Translation: A Spinozist Noo-Politics: Reconsideration of two recent books on Spinoza by Lorenzo Vinciguerra and Pascal Sévérac by Yves Citton

This is a draft translation of an early review by Yves Citton 

Published in Multitudes 

Picture from The Brain from Planet Arous

In his latest work, Maurizio Lazzarato proposed designating as "noo-politics" the "new power relations that take memory—and its conatus (attention)—as their object." Noo-politics (as it is currently exercised through "wireless, audiovisual, and telematic networks, and through the constitution of public opinion, perception, and collective intelligence") effects "the modulation of flows of desires and beliefs, as well as of the forces (memory and attention) that circulate them within the cooperation between brains" (This neologism—which, as a footnote clarifies, is to be situated at the intersection of the Greek noûs ("the highest part of the soul, the intellect") and the Internet service provider Noos—is rooted in a tradition of thought that the author explicitly traces back to Gabriel Tarde and Leibniz. Just as Tarde took pains to clarify his relationship to Leibniz in a lengthy essay devoted to the link between "Monadology and Sociology," so too does Maurizio Lazzarato propose a "neo-monadology" that draws upon Leibniz for the concepts of "event" and "possible world"—the very concepts upon which he constructs his political analysis of early twenty-first-century social movements. 

Living in Uncanny Valley: On the Forces and Relations of Production of AI

 

One common refrain one hears about AI is that it is inevitable. It is nothing other than the progressive development of the possibilities of technology. Such an assertion could be considered a version of technological determinism. It is technology, what Marx called the forces of production, that drive history. On this view history proceeds from the engineers workshop to the factory and into society.

Our Brand is in Crisis: The Summer of the Requel

 

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

Living in a Mythocracy: Projecting 2025

From the comic Undiscovered Country

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

Towards a Genealogy of Right Workerism: Notes on the Origin of Bizarro World

 At the end of a summer with at least a little time to read books not directly connected to teaching or writing I picked up Melinda Cooper's Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance and Stéphane Legrand's Ayn Rand: Femme Capital. The first I had been meaning to get to since it came out, and the second has lingered on my shelf for awhile. I was always curious what a French philosopher who has worked on Marx and Foucault would say about the very American (and anti-Marxist) phenomena of Ayn Rand.

Florida, Man! The War Against Higher Education

 

Alligator has to be the best University Mascot

“What is happening in Florida will not stay in Florida." From the AAUP's Report on Florida

There is no shortage of critical responses to what is happening to higher education in Florida. There is the report from the AAUP cited above, and the podcast I co-host even dedicated an episode to it. In many, but not all of these cases, these responses have dovetailed with DeSantis' political career, focusing on the person, the policy, and the overall strategy. See for the example the great episode of Know Your Enemy. 

Broken Brains: On an Etiology of the Present

 

Image from Fiend Without A Face 

I am not sure when I first heard the phrase "broke their brain" but I know that I have heard it multiple times. I have heard it used to explain the obsession with cancel culture on the part of the pundit class. That once they were subject to criticism and mockery online it effectively broke their brain, making it impossible for them to distinguish between criticism and actual threats to free speech. I have also heard it used to refer to the 2020 election and its aftermath.The idea underlying the phrase, at least as I understand it, as that something can happen that is so difficult for particular individuals to process or make sense of, that it effectively hinders their ability to make sense of everything after. It marks a traumatic before and after in which nothing ever makes sense again.

Imagination, Fiction, Knowledge: Towards a Spinozist Theory of Cultural Production Part II (This Time it is Mythical)

 

This post is more or less a sequel to this one, and like that first one it is in some sense a commentary on Macherey's A Theory of Literary Production. 

We Other Monsters: Living in the Interregnum with Citton and Rasmi

From Retro-Scifi arts instagram page

Yves Citton and Jacopo Rasmi's book Générations Collapsonautes: Naviguer par temps d'effondrements either arrived at the best time or the worst time.  It showed up in my campus mailbox in the week before spring break. Under different circumstances this would be a great time to get a surprise book. However, this year, the week before spring break was also the week that I learned that my campus would be closed after break, and all classes moved online, it was also the beginning of social distancing, and a week in which I did many things, visit friends, go out to eat, practice aikido, for the last time. In other words, I received it as the world began to collapse.

Negative Solidarity: The Affective Economy of Austerity

An Earlier Draft of this paper was presented at the Libidinal Economies of Crisis Times Conference

Spinoza’s question of political thought, “why do the masses fight for their servitude as if it was salvation” has taken on a unanticipated economic and social relevance since the post-2008 economic recession.Displaced from its seventeenth century context, of taxes and bread, wars of glory, and despots, it is possible to see a struggle for servitude in the way in which the masses clamor for more jobs, more austerity, and more persecution of the disadvantaged in the name of fiscal discipline. The blog Splintering Bone Ashes has dubbed this particular struggle for servitude “Negative solidarity.” Negative solidarity is defined as “an aggressively enraged sense of injustice, committed to the idea that, because I must endure increasingly austere working conditions (wage freezes, loss of benefits, declining pension pot, erasure of job security and increasing precarity) then everyone else must too.” 

It's Competition All the Way Down: On the Spontaneous Anthropology of Contemporary Capitalism

As much as people love to cite that ubiquitous remark by Fredric Jameson about the end of the world and the end of capitalism. You know the one. There is another, less discussed line, that covers the same terrain of ideological struggle and the limits of the imagination that I prefer. It is, “The market is in human nature’ is the proposition that cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged; in my opinion, it is the most crucial terrain of ideological struggle in our time.”   

The Myth of the Paid Protester

This is probably the worst way to begin a blog post, but I can't shake the figure of the paid protester. I am less interested in the rights fascination with George Soros (something that others could analyze better) than I am with the particular mythology of the paid protester. Although, I will say this about the former, the specter of a billionaire using his money to influence politics seems strange coming from people who ostensibly have no categorical problem with billionaires using their money to influence politics. I guess it could be understood as part of the spectacular division of capital, just as there are "woke" and "MAGA" brands, there are woke and MAGA billionaires, opposition to the specific actions of one circumvents any discussion of the entire system. 

Cold Call Man: On Sorry to Bother You

There is no film this year that I have anticipated more than Sorry to Bother You. I have been a fan of Boots Riley since I first learned about The Coup years ago. I have heard about this film for years; bought the album but eschewed reading the published screenplay. The latter seemed like admitting defeat and I desperately wanted to see this film get made. The first rule of movies, at least in Hollywood, is that anticipation is the enemy of enjoyment. Of course this is usually because most films fail to meet our expectations, the trailer would have been enough; it is rare that a film not only exceeds our expectations but calls them into question. 

Anti-Aesthetics: Or, Towards a Spinozist Theory of Cultural Production

 Images from the short lived Black Panther and the Crew

In all of the various attempts to produce and reproduce Spinozism, creating a Spinozist account of society, economy, and politics, little attention has been paid to Spinoza's aesthetics, or really anti-aesthetics. This Anti-Aesthetics is sketched between a few scattered propositions, scholium, and other remarks that address the basis of judgements of taste and value, at every point it shows that any aesthetics is at best an inadequate idea, making effects into causes, and at worst a kind of alienation. 

Old Time Religion: On American Gods the book and TV show

The following passage from Marx's Grundrisse could serve as a fairly accurate pitch meeting for American Gods:

Let us take e.g. the relation of Greek art and then of Shakespeare to the present time. It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against Roberts and Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Crédit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them...

From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?

The Original Sin of Accumulation: Trying to Say Something Original About Ursprüngliche Akkumulation

Red May Seattle

A bit of context: last weekend I was asked to participate in Red May Seattle, contributing to both its Marx-a-thon, a day long reading group on Capital and the Grundrisse, as well as discussing neoliberalism, science fiction, and the current struggles. What follows here is neither the text of what I presented on primitive accumulation, nor a kind of follow up self critique; it is an attempt to jot down some thoughts that were generated in collective discussion and reflection before they dissipate. It is red in practice and in theory, or, at the very least red in theoretical practice. What follows owes a great deal to all of those present at Red May. Names are withheld because I may have completely misunderstood what they were saying. 

Yet Another Effort, Spinozists, If You Would Become Marxists: Marxist Spinozism Against Enlightenment Spinozism

Me at PAF talking about Spinoza and Transindividuality 

(I am running out of Spinoza/Marx graphics)

In a recently published piece in Jacobin (which is a response to this piece in Viewpoint) we see the following statement:

"Precisely because of what we affirm in Spinoza, we view his French reception in the twentieth century skeptically. Thinkers such as Deleuze and Althusser largely reject Spinoza’s rationalism, monism, and determinism, reducing his substance to a swirl of anarchic forces, whether in Deleuze’s nomads or in Althusser’s aleatory materialism. These readings perform a kind of “substance abuse,” replacing Spinoza’s objective metaphysics with a Nietzschean play of forces.

But a different tradition of Marxist Spinozism doesn’t fall into this trap. Starting with Joseph Dietzgen and Georgi Plekhanov and proceeding with the Soviet Spinozists, A. M. Deborin and Evald Ilyenkov, these writers treat Spinoza as a dialectical thinker avant la lettre. They participate in the tradition of the left-Hegelians Heine, Feuerbach, and Hess, who hailed Spinoza as the real godfather of German Idealism. As such, they did not reject Spinoza’s humanism for a Heideggerian inspired antihumanism. Instead, they sought to affirm human power and dignity through an understanding of the material world."

Prophets of Rage: Affect and Elections

Since the election of Trump there seems to be a consensus that his surprising victory stemmed from anger and frustration on the part of the electorate. The only question that follows in most analysis is what is the nature of anger. Is it classed based, frustration at globalization the loss of industrial jobs, and a recovery that seems to have only benefited the elite? Or is it race based, anger at changing demographics and a steady decline of the wages of whiteness? Of course most answer that it is in some sense both, either through the mythic "white working class," which merges race and class in a handy formula or, in a more sophisticated way, arguing that Trump always framed class in racist terms, economic uncertainty became immigrants and globalization become China. 

Hobbes Versus Spinoza: This Time It's Anthropological

This morning I received an email that had the following sentence in it: "A demographic note for this week is that we have almost three times as many applicants to online programs as we did this time last year, confirming a trend we are all aware of --- that students want online degree offerings." Maybe it was the lack of coffee, or the fact that I was woken up in the night by a barfing dog (don't worry, Bento is fine. He just eats garbage sometimes), but I thought for a minute about responding to this email, pointing out that the premise did not support the conclusion. There are multiple reasons why people take online classes. They are ways of dealing with jobs that demand increased flexibility from employees, ways of finishing school around the demands of families and work. Negotiating these demands is not the same as wanting something, as desiring it or choosing it. 

Mythocracy II: This Time It's Personal

What follows is unauthorized and semi-competent translation of the introduction of Yves Citton's Mythocratie: Storytelling et Imagninaire de Gauche. I did this for my own self-clarification and teaching, but I posted it in an attempt to increase interest in Citton in the English speaking world. 

No one has yet to determine what a story can do. Some are offended by the “myths” that obscure;  others denounce “the histories” that we recount; others still believe in that it is enough to find the good story that would lead the donkeys to polls, the sheep to the market, and the ants to their work. More than these denunciations or formulas, this book proposes an interrogation of the power of stories, doubled by a narrative on the mythic nature of power: mythocracy.