Live Más, Comrades: Hegel, Marx, and the Dialectics of Diarrhea

The merit of Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right lie less in its solutions, constitutional monarchy, than in the way it grasps the fundamental problem of modern politics. Politics does not begin with individuals in some kind of pre-political state of nature, or as some kind of undifferentiated raw material. Politics, the state, comes after the institutions of the family and civil society, and these institutions are not just functional elements of society, they are, foundational in shaping the perspectives and conflicts of politics. The social is the antechamber of the political. 

Society is a Scam: On the Proliferation of Cons in Contemporary Life

 

A detourned Calivn and Hobbes cartoon going viral

When I was a kid we received a chain letter. It was sent to our house. It promised untold riches and bountiful luck if we sent money, I am a little unclear on the details, and warned of misfortune and calamity if we did not. I remember that it was adorned with all kinds of images from the world magic, strange symbols, evil eyes, and the like. It was absolutely fascinating. I also remember, a few years later, a friend of my father's bought a VCR from a shady looking fellow on the street. It seemed like a great deal, which reminds me of one of the first rules of cons, make the mark feel like he is in on it. When he got it home he opened the box to find a brick wrapped in a newspaper inside (VCRs used to be heavy). This were both scams, cons, and they seemed to be incredibly exotic and isolated incidents. My father must have told that VCR story at countless parties. Cons and scams were few and far between. 

Team Transindividuality: on Vittorio Morfino and Bernard Aspe

 

Jeremy Gilbert and I sometimes joke about TOP, the Transindividual Oriented Philosophy. The reference is obviously to the phenomenon of OOO (Object Oriented Ontology) in the early part of the millennium. As much as our joke has to do with sort of doctrinaire and polemical way the former arrived on the scene and our lack of interest in any such thing. (I should say in a parenthetical that is way too late, one of the things that always troubled me about OOO is that it emerged and thrived on blogs, but blogs with their intersection of the social and the technological seemed the last thing that the last thing that the crowd wanted to think about. Part of what makes me irredeemably a historical materialist is that I think the question of understanding where one is thinking from is paramount even if a bit quixotic--one can never see the ground that one speaks from). Despite this joke transindividuality, at least in terms of contemporary writers who use the concept, less a school of thought than a series of intersecting critiques and articulations. Or, if one wanted to be clever about it, the collection of writers who work on transindividuality are all part of a general orientation that is individuated differently in each of their specif philosophical articulations. I would say more about this but I feel like this is something that I tried to say with the examination of Balibar, Stiegler, and Virno in The Politics of Transindividuality.

Divisions of the Imagination: Imaginations of Division

What follows is neither the presentation I gave in Milan (in the picture above), nor the one from Rome (indicated in the picture below), but a combination of both, or more importantly, of the thoughts that emerge from the questions and conversations that followed each presentation. Why would we go to conferences after all if not to have our thoughts confronted and transformed by the ideas of others? 

The Means of Individuation: Castel on the Dialectics of Individuality

Images by Jacques Villeglé 

In the essay publishes as the conclusion to La Montée des Incertitudes: Travail, Protections, statut de l'individu Robert Castel gives a genealogy of the contemporary individual. First, in a line of thinking that would seem to parallel Etienne Balibar because it is one of his sources, Castel argues that the modern individual is founded upon property. As Locke argued, Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself." As Castel stresses this connection between property and individuation is not a theoretical assertion but a practice as well. Bourgeois modernity is founded upon the reciprocal connection of the individual and property.

Special Guest Post: Bill Haver on The Politics of Transindividuality

Back in the days when people actually read blogs I used to get requests for guest posts, some bad, some good--all of which I declined. My response to the good ones was always "you should start a blog with that," to the bad ones I just replied, "get your own damn blog." Now I just get weird spambot requests that have keyed in on my use of the terms "unemployed," "debt," and, in a post about Breaking Bad, "rental storage units," keywords for an age of austerity. Anyway I am making an exception to the longstanding, and now irrelevant rule, to post Bill Haver's response to my recently published book, The Politics of Transindividuality. Bill Haver was my professor and dissertation director back at SUNY Binghamton, and, to be quite honest, the only reason I stayed in graduate school (I know, damned by faint praise). He is just an amazing teacher and person. As the text below will hopefully, demonstrate, Bill is the most generous and perceptive reader of texts that I have ever known, the person who can most succinctly and perceptively understand what is at stake, and examine the limits of a text.

I post this here as both a shameless act of self-promotion and promotion of Bill's work. His introduction to Ontology of Production (as well as the essays by Nishida he translated) should be required reading. 

Affective Reproduction: Thinking Transindividuality in an Age of Individualism

Paper Presented at the Affect Theory Conference

One of the many theoretical and practical promises of the so-called “affective turn” in social and political thought is that it makes it possible to conceptualize the social and political dimensions of the most intimate aspects of experience. Or, put differently, it makes it possible to think of the way in which political and economic structures can only exist, can only reproduce themselves, if they do so at the level of affects and desire. The reconceptualization that I am referring to here is not to be confused with a reduction of the individual to the mere effects of structural conditions and relations, in which individuals become simply bearers of economic and political functions, nor is it a reduction of politics and economics to individual experiences and intentions, a kind of intimate theatre of micro-politics that never becomes macro. It is a matter of thinking the mutual implication of the individual and the collective, or in a word, transindividuality. 

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. 

Naturally Historical: On Paolo Virno's When the Word Becomes Flesh and Déjà Vu and the End of History

Paolo Virno's philosophical trajectory is an interesting and strange one. He first became known to the English speaking world through The Grammar of the Multitude. This book's particular grammar, or rather vocabulary, defines  the central terms of post-autonomist thought, multitude, general intellect, Post-Fordism, etc., in a somewhat idiosyncratic manner. Marx and Spinoza are cited, but so are Aristotle, Sohn-Rethel, Heidegger, and Simondon. Virno has been drawn as much to the philosophical presuppositions and effect of these terms, of this new grammar, than to their economic basis or political implications. 

America: Love it or Hate it (Or, on emotional reductionism and the Politics of Affect)

I tried to avoid commenting on current events in this blog, blockbuster films, new books, new television shows, but not current events. However, Giuliani's recent remarks about Obama are only interesting to me because the seem to be another event in a general trajectory of what I would call, for lack of a better term, emotional reductionism. Emotional reductionism is the insistence that the only meaningful political distinctions are emotional ones, and those emotional distinctions boil down to love and hate. I can think of quite a few instances of this in recent years, they "hate us for our freedoms," they love death, etc.  Politics has become an affair of love or hate. 

The Class Struggle at Home: Jaquet's Les Transclasses

Perhaps the best way to approach Chantal Jaquet's Les Transclasses: ou la non-reproduction is by situating it between two caricatures of intellectual positions. On the one hand, the left one, we have studies of the "reproduction of the relations of production," the work of Bourdieu most importantly, but also Althusser, that stresses how the classes endlessly reproduce themselves, or are reproduced by the institutions of schools, media, and so on. On the other hand, the right one, we have the various theories of the culture of poverty, and more importantly, various "pulled up by bootstraps" narratives, all of which stress that individual will and fortitude can overcome all socio-economic barriers. On the one hand there is a theory of the necessary reproduction of the relations of production, while on the other there is the entire anecdotal history of exceptions.

Paying Attention in an Age of Distraction: On Yves Citton's Pour Une Écologie de l'Attention

Yves Citton's Pour une Écologie de l'Attention is something of a companion volume to L’Économie de l’attention. Nouvel horizon du capitalisme? a book edited by Citton. Many of the essays in the latter cite the former. However, the different titles, and the question mark in the latter suggest a divergence around a central question. Both books work from the central provocation that we are living through a profound mutation in the nature of attention, never have we had so many distractions or devices soliciting our attention. What remains in question is first whether or not this transformation is best of all understood as a new economy of attention? Terms such as "paying," "cost," and "investment" regularly suggest themselves when it comes to discussing attention. Attention appears as a scarce resource and it is quite easy to speak of losses and gains when it comes to attention, as every moment spent reading tweets is not spent reading books. The more important question is whether or not attention can be understood as an economy of sorts, but whether we have entered a new phase of capitalism in which attention itself is productive of value. Metaphor meets mode of production.

Men without Qualities: Spinoza, Marx, Balibar and Philosophical Anthropology

This post is an attempt to draw together two different philosophical precursors to Balibar's philosophical anthropology. That Spinoza and Marx are the precursors in question is news to no one, at least no one familiar with Balibar's work, and yet the particular way they intersect, extend, or complicate each other is often unexamined. Examining them will help develop both the promise and limits of Balibar's philosophical anthropology, as well as set it apart from other philosophical anthopologies after the death of man.

Subjectification, Individuation, and Politics: On Bernard Aspe's Simondon, Politique du Transindividuel

I am going to refrain from beginning this review by pointing out the similarities between Aspe's Simondon, Politique du transindividuel and the manuscript I am currently finishing. Suffice to say I am glad that this book was published towards the end of working on the book, when the differences between my perspective and his can only refine the conclusion and revisions, and not at the beginning of conceiving of the project, when its very existence would put the whole thing into jeopardy. Reading the book can thus be considered an example of the standard practice of transindividuation--the simultaneous constitution of a group of people interested in the same sets of questions and thinkers and of a unique perspective on those questions.

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)?

Please Stand By: Or, Print Killed the Blogosphere Star

Dear friends, readers, and people who ended up here by poorly formulated search terms:

In order to complete a long overdue book project I will put my blog on hold for at least the remainder of the summer. As much as I would love to offer reviews of summer blockbusters,  the various books that I have read, and weigh in on current economic and political crises, all to the delight of dozens, I have to focus my writing energy and time on the book. So, for the summer I am eschewing the digital and its short term gratifications for print and its long term frustrations. My tentative schedule is to return at the end of Breaking Bad, because I really cannot resist writing about that. Thanks for reading. In case you are curious, I have posted a somewhat dated version of the prospectus of the book, which I am completing for Historical Materialism, below. 

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. 

Deviant Gesture Catalog: Between Mechanization and Spectacle

Lately I have been interested in the question of gesture. This interest is framed by two different lines of inquiry. The first, and dominant, one is in the transindividual dimension of gestures, or, perhaps gesture as a way of both illustrating and examining transindividuality. While gesture is not specifically named by Gilbert Simondon, the dominant theorist of transindividuality,  there is a great deal of interest in it by Paolo Virno, Bernard Stiegler, Yves Citton--although only the last specifically names it as such. The general problem is the same, however, gestures, habits, and comportments are both the constitution of collectives and individuals. Gestures mark one's historical moment, one's class, nation, and other groupings, but also define and delimite a singular way of inhabiting the world. 

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.

Strong Interpretation: Citton’s L’Avenir des Humanités

It is perhaps a matter of common knowledge that the humanities, philosophy, literature, classics, art history, as well as history and the “soft” social sciences, are under attack. This attack is generally framed in terms of the general logic of austerity, which views the idea of any education that is not directly and immediately job preparation, as something which we as a society could afford once but can afford no more. The humanities are seen as luxuries of more opulent times, a claim that may surprise anyone who has actually worked in the humanities. Against this brutal logic of austerity, which also views retirement benefits and dental plans as “luxuries,” there have attempts to defend the humanities. These defenses generally take two forms: some accept the premise that argues that higher education is job preparation, arguing for the marketable nature of the core skills of the humanities, such as critical reading, writing, and thinking; while a second set of arguments rejects the premise of marketability, arguing instead that higher education has lofty goals than just preparing workers. Critical reading and writing train political subjects, the citizens rather than employees of tomorrow.