up the first book out of curiosity, having heard a few of the details through osmosis, and found myself tearing through all three fairly quickly, they were this summer’s beach reads (concealed by the blank slate of a kindle).

For those unfamiliar with the plot, The Hunger Games is basically a variant on the dystopian death match genre, the idea that in some future society, post-apocalyptic or not, human society will end up staging some kind of life of death contest. Sometimes these games are for entertainment (Death Race 2000, Running Man) usually on a variant of bread and circuses, in which entertainment explicitly functions as a form of control, and other times they function as a form of punishment (Battle Royale) or justice (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome). They thus represent either barbarism or the spectacle, they are all variants on “bread and circuses” of decadence and decay.

In this case The Hunger Games, take place in the not too distant future, in a country called Panem, a country formed after ecological and/or political cataclysms destroyed the US. (The name panem is derived from the Latin phrase “panem et circenses,” bread and circuses) Little is said about this cataclysm, nor is much given that would connect this world, the world of the books, to the world we know, there is little mention of recognizable culture or politics, not even a crumbling Statue of Liberty. Rather, the book’s founding historical narrative begins with the thirteen districts of Panem revolted against the Capitol. The revolution was put down, apparently destroying one of the districts, and the Hunger Games exist as a kind of memorial and punishment. Every year two children, age twelve to eighteen, from each district are selected through a kind of lottery (perhaps a nod to Shirley Jackson) to participate in these “games” in which they battle to death. The specific details of the game, especially its setting and environmental conditions, vary from year to year. The games can take place in any environment, from wooded forest to ocean islands, and every creature and obstacle, from poisonous wasps to killer monkeys, is designed by the game creator. What remains constant is that there are children, weapons, and at the end one child is still standing, and is rewarded for the victory.

The districts where the children come from are by and large impoverished, and are each defined by a central industry. District 12 (the home of the protagonist, Katniss Everdeen ) is dedicated to mining, and is generally modeled after Appalachia, complete with a long tradition of game hunting to supplement meager pay. The other districts are dedicated to agriculture, fishing, lumber, livestock, weapons production, and electronics, to name a few. This gives the novels a basic textbook understanding of the economy, like those maps of the US with icons representing wheat and industry placed over Nebraska and Michigan. The work of the different districts doesn’t just define their contribution to the economy, it defines their character, the skills, talents, abilities, and degree of subjection. The most exploited districts, those dedicated to agriculture are repressed, while those dedicated to weapons or technology are kept relatively affluent. It is class composition for young adult readers.

The real class conflict is between the various districts and the Capitol. The Capitol is portrayed as the pinnacle of wealth and decadent consumption, while those in the districts struggle to survive the citizens of the Capitol indulge in fashions, dyeing their skin, and purchase the latest trends and devices. The relation of exploitation is actually more feudal bordering on the Asiatic mode of production, as the different districts pay tribute to Capitol. (Incidentally, “tribute” is the term used for the children who are forced to participate). What the novels miss in exploitation, however, the make clear in terms of difference. The novels underscore again and again that people who starve and people who dine on the latest extravagant delicacy make up part of the same world.

The greatest innovation of the novels is what they bring to the basic format of the games. Battles to the death have been done again and again, with various machinery and weapons. What the Hunger Games brings to this is two things. First, generalized surveillance, the participants of the hunger games can be seen at any and all times, and are aware of this fact. This generalized surveillance relates to the second fact, one that makes this a post-reality TV novel. It is not enough that the participants kill each other, but in doing so they must provide a compelling persona and narrative. Doing so guarantees them good standing in their odds and means that they will be provided with assistance Before they enter the arena they are given makeovers and are interviewed like contenders on American Idol. Gaining the support of the audience is a matter of life in death.

Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of the novels, is not selected by lottery, her sister is, and her offer to substitute her sister is her defining act of bravery and agency. (The second is important, since the novel’s central theme is “games,” not just the brutal contests to the death, but the games of politics and love, in which the distinction between playing and “being played” is never that clear). She is also reluctant to be made over, to put on make-up, and is much better at killing someone with a bow and arrow than wining an audience over with her charm. She is introduced as the quintessential tomboy, more interested in hunting and wearing her father’s hunting jacket than anything else. Her entry into the games is also a forced entry into gender norms, even a romance and picking out a wedding dress.

As deals were made for the inevitable major motion picture, it was perhaps not surprising that two of the major contenders to play Katniss were Jennifer Lawrence, from Winter’s Bone, and Hailee Steinfeld, from True Grit. The three characters are all cut from the same cloth: they are all poor and rural, they all have dead fathers, fathers whose loss must be dealt with in some way, avenged or corrected, and they each ally themselves with an unreliable (and often drunken) father figure in order to do “a man’s job,” proving themselves to be more than any man in the end. All three offer an interesting pop-culture meditation on female adolescence, one that contrasts quite sharply with Tiqqun’s Theory of a Young Girl. For Tiqqun the young is the total and sovereign consumer, the ideal of all marketing, and advertising, regardless of gender. These three girls are opposed to such appearances in every sense, defined not so much by work than by duty. They all end up wearing their father's clothes at some point or another, a testament to utility over appearance as much as longing for a lost father. They are three little Antigones, tragic and in some sense always already mourned, none of these stories take place in the present.

Katniss is an exception in that her story, unlike the others, has its romantic subplot, but it is one that she initiates. Children are selected into the games in pairs of boys and girls, Katniss’ partner Peeta quickly declares his love for her. This idea of two star-crossed lovers forced to kill each other becomes precisely the convincing story, the spin that makes them media stars and helps them survive, but “is it real?” Much of the book’s emotional core comes from this last question, a question that is explicitly asked in the final book. This question is asked against the backdrop of Katniss’ feelings for Gale, her hunting friend from her life as a tomboy. Although I have yet to see “Team Peeta” and “Team Gale” T-shirts, it seems that a split of romantic loyalties is an essential ingredient to the young adult novel. The plot of the books are artfully contrived to hold this question off until the end.

The plot of the books eventually descend into the cliché of rebels becoming oppressors (pigs becoming farmers and all that) which is perhaps one of the central myths of our “anti-promethean” times. However, their strength is in how they deal with the rule of appearances. Katniss is made over to participate in the games, and eventually becomes the symbol of rebellion. Her real struggle is between herself and her image. They are struggles with becoming an image as much as they are struggles with being made into a standard idea of femininity (thus not to far from Tiqqun). Katniss may be a hero of the apocalypse, but she is also a hero of an age in which individuals, men and women, are constantly made and remade into images of themselves. This is what makes the novels contemporary, and the fact that it wouldn’t hurt to become handy with a bow and arrow for the dark times ahead.

"Live Every Week Like it is Shark Week": Remarks on the Ecology of the Mediasphere

2011-08-27T21:01:00.003-04:00

Friday morning, as the local and national media went on a feeding frenzy of sorts over Hurricane Irene, complete with radar maps and rain-coated correspondents bracing themselves against the wind and rain, the following image, taken of a TV set in Miami made it onto youtube and into my facebook news feed.

I must confess that I posted it and shared it. And since one confession deserves another, I should say that I was shark obsessed as a kid. I would check out books on sharks from the library, and once even owned a book called Shark Attacks, which was nothing more than a series of brief descriptions, like a police blotter only more gory, of every documented shark attack. This book was sold as part of a school book series, because nothing encourages young readers like death. My desire to post it was part of my lingering fascination and fear of sharks, which I would like to critically unpack here.

Initially, it occurred to me that this image, with its evocation of sharks riding storm surges into city streets and preying on beleaguered hurricane beings, had already been done as film (albeit yet to be released) as an example of life imitating a bad movie.

It turns out that there is a third act to the story, it was later revealed that the image that made it onto the news is a fake, a doctored image. It is a photoshop of perhaps one of the most famous shark images to be produced recently. You can see the original, and read about it is origin here, an origin which includes a very different idea of sharks than the idea of Shark Week, one that presents them as animals, not monsters.

There is nothing exceptional about this little story, it is in some sense mundane, there are countless youtube phenomena that turn out to be fakes, but it does illustrate certain things. First, we have the TV news, which has responded to the decline in audience share and profits and the rise of digital image capturing devises (cameras, smart phones, etc) by more or less outsourcing its news gathering." Send us your pictures, video, comments, and tweets," is the demand made every newspaper and television station. This might be a way to make up for the loss of reporters, or it might be a way to gain audience, perhaps the news editors figure that people will watch and read just to see if their images and comments have made it onto the screen. We could celebrate this breakdown of the distinction between author and producer, see it as the democratization of the news: "You Report, You Decide," or something to that effect. However, doing so overlooks at least two things. First of all, there is the news media's imperative to capture attention, in this case, to read the storm of attention by offering the most extreme photos and the satellite pictures with the most vivid colors. That this fake image got past the editors, verification and checking second sources being a thing of the past, reveals something of this demand to out sensationalize other channels, other media. The might have the picture of the wind toppling a Mcdonald's but they do not have the blood thirsty shark cruising along the interstate. Second, and with all apologies to Walter Benjamin, any simple identification of the author as producer overlooks the way in which affects, such as fear, and imaginaries, such as the image of the shark, are disseminated just as fast as digital images. The audience that produces is itself a product of culture industry, to frame this whole issue in terms of the Benjamin/Adorno dialectic.

This brings us to sharks, my childhood object of fascination and fear. It will one day be necessary to write the history of the shark as image, as spectacle (perhaps this has already been done). This history, at least the history that I am thinking of, begins with Jaws, which we all know begins the history of that unique cultural form, the summer blockbuster. Despite this success at the level of form, Jaws has not really been duplicated at the level of genre. There have been a handful of sequels, a few lackluster shark movies, and the occasional piranha or killer bear. (One is reminded of Nobuhiko Ohbayashi's remarks about the limits of the culture industry, "A hit movie about shark attacks leads to a movie about bear attacks. That is the best they can do.") This failure at the level of fiction has been more than made up for at the level of fact, or pseudo-fact: we do not get a shark movie every year, or every few years, as we do slasher films, demonic possessions, zombies, and other variations on the horror genre, but we do get Shark Week. Jaws has permeated our consciousness in countless staged attacks by sharks on chunks of meat and dummies made up to look like surfers.

Sharks have permeated our imaginary, become objects of fear, despite the fact that shark attacks are still incredibly rare. After all, that book on shark attacks that I once owned was incredibly thin and small. A book of highway accidents or bathtub accidents, or just people killed in hurricanes, would be much thicker. At the same time sharks, actual sharks, are becoming increasingly threatened, victims of the appetite for shark fin soup and the perils of being an alpha predator in a declining ecosphere. This is what it might mean to "live every week like it is shark week," to repeat the quote stolen from Tracy Jordan on 30 Rock, it is to live in a world of imagined fears, of shark attacks and wars on terror, on a continued heightened state of alert, without seeing the real dangers, and, most importantly, the role we play in creating them. The really depressing part is that we create not only the real dangers, the dangers of oceans on the verge of dying, but we create the fake ones as well, submitting our images and tweets, and, if necessary, inventing them.

Closing remarks by Bertolt Brecht:

Please Be Aliens. Please Be Aliens: Limits of the Apocalyptic Imaginary

2011-08-21T18:29:00.004-04:00

Aliens have made it the news at least three times in the last week. This is fairly impressive considering the fact that there have been no shortage of actual events to report on (stock market collapse, the fallout from the Uk riots, Syria, etc.). This could be taken as symptomatic of the usual August slow news cycle, less a reflection of an actual lack of newsworthy stories than a collective decision not to reflect on the world. Past Augusts have brought us such stories as "Shark Attack Summer." August is the month dedicated to frivolous stories that make the rest of the years sound bytes and pseudo-events look serious by comparison. Taken together, however these reports construct an interesting snapshot of our existing political imaginary, the reflection of our social and political condition in our avoidance of it.

The first instance of Aliens in the news was from Paul Krugman, who argued that the build up to prepare for an alien invasion would be precisely the stimulus program that this country needs.

This has led some would be Rorschachs on the right (excuse the Watchmen reference) to conclude that Krugman was involved in a liberal plot to fabricate an alien invasion in order to advance One World Government. (Because openly declaring how useful a fake alien invasion would be is the perfect way to construct a fake invasion). Aside from such hystrionics Krugman's joke is indicative of how impossible it would be, given the prevailing political and economic ideologies, to pursue a Keynesian stimulus project. For the past few years of the recession, Krugman has written numerous columns and editorials representing the Keynesian point of view, the point of view that we were supposed to return to after the collapse of neoliberalism, advocating for government spending focusing on unemployment as an antidote to our economic situation, but now he even seems to understand that given our political climate such an idea is just as likely as an alien invasion.

This connection between what is politically feasible and what is imaginable is underscored in the next appearance of Aliens in the news. A study was published that argued that Aliens might attack us because of our destruction of our environment. As the report states,

"A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions," the report states.

"Green" aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. "These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,"

Thus, the scenario shifts from The Watchmen (or the Outer Limits episode Krugman referred to) to the The Day the Earth Stood Still (or at least its remake, and probably several other films in which aliens premptively destroy humanity because of our destructive tendencies). In this way it dovetails nicely with the fringe right wing response to Krugman, especially since global warming has often been presented as a hoax perpetuated to consolidate government power. Which brings us to our final story, the official right wing response to the study (now erroneously portrayed as yet another frivolous expenditure of tax dollars, as a NASA study) on Fox News:

At the end of this segment we learn that Fox News viewers would overwhelmingly prefer that we prepare to fight alien invasions rather than curtail emissions of green house gases, the former scenario being much easier to imagine than the latter, not to mention way cooler. (This is illustrated by the clip itself which qualifies "global warming" as supposedly, but does not do the same for aliens). At this point these three stories return full circle, Fox news viewers end up unwittingly reinforcing Krugman's point that it is easier to imagine an alien invasion than some large scale investment in a "green economy." Beyond that what do these stories tell us? Fredric Jameson's too often cited remark that "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism,"comes to mind. Only now the situation is even worse, we cannot even imagine the ecological destruction of the planet because doing so would involve some change in the here and now, some demand that we live differently, so we can only imagine aliens as a completely exterior force, as the rupture from the outside.

My point here is not to argue for some Keynesian project or to use the threat of aliens as a kind of secular (and green) judgement day, but to illustrate the limits of the current political imaginary. The limits of our world are not just the atmosphere and environment but include what we are capable of imagining, visualizing, and thinking. The ongoing collapse of the world economy and the global environment point to the necessity of imagining other relations, other conditions, than our current ones. However, that the image of earth unified, of a collective organized project, lingers even in the distorted summer blockbuster fantasy of a response to an alien invasion suggest that the promethean imaginary is not entirely exhausted, entirely worn out. It has only retreated to the realm of fantasy, to the image of a unified humanity against some global threat. What would it take then to realize that the threats to our survival, to the survival of this planet, have already arrived, that the alien is us?

The House Always Wins: Austerity Breeds Austerity, Repression Breeds Repression

2011-08-11T11:44:00.000-04:00

I have not written anything about the riots/insurrection/looting in the UK for the simple reason that I do not know enough about the context and conditions (of course this hasn't stopped others from doing so). I to not plan to change that now, but I did find an interesting response about the backlash by Owen Jones, author of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. As Jones states:

"My real fear is that we have just witnessed another crucial stage in the political ascendancy of the right. When asked how he would cure what he described as a "sickness", one of David Cameron's key suggestions was "a welfare state that doesn't reward idleness". And so begins an attempt to link the actions of a few with benefit claimants as a whole."

And finally:

"The left - in its broadest sense - has to face an alarming reality. The right is now hegemonic on the main political issues of the day: the economy, social issues and law-and-order. As the right taps into a reservoir of anger and resentment in our divided society, it is harder than ever for the left to get a hearing on practically anything. Those who will suffer most will be those who the left exists to represent."

I do not agree with everything he says in this post, including that last line about who the left "represents", but I do think that he is onto something that goes beyond the riots. Deleuze and Guattari famously argued that capitalism functions by breaking down, by producing crisis, but I do not think that they could even imagine the current conjuncture. The current crisis has not lead to an examination or a contestation of capital, at least on a large scale, but a further entrenchment. Austerity and security are the watchwords of the day, and they function as a kind of perpetual downward spiral in which austerity breeds austerity and security breeds security. It is clear that neither of these things function, at least well: austerity will not restore the economy and security will not improve peoples safety. What they will do is further the centralization of wealth and state power. They function by not functioning, by perpetuating the permanent crisis that is contemporary governmentality. When power is grounded on fear, insecurity, and resentment, than the reproduction of fear and insecurity is a necessary function of maintaining power.

When the house always wins it is time to change the game.

Finally, I would like to recommend the following documentary. It is a little long in points, and could have used a few less music and protest montages, but it is still an interesting example of what youtube is capable of doing.

Ape Like Imitation: Repetition and Difference in the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-06T14:27:00.011-04:00

The Hollywood tendency towards repetition, towards reproduction of the same, which reaches its culmination in recent reboots and remakes must, despite itself, confront history. History not in the sense of fashions, dates, and technology, but the historicity that defines a moment, its structure of feeling: history at the level of subtext rather than text.

There is perhaps no clearer illustration of this than The Planet of the Apes. The first version, the novel by Pierre Boulle, always seemed to me similar to John Stuart Mill’s colonialist use of the image of apes. In On Liberty Mill refers to those who do not choose, who only conform, as requiring no other faculty than the ape like one of imitation. This criticism takes on a colonialist tinge when Mill describes China and India as parts of the world that once had innovation and individuality, developing culture and innovation long before Europe, but have fallen into stagnation through the dominance of custom. “The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of custom is complete.” For Mill custom, ape like imitation, ends innovation. Boulle’s novel presents us with apes, apes who possess modern technology, rifles, jeeps, and aircraft, but cannot create it. Thus suggesting that “man,” or white man, will one day be overwhelmed by cultures which can only imitate and not create. Imitation destroys the original.

The film, written by Rod Serling, removed this subtext of colonial anxiety, replacing it with apocalyptic dread. He replaced the novel’s strange ending, restored in the ill conceived remake by Tim Burton, in which the human astronaut returns to an Earth dominated by apes, to make it set on “Earth all along,” a point driven home by the iconic image of the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand. The new subtext is one of a humanity destined to destroy itself, and the rebellion of the youth, “never trust anyone over thirty.” The lone human finds himself supported by young idealistic apes, tired of the authority of the older generation. (The movie also presents a society divided into the military, gorillas; religious and political authority, orangutans; and scientists, chimpanzees). The apes still imitated, but what they imitated was our inability to change, to stubbornly hold to our “sacred scrolls” to the point of destruction.

The apocalyptic dread culminates in the second apocalypse of Beneath the Planet of the Apes. After this film, the latter movies in the series, which, thanks to the paradoxes of time travel, are both sequels and prequels, play up the connection with rebellion and counter culture. The first, Escape from the Planet of the Apes begins with the sympathetic chimps from the first film traveling back in time in the missing human spacecraft only to arrive at Earth in 1973. While this was probably an ingenious way to deal with the dwindling budgets of the later sequels, it also sets up a narrative where the apes are the sympathetic figures, isolated outcasts rather than dominant species, inverting the book's inverted world. The US government is afraid of the apes, symbols of the decline of man, and eventually decides to kill them and their unborn son as a preemptive strike against the ape’s eventual dominance. The parents are killed, the infant survives, and humanity reveals itself to be the monster. The film offers everything that we would expect from a paranoid thriller of the seventies: a secretive government that is not above political assassinations and second sniper.

The opposition to “the man” becomes much more explicit in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Set in the distant nineteen nineties it follows the surviving ape from the future into the prehistory of the first Planet of the Apes. It is a world in which apes have already become slaves rather than pets: they work as butlers, hairdressers, and store clerks. There are no scenes of apes working in factories or farms: it is entirely a service based economy where everyone seems to be able to afford their own monkey butler. This is supposed to be efficient and beneficial for the humans, but the film constantly shows the apes to either incompetent or unruly, overturning buffet trays, shrieking from the flames of a fondue set, and grabbing the wrong book from the shelf. In contrast to this unruliness of the apes, one scene shows a group of out of work human waiters, displaced by the ape based slave economy, peacefully protesting their condition. The film offers an opposite message than it would appear to invoke: slavery proves to be a difficult form of domination, lashes and chains are less effective than an interiorized sense of privilege and belonging. The apes are difficult to dominate precisely because their domination is so overt, and their ignorance of their task always risks spilling over into insurrection. The movie brings together the primitive accumulation of original domestication with the indignities of service work, drawing a straight line that suggests that civilization is nothing other than obedience. Nature is the original strategy of refusal.

The analogy to the history of slavery and racial oppression is so heavy handed as to cease to be subtext. This is especially true in the case of Macdonald, the Governor’s African-American assistant. He is presented as someone who must necessarily be sympathetic with the apes, a point which is first uttered by a group of cops, perhaps as proof of their racism, of course they think that the black man must be sympathetic to the apes, but sooner or later everyone makes this equation. The difference between the enslavement of another species, even a highly intelligent one, and the enslavement of humans is barely mentioned in the film, which is either a testament to its concern for animals or evidence of its confused grasp of race. Nevertheless the constant invocation of racism and the history of slavery paints a rather brutal picture of human history, a picture underscored by cast of ugly, angry, and petty humans. The Ape's revolution doesn't just condem their treatment, but all of human history, a history of exploitation and domination. The distrust and hatred of humans that the first film presented as prejudice is now reiterated as fact.

Given that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a remake, or reimagining, of Conquest, albiet without the time travel, the question is how will it rewrite the odd anti-racist racism of the original. The focus is now on genetic engineering and the use of apes as research subjects. The tagline states "Evolution becomes Revolution," placing this film in the subgenre of what could be called "Darwinian" horror: films that try to make the extinction of humanity the nightmare. (other examples of the genre include Species and the horrible Godzilla remake). Such films could be understood as products of a biopolitical era when it is easier to imagine the extinction of mankind as a species than the end of capitalism, but the equivalence that the tagline sets up between "evolution" and "revolution," biology and politics suggests real confusion of nature and culture that is integral to racist thought. In the earlier Ape films the difference of species did not make much of a difference. Yes the apes were harrier, and walked with a slight hunch, but they were mostly hairy humans with different sets of laws and rules. Their evolution was really more of a revolution, an overthrowing of the oppressor. Rise is able to utilize the new digital technologies to give us apes that really move like apes, swinging through trees and over the Golden Gate bridge. In doing so it is able to really capture, in a way the earlier films could not, the feeling of being defeated by a smarter, faster, and stronger species. (The New York Times has suggested that form meets content in this case: the story of genetically altered superior apes is mapped at the level of the form with the digitally created characters of Caesar the ape leader. We are watching the extinction of the actor).

Where does Rise ultimately stand with respect to subtext? Much of the discussion has stressed the role that animal experimentation plays in the film. PETA has even come out in favor of it. This is true, but it overlooks the fact that the movie is no less critical of zoos, circus, shelters, and even the misguided practice of keeping wild animals in homes, domesticated as little children. (The release of this film overlaps with the release of the documentary Project Nim, a film about an attempt to raise an ape as a child). Caesar's rebellious spirit is cultivated in a seemingly unlikely place, an ape sanctuary, where bureaucracy, indifference, and the banality of daytime soap operas drives him against humanity. (One staff member, who appears to be left over from Conquest, repeatedly takes out the frustrations of his menial job on the apes). Ultimately the film suggests that the gulf that separates man and animal is unbridgeable: an uncanny gulf separates us from the apes, the more they look like us, think like us, and are like us, the less we can relate to them. We can place neither in our cages nor our homes (itself a kind of cage).

Both Conquest and Rise suggest that the similarity that links ape with man will be exploited, as servants in the first film and as research subjects in the second. They are differentiated by their two different ways of imagining exploitation, generalized servitude or the exploitation of information. The latter seems more realistic, after all, medical testing on apes is a reality, but the former is ultimately more satisfying. Scenes in the original Conquest resemble a kind of simian Fight Club, with the apes acting out everyday acts of refusal and sabotage, suggesting that the first film was trying to connect with the frustrations of waiters and shop clerks stuck at home watching "Ape week." The recent film offers no such identification with the day to day exploitation of the apes, unless you have been subject to medical trials. Despite the focus on science, and the generic "playing God" plot, the real incubator of revolutionary activity is the ape sanctuary, a prison of daily humiliations. It greatest success, however, is how much it vastly improves on the earlier film's scenes of apes in revolt. Caesar has often been referred to as a Che Guevera of the apes, but Rise really excels at its scenes of tactics, you get to watch as solidarity is developed across the species lines of gorilla, chimpanzee, and orangutan, and then see these alliances put to the test against humans. The final Golden Gate confrontation is a brilliant instance of tactics: if the cops control the streets, control the sky and the ground beneath them.

Finally, the turn towards comic books, old science fiction movies, and other elements of nerd culture as the basis for every summer blockbuster has created a kind of esoteric/exoteric divide in many films. Lines from old films, visual jokes, and other trivia become a kind of secret text, intended for the discriminating eyes and ears of those in the know, while the movie still delivers the explosions and romantic subplots for the masses. Rise is riddled with such moments, all of the iconic lines from the original are worked into the script ("bright eyes," "It's a mad house. A mad house," "Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape,"etc.) and if you look or listen closely you can find references to a missing Icarus spacecraft and a model Statue of Liberty. These are a little distracting, and the movie could have done without them. The movie does offer an interesting little scene during the closing credits (worth sticking around for). The scene is not a set up for a sequel, as we have seen in most summer movies, but a tiny bit of narrative closure, answering the question as to how revolt turns into revolution, how one ape saying "No" could lead to a global transformation. Unfortunately, it is more on the side of evolution than revolution, proving in this case that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of specieism.

The myth of Casear, the ape who stood up to man and said "no," has been central to the Apes films since the beginning. At its best Rise of the Planet of the Apes makes that "no," that refusal, necessary and affirmative.

Red Spinozism: Towards and Against a Spinozist Theory of Alienation

2011-07-24T18:27:00.002-04:00

It is possible to understand the interest in Marxist Spinozism, Spinozist Marxism, or, as Alberto Toscano once put it, Red Spinozism, as a kind of funhouse mirror, where the concepts from one philosopher take on new shapes and forms when reflected through the other. The two most well known of Marx’s concepts that have made it through this hall of mirrors are ideology, which has been refracted through Spinoza’s theory of imagination and the first kind of knowledge in Althusser, and living labor, which has been expanded to an ontological level of production through Negri’s reading of the productive nature of reason and desire. Moreover, Spinoza’s concepts of structural or immanent causality have been read through the mode of production and the multitude has been read through class struggle and the autonomist hypothesis. I hastily list these different concept refractions and transformations in order to stress that has been absent, namely alienation.

This is perhaps due to the influence of Althusser on the reception of Spinoza, Spinoza became synonymous with the rejection of humanism, but it is also perhaps an effect of the history of translation. Alexandre Matheron’s Individu et Commuaté chez Spinoza has not been translated into English. Matheron’s text offers one of the more interesting and provocative redefinitions of alienation in his reading of Spinoza. Matheron’s reading is oriented by the Appendix to Part One of the Ethics, what Althusser calls the “matrix of every possible theory of ideology.” Matheron takes his bearings from the two objects of Spinoza’s critique in the Appendix: the first, and most well know, is of course the anthropomorphic conception of God, a good that acts towards certain ends, ends which match with or thwart are own; the second, is that of the idea that objects, things, are intrinsically good or bad. Both of these inadequate ideas stem from the same cause, from the way in which we conscious of our appetite but ignorance of the causes of things. This leads to a way in which our appetite, our desire, becomes the way we make sense of the world, projecting it onto everything we encounter and the cosmos itself. Matheron describes this as follows (forgive my sloppy translation).

“The progress of consciousness is subject to a double alienation. On the one hand there is an “earthly alienation” [aliénation mondaine] , that can be called economic, provided that we give this word the largest possible sense: by which we unconditionally attach value to particular objects that surround us, valueing them as positive or negative, which we consider to be "goods" (worldly goods) or as "bad,” and which we will now devote our lives to pursuing and fleeing. On the other hand an ideological alienation, both cause and effect of the first: that by which we transpose our passions and beliefs into an ontology, developing an inverted vision of the world, a vision outlined by the traditional view of he cosmos: a universal teleogy and heirarchy of goods, which gives a privileged to man, and, as the keystone of the system, an undefined God. It is this double alienation, which will control the whole course of our emotional life.”

There are two interesting points about this. First, and this is part of Matheron’s entire critique of teology, or finalism, the idea of the explanatory power of final purposes in nature. Matheron argues that there are multiple versions of this idea of finalism, from religion which sees the purposes of a God underlying the universe, to metaphysics, which has as its twin objects the free subject and the object with intrinsic qualities, the good which we strive for. This broad spectrum of ideas stands in sharp contrast to Spinoza’s genealogy of the constructed and constructive desire, the conatus. As Spinoza writes, “it is clear that we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it” (EIIIP9Schol). Desire is shifted from the object and its qualities as well as from the subject and its interests to the history of encounters that have shaped our desires, from final to efficient and immanent causes. Second, Matheron’s “double alienation” makes possible an understanding of alienation in terms of both objects, the goods that we see as having value, and the ultimate purpose of the world, religion. Matheron adds an affective component to this alienation: for him superstition, the religion of gods and sacrifices, is dominated by an affective economy of fear, and metaphysics is a serene religion, a religion that contemplates its god rather than expecting them it to act. Thus, it is possible to see the way in which uncertainty and fear in the first alienation, the alienation of goods, reinforces the second alienation, the alienation in God. In Matheron we can see the basis for a theory for the mutual reinforcing ideologies of the market and God. To quote Ken Lay, “I believe in God and I believe in Free Markets.”

Alienation for Matheron is nearly synonymous with Spinoza’s definition of inadequate ideas, whenever we fail to grasp the cause of striving, the source of images, we are alienated, projecting our forces onto something else.

This interest in a Spinozist theory of alienation, from Matheron and others, stands in sharp contrast to Pascal Sévérac’s argument in Le Devenir actif chez Spinoza. Sévérac argues that Spinoza’s ontology makes alienation, which always relies on a difference between essence and existence, impossible (Sévérac is equally critical of Deleuze’s idea of force separated from what it can do, which raises the question as to how far this language of forces was from alienation in the first place). For Sévérac all power is actualized, desire is essence here and now. Thus, there can be no alienation, no separation, just different actualizations of power, different strivings of this essence. Sévérac’s book raises many isssues, too many to go into here, but to reduce it to one provocation would be as follows. Sévérac realizes that his reading blurs the distinction between passive and active, inadequate and adequate, making it difficult to understand an immanent distinction between the two. Sévérac turns to Canguilhelm, towards his natural theory of norms, to make this distinction. For Canghuilhelm, pathology is not an absence of norms, but a reduction of normativity. A sick person cannot create new norms, cannot actively transform his or herself. Health, or activity, is not a norm but the capacity to redefine norms.

There are two advantages to Sévérac’s reading. First, he separates inactivity from any theory of sadness, pointing out that is the passive joyful affects, the joys that contingently befall us, that poses the greatest threat to becoming active. This has always been the problem with the idea of alienation: it relies too heavily on some affective feeling of oppression, which seems increasingly absent in contemporary society. A consumer society could thus be described as a society of passive joyful affects, of the constant promise of joys that will come from the outside, from the purchase of this or that thing. Second, becoming active is then not the restoration of some essense, of some putative human nature, but the capacity to transform nature.

The Road Home: Treme Season Two

2011-07-12T09:55:00.002-04:00

After two seasons Treme still does not elicit the passion and dedication that can be found among fans of The Wire. One common complaint heard about the show is that it is dull, that it takes forever for things to happen, and in place of events or plot we get long musical numbers. I don't agree with this criticism, but I do think that it gets to the central question of the show: what is it about? and what does it mean for something to happen? As innovative as The Wire was it was still at its core a police show, and as much as it troubled the narrative logic and politics of the typical police procedural, replacing the weekly convictions of Law and Order with bureaucracy and pointless investigations, it was still punctuated by the events of the police show, arrests, convictions, and murders. As Wendell Pierce, who plays Antoine Baptiste, has agued, Treme is as much about culture, how it is produced, sustained, and destroyed, as it is about New Orleans.

What then is an event at the level of culture? Of course the easy answer is the writing of a new song, the creation of a new sound, a new dish, or even a new youtube video. However, taking Pierce at his word we could say that all those things, all of that entertainment, is just a residual of culture. As Pierce states "Culture is the intersection of people and life itself." I think that this definition does a good job of describing the second season, of its events, which are about people negotiating this intersection, finding a place in this culture, coming home, as it were.

Returning home is mentioned and referred to as a central problem in post Katrina New Orleans. In the first season we see the untouched housing projects left vacant, and the bureaucratic difficulties of returning home becomes the basis of Dj Davis and The Brassy Knoll's first song. However, aside from Janette Desautel, who spends much of the season in New York, the show doesn't directly deal with the tens of thousands who ended up dispersed across the nation. In its place we get a struggle to find a home, a place, in culture itself.

In Season Two this search is framed in terms of a quasi-Hegelian dialectic of recognition and misrecognition. Many of the characters start out striving for one place, for one position within culture, only to find themselves at home someplace else. In the case of Antoine and Davis the first place, the place that they would like to occupy, is fronting a band. Their desire is one for autonomy, success, and celebrity status. Davis and Antoine have spent years supporting others, Antoine as a capable back-up musician and Davis as a Dj and a somewhat less capable guitarist/lyricist. They both tire of this and place themselves front and center of a new band, Antoine Baptiste and the Soul Apostles and DJ Davis and the Brassy Knoll. Over the course of the season they begin to realize that they are not the bandleaders that they thought themselves to be; this is in part a reflection of the limitation of their talents, Antoine lacks the people skills to hold a band together and Davis just lacks the talent, but it also a realization of other concealed talents, Antoine reveals himself to be a reluctant teacher of the next generation and Davis is a better producer than a performer. These two intersecting and reflecting dialectics of misrecognition and recognition could be understood as a subtle counter-point to the general cultural idealization of star status, educating the audience as it educates Antoine and Davis in the quieter pleasures of teaching and cultivating talent in others.

These intersecting plot lines reflect Treme's position within television. The television terrain is increasingly split between "High" shows, programs with high production costs and complex intersecting plots demanding full attention to the entire season, such as The Wire, Treme, Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men, that are generally broadcast on cable, and "Low" shows, reality based competition shows that air on broadcast television and basic cable, Top Chef, Dancing with the Stars, etc. The middle ground, as it were, is made up of dramas and sitcoms that increasingly seem like remnants of an earlier television era, a time before DVD box sets and the permeability of television and internet. It is thus possible to see this division as performing the work of classification and schematization outlined by Horkheimer and Adorno: the culture industry finds a place for everyone and puts everyone in their place. There is generally a class and generational split between these different aspects of television, this is at least the case at my university where the faculty discuss The Wire and the students discuss American Idol. What makes Treme interesting is that it takes up the material of the "low," cooking and music, presenting in a different light, one of tradition and gradual transformation, what is often presented in terms immediate success and status (America's next....), as entertainment (that residue of culture, to use Pierce's terms). Treme thus valorizes precisely what much of popular culture eclipses, the slow work of cultivating talent and creating cultural forms.

Treme is less successful of depicting the forces that work against cultural creation. Season two adds the character of Nelson Hidalgo, a Dallas businessmen who sees opportunity in New Orleans reconstruction, to depict the moneyed interests. While the character of Nelson adds a layer to the story, moving beyond the street to the structures of power, similar to the mayoral campaign of The Wire, he remains oddly opaque and frustrating. In the last episode Nelson's cousin confronts him with a question that is all too commonplace in the age of credit default swaps and financial crisis, he asks him "what do you do?"This question and its underlying frustration seem to come out of nowhere, there is no hint of conflict between the two up to that point, perhaps reflects David Simon's own frustration of the forces of capitalist speculation. Nelson's cousin's question, which opposes his world of real work, building roofs and working as bouncer, to the mercurial world of business deals, reflects in some sense the show's limit, what it cannot present.

A Million Blooms: Tiqqun and Negri on the Actualization of Ontology

2011-07-07T10:41:00.000-04:00

With the publication in English of This is Not a Program, Tiqqun brings to light a certain insurrectionist critique of Negri (and Hardt’s) position. Broadly speaking this critique takes two forms. First, there is a critique of the valorization of immaterial labor. This critique does not concern the descriptive accuracy of the term, the continued existence of material production, but its political efficacy. For Tiqqun the valorization of immaterial labor is consistent with the values of the capitalist economy. As Tiqqun write, “Proletarian self-valorization, theorized by Negri as the ultimate subversion, is also taking place but in the form of universal prostitution.” Tiqqun thus joins the chorus of those who prefer the refusal of work, the quotidian negativity of sabotage, to the valorization of the communicative capacity of contemporary labor. Second, and related, Tiqqun argue that Negri underestimates the reality of exploitation. This can already be seen in the argument about immaterial labor, which, for Tiqqun, is less the condition for revolution than subjection, but comes to the front in their critique of biopower. Quite simply, Tiqqun contest the division (Hardt) and Negri make between biopower and biopolitics (itself modeled on the division of potestas and potentia). In a vein similar to Steven Shaviro, Tiqqun contest that such a division, between transcendence and immanence, could be said to make any sense in Foucault’s analysis. Biopower was always already produced from the immanent and contingent ground, that is how it has worked.

Despite these critiques there is a strange proximity between Tiqqun and Negri, and that is what I want to explore here. The idea of this proximity stemmed from finally getting around to reading Tiqqun’s Théorie du Bloom. Bloom is of course the name of the central character of Joyce’s Ulysses. For Tiqqun Bloom is the name of the contemporary condition, caught between the twin pinchers of biopolitics and the spectacle, twin pinchers that are the culmination of the commodification of existence. Biopolitics wants you to live, and the spectacle wants you to speak, but this activity, this production, takes place through a generalized passivity and indifference. Bloom thus lives permanently outside of itself, socialized in its isolation. Or as Tiqqun write, “The pure exteriority of the conditions of existence takes the form of the illusion of pure interiority.”

There is, however, a saving grace to this negative condition. Bloom is the intensification of alienation, but this culmination of alienation contains the grounds for its undoing. As Tiqqun write:

“The Bloom does not experience a particular finitude or a determined separation, but the ontological finitude and separation, common to all men. As well, the Bloom is only alone in appearance: because it is not alone in being alone, all men have that solitude in common. It lives as a foreigner in its own country, non-existent and on the fringe of everything, but all the Bloom together inhabit the homeland of Exile. All the Bloom are indistinctly part of a same world, which is forgetting the world. So therefore, the Common is alienated, but it is only so in appearance, because it is still alienated as the Common – the alienation of the Common only signifies the fact that that which is common between them appears to men to be something particular, their own, private. And this Common originates from the alienation of the Common, and what that forms is none other than the true Common that is unique among men, their original alienation: finitude, solitude, exposition. There, the most intimate merges with the most general, and the most “private” is the best shared.”

As the traditions and norms of cultures pass away becoming so many commodities, as even the stabilizing world of wage labor gives way to generalized precarity and unemployment, finitude and isolation is laid bare, becomes common. This is the slight but significant point of overlap between Negri and Tiqqun: the historical actualization of a general ontological condition.

In Hardt and Negri’s writing, this takes the form of the actualization of the multitude. This can be seen in the distinction between the multitude sub species aeternitatis, the ontological multitude, and the emergent multitude produced by the contemporary organization of labor, the political multitude. The first has always been there, even in the various peoples and classes that have obscured its common basis, while the second is its actualization, its becoming manifest. As labor changes, producing culture, knowledge, and affects, the common comes to light as nothing other than its capacity to produce and be produced.

Both Negri (with and without Hardt) and Tiqqun can be considered variations on Marx and Engels’ point in The Communist Manifesto. The idea that with capitalism exploitation is stripped-bare, seen as the basis of all history. History actualizes ontology, as either common alienation or common production.

In the case of Hardt and Negri this philosophical theme, history as the actualization of ontology, contrasts with another theme, that of Spinoza’s ontology in which everything is always already actualized, power exists only its action. Vittorio Morfino summed this conflict up nicely by stating, “Multitude is a card that you can only play once.” Morfino’s point, if I followed his presentation correctly, is that the multitude has to be though as a conjunctural combination of affects, forces, and ideas, as something which always is, albeit in different modifications, rather than something to come. This point, Spinoza’s ontology as always actual, has been developed at length by Pascal Sévérac in his book, Le devenir actif chez Spinoza. For Sévérac, the themes of separation (found in Deleuze) or alienation (found in Fischbach) are absolutely alien to Spinoza’s ontology in which every force actualizes itself.

I have to say that I find the Spinozist (or Althusserian Spinozist) corrective to be useful. The temptation to see the present as the apocalyptic realization of some general ontological or human condition, what Foucault called the “narcissism of the present,” has to be resisted. Alienation and production, the common and isolation, exist in different articulations, different modifications, throughout history. This is not to say that “there is nothing new under the sun,” but that what exists is not the realization of some hidden tendency, just the rearticulation of already existing forces.

Periodizing the Present: Nostalgia in X-Men: First Class and Super 8

2011-06-12T14:42:00.003-04:00

A quick glance at this year’s slew of summer blockbusters suggests a noticeable turn to other historical moments: Capitan America, Pirates of the Caribbean, Cowboys and Aliens all suggest that this years escapist entertainment is trying to escape the present. Of course such period escapism is not new, but it is striking against the usual tendency of remakes, which set everything in the eternal present with the most current B-list actors, pop songs, and hairstyles. (As I suggested earlier, the remake is an evasion of history) Within this crop of movies two films stand out in that they are not just set in the past, but set in the film styles and conventions of a bygone era. These films are X-Men: First Class and Super 8.

The first of these, X-Men is not just set in the sixties, but it is set in the narrative conventions of early James Bond films. As with those films the narrative is structured by the cold war, but the true antagonist is a shadowy and wealthy megalomaniac (complete with femme fatale sidekick and bachelor pad submarine) who intends to exasperate the conflict for his own ends, not the Soviet Union. The Cold War is viewed nostalgically in this film; it is not just a simpler time with clearly demarcated enemies, but is a massive misunderstanding amongst generals who would rather be friends. It turns out that the brinkmanship that culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis is the product of a mutant conspiracy and not US imperialism or Russian authoritarianism. The film’s nostalgic view of a simpler time when well dressed men in “war rooms” anxiously watched radar screens and barked orders into blinking red phones is disturbed by the awareness of the present, which filters in like the sounds of an alarm clock into a dream.

The “war against the mutants” functions as a metaphor for the “war on terror:” in each case the war is asymmetrical battle with a clandestine enemy, against which the primary weapons are preemptive strikes and indefinite detentions. Thus, the film’s sympathetic attitude towards the mutants is turned to a critical view towards the US government, which thanks the mutants for defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis by staging a massive preemptive strike on the beach near Guantánamo Bay. (A preemptive strike on Guantánamo suggest that we have not entirely left the present.)

I realize that I have said little about the way the film figures the mutants themselves. It seems to me that the film slightly shifts the emphasis to civil rights, with its all too easy metaphor of a persecuted minority in which Magneto stands in for Malcolm X and Dr. Charles Xavier stands in for Dr. Martin Luther King. In this film the conflict is not yet between separation and desegregation, but between practice and theory. Xavier has written a thesis on evolutionary conflict, studying how the early humans wiped out the Neanderthals, but is unwilling to see the practical implications of his study for the present. Magneto, however, is all about practice: he doesn’t want to think about mutant liberation but wants to seize it. This opposition of theory and practice works well with their respective powers: Xavier thinks and reads the thoughts of others, while Magneto violently externalizes his anger.

Super 8 is more explicitly about nostalgia. It is a film not just about childhood, but also about the films of the director’s childhood. It is not a remake or a reboot, but a tribute to early Spielberg. All of the elements of Spielberg’s early films: a dysfunctional family, E.T.; a group of plucky kids on and adventure, Goonies; a government cover-up, Close Encounters of the Third Kind; an unseen creature, Jaws; and an attack on a motor vehicle, Jurassic Park. The film is also remarkably similar to Paul, a movie that could be also described as a Spielberg tribute. Like Paul, released earlier this year, it maps the secret government project of Area 51 with Guantánamo Bay, both films deal with an alien that has escaped a government lab after years of confinement and torture. The timing of each corresponds to the Roswell crash, an event that corresponds with the Cold War. Fictions of the secret program to contain and restrain the alien allude to a darker history of US involvement during the Cold War.

The fact that the US government tortures and detains individuals for years has arguably become commonplace. At the beginning of the “war on terror” torture appeared in solemn and serious films and TV shows, all of which touted its “ripped from today’s headlines” relevance, that it now has become a generic plot element perhaps reveals how accepted it has become. Perhaps, but it might be too hasty to read such narratives as ones of acquiescence, doing so overlooks how much movies and tv are filled with sinister government agents and evil corporations. In the dark our darkest fantasies about our world come to light.

What is perhaps striking about Super 8 is that it is about a conflict at the level of cinema production. The kids who are at the center of the movie are making a movie, hence the title, a movie that borrows less from Spielberg than Romero (this connection is made explicit in the movie within a movie which runs during the closing credits and is definitely worth sticking around for). The movie within the movie is a tribute to Romero not just in that it is a zombie film, but also in its budget and spirit. The kids making the movie adapt to every event, such the train crash and the military occupying the town, incorporating them into their film in the name of “production values.” In this way they demonstrate the bricoleur quality, the ability to adjust to changing circumstances and events, which is at the origin of cinema’s history and the history of every director. Everyone has heard the story of Jaws and the failures of the mechanical shark, which transformed and improved that original Spielberg film (effectively making him a household name). Digital effects have eradicated the need for such on the fly adaptations and transformations: CGI monsters always work which is why they are perhaps so disappointing. Low budget ingenuity (Romero) and digital calculations (Spielberg) did battle during those seminal years of the Hollywood blockbuster and the stronger, faster digital special effects won that particular evolutionary battle. The trailer for Transformers 3 reveals how much of a loss that particular victory was.

Capital (The Book and the Totality): On Jameson’s Representing Capital

2011-06-06T17:27:00.001-04:00

It is impossible not to compare Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One with last year’s The Hegel Variations: in each case it is a rather succinct reflection, a meditation on one book by a central figure for Jameson’s thought. This book too has a pedagogical quality, which is not to say that it is pedantic at all, just that it is easy to imagine the book as stemming from a seminar. Like the previous book it offers reflections on themes central to Jameson’s work, such as dialectic and history, as well as some engagements with the broader intellectual horizon, including some surprising remarks on Heidegger’s critique of technology.

Jameson’s book is somewhat paradoxical. It is attentive to the spirit and letter of Marx’s argument: reflecting on the well-known concepts and categories, such as use value and primitive accumulation, as well as the neglected passages, the chapter on the Working Day and the section on Senior’s Last Hour are singled out for interesting reflection. (There is something almost comical of seeing Senior’s name, initially just a figure for Marx’s satirical barbs, placed alongside Hegel and Marx in a discussion of temporality) Despite this focus on the entire work, its logical and representative structure, it is not a reading in the strong sense of the word, a new interpretation of the entirety of Capital, more of a series of reflections. These are largely grouped around a few central themes, two of which I will focus on here.

The first of these is separation, which was already announced by Jameson as a central concern in A Singular Modernity. In that book Jameson posited separation as a central trope of Marx’s (and Marxist) thought, but one that had never been systematically examined. Representing Capital takes up this challenge, making separation one of its organizing principles. Separation is initially, and primarily, the separation of the worker from the means of production. However, as is the case with Marx, at least on Jameson’s reading, every initial contradiction is not so much overcome or sublated, as complicated by what comes next. This is true of that initial contradiction between use value and exchange value, or quality and quantity, which returns again and again in concrete and abstract labor, and every place where the singularity of the laboring body confronts universality and abstraction. It is also true of separation, which returns in unemployment, in immiseration.

Jameson makes unemployment, the reserve army of the unemployed, central for reasons that are both conjunctural and theoretically. Conjuncturally, because this is some sense a reading of Capital produced by the current crisis, by the prevailing realization that unemployment, and with it poverty, is a necessary product of capital, one that is increasingly hard for it to internalize. Which is not to say that the unemployed can simply return to the land, or strike out for new lands: unemployment is not the outside of capital, of the capitalist mode of production, but is its internal condition (something that is becoming increasingly clear in this age of unemployment and austerity).This then is the second reason for Jameson’s focus, unemployment underscores the unity of opposites that defines Marx’s dialectic, the necessity of thinking together in understanding capitalism both massive productivity and massive poverty.

This particular gesture moves in two directions at once. First, it removes Marx’s thought from any nostalgia, any desire to return to a time prior to technology and machines. Doing so would forget the positive aspect of capitalism, its productivity and revolutionary potential. Second, and more importantly, it redefines the dialectic, which is less and less about some formula of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, or even something substantialized into “contradiction” or “the negative,” than it is about a reflexive and differential mode of thinking, a kind of “dialectical immanence.” (This redefinition of the dialectic is actually the thing that unifies the latest three works of Jameson, The Hegel Variations, Valences of the Dialectic, and Representing Capital, but a more thorough discussion requires more time). Positive and negative, singular and universal, must then be seen as both identical and different in an irresolvable way. This can perhaps be illustrated more than explained. Here is the long passage on alienation:

“We found that in all reading here, indeed, is away with the concept of alienation—in its most Hegelian form, as the way in which I alienate my own production by producing it as separate from myself in the first place, so that it comes before me as a properly alien object in force—is very much built into the very structure of Capital, where as we have seen the working class forges its own “golden chains,” lends capital its own wages in advance, and advances the accumulation of surplus value by its own surplus labor, not even omitting to courage invention and introduction of new technology as capitalism’s response to its own resistance. Here we find the very form and action of alienation with a vengeance, only with the philosophical label omitted; and in this sense is remarkable to see this operation less as the abolition of philosophy in as its fulfillment in a new way. This is what Marx meant when, in his famous slogan, he recommended that we rise from the abstract to the concrete. Traditional philosophy was indeed the conquest of the abstract as such, the emergence of universal concepts from the “blooming buzzing confusion” of pensée sauvage, the disentanglement of the Platonic ideas from the material incarnation at the moment of the invention of philosophy in ancient Greece [Jameson’s reference is to paragraph 33 of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which he refers to often]. The Marxian concrete is not then some third term or Hegelian “returning to back into itself” of the abstract, but rather the supersession of those disciplinary differentiations that characterize modernity as such, and the discovery of totality as universal interrelationship: in this instance the discovery of the very abstraction called alienation is itself a sign and symptom of the dynamic civilian nation at work reality itself and in the totalization of society by capitalism as an emergent system.”

Jameson’s invocation of alienation, as an unnamed but central category of Capital, while structurally similar to Althusser’s reading of “structural causality,” would seem to be directly aimed against it. However, Jameson takes up one of Althusser’s central provocations (often unexamined) of the specific temporality of capital. As Jameson argues this temporality must be split between the wage relation (C-M-C), which begins anew at the end of every week or workday, an eternal present, and the accumulation of value and knowledge by capital itself (M-C-M’), most notably in machines. There is thus an accumulation of history but one which is effaced, or, as Jameson says, extinguished, in the eternal present of capitalism, in the interchangability of workdays.

Extinguished, or extinguishing, (auslöchen) is another central term for Jameson’s reading, as Marx’s section on commodity fetishism argued, capitalism extinguishes, or obscures, labor in the commodity. It also obscures its own historical conditions, and history itself. To cite Marx, "The taste of the porridge does not tell us who grew the oats..." (It is worth noting much much of contemporary culture, at least in the US, is organized in overcoming this, farmer's markets, etsy, even social networking, are all ideological responses to this separation). The interest in this extinguishing of history can perhaps be read as an explanation of Jameson’s most often cited remark, the one about how it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. History is effaced not just in the commodity but also in the eternal present of the precarious employment situation, where all those years worked do not add up, or they do, but in the form of an increasingly alien capital, in machinery and the wealth of the company. Separation and extinguished are ultimately terms that make it possible to make sense of both Capital and capitalism.

There is much more to say about this book, which is simultaneously provocative and frustrating (How could it not be?), but this is my initial response.

Social Life: Towards (Spinozist) Socio-Political Thought

2011-05-29T13:35:00.003-04:00

The socio-political, or the social, has been out of favor for some time now. Perhaps this started with Hannah Arendt’s influential critique, which defined the social as the nebulous space that blurred the necessary distinctions of home and polis. Beyond that, and closer to hand, there was perhaps the dominance, semantic and otherwise, of the ethico-political; a phrase that was initially associated with Foucault but soon spread to various attempts, including those that were anti-Foucauldian, to articulate politics with ethics. Politics would be henceforth founded on ethics, whether it be the ethics of human rights and communicative reason or the infinite alterity of the other. The dominance of this term was followed by the recent revival of the political, understood as prescription, or the axiom of equality, separated from any engagement with economy or society. This evasion of the social at the level of political thought has been doubled with rise of new materialisms that define the material is cosmological or vital terms, throwing out the “historical” or “dialectical” baby with the correlationist bathwater.

It is for this reason that I was interested to read two books that reexamine the social from the perspective of Spinoza. The first, Manifeste pour une philosophie sociale by Franck Fischbach is directly concerned with returning the social to philosophical discussions but only indirectly concerned with Spinoza (being written by a Spinozist Marxist). The second, Spinoza et les Science Sociales is directly concerned with Spinoza, but less concerned with the social as a philosophical object than the field of social sciences.

As I have indicated, Fischbach is directly concerned with redefining “social philosophy, “ a project that he takes up against the revival of political philosophy. As Fischbach argues, political philosophy, and he is referring to the dominance of Rawls, is primarily juridical and normative. Against this, social philosophy is situated ambiguously between description and evaluation. Its fundamental concepts such as alienation and domination are both descriptive and normative, and cannot be addressed through the juridical language of rights. This has lead to it not being seen as philosophical at all, which is complicated by the fact that its very object emerged in the nineteenth century, with the instability and alienation produced by the rise of capitalist society. Thus, the refusal of the social, in favor of a political rights and abstract theory of justice, is a refusal to confront the persistence of those problems in modern life, problems that we can no longer believe will be solved by democracy itself, by extending the vote to workers, women, and racial and ethnic minorities. The dominance of political of philosophy can thus be understood as a foreshortening of the powers of critique and liberation. As Marx and Foucault have both argued, rights fail to address the actual powers of capital and society.

Ultimately, however, the conflict between political and social philosophy is, as Fischbach argues, one of their respective anthropology. The individual of political philosophy is rational, cut off from its natural ignorance by a veil of ignorance. The human individual of social philosophy is a natural and relational individual constituted of needs, affects, and desires. It is in this context that Fischbach makes mention of his work on Spinoza, the social individual is situated in a network of increasing and decreasing powers. However, Fischbach’s work is simultaneously broader and more narrow than a Spinozist consideration of social philosophy: he traces its roots to Rousseau and argues that it includes Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault, but he ultimately settles on “recognition,” from Hegel interpreted by Honneth, as the central category of this new philosophy. It is recognition that makes it possible to address the conditions of the precarious and immigrants, the new alientations and dominations, a transformation of knowledge and politics, description and prescription.

Spinoza et les sciences sociales edited by Yves Citton et Frédéric Lordon can perhaps be best understood as an attempt to take up Fischbach’s suggestion of the anthropology, or ontology, of social philosophy, an ontology that has suggestive resonances with certain heterodox traditions within the social sciences, namely Tarde, Foucault, and Bourdieu. The different essays focus on everything from a Spinozist account of money to the theoretical similarities with Foucault. Despite this, there is a unifying theme of sorts, that of affects. Spinoza’s thought predates the “discovery of the social,” but his fundamental ontology of relation, of the capacity to affect and be affected, has similarities with social thought. Morevever, his thought is oriented towards the constitution of collectivities and individuals, avoiding the reification of either. Finally, there is in Spinoza a refusal of the division between the natural and the social, often understood as constitutive of the social sciences, a fact that the book affirms in its opening pages and cover illustration.

It would be difficult to sum up much of the book’s essays, and I have already mentioned Negri’s contribution, but the most interesting are the one’s that try to think through the gulf between Spinoza and the present, generating a Spinozist account of money and the contemporary economies of affect. Such investigations involve a transformation of philosophy (as well as social sciences): an engagement with the social involves both a destruction of the ontologies of rational autonomy and the construction of new knowledge, a construction which requires conflict and the conjuncture as its condition. This is after all one of Negri’s fundamental points about Spinoza, about the central role of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in its constitution. I offer his remark from The Savage Anomaly as a conclusion:

After the development of such a radical pars destruens, after the identification of a solid point of support by which the metaphysical perspective re-opens, the elaboration of the pars construens requires a practical moment. The ethics could not be constituted in a project, in the metaphysics of the mode and of reality, if it were not inserted into history, into politics, into the phenomenology of a single and collective life: if it were not to derive new nourishment from that engagement.

The Affective Composition of Labor

2011-05-17T16:26:00.002-04:00

Of all the various concepts, innovations, and interventions of “autonomist Marxism,” perhaps the most well known is the so-called autonomist hypothesis. This idea, first developed by Mario Tronti, and publicized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, fundamentally argued that resistance precedes and prefigures exploitation. The appeal of this hypothesis almost goes without saying, it makes it possible to see not capital, or Empire, everywhere, to see living labor and the multitude in place of exploitation and domination. However, its limitations are just as clear, it is too easy to simply identify this “hypothesis” with an unproblematic assertion of the ubiquity of resistance, of an insurrection that it is all the more impotent as it is everywhere. Thus, as something of an alternative, I propose that we take a different concept as our starting point, one that is perhaps more analytical, more of a conceptual problem than a political assertion. This concept is “class composition,” which can be broadly defined as an examination of the social, technological, and political composition of class, the structure of work, its relations of command and hierarchy, as well as the political articulation of the class, its cohesion and antagonism.

Class composition is not opposed to the so-called autonomist hypothesis. In fact it could be argued that it is only through the latter that the former becomes possible. It is only be recognizing he dynamics of resistance that it becomes possible to see the political composition, to recognize the struggle behind every change of the elements that compose class. This is the interpretation that can be traced back to at least Marx’s Capital, in which technological developments, such as the introduction of machinery, can be understood to be a response to struggle and resistance. As Marx writes, “It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working class revolt.” Class composition makes it possible to understand the autonomist hypothesis as something other than a great battle, or a Manichean dualism. Working class struggle reshapes the social and technological conditions of labor, which in turn becomes the source of new conflict. As Antonio Negri writes, “Every constitution of a new structure is the constitution of antagonism.” The autonomist hypothesis of resistance is not opposed to composition as event to structure, but necessarily animates and shapes it.

Most importantly class composition makes it possible to recast the philosophical and political shifts of post-autonomist thought, shifts which themselves are the effects of, and conditions for seeing, transformations of labor and society. These shifts can be best characterized, or explored, through the addition of subjectivity, in terms of affects, desire, and knowledge to the analysis of composition. Thus, to focus on one of these, we could say that post-autonomist thought could be characterized through the addition of the “affective composition” of labor to its political, social, and technical composition. The affective composition of labor is distinct from "affective labor." The term “affective labor” is used by Hardt and Negri (among others) to describe a particular subset of the larger field of “immaterial labor,” it describes labor that produces emotional states, care, wellness, desire, etc.: it is labor that produces subjectivity, in terms of its most basic conditions of existence through the work of care, and in terms of the feeling and sense of self. Moreover, the history of feminist writing on “care work,” reminds us that such work, especially as it performed in day care centers and nursing homes, is devalued because it is seen as natural attribute of being female, as something given rather than learned. Affective labor plunges us into the unstable border between reproduction and production, subjectivity and the conditions that produce it.

However, by the affective composition of labor I mean something broader than “affective labor,” something that can be analyzed in any labor process, no matter what it produces. The affective composition of labor refers to the way in which all labor is situated within the production and reproduction of affects and desires. Thus, it is close to what Paolo Virno refers to as the “emotional tonality” of a given historical moment. As Virno argues, defining, the need for the theorization of this connection: “What is involved here is the conceptualization of the field of immediate coincidence between production and ethics, structure and superstructure, between the revolution of labour process and the revolution of sentiments, between technology and emotional tonality, between material development and culture.” This tonality can only be grasped through class composition, through the technological, political, and social conditions of labor: it is one of the effects of this composition, but also one of its conditions, a crucial aspect of its reproduction. Virno’s argument is that it is through this affective tonality that much of resistance and subjection is produced, it is on this quotidian terrain that class is composed and decomposed. Virno’s analysis is oriented towards the current conjuncture, a conjuncture which is defined by both the increased sense of precariousness, brought about by contingent and part time work, and the increased role of knowledge and intellect in the production process, these combine to create an affective situation defined by anxiety and cynicism.

My point here is less to focus on Virno’s specific analysis of the conjuncture, but I will return to it, than to develop the general conditions for an analysis of the affective composition of labor. Virno’s analysis offers two major provocations for grasping this composition. First, what he calls “immediate coincidence” can be understood as immanence, or immanent causality, the idea that what appears as an effect of the economy, such as the affective anxiety, has to be thought as a cause, as a condition of its functioning. Second, Virno argues that there are few philosophical precursors that make it possible to grasp this affective composition: affects, or emotions, are generally considered to be a private matter, cut off from changes in the economy or politics. There are exceptions to this, the writings of the young Marx contain a reference to feelings as “ontological affirmations of being,” a point which is perhaps only developed in a few scant references of the power of money to restructure desire and subjectivity. Beyond these suggestions (which unfortunately are never really developed), the primary precursors to thinking affects as constitutive, rather than simply expressive, and as social, rather than individual, are Spinoza and Heidegger. Virno has interesting things to say about Heidegger’s general concept of anxiety, as well as the importance of idle talk and curiosity in a post-fordist economy, but I would leave Heidegger aside to focus on Spinoza.

Spinoza is not a central figure for Virno, but he is of course central to the recent thought of Negri. Beyond this, Spinoza is a central philosopher for those outside the autonomist tradition from Althusser and Deleuze to contemporary thinkers such as Frédéric Lordon and Yves Citton who articulate a Spinozist critique of political economy. Without attempting to survey all of this vast literature, it is possible to isolate several aspects of Spinoza’s thought that make it an indispensable point of reference for a theory of the affective constitution of labor. To start with, we have the conatus, the striving that defines every particular thing. At the level of human life, subjectivity, this conatus is desire, the striving to persevere in one’s being. Desire is thus constructive, constituting a world. While it might seem that this desire is radically atomistic, an interest to preserve one’s being. Spinoza subverts this now familiar figure of interest that defines everything from Hobbes to neoliberal economics. First, he removes any finalism, any pregiven good, even self-preservation from this striving, it is without telos. As Spinoza writes, “it is clear that we neither strive for, nor will, neither want nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, and desire it.” Desire is conditioned, shaped by the affects, images, and concept we have of things. These affects, starting with joy and sadness, the increase and decrease of my power to act, are necessarily relational, love and hate, the things that I strive towards and against, are themselves determined by other relations and histories. At the core of desire, of my striving, is nothing other than my relation with others: all individuation is transindividual. Put differently, that which individuates me, my particular striving, exists only in and through the relations that constitute my love and hatred, my hopes and fears.

If we take these two principles, the constitutive nature of desire and the transindividual conditions of individuation, as our basic orienting ideas, what then does Spinoza’s thought offer for the affective composition of labor? It is worth noting that Spinoza does not have anything like a theory of labor. This limit may also have merit: the lack of a theory of labor in its instrumental or teleological dimension, labor as the work of a subject on an object to realize an end, makes it possible for Spinoza to think a generalized constitutive ontology. As Spinoza states, “Nothing exist from whose nature some effect does not follow,” a general proposition which, once applied to the realm of politics and human history, makes it possible to think the productive nature of the imagination and reason. As Negri writes of the analysis of prophecy, scripture in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, “Imaginative activity reaches the level of an ontological statute, certainly not to confirm the truth of prophecy but to consolidate the truth of the world and the positivity, the productivity, and the sociability of human action.” Imagination constructs the world. In Negri’s reading Spinoza’s lack of a theory of labor makes it possible to view his work as all the more contemporary: it is possible see in Spinoza a kind of precursor to affective labor, to the production of affects by affects, through the various constitutions of associations and connections. Or, as Negri writes in his latest collection of essays on Spinoza, “With Spinoza, forces of production produce the relations of production,” the practice of desire, reason, and imagination, produces the structure of society.

It is then possible to make Spinoza into a thinker of “affective labor” but what of the affective constitution of labor? First, following the work of Frédéric Lordon and André Orlean, we have to start from the axiom that labor in capitalism is not directly a striving for an object, we are not actively engaged in seeking this or that desired good, but money, the means to acquire any object. Any thought of the affective composition of labor must begin from this initial separation, the separation of the activity, the striving, from its good, from the object. There is thus in capital a tendency towards indifference to the activity itself, the goals of the particular activity are stripped of their meaning, their particular orientations of good and bad, perfect and imperfect. (It is important to remember that as much as Spinoza stripped these terms of any intrinsic transcendental meaning, he does relate them back to practice, to projects as their only possible ground). As much as we might affectively attach ourselves to any particular job, any particular task, developing our potential and relations, becoming the cause of our joy this is secondary to the desire for money. Money is a common affect, a sort of general equivalent of all of the possible joys, loves, and desires. There is thus an affective split at the core of the labor process, between the love of my own activity and its results. Second, the love that attaches itself to money is amplified by the uncertainty of capitalist life. Whatever I do only has value insofar as it makes possible money, a condition that changes with the vicissitudes of cooperation and technological development. This uncertainty, or precarity, which despite the current vogue of the term has always been a part of capitalism, increases the desire for money, a desire based on its quasi-eternal status as an object of desire. Time, or the imagination of the uncertainties of time, plays a crucial role in Spinoza’s Ethics: it is my tendency to prefer a current good to an uncertain future one that explains mankind’s tendency to “see the better but do the worse.” The quasi-eternity of money, of the general equivalent, stems from the fact that it remains certain as an object of desire, including the desires of others, even as other things, including my own activity, my labor, remain uncertain. The affective composition of labor is how, at a given moment in time, these two poles are valued or devalued, how much joy is sought in the activity of labor itself, or how much is found in sought in money.

This affective split between the activity and the object of that activity, between labor and money, is a generic condition of labor under capitalism, which is itself subject to historical transformation. The history of capitalism, from Fordism with its increased Taylorization and fragmentation of the labor process and the “five dollar day,” to the consumer society, has been one of developing the affective attachments of money, over and above the attachments and investments in labor. Which is to say the “exchange” of labor for money, is itself made possible by an affective economy in which labor, as a task with its own joys, power, and potential is devalued in the face of money. We might call this an affective economy of hope. The sadness, the decrease of my power, that I endure in the present is made possible by the idea of future pleasure, what I could buy. Its corollary, and opposite, is an affective economy of fear, of austerity, precarity, and insecurity. Money is central in this economy as well, but it is not the money of desire, of consumer goods, vacations, and advertising fantasies, but money as the only possibility of security, of food and shelter in an uncertain world. These are the two extreme cases, but for Spinoza fear can never be separated from hope and vice versa. In each case living labor, which is not just work, but one’s life and activity, is devalued, seen as something that only has value only insofar as it is exchanged. There is a difference on this pole as well, an affective difference between the hours and toil that are devalued as a means to some desired object, and the devaluation of one’s activity in the face of uncertainty. As Ivor Southwood and others have argued, the often touted flexibility is often nothing more than utter passivity in the face of market demands: it is a absolute indifference to the content of work, to its tasks, social relations etc., but a commitment to its form, to dedication, availability, etc. To sum up all too quickly, we could say that the current conjuncture, the combination of neoliberalism and austerity is one in which the conditions of fear, job insecurity, etc., are revalorized through a whole discourse and imaginary onto objects of desire: insecurity is sold as freedom and lack of bonds and connections are sold as independence.

The affective composition of labor is the way in which every labor condition, every particular conjuncture in the mode of production, involves a production and a reproduction of hope, fear, joy, and sadness, distributed not just across the activity, and its monetary reward, as I have outlined here, but also across the social relations, the joys of comraderie and cooperation, and political relations, the sadness and envy of hierarchy. As such it is also transformed by the political and technological transformations examined in (classical) class composition. A thorough investigation would examine the intersections of this affective composition with the other dimensions, including “affective labor.” In closing, however, I intend to ask one last lingering question. This question lingers because both of the “compositions” I have outlined here, the one dominated by hope, the hope of consumer goods, and the other dominated by fear, have as their common denominator a lack of revolutionary desire, they are each defined by an acceptance of the given labor practices, the time of work and life, as something which exists only to be exchanged. In each case money dominates as the object of hope or fear (but often a combination of the two). So the question remains as to how it could be possible to constitute a revolutionary affective composition, one in which hope is not directed to money but to an alternate future, where fear, the insecurity of the present, makes possible something other than docility? The beginning of a response can be found in recognizing the transindividuality in each of the poles of the affective composition, that of both labor and money. This is obvious in the first case, that of labor, which has an irreducible (and perhaps even increasing) social dimension, but it is no less true of money, which is as Marx argued, the alienated social ability of mankind. When I desire money my desire is also the desire for not only what others desire, as a communication of the affects, it is also a desire to coordinate my actions with that of others, a desire for autonomy, but one that it is always already thwarted by the disorder of capitalist society. Money is an inadequate idea of the fundamental idea that nothing is more useful to man than man. Thus, transforming the affective composition of labor entails transforming the sociality of labor. This may seem circular in which passivity breeds passivity, and isolation breeds isolation, but the way out of this circle, the condition for its rupture, lies in the affects themselves, in the hopes and fears the condition our daily existence. If we can understand these affects, and communicate this understanding, see not just the hope but the fear that underlies money, we can be brought to the point of transforming them as well.

Reanimating Dead Dogs: Foucault on Political Economy

2011-05-11T13:30:00.006-04:00

It is perhaps true that every generation treats the revered thinkers of the previous generation as a “dead dog,” to quote Marx’s famous phrase. When I was in grad school I remember that Sartre in particular was dead to us, too tainted by humanism to be interesting. This was of course a shame. From a rather cursory observation of current conferences and publications it seems that a similar fate is befalling Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard. This may just be another example of a generational shift, but it also may have to do with the revival of interest in Marx and Marxist thought. (The "dead dog" of their generation.) Thus, focusing on one of these figures in particular, namely Foucault, I offer the following two paragraphs, paragraphs edited out of a published piece, as something of a provocation.

Foucault’s courses of the late seventies, the course on security and biopolitics, address something largely absent from his published work: the relation between the formation of subjects and economic relations. Foucault always kept his distance from explicitly addressing this problem, a problem which in many ways would be a variant of the classical Marxist base/superstructure problem, but this distance took at least two different forms. At times, Foucault clearly stated that it was a matter of a difference of emphasis, arguing that while it is possible to study the relation between power relations constitutive of subjectivity and economic exploitation he prefers to study the relationship between power and truth. In such a case, the study of power and exploitation stand as simply two different approaches for understanding history and politics. At other times, however, Foucault sees the examination of power relations and economic analysis to be completely opposed, arguing against the reduction of the former by the latter. Foucault argues that the two political philosophies, liberalism and Marxism, which are generally considered to be opposed are united in what he terms an “economism of power.” Although what is meant by economism changes in each philosophy, as Foucault writes: “Broadly speaking, we have, if you like, in one case a political power which finds its formal model in the process of exchange, in the economy of the circulation of goods: and in the other case, political power finds its historical raison d’etre, the principle of its concrete form and of its actual workings in the economy.”

These vacillations at the level of programmatic theoretical statements are echoed in Foucault’s actual historical analyses. Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality each begin with a rejection of a Marxist analysis, one cannot directly correlate punishment to the mode of production or comprehend sexuality based on the demand for productive labor, yet nonetheless each of these analysis ends up affirming a connection between the economy and power; the rise of disciplinary power and biopower cannot be separated from the transformation of society from feudalism to capitalism. While Foucault overtly distances himself from Marx, or explicitly criticizes the reduction of history to economic struggle, he continually cites elements of Marx’s analysis, without quotation marks, as he puts it. In addressing this vacillation my point is not to ultimately settle the relationship between the analysis of power and the critique of political economy, or Foucault and Marx, to take the proper names, especially since this relationship is thoroughly mired in the polemics and politics of another time and place, but rather to lay the groundwork for addressing the turn that characterizes not only Naissance de la biopolitique, but the previous year’s course, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, as well. In the lectures that make up these courses Foucault turns to the question of the relation between politics and economy, not in terms of the imposing figure of Marx, or the question of relation between base and superstructure, which is always a question of priority and hierarchy, of determination in the last instance, but in terms of governmentality, which situates politics and economics on the same level, that of the control of conducts, and the constitution of subjectivity.

As I have said, these a remnants of a longer piece, something that I will not be able to return to for a long time, I post them here as a provocation and a question. Perhaps someone can tell me where this is addressed, or would like to take up the provocation.

Works and Days: Remarks on the First Season of Treme

2011-04-26T01:00:00.002-04:00

Comparisons between Treme and The Wire are inevitable. Unlike Generation Kill, which seems more and more like a side project, Treme has the same sprawling story line, the same focus on an American city, and even some of the same actors as The Wire.

The differences are just as striking. In the first show, Baltimore generally functioned as a generic mid size city, albeit one that David Simon knew well: the focus was on the “war on drugs” and its devastating effects, elements of local culture from “lake trout” to the Baltimore accent functioned as markers of authenticity. In contrast to this, Treme is very much about New Orleans, about its cultural, geographical, and historical specificity. There is also the difference of tone, the first show was bleak, tragic even, in its outlook. While the second has preserved much of Simon’s skepticism of American government and capital, illustrated by the massive failure of every institution that became synonymous with Katrina, it has moments of pure joy, culinary and musical, the likes of which are never seen on television. Television can give you Dancing with the Stars or Cake Boss, but rarely has so much screen time been dedicated to the awkward joy of a drunken night of dancing or the simple pleasure of washing down hot sauce with beer.

The main difference between the shows has to do with the occupations of the characters of the shows. Simon has been quoted as saying that the show is about musicians, which itself is fairly unprecedented in television. Cops, doctors, lawyers, and spaceship captains are all television staples, but musicians are rare in the world of television. Simon repeatedly claimed that The Wire was about institutions, about the police, schools, and city hall. Even the underground economy of drugs proved to be more institutional than it would first appear, with its own rules and its ability to trample over individuals. It is the latter aspect that pretty much defines institutions for Simon and is the basis for his tragic sensibility. As Simon argues, “The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason…In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed.” In contrast to this tragic vision, Treme is mostly about people who are outsiders, who function outside of institutions, at least official ones. The police, politicians, and reporters are still there, but they have become part of the background. What has moved to the foreground are musicians, “Indian chiefs,” chefs, and professors, all of whom are not so much outside of institutions, but outside of those institutions that are central in deciding the fate of post-Katrina New Orleans. We might argue that they are outside of institutions, but central to culture.

Their status as outsiders become foregrounded as they all struggle with the shows central theme, rebuilding New Orleans. Left outside, they have no choice but to invent new strategies for action, for changing the world. Well mostly new, anyway, the “Indian Chief” Albert Lambreaux (Clarke Peters) engages in the time-honored strategy of a one manned occupation to draw attention to the projects which have been left empty, keeping his people from returning. His political act is contrasted with the professor, Creighton Bernette (played by John Goodman) who turns to the relatively new technology of youtube to record a series of angry denunciations of the nation’s indifference to his city’s plight. A third character, a radio dj named Davis Mcalary (Steve Zahn) records a EP mocking the ruling class, and runs a parody of a political campaign, all theatrics, What links these people, besides their love for New Orleans, is they are all “immaterial laborers,” producers of knowledge, culture, and taste. This is true of many of the characters of the show, from the buskers to the cook, all of whom produce culture. This reflects the modern situation of America as much as it does the particular history of New Orleans, a city rich with cultural history that has been relegated to convention destination.

In The Wire political economy figured in the narrative in two ways: first, in the drug trade, which I have written about elsewhere, and secondly in “juking the stats.” The latter refers to the ubiquitous tendency to make the numbers, statistics, the standard by which everything from police patrols to schools are evaluated. Once this happens, once the numbers count, then there is a tendency to make the institutions produce the numbers, the numbers become a goal not a measure, testing leads to teaching to the test and so on. This inverted world, where numbers count more than what they are supposed to measure is The Wire’s version of neoliberalism. What Treme offers in its place is a generalized precariousness, the precariousness of New Orleans as a city on the brink, but also the precariousness of labor in general, creative or otherwise. The characters in Treme are constantly moving from gig to gig, turning every friendship into a network, into a possible connection. This is the clearest in the case of Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce) who travels the city on a scam and a smile. Over the course of the season we get to see Antoine enjoy his freedom (perhaps too much), but we are also reminded of the exposure of this vulnerability: how the slightest brush with the police can turn to violence and an injury means hours waiting for indifferent care from an emergency room.

Precarity and creativity might unify the characters on the show, but they are divided by race and class. The show takes place after the flood, but a flashback in the last episode (a cinematic technique The Wire never indulged in) reminds us as much as the people of New Orleans are unified by culture and crisis, race and class decided who made it to high ground and who faced high water.

You Have to Get Mad: Spinoza, Lumet, and the Politics of Indignation

2011-04-17T23:18:00.002-04:00

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have remarked that for Spinoza the central question is “Why do people fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?” and I have often cited them on this point. Ted Stolze and Alexandre Matheron have argued that this is only half the question, its corollary (geometrically speaking) would have to be why do people revolt? The answer for both of these questions has to be sought on the terrain of the affects and the imagination. Revolt is founded on the political affect of indignation, which Spinoza defines as “a hate toward someone who has done evil to another.” As such indignation is grounded on the basic communication of the affects, in indignation I expand the horizon of the affects to found a common enemy, a common evil.

The two questions, one explicit the other implicit, would seem to frame a particular politics of the affects that has as its two poles servitude and revolt. Affective life vacillates between a servitude that is lived as salvation, as something freely chosen, indignation, the affective precursor of revolt. As with all of the affects, these two poles vacillate, and are extended to the various individuals, groups, and institutions that we take to be the causes of our joy and sadness, the increase and decrease of our power of acting. Recognizing that for Spinoza the elementary definition of the affects is complicated by a nominalism of causes, there are many loves and hatreds as there are objects and individuals, making possible a multiplicity of affects existing within the same individual. Framed by this brief sketch we could define the current conjuncture, at least in the US, as framed by an odd combination of servitude and indignation. Or, put otherwise, what is striking is how little indignation there is at capital or its various institutions, Wall Street, etc., given the current crisis. In its place there is plenty of indignation, plenty of anger, all of it aimed at some of the most unlikely of subjects, unions, school teachers, and those perennial scapegoats, immigrants.

Of course any answer of contemporary political affects would have to look at the various institutions, specifically the media, which work to focus and channel the affects, providing its images and organizations. The right is particularly good at this; in fact, we could argue that the right prefers to keep all political discussion on the level of pure affects, as in the case of those who “hate America,” making it possible to lump together Muslims, communists, and NPR in conspiracy of hate and fear. The usual response to this on the part of progressives or the left is to insist on how ridiculous this is, to use the common notions of history, economics, and politics to argue that such strange bedfellows are simply not made. The affects, however, have a different logic, one that relates less to the actual relations between things than to the relation of their images. After all, anything can become the cause of hatred or love, all it needs to do is to is become attached to a cause of sadness or joy, hope or fear. The logic of the affects is nominalist and conventional. How else could anyone explain this:

The question remains, however, as to why it is difficult to make capital itself an object of indignation. The immediate answer has to do with its impersonality, its inability to appear less as an object, than as the milieu in which we thrive. As Spinoza argues, hatred towards a thing will be greater if we imagine the thing to be free than necessary. Combine this point with Marx’s argument about commodity fetishism, about the reification of the economy into its law-like and necessary character, and it is easy to understand how difficult it is to generate indignation at capitalism itself. It is like being angry at the weather. The recent bouts of left-ish indignation at Scott Walker in Wisconsin and even Paul LePage in Maine has stemmed from the fact that they have emerged as a face of the present political conjuncture’s absolute indifference towards the life of the working class, their decisions appear to be arbitrary and personal (all too personal).

I have no real conclusion for this, except the obvious point that it is necessary to construct a politics of the imagination, affects, and reason that can provoke indignation and sustain it into a politics of revolt and construction. All of these points would go beyond this blog post, which is not to say that I wont return to them at some point. Rather, as way of a conclusion and a tribute I would like to offer two scenes from Sidney Lumet’s Network. The first is incredibly well known, especially since Glenn Beck continues to imitate it in one of the longest running remakes in film/television history.

What is less often remembered, least of all by Glenn Beck himself, is how this particular indignation ends. I am referring not just to the death of Beale, but the particular pedagogical scene preceding it. (Which, as if to illustrate my point, cannot be embedded, but you can follow this link to view it) It is at this point that the film attempts to move beyond the day-to-day offenses that form the basis for its great scene of indignation, and fails to do so. The green bankers desk lamps, the austere boardroom table, all attempt to represent exactly what exceeds representation, the real abstractions of capital itself.

The question is not how to shift indignation from one set of figures to another, but to move it beyond the persons and faces to structures and forces, to construct a rational indignation.

“A Subjection Much More Profound Than Himself”: A Few Remarks on Source Code

2011-04-03T18:58:00.002-04:00

Duncan Jones’ Source Code has all the telltale signs of a second movie, it has bigger stars, bigger explosions, and the requisite romantic subplot. Of course it wouldn’t be hard to outspend the rather minimalist Moon. Less is more in this case, and all of these things serve to highlight just how engaging the first film was through its minimalist aesthetic. However, what is striking about the second film is its thematic continuity with the first.

Spoiler Alert

The basic details of the plot are pretty clear from trailer. A soldier, Colter Stevens (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) is transported into the body of a school teacher aboard a train eight minutes before it explodes. He has eight minutes to find the identity of the bomber. If he fails in his mission, he is sent back to the beginning in order to start over. His mission is like a level on a videogame, he must repeat it until he wins. He is seated across from a young woman, Christina who has been courting, making for the most awkward first date in human history.

Seriously, spoiler alert

Those are the basic details, what we eventually learn is that the technology, “the source code” supposedly can’t change the past: he is only sent back to learn the identity of the bomber in order to stop a much bigger attack on Chicago that is imminent. This sets up the conflict between fate and free will, a kind of Philip K. Dick-lite that will structure the rest of the movie. We also learn that Stevens is already dead, or at least partially so, he was killed flying a helicopter mission in Afghanistan and his continued service with the source code project represents the most drastic implementation of the Army’s “stop loss” program to date. As with Moon we learn that every job demands more of us than we think, exploitation does not end with one’s biological existence.

Stevens eventually decides that he wants to save the passengers on the train, starting with Christina, altering the past. The film is a little unclear on this point. His supervisors in the Army, including an underutilized Jeffrey Wright as Dr. Rutledge, the source code’s architect, insist this is impossible: he is not back in time after all, just reliving the last few minutes of another man’s life. Steven believes that it is possible to alter this past and eventually saves the train, gets the girl, etc. This is a second point of similarity with Moon: in each case the protagonist escapes to an uncertain future, figuring anything must be better. These are films about an escape from an infinite subjection.

While the film is unclear about how this is possible scientifically, it is quite clear about what it means politically. The “Source Code” is a shady top-secret project, clearly keeping the half-dead bodies of soldiers in boxes so that they may continue to serve indefinitely must be illegal, not to mention immoral. Such a project requires an exceptional event in order to gain legitimacy, an event like a bomb attack on a train followed by the ultimate “ticking time bomb” scenario, a dirty bomb in a major city. After Stevens completes his mission the first time, identifying the bomber and locating the bomb, Dr. Rutledge can be seen celebrating. This is contrasted in the film to the final scene after Stevens alters the timeline by saving the train. In that scene Dr. Rutledge can be seen sitting behind a desk being debriefed about the attack that almost was anxious awaiting an attempt to legitimate his project. He is the architect of a shock doctrine, waiting for the right series of events, the right catastrophe, to put his plan into place. The film makes it clear that the real horrors of the present are not guys building bombs in their basements, but the men and women in well financed government bunkers just waiting for the right disaster, the right crisis, to put their plans into motion.

Both of Duncan Jones’ films deal with a protagonist whose subjection is “more profound than himself,” to borrow the lines from Foucault. An individual who figures out that there is no end to the contract, no end to the mission, no way out except a drastic line of flight. Source Code brings this condition into a political present. It reveals that we are subject to the “permanent state of exception” that is the war on terror, a war that justifies nearly everything in advance and will become much more pernicious if another bomb should detonate or another attack is successful. The only way out of this is to rewrite history itself or exodus, an escape to an uncertain future.

Still Anomalous After All These Years: Negri’s Latest Book on Spinoza

2011-03-24T10:18:00.005-04:00

Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the French and Italian turn to Spinoza over the past forty years is the sheer volume of the texts produced. A volume in terms of the massive tomes, such as Matheron, Moreau, and Macherey’s studies, but also in terms of the repeated returns to Spinoza’s thought, returns that attest to what Macherey referred to as its infinite productive nature, its capacity to produce new readings, new effects. Negri’s latest book on Spinoza, Spinoza et nous (Translated into French by Judith Revel, although I could not find a corresponding Italian text) is his third book on Spinoza.

Negri’s little book, a series of essays on Spinoza covering democracy, Spinoza and Heidegger, and a sociology of the affects, is presented as both a defense of his particular interpretation of Spinoza, which began with The Savage Anomaly, and of what is stake in the general turn to Spinoza. With respect to the latter, Negri argues that the return to Spinoza should be given the conspicuous date of 1968. This is its date in intellectual history, following the publication of Matheron and Deleuze’s studies, but it also places it within the post-68 crisis of Marxism and transformation of capital. As Negri argues, the crisis of Marxism opened the turn to Spinoza.

What is perhaps more interesting is how Negri defines and defends his particular project. He does not mention the famous, or infamous, thesis regarding the dual foundations of the Ethics, the split between a more or less neo-platonist philosophy of emanation in Parts One and Two and an immanent constitutive ontology in Part Three onwards. Rather, the focus is now on potentia as the construction of the common. Or as Negri puts it, in a concise formulation, “Chez Spinoza, les forces productives produisent les rapports de production.”(“With Spinoza, the forces of production produce the relations of production.”)

This formulation takes us back, well way back to the dialectic of forces and relations with their corresponding fetters, but also to The Savage Anomaly. In that book Negri argued that all instances of potestas, of sovereign power, must ultimately be seen as instances of potential, of immanent power. More specifically, following Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the image of God as lawgiver must be seen as a product of human imagination and human desires. Negri’s return and reformulation of that crucial aspect of his earlier work affirms what remains its central aspect: the relation of politics and metaphysics in which Spinoza’s metaphysics is his politics and politics has an unavoidable metaphysical aspect. As Negri writes, “Politics is the metaphysics of the imagination, the metaphysics of the human constitution of reality, the world.” Negri’s reading of Spinoza expands what is meant by forces beyond labor power to encompass desire, affects, and reason, all of which make the world, including the relations that constrain and restrict them. Now the assertion becomes the basis for a polemic for all those who would reduce Spinoza’s thought to a history of democracy (Isreal) or even a genesis of institutions (Balibar). Against any attempt to posit a symmetry of potentia and potestas, forces and relations, to make relations (law, institutions) the necessary mediation of forces, Negri asserts the primacy of forces, or potentia.

This is the original thesis of The Savage Anomaly and Negri defends it against its multiple detractors. The first chapter, “Spinoza et nous” is organized much along the same lines as the first chapter of the book on constituent power (Insurgencies in English): in each case a radical central thesis is defined as it is defended against all attempts to curtail or contain it. However, this defense is bolstered and transformed by two concepts which have appeared in Negri’s books with Michael Hardt: biopolitics and the common. The first of these concepts moves Spinoza’s thought beyond the interplay of politics and metaphysics, in which one defines the other, to a terrain of a production of subjectivity. The common is what produces and is produced by this subjectivity. In defining the latter Negri draws extensively from Part V of the Ethics, constructing a trajectory in which an irreducible striving (conatus) constitutes a multitude. In each case the imported terms help define the singularity of Spinoza’s thought in which desire and imagination construct the multitude.

The final essay in the book, “Spinoza: un sociologie des affects” (which was presented and published as part of Spinoza et les sciences sociales edited by Yves Citton and Frédéric Lordon) represents the most promising aspect of contemporary “Marxist-Spinozism,” for lack of a better word, and that is the affects as way for understanding sociality. Negri points out how Spinozist social science necessarily calls into question the very division constitutive of the social sciences, the separation of value neutral “sciences” from politics and the institutions of society from nature. Spinoza contests each of these, in the first case by offering a genealogy of value, of the different constitutions of desire, while, in the second, there is no division between nature and institution, the organization of bodies and the organization of minds. Finally, Negri insists, as he does throughout this little book, that Spinoza must be understood as a transindividual thinker. (This last point, and the reference to Simondon, is something of an interesting surprise, although I admit that it threatens to throw something else that I am writing off a bit)

In general Spinoza et nous follows the trajectory of Negri’s engagement with Spinoza, Spinoza becomes a singular and anomalous figure only in and through the engagements with Marx, Heidegger, Hegel, Machiavelli and Foucault. It is a work of the transindividuation of Spinoza.

Teachers are the New Welfare Queens

2011-03-07T10:14:00.000-05:00

I am sure that you have seen the bumper stickers before. They say things like “Keep Working Millions on Welfare Depend on You” and, more recently, “Spread My Work Ethic, Not My Wealth.” They reflect a cornerstone of conservative ideology, the distinction between those hard working real Americans and the lazy people on welfare.

One could say a few things about these distilled little kernels of ideology. First, it is just that, ideology, not an accurate depiction of reality, but has become less accurate in the years following "welfare reform." However, that these bumper stickers linger on, and get reprinted after Clinton’s “end welfare as we know it,” and the emergence of workfare, suggests a pure fantasy sustained more by resentment and frustration than anything else. Second, as ideology, it testifies to Ronald Reagan’s ability as an ideologist, while stories of welfare fraud preexisted him, he made the “welfare queen” a central figure in the conservative imaginary. Third, and most importantly for my interests here, all these bumper sticker slogans and images depend on a distinction between those who work and those who do not, something that will be of interest to Marxists. After all exploitation, which can be very basically understood as distinction between those who work and those who benefit, is fundamental to the Marxist critique of capitalism (or any mode of production, actually).

Several Marxist philosophers, notably Etienne Balibar, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Zizek, have all remarked that Marx’s basic formulation, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force,” needs to be augmented. These ideas would not become ruling ideas, would not take hold, if they did not in some way reflect and refract the basic experience of the dominated working class. We could call this a version of Machiavelli’s thesis that a ruler must appear to be “of the people,” to share the concerns, values, and ideals of those who he or she rules over. The combination of these two theses, the ruling class and the dominated class, explains the faux populism that dominates American politics, the forced folksy sayings and the endless parade of candidates we would supposedly “like to have a beer with.”

In this case the experience of the working class is the basic fact of exploitation, the sense that someone somewhere is benefiting from all this work. Ideology is an inversion of this, a camera obscura in a different sense. The history of politics in the years post Reagan, and just as likely before, has been a history of different figures playing the role of “welfare queen.” In the nineties it became the illegal immigrant, crossing the border to benefit from non-existent social services. Now, as this article suggests, it is the public employee, most specifically the teacher, playing this role.

This can only be considered a step backwards: no longer are workers pitted against imagined non-workers but against other workers. (Although I cannot really say this, not much is worse the ideological assault on illegal immigrants: a hyper-exploited labor force, often contributing to taxes and social security, portrayed as a parasite) It uses the insecurity and poverty of some workers, those without benefits and retirement accounts, to argue against any security, any protection, in a frenzied race to the bottom. Moreover, the folksy “We’re broke,” which is uttered by governors and senators to justify such cuts, is an attempt to take the everyday experience of poverty and uses it to efface the conditions of such poverty, tax cuts and benefits for the rich. Once again The Daily Show provides some useful media critique:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Crisis in Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer - Teachers and Wall Street

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Recognizing that the fundamental kernel of all these attacks is the fact of exploitation does have its upside, however, it makes it possible to turn this anger and frustration to other targets, to the class of financial capitalists. If exploitation is at the basis of all these attacks on "welfare queens," "illegal immigrants," and, now, "teachers," then it should be possible to use that as a political opening, to begin to address exploitation that actually exists, the real divisions of wealth and poverty rather than the imagine ones. The bumper sticker I want: “Keep Working Thousands With Trust Funds Depend On You.” Or something to that effect, I am not good at bumper stickers.

The General Intellect Personified: More Notes on Capitalism as a Social Relation

2011-03-01T03:07:00.000-05:00

This is a continuation of the reading of Capital I begun earlier, and a return to a passage in Capital that I have written on several times, Chapter Thirteen on Cooperation. Whereas I wrote a previous post on Cooperation in terms of Marx’s theory of social relations, my concern now is what this passage has to say about surplus value. (This is not to say that the two are separate, far from it actually: what I want to argue is that these two questions, social relations and surplus, are never separable from Marx).

Surplus value, M-C-M’ is at the core of Marx’s critique and at this point in his analysis it has already been demonstrated. It rests on the difference between the cost of labor power and the value labor power is capable of producing. However, in the section on cooperation Marx adds to this, adding a surplus to a surplus. Marx argues that the simple fact of adding the forces of labor together, of combining the efforts of workers, increases the productivity of labor. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There is thus a surplus above and beyond the surplus value grounded in the exploitation of labor.

Marx also argues that this cooperation, this collective worker, is itself the genesis of the increasingly specialized and technological work of manufacture, large-scale industry, and the factory. It is only once that a group of workers are brought together in one place, in one productive process, that it becomes possible to begin fragment the labor process, assigning different tasks to different individuals. This specialization gives rise to specialized tools through an analysis of the component elements of the labor process. Marx’s argument in the middle section of Capital is an argument about technology, arguing that technology is itself a product of social relations. Machines emerge from the cooperative and fragmented labor process, even responding to its crises and conflict. As Marx writes, “It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working class revolt.”

Beyond what this might mean for a philosophy of technology it is worth pointing out that the social surplus then gives rise to the technological surplus. Science, like cooperation, is not paid for, it becomes part of the generalized productive force of society. This is, after all, the initial definition of the "general intellect."

Social relations and science, or technology, both create a surplus, a surplus above and beyond the exploitation of the individual. It could also be said that these surpluses are above and beyond labor, at least abstract wage labor. It could be said, and if we did we would be very close to some of the concepts and problems of autonomist Marxism, all of which start from the idea of a surplus produced by immaterial labor or the general intellect. However, it is important to underscore that unlike autonomist Marxism, at least in some assertions, Marx never ceases to identify this surplus with an increased fetishization of capital. The more that capital utilizes the combined energy of the collective worker and the more that it puts to work science and knowledge the more that it appears that capital itself is productive. As Marx writes:

“This entire development of the productive forces of socialized labor (in contrast to the more or less isolated labor of individuals), and together with it the uses of science (the general product of social development), in the immediate process of production, takes the form of the productive power of capital. It does not appear as the productive power of labor, or even of that part of it that is identical with capital. And least of all does it appear as the productive power either of the individual workers or of the workers joined together in the process of production.”

Marx even takes this a step further, suggesting that it appears as not just as the productive power of capital in general but the attribute of a specific capitalist. One could perhaps interpret this as an argument that the more these surpluses of cooperation and science enter into production the more the person of the capitalist is fetishized, seen as the source of wealth. This might be an interesting thesis to examine, a dialectic of abstraction and concretization in which abstraction leads to concretization. Anecdotal evidence of this can be found by surveying the companies of contemporary capitalism. The more wealth is produced by knowledge and cooperation, the more it appears to be the attribute of a talented individual. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, these are all household names. Contrast this to corporations such as BP, Toyota, Boeing, etc., their CEOs are known only to a select few, perhaps reflecting the fact that in their case the source of value is not so readily obscured. The more cooperative and knowledge based the production, the more readily it is fetishized in the genius of an individual.

That might be one direction to pursue, but I would rather suggest that these observations point to a necessary corrective of autonomist theory. It is not enough to champion the productive power of the general intellect, it is necessary to explore the fetishization of this power in capital, and in the supposed “great men” that make up the history of the present. In previous writings I have focused on Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the “socius” to theorize this relation. Deleuze and Guattari develop this concept from Marx’s fetish, stressing that society itself is a fetish. To quote one of my publications on this point,

“Just as the despot appears to be the cause and not the effect of subjection, capital appears to be the cause and not the effect of labor. Once disconnected from the conditions of production, from the virtual relations that make it possible, society, the socius, not only appears to be autonomous, in the form of money making money, but is an effect that appears as a cause. Society not only appears to exist prior to the differential relations, the production and desire that constitute it, it also appears to stand above these relations as their necessary condition. The fetish has become common sense in that we see society, with its structures, rules and goals, as something that exists prior to and is constitutive of the social relations of desire, perception and production.”

At this point, however, I am struck not so much by the incorrectness of this approach, but its imprecision. To argue that capital, or individual capitalists, represent the productive power of capital based on an almost metaphysical divide between production and representation, becoming and being, is to miss the specific relations that, in Marx’s thought, constitute this appearance. These relations are cooperation and science, sources of surplus that cannot be phenomenally located in the individual’s exertion and labor. The more abstract and relational labor becomes, the more it appears to be concretized in the genius of an individual. Just as the real abstraction of value is concretized in money, the real abstraction of cooperation is concretized in the figure of the genius capitalist, the CEO or entrepreneur. Some individuals are real abstractions. That would be the polemical provocation of this line of thought, but still much needs to be done to examine the specific ways that the productive power of cooperation and science is represented.

What We Write About When We Write About Movies: Or, Memory in the Age of Youtube

2011-02-24T04:47:00.003-05:00

Jonathan Lethem’s little book on They Live (part of a relatively new series on films by Soft Skull Press, a cinematic equivalent of Continuum’s 33-1/3 books on records) offers two beginnings. The first presents the film as a dream, focusing on the things that everyone will remember even years after seeing the film, the glasses, the decoded billboards, and of course this:

The second, which sets up the books method, chapters broken down to a minute by minute count of the film, a sort of print commentary track, states the following.

“A Netflix copy of They Live plays behind these words as I type. Not on a television screen in the same room, but on the computer screen, on which my document also appears. Thanks to contemporary technology—not just DVDs, but YouTube excerpts, available via the wireless signal in the café where I write sometimes, if I’ve forgotten to bring the disk—I’m Pauline Kael’s ultimate opposite here: I’ve watched the entirety of my subject film a dozen times at least, and many individual scenes countless times more (Kael used to brag of seeing each film only once). This situation isn’t normal in the history of film studies (unless it’s “the new normal,” which it probably is): even if Robin Wood or Tag Gallagher resorted to owning a 16-millimeter print or a VHS tape of their Hitchcock or Rossellini subjects, they’d have worn holes in those artifacts and perhaps also destroyed their projection devices with the kind of obsessive close viewing I can do simply at the click of a cursor.”

Lethem book is engaging, it is no Fortress of Solitude but it is perhaps more enjoyable then Chronic City. When I finish the book I might say something about its particular method of film criticism, caught somewhere between the pop and academic, but I am particular struck by his remark about technology and memory.

The great works of film criticism written before the DVD and Youtube, I am thinking particularly of Deleuze and Zizek, who I taught recently, are books of memory. As such they often make mistakes, remembering a scene wrong. One could say that to write about films before the VCR, DVD, and Youtube was always to write about one's memory of films: the way in which our memory reconstructs its own version of films, dropping certain scenes, extending others. We all swede films. Lethem is right that this has changed, I have written about movies and TV, playing the scenes on the same computer.

However, Lethem’s point goes beyond writing about film to touch on memory in the age of its technological reproduction. These youtube clips are not just useful for writing about films, but are often used to recall memories, settle arguments about critical scenes or dialogue etc. To follow Lethem’s analogy with the hazy recollection of dreams one could say that the science fiction fantasy of a machine that records our dreams might never come true, but with youtube we do not need it. Its film clips, old commercials, videos are the stuff of memory freed from the hazy gray confines of our heads.

Of course the question remains, and this is the question that Jonathan Beller, Bernard Stiegler, and others are working on is what this transformation, this ability to recall everything immediately, looks like once we put the glasses on, once we move past its appearance to grasp the forces and powers that underlie it.

Another Day in the Future: Philip K. Dick and the Philosophy of Science Fiction

2011-02-17T16:56:00.001-05:00

The recent news that Michel Gondry planned to make a film based on Ubik convinced me to look at this again. It is an old piece, and one that I wrote for an undergraduate audience. I can’t really say that my thinking on the matter has changed much, however, in part because I have not have had time to revisit it, so I thought that I would post it.

Rather than discuss the connection between a particular theme or subject and science fiction I would like to discuss some philosophical issues raised by the problem of defining the genre of science fiction itself. Defining the genre of science fiction is notoriously difficult, especially since all such definitions struggle against science-fiction’s status as what Samuel Delaney calls “para-literature”, as a substandard or maligned category of literature. In fact unlike other genres of fiction, mystery etc. much of the writing on science fiction is concerned with defining the genre itself, its history, and its differences from other sorts of fiction. A definition offered by Darko Suvin is as follows: “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.” This definition does the necessary work of distinguishing between science fiction and fantasy, fantasy as estrangement—as another world with no real connection to our own, as well as science fiction and “mundane” fiction—as lacking any real estrangement. As much as this definition marks off a territory, it also poses multiple problems, problems that hinge on the relation, or the dialectic, between estrangement and cognition. I would like to explore some of these problems in light of the fiction of Philip K. Dick.

To say that science fiction is defined by both estrangement and cognition is to argue that as much as science fiction deals with other worlds, distant futures, or time travel, things that most of us have no knowledge of, it presents these things not as an entirely ungraspable, as completely alien, but as understandable. This cognitive dimension is generally understood as having something to do with the “science” half of the term science fiction. However, any attempt to define the genre of science fiction in relation to science as we know it, to existing scientific theories or knowledge, comes up against one insurmountable problem— much of the realm of science fiction concerns areas in which there is little or no scientific knowledge—alien physiology and faster than light speed travel. On top of this many of the recognized classics of science fiction are written with little regard for science. Carl Freedman amends the above definition by referring to what he calls the “cognition effect”, stressing that science fiction must present a world that is presented as potentially understandable; that is, it lays day certain rules—technological, sociological, and political—that the writing must conform to no matter how imagined or arbitrary they are. This frees any definition of science fiction from any dependency on actual science. Thus, I would argue, following Suvin and Freedman, but also going beyond them a bit—that this “cognition effect” has a lot to do with one of the most difficult challenges of science fiction writing—constituting a “world”, a world that despite is distance in time and space from our world seems to cohere. That is to say science fiction must present a world, which, no matter how remarkable it is to us, is lived by those who inhabit it as a world in its everydayness. In order to make this world appear as a functioning world, the different elements of society—the existing technology, political structures, arts, and culture—must appear to interrelate in a way that seems convincing. In fact I think that it is possible to argue that much science fiction deals with relationship between technological transformations and political and social transformations. (This would seem to obviously the case with respect to those to classics of science fiction which have made into the cannon of respectable literature—Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World—which demonstrate the political effects, or conditions, of “genetic engineering” and universal surveillance).

Freedman’s idea of a “cognition effect” once cast in this light can be seen to have interesting parallels with Althusser’s concept of a “society effect.” As Althusser argues: “The mechanism of the production of this “society effect” is only complete when all the effects of the mechanism have been expounded, down to the point where they are produced in the form of the very effects that constitute the concrete, conscious or unconscious relation of the individuals to the society as a society, i.e., down to the effects of the fetishism of ideology (or ‘forms of social consciousness’--Preface to A Contribution….), in which men consciously or unconsciously live their lives, their projects, their actions, their attitudes and their functions as social”.

At the level of the actual writing this constituting of a world, or a society, as the cohesion of different dimensions of existence poses particular problems. A world exists all at once, synchronically, but a novel is written linearly, line by line, as it develops plot and character. One of the challenges of writing science fiction, a challenge that should give pause to all of those who criticize it for being poorly written, is that it has to unpack dimensions of this world line by line. (Good science fiction writing does this seamlessly; bad science fiction will often interrupt the action of the plot in order to develop the necessary exposition. This is why it is really difficult to make a good science fiction film.) Turning now to Philip K. Dick, finally, we can begin to see that much of the philosophical importance of his writing lies in the way he solves this problem. The opening lines of Ubik read as follows:

At three thirty A.M. on the night of June 5, 1992, the top telepath in the Sol system fell off the map in the offices of Runciter Associates in New York city. That started vidphones ringing. The Runciter organization had lost its track of too many Hollis’ psis during the last few months; this added disappearance would not do.

“Mr. Runciter? Sorry to bother you.” The technician in charge of the night shift at the map room coughed nervously as the massive, sloppy head of Glen Runciter swam up to fill the vidscreen.

Immediately we are confronted with strange things that have no place in our world, telepaths, psis, vidphones—all point to a transformation of technology. However, these unrecognizable elements of a different world are coupled with a situation that is at least somewhat recognizable—it is the familiar scene of an underling or employee waking up his boss in order to deliver bad news. The relation between “cognition” and “estrangement” referred to above is thus a dialectical one—recognizable and unrecognizable elements of society are given at the same time. Reading is a matter of piecing together the various elements of the existing reality, constantly latching on dimensions of a recognizable social or political reality and trying to make sense of the “vidphones,” “psi’s,” and “telepaths”. The reader’s attitude towards science fiction is almost necessarily an interrogative one—with each sentence the reader is continually attempting to find out what the “rules” of this world are, what sort of technological, social, and political reality exists.

In the novels of Philip K. Dick this dialectical interplay between “cognition” and “estrangement” quickly takes on a critical function—making possible not just an interrogation of the “fictional” world of the novels but of our world as well. As the passage from Ubik above indicates, Dick’s novels are often situated in a world in which the fundamental transformation of the basic structures of perception and existence are situated against the backdrop of fairly recognizable corporate culture. The novel’s major plot concerns the Runciter Organization a corporation which supplies “inertials,” individuals with the ability to limit or damper the telepathic abilities of the individuals from the competing Hollis organization. The transformation of the biological limitations of human experience is juxtaposed against a somewhat standard plot of competition and corporate intrigue. Estrangement in the novel seems to follow the transformations of technology and biology, an estrangement that seems all the stranger given the recognizable mundane dimensions of late twentieth century human life. For example in response to the emergency indicated in the opening passage, Runciter replies as follows, “I’ll consult my dead wife.” To which the technician on the vidphone replies, “It’s the middle of the night. The moratoriums are closed now.” Thus the world of Ubik, the world that we are trying to make sense of, is a world in which the divide separating the living and the dead has been crossed, however, this has done nothing to change the rather mundane fact that such limits are only crossed within regular working hours. Which would suggest that the as much as the division between the living and the dead passes away as an organizing structure of experience, the commodification of experience has not passed away. As the novel’s temporal frame of reference shifts, moving backward in time, the difference between the present and past is often expressed in terms of the difference of advertising type written for the mysterious commodity Ubik.

In the beginning of the novel, set in the year 1992, Ubik™ is advertised and sold in convenient aerosol cans by the end novel, which is set in the mid-thirties, it is a salve, or elixir, to be mixed with tar water. Thus Dick takes the transformation of the commodity, from a elixir peddled by traveling salesman to a mass produced item sold by the millions, to be a shorthand for indicating historical progress itself. As if to suggest that the experience of historical difference is experienced primarily as a difference of marketing strategies.

The world of Ubik, as so many other novels of Philip K. Dick (including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep the basis for the film Blade Runner), is a world in which radical transformations at the level of technology, what used to be called the forces of production, coexist with an absolute stagnation at the level of relations of production, the property relations. Unlike the classic works of science fiction referred to above, Brave New World and 1984, which present a dystopian world based on the absolute harmony between technology and a social order, Dick’s novels present a world in which the technological potential and the social order seem almost comically out of step. A point illustrated by such things as “coin-operated toilets” equipped with artificial intelligence. This tension between technology and the social order is not a contradiction in the classical Marxist sense, because it does not seem to threaten to topple the existing social and political structures—Dick rarely addresses anything like revolution. However, this contradiction is given critical force by the fact that Dick’s novels are populated by characters who are alienated and disaffected, the typical Dickian protoganist, such as Joe Chip from Ubik, is a mid level employee emotionally, economically, and sexual alienated. The breakdown of barriers of human perception, of the division between the living and the dead, may have open up new areas for investment, but has nothing to improve the lot of the average person.

Thus in Dick’s novels the dialectic of estrangement and cognition works in a critical manner—forcing the reader to confront the limitations of his or her world. Dick uses the basic material of science fiction, the imaginative challenging of the basic technological and biological limits of the world as we know it---mind altering drugs, time travel, artificial life forms, and alternate realities, to challenge dimensions of our life that we cynically consider to be unchangeable, most notably the commodity structure and capitalism itself.

Isolation and Relation: Notes on Capital

2011-02-05T21:22:00.007-05:00

I am teaching Capital, or at least parts of Volume One. This is not the first time that I have done this, I have taught selections of it in my nineteenth century philosophy class and have taught parts of Marx, in some form or another, every year. However, this is the most of the book that I have ever taught, almost all of it over seven weeks. It is also my attempt to break with my past reading, more or less documented in the Micro-Politics book and heavily influenced by Althusser and Negri. Along these lines I have been reading some of the more or less recent interpretations by Arthur, Bidet, and Harvey, as well as collection of essays titled Relire Le Capital edited by Franck Fischbach.

I had hoped to make this course a regular feature in the blog, perhaps even giving it its own blog dedicated to a rereading of Capital, but it is three weeks into the semester now and it does not look like that is going to happen. However, I thought that I would write a few things, not so much a full investigation but scattered remarks with the hope that it might be of interest.

My first entry begins not with Capital but with the Grundrisse, and a passage that shows up quite a bit in my thoughts, if not on this blog. Like many of Marx’s most provocative remarks in the later writings, it is simultaneously a critique of political economy and of capital, of the social relation and its representation.

Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

This passage concludes with the “social individual,” the individual who is only individuated within society, which is to say transindividualy, but not before first asserting that the individual can appear as something which opposes itself to its social conditions. This isolated individual appears at the maxim point of the development of social relations: the most general relations appear in and through the standpoint of the isolated individual.

This could just be Marx citing Hegel’s critique of civil society in the Philosophy of Right, but it raises the question as to what extent this idea of the contradictory sociality of capitalism is continued through the text of Capital itself.

The stakes of this question become clear if one recognizes the role that sociality plays in the development for commodity fetishism. As Marx writes,

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor. This is the reason why the products of labor become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible [sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social].

It might be possible to understand the passage on commodity fetishism cited above, and its structure in general, as an answer to the question that is not even posed in the passage from the Grundrisse. Why does the standpoint of the isolated individual emerge with the most developed general relations? Why don’t these relations produce, or carry with them, a consciousness that is equally social? It is because the relations appear in the commodity form itself. Two things would seem to follow from this: first, as I have argued elsewhere on this blog, the commodity form could be understood as Marx’s response to Hegel. There is no passage from the particular consciousness of civil society to the universal consciousness of the state. Second, it underscores in a manner that is often not discussed enough the relational dimension of the value form. In the passages prior to this, the chapters on the accidental, relative, and expanded form of value, the endless equivalences between pounds of corn and yards of linen, which are so tempting to skim over, can be understood to be arguing that the value form is necessarily relational and, at a higher level of philosophical abstraction, that forms are nothing other than relations. Acknowledging this first part is necessary to fend off the moralizing readings of Marx, or critiques of the moralizing straw man, all of which focus on some supposed purity of use value, as an individual unfetishized relation to an object (Such a reading would be nothing other than a Robinsonade). The second aspect gets us close to how Marx is redefining both form and relation, a necessary aspect to understanding his philosophy.

Commodity fetishism is not the only place in capital in which the value form is presented as a mode of sociality, a particular manner of relating. In the Chapter on money for example, Marx makes an explicit connection between use value and exchange value and isolation and relation.

“The owner of a commodity is prepared to part with it only in return for other commodities whose use value satisfies his own need. So far, exchange is merely an individual process for him. On the other hand, he desires to realize his commodity, as a value, in any other suitable commodity of the same value. It does not matter to whim whether his own commodity has use value for the owner of the other commodity or not. From this point of view, exchange is for him a general social process. But the same process cannot be simultaneously for all owners of commodities both exclusively individual and exclusively social and general.”

This passage would seem to prefigure Sohn-Rethel’s assertion that in the act of exchange consciousness and action go separate ways: consciously I am focused on the use value of the commodity, but my actions are still governed by exchange value, by its fetishized value. Sohn-Rethel ups the ante of Marx’s analysis, stressing it is not just the isolated individual that emerges from these interconnected and fetishized relations, but consciousness itself. As Sohn-Rethel writes, “Nothing could be wrapped in greater secrecy than the truth that the independence of the intellect is owed to its original social character.” It is social in that even its isolation, its solipsistic focus on use values, is made possible by the fact that production takes place out of sight. It is also social in that the abstraction of value, even abstraction itself, is formed through these relations. To cite Sohn-Rethel again, “Nothing that a single commodity-owner might undertake on his own could give rise to this abstraction, no more than a hammock could play its part when attached to one pole only.”

More could be said about Sohn-Rethel, and I have tried to do so here and elsewhere, but I would like to draw two provisional conclusions/provocations. First, it seems that Marx makes possible a thought of sociality as a form, or as a form of relations. This is interesting given the way that many trends in contemporary philosophy have turned away from the social, or society, treating it as a badly framed empirical concept, burdened with content it cannot justify, towards various subtractive, formal, or relational ontologies. A reading of Marx would suggest that this is not necessary, and this may have been what was at stake in so-called structuralist Marxism and the endless controversy over Marx’s use of Träger. Second, and this is really more of provocation, it remains to be seen how one could continue to trace this thought of relations through the entire text of Capital. More specifically, it remains to be seen what remains of this divide when it passes from the sphere of circulation to the hidden abode of production; which is to say, how does the contradictory sociality reframe the divide between exchange and production.

Perhaps I will try to address this in the next post.

In Body if not in Spirit: Butler and Malabou on Hegel

2011-01-22T14:37:00.006-05:00

In the history of philosophy there are some texts that are difficult to say anything new about. These texts are so dominated by one influential reading that it becomes difficult, even impossible, to say interpret anew. Paradigmatic in these respects is the brief section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit known as the “master slave dialectic” or “lordship and bondage”.This section is so dominated by Kojeve’s canonical reading that is almost as if his words were already there on the pages of Hegel’s text.

This is one reason why Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou’s exchange on “Domination and Servitude” published in French as Sois mon corps: une lecture contemporaine de la domination et servitude chez Hegel is engaging. It is a reading of this all too well known section of Hegel’s text, but one that dispenses with the preoccupations of a previous generation in order to reread Hegel. Butler and Malabou each address Hegel from their particular philosophical commitments and engagements: Butler’s intervention is framed by her reading of Hegel in The Psychic Life of Power and Malabou continues her development of plasticity in her reading of Hegel. Which is not to say that the concerns of Kojeve are entirely absent. He is mentioned not just in name, but also in general orientation. His reading, which influenced Lacan, Bataille, etc., made this particular passage not just the genesis of self-consciousness, but an anthropogenesis, the constitution of the human as such.

In Butler’s reading in particular, this passage from animal to human becomes about attachment to the body. The title would translate into English as “Be my body,” which is the masters injunction to the slave. The slave will work and toil and the master will consume the fruits of the labor. It is worth noting, and this is something that comes up in both Butler and Malabou’s intervention, that Hegel does not speak of the body as such. Any attempt to comprehend “the body” would have to be framed by the discussion of “life” that precedes the section, and the intersections of fear, work, death, consumption, and consciousness that punctuate the passage. It is on this point, on their attempt to not just read the body, but read it through death, work, and fear, that Butler and Malabou’s intervention joins what Negri describes as a post-humanist anthropology.

Although it remains to be seen how post-humanist this anthropology is, how much it can work through the defining aspects of human existence, construed as practices and relations, without relying on a concept of the human, constituted as an essence. This problem is especially vexing given the role death, the fear, or death or finitude plays in this text, and Kojeve’s reading. Death in post-Heideggarian thought, functions as a kind of finite transcendence: it is finite, being death and all, but it avoids whether or not there might be other ways of figuring finitude and, more importantly, it functions as a kind transcendent condition, as that which exceeds and structures all experience. This is of course, Kojeve’s contribution to Hegel, of his radically interrupted reading that makes death the “absolute master,” failing to notice that it is not Hegel’s last word on finitude or negativity. This is both the challenge and the limit of their project: in some sense a post-humanist interpretation of “Domination and Servitude” is nearly impossible because it is precisely placing this section, with its drama of death, work, and desire, at the center of Hegel’s thought that constitutes the humanist reading.

Malabou and Butler both focus on the impossibility of actualizing the injunction, the separation of subjectivity from the body. The master still needs to eat, to consume, and is thus confronted by the very object that he sought to avoid. The same could be said of the slave’s encounter death: the slave flees death in the struggle for recognition only to find it again waiting, in the fear of the master. Complete detachment from the body is just as impossible as complete surrender to the demands of life, a purely animal existence, physicality and negativity, determination and intederminacy, are equally unavoidable aspects of human life. There is nothing terribly new to this reading, but it perhaps has the merit of avoiding “recognition” as its central concept.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Malabou and Butler’s confrontation is the way in which it pits their particular conceptual innovations, plasticity in the case of Malabou and subjection/attachment in the case of Butler, in relation to Hegel’s text. In each case the concept in question is developed in relation to Hegel’s thought, albeit differently. To start with Malabou’s reading of Butler, Malabou poses the question as to what extent Foucault’s problematic of subjectivity/subjection, especially once understood as an attachment and detachment to a particular kind of power differs from a dialectic, countering Butler’s Foucauldian reading of Hegel with a Hegelian reading of Foucault. The slave's subjection is nothing other than a kind of attachment, the attachment to simply living, to the body as given, and mastery is a kind of detachment, an active constitution of the self as something other than this particular life, this body.What makes this possible is her concept of plasticity, the capacity to give and receive form, which cuts through dialects and subjection/subjectivity, to think the interconnection of passivity and activity.

In the end plasticity, as the simultaneity of shaping and being shaped of consciousness, and performativity, as constraint and action, circle around the same fundamental problem: as Spinoza perhaps was the first to note, every finite thing, which is to say everything, is simultaneously determined and determining, affected by other things around it and striving to act on the world. Thinking the specific conjunction of these two aspects is to some extent the task of any materialist philosophy, which is to say any philosophy that is not hopelessly caught up in a metaphysics of freedom and freewill. Malabou and Butler’s argument about Hegel has the merit of putting some of these different concepts of servitude and mastery in relation, most notably Hegel and Foucault, but, despite itself, it also indicates the limit of a purely philosophical investigation. If Foucault’s problem of subjection, the fact that we are always saying yes and no to power, can itself be understood as a restaging of the dialectic of attachment and detachment that defines servitude and domination, then wouldn’t it be possible to say the same thing about performativity and plasticity? My point is not to confirm Foucault’s nightmare in which Hegel subsumes all attempts to escape his influence, but to pose the question of a reorientation of thought. Perhaps the task is not to conceptualize this relation, to rigorously isolate the point where passivity becomes activity, but to think the materiality and specificity of different ways in which one becomes the other. What is perhaps important is not the general dimension of the concept, but the specific modality of the encounter. This maybe the reason that Hegel’s little narrative draws us back again and again: it offers us not the general figure of negation but something of the specific contours of domination and struggle.

Negativity Employed: Benjamin Noys’ The Persistence of the Negative

2011-01-05T00:17:00.004-05:00

Ben Noys’ The Persistence of the Negative is interesting to me for at least two reasons. 1) As someone whose introduction to philosophy, or theory, if you prefer, was through the intersecting texts of Deleuze, Spinoza, and Negri, I am firmly within the strain of affirmative thought that Noys critiques. Thus, the text constitutes something of a critical reckoning with my own philosophical consciousness. 2) Noys text is not just an argument for or against a particular theoretical perspective, but is ultimately concerned with a larger problem; namely, the relationship between history and theory, or, more precisely, between the real abstractions of capital and the abstraction of thought.

I initially approached the book thinking that it would be the first aspect that would be most interesting. My own particular trajectory of thinking as of late has been somewhat away from my affirmationist roots (more on this particular terminology in a little bit) and towards a reconsideration of dialectical thought, towards the problem of a materialist dialectic. However, Noys book is less about that than I imagined. Noys book is less an argument for “The Dialectic,” especially in its more rigid form, as it is concerned with the question of negativity, within and beyond its dialectical role. While this revalorization of the negative is interesting, and timely, just think of the trajectory from Adorno to Deleuze, it is Noys’ particular understanding of the intersection of theoretical positions and the vicissitudes of history that make the book particularly compelling.

As much as Noys will offer a very developed criticism of Negri in the final pages in his text, he begins with a quote from Negri, which situates the intersection of theory and politics. As Negri writes, “The clash between productive forces and capitalist relations of production, both in reality and in representation (theoretical and metaphysical, scientific and historiographical) is always linked to events, to relationships of forces, to the creative capacity of historical subjects.” It is from this overdetermined, for lack of a better word, intersection that Noys makes sense of “accelerationism.” Accelerationism is the position attributed to Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari in which capital itself is identified with its own forces of dissolution, or deterritorialization, constantly overcoming itself. It does not create its gravediggers but is its own pallbearer. One only has to step out of its way, or push it along. Noys argues that this position is in some sense what remains after May ’68, when there is revolution but no revolutionary subject: one retains the revolutionary idea of desire, of overcoming every moral and social constraint, but one projects this onto the social forces themselves, or an indeterminate subject such as the “schizo.” On this reading accelerationism exhausts itself as the various deterritorializations of norms seem to be less and less capitalism’s undoing than its perpetual reinvention. What is the nineteen-eighties, and the rise of neoliberalism, but history’s revenge against accelerationism?

(As something of an aside, I should say that I am less than comfortable with these labels, accelerationism, weak and strong affirmation, etc. I understand their tactical value, but, to take Anti-Oedipus as an example, I have always thought that it offers more for thinking about subjectivity and capitalism than its dubious claims about the revolutionary schizophrenic tendencies of capital. If, as Walter Benjamin argues, the work is the death mask of its conception then the classification can only be its corpse. However, I do stress the tactical importance, and it is possible that these new terms, distinct from the old classifications of post-structuralism, Marxism, etc., reflect a more engaged mode of thought.)

If accelerationism can be understood as a response to a particular historical situation, a particular position of the French ultra-left, affirmationism is more ambiguous. Defined broadly it encompasses the work of Derrida, Deleuze, Latour, Negri, and Badiou, all of whom have eschewed the dialectic, negative, and critique in favor of multiplicity, affirmation, and constitution. However, if, as Noys argues, the French (and Italians) pursued metaphysics as politics, then it must be said that metaphysics makes even stranger bedfellows than politics. Affirmation joins disparate figures of thought. Most suggestive in this regard is the connections that Noys sketches between Latour, whose insistence on the ontology of networks is explicitly aimed against the reductions, criticisms, and totalizations of Marxism, and Negri for whom the networks of immaterial labor are the ontology of communism to come.

“In many ways Negri (with or with Hardt) offers the flip side of Latour’s modeling of networks. Both agree on the fundamental positivity of networks, but while Latour uses this to constrain political activity and to resist any conceptualization of capital, Negri simply takes it as a sign of an immanent and imminent communism to come. This is not only an ontologically flattened network, but also a politically flattened network. In the case of Negri it functions to give capitalism a false consistency to all the while accrue the true consistency of the side of the multitude. ‘Power is everywhere’ is a banal truism, especially when it leave us with a multitude that is everywhere without intervening anywhere.”

Noys critique of Latour is devasting in revealing the “reactionary” political positions that underlie the alluring ontology of networks. The connection to Negri then, is perhaps no less devastating. However, as the last sentences of the passages above make clear, Noys real target is less affirmation itself, than the way in which affirmation, the assertion that power, the multitude, or difference is everywhere, forecloses any real thought that would locate points of tension and transformation. For Noys affirmation is not even complicit with capitalism, since capital has its own negativity, alienations, and separations, rather it is complicit with capitalisms ideological image of itself, with the flows and networks the dominate adds for Microsoft.

Noys says less about some of the theoretical positions that would be opposed to this broad affirmationist trend, but he has some incisive remarks about the way in which finitude has functioned as a kind of alibi and justification for negation. As Noys writes:

“The inscription of negativity in the subject, usually in the form of a constitutive finitude is taken as a sign of what allows the subject to always escape or evade capitalist capture. We have a symmetrical affirmation and ontologization of resistance to high affirmationism, simply recast in different terms. The deflationary concept of the subject, however, leaves mysterious the process by which the failure of the subject will be converted into active and successful resistance.”

I wish Noys said more about this particular rendering of negativity, if only because it is so dominant in Anglo-American continental philosophy. However, that is not why I cite the passage here. The symmetry that Noys points to (as well as the symmetry to the quote about Negri above) reveals that Noys is not interested in positing an ontology of negativity against the ontologies of affirmation. Negativity is a practice, not a principle, a destruction of existing positivities.

In the end I think that it is possible to read Noys’ insistence on the negative as a practice to be an insistence on localizing thought and practices, resisting both an ontology of affirmation and an ontology of finitude. As such it is not to be confused with a simple invocation of context, the injunction to “always historicize.” This is because Noys takes seriously Sohn-Rethel’s (and others) fundamental point regarding real abstractions, the abstractions of value, the commodity form, and money. These abstractions are real in that they are constituted through practice, not just through thought, and as such they frame our world. Thus, in contemporary capitalism we cannot simply refer to the Marx’s “activity and material conditions of real individuals” in order to contextualize or specify thinking or practice because our present is defined less by the concrete content of our experience than the abstractions that evade it. In this context negativity cannot be grounded on some supposed element of finite transcendence, the insurmountable facticity of death or finitude, but nor cannot it be an ontological principle. It can only be the situated détournement, the rupture of the existing positivities. This is Noys idea of agency, of transformation, but I will argue that what is perhaps more interesting, at least to me, is the way that he makes “real abstractions” not just some point of reference for understanding capitalist society, but for understanding “theory.”

Theory has come under abuse as of late, and there has been much talk of a return to good old fashion philosophy and ethics. What Noys’ book demonstrates that at its best theory, and debates within theory, are situated at that obscure point where the contradictions of historical forces pass into thought and vice versa.

Winchester ’73: Destiny or Contingency

2010-12-18T23:49:00.007-05:00

“…the American cinema constantly shoots and re-shoots a single fundamental film, which is the birth of a nation-civilization…” –Gilles Deleuze

I have often thought that one could write something of an history of American ideology in the middle of the last century through the films of Jimmy Stewart. This is in part due to his casting as a sort of “everyman,” the generic subject of mass society, but, more importantly, it is the way in which this “everyman” was cast in very different light from the black and white morality of Capra to Hitchcock’s infinite shades of grey. The shift of directors is not just a shift of style, but a fundamental shift in the understanding of subjectivity and the world. The Capra, Ford, and Hitchcock films are well known. Perhaps less well known are the Westerns that Stewart made with Anthony Mann. Mann’s films are thematically and chronologically placed between the films of Capra and Hitchcock: Stewart plays the hero but one who is often driven by an obsession, conflicted beneath his generic exterior.

Stewart may seem like an unlikely western hero, especially to anyone who has seen The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. Mann seemed to be aware of this, Jacques Rancière cites him as saying that he found it necessary to follow a “series of precautions” in order to make Stewart, who is not "the broad shouldered type," believable as a man who can take on the world, precautions that define the relationship between what one can do and what one must do within the film. These precautions define the relation between the character and action, a relation that breaks with almost organic connection with a mileu that Deleuze argues defines Ford’s and Hawk’s westerns. As Rancière writes, “It doesn’t much matter whether Mann’s hero is a man of justice or a reformed criminal, since that is not the source of his quality. His hero belongs to no place, has no social function and no typical Western role: he is not a sheriff, bandit, ranch owner, cowboy, or officer; he doesn’t defend or attack the established order, and he does not conquer or defend any land. He acts and that’s it, he does some things.”

In Winchester ’73 Stewart plays Lin McAdam a brother pitted against brother, seeking to avenge his father’s murder. Cain doesn’t so much slay Abel, but his father. This fact, this crucial motivation, is only alluded to in the opening of the film: it is finally explained much latter, during the final shootout. Initially we only know that he is pursuing a man to Dodge City with determination that borders on the murderous. Narrative completion is only given retroactively, in the closing scene. Up to that point we only have a quest, a conflict without clear sense of its stakes. This quest, with its linear obsessive determination, is immediately displaced and deferred by the rifle of the film’s title. The rifle, which is introduced before any character, first appears as the prize in the fourth of July shooting contest organized by Wyatt Earp. The contest, and Dodge City in general, are presented as ordered and just: the story begins in place order and descends into lawlessness, a reversal of the traditional western narrative.

The contest pits Stewart against his brother, “Dutch Henry” (an alias) as two expert marksmen, both taught by the same man (their father). As Stewart says, hinting at the murder he is seeking to avenge, they were both taught how to shoot, but not why: equal in skill, but distinguished only by a slight moral difference. Just how slight this difference is made clear in the first scene where brother encounters brother. They both simultaneously reach for their guns. There is no difference of hero and villain at the level of basic actions: they are both prepared to shoot the other in relative cold blood. They would have shot each other, but there are no guns allowed in the oasis of order that is Dodge City, so all they can do is reach for their thighs, grasping at absent guns. As is so often the case in this film, intention exceeds action, the logic of the film restores one to the other.

Stewart wins the shooting contest, but is ambushed by his brother and the prize gun is stolen. This crime takes place within Dodge City, suggesting as the film does repeatedly that order and authority are only appearances. The plot of the film then follows three series of events. First, there is Stewart doggedly pursuing his brother from Dodge City across the west; then there is Dutch Henry, who isn’t so much fleeing pursuit as setting off on his own attempt to rob a bank; and finally there is the gun itself, which travels from the hands of Dutch, to the gun dealer who swindles him out of it, to a Native American chief (played by Rock Hudson), to the calvary, to “Waco Johnny Dean,” a member of Henry’s gang, eventually back to Henry for the final shootout. In the end Dutch Henry is defeated by Stewart and the gun is returned to its rightful owner.

This trajectory of the rifle’s movement, from hand to hand, could be understood as a kind of test, a quest with an object at its center. Criminals, corrupt gun dealers, Indians, and cowards all try to possess the gun, only to be deemed unworthy in the moral (and racist) logic of the film. Read this way the trajectory of the rifle overlaps with that of the moral quest for vengeance and the restoration of order. It is logic of fate: the murdering brother will be killed, and the gun will return to its rightful owner. However, the gun’s trajectory is overdetermined by the events of history itself. The film makes constant reference to the Battle of Little Big Horn, and the role that the Native American’s Winchesters played in Custer’s last stand. The repeating Winchesters were able to outgun the calvary’s single shot rifles. Custer’s defeat is presented as a kind of trauma, of a reversal of the established order based on the slight difference of a faster rifle. In the final shootout Stewart is able to defeat his brother, despite his superior gun, by tossing pebbles, distracting him to waste ammunition shooting at rocks and shadows. Underneath the moral narrative in which the gun is restored to its proper owner, and justice is dealt, there is the contingency of history, of the slight differences of technology, speed, and skill that simultaneously realize and undermine any intention.

The rifle doesn't just move from hand to hand, passing from Dutch, to the gun dealer, to the chief, and so on, it also passes between two different ways of understanding events; it passes between the moral logic of destiny and the historical logic of contingency.

Mann is most well known for introducing a noir sensibility to the Western, of bringing the conflicted and ambiguous psyche of the postwar urban milieu into the open spaces of the West. However, what is interesting about Winchester ’73 is the way in which this interior space, Stewart’s drive for vengeance, a drive that borders on the obsessive, is displaced by the pure exteriority of history. History in this case is indicated by the gun itself: it is an object that is always out of place, despite being named and dated. There is nothing to keep this gun from falling into the wrong hands: materiality is defined as that which simultaneously enables and thwarts the intentions of individuals. The gun might have a rightful owner, and there might be a rightful order of justice, but a faster gun and the luck of finding it can set everything off kilter. In the end the only way to correct this, to right things, is to toss a few pebbles into the air. Slight differences of speed and timing ultimately matter more than official differences of law and order.

Perhaps when Althusser invoked the figure of the cowboy to sketch his portrait of a materialist philosopher, the philosopher of aleatory materialism who catches a moving train, he was thinking of Anthony Mann.

Everyone is Kettled: Lordon on Marx and Spinoza (with some reflections on the current conjuncture)

2010-12-04T18:06:00.005-05:00

Frédéric Lordon’s Capitalisme, désir et servitude: Marx et Spinoza is not so much a book on Marx and Spinoza, on the influences and affiliations that would connect them, but a book that immediately puts Spinoza’s philosophy to work within Marx’s problematics. It is similar in this respect to Franck Fischbach’s La Production de hommes: Marx avec Spinoza. The major difference being that the while latter book is primarily concerned with ontology, with production, nature, and the subject, Lordon’s book is primarily concerned with politics and the current conjuncture.

Lordon could be understood as connecting the lines between Spinoza’s often cited question, “why do men fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?” and the general problematic of subjection in Marx. Which is to say that Lordon is interested in how it is that people not only tolerate exploitation, continuing to reproduce the system, but actively desire it. Lordon is interested in precisely the way that contemporary capitalism, or neoliberalism, has moved beyond Marx’s concepts of exploitation and alienation to involve an active participation in one’s subjection, exactly what Spinoza question, and his examination of the affects, would seem to analyze.

The general problem of society, any society, is the articulation of its particular conatus, its particular striving, or functioning, with that of the individuals and collectives that constitute it. For society to function we must desire to do so, and we do this because we must believe that it is the necessary condition of our desires. Lordon dubs this problem, or its solution, colinearization. One of the most important factors of colinearization in capitalism is money itself. For Spinoza anything that is believed to be the cause of joy, of the increase of one’s power, is an object of love. Thus, it is possible to consider money as the “universal equivalent of desire,” as the object which is seen as the cause of any possible joy, any possible desire. Money captures desire and imagination.

Perhaps one of the most interesting remarks that Lordon makes has to do with precisely how he understands the politics of the imagination. Lordon cites the passage from Spinoza in which he argues that there is no opposite of excessive self-esteem. It is possible to overestimate oneself, and to some extent this overestimation, mankind as "kingdom within a kingdom" is the human condition. As Spinoza writes,

“For no one, out of hate, thinks less highly of himself than is just. Indeed, no one thinks less highly of himself than is just, insofar as he imagines that he cannot do this or that. For whatever man imagines he cannot do, he necessarily images; and he is so disposed by this imagination that he really cannot do what he imagines he cannot do this or that, he is not determined to do it, and consequently it is impossible for him to do it.”

Thus, to use the language of pop psychology, there is thus no such thing as “low self-esteem.” If one thinks that one cannot do something, then one effectively cannot do it. The imagination is a material force that determines one’s conduct.

There are thus two strategies for colinearization, for making the desire of individuals conform to society. The first is a kind of imaginary fullness, as in the case of money as the object of desire. It is full because through it the given social order represents itself as the possible realization of every desire. The second draws the limits of what is possible, curtailing modes of thinking and living. These limitations, the poverty of the imagination, has real material effects,.The central message of any social order, reflected in its practices, ideologies, and actions is “everything is here, nothing else is possible.” Society, or should we say capital, is the kettling of the imagination.

The determining and delimiting of the imagination is not alienation. It is one of the merits of Lordon’s book that he is so attentive to Spinoza’s position with respect to the bourgeois homilies of self, interiority and freedom. He argues that Spinoza’s capacity to “affect and be affected” is always realized, always actualized. There is no reserve in Spinoza’s ontology. Lordon follows Pascal Sévérac in arguing that Spinoza’s merit is in abandoning all themes of alienation or separation, themes that still show up in Deleuze (not to mention Fischbach), in favor of fixation. No one is every really separated from the powers, from their capacities; these capacities are just fixated into particular objects and goals, objects which are defined by the poverty of the social imagination.

The outside of fixation, of a limited and curtailed imagination, cannot come from a reservoir of freedom, from a subject outside of history. It must come from within the order itself. Lordon’s answer to this is Spinoza’s concept of indignation, “the hate towards someone who has done evil toward another.” Indignation, expanded to encompass the affective hatred for the existing order, is something precarious, produced by a series of encounters and frustrations, extending throughout the social body through a series of encounters. Indignation does not come from the outside, from outside of the social order, but is produced internally, by any orders limited conception of desire. As such it is not some return to an originary freedom, but only a “détournent du détourement,” a deviation of the already established goals of society to something other.

That is precisely the question: what is this something else? Or, more importantly, how can it be produced? Spinoza’s immanence reminds us that our minds our limited by our imagination, which are in turn limited by our bodies, which are in turn limited by our minds, and so on. The intersection of all of these determinations is also the intersection of different sites for transformation. We imagine that nothing is possible, that nothing can be done, but only up to the point that someone actually does something. Once that happens, once there is an opposition to an existing order, a Paris Commune, a May '68, etc., In such moments the very limits of the world, of what is possible, are redrawn. However, these fleeting moments of possibility, the indignation of the moment, need new thoughts new bodies to sustain them. According to Lordon, the transformation of bodies by the imagination and the extension of indignation into organization is the work of politics.

David Graeber's remarks on politics, the cuts to the university, and the imagination inspired much of this, and are well worth listening to.

The True Meaning of Thanksgiving

2010-11-26T20:43:00.011-05:00

Every year, at least since sometime in the middle of the last century, the President of the United States pardons a turkey. The ceremony, which could be described as a kind of sovereignty kitsch, is covered by the media become part of the general holiday pablum along with the stories of the new floats at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and "what to do with holiday leftovers."

There is something so obviously absurd about this ritual that it is almost pointless to point it out. There is of course the question of guilt, of what crime the turkeys are being pardoned for, other than their rather unfortunate luck of coming into this world as a domesticated turkey. There is however, a symmetry between the pardon of the turkey and the holiday in general. The turkey is spared just before millions are cooked in a massive consumption of a single species: it is an idyllic symbol of peace between man and beast just before the true slaughter. Thanksgiving is supposedly the celebration of a peaceful cooperation between colonists and Native Americans: as we all know, this peaceful celebration came before genocide. Each ritual is a staging of a just world that we know to be a lie.

One question remained, however, what happens to these turkeys after they are spared. I found the following statement in The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, The Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánomo by Magnus Fiskejö:

"The birds are then, in proverbial fashion, said to live happily ever after. In reality, however, they are usually killed within a year and stand-in turkeys are supplied. This goes on year after year. The chosen birds are killed because they have been engineered and packed with hormones to the point that they are unfit for any other purpose than their own slaughter and consumption. They are fast-forward turkeys. Presidential turkey caretakers have explained that most succumb rather quickly to joint disease—their frail joints simply cannot bear the weight of their artificially enhanced bodies. The sturdiest survivors may live a little more than a year. But the birds are always finally put out of their growing misery. Then they are buried nearby in a presidential turkey cemetery—the ritualistic significance of which remains to be explored. (May the archaeologists of the future excavate it!)"

The reason that these turkeys are so ill suited for their lives of freedom is that they are supplied by the National Turkey Federation. They are products of industrial farms, bred to grow fat quick rather than live long. Much could be said about the fact that corporate lobby's interests trumps even the symbolism of the ceremony, making even the pardon itself a lie within a lie. The whole thing is so overdetermined, a "turducken" of empty symbolism, sovereign authority, and corporate power. However, my mind remains fixated on that cemetery of (what I imagine to be) unmarked graves where the birds go, unable to bear the weight of their supposed freedoms. They are creatures designed for the cage, and no decree can change that. Yep, the holiday really symbolizes the nation.