Work Like It is 1999: A Year of the Refusal of Work in Film

On first glance nothing much connects American Beauty, Fight Club, and Office Space except the fact that they came out in the same year, 1999. They are distinct in terms of their genres, middle brow prestige picture, pseudo underground action thriller, and comedy, and their reception; the first was a critically lauded Oscar winner, the second a critically reviled cult film, while the third found its audience through repeat viewings on cable, making it a more passive sort of cult film. Despite these differences of genre and audience they are linked in that all films about the refusal of work. 

Beyond Enslavement and Subjection: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari

Paper Presented at the above conference. 

Since publication plans have fallen through 

I am posting a draft of it here

One of the minor theoretical interventions of A Thousand Plateaus, minor because it seems to retrace and recapitulate arguments made by others, is the distinction between social subjection and machinic enslavement. As Deleuze and Guattari write,

There is enslavement when human beings themselves are constituent pieces of a machine that they compose among themselves and with other things (animal, tools), under the control and direction of a higher unity. But there is subjection when the higher unity constitutes the human being as a subject linked to a new exterior object, which can be an animal, a tool, or even a machine. [1]

This distinction is made in the plateau titled “Apparatus of Capture”, and it is subordinated to the larger focus of articulating the relation between the state and market. It makes up no more than two pages, and in many senses seems to borrow from its general theoretical milieu of the sixties and seventies. Machinic enslavement would seem to carry with it the entire history of alienation of dehumanization that makes the individual part of the machine. Social subjection bares traces of Althusser’s famous declaration that “ideology interpellates individuals as subjects,” or of the general “critique of the subject” developed through Althusser and Foucault. Its only innovation, the only point that goes beyond a general citation of concepts that are the general background of Deleuze and Guattari’s particular conceptual innovations, is in presenting these concepts less as theoretical alternatives, pitting humanism against post-humanism, than as different aspects of the same machine, the same apparatus of capture. That is perhaps not the only philosophical innovation and transformation, the distinction between enslavement and subjection carries with it a larger series of references, not just the immediate precursors of Althusser and Foucault but more distant antecedents of Marx and Gilbert Simondon, but its implications exceed the distinction between part and whole to encompass not only the already mentioned division between the state and market, but also the intersection between technology and politics. Far from being a simple terminological distinction the division between enslavement and subjection opens up a way to think the history of different formations of subjectivity, and the tensions internal to them in their historicity.

Coming Soon: The Politics of Transindividuality

I have not had much time for blogging as of late as I complete the finishing touches, indexing, proofreading, etc., of The Politics of Transindividuality. 

Divisions: Theorizations and Repudiations of the Division of Mental and Manual Labor

If there was a column listing the what is hot and what is not of contemporary Marxism (and why shouldn't there be?), then the division of mental and manual labor would definitely be in the "not" column. There are multiple reasons for this not the least of which is that the division, especially as it was developed into "the separation of execution from conception," was identified with the factories of Taylorism and Fordism. The separation of mental and manual labor was something that our age, an age of "immaterial labor" or "cognitive capitalism" was supposed to have surpassed.

The Production of Belief: From James to Lazzarato (and Back Again)

My approach to William James is necessarily oblique and eccentric. I am not a scholar of James or Pragmatism. My entire approach to James’ The Will to Believe is framed by a reference to it in the work of the post-autonomous thinker Maurizio Lazzarato. While such an approach is perhaps outside of the of James’ scholarship, the emphasis of on the shifting context as different philosophers and different historical moments is perhaps faithful to the spirit if not the letter of James’ writing. From this perspective philosophy is less a Kampfplatz, a particular battlefield between different positions, than a hall of mirrors in which the perspectives shift and change as time progresses. 

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. 

Revolution in Theory/Theorizing Revolution: On Hardt and Negri's Declaration

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Image from Artnet

It is easy to imagine Hardt and Negri's Declaration as something like a revolution in terms of at least the form and content of its publication. In terms of form, it is a self-published text, appearing first on Kindle, then on Jacobin, all of which should be followed by a pamphlet (and no doubt multiple pirated versions on scribd and other sites). Two things can be said about this format. First, it is something of a reversal of the event that was Empire, in which Antonio Negri co-published a book with Harvard Press, bringing autonomia into the mainstream. Over ten years ago it was an event that one of the most notorious figures of the Italian left was publishing with the bastion of academic respectably: now it is a matter of two of the biggest names on the left publishing on their own. However, it is still a publication; as cheap as the 99¢ price is, it is still a price. The ebook/pamphlet is copyrighted. That it is a work arguing for the common appears under the rules of private property is a point that has already generated some criticism. This transformation of format is matched at the level of content, Declaration opens with a declaration that it is not a manifesto. Once again, this is a point of distinction with Empire, which was hailed or lambasted as the new "communist manifesto." The difference here is not one of analysis, but of the changing social and political terrain. As Hardt and Negri write, "Today’s social movements have reversed the order, making manifestos and prophets obsolete." Declaration reflects, albeit in a somewhat distorted way, some of the shifts in theoretical production provoked by the series of struggles from Arab Spring to OWS, namely the shift from books to websites and pamphlets.

Starting from Year Zero: Occupy Wall Street and the Transformations of the Socio-Political

Day and Night, by Occuprint

To consider what Occupy Wall Street has to do with philosophy, to Occupy Philosophy, is already to depart from one of the longstanding dictums of the relationship between philosophy and political invents. I am thinking of Hegel, who as much as he argued that philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought, also famously argued that philosophy can only comprehend its own time retrospectively, can only paint grey on grey once the ink has dried. Occupy, or OWS to use a preferred moniker, preferred not because it ties the movement to the hashtag, making it one of the many instances of the supposed twitter revolutions, but because it abstracts the movement from a specific place making it a general political transformation and not a specific occupation, is very much an active movement. Any statement about it, about its ultimate meaning, possibility, or limitations, must confront the fact that it is still in the process of shaping and forming.

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

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

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

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

Generation and Corruption of Subjectivity: Dialectic and Anti-Dialectic in Balibar and Lazzarato

Several months ago, I wrote that I was struck by the fact that three different corruptions of the common offered by Commonwealth, family, corporation, and the state, are the three different institutions/concepts of civil society in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The same figures are repeated, but the massive, some would say overpowering, dialectical structure is missing.

Thus I was struck again to find something of a similar return, only more explicit, in Etienne Balibar’s Violence et Civilité*. Balibar considers Hegel’s Philosophy of Right under the general rubric of civility, the third of his three concepts of politics, after emancipation and transformation, and the one most explicitly concerned with the problem of violence and anti-violence. (All translations here are mine)

“…The idea that is at the heart of the problematic of Sittlichkeit is that of a dialectic of deconstruction and reconstruction of belonging, which profoundly defines a certain modality of political subjectivation: from this point of view, the life and liberty of the individual consists in what is effectively a permanent play between two poles which cannot be abstractly opposed to each other and which also provide an immediately transindividual character to self-consciousness, making the constitution of the “self” a function of its relation to the other”

For Balibar, family, civil society, and the state are as much particular modalities of subjectivation, particular articulations of the transindividual, as they are institutions. Balibar’s reading of Hegel is not without its critiques and reservations. These reservations take on a historical, almost empirical, dimension. As Balibar argues Hegel underestimated the violence contained in civil society, a violence that requires an equally violent, or excessive, nationalism in order to hold it in check. There are thus echoes of Balibar’s claim that Marx should be understood as an active incompletion of Hegel’s politics, interrupting the smooth transition from the particular to the universal with the violence of class struggle. This violence cannot be subsumed, or converted, by any philosophy of history: it is not history advancing by its bad side.

“The reading of Capital, coming after the Hegelian philosophy of history, appears thus as an immense demonstration of the fact that much of the violence at work in history has been ignored, or denied by Hegel, as by all of the representatives of the ideology of progress, despite their dialectical ambitions.”

The dialectic is simultaneously affirmed and denied: one divides into two. It is affirmed as a transindividual constitution of subjectivity, as the generation and corruption and subjectivity, without telos or end. It is criticized, however, as a matrix for the interpretation of history, one that subsumes all violence into the order of history. There is no passage from the conflict of particularity to the universality of the state, just the constant interplay between citizen and bourgeois, “man without qualities” and “man of qualities.” Balibar’s reference here is to Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” suggesting that the bourgeois, civil society, is not the truth of the state, but one pole of identity that is torn between quality and universality, civil society and state. (This is similar to Jameson’s recent book)

What is striking, beyond the revival of the Philosophy of Right, a revival that is somewhat different than the much touted philosophy of recognition, is the way that this general formula, the destruction and generation of subjectivation, also makes its appearance in philosophies which are explicitly anti-dialectical, namely Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. This tendency is taken to its extreme in Maurizio Lazzarato’s Expérimentations Politiques. As Lazzarato writes, drawing from Guattari and Duchamp:

“It is in order to activate and put to work this creative potentiality that [Félix] Guattari makes an appeal to artistic techniques insofar as they are techniques of “rupture” and “suture,” of desubjectivation and subjectivation, abandoning of roles and functions that we are assigned, and seizing new realities and subjectivities. What in the turn towards these techniques is useful for the process of subjectivation in general? In the traditional workers movement, the rupture was overdetermined by a dualism (worker/capitalist) which delimited its possibilities. It acted as a totalizing and predetermined break, the outlines of which were, in a certain fashion, already traced. History has been the history of class struggle since the very beginning, and it would be abolished by the same class struggle. The question of suture (of organization, of the composition/constitution) would follow from this rupture. It would already be traced, since class struggle not only defined the conditions of rupture, but also the conditions of composition, of its evolution and development, the passage from class in itself to class for itself, to resume the terms of its original formulation. In contemporary capitalism, alongside the dualistic divisions, it produces fractal and differential ruptures, which are open to partial liberties and subjectivations that are not predetermined by any “structures.” Artistic practices can thus aid in seizing the unpredictable developments of these ruptures and works through always partial compositions.”

There is much of Lazzarato’s book that I like: the emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of the constitution of subjectivity, in which aesthetic is as the general transformation of sensibility and perception (hence the importance of Duchamp). However, in this latest book, as in the earlier Les Révolutions du Capitalisme, Lazzarato takes as a polemical opponent a Marxism, and a dialectic, that almost no one actually believes in. It is a strawman, and it definitely lacks a brain. It is governed by the stark oppositions between subject/object and worker/capital, oppositions which always overdetermine the sheer plurality of existence.

My intent here is not to make Hegel inescapable once again, to show that he has anticipated and answered all objections in advance. I want to simply propose that “subjectivation” and “desubjectivation” are not the outside of Hegel’s thought. More to the point, I would like to argue for nuance in relation to dialectical thought, to put an end to categorical opposition to THE dialectic, which is only ever a caricature, produced ironically by those who claim to espouse philosophies of difference. It is also to argue for a materialist dialectic in multiple senses. As Balibar argues, Marx’s interruption of the Hegelian dialectic is less about dualism or teleology than it is about contesting the smooth transition from civil society to the universality of the state. Which is not to dismiss the materialist dimension of Lazzarato’s critique, of the emphasis on the constitution of subjectivity through sensibility, belief, and desire. Hegel’s description of the family and the state encompasses some of this, but it must be liberated from its progress and telos, to encompass the multiple intersections of structures, subjectivations, and contradictions.

*= Violence et Civilité is largely made up of Balibar's Wellek library lectures, the same series that Judith Butler gave her lectures on Antigone and Jameson gave his lectures that became The Seeds of Time. Balibar's lectures were recently published in French, but have yet to appear in the series by Columbia University that has published past lectures.

We Are All Neoliberals

This is something of a follow up to a previous post. It is actually awkwardly framed between reflections on “the current crisis” and some attempt to compile some notes on the work of Maurizio Lazzarato. In many ways the political terrain has changed; it is no longer true that there are no popular protests to the current capitalist crisis and the government response to it. There are the infamous Tea Parties, but these are not protests against capital, against profits, exploitation, and corporate power, but against government, against taxes, and “socialism.” Of course their status as actual political protests can be disputed, they have more of the status of simulated protests, advertised and televised. It is a perfect example of that all too clever neologism “astro-turf,” an artificial or simulated grassroots organization.

I do not want to discuss these protests here, but merely entertain a hypothesis. The current economic crisis is not only a crisis of neoliberalism but in neoliberalism as well. The first part of the statement should be fairly clear. As I stated earlier, it is a crisis of the idea of the market as a self-regulating system, capable of not only governing over itself but of all other areas of social life. This first aspect, this crisis of neoliberalism, is seriously complicated by it being a crisis in neoliberalism. By “in” neoliberalism I mean that this crisis takes place within a terrain in which the dominant common sense is shaped by neoliberalism.

In order to clarify what this means I take as a starting point a remark by Maurizio Lazzarato in Les gouvernement des inégalités: critique de l’insécurité néolibérale. Lazzarato argues, following Foucault, that neoliberalism has as a fundamental project a polarization of power and wealth that simultaneously seeks to neutralize the antagonisms that such a polarization risks producing. As Lazzarato points out, it does this through a disintegration of the social: health insurance is replaced by individual savings accounts and social security by individual investment accounts. Against everything that would produce a common problem and a common solution, neoliberal “social” programs reduce to individual solutions, solutions that demand different, which is to say unequal, results. On this point Lazzarato is repeating a refrain that can be found in Brown and Foucault.

Although it is worth pointing out that Lazzarato critiques the latter (and is most likely unaware of the former) for failing to adequately consider the role of “financialization” in the formation of neoliberalism. Lazzarato thinks that financialization should be considered not just as an economic strategy, as a mode of generating wealth, but as a political strategy as well, a transformation of subjectivity. Most importantly it is a manner of shifting the understanding of risk. He argues that Fordist policies of social security (in France) were legitimated by the asymmetry of power between employer and employee implied in every labor contract. It was compensation for subordination in the labor process. There was an understanding of an asymmetry of risk. Financialization transforms this social risk to an individual risk. It is no longer the risk of a class, but of the individual conceived no longer as a member of a class, defined by wages or profits, but the general figure of investment. Lazzarato then turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of money, specifically the way in which the asymmetry of the two flows of money, payment and credit, are effaced by the same object, by money.

(Lazzarato’s turn to the discussion of money in Anti-Oedipus is interesting for two reasons, reasons that are somewhat peripheral to my discussion here. First, it represents a more nuanced engagement with Marx than Lazzarato suggested in Les Révolutions du capitalisme. Not that Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of finance capital is doctrinaire, but that is precisely the point; in Révolutions Lazzarato reduced Marx to a caricature of doctrine. Second, it turns attention to an important and overlooked dimension of Deleuze and Guattari, the theory of finance, which is important for a critique of neoliberalism.)

At the core of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of money is that idea that money reduces the qualitative difference between wages and surplus value, or profit, represented by the equations C-M-C and M-C-M, to a simple quantitative difference. The only thing that separates the wage earner and the capitalist is a certain quantity of money, with a few dollars more my savings could become an investment. Financialization continues this trend by transforming the minimal elements of social welfare, pensions, health care, and social security, all which are the products of social struggles, into individual investments.

All of this culminates in “human capital” the term of the complete effacement of the difference between wage and surplus value, worker and capitalist. In another essay, Lazzarato cites a remark from Deleuze and Guattari in which capital is defined as a “point of subjectivation that constitutes all human beings as subjects; but some, the ‘capitalists’, are subjects of enunciation […], while others, the ‘proletarians’, are subjects of the statement, subjected to the technical machines.” Capitalist and worker are differentiated according the one who speaks and the one who is spoken. (I must admit that I have never really been interested in this distinction, I much more interested in the second point) human capital combines these two aspects, making everyone capitalist and worker.

“The transformation of a salaried employee into “human capital”, into an entrepreneur of her/himself, a transformation facilitated by contemporary management techniques, represents the fulfilment of the process of subjectivation and exploitation, since in this case it is the same individual who splits in two. On the one hand, the individual brings the subjectivation process to its pinnacle, because in all these activities s/he involves the “immaterial” and “cognitive” resources of her/his “self”, while on the other, s/he inclines towards identification, subjectivation and exploitation, given that s/he is both her/his own master and slave, a capitalist and a proletarian, the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement.”

What does all of this have to do with protest or lack of protest in the current crisis? Up to this point much of the protest against the crisis of capital has been entirely within neoliberalism, framed entirely in terms of individual cost and responsibility. The bailouts have been criticized in terms that are entirely consistent with neoliberalism, as an improper response to a risk assumed, or an improper use of task money, understood as “our” money. As much as there have been positive effects to this criticism, as the excessive bonuses of Wall Street have come to light, bonuses that show themselves to be entirely disconnected from any moral justification of productivity (that old capitalist standby), this criticism has remained within the terrain of neoliberalism. Popular outrage has been able to swing easily from the cost of banker’s office renovations to autoworker’s health care, both of which are seen as an excessive public cost or a failure to assume individual risk. What is missing is not only some understanding of class, the difference between a banker and an autoworker, but the very idea of the social or collective goods. Everything becomes a profit, some gain on an individual risk.

Now is the time to invent

Every philosophical library, public or private, has to deal with the unstable division between “primary” and “secondary” literature. At what point does a book on Nietzsche for example cease to be a book on Nietzsche and become a philosophical work in its own right; are Heidegger’s four volumes on Nietzsche Nietzsche books or books to be shelved with the rest of Heidegger? How about Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche?

This is not really the question that I want to ask, but it does occur to me as I sit down to write some reflections on Maurizio Lazzarato’s Puissance de l’invention: La psychologie économique de Gabriel Tarde contre l’économie politique. This book could arguably be considered a secondary source, a work on Tarde, and in some sense it is. However, that is not how I initially approached it. I read it because I was interested by Lazzarato’s work, specifically Les revolutions de capitalisme, and not so much because of an interest in Tarde, of whom I have read very little. (In fact I read the book in part to figure out if I should be really interested in Tarde, if it is worth the commitment of time to slog through the many long books that Tarde wrote).


The book definitely stands on its own in part because of its thorough consideration of Tarde’s work, but also due to the fact that it is situated within the contemporary debates: Tarde is examined alongside Deleuze, Guattari, Rancière, Foucault, Arendt, and Negri, not to mention Marx. As the title suggests, of all these names Marx is the central focus, given that the work positions Tarde’s conception of “economic psychology” against “political economy.” I have to say that some of the criticisms of Marx are the weakest part of the book. As is so often the case with criticism of “Marxism,” it is often unclear who (or what period of Marx’s writing) is being referred to when the standard ideas of so-called Marxism are trotted out: superstructure a mere reflection of base, labor as primarily industrial labor, and so on. These are arguably tendencies within Marxism, and it would be foolish to deny that they exist, but they are only tendencies, which are always countered by counter-tendencies. Lazzarato, who traveled in circles with Negri and Virno, should know better than to reduce Marxism to such tendencies.

However, Lazzarato argues that Tarde’s target is not just Marxist political economy but Marxist and classical political economy. Specifically he is targeting their specific psychologies, or theories of subjectivity. Classical (or bourgeois political economy) posits the subject as a bearer of pleasure or pain, happiness or sadness. These affects which provide the backdrop for the calculations of cost and benefit are irreducibly individual, unaffected by any relations with others, by collective or social evaluations. (This what some in the economics business call the myth of the rational consumer, the idea that there are only individual choices animated by pleasure and pain underlying the economy, that everyone really likes those stupid “crocs”). While Marx introduces a social and collective dimension to economics, this dimension is primarily seen as defined by labor, by abstract labor that has been rendered interchangeable. Aside from the few remarks on cooperation labor does not really interact with anything other than capital, the social dimension is subordinated to a dialectic of struggle. On the one side, there is a subject of pleasure and pain that can only be conceived as an atom of society, and on the other, there is a social relation founded primarily on labor.

What is missing from both of these accounts is what Tarde calls the relation between minds, or the cooperation of “brains” [cerveaux]. What Tarde is referring to, according to Lazzarato, is the myriad way that thinking, believing, and desiring is defined by the capacity to affect and be affected: habits, beliefs, ideas, and desires are defined by a fundamental instability and contagion in which thoughts determine thoughts. Ultimately, and this gets us to what is meant by the idea of economic psychology, Lazzarato argues that these relations between minds are fundamental to any economy. This is true of production; every labor process is ultimately a set of habits that must be communicated and shared. In a similar sense, the economy of goods depends on an economy of desires and beliefs without which the former would not function. Notwithstanding the polemics against Marxism here, there is a lot to this idea of examining the circulation of ideas and habits that underlie the economy, society, and politics. Lazzarato’s argument is strengthened by the fact that he distances himself here from any sort of epochal argument in which the economy is now at this moment an economy of habits, desires, etc. (Although it should be noted that Lazzarato does follow Tarde on another epochal division, that which divides a premodern society of custom, stable and conservative, from a modern society of ever changing and circulating habits, caught in relations of flux. And if I wanted to extend this parenthesis, to the point where it should be its own paragraph or post, I would say that Lazzarato’s Les Révolutions du Capitalisme does pursue a more epochal argument, linking Tarde’s idea of the relation between minds, and the technologies that make action at a distance possible, with Deleuze’s concept of control).

While Lazzarato’s invocation of Tarde’s theory of subjectivity opens up an interesting “micro-political” terrain of habits and desires, the more he discusses hiss theory the more it seems to pivot around an impasse of sorts. Lazzarato stresses that at the basis of Tarde’s psychology is difference, sensations, memories, and habits are articulated based on difference. Case in point, two of the fundamental categories of Tarde’s theory are imitation, the process by which a habit, belief, or desire is passed between minds, and invention, the creation of the new. Lazzarato stresses that these are each relations of difference: imitation is the repetition of the same habit in new conditions and invention is the creation of a different way of acting or thinking. The point, as Lazzarato sees it is to bridge the gap between imitation and invention. Imitation is more inventive than it would first appear, since it must recreate the old in new situations, and invention is nothing more than the transformation of certain undiscovered potentialities in what already exists. What appears to be radically new is dependent on small scale differences and transformations.

It is around these points that we see Lazzarato circle around a point that is both unavoidable and all too familiar: subjectivity must be thought as simultaneously conditioned and irreducible to its conditions, as constrained and free. This point shows up repeatedly in contemporary theory under various names: enabling constraints, iterability, power/resistance, deterritorialization/reterritorialization, etc. Its ubiquity may be due to fact that it is true, it is perhaps a fact of life that we are passive and active. At the same time, however, it appears to be a dead end of thought, a fact that can be asserted and renamed, couched in new philosophical language, that of power, habit, language, affects, etc., but never really elucidated. I wonder if it can be elucidated, at least theoretically. To go beyond this fact, one needs a concrete instance, a specific site, someway of moving beyond abstract possibility, the capacity to affect and be affected, to the concrete ways in which this particular capacity has been realized.

Despite these limits, I am now tempted to read some Tarde. Just what I need, another French guy to read up on, which will soon have me spending lots of money on alapage and lots of time that I should be doing other things.

Animal Spirits

Image from Hugo Gellert "Karl Marx's Capital in Lithographs"

For brevity’s sake, I am not going to go through the myriad problems and paradoxes of that strange thing called “Marxist Philosophy”: the interminable debate of “interpreting” versus “changing” the world. However, as a short introduction to what I want to discuss, I will say that one way to understand the relation between Marx and philosophy is as a series of both provocations and critiques. What Etienne Balibar, in The Philosophy of Marx, called simultaneously “falling short of” and “going beyond philosophy”; the first takes the form of fragments of philosophical speculation, often presented as conclusions without premises, and the later takes the form of a critique of philosophy’s claim to autonomy. It is the first of these that I would like to focus on.

The unstated center of Marx’s thought is a thought of social existence, of community, that is something more than, or other than, a collection of individuals. Without this, the critique of the egocentric rights of man;” of the Robinsonades of political economy; and of the illusions of “Freedom, equality. and Bentham” that make up the spontaneous ideology of the market would not make any sense. Or, more fundamentally, without this communism would be the empty utopia that its critics accuse it of being.

However, when it comes to theorizing the grounds of this community though some understanding of social existence, Marx often falls short. At times Marx asserts it as a fact, without giving the ground of this fact, as in the following passage from Capital.

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

This passage, and the entire section on cooperation, is important for at least two reasons. First, within the logic of Capital, it precedes the sections on “The Working Day,” thus illustrating the struggle and antagonism that animates and transforms the capitalist mode of production. Second, the reference to Gattungsvermögen, species capacity, suggests another way of reading the relation of the young Marx to the old Marx. It offers a way of thinking species being, not as some metaphysical notion of the essence of man, but as part of a social ontology, as the historically existing capacity and powers of social relations. Despite this provocation, there is also the strange indifference to the ultimate conditions of this increased value of cooperation: it could be the effect of the uniformity imposed by the machine, animal spirits, or whatever.

So, one of the philosophical tasks left in the wake of Marx, an answer to a question posed but not answered, would be to theorize cooperation itself. This is not to be confused with the altruism that moralists and evolutionary psychologist concern themselves with; cooperation, and the sociality it implies, is not a moral category but simply the effects that individual actions have on each other.

Maurizio Lazzarato and Paolo Virno are two thinkers who have tried to create the theory of sociality or cooperation that Marxism, or at least the critique of capital, needs. In the case of Lazzarato this takes the form of a lengthy engagement with Gabriel Tarde. For Lazzarato, the center of Tarde’s thought is precisely what Marx passes over with indifference in the passage above: the intercerebral relations (I could not think of better translation), the relations and effects that different thoughts and habits have on each other. These relations are not just at work on the factory floor, but they permeate all of the economy; consumption, production, and even financial speculation all require the spread of opinion and beliefs, which is why Lazzarato argues that such relations determine the “economy” (in a restricted sense) rather than vice versa. The title of his book on Tarde (which I am halfway through) is, after all, Puissance de l’invention: la psychologie économique de Gabriel Tarde contre l’économie politique. In a similar way, Virno examines Simondon’s notion of transindividuality to examine the manner in which subjectivity is constitutive of and constituted by habits, languages, and knowledges that exceed it. Simondon offers the grounds for understanding what Marx referred to as the “social individual.”

In the case of both Virno and Lazzarato the examination of what could be called, for lack of a better world, sociality, is tied up with arguments regarding the “general intellect” and the epochal transition from material to immaterial labor. However, and this is why I began the post with the passage on cooperation, as well as the general point about Marxist philosophy, there is also the sense that Marxism, or at least materialism, requires an anti- or non-individualistic account of social relations. Virno’s analysis of Simondon (in various articles and interviews) is as much about a general ontology of social relations as it is about a new mode of production. This is even more the case with Lazzarato’s sudy of Tarde; especially since Tarde already claimed, in the early part of the twentieth century, that political economy failed to grasp the relation between thoughts, habits, and beliefs that make anything like an economy possible. So it is as much of a matter of grasping the past as the present or future of capital.

I do not have a real focused conclusion to this post; it does seem to me that this task of thinking social relations beyond the category of the individual is crucial to understanding the past, present, and future. The effect of thoughts on thoughts, habits on habits, beliefs on beliefs, is a terrain that is in need of conceptualization. This may not be something that can be extracted from Capital, but it is very much a philosophy that the later requires. A philosophy for Marxism rather than a Marxist philosophy, to use Althusser's distinction.

Commodity Corner Part II: Welcome to the Food Court

The university where I work recently redesigned its main dinning commons. The design includes a new café called "The Bleecker St. Cafe." This continues to amuse me. I do not know precisely what is supposed to make a little kiosk selling sandwiches, coffee, and juice in New England reminiscent of Greenwich village. Is it the hummus?

I have given the place the slogan: "Urban dining in a safe food court atmosphere."

This has got me thinking about immaterial labor. Which Lazzarato defines as follows:

"The concept of immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of labor. On the one hand, as regards the “informational content” of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labor processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication). On the other hand, as regards the activity that produces the “cultural content” of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as “work”—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and more strategically, public opinion."

Now, I am interested in this idea of the hegemony of immaterial labor; that is, I think it makes it possible to grasp many of the economic and cultural transformations of capital. While I think it is true that commodities have become inseparable from their cultural content, and to some extent the "Bleecker St. Café" testifies to this, otherwise it would just be labeled "Food court," it also reveals how absolutely ineffective and laughable some of this cultural work actually is. It is not just a matter of this particular food court, we are surrounded by poorly named and designed commodities: housing developments with names like "Whispering Pines," which can only refer to the trees that were destroyed to make way for the houses, and food courts with nautical themes in landlocked states.

So my question is where does this leave us: in the realm of the spectacle, where signs are completely separated from what they signify, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa is just something on the menu. Or does the gap between the commodity and its image make possible something, some critical strategy, other than inexhaustable and insufferable irony?

In the name of full disclosure I should mention that I eat at the Bleecker St. Café quite a lot, at least whenever I forget to pack my lunch. I recommend the hummus/feta sandwich with the chips, you gotta get the chips. It beats the veggie burgers I used to eat at the old generic dining commons.

Help Wanted: Fragments of a Theory of the Missing Worker

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

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

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

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

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

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