Rewiring Genre: On Linda Williams' On The Wire

Like many fans of The Wire I have a fantasy of re-watching the entire series from beginning until the end. It is something that I will do someday, once I can clear my schedule enough for multiple nights on end of three hours plus of watching. Until then reading something like Linda Williams’ On The Wire is perhaps the next best thing. It makes it possible to revisit the series without revisiting the trials and tribulations of binge watching.

"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!": Breaking Bad as Austerity Allegory

What follows should perhaps have the subtitle "Scattered Speculations on Breaking Bad" because it started as a post a few episodes into the final run and was finished after the penultimate episode. Edits were made along the way, but it is less a coherent essay taking into consideration the entire narrative arc of the last season than it is a series of observations as it unfolds. It is a bit long, and, if you have not seen the last season, spoiler alert.

We are all Neoliberals: Dardot and Laval's La Nouvelle Raison du Monde

Neoliberalism has become an increasingly popular word in contemporary critical thought and philosophy. Its popularity has come at a cost, however, as the meaning of the word has been reduced to a few vague inclinations about the truly bad kind of capitalism held together by invocations of competition, markets, and individualism. It has become what Althusser called a descriptive theory at best, and, at worse, a way to speak about capitalism without speaking about capitalism. In the worse case it became the name for a kind of nostalgia for an earlier kinder and gentler capitalism, one that we could get back to as soon as the full impact of the recession was felt and people started really paying attention to Paul Krugman. 

Works and Days: Remarks on the First Season of Treme

Comparisons between Treme and The Wire are inevitable. Unlike Generation Kill, which seems more and more like a side project, Treme has the same sprawling story line, the same focus on an American city, and even some of the same actors as The Wire. 

Everything I Needed to Know About Capitalism I Learned from Watching Television: The Wire and Marx

I decided to post the audio of a talk that I recently gave on The Wire and Marx here:


The talk covers some of the same territory as a few previous blog posts as well as other writings, and was meant for a general audience of undergraduate students. It was meant as a public lecture and not reading of a prepared talk, so for better or worse I am pretty much just working from some notes. I ended up saying less about Marx than the title promised, and more about David Simon and Ed Burns particular critique of capitalism (as well as running some metaphors about chess and checkers into the ground).

The clips that I refer to can be found by following the following links: clip one, clip two, clip three, clip four, clip five, clip six, and clip seven (you can hear them on the audio file).

This is your TV on Drugs

As something of a preliminary observation it is curious that three of the cable networks known for their high end shows (the sort that end up in TV critics list, box sets, and in “Stuff White People Like”) have programs that deal with the “war on drugs”: HBO has The Wire, Showtime has Weeds, and AMC has Breaking Bad. Except these shows aren’t really about the “war on drugs,” at least exclusively; even The Wire, which has the strongest claim for authenticity and spends the most time on the details of the drug trade, ultimately makes drugs something like a refracted lens from which to observe the decline of the American city. In each of these shows the drug trade becomes the equivalent of the monster or alien in old horror movies: the question is what does it signify, what does it stand in for?


One might wonder what is happening culturally and politically for the “war on drugs” to become a metaphor. After all it has not gone away, it still makes money and fills prisons. It has seemed to have faded into the background of cultural consciousness, however, so much so that it can never function as narrative material all on its own, it must stand for something. In some sense genres are constituted by this symbolization, film-noir, the western, the samurai film, or the sci-fi film are all defined by their mythologization of their narrative basis, it is symbolic of something. However, in all those cases the symbolism takes place after the fact, or with respect to an imaginary condition, with the war on drugs we are mythologizing our reality.

I do no plan to write about The Wire here, having done that before, but I should say that The Wire remains for me the gold standard of what can be done with the medium of television. Since The Wire ended last year I have searched in vain for something that might fill its void. To use my own drug metaphor: I have been searching for the television equivalent of methadone. I have tried Rome, Deadwood, Mad Men, Generation Kill, and now Breaking Bad, to varying degrees of success. I have watched some of those until the end and some have trailed off, but I have not written about any, until now.

One of the many ways that The Wire has spoiled me has to do with its particular narrative structure. The Wire eschews the trappings of what passes for depth, the flashbacks and dream sequences that give us privileged access to the interior of a character, in favor of a focus on the institutions that structure an individual’s actions. This institutional perspective is combined with an egalitarian aesthetic in which minor characters will come to the forefront while major characters will fade into the background, at least temporarily. There are no minor characters on The Wire, at least no minor characters who might not become central in a later season. This has left me very impatient with the more conventional structure of a show with its major characters, given depth, and minor characters, defined in terms of stereotypes.

The plot of Breaking Bad is fairly simple: Walter White, a chemistry teacher finds out that he has inoperable lung cancer and goes into the drug business (crystal meth) in order to provide for his families future. (I hear that this basic plot is similar to Weeds, which I have never seen). This basic plot is complicated by the fact that his brother is a high ranking DEA officer, and his business partner Jesse is a failed former student. It is by and large a character study, or two character studies, however, it is less interested in the socio-economic structures of the crystal meth trade than it is on the effect of this trade on the individuals involved. Despite all of this I have found Breaking Bad compelling.

Walter White is played by Bryan Cranston, an actor most famous for his part as the father in Malcolm in the Middle. He has a comic actors talent for slapstick, and in the first season he uses this talent to embody the indignities of contemporary existence. He is an enthusiastic teacher, but his enthusiasm is played to a comic effect in front of an audience of bored students. Money is tight, so after school Walter works at a carwash where he washes some of the same student’s cars. At first his diagnosis, and descent into crime, liberates Walter, he becomes a man between two deaths, as it were. His death sentence has been pronounced, so he is a free man. He uses this freedom to not only embark on a new life as a drug kingpin, but to stand up to the daily indignities of life—quitting his car wash job and standing up to obnoxious jocks and yuppies. It would be wrong, however, to see Walter as a rebel, as someone liberated from all societies norms; his entire criminal enterprise is all about one over-arching masculine ideal, being a good provider. It is one thing to escape the fear of death, a fear that keeps us from taking risks, it is another thing altogether to escape our most internalized ideologies. Walter, the formerly mild mannered chemistry teacher, can face down a drug kingpin, even commit murder, but he cannot stand the idea that his family would take money from others.



This ideal of a provider becomes increasingly pathological in the second season, as Walter destroys his position as father, husband, and teacher in order to make more money. In order to save his family he has to destroy it. [Spoiler Alert] I know that some people are frustrated with the much hyped season finale, as the scenes of destruction that were flash-forwarded to all season proved to be something else than the dramatic showdown with Mexican cartels. However, the real devastation happened a few seconds prior, as Walter proved incapable of recognizing his family’s respect, only seeing the need to make more money. The money starts out as something of an insurance policy, later a way to pay for cancer treatment, in the end it becomes its own end, a pure symbol of masculine power.

There is a way in which Walter's arc is structurally similar to Stringer Bell from The Wire. With Stringer the central narrative was one ascent, a Horatio Algers, by the bootstraps story of one man's attempt to go from drug dealer to real estate investor; accept that it was a dark perversion of this narrative, in which the two, dealer and business man, are shown not to be so different. The drug trade exposes the ruthless calculation that is at the core of capitalism. Walter's story is a story of a fall from respected family man to meth dealer, but the refraction is the same. What the show exposes, or pathologizes, is not so much the ruthless capacity to calculate, but masculinity itself, at least an ideal of masculinity as the provider.

As a final remark I will add that one of the interesting things about the show is that is in many ways a show about knowledge and its limits; chemistry first and foremost, which functions as the shows central metaphor (the composition and decomposition of relations, the storing and release of energy) while simultaneously serving as an actual mode of thought. Walter is ingenious at using chemistry to solve every problem from a dead car battery to a dead body. However, Walter is clueless about how the drug trade works, this is where Jesse his former student comes in. Much of the shows dark humor comes from the bickering conversations between the chemistry teacher and low level drug dealer, each ignorant about the other’s basis of knowledge. Ultimately the show deals with another limit of knowledge, not that of chemistry or the streets, but a fundamental ignorance about oneself. Despite all of his knowledge Walter reacts to everything emotionally, going from despair to rage. To risk a Socratic cliché, he does not seem to know himself, and this, and not the Mexicans or the DEA will be his undoing.

In the past few weeks I have also been reading a lot of Bernard Stiegler's cultural and political criticism of contemporary society. (More on that later) One of the things that he stresses is that modern hyperindustrial society is a society of pulsions, of drives, not desire. Our current media stimulates us to feel anger, humiliation, lust, etc., while destroying any sense of shared values, of the sublimated values necessary for desire. Despite his intelligence, Walter is very much a figure of this regime of affects, he feels a deep sense of anger, humiliation, and, at times, pride, but all of these affects are immediate and unyielding. He is less a character, a person with a history and a place and society, than a collection of affects and drives.

In the end this might explain the centrality of the "war on drugs" as a metaphor for understanding contemporary society. It offers the clearest illustration of need, addiction, and greed, of the market as the source of all our pain and pleasures.

Everyone is Educated




This is not exactly the Bunny Colvin scene from The Wire I was looking for, but it will have to do for now. The scene that I was looking for is where Bunny discusses his impression of the Junior High School. Against the common impression that the kids are not learning, Bunny responds that the kids are learning just not in the way that the teachers imagine. The kids are learning lessons that are relevant to their world, to the world of hoppers and corners; they are learning how to negotiate the world of rules and authority, to get away with stuff, before breaking those rules have any real consequences. As Bunny makes clear, in the scene I am thinking of, as well as the scene above, the kids are always learning, but what they learn and how reflects previous lessons. Education always already begins before the school bell rings. The educator must be educated.

It is admittedly quite a leap from the inner city school depicted in The Wire to my experience at a state university. Despite that difference I found myself thinking of Bunny’s remarks this week. We are in the final weeks of classes, and the final philosopher we are reading in my “intro to political philosophy class” is Paolo Virno. This follows a semester of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, Arendt, and others, all of which sets up Virno: a philosopher that I consider to be offering both an interesting summation of that history and an engaging take on the current conjuncture. Class went well. I reviewed Aristotle, Marx, and Arendt in order to set up Virno’s argument about contemporary labor and its connection with politics. I could tell that they were struggling however, especially with Virno’s idea of “intellect in general,” the diffuse intelligence underlying production.

After the class I had a bunch of students who wanted to talk to me about their final essay. Some had actually questions, but others wanted extensions or wanted to figure out how to get through the essay with as little work as possible. It occurred to me that this is what many students learn in college: how to negotiate the bureaucracy, how to get by, how to brown nose a little, and how to navigate the structures around them. This lesson will probably serve them more than reading any “great mind.” For most students college is bureaucracy 101. This education, the education in how to follow rules, bend rules, and keep up appearances is perhaps what will best serve them as future employees. What I wonder is how they learned to learn this, I suppose that it is the lesson of all education.

The irony of it all is that the very students who were struggling with Virno’s concept of cynicism in theory demonstrated in practice that they understood it all too well.

The Essence of Ideology

The following scene from The Wire is in my estimation brilliant, not just because it reveals the functioning of the drug trade, but more importantly it reveals something essential about capitalist ideology.




As Bodie states, after a lesson on the fundamentally rigid hierarchy that characterizes both the chess board and the drug trade, that a "smart ass pawn" could not only make it through the game but get to be queen. This statement describes his own perspective of his situation: a lowly soldier in the drug war who believes that his intelligence and perseverance will ultimately see him through to the end. This idea, an awareness that the odds are stacked, that most of us wont get rich, coupled with a confidence that the odds do not apply to us, is the the fundamental ideology of capitalism. It is in a sense what Althusser meant when he wrote that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects, as much as we are aware of the historical conditions that define and limit our situation we believe that they do not apply to us, that we transcend them as a kingdom within a kingdom (to cite Spinoza, Althusser's point of reference).

Althusser thought that his applied to all ideology, but it seems to be in many ways specific to capitalist ideology. After all capitalist ideology disentengles power from any specific condition, all those motley ties; one does have to be descended from a particular family, a particular race, or background to have money. The only thing that characterizes the ruling class is money. There is no barrier that keeps us from changing our class position. Thus, we all fantasize that we will one day be rich: as the New York State lottery used to say, "It could happen to you."

Many progressives or leftists are constantly frustrated that the working class fails to vote their interest, supporting tax breaks, like the "death tax," that do not apply to them. I think that this is because they, or we, do not identify with our interests, our specific position, we identify with the fantasy. We are all the "smart ass pawn," the exception, the person who makes it rich, or to take an example closer to home, gets tenure in a job market that increasingly eliminates tenure track jobs for temporary or adjunct work. This makes it very difficult to construct politics that address systematic failures, like that of health insurance or the mortgage industry; most of us believe that such bad things happen only to others.

In case you are wondering how things turn out for Bodie (spoiler alert for those who have not seen Season Four).

Updated 6/30/25 

I have no idea why this post still gets traffic seventeen years later, but it does seem to. Perhaps because of that I did write an updated version which you can find here. 

Follow the Money

What follows are some reflections on the final season of The Wire so Spoiler Alert.

The fifth season of The Wire is best understood as the intersection, maybe even the collision, of two trajectories. The first is the culmination of a theme introduced in the first season, namely money. Money has always been an integral part of the drug investigation on The Wire, but it is also that which expands and disrupts the drug investigation connecting it to the broader world of politicians and corruption. As Lester Freamon stated in the first season, “You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where the fuck it's gonna take you.” The second theme is unique to the fifth season, and constitutes something of a meta-level reflection of the show itself and that is the relation of truth and fiction.

I am not a Marxist, but...

Much of what David Simon says in this lecture I agree with. I was so excited when he said "Capitalism is our God," but then was disappointed to hear him accept capitalism as the only game in town and disavow Marxism. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Perhaps "I am not a Marxist, but..." will become the equivalent of "I am not a feminist, but..."; In each case the analysis of the conditions stands, patriarchy, the destructive aspects of capitalism, etc. but what is disavowed is the subjective identity, the radical position.

Now, I love The Wire as the recent posts on this blog demonstrate, but I think that David Simon could perhaps use some brushing up on his Marxism. The funny thing is that I was standing less than fifty yards from David Simon a few weeks ago. I desperately wanted to talk to him, but I couldn't get close. It is probably for the better, since all I would said was "I love your show."

Follow the Youtube links to get to the rest of the video. Although it gets a little odd, since the final portions are Q and A with the questions edited out.

Stringer Bell's Lament

When I started this blog almost two years ago, one of the many ideas behind it was to have it function as a kind of outlet for my various musings on films and television. I wanted to write about these things, but did not want to contribute to the latest volume of "That's What She Said: Philosophy and Gender in The Office." Today, I have effectively broken that little rule, and have proposed the following for a book on The Wire. Given that this blog is usually the outlet for these thoughts I thought that I would post it here as well.

In The Wire the illegal drug trade function as a sustained allegory of capitalism. It is at once the outside of the world of legitimate business, governed by different rules and principles of loyalty, and the former’s dark mirror, revealing the effects of a relentless pursuit of profit on the community and lives of those caught up in its grip. Nowhere is this tension between “the game,” the drug trade, and the larger game of capital illustrated with greater clarity than in the life and death of Russell “Stringer” Bell. Bell is often presented as the character most enamored of the legitimate world of business, taking economics classes at community college and applying the lessons to the world of the drug trade. Bell is also presented as the character who desires not only wealth, but the legitimacy of the world of legal business. His story functions as a brutal and tragic retelling of the classic Horatio Alger story, a “by the bootstraps” “rags to riches” story in which murder, addiction, and betrayal are as fundamental as hard work and business acumen. It is story that ends tragically as well, while Stringer Bell is able to accumulate money, he is unable to acquire security and legitimacy, he remains caught between the “semi-feudal” loyalties of the drug trade and the ruthless world of capital until the contradictions between the two eventually kill him.

Bell’s trajectory is best understood as a variation of what Marx referred to as “primitive accumulation.” Marx’s chapters in Capital on primitive, or so-called primitive accumulation, make two separate but related arguments. First, Marx counters the account of the formation of capital provided by political economy, an account that is presented as a moral tale dividing the thrifty from the wasteful. It is the original template for all Horatio Alger stories. Second, Marx provides his own historical account of the emergence of capitalism from feudalism, an account in which violence is an indispensable element. What is at stake in Marx’s theory (and in the works of such theorists as Althusser, Deleuze, and Negri that have developed these ideas) is less a matter of distinguishing between a positive or negative account of capitalism, in which capital is seen as either moral or immoral, than of working through the complex intersection of morality, desire, narrative, and violence that is at stake in life under capitalism. Capitalism cannot be separated from its narratives that equate financial worth and moral worth, as much as it continually undermines these narratives in practice.

Bell’s arc over the course of The Wire does not simply function as an illustration of this theory, but pushes it into the present. As the series illustrates as legitimacy in capitalist society is equated with financial success this leads to the devaluing of human life. In order to be valued, one must devalue the lives of others. To quote David Simon, summing up the major lesson of the show, “It’s the triumph of capitalism over human value.”

Mediocrity Rules: Notes from TV Land

Just when I was losing all patience with Battlestar Galactica, the show springs a plot with a general strike. There is nothing like the promise of a general strike to reignite my interest in a television show (Do you hear that Gilmore Girls?). However, I have to say that the actual episode did not live up to the promise, clearly an example of what Sorel would call a political and not a proletarian general strike. Worse than that is making Baltar the author of a radical manifesto. This seemed completely out of character, not to mention ideological, the radical intellectual as self-serving effete. What I enjoy about the character of Baltar is that he is pure opportunism, his evil is simply an effect of weakness. Like Spinoza’s devil he is a being to be pitied. (A more favorable discussion of the show can be found here).

I have become hooked on The Wire as of late, and have watched the whole first season over the last few weeks. I was incredibly reluctant to start watching this show, despite its praise by critics and friends. This is mainly I really do not like cop shows, I have no patience for the various “CSI: Texarkana” and “Law and Order: Traffic Court” that populate television. However, I found myself getting interested in The Wire because it is, as the creators of the show argue, really a show about the decline of the American city and the futility of the war on drugs. More than that I find the most compelling thing about the show to be its representation of the modern relation between the state, which is to say bureaucracy, and capital.

On the surface the first season of the show deals with the Baltimore police’s attempt to break a drug cartel in a housing project. The police are not the pure representatives of good, found in usual shows, but a collection of individuals driven by motivations of career, prejudice, petty revenge, and macho brutality. The series also foregrounds the institutional structure of the police, and not just in the sense of the usual “lone cop against a bureaucracy.” One of the phrases heard throughout the series is “chain of command,” meaning a respect for the structures of institutional hierarchy. The series reveals that as one goes up the chain, dealing with judges, city council, etc., the motivations become more unclear, more political, in the pejorative sense. Case in point: important leads and convictions are squandered when the higher ups decide, after the shooting of a police officer, that they need “drugs on the table,” one of those photo-ops where piles of drugs, money, and guns are displayed as some kind of trophy from the war on drugs. The demand to appear effective outweighs the need to be effective.

It is hard not to think of every theory of bureaucracy that I have ever read while watching the show, from Marx (“the materialism of passive obedience, of faith in authority, of the mechanism of fixed and formalistic behavior…”) to Claude Lefort, as well as my own experience within a state institution. In fact what it reminds me of most of all is a discussion I had with an anthropology professor years ago. It was when I was involved in some political struggle over curriculum reform. The professor explained, in the calm and detached way that one would expect from an anthropologist, how the university functions. The explanation went a little like this: The dedicated members of the faculty are too busy with research, writing, and teaching to really bother with committees, seeking the service appointments that distract the least. Thus, the mediocre professors, the ones with their best years behind them, gravitate to the really important committees, the ones that determine curriculum, tenure, etc. Of course he explained all of this as if he was discussing the rituals of the Yanomamö of Central Brazil, ultimately concluding that the university bureaucracy rewards mediocrity.

Back to The Wire: If the police are the state, then the drug dealers are capital. The latter are brutally inefficient, free of the conflicted motivations of the police/state. In the beginning of the series one cop says to a dealer something to the effect of, “Why is that everything else can be bought and sold without people being killed?” For the conflicted dealer at the center of the show, D’Angelo Barksdale, this becomes something of a utopian dream, the idea of pure business without violence. Over the course of the first season this ideal become increasingly impossible, not only with respect to the drug business, but with respect to capital itself. [Spoilers ahead] It is eventually revealed that the economy of drugs is not the outside, the dark underbelly, of the legitimate economy, but is internal to it, as the money trail leads to connections between the drug trade and real estate speculation, connections that lead to politics etc. Thus, there is no opposition between the state and capital.

Best "Get Your War On" Cartoon ever.