Two Thesis on the Limits of Philosophy: Marx and Spinoza

 

I once contemplated getting my favorite Spinoza proposition 

as a Vanity Plate 

In the past few months, longer even, but before the recent wave of student occupations (more on that later), I have found myself in the grips of a kind of depression that stems in part from what can only be described as a gap between theory and practice. How this works is like this, all day, or at least part of it, I read books, and get into discussions understanding how the world works, and what could be done to change it and yet the world goes on unchanged, or, more to the point, it just seems to get worse and worse. (I will let the reader fill this in with whatever ecological, political, or economic calamity that comes to mind) The disconnect between the classroom and the world creates not just division but despair.

Go Figure: On Lordon's Figures du Communisme

 

Frédéric Lordon has published four books since Capitalisme, désire, et Servitude in 2010, not counting collections of essays, edited volumes and even a play. I have reviewed them all here, and continued to use Lordon's writing in my research on the intersection of affect, imagination, and work in capitalism. I remain profoundly influenced by his interventions. However, I will be honest, prolific authors make me skeptical, even nervous. Sometimes publishing overtakes thinking and one ends up with a kind of diminishing returns as later books only put finishing touches on earlier innovations. 

Ghosting: The Long Life of Red Scares

 

from facebook

This post could be considered a follow up to my previous post on The Communist Manifesto.  In each case it is a matter of what could be considered an error of the Manifesto. I know that it seems wrong to pick on the Manifesto a text which is less an attempt to state everything than an intervention in a specific theoretical and political conjunction--a stunning one. My one real criticism of the Manifesto is that its length has led to be being seen as THE summation of Marx's position so that even Jordan Peterson can read it before debating Zizek. However, it is a useful text to confront some of the limitations of Marxist thought. As I argued in the previous post, the assertion of the ruthlessly modernizing of the bourgeois mode of production makes it difficult to grasp the way in which not all that is solid melts into air, some of keeps coming back. 

The World as Affect and Institution: On Lordon's Vivre Sans?

Frédéric Lordon's latest book, Vivre Sans? Institutions, Police, Travail, Argent... is a conversation with Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée (who among other things runs the great review Période), although one in which Lordon's responses to Éwanjé-Épée's questions. Lordon uses the reflection to situate his particular Spinozist/Marxism (perhaps more adequately grasped as a kind of left Spinozism) with respect to both traditions of radical thought, Badiou, Deleuze, Agamben, and Rancière, and the current radical movements, Gilet Jaunes, ZAD, and the invisible committee. In doing so Lordon  not only begins to clarify his own conception of a politics of  affects and institutions, but also continues to develop a Spinozist (rather than a Marxist-Spinozist) concept of politics.

Losing Strategies: Negative Solidarity as Practice

Once in class a student said, "Bernie Sanders wants to give free tuition to everyone: I can't pay for everyone else's tuition I am having a hard enough time just paying for my own." My interest in this statement has less to do with the merits of Bernie Sanders campaign, or such promises, than its strange logic. I admit that I almost had a stifle a laugh when this was uttered in class. I wasn't trying to be mean, but I thought that the student must be joking. When I saw that he wasn't, that he did not grasp the contradiction at the heart of what he was saying, it struck me as a stunning example of negative solidarity. 

Pop Nazi: History and Repetition

In The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates writes the following about HBO's plans to create a show called Confederate about an alternate reality in which the south won the civil war,

Knowing this, we do not have to wait to point out that comparisons between Confederate and The Man in the High Castle are fatuous. Nazi Germany was also defeated. But while its surviving leadership was put on trial before the world, not one author of the Confederacy was convicted of treason. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Confederate General John B. Gordon became a senator. Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.

Triptych of a Tree: Memoirs of a Film Goer

That Hitchcock's Vertigo  has been imitated multiple times is not surprising, but it is slightly curious that the same tree appears in two other films. The original scene takes place as Scottie Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) takes Madeline (Kim Novak) to the redwoods. It is a fiction within a fiction, we later learn that it is actually Judy imitating Madeleine who, at the moment, is channeling Carlotta Valdez a woman who lived decades prior. The lines on the tree make it possible for Madeleine to present a life that began before her life. The lines in its bark is a memory before memory. The tree stands as a mute witness to a life that has passed before. It is a living fossil of a life not lived. 

The Industrialization of Nostalgia

“Capitalism is only a repetition” –Alain Badiou



In recent years the remake, or reboot, has ceased to be one sort of film that Hollywood produces to become its dominant form, at least when it comes to summer movies. The dominant films this summer, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek, Terminator: Salvation, Taking of Pelham 123, Land of the Lost, G.I. Joe, and so on are all remakes of something that existed in some form or another, comic book, television series, movie or cartoon. Of course much can be made of this transformation of contemporary film, and I am sure that more qualified folks than I will weigh in on the issue. However, I thought that I would jot down the following thoughts.

“Let’s get an old movie, like something from the eighties.”—Overheard at a videostore

As the quote from Badiou makes clear, capitalism can be defined as the absence of history. It is what Jameson refers to as the eternal present. This criticism of capitalisms lack of historical consciousness is as old as Marx himself, and it takes on myriad forms. What specifically does it mean with respect to the Hollywood remake. It seems to me, and this perhaps the wrong way of looking at it, is that the assumption underlying the remake is that people, at least the dominant movie going audience, does not want to watch a film that is twenty or even ten years old. Special effects have changed making the once awe-inspiring now laughable crude, and this might explain the need to constantly update films as a purely technical matter--like new phones or faster computers. The remakes is not entirely a technical matter and many films that used minimal special effects are remade. When one watches a film from even a few years ago one needs to possess a bare minimum of historical consciousness to orient oneself in terms of the technological, social, and cultural points of reference. You have to know when it is reasonable to expect someone in a film to use a cellphone, or a computer, both of which have become ubiquitous in contemporary films. Or, for that matter, what counts as the expected fashions of a period versus a personal affectation. This is only history at its most micro and quotidian level, there are also the historical events that structure the narratives of films. A remake removes the need for this minimal displacement: one no longer has to transport oneself to the cultural, technological, and social milieu of another period. One no longer has to transport oneself to the world of nineteen seventies in order to understand the Taking of Pelham 123; one no longer has to wonder why someone on the train does not just use a cellphone. The world is remade in the form of the present. “Look they are using an iphone.” Moreover, the stars, music, and clothing are all completely recognizable. Everything is ripped from the headlines of the latest celebrity rag. It is not accident that the films, once made and released on DVD, will end up on the adjecant rack at the supermarket checkout. Films have become much more disposable as the time between original and remake shrinks.

This idea of the remake as effacing history can only, at best, account for half the picture. Why not just make new films, with current actors, under contemporary conditions? Why tarry with the past at all? Of course the standard explanation to this is that Hollywood has run out of ideas? But there must be more than this cliché, especially since the originals are not ideas, in any strict sense of the term. G.I. Joe and Transformers were basically half-hour long toy commercials, and has anyone seen the original Land of the Lost? There is nothing in the original that merits repeating. The remake does not use the original, which in some sense is its raw material, for its ideas, for some script or narrative. The remake utilizes the original, the TV show or comic book, at the level of memory. 

Contemporary philosophers such as Maurizzio Lazzarato and Bernard Stiegler have focused on the relationship between contemporary capitalism and memory, the latter even coining the phrase “the industrialization of memory” to describe the way in contemporary cultural commodities such as films or programs structure their own sense of temporality. I think that the modern remake is more of an industrialization of nostalgia, or, more to the point a primitive accumulation of nostalgia, an enclosure of hazy, happy memories that is being strip mined for the last bits of entertainment. The studio is not so much remaking the original film, but utilizing the name and associations to drum up nostalgia. There is a phrase that has become popular in various websites where people discuss film, a phrase that people use to condemn the various remakes and reboots, that phrase is “raping my childhood.” Now the trivialization of rape implied in the phrase is no doubt offensive, but it does get at something essential. Remakes are aimed at the childhood memories of a generation, They address us not as adults, but as children. As Adorno wrote, "It is no coincidence that cynical American film producers are heard to say that their pictures must take into consideration the level of eleven-year-olds. In doing so they would very much like to make adults into eleven-year-olds.” Contemporary fan culture bears witness to this in that it often insists that the rights of the eleven year old's memory takes precedence over everything else. 


Nostalgia against history: there is no need to go outside oneself, to imagine other conditions, not when every film becomes one’s own private screening room.

What Interests Me

I have been following the news of the economic collapse and the stimulus bill with some interest. Although I have to admit that I am of two minds on the issue. As a tenure track (but not yet tenured) philosophy professor at a state university I am keenly aware of my precarious job position. I am also concerned for the well being of my friends and family, many of whom work in non-profits, education, and social services, in other words all of whom are expendable. Because of this, part of me would to see this bill succeed, to see the economy restored, or at least brought out of this downward spiral. At the same time, however, I do not want to say that I would like to see it fail, but at the very least I would like to see something other than a restoration of business as usual. I would like to see this conjuncture extended into real critical reflection about the fundamentals of our economy: of what counts as wealth and how it is distributed. I am not hoping for a revolution (at least yet) just a transformation, and it seems like it has to get much worse for that to happen.

One could label the first thought, that of hope for success of the economic stimulus package, interest, since it bears directly on my economic wellbeing. In doing so it brings to mind the critical ways in which interest has been discussed by Badiou, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. (Admittedly this is a somewhat odd constellation since it encompasses texts written over the last thirty-five years). In Badiou’s little text on Ethics, he argues that “interest” is fundamentally conservative, even nihilistic, because it can recognize no event other than harm, than the eventual death of the human animal. “The ordinary behavior of the human animal is a matter of what Spinoza calls perseverance in being, which is nothing other than the pursuit of interest, or the conservation of self.” In Metapolitics Badiou goes on to argue that “interest” is at the heart of every “Thermidor” of every attempt to deny the truth of a revolutionary event. The revolution comes to an end when it is declared that “interest lies at the heart of every subjective demand.” Politics is reduced to the conflict of interests—truth, equality, and universality collapse in the face of competing interest groups. I find Badiou’s scattered remarks of interest to be well interesting, they capture something that is essential to both neoliberalism and interest group politics. However, they are not presented as such, as diagnoses of the present. For Badiou there is a fundamental split in humanity: on the one side there is interest, a struggle for survival shared with all living things, on the other there is the capacity to be immortal, to maintain fidelity to the truth of equality and justice.

In a different way Deleuze and Guattari argue for a division, not between interest and truth, but between interest and desire. However, for Deleuze and Guattari, interest is not the residue of a purely animalistic existence, rather it is the product of a particular social formation. As Deleuze writes in Desert Islands, “Once interests have been defined within the confines of a society, the rational is the way in which people pursue those interests and attempt to realize them. But underneath that, you find desires, investments of desire that are not to be confused with investments of interests, and on which interests depend for their determination and very distribution: an enormous flow, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that constitute the delirium of this society.” The distinction between interest and desire relates to a short period in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, roughly the years around Anti-Oedipus, and it seems to be part of the incomplete project of that early work: the project of schizoanalysis as an analysis of the political unconscious. Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the distinction between desire and interest is an attempt to overcome two dualisms: one between base and superstructure, desire is part of the infrastructure, and one between rational interest and irrational false interest. Thus sometimes it is desire that is completely subjugated to the system, caught in the flows of money that make it appear as if we all participate in the massive flows of wealth. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “Desire of the most disadvantaged creature will invest with all its strength, irrespective of any economic understanding or lack of it, the capitalist social field as a whole.” At other times, interest is entirely subordinate to the social aggregates, to the socius, and it is desire that is revolutionary. It is possible to be radical at the level of desire, breaking the chains of society, and reactionary at the level of interest, or, and this is more Deleuze and Guattari’s concern, vice versa, to have an interest in changing society but fascist desires. What is essential, at least as far as differentiating Deleuze and Guattari from Badiou, is that neither interest nor desire are natural; they are not anthropological constants, but thoroughly historical and social, even at the point where they break with society.

Michel Foucault continues this discontinuous line of considering the historicity of subjects of interest in his lectures on neoliberalism (The Birth of Biopolitics). According to Foucault neoliberalism can best be understood as a form (or would that be mode?) of governmentality that acts on interests rather than on rights. Rights by definition are exchangeable; in fact one could argue that, at least in classical social contract theory, rights come into existence through the exchange of certain “natural rights” for the right of security, safety, and property. Thus rights are oddly social even in their separation. Interests are irreducible, they cannot be exchanged or alienated. To be governed by interests is to take this irreducible asocial aspect as foundational: one channels interest by making certain activities cheap and others costly.

I am not sure what this quick survey of interest has to do with the dilemma above, except to pose the following question: what if we assume that we are governed by interest? Which is to say that we are not so much controlled by ideology, by arguments and ideals about how we should live, but by our simple desire to live. Our interest causes us to be invested in things that we might otherwise oppose, like huge bailouts to banks, because we need them to simply survive. Interest ties us to society as it exists. It seems to me that we can then follow Badiou and Deleuze’s route, and try to find that which radically breaks with interest: truth or desire. We could try to recognize in interest the seeds of our subjection and try to think about how we could constitute ourselves otherwise.

Finance and the Production of Subjectivity

Christian Marazzi’s Capital and Language was written well before the current crisis, but that does not mean that it does not offer some terms with which to understand the current crisis. Most importantly it offers a context for understanding what he calls “financialization.” Financialization marks a fundamental change in accumulation, shifting money from household savings and union run pension funds to the stock market. This of course “liberates” a great deal of money, freeing up flows for profits. More importantly, at least in my view, is that it transforms the terms of antagonism. The opposition between work and capital, between wages and profits, is transformed when workers look to the stock market for their future. This in some sense divides the worker faced with downsizing, an act that will cut off wages but increase stock value. As Marazzi succinctly puts it, “In the name of his interests as a shareholder the salaried employee (in the public or private sector) is prepared to fire himself if Wall Street should demand it.” This is not just an isolated phenomena, as Marazzi argues financialization generates profits by destroying salaries and stable employment through mergers and acquisitions.

It is the subjective dimension of this that interests me, the way that financialization can be understood as a production of subjectivity. Maurizio Lazzarato underscores the subjective dimension in Les Révolutions du Capitalisme. As Lazzarato writes, “The workers are caught in a relation of exploitation when they sell their labor power [force de travail] to an entrepreneur, but they are implicated within a majortarian dynamic [dynamique majoritaire], when, for example their revenues are invested in pension funds.” Lazzarato’s use of Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction of major and minor is crucial, as it stresses that the worker as a minor position is destroyed by investment. As Deleuze and Guattari write elsewhere, in capitalism the most disadvantaged creature invests in the economy. Of course apologists for capital would argue that the extension of stock options to workers represents a massive democratization of wealth. However, I would argue that it is a less a matter of redistributing wealth than a transformation of the appearance of the economy. As Alain Badiou writes: “what is counted is the level of the stock market, the Euro, financial investment, competition, and so on: the figure of the worker, on the other hand, counts for nothing.” The economy is counted in terms of the market, wages count for nothing. This transformation of the account of the economy is also a transformation of subjectivity, we see ourselves as investors or potential investors.

If the current crisis is going to mean anything politically it must become a crisis of how capital is counted, and how we see ourselves as subjects of capital.

Diminishing Returns

Two of my favorite blogs (The Pinocchio Theory and What in the Hell…) have written about Negri’s recent books, namely The Porcelain Factory and Good-Bye Mr. Socialism, expressing disappointment. I have to admit that I share this disappointment. I am not going to address the specific texts in question, I read the former over a year ago when it appeared in French and am only halfway through the latter, but I agree with the fundamental point that with the exception of Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo Negri’s recent work does not touch the sheer greatness of The Savage Anomaly, Marx Beyond Marx, or Insurgencies (Constituent Power).

The criticism of these recent works (in these blogs and elsewhere) basically follows two fundamental points: First, the excessive confidence in the fundamentally creative and subversive nature of the existing labor practices and social relations, the multitude as a latent reservoir of revolution and, second, the misplaced emphasis on the present as a radical break with the past, immaterial labor as something fundamentally unseen. I do not want to address these criticisms here, rather I would like to focus on another problem, one that has to do with the provocations of Negri’s early works.

In The Politics of Subversion Negri makes a point which I have taken to be fundamental regarding his understanding of the production of subjectivity, in that book he writes: “The ontological aspects of subjectivity are produced in different (or rather, antagonistic) ways.” As Negri elaborates, there is a proletarian production of subjectivity, passing through the wage, through the social relations of cooperation, and into insurrection. Against this there is leveled a capitalist production of subjectivity that breaks down this collective subjectivity through competition and the market. In these passages Negri maintains in productive tension between what could be broadly described as post-structuralism, (namely, Foucault) in which subjectivity is effectively produced by discourses and relations of power, and Marxism, insisting on a duality of struggle, even if it is produced rather than given. This assertion in an early work is to some extent vexed by the problem of lapsing back into a dialectic, or what Negri refers to as an “antagonistic Manicheism”; that is to say it is a matter of maintaining antagonism without lapsing into the symmetry of opposites or the inevitable conflict of pregiven social substances.

It is this sense of the antagonistic constitution of subjectivity that is largely absent from Negri’s later works. In later works the networks and social relations of immaterial labor produced a subject that is wholly opposed to capital, untouched by the market, by neoliberal strategies. This is largely the case, but not entirely. In Empire Hardt and Negri cite Debord’s theory of the spectacle as a fundamental dimension of the antagnostic constitution of subjectivity, and not a misrepresentation of a given reality. As Hardt and Negri write: “The spectacle destroys any collective form of sociality—individualizing social actors in their separate automobiles and in front of separate video screens—and at the same time imposes a new mass sociality, a new uniformity of action and thought.” This idea of a production of subjectivity that passes through the media, through the “immaterial” technologies of television and the internet, and does not produce a multitude but something else also appears, albeit briefly, in Negri’s latest works. As Negri states in Goodbye, Mr. Socialism the public functions as a kind of capitalist production of subjectivity.“The public is a medium between people, class, and individuality: the people were formed by the State the class by the party, while the public is constructed from a mixture of the media, television, newspaper, and by small editorial production of the worst type…This public isn’t multitude at all.”

This discussion of the antagonistic production of subjectivity is not only more interesting than the endless repetition of the power of the multitude versus the empty shell of capital it is more useful as well. What we need are the tools for the analysis of the production of subjectivity. We need to understand the way in which the existing power structure, Empire, for lack of a better word, is produced and reproduced by the existing machines of consumption and production. To paraphrase Alain Badiou, who in turn was paraphrasing Hegel, “We must think Empire not just as substance but as subject.” Less cryptically we need to understand how Empire is not something out there, but in us, part of our subjectivity. Second, we need to understand the tools and techniques that make possible a counter production of subjectivity. Negri’s provocative statements regarding the changing status of labor, the emerging affective and intellectual dimensions, are an important part of this, but they are not the whole picture.

Marxism in Reverse

The idea that neoliberalism is a kind of Marxism in reverse has taken on a great deal of currency in academic, popular, and activist circles. In Chroniques de temps consuels, Jacques Rancière goes so far as to say that Marxism has in some sense become the official ideology of liberal societies. (Similar remarks can be found in Disagreement).The grounds for this idea of Marxism displaced or reversed are basic. In each case it is the matter of the economy determining the political. What has been reversed is only the value attached to this determination; free markets and private property and not the free association of producers is now the basis for freedom.

Alain Badiou has pushed this argument further, stating that is not simply economic determinism that unifies Marxism and neoliberalism but a shared anthropology that unifies all economic discourse. It is an anthropology of interest, in which the human animal is defined by its desire for the conservation of self. It is hardly an anthropology at all, since it does not so much define the human as reduce humans to the animalistic basis of existence. It is against this that Badiou juxtaposes the human capacity for fidelity to truth.

In identifying Marxism with neoliberalism, Rancière and Badiou repeat some of the old polemics and arguments against Marxism from the past decades. The accusation of economism, of an anthropology which identified humanity with basic needs, can be found in critics such as Arendt, Baudrillard, Gorz, Habermas, and Foucault, to name a few. Thus it would be more accurate to say that neoliberalism is vulgar Marxism in reverse.

These same positions, economism, anthropology of labor, etc., are what Marxism (what has sometimes been called Western Marxism) has been trying to philosophically distance itself in past decades. So, rather than say that neoliberalism is Marxism in reverse, it is possible to say that Marxism confronts its own limitations in an inverted form. This opens up an interesting critical predicament. At the same time that Marxism has been expanding its critical tools, developing materialist understandings of ideology, non-reductive accounts of the economy, and a nuanced social ontology, capitalist ideology has been simplifying itself, to the point where it no longer conceals its economic basis. Can neoliberalism even be called ideology?

Body Politic

In many ways this post is a follow up to “No Admittance Except on Business,” in that it deals with relation, or non-relation, between production and representation. This time the point of entry is that of the body politic. Of course the idea of a body politic has a long history from Menenius Agrippa through Chrstian Pizan and so on, but I am interested in a more contemporary and critical use. First, in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, where they write the following:

…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. (pg. 10)

Deleuze and Guattari are drawing from Marx’s notebooks on “Precapitalist Economic Formations.” These notebooks are the conceptual underpinning of much of Anti-Oedipus. The focus of their particular borrowing seems to set up a relation between production and what appears to be the presupposition of production, a relation that in many ways an opposition between production and appearance, production and representation. The despot, which is produced by the institutions and structures of precapitalist society appears to produce those same structures. As Spinoza would perhaps say: the effect is taken as a cause. This lineage descends down to capital itself, which appears as wealth generating wealth without the need of labor. The full body is always an appropriation and a misrepresentation of the productive relations of society.

In the opening pages of Alain Badiou’s Logique du Mondes, there is an articulation of the three forms of subjectivity: the revolutionary subject (or subject defined by fidelity to truth), reactive subject (defined by a denial of the truth) and an obscure subject. The first two are symmetrical, structured by the same event. The reaction is defined by the revolution it denies. Badiou’s example here is Francis Furet or the “new philosophers” whose thought is defined by the very event that they deny, declaring the French Revolution or May’68 to be a non-event. (As I have written earlier, this is Badiou’s “autonomist hypothesis” all counter-revolutions must be traced back to the revolution they deny). The obscure subject has a different trajectory. It is based not a pure and simple conservation, a retention of the past, but on an invention. It produces something, but its production is not related to an event, to a rupture of the existing order. It is an invention that is oriented in terms of a transcendental body. “The obscure subject articulates in a decisive way a timeless fetish, an incorruptible and indivisible body. Nation, God, or race”(pg. 69). The obscure subject does not address the revolution, even to deny it, but severs any connection to it through a fetish, a full body, which is produced as transcendent.

This overlap is admittedly superficial, much of it hinges on the use of the term full body [corps plein], and some vague suggestion of similar problems through the idea of the fetish. However, this superficial point of intersection, makes it possible to bring together two different critical approaches on the “production of subjectivity.” The first, in Deleuze and Guattari, is historico-structural in that the subject is related to different modes of production, different regimes of desiring production, savage, barbaric, and capitalist. In this way Deleuze and Guattari’s work intersects with Foucault, who in his own way provided for a genealogy of the oedipalized subject of desire, as well as that of Negri and others, who have theorized the new subject produced by the desiring machines of the real subsumption of capital. The second, in Badiou, is formal-structural, in that subjectivity is not related to specific social transformations, but the general, or generic, coordinates of a truth, whether this truth is actively produced, denied, or simply obscured. These strike me as two different ways of discussing the subject, each with their strength and weaknesses. The first offers an important materialist perspective, situating subjectivity as part of the larger social force (desire is part of the infrastructure), but in relating subjectivity to social forces in general it overlooks some of the transformative effects of subjectivity. While the second offers an interesting ethics of revolt, that is totally disconnected from an understanding of social forces.

Here these two understandings of subjectivity are related, however, through a problem that is important in its own regard: that of the (re)presentation of sociality itself. It seems that we cannot avoid some presentation of the social totality, and of our relation to it, what Althusser called “the society effect.” However, we could see our actions as effects of the large molar structures, capital, the state, etc. or see these structures as apparatuses of capture that obscure their conditions.

Last Communist Standing 3-D: The Commons

If you have the glasses I believe this picture will be in 3-D. I would have made the entire post in 3D, but who really wants a buch of words jumping out at them?

As I stated in a previous post, I consider Badiou and Rancière’s work on "the axiom of equality" as well as Negri and Virno’s work on “the commons” to be important aspects for a renewal of communist thought. (I could also say the same for Balibar’s work on equaliberty.) Communist, and not Marxist, first, because as it has been documented Marx had little to say about communism, and second, because it is less a matter of citation of textual authority than drawing out the logics of political practice. Finally, such works deal with the axiom or the ideal that one struggles for, rather than what one struggles against: elaborating a theory of communism rather than furthering the critique of capital.

So, how to define the commons? In one of Negri’s latest books, published in French as Fabrique de porcelaine: pour une nouvelle grammaire du politique, the common is defined through the old problem of the relation between public and private. As Negri states, following arguments that are as old as Marx’s writing, capitalist appropriation is always private while its form, that of contractual law, is public, defined by the state. Capital is thus neither public nor private, it is what Marx refers to as a “social power.” The liminal position of capital only increases as it appropriates not only the physical aspects of labor but language, science, and social knowledge, what Marx calls he “general intellect.” The common must thus be thought as the inverse of capital, occupying the same liminal space. It is neither public nor private, collective nor individual, but the ground through which such distinctions are made.

Three things make this argument interesting. One, as it takes as its starting point the contradictions within capital itself. This is a departure from some of Negri’s definitions of the common, which are often excessively celebratory. Secondly, in that Negri writes of the emergence of the common from the transformation of capital, it stresses the fact that Negri’s understanding of the common has little to do with a nostalgia for “the commons” for pre-capitalist relations of shared use. Capital is criticized from the future it makes possible not the past that it destroys. Finally, it draws out one of the strengths of the concept of the common and that is ambiguous or liminal nature. This comes out must strongly in the work of Paolo Virno, for whom the common (or the multitude, a term which is thoroughly intertwined with the meaning of the former), is situated at a point of indistinction between collective and individual; public and private; work and action (to use Arendt’s categories).

This last point is perhaps the most important, the common is not the collective, nor is it any term, such as society that could be understood to stand above or beyond the individual. The idea of the common is inseparable from rethinking these oppositions from the perspective of “the production of subjectivity.” As Negri and Hardt write in Multitude “Subjectivity, in other words, is produced through cooperation and communication and, in turn, this produced subjectivity itself produces new forms of cooperation and communication, which in turn produce new subjectivity, and so forth.” The concept of the common is inseparable from a new thought of subjectivity one that moves beyond the opposition of individual and collective. The very things that individuate us, a manner of thinking, speaking, inhabiting the world, are drawn from the common, and the common does not exist outside these acts of individuation. The common produces subjectivity and subjectivity produces the common. To quote Negri once again, “It follows that subjectivity is not something interior placed before an ‘exterior’ that we define as language; on the contrary, like language it is another mode of common being and nothing more.”

To return to the theme of this series of posts, the communism of Badiou and Negri, this insistence on the intersection of the common and the production of subjectivity is based on very different grounds than the former’s axioms of equality. In Badiou’s case (as well as that of Rancière) it is a matter of communism based on the axiom, or invariant of equality. Equality is an axiom, and a prescription, a here and now insistence, indexed only to the generic equality of thought. While in Negri’s thought (and in post-operaismo) it is a matter of a communism of the common, a communism of the production of the common, in which capital’s subsumption of the capacitites for language, knowledge, and desires, produces a common ensemble of capacities, the conditions for not only he creation of wealth, but also the transformation of society.

There are very different philosophical anthropologies underlying these two concepts. In the first it is the matter of isolating a generic invariant, thought or speech as that which precedes and exceeds the hierarchies and classifications of any social order. While in the second, it is a matter of locating the historical nexus of productive capacities that defines the common. The risk of the first approach, the axiom of equality, is that it overlooks the actual divisions and mutations of thought and speech that are produced through historical structures. While the latter carries with it all of the baggage of any historicism; just look at all of problems and debates surrounding the attempt to identify the present through the concepts of “immaterial labor” and “real subsumption.” The strength of both these perspectives, and the debate that opens up between them, is that they foreground the idea of a different account of the social order and the human subject, against the consensus that locates a self interested individual at the basis of all of history, and any social order.

Last Communist Standing II: This Time it’s Personal

This is something of a follow up to my earlier post on Badiou and Negri. This is not actually more personal, I just think that the second in an any series needs to have as its tag line either “This time it’s personal” or “The War.” The third in any series then should be in 3-D (a la “Jaws” and “Friday the Thirteenth”). The fourth is then set in space, and the fifth can then only take place in “Da Hood.” There is a science to sequels, just look at the Leprechaun films.

Anyway, what I really wanted to do was to add the following to the Badiou and Negri comparison. With respect to a renewal of communist thought, the writing of Negri and Badiou could be seen to represent two major trends: in the first case a communism based on the axiom of equality and, in the second case, a communism based on a reconsideration of the common.

The first is, in a general sense, a perspective shared by Badiou, Ranciere, and Sylvan Lazarus. Defining characteristic that could be said to unite all of these thinkers is that in each case equality is an axiom, a presupposition for politics, and not something to be realized. To state that equality is an axiom for politics is to remove politics from the idea of a program or a plan, since equality means that there is always the possibility of a political event. Rancière goes the furthest is maintaining the anarchic dimension of the axiom of equality. As Rancière writes in Disagreement:

“Politics only occurs when these mechanisms are stopped in their tracks by the effect of a presupposition that is totally foreign to them yet without which none of them could ultimately function: the presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone, or the paradoxical effectiveness of the sheer contingency of any order.”

Equality means that any order, any hierarchy, is ultimately illegitimate. Especially since, as Rancière points out, any hierarchical order makes the point of explaining itself to those who are inferior, simultaneously acknowledging and denying their equality in understanding. While equality has a disruptive effect on any attempt to ground politics, there is still the question of its ground. What justifies such an axiom? This might be the wrong question, and it is quite possible that it bears the ideological weight of the times that asserts the equality is nonexistent (after all nature is filled with hierarchies) and thus impossible. (Badiou’s The Century has some interesting remarks mapping the ideological vicissitudes of the last century according to shifting emphasis given to one or the other of the terms in the formula “liberty, equality, and fraternity.”) However, I still think that it is an important question to ask, if only because the answers get to some interesting points of distinction.

In the case of Rancière the answer would seem to speech, the equal capacity for speech. This in some sense shows the influence of Aristotle on Rancière. In many ways Rancière could be understood as working through the connection that Arisotle initially asserted between mankind as a speaking animal and a political animal. However, Rancière argues that far from being an anthropological constant speech is in some sense “always already” political. As Rancière argues “This is because the possession of language is not a physical capacity. It is a symbolic division, that is a symbolic determination of the relation between the order of speech and that of bodies…” Thus, speech refers back to the distribution of the sensible. Despite this move, it does seem to me that speech or rather language, the language through which political orders are articulated and contested, remains something of a ground, or a basis, of this axiom of equality.

In many respects Badiou seems less cautious with respect to the anthropological ground of this axiom. For Badiou it is not speech which provides the basis for equality, but thought, or as Lazarus writes, “man thinks.’ Equality is not a political goal to be realized, but a fundamental axiom, a starting point for politics based on the universal human capacity for thought. For Badiou there is an anthropological division at the heart of mankind, between thought, the human capacity to maintain itself in fidelity to truth, and interest, the preservation of self that mankind shares with all animals. Behind every “Thermidor,” every attempt to put an end to the political process, every reaction which occludes the event, “there is the idea that an interest lies at the heart of every subjective demand.”

The axiom of equality is thus not without its anthropological postulates. Postulates which refer to human capacities which are at once generic, shared by all, and ahistorical, thought and speech do not substantially change over time. Although one should not be too quick to simply assume the first. In fact what strikes me about this generic equality of thought is how it immediately calls to mind a very different sort of thought about anthropology in what Etienne Balibar calls “anthropological difference.’ What Balibar calls “anthropological difference” is a difference that fulfills two conditions: first, it is a necessary component of any definition of the human (such as language); and second, the dividing line can never finally be objectively drawn. Examples of this would include sexual difference and the difference between sickness and health. In each case there is no division of humanity into men and women (or the healthy and the sick) without remainders, intersections, and identities that would ultimately need to be policed and patrolled. Balibar includes the division of labor, or what he calls “intellectual difference”, within this category. Humankind cannot be defined without the idea of thought (as Spinoza writes: “Man Thinks”), but this general definition is divided by the practices and institutions which determine and dictate the division between the “ignorant” and the “educated” or between “manual” and “mental” labor.

Balibar’s concept stands as a necessary correction to the work of Rancière and Badiou. One that introduces what I see as a necessarily materialist dimension, since these divisions relate ultimately to the division of mental and manual labor, that is the historical production of divisions and differences. As such this division is complicated by technological history, which continually redraws the line between head and hand, through automation and labor saving devices, thus fundamentally rewriting the very schema or idea of the human body. Through the use of computers and technology intellectual operations are broken down and subject to the same mechanization as physical operations, while at the same time other intellectual operations are "somatized," inscribed in the body, as in "the aesthetization of the executive as decision maker, intellectual, and athlete." The division between head and hand determines and modifies the very figure, and ideal, of humanity into "body-men" and "men without bodies." These images of perversions of the human are ambiguous objects of both fear and idealization. For example: "body-men" human beings reduced to brute physicality by the labor process are objects of both an aesthetization and idealization, as athletes, and fear, as contemporary savages. As such the division between mental and manual labor is integral to, without determining, the imagery of various racisms and other forms of conflict, which are in part conflicts over the proper identity of the human, over the ideal of the "correct" integration of mind and body. The division of mental and manual labor is the point of intersection of the figure of the idea of humanity, as it is envisioned and lived, and the historical transformations of technology and the economy.

However, the direction that I wanted to go in was not to contest the generic aspect of equality, its anthropological basis in speech or thought, but its ahistorical basis. As I stated in the outset, what I want to do is contrast the axiom of equality to the materialism of the common in the work of Negri, Virno, etc. But I guess that is going to have to wait for the sequel. So stay tuned for “The Last Communist Standing III: In 3-D.” (I am going to have to figure out a way to distribute those cardboard glasses.)

No Admittance Except on Business

This is going to be one of those posts where I stitch together a few quotes, make a few comments that are somewhere between banal and provocative, and leave it at that. I consider this to be fair warning.

If I had to pick my favorite passage in all of Capital, it would be the following, which is the transition from Part Two to Part Three:

Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face “No admittance except on business.” Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making.

This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all.

On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.

(OK, that is probably more than could be called a “passage,” it is more like page). There is so much that could be said about the sheer rhetorical density of this passage, the allusions, sarcasm, and characterizations. I suspect that it was a good writing day for Marx. Marx’s general point is the division between the sphere of production and exchange. A division that offers another account of ideology or fetishism; ideology is a necessarily partial view of society, based on the market, a partial view which takes itself for the whole. The “eden of the innate rights of man” is an after image of market activity itself. Lately, I have been wondering if it is possible to push Marx on this point. I wonder if he may be understood to be saying something about the relationship between work and representation. What if the no admittance sign obscures work, and production, from the realm of social representation?

I have seen this theme come up a few places as of late. First, I am reminded of a theme that appears in Anti-Oedipus. As Deleuze and Guattari argue repeatedly in that book,“desire is not recorded in the same way that it is produced.” The entire thematic of the production of desire against the theater of desire is one form that this distinction takes. Deleuze and Guattari also suggest that since production is upresentable, idealist explanations rush in to fill the void. As Deleuze and Guattari write: “Let us remember once again one of Marx's caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of the wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and relations of production. The product appears to be all the more specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends.”

In a short piece titled “The Factory as Event Site” Alain Badiou goes the furthest in suggesting that there is a general division between production and presentation. As Badiou writes: “Whomsoever is in civil society is presented, since presentation defines sociality as such. But the factory is precisely separated from society, by wall, security guards, hierarchies, schedules…That is because its norm, productivity, is entirely different from general social presentation.”
Finally, Rancière relates the “unpresentability” of labor to the “distribution of the sensible, a particular articulation of what is seen and felt, rather than a general ontological problem. As Rancière writes of the exclusion of the worker from public space in the nineteenth century: “That is, relations between workers’ practice—located in private space and in a definite temporal alternation of labor and rest—and a form of visibility that equated to their public invisibility relations between their practice and the presupposition of a certain kind of body, of the capacities and incapacities of that body—the first of which being their incapacity to voice their experience as a common experience in the universal language of public argumentation.”
Whatever the reasons, ontological, aesthetic, or political, the division between work and representation, would seem to necessitate two things: democratic politics, politics of representation are ideological, or rather fetishistic at their very core, and, second, the politics of work can only exist as a disruption of this order.

Last Communist Standing: Notes on the Relation between Negri and Badiou

It is perhaps one of the many ironies of history that the two of the lastest intellectuals from Europe to be discussed and debated in “theory” circles are not “postmodernists” but two thinkers for whom “communism” remains an unavoidable point of reference, a word which is to be discussed, debated, and even contested, but not simply dismissed. Communism has outlived its various “pomo” gravediggers. I am talking about Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou. (I should also mention that I am omitting European liberals such as Luc Ferry, why would we import them? There is a glut in the market after all, and liberals should understand that.)

There has been very little discussion of the connections or relations between these two thinkers, despite the fact that Badiou opens his Logiques des Mondes (also published as Radical Philosophy “Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic”) with a criticism of Negri’s democratic materialism, his assertion that the body is the ultimate horizon of production. Now, I think that this criticism, which links Negri to a kind of ineffective pluralism through the assertion of biopower, a kind of bad infinity in which humanity is made up of multiple particularities, like so many exotic fauna, is patently unfair, given the fact that Negri’s thought has rigorously avoided such liberal platitudes. That in itself is not important, as Deleuze writes “ encounters between independent thinkers always occur in a blind zone.” So in the spirit of this blind zone, I would like to outline points of contact and disagreement. I should say from the outset that despite my invocation of Logiques des Mondes, which arrived in the mail last week, as of late I have been reading old Badiou (De l’idéologie and Théorie du sujet) and old Negri for that matter, Books for Burning and Labor of Dionysus, so this may end up being about a point of contact between their work in the seventies and eighties.

1) The primacy of revolt: In Badiou’s (and Francois Balmes) little pamphlet, which is primarily a polemic against Althusser’s ISA essay, Badiou and Balmes argue that ideology can only be understood dialectically, as a struggle between domination and revolt. Moreover, in this dialectic revolt is primary, “c’est la résistance qui est le secret de la domination.” Of course this argument of the primacy of revolt could be dismissed as a product of Badiou’s Maoism (“It is always right to revolt”). The primacy of revolt perists, however, through Badiou’s writing on the event. Badiou argues that Nazism can only be understood from the perspective of an event of a successful revolution, the simulacrum of the event can only be understood from the event itself, or, as he states in Ethics, evil from the standpoint of the good. This “primacy of revolt” is structurally similar to the famous “autonomist hypothesis,” in which resistance precedes and prefigures domination. Thus, Badiou and Negri are two thinkers for whom have a generally philosophical (even ontological) commitment to revolution; it is not just something which should be done, but something that must be posited to comprehend the world.

2) The discontinuous continuity of the subject: For both Badiou and Negri politics always passes through a subject. (As Badiou wrote somewhat dogmatically in Théorie du Sujet, “Every subject is political. That is why there are so few subjects, and so little politics.”) The connection between politics and subjectivity is not continuous but is made up of real breaks and ruptures. As Badiou writes: “This political subject has gone under various names. He used to be referred to as a ‘citizen,’ certainly not in the sense of the elector or town councilor, but in the sense of the Jacobin of 1793. He used to be called ‘professional revolutionary.’ He used to be called ‘grassroots militant.’ We seem to be living in a time when his name is suspended, a time when we must find a new name for him.” Negri’s history has different names, mass worker, social worker, and finally, immaterial labor and the multitude itself. In Badiou’s case this series seems to relate primarily to the political activism, to its subjective dimension, while for Negri the series is constituted by transformations of “class composition.” Thus it possible to simply place Badiou on the side of politics, even voluntarism, and Negri on the side of the economy, and an economism of sorts. However, I think that the actually situation is more complicated.

3) The Excess of the state: This is perhaps a legacy of Marx, for whom the state is not an expression of the community, but a monstrous machine standing above it. In Badiou’s thought this takes a mathematic formulation, inclusion is in excess of belonging. Or, put politically, the state does not deal with individuals, but with classes, groups, it represents and codifies what has been presented. As Badiou writes in Being and Event, “To say of the state that it is of the bourgeoisie has the advantage of underlining that the state re-presents something that has already been historically and socially presented.” Representation is the codification of what exists. For Negri the state also has to be understood as an excess and overdetermination. As the factory is extended across society, so has the structure of command. As Negri writes, “If the factory has been extended across the social plane, then organization and subordination, in their varying relationship of interpenetration, are equally spread across the entire society.” The point of commonality, besides a return and transformation of Marxist state theory, can be understood in opposition to both a Foucaultian tendency to reduce the state to micropowers and a liberal tendency to see the state as a possible defense against the market. For Badiou and Negri the state has to be thought and fought in its excess.

4) Ontology: Now it is on this point that the two perhaps diverge the most. However, there is at least a similar turn toward ontology in both thinkers at about the same time, during the 1980s. Of course this can be interpreted as a response to a similar, or at least connected, set of events: that is, the collapse of a radical activity, and thus “the consolations of philosophy.” That is probably true, but what interests me is the way this ontology makes possible a rethinking of practice itself, what Badiou calls intervention and Negri constitutive practice.

More in Part II

Help Wanted: Fragments of a Theory of the Missing Worker

The figure of the worker has disappeared from politics. It has disappeared from the left, which has replaced it with an increasingly fragmented and fractious series of identities, and from the right, which has proclaimed everyone an entrepreneur, even if it is only of their own human capital. Moreover, as politics gravitates towards “the center,” towards consensus, the only class that dares to speak its name is the middle-class, which is absolutely ubiquitous because everyone claims to be it.

What interest me is less this fact, than a resurgence of sorts of theoretical perspectives from which to address it. Perhaps the most overt can be found in the work of Alain Badiou, who states quite directly what happens when the worker is excluded from the count. As Badiou writes, "what is counted is the level of the stock market, the Euro, financial investment, competition, and so on: the figure of the worker, on the other hand, counts for nothing.” (For more on this see "The Factory as Event Site" in the journal Prelom, thanks to Infinite Thought for pointing this out.)

There is more to this post, just follow the "Read More" link below.

For Badiou the worker is emblematic of the political process of the "count." The worker is included in society, but not counted. Included in the economic functioning of society without belonging to the official representation of society, the state. The same could be said of immigrants, etc. Thus, for Badiou what is living in Marx is the paradoxical status of the proletariat as “a class that is in civil society but not of civil society.” While what is dead is the entire theoretical edifice that Marx constructed to explain this fact, the theory of the mode of production, class struggle, etc. In short, the critique of political economy. As Badiou writes, “There can be no economic battle against the economy.” This is because political economy, Marxist or otherwise, if based on the fundamental principle of interest. Badiou radically distinguishes this subject, the subject that maintains itself in fidelity to the egalitarian axiom against the subject defined by interest. Behind every “Thermidor,” every attempt to put an end to the political process “there is the idea that an interest lies at the heart of every subjective demand.”

In Les Revolutions du Capitalisme Maurizio Lazzarato has also written about the disappearance of the working class, but in a very different vein. Lazzarato begins from Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between major and minor. It is important to point out that when Deleuze and Guattari first articulated this distinction in Mille Plateaux they did so by referencing at leas polemically a critique of the working class, from the perspectives of the "margins." Lazzarato, however, uses the distinction between major and minor to not so much dispense with the working class as a political subject, but to make a distinction between competing productions of subjectivity within the working class. As Lazzarato argues, worker’s are exploited insofar as they sell their labor to capital, but they are also investors, investors, through pension plans and stock options. As Lazzarato states, following Deleuze and Guattari, the 'working class,’ or those that sell their wage labor, have been incorporated in the capitalist ‘majority’. The majority is not defined numerically but by the way in which a particular form of existence becomes the norm. ‘Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it.' In the case of capitalism investing becomes the norm of economic participation; for example, the stock market, and not wages, becomes the standard through which the economy is evaluated, regardless of the fact that it does not benefit everyone. Thus, in capitalism ‘Desire of the most disadvantaged creature will invest with all its strength, irrespective of any economic understanding or lack of it, the capitalist social field as a whole.’

More names and concepts could be added to this survey, such as Hardt and Negri's argument that with real subsumption "the working class" becomes coextensive with society, which is a kind of a positive theory of this disappearance. However, I am less interested in charting out all of the responses to this than juxtaposing these different perspectives as the starting point for reflection.

Dialectics (part two)

Once again working off of an idea from Badiou (Theorie du Sujet). Badiou writes that there are two contradictions in Marx’s understanding of capitalism: between the forces and relations of production and then class struggle, or the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. “Two contradictions, two definitions, one object—capitalism--, one doctrine Marxism” (pg. 44) The first contradiction is objective, defining the place of the proletariat, caught between the productive powers of industry and the rule of private property. While the second is subjective, defining the intensity of struggle and commitment. As Badiou argues both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat draw their members from the same “inconsistent multiplicity”: the masses. What Badiou stresses is the double inscription: that every historical moment, every struggle, must be related both to the objective struggle of places and subjective struggle of forces. And in turn every force is placed, while every place is displaced by force.

This is the strength of dialectical thinking, specifically in a Marxist context it allows one to think that every economic transformation is political, and every political transformation is economic.

It is also from this perspective that one can grasp one of the dominant trends and even strengths of anti-dialectical thought: the refusal of mediation (displacement) in the name of immanence. Take for example Deleuze and Guattari’s claim in Anti-Oedipus: “Desire is part of the infrastructure.” It indicates that transformations of the economy are directly transformations of desire and subjectivity, without passing through the mediations of superstructure (specifically the family). It is a matter of what Paolo Virno calls “immediate coincidence between production and ethics, structure and superstructure, between the revolution of labor process and the revolution of sentiments, between technology and emotional tonality, between material development and culture.”

Michel Foucault is also a thinker of immanence or immediate coincidence. This can be seen through his lectures in the late seventies (Securite, Territoire, Population and Naissance de la Biopolitique). Foucault argues that “neoliberalism” should be viewed not as an ideology (politics) or as economic policy (economy) but as a conduct of conduct, a mode of governmentality.

It is at this point that I see both the merits and the tension between these two perspectives.

Dialectics (part one) and Cover Bands

As I mentioned earlier I have been reading Badiou's Theorie du Sujet. In many ways I find it be comparable to Althusser's For Marx. In each case there is an effort to draw out the philosophical implications of some of the revolutionary slogans of the past century (One divides into Two) as well as an attempt to revive the dialectic. In Althusser's case this takes the form of overdetermination while in Badiou's case it entails splitting the dialectic itself into one of places and forces.

What interests me about this is that at the time that I became interested in philosophy the dialectic was the enemy. The charges were so well known that they did not even need to be articulated: the dialectic totalizes, it simultaneously elevates and reduces all difference to contradiction, etc. Now these criticism are for the most part true, but at the same time there is a whole series of attempts to push the dialectic into new directions, to think difference, singularity, and antagonism: I am thinking of Adorno, Althusser, Badiou, and to some extent even Sartre.

In some ways the situation is similar to Marxism itself. On the one hand, Marxism appears to the very model of dogmatic thought, the repetition of key formulas as doctrine, but on the other hand there are real innovations in the work of those who call themselves, or are called, Marxists. Most notably while the various other philosophical "isms" restrict themselves to the topics that the philosopher in question cover, there are Marxist (Marxian) philosophers of language, literature, and film, even though Marx wrote nothing on these topics.

Innovation at the heart of repetition: one divides into two.

It is too long of a story to tell, but I ended up at a bar last Friday night listening to what could only be described as a bar band. They were not one of those cover bands that dedicate themselves to one band, like "In the Spirit of the Doors: Riders on the Storm"etc, but a band that covered a wide variety of different songs (not a wide variety, there entire set could have been an hours listening of any classic rock station on a no repeat Monday--Zeppelin, Sly and the Family Stone, Bob Marley, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Peter Gabriel). There range was perhaps the only thing impressive about them, although it was unintentionally amusing to watch the horn section try to look busy during the sans-horn- Zeppelin covers. Couldn't someone at least give them a cowbell?

Since I was bored by the experience it did leave me thinking about two things:

1) Classic Rock. When I was in high school classic rock was the default music selection for most Frat Boys, all of whom owned their copy of Bob Marley's Legend, assorted Zeppelin cds, and related music. Even during the late eighties this seemed odd, a bunch of kids living off of someone else's nostalgia. Given that I was older than most of the drunk and enthusiastic crowd on Friday it would appear that this has not changed much. Classic rock will outlive the babyboomers.

2)Continental philosophy. It has occurred to me before that most of the Anglo-American Continental Philosophy scene is structured sort of like the world of cover bands. You have your Nietzscheans (who write on Nietzsche, or in "the spirit of Nietzsche"), Heideggerians, Derridians, Deleuzians, and so on. All of whom produce very interesting commentary, but it leaves you wondering if anyone will ever write any originals. But perhaps I am being too harsh.

Innovation at the heart of repetition: one divides into two.