It is All Subjective: Marx, Spinoza, and Subjectivity

 

Anyone who has ever taken or taught a philosophy class is familiar with the claim "[Blank] is subjective" in which the [Blank] in question could be anything from literary interpretations to ethical norms. This response effectively ends any and all cultural and philosophical discussion, which is why it is so aggravating. One response is to argue against this claim, to point out that not every interpretation of a poem, novel, or film, is authorized, that there are better or worse interpretations, with respect to cultural version. With respect to the ethical or political arguments it is tempting to point out that the very existence of ethics, of society, presupposes norms that are shared as well as debated and challenged.

It is the Symbolism, Stupid: Trump and Sanders

There is a certain similarity in criticism of Sanders and Trump. I am not referring to the symmetry posited by pundits of the radical center for who every left has an equal and opposite right--the tea party and Occupy Wall Street, Fox News and CNN, Iron Man and Captain America, but to a criticism offered by those far from the radical center that argue that Trump and Sanders are not the outside of the existing political spectrum. Trump's supposedly outlandish promises to deport millions of undocumented workers is not that different from existing policy. Sander's socialism is just what a previous generation would have called a new deal democrat, or what the rest of the world calls "center-left". 

The Power of the False: On Fargo

Fargo opens with a claim that the story the film tells is based on a true story. As is well know by anyone who has looked into the story this claim is a lie. What is less remarked upon, however, is the way in which much of the film is structured around a series of lies. These lies move beyond the ordinary deceptions to become part of what Deleuze calls "the power of the false."

Politics of Transindividuality: Some Preliminary Remarks on Citton's Renverser l'insoutenable

The revival of interest in Simondon's term transindividuality to thematize social relations has raised the question of what a politics of transindividuality would mean, or what the very concept of transindividuality offers for politics. As Alberto Toscano argues, this question has as its basis the lack of any real political dimension to Simondon's thought. Despite this lack, or maybe because of it, much of the contemporary revival of Simondon in such thinkers as Stiegler, Virno, Balibar, and Citton, is political, or social-political in orientation. That last qualification is important, because it is my contention  that what is at stake in Simondon's concept of transindividuality is not just a rethinking of "the political" (do we really need another?) but a rethinking of the relation between politics and economy.

Corporate Imaginations: In Praise of Weyland-Yutani

The films Alien, Aliens, Bladerunner, Terminator, They Live and Robocop were, in varying degrees, all formative films for me. This is in part their timing, all of the films were produced and released in the late 70s and 80s, and readily available in the decade of the VHS player. They are the films of my adolescence and thus helped me transition from my youthful love of robots and Star Wars into more sophisticated ideas of what science fiction was capable of. These films were gateway drugs to Philip K Dick and Frederick Pohl (and, much later, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ken Macleod, and China Mieville). In some sense this period was a kind of renaissance of sci-fi film, situated between the rise of special effects and the decline of the globalized film into sequels, prequels, and remakes, and I was at the perfect age to enjoy it. Beyond timing, these films all have one thing in common, they all deal with the corporation as something of an antagonist Weyland-Yutani, The Tyrell Corporation, Cyberdine Systems, and Omni Consumer Corp are as much the villains as the aliens, androids, and robots. My enjoyment of them was also a shift in my understanding of the world. They were my transition from evil empires to exploitation, from Star Wars to class war. 

Reproducing Relations: On Communization and its Discontents

This is not intended as a review of Communization and its Discontents. If I were to write a review of the book it would simply be: it is a good book, you should read it (hell, you can even downloaded it for free, so there is no excuse not to). This is intended instead as a series of provocations for further reflection.

Primer for the Post-Apocalypse: The Hunger Games Trilogy

Up until now I have avoided the trend of adults reading young adult fiction. I have never read a single Harry Potter book, but I have seen a few of the movies, and I have avoided Twilight as much as possible. (Of course it is nearly impossible to completely avoid such mega-media events, I find myself picking up references to these things, to “Team Edward and “Team Jacob” by sheer cultural osmosis.) This avoidance of young adult fiction came to an end with The Hunger Games. I picked up the first book out of curiosity, having heard a few of the details through osmosis, and found myself tearing through all three fairly quickly, they were this summer’s beach reads (concealed by the blank slate of a kindle). 

A Million Blooms: Tiqqun and Negri on the Actualization of Ontology

With the publication in English of This is Not a Program, Tiqqun brings to light a certain insurrectionist critique of Negri (and Hardt’s) position. Broadly speaking this critique takes two forms. First, there is a critique of the valorization of immaterial labor. This critique does not concern the descriptive accuracy of the term, the continued existence of material production, but its political efficacy. For Tiqqun the valorization of immaterial labor is consistent with the values of the capitalist economy. As Tiqqun write, “Proletarian self-valorization, theorized by Negri as the ultimate subversion, is also taking place but in the form of universal prostitution.” Tiqqun thus joins the chorus of those who prefer the refusal of work, the quotidian negativity of sabotage, to the valorization of the communicative capacity of contemporary labor. Second, and related, Tiqqun argue that Negri underestimates the reality of exploitation. This can already be seen in the argument about immaterial labor, which, for Tiqqun, is less the condition for revolution than subjection, but comes to the front in their critique of biopower. Quite simply, Tiqqun contest the division (Hardt) and Negri make between biopower and biopolitics (itself modeled on the division of potestas and potentia). In a vein similar to Steven Shaviro, Tiqqun contest that such a division, between transcendence and immanence, could not be said to make any sense in Foucault’s analysis. Biopower was always already produced from the immanent and contingent ground, that is how it has worked. 

From Restricted to General Antagonism: Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War

The little books of Semiotexte’s Foreign Agent Series played an absolutely formative role in my intellectual and political development. They occupied a middle ground between my official philosophical education and the anarchist and situationist zines that formed my unofficial education. The little books offered an affordable and immediate introduction to the ideas of Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault, etc.: intellectually stimulating, but free of the excessive scholasticism that burdens American academia. Even though some of the names have faded, Baudrillard does not do much for me nowadays, the books still have a special place in my heart.

Thus I was pleased to see Semiotexte restart the format with their Intervention series. The first of these, The Coming Insurrection, has already received so much attention from Glenn Beck that it does not need my help. I have read The Violence of Financial Capital, but I must admit that I did so very quickly, so much so that I did not get much from my reading. What I really want to talk about is Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War.

One way to approach Introduction to Civil War is to address it at the level of its synthesis. Concepts and problems from recognizable authors make an appearance: Agamben’s concept of form of life and bare life appear, but in different sense, the same could be said for Schmitt’s concepts of friend and enemy, and the whole discussion of clinamen and encounter has a vaguely Spinozist orientation. Concepts from contemporary critical thought such as the “police,” in its Foucauldian expansion, micro-politics and macropolitics, and Empire also appear, but these too are transformed. One could produce an inventory of such borrowings, cited and implied, but it seems to me that would be exactly the wrong way to read such a book. It would be an act of academic neutralization.

What then is the best way to read this Introduction? What is intending to introduce, or introduce us to? Despite the epigraph referring to Solon’s The Constitution of Athens (“Whoever does not take sides in a civil war is struck with infamy, and loses all right to politics.”) this is not a history of civil war, and its various theorizations, from the ancient Greeks to Marx on France. This is an introduction in a much stronger sense, not to what has already been said about civil war, but to civil war as an originary condition. What does this mean? As the book’s initial, almost geometrical definitions spell it out, the elementary unit of human existence is the form-of-life, not the body or individual. Every form of life is affected by a particular inclination, a taste. These inclinations determine the various encounter that forms of life, encounters that follow a logic reminiscent of Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza, in which each encounter other increases power, constituting community, or reduces it. (I know I said that I did not want to do this, but it is hard not to see the traces of Deleuze, Spinoza, Agamben, and Schmitt in this conceptualization but the point to move beyond the names, to the fundamental assertion that they make possible.) The ethico-political is this relationship of friendship or enmity, or relations that either put a form-of-life in contact with its power or distant it from it. This terrain of encounters is the originary civil war, the conflict and community of forms of life. “Civil war is the free play of forms-of-life; it is the principle of their coexistence.”

Against this fundamental coexistence and conflict the State and Empire can only be understood as attempts to neutralize the conflict. As Tiqqun write, “The modern state, insofar as it still exists, defines itself ethically as the theater of operations for a twofold fiction: the fiction that when it comes to forms-of-life both neutrality and centrality can exist.” The state emerges from civil war, which it claims to end, but only continues by other means. At this point Hobbes becomes an unavoidable point of reference. However, that obscures the particular novelty of Tiqqun’s intervention. What they would like to stress is precisely this idea of a form-of-life, an inclination, as something irreducible to bare life. This is what the stand cannot withstand, it can only govern only individuals, over lives that have renounced their inclination, becoming interchangeable. “What at the molar scale assumes the aspect of the modern state, is called at the molecular scale the economic subject.” Tiqqun’s analysis cuts through the ethical, political, and economic by focusing precisely on this relation between a life and its capacities and inclinations. What Tiqqun insist is the political can only be thought from thinking precisely what is at stake in the sheer plurality and relations of the different forms-of-life, refusing the division that separates some individual, citizen or economic subject, from its constitutive conditions and relations. This splitting is central to politics, to the state, and to philosophy. The enlightenment division between free thought and obedience is the neutralization of both. As Tiqqun write: “Gesture without discourse on the one hand and discourse without gesture on the other—the State and Critique guarantee by the techniques specific to each (police and publicity, respectively) the neutralization of every ethical difference. This is how THEY conjured away, along the free play of forms-of-life, the political itself.” Such an assertion seems like a needed return to anarchist (or anarcho-syndicalist) themes of self-government, of the necessity of the practical dimension of every idea, on the terrain of contemporary ontological speculation.

For Tiqqun Empire is a continuation of this strategy of neutralization, it is predicated on the attenuation of forms-of-life. As such it embraces conflict and crisis, making the impossibility of the state’s neutrality the condition of its rule. It governs best in situations of crisis, when the neutrality of law cannot be used. “Nothing matters less to Empire than the question, “who controls what?”—provided, of course, that control has been established.” Empire than is even less of a figure, less of a subject than the state, which was always caught between its supposed neutrality, its transcendence, and its particular location. Empire diffuses this, ruling over the conflicts as such, but defusing them at every turn, inhibiting the possibility of them becoming something other than interests to be represented, markets to be cultivated. As Tiqqun write, “Empire does not confront us like a subject, facing us, but like an environment that is hostile to us.” It is possible to think of this as an antagonism without an enemy. This is the ultimate merit of Tiqqun’s little intervention: returning the idea of conflict to the center of political thought, of a fundamental antagonism that is at once economic, ethical, and political, in an age of consensus and neutralization. I should be more specific and say that its merit has to do with the way it returns conflict to politics without lapsing into Schmittian decisionism, it ontologizes conflict, removing it from the realm of decision. Ultimately, it is an analysis that refuses both nostalgia of old forms of antagonism, a search for an enemy, for a state that could still be party to struggle, and resignation to the disappearance of antagonism. Instead it seeks to interpret the disappearance of antagonism, of struggle, as itself a form of struggle.

Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War strikes me as a necessary book, and I am tempted to ignore its shortcomings and any disagreements I might have, to ask what I see as its fundamental provocation: how construct a politics from conflict again? To revive a mode of existence that would be against the state and Empire? To ask again what it means to live a life.