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

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 something new. Paradigmatic in these respects is the brief section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit known as the “master/slave dialectic” or “dialectic of 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

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.

Confessions of Minerva’s Owl: Notes on Jameson’s The Hegel Variations

Any interpretation of Hegel is its own time comprehended in thought, this little twist on Hegel’s famous dictum perhaps best describes Jameson’s little book on Hegel. This little book, mostly focused on the Phenomenology of Spirit, follows The Valences of the Dialectic and precedes a recently announced book on Capital: Volume One. Taken together the three constitute something of a return to first principles by Jameson, a return to the fundamental sources of his thought after a lifetime of combining Marx, Hegel, and the dialectic to analyze everything from architecture to science fiction novels. The brevity of this recent book is especially welcome, it reads more like a lecture, or a conversation even, than a full on book.

As much as the Hegel book constitutes a kind of fundamental, and delayed, return to first principles, it is founded, as I have already suggested, on the fundamental idea that any rereading of Hegel will necessarily confront the specters of Hegelianism: the critique of teleology, totality, and idealism that have rendered “Hegelian” an epithet more than a description. Jameson restrains much of his “shotgun style” of writing, in which a given paragraph might include remarks on Wal-mart, the general intellect, and the utopian dimension of popular culture, in order to focus on particular passages from Hegel’s text. Which is not to say that this is an attempt at some kind of immediate grasp of what Hegel “really meant,” independent of reference and shifting context, just that these references are sparse, limited to the works that have framed Hegel, Kant, Fichte, and Schiller, and Hegelianism, Kojève, Lukacs, and Honneth. Jameson recognizes that Hegel comes to us as always already read, and thus any new reading will be in some sense a negation of a reified image of Hegel. To cite Hegel himself on this matter (in a passage that Jameson refers to often, albeit not in this particular monograph):

The manner of study in ancient times differed from that of the modern age in that the former was the proper and complete formation of natural consciousness. Putting itself to a test at every point of its existence, and philosophizing about everything that it came across it made itself into a universality that was active through and through. In modern times, however, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made; the effort to grasp and appropriate it is more the direct driving forth of what is within and the truncated generation of the universal than it is the emergence of the latter from the concrete variety of existence. Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it spiritual life. (Phenomenology of Spirit ¶33.)

As such Jameson’s intervention is at once a transformation of Hegel and a reexamination of what his thought might mean for us today: how we view Hegel and how Hegel views us. Its particular, and focused, sites of intervention are the dialectic, collectivity, and the master/slave relation; in this case the last is understood less as a particular stage of the Phenomenology than as a particular staging of the conflict between materialism (work, action, the body) and idealism (recognition) as well as a general reflection on the meaning of the revolution against feudalism.

It is possible to say that every reading of Hegel necessarily takes up a position on the dialectic itself. First and foremost Jameson’s particular intervention/interpretation takes aim at the schema of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, stressing that not only does Hegel never use such schematic language, but more to the point, such a schema produces a kind of rigidity that the dialectical thinking is meant to fundamentally destroy. The task of the dialectic is then “to think without positive terms,” to not so much resolve oppositions into some higher order, but to constantly think between two terms, between relation and contradiction. Of course this is a sentiment that one hears a lot about Hegel, what makes it interesting in Jameson’s case is the particular way in which he reads the opening passages of the Phenomenology. For Jameson the opening chapters of the Phenomenology, most notably “sense certainty,” are to be read less as stages in some kind of progression towards Spirit than they are dialectical destructions of the eternal temptations for thought, the common sense and everyday priority of things over relations. The dialectic is less a teleological progression towards some sort absolute than an eternal battle against reification: against the primacy of things and the tendency to posit concepts as things, what Hegel called Verstand (understanding).

This sets up a tension between positing (not in the technical Hegelian sense) actual claims about reality and the necessary dialectical subversion of such claims. Jameson demonstrates this with respect to one of the boldest points he makes with respect to collectivity:

“Yes, Spirit is the collective, but we must not call it that, owing to the reification of language, owing to the positivities of the philosophical terms or names themselves, which restore precisely that empirical common-sense ideology it was the very vocation of the dialectic to destroy in the first place. To name the social is to make it over into a thing or an empirical entity, just as to celebrate its objectivity in the face of idealistic subjectivism is to reestablish the old subject-object opposition which was to have been done away with.”

As much as Jameson makes this assertion it is immediately subject to the necessary dialectical problematization through subsequent oppositions and tensions. (One of the subtexts of Jameson’s books is that it more or less argues for the superiority of the Phenomenology; a superiority that is not founded on the old opposition between dialectic form and Prussian authoritarian content, but on the unresolved nature of the phenomenology: its tendency to combine philosophical problems with historical events, fundamental problems of subjectivity with literary analysis.) The preponderance of collectivity makes an appearance twice in Jameson’s reading of Hegel. The first is in the section on sense certainy, in which attempt to give voice to the irreducible particularity of senses ends up speaking the universal. “Language is thus already a symbolic apprenticeship of Spirit as a collective reality beyond the individual; and even personal or private expression necessarily takes place within an already established collective framework and as a reaction against it.” However, that is not the only point at which the individual is made part of the collective, work does the same thing. This is a point that Hegel makes most strongly in the Philosophy of Right, but it makes its appearance in the Phenomenology as well in the labor of the bondsman and the work of culture. In work my concern with the matter at hand necessarily exceeds itself, as what I produce becomes a concern for others.

These different universalizations, different senses of collective, one founded by language and another by work, return us to the dualisms that define Hegel’s reception: idealism, materialism; superstructure and base; and master and slave. Jameson does not so much place Kojève’s reading of this final pair, master and slave, at the center of his understanding of Hegel, but recognizes that Kojève’s reading constitutes an unavoidable mediation of our reception of Hegel. As Jameson notes, with respect to the “master/slave” one splits into two: the master and slave dialectic gives us two dialectics, two recognitions, one based on the intersubjective recognition of individual to individual, and another recognition based on the slave’s recognition of self in the work of production. These two, or really three recognitions (the third being the recognition of self in political institutions that makes up much of Hegel’s philosophy), structure the post-revolutionary bourgeois world: we have the recognition of self by self in a world no longer defined by aristocracy, by official differences of birth; we have the recognition of the individual in the institutions and laws that defines democracy, these laws are supposed to be nothing other than the will of the people; and finally we have the recognition of the self in the world of work and consumption. (Although this final dialectic also splits into work and consumption, into the two sides of the commodity; one which presents us with alienation, the other with recognition, if not the constitution of identity). These three “recognitions” stretch the meaning of term, not to mention the dialectic itself, as they come into conflict. As Jameson defines the contemporary political situation:

“It is thus scarcely a distortion to posit the humanized world of consumer society as that externalization in which the subject can find itself most completely objectified and yet most completely itself. The contradiction begins to appear when we set this cultural dimension alongside the legal and political levels of late capitalism: for it is with these that the Kantian ethical citizen ought to identify himself, according to the theory, and in these that he ought to be able to recognize his own subjectivity and the traces of his own production. But this is precisely what does not obtain today; where so many people feel powerless in the face of the objective institutions which constitute their world, and in which they are so far from identifying that legal and political world as their own doing and their own production.”

There are suggestive remarks here about the current situation of late capitalism: in which people recognize themselves in the commodities they consume more than the laws and institutions that are supposedly based on their consent. (Of course it is worth noting that these laws and institutions often serve the corporations that produce the friendly egalitarian images that one identifies with). This is Jameson’s explanation of What is the Matter with Kansas? (Or, as Jameson puts it, “It is permitted to be wealthy, as long as the rich man is as vulgar as everyone else.”) However, such an interpretation remark is as limited as it is suggestive. Overall Jameson’s strategy is to combine the Maoist “one divides into two” with “two fuse into one”: Hegel’s recognition divides into two, perhaps three, recognitions; while Hegel is constantly being fused back into Marx.

Post-Post-Modernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Zombie Capitalism

Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic is a book that is very similar to Archeologies of the Future. They are both massive tomes, comprised in part of new material and republished essays, that represent sustained meditations on the central and enduring concepts of Jameson’s thought, namely Utopia and Dialectics. Beyond such superficial resemblances they also function together. If the earlier book on utopia revealed something a dialectic of the very presentation of utopia itself, in which the later cannot be separated from its negation, from dystopia, then the latter reveals a utopian dimension of the dialectic itself: the goals of the dialectic, overcoming reification and the static binary between self and society, are inseparable from utopia, from a transformation of social conditions. This last point, which constitutes not so much a new position on the part of Jameson, but a new articulation of existing themes and problematics (after all, the essays in question go back over twenty years) will have to wait for a later post, after I finish the book on the dialectic.


At this point I would like to approach Valences of the Dialectic rather obliquely, from what it says about the more or less current conjuncture. Given that Jameson is most famous for describing “postmodernism” as the cultural logic of late capitalism it makes sense to ask where we stand now with respect to capitalism, late, resurgent, or dying, and its specific cultural logic. There are two statements that appear more than once in Jameson’s book, albeit in different formulations.

The first describes the present as a simplifying of the ideological dimension. As Jameson writes:

“What is paradoxical is that the crudest forms of ideology seem to have returned, and that in our public life an older vulgar Marxism would have no need of the hypersubtleties of the Frankfurt School and of negative dialectics, let alone of deconstruction, to identify and unmask the simplest and most class conscious motives and interests at work, from Reaganism and Thatcherism down to our own politicians: to lower taxes so rich people can keep more of their money, a simple principle about which what is surprising is that so few people find it surprising anymore, and what is scandalous, in the universality of market values, is the way it goes without saying and scarcely scandalizes anyone.”

One could see this as a much delayed fulfillment of Marx’s statement in The Communist Manifesto, where Marx argues that capitalism entails a reduction of ideology to its material base. All the illusions of religion and monarchy fall aside and “man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.” The major exception being that in Marx’s account this clarity is the catalyst for revolution, while Jameson suggests that it is met with a shrug. We all know that the rich pass laws in their interest, and the best we can hope to do is to one day become rich so that we might do the same. Jameson could be describing a kind of universal cynicism that is synonymous with the post-modern condition.

However, the second description of the present suggests something else entirely. As Jameson writes in an often repeated formula:

“The dualism of culture and the economic has however come to seem unproductive, particularly in the third stage of capitalism (postmodernity or late capitalism), in which these two dimensions have seemed to dedifferentiate and to fold back in on each other: culture becoming a commodity and the economic becoming a process of libidinal and symbolic investment.”

On first glance one could say that this second statement contradicts the first, but that seems almost silly given that both of these statements come from a book on dialectics. However, the second does complicate the first. It is no longer that the economy, and with it the interests of class, emerges from an ideological cloud, but that the economy becomes its own kind of ideology (Think of the proliferation of investing magazines and television shows, aimed less at informing an invest class than produce this “economy as culture’). The trajectory of these two remarks follows Marx’s own trajectory from the Manifesto to Capital, from the holy that is profaned to the misty enshrouded realm of commodity fetishism.

Two provisional conclusions:

We are living in an age in which the category of ideology is increasing inadequate. This is not because it is metaphysically suspect, as Foucault and others claimed, but because it no longer adequately grasps the way society functions. One of the things that I like about the first quote is that it demonstrates that what is theoretically sophisticated is not necessarily political useful (a difficult lesson, and one coming from an odd place). However, the second quote points to the fact that this is not an “end of ideology,” but that new critical concepts are needed to make sense of this new order.

Second, and this is much more provisional, I think that understanding the combination of cyncism and libidinal investment in the economy might help explain the peculiarities of the current situation. We are cynical about capital's capacity to deliver any kind of just order, yet invested in it all the same. Zombie capitalism: desire lingering on, long after its rational has ceased.

Photo of Randall Park Mall, Cleveland, Ohio.

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.