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.

Dialectics (Part Three)

OK, so the first thesis on Feuerbach is not as punchy as some of the others, and it is not going to fit on anyone’s tombstone, no matter how large, I still think that it is the most philosophically provocative of the eleven. In case anyone has forgotten how it goes, I will hum a few bars:

“The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.”

As of late I have been concerned less with the defect of materialism, or idealism for that matter, than the positive dimension of idealism alluded to here, its concept of activity. Specifically I have been thinking about the role of activity, or action, in The Phenomenology of Spirit. These thoughts are occasioned by a partial reading of some of the hits (“Sense Certainty,” Self-Consciousness”) for the purpose of teaching. On of the thing that struck me in rereading these sections is the way in which activity often necessitates the dialectical reversal. Transforming how the situation appears to how it actually is, from the in-itself to the for-itself, or rather the in and for itself. This can be seen most clearly in the section on Self-Consciousness, in which it is work that transforms the slave.

But action, at least some kind of activity, also appears as the transforming force, somewhat arbitrarily I might add, in the section on sense-certainty, where it is the act of writing that transforms the apparent richness of sense-certainty into an empty universal. Once “Now is day” is written down, materialized in paper, it becomes subject to the vicissitudes of time, becoming false as day turns to night.

Hegel explicitly acknowledges this gap between thought and action, in which action negates the thought which is its precondition in the section on “Scepticism.” As Hegel writes of Scepticism: “Its deeds and words always belie one another and equally it has itself the doubly contradictory consciousness of unchangableness and sameness, and of utter contingency and non-identity with itself.” Now if scepticism is in part a becoming conscious of the dialectical process itself (to quote Hegel: “Sceptic consciousness is the very experience of the dialectic. But whereas, in the preceding stages of the phenomenological development, the dialectic occurred, so to speak without the knowledge of consciousness, now it is its deed”), then this gap between consciousness and action now becomes explicitly manifest as well. From this point forward consciousness struggles with its non-identity with its own activity.

Now this is just a thought, but certain questions follow: First, what would this mean for a reading of Hegel, for a reading of a thought of practice in the Phenomenology in its various instantiations, from the work of the slave to Antigone’s ethical action? Is it possible to extract a thought of practice that is something other than conscious intent, but also perhaps something other than the cunning of reason? Second, what would this mean for a rethinking of the Hegel/Marx relation? In The German Ideology Marx reference the difference between what one says and what one does against German Idealism. As Marx writes: “Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet one this trivial insight.” More importantly, Marx relies on this non-identity between thought and action to articulate the social relations underlying “commodity fetishism.” As Alfred Sohn-Rethel writes of commodity relations: ‘The consciousness and the action of people part company in exchange and go different ways.’ Fetishism is not something we think, we all claim that commodities are unique with their specific use values, it is something we do, we act as if they are concrete instantiations of value. Finally, could we extract form Hegel’s phenomenology a description of contemporary forms of scepticism and cynicism?

This is Fun

Last Communist Standing: Notes on the Relation between Negri and Badiou

It is perhaps one of the many ironies of history that the two of the lastest intellectuals from Europe to be discussed and debated in “theory” circles are not “postmodernists” but two thinkers for whom “communism” remains an unavoidable point of reference, a word which is to be discussed, debated, and even contested, but not simply dismissed. Communism has outlived its various “pomo” gravediggers. I am talking about Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou. (I should also mention that I am omitting European liberals such as Luc Ferry, why would we import them? There is a glut in the market after all, and liberals should understand that.)

There has been very little discussion of the connections or relations between these two thinkers, despite the fact that Badiou opens his Logiques des Mondes (also published as Radical Philosophy “Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic”) with a criticism of Negri’s democratic materialism, his assertion that the body is the ultimate horizon of production. Now, I think that this criticism, which links Negri to a kind of ineffective pluralism through the assertion of biopower, a kind of bad infinity in which humanity is made up of multiple particularities, like so many exotic fauna, is patently unfair, given the fact that Negri’s thought has rigorously avoided such liberal platitudes. That in itself is not important, as Deleuze writes “ encounters between independent thinkers always occur in a blind zone.” So in the spirit of this blind zone, I would like to outline points of contact and disagreement. I should say from the outset that despite my invocation of Logiques des Mondes, which arrived in the mail last week, as of late I have been reading old Badiou (De l’idéologie and Théorie du sujet) and old Negri for that matter, Books for Burning and Labor of Dionysus, so this may end up being about a point of contact between their work in the seventies and eighties.

1) The primacy of revolt: In Badiou’s (and Francois Balmes) little pamphlet, which is primarily a polemic against Althusser’s ISA essay, Badiou and Balmes argue that ideology can only be understood dialectically, as a struggle between domination and revolt. Moreover, in this dialectic revolt is primary, “c’est la résistance qui est le secret de la domination.” Of course this argument of the primacy of revolt could be dismissed as a product of Badiou’s Maoism (“It is always right to revolt”). The primacy of revolt perists, however, through Badiou’s writing on the event. Badiou argues that Nazism can only be understood from the perspective of an event of a successful revolution, the simulacrum of the event can only be understood from the event itself, or, as he states in Ethics, evil from the standpoint of the good. This “primacy of revolt” is structurally similar to the famous “autonomist hypothesis,” in which resistance precedes and prefigures domination. Thus, Badiou and Negri are two thinkers for whom have a generally philosophical (even ontological) commitment to revolution; it is not just something which should be done, but something that must be posited to comprehend the world.

2) The discontinuous continuity of the subject: For both Badiou and Negri politics always passes through a subject. (As Badiou wrote somewhat dogmatically in Théorie du Sujet, “Every subject is political. That is why there are so few subjects, and so little politics.”) The connection between politics and subjectivity is not continuous but is made up of real breaks and ruptures. As Badiou writes: “This political subject has gone under various names. He used to be referred to as a ‘citizen,’ certainly not in the sense of the elector or town councilor, but in the sense of the Jacobin of 1793. He used to be called ‘professional revolutionary.’ He used to be called ‘grassroots militant.’ We seem to be living in a time when his name is suspended, a time when we must find a new name for him.” Negri’s history has different names, mass worker, social worker, and finally, immaterial labor and the multitude itself. In Badiou’s case this series seems to relate primarily to the political activism, to its subjective dimension, while for Negri the series is constituted by transformations of “class composition.” Thus it possible to simply place Badiou on the side of politics, even voluntarism, and Negri on the side of the economy, and an economism of sorts. However, I think that the actually situation is more complicated.

3) The Excess of the state: This is perhaps a legacy of Marx, for whom the state is not an expression of the community, but a monstrous machine standing above it. In Badiou’s thought this takes a mathematic formulation, inclusion is in excess of belonging. Or, put politically, the state does not deal with individuals, but with classes, groups, it represents and codifies what has been presented. As Badiou writes in Being and Event, “To say of the state that it is of the bourgeoisie has the advantage of underlining that the state re-presents something that has already been historically and socially presented.” Representation is the codification of what exists. For Negri the state also has to be understood as an excess and overdetermination. As the factory is extended across society, so has the structure of command. As Negri writes, “If the factory has been extended across the social plane, then organization and subordination, in their varying relationship of interpenetration, are equally spread across the entire society.” The point of commonality, besides a return and transformation of Marxist state theory, can be understood in opposition to both a Foucaultian tendency to reduce the state to micropowers and a liberal tendency to see the state as a possible defense against the market. For Badiou and Negri the state has to be thought and fought in its excess.

4) Ontology: Now it is on this point that the two perhaps diverge the most. However, there is at least a similar turn toward ontology in both thinkers at about the same time, during the 1980s. Of course this can be interpreted as a response to a similar, or at least connected, set of events: that is, the collapse of a radical activity, and thus “the consolations of philosophy.” That is probably true, but what interests me is the way this ontology makes possible a rethinking of practice itself, what Badiou calls intervention and Negri constitutive practice.

More in Part II

The Pop Life of Mario Savio

On Friday I finally got a chance to see Half Nelson. I had high hopes for the film, which is usually the perfect set up for a let down. However, in this case the film more than met my expectations at least when it came to the teaching scenes. In the film Ryan Gosling's character decides to teach eighth graders lessons on dialectics, and a dialectical conception of history; history defined by opposition, contradiction and conflict. (It is because of this drive to teach something that is both too difficult and yet very important, that I found myself identifying with the Gosling character; despite the fact that I have never taught in an inner city school, coached basketball, or had anything even resembling a drug habit.) Hands down my favorite scene in the whole film involved Gosling showing a clip of Mario Savio's speech before the Free Speech Movement sit-in. The quoted passage is as follows:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

Now I love that speech, who doesn't? Oh yeah, right, most people living on this planet, for whom it is just overinflated Marxist rhetoric. The inclusion of the speech itself in the film (as well as the inclusion of Pinochet's CIA sponsored coup, and other events from history) would already put it high on my list of films of the year. It is what happens after that makes the film stand out. Gosling asks the students what Savio means by machine. One student responds, "robots and stuff?" (It is that moment that I identify with, you have your perfect passage, your perfect opening question, and suddenly you are derailed by an answer that you could not possibly anticipate.) Later, over the course of discussion, after suggesting the possibility that the machine is a metaphor, he gets the class to see how we are all part of the machine. "We are all part of the machine," that is more than one expects from a Hollywood movie.

I could say more about the film, especially about its use of dialectics, which are not just a topic for classroom discussion but a structuring principle of the film itself. The film is riddled with dialectical pairs: student/teacher, dealer/addict, etc. It also has a few moments of what could be considered "dialectical montage," shots inter-cutting the drug dealer and student on rounds with the consumption of drugs. I actually take the drugs to be a metaphor through which the "ethics of consumption" are confronted by the "ethics of the producers." The teacher is horrified that his favorite student is involved in the drug trade, never really considering his complicity in that trade. In the same way we are all horrified with the sweatshops and global labor conditions, never really considering our complicity in that trade.

The odd thing, from which this entry gets its title, is that this is the second time in the last year that Savio's speech has appeared in pop culture. It was also cited in the season two finale of Battlestar Galactica, well not so much cited as appropriated. It is Tyrol's speech against labor conditions on New Caprica. Although, in this case the machine would have to include "robots and stuff," since they are working for the cylons. 

Hegel said that all great events in history happen twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy second time as pop culture injoke.

Capitalist Dogs

The New York times did a piece on "Designer Dogs,"the labradoodles, puggles, and other crossbreeds that are popping up everywhere, in the Sunday Magazine. What struck me about this piece is the way it grafts onto a history of the species that Donna Haraway alludes to in The Companion Species Manifesto. We can only speculate about the origin of the dog, and as Haraway argues such speculations (man creating dog, dogs choosing man, symbiotic relations) determine, or are determined by, how we think about culture and nature. They are modern stories of the garden before the fall, Master and Slave dialectics, or at least of Davy and Goliath. The recent history of the breed is caught somewhere between an idyll of peasant existence and Victorian economy of distinction and prestige. To quote Haraway: "Complete with the romantic idealization of peasant-shepherds and their animals characteristic of capitalist modernization and class formations that make such life ways nearly impossible discourses of pure blood and nobility haunt modern breeds like the undead."

Dogs are the last remaining aristocrats, still caught up in a "symbolics of blood," the purity of the blood line. Anyone who has seen AKC papers for a pure bred dog can't help but think this, the lineages include names like "Lady Gertrude," and I do not think that they are being ironic. In the dog's transition from feudalism to capitalism both the peasant definition of breed according to work and the aristocratic economy of distinctions gave way to the Oedipalized demand for "the family dog." To quote the times: "The new middle class spoke explicitly of “civilizing” the dog so it might better reflect its master. Cities were tidying themselves up, pushing unsavory things like abattoirs and coal-burning plants farther out of sight. Why not reform the dog as well?" Dogs became "privatized," removed from the world of work and the economies of surplus and expenditure, they were called upon to complete the home, to provide love and company.

It is at this point in the story that the "designer dog" comes in. The article in the times details some of the sociological reasons for the "designer dog," babyboomers retiring to smaller condos, urban living, and restrictions placed on condos. "It also suggests a kind of new status symbol, one not burdened by a bloodline, but one based on the "must-have" lifestyle accessories seen on television. The "designer dog" is as much a part of our current mode of production as custom ring tones and other signifiers of a unique lifestyle. To quote Haraway one last time, "Co-constitutive companion species and co-evolution are the rule, not the exception."

The End of the World, as We Imagine It

The following quote from Fred Jameson has been discussed a great deal on the internets as of late, "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination." In some way this statement cannot be disputed, however, I want to stress that the weakness of the imagination, the fact that we must always imagine the end of the world in some specific form, reveals something. In some way it is a matter of what could be called the apocalyptic sublime. The end of the world is too big, it is beyond our capacity to envision, yet that does not keep us from imagining it, representing it, in some finite way, nuclear holocaust, zombie invasion, asteroid, etc. The specific image reveals something of the historical situation from which we imagine. Which is why every generation gets the apocalypse it deserves.

I came to think this after reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Stephen Shaviro has already written an interesting commentary on this book, one that happens to call into question the possibility of producing any interpretation of it. Well, here goes anyway...

First the basic plot, it concerns a father and son making their way south across a barren post-apocalyptic landscape. The specifics of how the world came to an end are vague at best, although, the cold and ashen snow suggests that it takes place during a "nuclear winter." However, the book is not situated in the immediate aftermath. This is not the day after. All animal and plant life has ceased to exist, and human beings are left to cannibalism or foraging for canned goods. In some ways the book is almost post-post-apocalyptic; in that it takes place after the dramatic struggle for survival that makes up the plot of most post-apocalyptic stories. When the novel begins even the murderous gangs have begun to die out. This is the end of the end.

What interests me is the way the novel sketches out some sense of the social and political dimensions of this world. For the most part the novel focuses on the relationship between the father and son, which is a fragile bound of love in a world that constantly threatens to destroy it. This bound is set against the threatening cannibalistic gangs, "bad guys" as the boy puts them. Now, at some point in reading this novel I became frustrated with this, despite its enthralling prose. It began to seem reactionary, the family against brutal society. However, I now think that there is more to it than that. At a few points in the novel the characters refer to "good guys," to even "communes." But these are never really depicted or encountered, except almost mystically at the end. (Shaviro alludes to McCarthy's gnosticism, of a salvation that can only come from outside the world.) In some way I think that the novel is gesturing towards the limits of our own imagination. It is easy for us to imagine society collapsing into murderous biker gangs (Hence the central place of The Road Warrior in representations of post-apocalyptic world. Its dominance is an effect not a cause: it is popular because it conforms to our own Hobbesian imaginary.) It is much more difficult, however, to imagine the creation of a new world (the end of capitalism). McCarthy's novel does not try to present this, but rather draws the limits of our ability to imagine it. Perhaps the "communist sublime"?


In a completely different way Idiocracy is also a story of the end of the world. Its premise is a kind of Darwin in reverse, "stupid" people continue to have many kids while the "educated" elites have few. Add to this the "dumbing down" of popular culture, and you have a future in which the slightest act of intelligence, like reading, is considered gay. Now this film clearly stems from the age of George W. Bush and Paris Hilton, and it could be considered the spontaneous ideology of Bush's America. An ideology which states that the one thing wrong with the world is stupidity.


Two things about this film. First, as my friend Hasana points out it is clearly about male stupidity, women are largely absent from this future, a future of monster truck rallies, pornstar presidents, and television shows based on guy getting hit in the testicles with various objects. Second, the movie has to go to great narrative lengths to explain how such a world could be possible. Its question is not the old question posed to communists, "who will clean the toilets," but rather "who will keep the cars running." It begs the question of minimal competence, not untranscendable toil. The film solves this problem by depicting a society in which everything is either automated, like the touch screen keypads at the hospital, making a diagnosis no more complicated than ordering a Big Mac, or in crisis, like the system of agriculture. In doing so the film stretches to the absurd suggesting, albeit obliquely, that stupidity is not a sufficient cause to destroy the world. In other words, while the world may appear to be stupid, that is only because the intelligence has become automated, placed in various machines, human and inhuman.


Finally, I should add that the film is completely oblivious to the existence of class. This is the main way in which its imagination of the end is circumscribed by the existing historical moment. It posits stupidity as an entirely natural phenomenon. It sees it as a cause, not an effect. It fails to see stupidity as a product of capitalism, as Marx writes, “It replaces labor by machines—but some of the workers it throws back into a barbarous type of labor, and the other workers it turns into machines. It produces intelligence—but for the worker idiocy, cretinism.” Having said that I did not hate the film. That one line, "You like money too?" Hil-a-rious.

All Sins Paid in Full: The Morality of a Weatherman

The northeast is currently experiencing unseasonably warm weather. It is delightful if you do not think of polar bears drowning, and the ecological catastrophe it would seem to portend. This evening exhaustion and a strange headache left me in front of the TV during the nightly round of infotainment that some call news. I happened to catch the local weather forecast, which ended with a discussion of an impending cold front. The weatherperson, I mean meteorologist, stated that colder temperatures were imminent, that soon "we would pay for this nice weather."

This happens a lot on local weather forecasts. (In fact my brother pointed this out to me, and since does not have a blog it is my minimally insightful observation now). Weather forecasting is often a matter of subjecting the weather to a moral economy of debt and cost. "After all of this rain, we are due some sun..." "We are paying for those warm days" etc. Suffering is rewarded with sun and warm weather, and, in turn, every nice day must be paid for with a day of rain. To quote Nietzsche, “Fixing prices, setting values, working out equivalents, exchanging—this preoccupied man’s first thoughts to such a degree that in a certain sense it constitutes thought.” Or, to turn to Spinoza, the weather is not just predicted, or explained according to a series of causes, the high fronts and approaching low pressure systems of meteorology, but subject to a narrative of final causes, of purposes subordinated to our all too human goals and desires.

Thus, the weather forecast could be taken as an allegory for the "news" itself, it is not so much that events have to be explained, or predicted, according to their causes, but narrated according to their ends. Good actions (and countries) must be rewarded and bad ones punished.

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.

Technical Difficulties, Please Standby

It has been over two weeks since my last confession...er...post. There are external reasons for this, the last few weeks have pretty much consisted of the following: a nasty little cold, grading, and a brief trip to beautiful Cleveland, Ohio for Christmas. So I have not had a lot of time. I also have not had much inclination. All of the grading has left me without much by way of ideas, in fact I pretty convinced that reading sixty papers by college freshman on Marx's 1844 Manuscripts has sucked all of the ideas out of my head.

Could some please explain why Marx has the magic ability to turn your average fairly intelligent college student into an odd ideological mix of social Darwinism and neoliberalism babbling on about human nature and the survival of the fittest. To cite my favorite quote from Emma Goldman, "Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?"

OK, that was a bit of a digression, I really did not intend to write about Marx, or Goldman for that matter, but rather to write about not writing. As I said, there are quite a few external reasons as to why I have not written much of anything as of late. However, I have also been avoiding anything resembling introspection for awhile. Not to say that this "blog" (yes, I still find it necessary to put scare quotes around the word even as I engaged in the practice) is that introspective at all, there is a great deal about my personal life that I avoid writing about here. Or, more to the point, part of the reason that I started this "blog" is to give myself something else to do in the wee hours of the night than to think about the sad and serious events that have affected my life as of late. Lately, however, I have been avoiding even the minimal reflection that blogging demands. In the past few weeks I have filled the time left over after grading by reading several novels, Dashiell Hammet's Red Harvest, China Mieville's Iron Council, and A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, watched a season of Veronica Mars, as well as several films from the good, My Man Godfrey, to the bad, Enemy of the State, to the just plain ugly, Terminator 3.

All of which is to say that introspection can be overrated. Sometimes you have to peer into the dark recesses of your soul, and sometimes you have to spend the dark hours of the night wondering who killed Lily Kane.

Well since this is quickly becoming a post about nothing, and not in that hip postmodern way, I thought that I would conclude by relaying a bit of tragic news (oh, goody). I am afraid that tragedy has befallen America's greatest Marxist hip hop group The Coup. You can read all about it by following the link.

Hearing Your Own Accent

After having spent the weekend in London, I found this article in The New York Times on the connotations of the English Accent. It was an odd bit of synchronicity, since while I was there I found myself wondering what an American accent sounds like. Or, more to the point, how my accent sounded to them.

The English Accent, or should I say accents to include the various class versions, Cockney etc., not to mention the accents of Great Britain, is such a staple of American pop culture--signifying everything from snotty rebellion (The Sex Pistols) to dignity and education (Rupert Giles, etc.) Now I wonder what my accent signifies to them, American brashness and idiocy? If there is one thing that being awake at three in the morning in a hotel room in London teaches you, is that the British are exposed to a great deal of American pop-culture. During one night of jetlag and pre-conference jitters, I flipped through several American movies (Jaws 2, The Perfect Score, Mr. and Mrs. Smith) not to mention The Simpsons and other programs. Like much of the world the British are drowning in the dregs of our pop culture. Have you seen The Perfect Score (or The Breakfast Club versus the SAT)? There is no reason for that movie to exist. Then again it was on at three in the morning, so it is not like anyone was watching it.

It is perhaps an impossible task, to hear one's own accent. To not only hear it as an accent, but as an accent layered with various cultural and political connotations. It is not like the British walk around and think that they sound so intelligent and dignified, or maybe they do.

By the way Jean-Jacque Lecerle is a really funny guy, who knew?

Get meta with me

Thanks to s0metim3s for posting a link to this great little essay by Etienne Balibar, cleverly titled "Sub specie universitatis." As the title suggests much of the article, the first part at least, deals with the institutional conditions of thinking within the university. Or, more to the point the tension between the specific site of the university, or rather specific universities with their institutional and political conditions, and philosophy's claim to be the universal grasped in thought.

The piece is interesting for two reasons: one, it is Balibar, and I find nearly everything he writes to be engaging and interesting (how is that for pathetic academic-fandom?) and, second, it deals with the question of the institution of philosophy, which is both philosophically interesting and completely practical at the same time.

On the speculative side it seems to me that one of the many philosophical tasks that Marx left in his wake, namely from the identification of philosophy and ideology in The German Ideology, is thinking philosophy in relation to its constitutive outside. As Pierre Macherey writes: "Hence this notion that Marxism was the first to explore: philosophy is not an independent speculative activity, as would be a pure speculation, but is tied to "real" conditions, which are its historical conditions; and this is why, let it be said in passing, there is a history of philosophy, which can be retraced and understood"

The academization of philosophy, a process by which outsiders to the institution of philosophy (Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche, Benjamin, to name just a few) are made into respectable objects of study, around which careers can be made, also raises some real practical issues. For example, I always try to incorporate some contemporary philosophers in my intro to philosophy class. This inevitably leads to some objections from students who find the whole practice of citing and referencing to be at odds with their idea of philosophy (the search for the meaning of life, or whatever). Now these objections could be dismissed as naive, but I do not think that they are. I think that we have to offer our students something more than a future of commentary if philosophy is going to continue to exist.

Fries with that?

I just got back from spending Thanksgiving in Houston. In the weeks before my trip, whenever I would tell people where I was going, they would at me look as if I just told them that a distant relative had died, and offer their condolences. Yes, indeed, we east coast education and arts types have a bias against Texas and vice versa. But I have to tell you that it is not that bad, hence the city's new motto: "Houston, It is Not as Bad You Think."

It was great to see my brother (whose art is featured above), mother, and assorted friends of my brother (namely Donna and Amy). I also saw many fine sights, such as the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Diverseworks, the former Enron Building, and everyone's favorite Halliburton.

There are a few mysteries of Houston, however, like the predominance of Pawn Shops and Bail Bonds offices. Now, this might have something to do with Houston's famous lack of zoning laws, which leads to all sorts of strange combinations of businesses, like strip clubs nestled amongst Applebees and Dick's Sporting Goods (giving new meaning to the word "strip mall"--budda-boom.) Of course that would explain the placement of Pawn Shops but not the sheer number of them.(To continue reading about Houston and fries click "Read More")

The biggest mystery, at least of a culinary sort, occurred not in Houston but in Galveston. We were dining at a restaurant called "Fisherman's Wharf" which attempted to bring the tackiness of San Francisco's famous tourist trap to the Gulf Coast. Let me tell you they succeeded, it was just like fisherman's wharf but with oil rigs instead of Alcatraz. Being an vegetarian I ordered a salad (it was the only non-fish item), which came topped with onion rings and little balls of fried feta cheese. Now I am not opposed to fried food, I even ordered fries with my salad (a combo which I have sampled at many a restaurant), but I have never had so much fried food in a salad before.

We also went to see Fast Food Nation while in Houston. I was a little dubious about the film at first, but was curious enough to see it. I have to say that I enjoyed it, and thought that it worked better than the book. While the book has some interesting tidbits of information about the history of McDonalds, working conditions in meat processing plants, and fast food restaurants the films structure makes it possible to go beyond the perspective of scandalous facts.

The film follows three stories: an executive from a fictional fast-food chain investigating complaints about a meat processing plant, a high school age girl (and employee at the same chain) beginning to discover the world of campus politics, and a group of immigrants from Mexico working at the same processing plant. These stories do not really intersect, except tangentially, the girl serves a hamburger to the executive, etc. and I know from reading a few reviews that many people find this to be a weakness of the film. I would argue that it is a strength. First, because the stories do intersect, not directly through the characters meeting, but indirectly, through the corporation which they all work for, consume from, etc. Second, because as the film progresses all of these characters begin to struggle against the same corporation, albeit for different reasons, for some it is a matter of politics or conscience for others it is a matter of survival. It is this point that the disconnection between the stories, the relation of nonrelation, becomes powerful. All of the characters struggle in isolation and for the most part their struggles are futile. Watching the film one gets the sense that things would turn out better if the various characters could meet and organize (the executive would get evidence about the working conditions at the plant, the teen age girl could find a more effective way to rebel, etc.), but of course they cannot, and that seems to me to be the films point. These people (who are really just stand-ins for us) only relate through the commodities which they produce.

Milton Lost

Milton Friedman died the other day. Now I cannot say that I am all torn up by that, but it does provide an opportunity to tell this little story.

I was in a used bookstore, buying among many other things a copy of and Capitalism and Freedom and Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (It was my second copy of the latter, the first was falling a part, held together with packing tape.) As the clerk was ringing up the various books he read the covers, first Capitalism and Freedom then Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. When he got to the second he exclaimed, "Capitalism and Schizophrenia, that is more like it. It is definitely schizophrenia, not freedom."

I always thought that was funny.

This story made me think about the books that I have completely worn out, and even replaced, and the fact that they probably say a lot about me.

Books that I have replaced include: The Ethics, The Savage Anomaly, The Genealogy of Morals, For Marx, and The Phenomenology of Spirit (Although the last one doesn't really count because I started with a crappy used version that had pen markings in the first few pages, as far as the reader got I suppose). Of course the list should also include books that are now held together with rubber bands or tape like: Lenin and Philosophy, Capital, and The Grundrisse.

It occurs to me that this is a game that everyone can play. So what books have you worn out?

Weekly Indoctrination

I end up teaching Marx, a lot. Sometimes I try to avoid it, but it is hard to teach classes on political philosophy, nineteenth century philosophy, etc. without teaching Marx. What I notice most of all is that the whole dynamics of the class changes when Marx comes up, when I teach Aristotle, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Arendt, etc., I feel like I really have to sell it, convinve them why this is worth reading, with Marx they may not know why, but at least the relevance has already been established. As Althusser says "philosophy should be judged in terms of its effects." Well Marx has had effects, not all good, some nightmarish even, but effects nonetheless.

With Marx I am already dealing with a misreading. This can lead to some amusing responses. Case in point, a discussion of "Estranged Labor."

Student: "It sounds like Marx is on the side of the workers."
Me: "You could say that, yes."
Student: "Then why is he a bad guy?"

Now, not all responses are that amusing. Some can be downright interesting, even daunting. Today I was teaching some short pieces including "The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society" and the first question was about money in communism, could it be dispensed with, etc? Now this question is difficult to answer, especially for a class that is only reading the "1844 Manuscripts." I did a passable job, or at least I avoided loosing the whole class by discussing Marx's critique of "time chits", but it occurred to me while answering that this student really wanted to know this, it was not an academic question.

I have also noticed a particular impass in teaching Marx. Most students grasp the critique of capitalist society and agree with at least part of it. However, at the same time they are aware, albeit vaguely, that some attempt to put these ideas into practice went horribly wrong. Caught between the critique and the solution, students are often left in a position of impotence, in which all attempts to change things are doomed to fail. As Homer Simpson says, "Never ever try." Thus despite Marx's best efforts (and mine) students end at the place where they began: cynically aware that everything is bad, and any attempt to change it can only get worse.

Rethinking and Remembering

Attending conferences and grading have kept me from the blog as of late. Last weekend I attended the intermittently held "Rethinking Marxism" Conference (aka: Marx-a-palooza). This is my fourth time attending the conference. Which means that a) I got to see a lot of people that I know and b) the whole place (UMASS conference center/student union) has all kinds of Proustian resonances. I never knew that grey concrete could conjure up so many memories.

The pleasures of this conference were mostly of the social variety. To quote the old man himself:

When communist workmen associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need— the need for society— and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together. Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies (1844 Manuscripts)

Strike the whole patriarchal (or fraternal) "brotherhood of man" and the "work-hardened bodies," these are academics after all, and you pretty much get the picture. All in all I saw friends from undergrad, grad school, as well as my current institution, and managed to make some new ones as well. Yes, it is true what they say, there ain't no party like a Marxist party (cause of all the denunciations...)

Anyone who has attended the conference knows that the real fun (and by fun I mean fiasco) is in the plenary sessions, in which various big-wigs are harangued for the sins of theory, as well as everything that has or has not happened under the name of Marxism. The wigs were not as big this time (Ernesto Laclau, Susan Buck-Morss, Kojin Karatini, are hardly household names), but that did not keep the last plenary on "Rethinking Communism" from getting pretty contentious. First, I should say that I really admire RM for putting this panel on, after all Marx has become perfectly respectable academically (even "The Economist" says we should read him), but communism is another thing entirely. It was, however, the name of communism, as well as the fact that a certain speaker (who shall remain unnameded) went well over his allotteded time, that opened up the floor to all kinds of frustrations. As much as I cringe at every demand to "tell us what we should do to bring about revolution" (or something like that) I have to say that I like the insistence on some connection to politics, to practice. After all you just do not get those kind of questions at SPEP.

Commentary and Creation

I guess that this qualifies as more post-SPEP musings, since SPEP is, as many have noted, ruled by the tyranny of the proper name, in which panels or papers are organized under the banner of this or that philosopher, it raises the question--is commentary all that remains of philosophy? A colleague of mine recently compared philosophy, or the history of philosophy, to art history, where all one does is comment and categorized what has already been created. It is a depressing picture (no pun intended) one that the powers that be seem to only want to reinforce. Along these lines I thought that I would post the following (abandoned) review of Alliez's book, which paradoxically attempts to escape commentary from the inside.

Repetition as Creation

Review of:
The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy?
By Eric Alliez
London and New York: Continuum, 2004


When Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What is Philosophy? appeared in English in nineteen ninety-four the title and the topic of the book was cause for a reconsideration of the earlier collaborative efforts of the unlikely pairing of the philosopher and the activist/psychoanalysist. Gone was the provocative subtitle “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” as well as the references to anthropology, literature, politics, and film, all of this was stripped away in favor of a book that dealt almost exclusively with philosophy with a definition of philosophy, as practiced by Plato, Descartes, and Kant. For many, such as Jonathan Rée, writing in the New Left Review, this change was not interpreted as a shift of position, a mellowing with age or a change of topic, but as revealing the truth of Deleuze and Guattari’s early positions.1 Deleuze and Guattari were not the radicals after all, the theorists of “micro-politics” of the revolutions of feeling and thinking of post-nineteen sixty-eight France, but philosophers, in the classical sense of the term, even philosophical “snobs” concerned with nothing more than the privileges of pure thought. The archetype of the reader of Deleuze and Guattari was no longer the student revolutionary, but Slavoj Zizek’s yuppie on the Paris underground, who locates in Deleuze and Guattari’s “deterritorialization” of desire a perfectly adequate description of globalized capital.2

Why did this final collaboration do so much to put the earlier works in question, becoming the scandalous truth that revealed the lie of their claim to be radical, political, and inventive? This change may have something to do with extrinsic factors (at least in the Anglo-American World). In the years that the first volumes of “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” were being translated, articles on Deleuze and Guattari appeared outside of the mainstream academic press, appearing in journals such as Semiotext(e) and presses such as Autonomedia, with their veneer of street-credibility, and Zone, with its blatantly avant-garde aesthetic, and discussion of their works was to be found on the internet, rather than in a graduate seminar. By the time that What is Philosophy? was translated this had begun to change, leading up to the cottage industry of Deleuze-studies that appear today. It may also be that while the first books could be easily grasped as inventive, as the production of something new on even the most superficial reading, all one had to do was glance at the footnotes to see Kafka cited alongside historical studies of nomadic peoples, Marx read along with D.H. Lawrence, and Bergson alongside the nineteen-seventies B-Movie Willard, the later work, with its references to the all too familiar names of Plato, Descartes, and Kant, seemed to be a return to business as usual. What is Philosophy? returns to not only a classic question, philosophy’s self-understanding, its concept of itself, but a classical way of answering questions, through the discussion of previous figures in the history of philosophy. Which is not to say that science and art (and even history and geography) are absent from What is Philosophy, but their presence is fundamentally altered. Science and art are defined through their own particular material and act of creation, science creates “functions” and art creates “percepts,” but these creative acts remain, it would appear, named and conceptualized by philosophy. This is strikingly different from Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in which central concepts such as the “body-without-organs” and “rhizomes” are directly imported from art and science, the first from Antonin Artaud and the second from botany. While in the former collaborative works, science and art interrupt philosophy’s history, in What is Philosophy, they would appear to be subsumed under a “philosophy of” art and science.3 Thus, potentially returning Deleuze and Guattari’s work to what Deleuze had earlier described as the “intimidation machine” of philosophy:

The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the represser’s role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger, and so-and-so’s book about them? A formidable school of intimidation which manufactures specialists in thought—but which also makes those who stay outside conform all the more to this specialism which they despise. An image of thought called philosophy has been born historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.4

The form Deleuze and Guattari’s argument takes in What is Philosophy? would appear to betray not only the spirit of their previous works, books that exemplify the trans-disciplinary mode of knowledge that has come to be known as theory, but its own specific content as well, its argument that philosophy should be considered to be a practice of the invention of concepts.

It is in light of this tension within Deleuze and Guattari’s last (collaborative) work that the paradox of Eric Alliez’s The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy? can be grasped. This short book which for all intents and purposes appears to be an addition to the genre of commentary/interpretaton, so-and so’s book on Deleuze and Guattari, aims to return this work to its project of invention and construction. As Alliez defines the paradoxical status of his own endeavor: “For it is the strength and the paradox of this book that it forces us to carry out an exercise in ‘textual commentary’ in order to escape both the fatality of Exegesis and the snare of Reference” (2). Alliez’s aims to produce something other than exegesis, the interminable practice of revealing what was already written, through the very tools of commentary, by writing a book on a book. In doing so his intent is to reveal not so much the content of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, but its practice, its way of doing philosophy. “Philosophy must constitute itself as the theory of what we do and not as the theory of what is…” (90).

This “practical turn” from philosophy as a description of what is, an interpretation of the world, to cite Marx’s famous statement from the These on Feuerbach, to a practice, an activity, bears more than a superficial resemblance to Louis Althusser’s work on “theoretical practice.” In each case it is a matter of seeing philosophy as an activity, as productive of effects, rather than as a picture or description of the world. Alliez alludes to this proximity by placing a quote from Althusser on Spinoza (whose influence on Althusser and Deleuze is immense) as the epigraph to the first chapter. Secondly, in Deleuze and Guattari as well as in Althusser, grasping philosophy as an activity means thinking its relation to other disciplines, other modes of thinking. Philosophy must be viewed through its constitutive relationship with “non-philosophy.”5 Although, the two will have very different conclusions regarding the relations that philosophy establishes to these other areas of thought. The most notable difference between Deleuze and Guattari and Althusser is that politics is absent from the former’s discussion of the conditions of philosophy, while art is absent from the latter’s understanding of philosophical practice. Which is not to say that art is absent from Althusser’s thought, not only is an essay on theater situated at the center of For Marx, but Althusser’s central concepts of “Darstellung” and “symptomatic reading” are drawn from an engagement with artistic production.6 However, art is absent when Althusser turns his attention towards a general theory of philosophy as a theoretical practice. As Althusser argues, philosophy is situated between the breaks of science, the new discoveries that are also new logics, new rationalities, and the revolutions of politics, which are transformations of ideology.7 This double determination also defines philosophy’s specific site of intervention: philosophy represents “science” to politics, bringing its rationality and logic to the conflicts of politics, and it represents politics in science, separating the discoveries and inventions of science from the dominant ideologies.8 A discussion of the relation between Deleuze and Guattari and Althusser is not just a matter of dredging up some distant ghost from the past to critique the present, the absence of politics as a specific mode of thinking, a specific condition for philosophy, is also the charged leveled by Alain Badiou against Deleuze (and Guattari’s) philosophy.9 Badiou’s charge mirrors the general critique of What is Philosophy? in which Deleuze and Guattari are revealed to be the opposite of what they claimed: not the anarchic liberators of desire, but rather neo-Platonists in revolutionary’s clothing, who have no politics, only a naturalist mysticism which reduces the world in its multiplicity to expressions of one vital force.10 For Badiou, the omission of “politics” as a condition for philosophy reduces Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy to ineffective speculation.

In latter works, published after The Signature of the World, Alliez defends Deleuze against this charge of the avoidance of politics, (eventually arguing that the encounter between Deleuze and Badiou is the definitive polarity within the contemporary orientation of philosophy), thus it is not surprising that Alliez’s earlier work, already contains not just a response to this specific charge, but an understanding of the political dimension of Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the status of philosophy.11 For Alliez, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical practice is summed up with the formula “Expressionism = Constructivism” (103). It is this general formula that Alliez uses to develop a different account of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, one that makes philosophy not an ineffective reflection, but a task of invention adequate to contemporary conditions. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.”12 It is this statement that Deleuze and Guattari develop and demonstrate through the rest of their book, and as Alliez argues it is in this development that the specific idea of expression as construction is developed. In order to demonstrate this point Deleuze and Guattari take as their initial example Descartes’ philosophy. This example, like most of the texts that Deleuze and Guattari cite in What is Philosophy? is self consciously drawn from outside the lineage of philosophers, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, from which Deleuze constructed his genealogy of a subversive strain of immanence in philosophy. Descartes is from the enemy camp, a philosopher of transcendence, subjectivity, and idealism. For Deleuze and Guattari, Descartes is first and foremost a philosopher of beginnings, of radical breaks with the past, or with presuppositions in general. It is perhaps this attempt to start anew and not the content of his thought that would make Descartes truly modern. “Descartes…does not want to define man as a rational animal because such a concept explicity presupposes the concepts of rationality and animality: in presenting the Cogito as a definition, he therefore claims to avoid all objective presuppositions…”13 Which is not to say that Descartes can avoid all presuppositions, can think ex nihilo, his famous formulation “I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum) presupposes that everyone knows what it means to think (8). Deleuze and Guattari do not see this replacement of objective presuppositions (the definitions of “animal” and “man”) with subjective presuppositions (the experience of what it means to think) as a failure on Descartes part. Rather it reveals an important part of “constructivism.” The philosopher does not simply construct concepts, but in doing so draws on a particular “image of thought, ” the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, or what Deleuze and Guattari call “the plane of immanence.” “Philosophy is a constructivism, and constructivism has two qualitatively different complementary aspects: the creation of concepts and the laying out of a plane.”14 Concepts are not pure inventions, but take place on a plane that they presuppose and realize.

The plane of immanence is the “non-philosophical” condition of philosophy. It is with respect to this that the stakes of Alliez’s formulation regarding “constructivism =expressionism” can be grasped in such a way that it traverses all of the problems alluded to above. As Alliez indicates the true inspiration for this idea of philosophy as constructivism is not Descartes, who it can be applied to, but Spinoza. It is Spinoza who illustrates the relationship between a “plane of immanence” and the concepts or definitions that are created on it. As Alliez writes with respect to Spinozist definitions in the Ethics: “Spinozist definitions do not derive from a reflexive relationship of the representer to the represented that would necessarily transcend (as their reference); rather they manifest an expressive material aspect immanent to their conditions of enunciation” (13). Alliez point of reference is Deleuze’s work on Spinoza, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. In that work Deleuze argues that “expressionism” defines the relation of immanent causality, not only between God and the natural world, but between ideas and their causes.15 Ideas do not represent objects, but express or comprehend their causes. For Spinoza all ideas, including the inadequate ideas of superstition, have causes, conditions that they expresses, in a more less confused manner. At the core of the relationship between a plane of immanence and the concepts that are created on it is then a causal relationship between a manner of thinking and a manner of living. Concepts are invented on planes of existence that orient them. This relation passes through what Deleuze and Guattari call “conceptual personae.” Conceptual personae are the figures that appear in philosophy, such as Descartes’ “idiot,” the one who doubts everything. These “figures,” persons, hypothetical and imagined make the concrete connections between a way of thinking and a way of living. Descartes philosophical creation, the “cogito”, not only presuppose a particular idea of thought, but also a particular manner of evaluating life, of valuing certainty over doubt. “It is only from the ‘affective’ and ‘perceptual’ point of view of the conceptual personae that the plane can be traced and concepts can be created on the plane of immanence” (10). The conceptual personae illustrate Spinoza’s point that all thinking passes through its affective coordinates, its joys and its sorrows.

The formulation “Expressionism = Constructivism” results in a new perspective in philosophy, what Alliez calls “onto-ethology.”(25) An onto-ethology evaluates philosophy by grasping the connection that a philosophy, a particular creation of concepts, makes with a particular way of inhabiting the earth, the territories it creates. It evaluates them not by comparing them to some transcendent set of values, a vision of the good life, but by an immanent examination of the possibilities and connections it opens. “A possibility of life is evaluated through itself in the movements it lays out and the intensities it creates on a plane of immanence: what is not laid out or created is rejected.”16 This onto-ethology is opposed to what Alliez calls “onto-theology”or “onto-teleology.” Onto-teleology is caught in the relationship between “subject” and “object” searching for the guarantee of representation. In sharp contrast to this “onto-ethology” evaluates philosophy not in terms of how it represents an object to a subject, but in terms of the objects and subjects, the world, it creates. “The question is no longer that of the methodological dependence of the object in relation to the subject, but of the ontological auto-constitution of a new subject on the basis of its objects” (56).

Alliez’s “onto-ethology” in part answers to the question of the omission of politics as a specific engagement with the world in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari do not address politics as a particular mode of thinking because all thinking, insofar as it relates to the construction and destruction of planes of existence, is political. A politics not of representation, of the state, contracts, and laws that represent subjects to institutions and vice versa, but a politics of production.17 The production of habits, ethos, ways of living. “Expressionism = Constructivism” has as its correlate a second formulation drawn from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Nature = Production.18 Deleuze and Guattari construct this formulation from an inventive approach to Marx’s formulation in the 1844 Manuscript, in which man and industry are declared to be a part of nature, as well as the definition of production in the Grundrisse. As Deleuze and Guattari write, reflecting on the way in which consumption, distribution, and production effect and determine each other: “everything is production.”19 What Alliez’s formulations stress is that in each case the first term, expressionism or nature, which is generally understood to exist on the side of the object, or at least, outside of human interaction, only exists insofar as it is actualized, constructed or produced. To take the most contested example of Deleuze and Guattari’s corpus, the concept most capable of being understood as indicating a vitalist metaphysics, desire, Alliez reminds us that desire only exists as it is assembled, constructed in historically specific formations.20 As Deleuze and Guattari write “There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.”21 Alliez’s pithy formulations work in two directions at once. First, against “naturalism” or “vitalism” in that they stresses that the nature or the expressive powers of the universe is necessarily actualized by the constructions and productions of desire and thought. Secondly, against a pure act of creation, in that they argue that constructions or productions are always constructions of some already existing material conditions. As Alliez reminds us Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy could be considered a philosophy of nature “now that any distinction between nature and artifice is becoming blurred” (77). Politics is this intersection of nature and artifice, invention and constraint, thinking and living, praxis and poeisis. Thus to formulate something of a response to the criticism outlined above regarding politics, Deleuze and Guattari do not have a specific thought of politics because politics, the creation of ways of thinking and living, is immanent to thought. “Politics precedes being.”22

As we have seen with respect to philosophy this intersection of constraint and creation takes the following form. Every invention of a concept presupposes a “plane of immanence,” sometimes referred to as an “image of thought,” which is illustrated by conceptual personae, by “sketches” of its existential, relational, and dynamic features.23 Alliez highlights that it is a matter of engaging “the constitutive relationship of philosophy with non-philosophy” (29). In stressing this formulation from What is Philosophy? Alliez would appear to get at the heart of much of the criticism of the book, which has argued, more or less explicitly, that it is precisely this constitutive relationship that is absent from the book. The specific name that Deleuze and Guattari give this “non-philosophy” is (at least initially) the “plane of immanence.” As such it functions as an index of differentiation and periodization. “The plane is certainly not the same in the time of the Greeks, in the seventeenth century, and today (and these are still vague and general terms): there is neither the same image of thought nor the same substance of being.”24 Such a formulation turns the plane of immanence into something akin to a stage in the development of Spirit or even a particular epoch in the preontological understanding of being, to use Heidegger’s term. However, Deleuze and Guattari are wary of such narrativizations and historizations of philosophy, which bestow on it a necessary beginning, origin, and end. This narrative of philosophy can either be one of progress, “the self-unfolding of spirit”, or of decline, “the forgetting of being,” but in either case it remains to be a narrative of origin and end. In such cases “non-philosophy,” history or the understanding of being, becomes entirely subsumed by philosophy becoming a part of its necessary development.

Alliez argues that Deleuze and Guattari develop a different understanding of philosophy’s relation with non-philosophy, one based upon a “principle of contingent reason” (22). Deleuze and Guattari label this principle of contingent reason “geophilosophy,” because it replaces the question of the origin and end in time, “philosophy as the destiny of the west,” with the question of the formation in space. “Geography wrests history from the cult of necessity in order to stress the irreducibility of contingency. It wrests it from the cult of origins in order to affirm the power of a milieu.”25 Deleuze and Guattari are referring to Fernand Braudel’s geohistory of the contingent formation of capitalism in western Europe, a formation that involved multiple encounters, geographical, political, etc. but they could also refer to their own work in Anti-Oedipus which stresses the “contingent” formation of capitalism.26 As Deleuze and Guattari argue following Marx, capitalism is dependent upon the encounter of two “flows,” a flow of workers with nothing to sell but their labor power and a flow of money free to invest, these two flows have different and complex conditions, primitive accumulation, usury, merchant capital, colonialism. "The encounter might not have taken place, with the free workers and the money-capital existing 'virtually' side by side."27 Or it could have taken other forms: slavery or perhaps a bloody revolt of the poor. This assertion becomes a principle when it is both generalized and made into an interior condition. It is generalized to include the formation of philosophy in Greece, the so-called “Greek miracle,” which they argue should be understood in relation to its milieu, the jagged coast open to the sea, to maritime networks of exchange, and the stranger. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not just that capitalism and philosophy are contingent elements of the west, unrelated and separate, but they intersect on the same terrain, the destruction of transcendental modes of evaluation in favor of an immanent process. For the Greeks this immanent process is the “agon” the contest between friends, which constitute the terrain of debate, while in capital it is the flows of capital, which place everything on the same terrain of exchange. “Modern philosophy’s link with capitalism, therefore, is of the same kind as that of ancient philosophy with Greece: the connection of an absolute plane of immanence with a relative social milieu that also functions through immanence.”28 Finally, “the principle of contingent reason” situates history with respect to the “becomings” that animate it. “Becomings” refer to the process of invention, a process that is dependent upon conditions, on a specific plane of immanence, but turns away from it, intersecting with the dimensions of the event not realized.

Deleuze and Guattari’s citation of Fernand Braudel as a model for this contingent history is a bit confusing, since it is not clear that Braudel himself (or his disciplines) would recognize Braudel as a theorist of contingency. What Braudel stressed was the intersection of multiple histories, the long dureé of geography and day-to-day practices intersecting with the more rapid transformations of markets, and the punctual events of political transformations and battles. For Deleuze and Guattari it is less a matter of thinking the intersection of different histories, for example the history of art, science, and philosophy, than it is a matter of stressing the heterogeneity between history and “becoming.” It is a matter of thinking the “event” as the production of the new that always exceeds its conditions. As Deleuze stresses in an interview with Antonio Negri, “What history grasps in an event is the way that it is actualized in particular circumstances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history.”29 Becoming refers to what cannot be explained or narrativized by history, it is the presence of the unforeseen, the contingent, in any historical process. In asserting the categorical difference between history and becoming, Deleuze and Guattari make it clear that they are opposed to not only the teleological histories of Hegel and Heidegger, but any historization of philosophy, this would most likely include Marxist or materialist historicizations. While many would equate the rejection of historicization as a rejection of Marx, and materialism, altogether, it is clear that Deleuze and Guattari do not. Despite the fact that What is Philosophy? unlike the previous volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia does not offer any novel interpretations of surplus value, commodity fetishism, or the role of power in capitalist society, it does offer an important challenge to the appropriation of the creative powers of the concept by capital. As Deleuze and Guattari write, lamenting advertising and publicity’s claim to be creative: “The only events are exhibitions, and the only concepts are products that can be sold.”30 However, precisely how Deleuze and Guattari reconcile Marx’s critique of capitalism and a problematization of history as a method of explanation is not clarified in What is Philosophy?31 Alliez’s The Signature of the World does not exactly address this tension, but it does offer at least a point to place from which to begin by suggesting that Deleuze and Guattari’s category of the virtual must be thought as simultaneously material and abstract, which brings it into conceptual proximity with the Marxist concepts of abstract labor, money, and surplus value, all of which can be described as simultaneously material and abstract (105).32 However, the problem of the materiality of abstraction is not central to What is Philosophy? or even The Signature of the World, their central problem is the creativity of philosophy, and it is in light of this that the distinction between history and becoming is invoked.

While the different “planes of immanence” the different “images of thought” make up the history of philosophy, determining its different periods, Greek, Modern, Postmodern, philosophy as an act of creation exceeds this history. It exceeds it in part by the ability of placing these different periods and figures in proximity to each other. “Philosophy is becoming, not history; it is the coexistence of planes, not the succession of systems.”33 As Alliez writes, clarifying this perspective on the history of philosophy: “There can thus be a philosophical history of philosophy only through the elaboration of virtual philosophies that dramatize the play of concepts as the expression of the play of the world” (100). Thus there is a definite stress given to the history of philosophy in What is Philosophy? It is a history that forgoes the assumed lines of influence that pass for history in most discussions, and teaching, of the history of philosophy; that is, Deleuze and Guattari are not primarily concerned with the influences or “conversations” that are generally invoked to explain philosophical positions (the way Kant responds to Descartes, or Aristotle to Plato). For Deleuze and Guattari each philosopher must be grasped transversally (as an act of creation, expressing a particular plane of immanence) not linearly (as part of the “great conversation” of philosophy) or horizontally (as the expression of a particular historical moment). Or, it might be more accurate to say that while Deleuze and Guattari’s other collaborative works stressed the non-philosophical conditions of philosophy, by converting history, economics, and anthropology into conditions for philosophical invention, the latter book attempts to thematize this very act of invention, of fabrication. Alliez refers to this difference, between the former and the latter, as the difference between an extensive and intensive definition of philosophical practice (86). When Deleuze and Guattari consider art and science in the final chapters of this book, it is not to consider them as part of the “non-philosophical” conditions of philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari’s writing is far from Althusser or Badiou, who consider science, politics, and art (in the case of the latter) as conditions for philosophy (to use Badiou’s term), which modifiy or transform its practice. For Deleuze and Guattari art and science are not conditions for philosophy, provocations or raw material, but fellow travelers in a process of thinking, a process of invention. They are different ways of confronting or organizing the “chaos" of the world. "What defines thought in its three great forms--art, science, and philosophy—is always confronting chaos, laying out a plane, throwing a plane over chaos.”34 It is this chaos, or the plane that is constructed over it that defines the non-philosophical condition of philosophy, art and science intersect with this plane, pursuing their own vectors, but they do not determine it. Deleuze and Guattari are not interested in laying out the groundwork for a renewed intellectual history, that would chart the effects of scientific discoveries and aesthetic innovations on philosophy, but on studying how each discipline (for lack of a better word) constructs a particular mode of living and thinking. Alliez’s little book makes it possible to see the stress on philosophy, defined as a practice of invention, not as a retreat to the ivory tower, but rather an attempt on Deleuze and Guattari’s part to thematize their own practice, as well as the practice of philosophy in general. Hence the importance of the parallels with science and art, which can be intuitively grasped as practices of invention and creation. What is Philosophy? was written as an invitation to produce philosophy rather than just another comment on it. Its goal is to turn philosophy away from the institutions of commentary and interpretation in order to make it a practice of invention. Ironically The Signature of the World is in some sense the attempt to write the last commentary on Deleuze and Guattari’s book, one that would liberate its specific practice. It is easy enough to add a new interpretation to philosophy, a new understanding of this or that philosopher, it is more difficult, however to reorient its practice, to set it new goals, however, Deleuze, Guattari, and Alliez remind us that this is all any philosopher worth of the name has tried to do, this reminder is also a challenge and a provocation.

1 Reé 1995, p. 111.
2 Zizek 2004, p. 183.
3 There are suggestions that this difference is not merely one of form. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari explain their tendency to draw from science and the arts through their theory of capitalist deterritorialization: “Why this appeal to art and science, in a world where scientists and technicians and even artists, and science and art themselves, work so closely with the established sovereignties—if only because of the structures of financing? Because art, as soon as it attains its own grandeur, its onw genius, creates chains of decoding and deterritorialization that serve as the foundation for desiring machines, and make them function” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 368).
4 Deleuze and Parnet 1987, p. 13.
5 Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p 218.
6 Montag 2003, p.35.
7 Althusser 1995, p. 308.
8 Althusser 1971, p. 65.
9 Badiou 2000b, p. 196.
10 Badiou 2000a,p. 10.
12 Alliez 2004, p. 6.
13 Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 2.
14 Deleuze 1994, p. 126.
15 Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 37.
16 Deleuze 1992, p. 138.
17 Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 74.
18 Alliez 2004, p. 9.
19 Alliez et al 1999, p. 125.
20 Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 4; see also Read 2000,96.
21 Alliez 2004, p. 9.
22 Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 29.
23 Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 203.
24 Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 70.
25 Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 39.
26 Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 96.
27 Read 2003b, p. 5.
28 Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 225.
29 Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 98.
30 Deleuze 1995, p. 170.
31 Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 10.
32 It is worth noting here recent works that while have developed the connection between Marx and Deleuze and Guattari, none so far have fully explored the idea of the virtual in connection with the abstract materiality of money. See Read 2003a and Thoburn 2003.
33 Alliez’s early works demonstrate an ease in working through the Deleuze/Marx intersection in thinking through the specific politics of neoliberalism. See Alliez and Feher 1986.
34 Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 59.
25 Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 197.


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