Don't Praise the Machine: AI and the Destruction of Three Ecologies

 

I was asked to speak at an AI and Ethics panel at my university. What follows is the outline that I am using for my talk.

Everybody Gets to be a Fascist: Or, What Taylor Swift Taught Me About Fascism

 

The Best Joke in Barbie 

Years ago I remember encountering Félix Guattari's little essay, "Everybody Wants to be a Fascist." At the time its title seemed more clever than prescient. (Although it is worth remembering how much fascism, and the encounter with fascism was integral to Deleuze and Guattari's theorizing, well beyond the reference to Reich). Now that we are living in a different relation to fascism the problem posed by Guattari (and Deleuze) of desire seems all the more pertinent and pressing. 

Nostalgic for Nothing: Industry and Affect

 

this is not a picture of me

The dominance of intellectual property in film is driven by one central affect, or affective composition, nostalgia, the sense that something about the past was once better. It is unclear, however, if this mood is oriented towards the actual films of the recent past, or childhood itself. What is it we are nostalgic for? 

From Desiring Production to Producing Desire: Between Anti-Oedipus and Lordon

Art by Fernando Vicente

Upon rereading and teaching Lordon's Capitalisme, Désir, et Servitude (or, as it is called in English, Willing Slaves of Capital) I was struck by certain productive similarities between the book and Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. These similarities are not of influence; Lordon is much more influenced by recent Spinozist thinkers such as Bove and Sévérac (even embracing the latter's critique of Deleuze) than he is by Deleuze's reading. Nor are the similarities of a shared point of reference, despite Deleuze and Guattari's invocation of Spinoza in the opening pages Anti-Oedipus is not a very Spinozist book. Rather the connection is one of a shared problem, or, more to the point it brings out particular elements of Deleuze and Guattari's book obscured by the '68 reading (what a crazy book!) or the more current, accelerationist interpretation.

Ends of Man: Cynicism and Sentiment in Nightcrawler and Interstellar

OK. I am going to make this quick. I saw two films this weekend, Nightcrawler and Interstellar,  and since I am me, many people expected me to blog about them. I am way too busy for such things, but like Louis Bloom (Tiqqun reference?) pictured above, I aim to please my fans and my own craven ego, I thought that I would try a quick post wrapping up my impressions of both films. 

The Affective Economy: Producing and Consuming Affects in Deleuze and Guattari

Presented at Deleuze and the Passions

Erasmus University Rotterdam

The thought of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari) bears on ambiguous relation with respect to the “affective turn” in social and political thought that it supposedly helped initiate. This ambiguity touches on the very role and meaning of affects. From Deleuze’s writings on Nietzsche and Spinoza through the collaborations of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari insist on the central role of the affects, joy, sadness, fear, and hope, as structuring individual and collective life. In that sense, Deleuze and Guattari are rightfully hailed as central figures in a turn towards affect. However, if, as some argue, the “affective turn” is a turn towards the lived over the structural and the intimate over the public, then Deleuze and Guattari’s thought has a much more complex relation to affects. The broader polemical target of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, beyond the specific polemics with psychoanalysis, is any explanatory theory that would reduce social relations to expressions of individual passions and desires. Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that there is only “the desire and the social, and nothing else” is oriented against such individualistic accounts of subjectivity. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari define capitalism as a socius that it reproduces itself in and through the encounter of abstract quantities of money and labor power, and as such is  is indifferent to the beliefs, feelings, and meaning that we attach to it. Thus, if affect is central to Deleuze and Guattari’s thought it is necessary to add the caveats that affect must be thought of as anti-individualistic, as social rather than intimate, and as impersonal, reflecting the abstractions that dominant life. 

Commonalities: On Gilbert's Common Ground

Full disclosure: I met Jeremy Gilbert at a Deleuze conference in Wales in the summer of 2008. He gave an interesting paper on Deleuze, Guattari, and Gramsci and I ended up talking to him at pub. The conversation was one of shared interests that went beyond Deleuze, it was a Deleuze conference after all, to include Simondon, transindividuality, and the broader problem of reimagining collectivity in individualistic (and individuated) times. As anyone in academia knows, the experience of meeting someone with shared interest is often ambivalent. There is the joy of finding someone to talk to, of feeling less alone in the wilds of academia, coupled with the sadness of feeling less original, less insightful. The latter feeling is of course intensified by a publishing culture that is predicated less on collective projects and more on developing a highly individuated name for oneself. In the years since then, as our projects progressed (his made it toprint first) we joked about constituting a new school of thought, Transindividual Ontology and Politics (TOP)?

Personalized Ideology (or Ideology Personified): Silva's Mood Economy

Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize’ by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generation of de-individualization.  Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus. 

In the past few weeks I have returned again and again to the idea of "negative solidarity" that I outlined on this blog. I found myself mentally bookmarking news reports and articles that seem to be evidence of hostility to any collective organization for wages or benefits, not to mention larger or more structural transformations. The affect of ressentiment, the distinct sense that someone somewhere was benefiting at your expense, seemed prevalent. (Of course the "someones" in this situation are always those on social welfare programs, state employees, etc., never capitalists, investors, etc.) However, negative solidarity risked having all of the characteristics of what Althusser called a "descriptive theory," a sophisticated sounding recasting of what one already knows and thinks. The dangers of descriptive theories is that they provide a moment of recognition, ("That is it, dude; totally,")but no way to move forward. So the question which I returned to again, is how to account for the genesis and constitution of negative solidarity, how to move beyond description. This is a question of socio-political theory, but it is a necessary precondition of political action as well.  Negative Solidarity is in that sense another name to the barrier of any politics whatsoever. 

Untenable Subtexts: Iron Man Three

Having written something about the first two Iron Man films on this blog in the past I felt obligated to write at least something about the third. My thoughts on this film are framed by Hassler Forest's assertion that the superhero film is a post 9/11 cultural form; the genre not only emerges after that historical event but it provides sufficient fantasy difference to confront both historical trauma and to legitimate the emerging national security state. It makes large scale destruction, often of New York, palatable and, more importantly, it makes generalized surveillance and extra-judicial forms of enforcement not only acceptable, but cool. 

Figures of the Common: Species Being, Transindividuality, Virtual Action

Paper was originally presented at the Futures of the Common conference at the University of Minnesota in 2009. Some of this has been taken up into my current work, and some of it has been abandoned. I am posting it here for the gnawing criticism of digital mice. 

The common has become a central term for political action and philosophical reflection. At first glance this would seem paradoxical; after all, Marx argued that capitalism confronts us as immense accumulation of commodities, as a situation in which all that exists, exists as a commodity, as private property. The attention to the common would then seem to be the worst sort of nostalgia, a lost Eden before the fall of primitive accumulation. Proponents of the concept, however, argue that the term does not just shed light on the origins of the capitalism, on the destruction of the agrarian commons that constituted the necessary condition for the emergence of labor power, but reveals its current function, as capital appropriates not just the commons in terms of land and resources, but the common, understood as the collectively produced and circulated knowledges, habits, affects, and concepts that produce our cultural life.[1] It is worth noting, however, that this distinction between past and present, material commons and the immaterial common, is not that rigid. 

We Other Cannibals: Viveiros de Castro and Deleuze and Guattari

I have always been more on Team Anti-Oedipus than Team A Thousand Plateaus. Partly this is autobiographical. I read Anti-Oedipus at a very impressionable time, too soon--in undergrad. I picked the book at City Lights in San Francisco partly because Hampshire Professor Margaret Cerullo had a blurb on the back. (This was the old Minnesota copy with the cover designed by Harold and the Purple Crayon.) At the time I was trying to navigate the world of "theory," designing my own major which combined anthropology and philosophy. I was positioned to understand less than a quarter of it, but the rest I thoroughly enjoyed. I stayed up all night on a red eye reading it. The other reason that I have continued to gravitate towards Anti-Oedipus, writing on it and teaching it, is that I felt that I could do more with it, plug it into my various conceptual machines, producing readings of primitive accumulation and Marx's ontology. In contrast to this A Thousand Plateaus seems to descend down so many rabbit holes that I cannot follow. I just don't know enough about birdsong and geology (another reason that I will never be a speculative realist, I suppose).

A Brief Encounter: Between Analysis and Affect

I was introduced to David Lean's A Brief Encounter by Slavoj Zizek and Sophie Fiennes A Pervert's Guide to Ideology.  The film is about a married doctor and a woman (also married) who meet in a train station and fall in love. The film documents their brief affair against a stifling atmosphere of propriety in Post-World War Two England. 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

Bigger than Life: Nicholas Ray films Anti-Oedipus

It seems to me that a fundamental point has perhaps been lost in all of the writing on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Deterritorialization, body without organs, desiring machines, codes, and axioms have been debated, clarified, and discussed, becoming part of contemporary jargon, but the fundamental critique of psychoanalysis has passed by the wayside. This criticism can be summed up as follows: the conditions of the production, and reproduction of subjectivity, exceed the confines of the family, encompassing all of history. That is what it means to be “anti-oedipal” to have a fundamentally different ontology, or ontogenesis, of subjectivity, one that is more materialist, moving beyond the confines of desire in the family. Against the tendency of psychoanalysis to reduce everything to the family, to see father figures lurking behind every boss and president, Deleuze and Guattari explode the family triangle seeing the political and historical dimensions underlying it, to see politics where psychoanalysis see only Oedipus.

“The father, the mother, and the self are at grips with, and directly coupled to, the elements of the political and historical situation—the soldier, the cop, the occupier, the collaborator, the radical, the resister, the boss, the boss’s wife—who constantly break all triangulations, and who prevent the entire situation from falling back on the familial complex and being internalized in it.”

This must be the case not only of those “extreme situations,” the political conflict that cuts through a family, but those situations where Oedipus would appear to be most applicable, where it is just a father and a son in conflict. Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate this in their book on Kafka, arguing that even Kafka’s conflict with his father has to be seen as political. Thus using Kafka to restate their position.

“The goal is to obtain a blowup of the “photo,” an exaggeration of it to the point of absurdity. The photo of the father, expanded beyond all bounds, will be projected onto the geographic, historical, and political map of the world in order to reach vast regions of it: ‘I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach.’ An Oedipalization of the universe. The Name of the Father encodes the names of history—Jews, Czechs, Germans, Prague, city country. But beyond that, to the degree that one enlarges Oedipus, this sort of microscopic enlargement shows up the father for what he is; it gives him a molecular agitation in which an entirely different sort of combat is being played out.”

The best cinematic version of this process, of this blow-up, is perhaps Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life. As Deleuze and Guattari write,

"Witness a film by Nicholas Ray, supposedly representing the formation of a cortisone delerium: an overworked father, a high-school teacher who works overtime for a radio-taxi service and is being treated for heart trouble. He begins to rave about the educational system in general, the need to restore a pure race, the salvation of the social and moral order, then passes to religion, the timeliness of a return to the Bible, Abraham...What the film shows so well, to the shame of psychiatrists, is that every delirium is first of all the investment of a field that is social, economic, political, cultural, racist and racist, pedagogical, and religious..."

It is tempting to subject Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life to a psychoanalytic interpretation. Paired with the well-known Rebel without a Cause, it functions as a kind diptych: one on the father, the other on the son. Thus it is possible to see each film, which were made in the mid-fifties, right after each other, as completing two sides of an Oedipal triangle. Which is not to say that Rebel is not about fathers. As Ray argues, in that film Jim Stark (James Dean) is searching for some kind of guidance from his father (Jim Backus), who “fails to provide the adequate father image, either in strength or authority.” In fact all of the misfits of the film have daddy issues: Judy (Natalie Wood) just wants her father to love her (perhaps a bit too much) and Plato (Sal Mineo) just wants his parents to be there at all. It is odd that this film, a film that is supposed to document the early stages of a generation of rebellion, is ultimately about a bunch of kids looking for a proper parental relationship. (However, I will leave aside for a moment the question as to whether or not it is possible to extract an Anti-Oedipal reading of that film to focus on Bigger than Life).

Bigger than Life is the story of a schoolteacher in an unnamed suburb, whose life self destructs due to his increased addiction to a drug that he has been prescribed for a rare illness. James Mason, a British actor best known for playing Humbert Humbert in Kubrick’s Lolita, plays the teacher, Ed Avery. This casting introduces a bit of old world class and distinction into the suburban egalitarianism of nineteen-fifties America. A point that is reinforced by the layout of the Avery home, the walls of which are decorated by maps and travel posters of Barcelona and Greece. These posters suggest both the past, the weight of history, and middle class aspirations of travel and luxury. The latter are undermined by the presence of an exposed water heater in the Avery kitchen. The rusty and malfunctioning heater stands out as a kind of Zizekian anamorphosis, a stain that actually puts the whole scene in perspective. We quickly learn that the middle class comfort of the Avery household is just a veneer, Ed Avery works as a taxi dispatcher after school hours to make ends meet. He keeps this secret from his wife, generating suspicion.

Most of the initial clues of conflict are subtle, functioning at the level of casting and sets, demonstrating Ray’s often cited control, but all of this begins to explode, moving from subtext to text, as Avery begins to unravel. His unraveling stems from a drug that he is prescribed to treat a rare condition, a drug that has serious psychological side effects. However, I think that it would be as much of a mistake to see this as cautionary tale about drugs as to see it as an Oedipal drama. The drug is something of a Macguffin, setting the plot in motion. Ray later said that he regretting naming the drug in the film, reducing the crisis of the film to a single knowable cause. As much as the drug sets the conflict in motion, turning Avery into a grotesque parody of paternal authority and middle class aspirations, it is their precarious class position that maintains it. Even as he spirals out of control, his wife refuses to call the doctor for fear of what another medical bill will do to their financial situation, or what the stigma of going to see a psychiatrist will do to his job. Avery’s addiction to the drug sets in motion a spiral of delusion and delirium that crosses through class, politics, and religion.

First, in an initial bought of megalomania, Avery takes his wife and son to a high-end department store. His wife immediately protests this transgression of the class position. The scene that follows prefigures the dress-fitting scene of Vertigo, a man violently demanding that “his” woman look a particular way. Only in this case the ideal is not a melancholic lost love object, as in Hitchcock's film, but a desired class position. Avery’s second noticeable outburst takes place during “parent teacher” night at his school. He refuses to play the faux-egalitarian game of hanging every student’s artwork, of acknowledging that every child is a special little snowflake, and gives a tirade against collapsing standards. As Avery states, “Childhood is a congenital disease - and the purpose of education is to cure it.” Ultimately warning that, “We're breeding a race of moral midgets,” in a remark that will be heard again and again in authoritarian philosophies of education from Plato to Allan Bloom. Half of the audience of parents reacts in horror, offended to hear their children spoken of in such a way, as idiots in need of discipline, while the other half openly embrace the new authoritarian standards.

After this the posters of Europe, of Barcelona at the home take on a new significance: they are no longer symbols of middle class aspirations, but of the possibility of fascism. After the debacle of the PTA meeting Avery returns home, focusing his efforts now on his son--privatizing his desires for discipline and authority. This is arguably the most Oedipal dimension of the film, and the one most caught up in a particular middle class ideal of “wanting a better life for one’s children.” Avery looms over his son in a monstrous scene of parental discipline. When his son fails to perform, fails to become an instant genius, Avery turns to the Bible, specifically the story of Abraham, for parenting advice, deciding that his son must be sacrificed. When his wife reminds him that God stayed Abraham’s hand, Avery declares, “God was Wrong!” With the exception of this last heretical remark, the film prefigures a particular American form of fascism (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense) based on consumption, family, and the Bible.

Avery’s blasphemous declaration completes the sequence of megalomania, passing through class, politics, and ultimately religion. Oedipus is blown up until it encompass all of history and the cosmos, revealing its social and political dimensions. What follows in the denouement, the happy reconciliation of the family, can only be understood as the imposition of the era’s ideological demands. What is more important is that the film illustrates that every familial conflict encompasses all of society and history; there is no demand for an authoritarian father without a demand for authority, that every desire for a better future for one's children is the projection of one's own frustrated economic aspirations. Thus, the unconscious is political and economic before being familial and libidinal.

Iron Man Versus Masculinity: Or, Writing Myths Backwards from Freud

The standard nomenclature for superheroes takes the form of “[blank]-man”, in which the blank, the variable, defines the qualities, powers, or theme (super, spider, or bat) and “man” in this case is simply generically human. There is little thought of the specific gender, except in the patriarchal manner in which man stands in for all of humanity. Invariably these superheroes are followed by their female variants, supergirl, spiderwoman, batgirl, in which gender is specifically marked, usually by a short skirt.

To the extent that gender does appear, it appears through the superhero’s origin story, a necessary component of all superheroes. This origin story appears, as it were, twice: once in terms of the superpower, the mutant spider, or cybernetic suit, and once in terms of the founding trauma that provides the fundamental motivation. The latter is decidedly familial, even oedipal, in that it is a story of lost love and paternal authority. The contemporary superhero is at once post-human, alien, mutated with superhuman strength, or at least possessing an array of gadgets, and all too human, still worried about what dad (or Uncle Ben) would think and still missing mom. (Ang Lee’s Hulk film pushed this furthest, moving into absolutely Freudian territory, complete with repressed memories of a mother, and an epic battle between father and son). Superhero stories reflect, in a pop-culture manner, Deleuze and Guattari’s argument regarding of the fundamental contradiction of contemporary capitalism in Anti-Oedipus, that as much as capitalist production confronts and transforms the fundamental nature of reality, unlocking the secrets of the universe and DNA, capitalist reproduction reterritorializes all of this on the relations of production, relations that include the family as the fundamental matrix of identity and desire. To cite the most distilled and concentrated passage on this point.

Civilized modern societies are defined by processes of decoding and deterritorialization. But what they deterritorialize with one hand, they reterritorialize with the other. These neoterritorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; but they are archaisms having a perfectly current function, our modern way of ‘imbricating,’ of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resuscitating old codes inventing pseudo codes or jargons…These modern archaisms are extremely complex and varied. Some are mainly folkloric, but they nonetheless represent social and potentially political forces…. Others are enclaves whose archaism is just as capable of nourishing a modern fascism as of freeing a revolutionary charge…Some of these archaisms take form as if spontaneously in the current of the movement of deterritorialization…Others are organized and promoted by the state, even though the might turn against the state and cause it serious problems (regionalism, nationalism). (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 258/307)

On this reading superheroes are the personification of the contradiction of capital. At the level of their powers, their masked selves, they unlock the secrets of the universe, of spider DNA, and bat-a-rangs, but at the level of their secret identities they are burdened by Oedipal subjectivity, by a father who never showed his love or parents who are lost with the true alien homeworld.

The first Iron Man film was relatively free of any Oedipal coding. Iron Man created himself, with the help of the military industrial complex, in the desert. Its myth was more Prometheus than Oedipus: the first movie’s tagline was, “Hero’s aren’t born. They are built.” The only father figure was Jeff Bridges’ Obadiah Stane, which opened up the general question of inheritance and legacy, a theme that the second film continues. The second film is all about inheritance, of property, legacy, etc., but more on that in a minute. Some people have argued that the film suffers from too many villains, Rourke’s Whiplash, Sam Rockwell as a rival arms manufacturer, Don Cheadle as War Machine, and an army of drone soldiers. However, it occurred to me while watching the film that Iron Man’s true enemy is masculinity itself. We learn early in the film that the technobabble in his chest is slowly poisoning him. He reacts to this situation with a combination of stoic isolation, refusing to tell his closest friends and confidantes, and all the clichés of a midlife crisis, racing a car at Monte Carlo, dancing to Dr. Dre, and hiring a young attractive redhead as his personal assistant.

All of these actions drive Tony Stark’s (Iron Man) friends away, further exasperating the situation. He is finally rescued from both his technical problem and his existential malaise when Nick Fury gives him some old home movies of his father. In a brilliant bit of casting his father is played by John Slattery, who plays Roger Sterling on Mad Men, thus borrowing the latter’s nostalgia for a “simpler” time when men were men and women did not study mixed martial arts. These home movies provide Stark with the necessary science to solve his problem and with the reassurance of his father’s love, which powers his new suit making it possible for him to defeat the enemy and get the girl. Oedipus complex successfully resolved.

Iron Man is a cold war creation, and his place in the Marvel pantheon has generally been to outdo Captain America in jingoistic nationalism, so one would not be surprised to see Cold War themes in the film. The first film dispensed with these references, rewriting Iron Man’s origin in the “War on Terror.” They return in the second film. We learn that Iron Man has his origins in the cold war arms race, and that his new nemesis, Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash, is the son of his father’s one time collaborator. What is strange is that we learn that Iron Man’s father had him deported when he learned that he planned to exploit the technology for profit, a definite case of a pot calling a kettle black. Whiplash seeks revenge for a legitimate wrong, but the film does not address that. The only sins of the past that need to be addressed are familial, political wrongs can simply be overcome with superior firepower.

Faux + Homey =Fauxmey (or Foamy)

In the film Up in the Air the term Fauxmey, a combination of faux and homey, is coined to describe the little touches of hominess used by hotels, such as the “Fresh Baked Cookies” available at checkout. This is a clever little turn of phrase, but it is also incredibly risky one for a Hollywood movie, especially one released over the holidays, to utter. Fauxmey is what Hollywood specializes in.

Up in the Air has been embraced by some as the first real film of the current economic depression. On the surface this would seem to be the case; the film’s central character Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) works for an unnamed company that is sent into to do the dirty work of laying off thousands of employees. As the film begins, however, it is his job that is in jeopardy as his company contemplates replacing the expensive flights cross country with firing by teleconference. Economic insecurity, the thing that Americans flock to the theaters to avoid, would seem to be given center stage. This expression of the current age comes heavily mediated by the homilies that are the stock and trade of Hollywood.

Bingham is presented not so much as someone who lays people off for a living, lagging slightly behind the migrating flows of capital to inform people that their position is no longer available, but as someone who makes flight, movement, and instability a virtue. As he remarks in narration, the airport lounge, first class seat, and hotel bar are his home. (And you know what they say, anyone who questions the virtues of home and family in the first act, will discover find themselves longing for them in the third.) He expresses the virtues of displacement and movement every time that he informs someone that they have been terminated (a word that he is careful not to use). In a speech that is reminiscent of Machiavelli’s discussion of the good fortune of Romulus, Moses, and others, a good fortune that is nothing other than being cast out of the existing order, he states that “everyone who ever founded an empire or started a company sat in that chair, and was able to do so because he sat there” (rough paraphrase). Losing one’s job is represented as an opportunity to follow one’s dream, as a chance to become one’s true self. In case that is not clear enough, Bingham also moonlights as a motivational speaker, delivering speeches with the title “What is in Your Backpack?” which argue for emptying the proverbial backpack of the various impediments and attachments of home and family. Life is movement, he declares, summing up the virtues of the neoliberal subject.

These three different testaments to the virtues of movement are somehow both overkill and contradictory. There are of course fundamental differences between the mobility of flying first class and the flexibility of being fired from your job after seventeen years of hard work and dedication. Bingham works hard to not so much conceal these differences but to model the mobility of his life with the mobility of capital. His goal in life is to accumulate ten million miles with his airline, a goal that is seemingly devoid of any end other than pure quantitative accumulation. He does not plan to do anything with these miles; accumulation is its own end and justification.

As fast as Bingham moves, however, it is not fast enough. As I stated at the beginning, Bingham is being outpaced by technological innovation itself, by virtual networks that make airline travel obsolete. Part of the film’s drama has to do with irony of the master of mobility being confronted with the horrors of stability, with having to stay in one place. That is part of the drama, but only part. Eventually Bingham is lead to desire family and stability. He is tempted in part by a new jet setting lover named Alex (Vera Farmiga) and by a return home for a family wedding. I will spare you the details, but let you know that you get all of the requisite scenes of dramatic reversal of values, including a last minute dash through an airport. It is not love unless there is a last minute run through a crowded place to stop a wedding or reunite with a spurned lover.

(Spoiler Alert) What is surprising and curious, albeit not as clever as the film thinks, is that it does not pursue this direction. One assumes that Alex, being a woman, secretly desires home and hearth. However, this turns out not to be the case, or not exactly. This is conveyed in a scene in which Alex describes her perfect man, a stable good natured lover of children with a nice smile. Alex already has those things, a husband and kid: her relationship with Bingham is not some frustrated desire for the corporate bad boy who will never settle down, but simply an affair on the road. He is just one of those transgressions that one allows oneself while in travel, like watching lots of television. Bingham is  thus rejected, his attempt to become a family man fails. In a response to this he returns to the sky, to a life in transit. In doing so he meets his goal, he flies ten million miles and gets a special elite business card and meets the pilot. The film ends with Bingham singing the praises of the open sky, but now it is not so much the sky of ten million miles, of a pure quantity, but a sky of special perks, of hospitality and the warm smile of Sam Elliot (playing the embodiment of folksy charm yet again).

Oddly enough the film would seem to end with a praise of the fauxmey, of the false charms of corporate perks. People are shown to be unreliable and disloyal. In their place we have the reliable world of corporate rewards in which loyalty always comes with perks. To put it in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the film is less a celebration of deterritorialization, of pure mobility, but of reterritorialization, of the codes of home and friendship that have become part of every brand. This celebration of fauxmey at the level of content is duplicated at the level of form. The film quite famously cast actually downsized individuals to flesh out the emotional intensity of people losing their jobs. These individuals are shown are in the closing credits, discussing the virtues of family against the world of work, lessons learned from losing their jobs. These statements contradict the overall arch of the film, but no matter, they reassure us of its seriousness and concern.

Adorno once compared the products of the culture industry to baby food, predigested. It is perhaps more accurate to say that they are chocolate chip cookies, microwave reheated and available at checkout.

You Can't Kill a Ghost: Hegel, Hardt, and Negri

It was perhaps Foucault who first cast Hegel in the light of a horror movie, who argued that for all of his generation’s attempts to escape Hegel, they still might find him “motionless, waiting for us.” Like the killer in a slasher movie, Hegel springs out of the dark just when you thought he was dead. Perhaps a fitting fate for the philosopher who gave us the conceptual underpinnings of the contemporary sequel: the bad infinity, a series of differences that do not make a difference.

I thought of these remarks on Hegel, which suggest that all anti-Hegelianism will return to Hegel in some way or another, in reading Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth. Hardt and Negri are famously anti-Hegelian, presenting an immanent constitutive tradition of Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx, against a political tradition of dialectic and mediation, made up of Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. However, Hegel, or at least a ghost of Hegel makes an odd reappearance in this text, raising some interesting questions.

As the title suggests, Commonwealth is concerned with the common. The common is defined as that which exceeds state or private ownership, everything from natural resources to the second nature of language, knowledge, and habits that becomes the basis for wealth production but cannot be owned. (Hardt and Negri’s primary concern in Commonwealth is with the latter, second nature; they say little about the former. Michael Hardt recently made some interesting remarks about the distinction between nature, as the commons, and the common in Copenhagen.) The common is what capital exploits, but it is also what gives the multitude direction and consistency: the goal is to liberate the common from all of the corrupt institutions, which exploit its creativity and openness.

In what is perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book they outline the family, corporation, and the state as the three “specters of the common,” three institutions that corrupt and limit it. To return to the metaphor of a horror movie, the frightening theme would cue up right about now, suggesting that the monster is lurking about, just out of sight. The family, cooperation (or civil society), and the state are the three spheres of Hegel’s ethical life. Hegel’s presentation of these three spheres, in which the family is immediacy, all warm and confining; civil society, is the negation, competition as the war of all against all; and the state is the reconciliation of the two, individual freedom and ethical substance, is one of the places where Hegel risks collapsing into a caricature of himself. Which is unfortunate, since these passages constitute some of Hegel’s most important socio-historical writing, incorporating his reflection on the limits of political economy and its perspective on the state. It also suggests that politics should be understood in terms of the various institutions and relations that traverse it, relations which are also productions of subjectivity.

(The curious thing about this oddly spectral Hegel is that Hardt has written one of the better essays on the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s conception of civil society. In that essay, “The Withering of Civil Society,” Hardt follows Deleuze’s idea of a control society, arguing that Hegel’s civil society corresponds to Foucault’s disciplinary power. The very idea of civil society, situated between family and the state, demands heterogeneity and separation of institutions, each with their own norm and structures. In its place we have control which permeates all of these structures, subordinating to the same relations of debt; think of the breakdown of family, work, and school that confronts the modern university student, still at home, working, and already in debt. Finally, Hardt and Negri argue that the “withering away” of civil society often entails the creation of a simulation of society, such as the media, which simulates society without its conflicts. This historicization of the concept, as well as a specific mention of Hegel, is absent from Commonwealth.)

What is most striking, however, in this contrast between Hegel, Hardt, and Negri is the presence of this logical, or conceptual structure, that of the dialectic itself in the former. Hardt and Negri’s presentation of the corruption of the common contains many insights, but there is no real articulation of the relation between these three different sites. The family is presented as the primary institution in society for mobilizing the common as the sole paradigm for relationships of intimacy and solidarity. The family corrupts the common in limiting it, isolating it to what is essentially an extended narcissism: my family as a projection of myself. The corporation is then presented as a massive corruption of cooperation: it is the primary experience most of us have of cooperation, but it is cooperation subordinated to a false unity, that of the corporation as our common interest. Finally, the nation remains the “only community imaginable,” the only common basis for politics.

These remarks are interesting, and I share their fundamental idea that the task of any committed political philosophy is thinking the social relations, collectivity, or the common beyond the ossified structures of family, corporation, and nation. However, the contrast with Hegel demonstrates that it is not enough to posit each of these as institutions as corruptions of the common, it is necessary to grasp the relations between them. Hegel presents family, civil society, and the state not just as different corruptions of the common, but as a dialectical progression, defined by their relations, by contradiction and negation.

In Empire Hardt and Negri argued that various fundamentalisms, returns to family, religion, and the state, are themselves made possible by the abstractions and connections of capital. Which is to say that corruptions of one form of the common produce a kind of fetishization of other forms of the common: globalization produces a return to the family. In my view Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, and the conceptual apparatus of deterritorializarion and reterritorialization remains a crucial and even exemplary way to think about these odd anachronisms of the present, but this would take us too far off topic.

I am not arguing for a return to the dialectic, the reference to Deleuze and Guattari should make that clear, but for at least a conceptualization of the relation between the different corruptions of the common. Finally, and I am aware that this heresy, it is worth asking the question as to what extent Hegel’s ethical life (Sittlichkeit) can be reconsidered as a kind of figure of the common, or, if at least not the common, then transindividuality. I take it as foundational that any new politics capable of countering capitalisms subordination of social relations to the imaginary atoms of individuals and the axioms of accumulation will require a new understanding of social relations, if not relations in general. It is also true that the language and concepts to develop this are sorely lacking. Philosophy has been dominated by the spontaneous ontology of individualism, and to what extent the common appears it appears in its corrupt form as family, nation, and corporation. In other words, philosophy has been dominated by ideology. Developing these concepts may require a rereading of the history of philosophy. Perhaps it is time to stop being so afraid of Hegel.

Archaisms with a Current Function

Daniel J. Martinez’s 2006 billboard for LAXART, with quote from Horkheimer & Adorno’s 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment

It would seem that the only thing that links Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus are a few superficial and extraneous factors; namely, that they are two collectively authored books, and are works that continue to circulate in the same circles of often cited “theorists.” It is difficult to say more beyond such superficial connections, the walls that separate Critical Theory from post-structuralism are just too high and too thick to allow any exploration of the points of intersection between these two works. At least I do not know of any essay or book which has addressed them both, with the exception of general surveys of twentieth century philosophy or theory. To remedy this situation I would like to sketch out something of their possible points of intersection.


Most immediately there are certain formal connections at the level of what could be called “Theory.” I realize that the term “Theory” is a best a misnomer and at worse a pejorative term, referring to the marginalization of certain types of philosophy, but I am following Jameson’s remarks about theory as general problematization of representation, of language and concept, that breaks down the borders between philosophy and literature. Both of the works in question engage in some very provocative readings, even misreadings, in which concepts and narratives switch places: The Odyssey and Kafka’s "Penal Colony" are read for theories of modernity and power, while the works of Marx and Nietzsche are read in such a way that their narratives and metaphors are as important as their concepts. This is not unique to these works, but it bears notice if only because such modes of writing are often explicated and commented upon, but almost never duplicated. They are more often than not treated as raw material, for conferences and dissertations, rather than models or even tools.

Beyond this formal similarity, a similarity that must be qualified by the difference of theoretical perspectives, there is a shared narrative, even content. Both texts critique the present “anthropologically” or “anthropogenetically,” focusing on society not just as a political system or economic order, but as a formation of subjectivity. The term “anthropology” or “philosophical anthropology” is actively embraced by Horkheimer and Adorno, but perhaps seems out of place with respect to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of desiring machines and bodies without organs. However, the recent revival of a kind of “philosophical anthropology” in the works of Paolo Virno and Bernard Stiegler, in which the emphasis is less on some putative human “nature” than on the relations and processes constitutive of humanity, makes it possible to see the way in which Deleuze and Guattari’s text is concerned with the reproduction and transformation of the human, through multiple codings of desire.

Their respective philosophical anthropology’s are framed by the imposing figures of Nietzsche and Marx. The synthesis of Nietzsche and Marx, if such a thing is possible, is not just a matter of two imposing names, but of two theses. In these texts, Nietzsche stands in for an originary and inescapable cruelty, a violence at the origin of things that never dissipates but only mutates. The Genealogy of Morals is the central text of reference.“The great book of modern ethnology is not so much Mauss’s The Gift as Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals.” While the reference to Marx is twofold: first, there is the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts, who wrote of man’s metabolic nature, as nature transforming itself; and, second, there is the general Marxist idea that everything must be historicized, that conflict has to be related back to the mode of production. These two anthropologies conflict: the first sees conflict as primary and irreducible, while the second sees unity as primary, conflict must be historicized. This is a general picture, but one that fits the texts in question. In their quasi-popular reception Nietzsche and Marx could be considered our Hobbes and Rousseau, the first insisting on a war of conflicting wills while the latter holds out the possibility of some kind of cooperation. The writers involved refuse this moralizing reading, but do not refuse the general problem. The idea of a human nature is neither rejected nor embraced, but problematized.

For Horkheimer and Adorno the relation between cruelty and nature, a relation that frames their particular (negative) dialectic forms the modern subject. The overcoming of myth and nature, that defines enlightenment, leads to an overcoming of, and destruction of the nature internal to mankind. The central figure of this narrative is Odysseus who can only escape the horrors of the ancient world by sacrificing himself and calculating. “The lone voyager armed with cunning is already homo economicus, who all reasonable people will one day resemble.” For Deleuze and Guattari the passage into the modern world is less the narrative of a subject, than the formation of subjectivity altogether. Desire, or desiring production, is at first directly political, it is only through capital that desire becomes a private affair. The transition is one from Oedipus, the Greek figure whose desire is immediately public, to the Oedipus complex, desire becomes a private affair and transgression becomes banal. Each text is characterized by odd anachronisms, by a history of the bourgeois subject that begins with Homer, or a genealogy of the state that begins with Ur. In each case there is a similar basic intuition, that the present can only be grasped by seeing the archaic within it. This intuition stems from Marx’s fundamental observation underlying “commodity fetishism,” the mists of the ancient world cast more light on the present than its contemporary texts and debates.

Where they differ is in how they understand the dynamic underlying this history. For Horkheimer and Adorno it is very much a dialectic of enlightenment, a history of reason becoming its other, becoming myth and domination. (I have always viewed this critique of reason as something of a wrong turn, not because I believe in the intrinsically liberating dimension of reason, but because as a materialist I do not believe in “Reason,” as something transcendent and unified. There are only specific rationalities, situated within specific practices. The reason of homo economicus is not reason tout court, as much as it would try to present itself that way.). Deleuze and Guattari provide a history of desire, or, more accurately, desiring production. This term leads to a great deal of confusion and many misreadings that cannot be dispelled here. Desiring production is always assembled, always structured, while simultaneously in excess of the structure. It is what structures the various idols and fetishes, while undermining them. The difference between these two understanding is that the former constitutes a kind of iron cage, in which there is no escape, while the later sees society as constituted by what escapes it. What is less obvious is the way in which this difference has to do with the way in which the latter concept is formulated through an expansion of labor. “Desire is part of the infrastructure.” This expansion is in part made possible by Horkheimer and Adorno’s insights. If culture is indeed an industry, then it must be examined not just according to its standardization and manipulation of its audience, but according to the labor and desire that sustains it. (Which is not to suggest that Deleuze and Guattari have read their work, but have followed the fundamental idea that capital has seized not just industrial production but cultural production as well.)

I not entirely sure where I am going with all of this, my point is not to argue that these two books are THE SAME, by any means, merely that they are more similar than their epigones would admit. I suppose that could be my purpose, to break down the labels and camps that present every text to us as something already categorized, and already read. Second, I would also like to applaud the sheer inventiveness of these texts, their attempt to create new concepts, and new connections. It is clear that such inventiveness is out of sync with contemporary scholarly production. Remove the names and send either one of these books to a publisher, and the rejection notices would come rolling in. Of course there is always room for one more commentary, one more introduction, to these books. If I had a final point to end on, it would be where I began, in praise of such inventiveness.