Last Communist Standing 3-D: The Commons

If you have the glasses I believe this picture will be in 3-D. I would have made the entire post in 3D, but who really wants a buch of words jumping out at them?

As I stated in a previous post, I consider Badiou and Rancière’s work on "the axiom of equality" as well as Negri and Virno’s work on “the commons” to be important aspects for a renewal of communist thought. (I could also say the same for Balibar’s work on equaliberty.) Communist, and not Marxist, first, because as it has been documented Marx had little to say about communism, and second, because it is less a matter of citation of textual authority than drawing out the logics of political practice. Finally, such works deal with the axiom or the ideal that one struggles for, rather than what one struggles against: elaborating a theory of communism rather than furthering the critique of capital.

So, how to define the commons? In one of Negri’s latest books, published in French as Fabrique de porcelaine: pour une nouvelle grammaire du politique, the common is defined through the old problem of the relation between public and private. As Negri states, following arguments that are as old as Marx’s writing, capitalist appropriation is always private while its form, that of contractual law, is public, defined by the state. Capital is thus neither public nor private, it is what Marx refers to as a “social power.” The liminal position of capital only increases as it appropriates not only the physical aspects of labor but language, science, and social knowledge, what Marx calls he “general intellect.” The common must thus be thought as the inverse of capital, occupying the same liminal space. It is neither public nor private, collective nor individual, but the ground through which such distinctions are made.

Three things make this argument interesting. One, as it takes as its starting point the contradictions within capital itself. This is a departure from some of Negri’s definitions of the common, which are often excessively celebratory. Secondly, in that Negri writes of the emergence of the common from the transformation of capital, it stresses the fact that Negri’s understanding of the common has little to do with a nostalgia for “the commons” for pre-capitalist relations of shared use. Capital is criticized from the future it makes possible not the past that it destroys. Finally, it draws out one of the strengths of the concept of the common and that is ambiguous or liminal nature. This comes out must strongly in the work of Paolo Virno, for whom the common (or the multitude, a term which is thoroughly intertwined with the meaning of the former), is situated at a point of indistinction between collective and individual; public and private; work and action (to use Arendt’s categories).

This last point is perhaps the most important, the common is not the collective, nor is it any term, such as society that could be understood to stand above or beyond the individual. The idea of the common is inseparable from rethinking these oppositions from the perspective of “the production of subjectivity.” As Negri and Hardt write in Multitude “Subjectivity, in other words, is produced through cooperation and communication and, in turn, this produced subjectivity itself produces new forms of cooperation and communication, which in turn produce new subjectivity, and so forth.” The concept of the common is inseparable from a new thought of subjectivity one that moves beyond the opposition of individual and collective. The very things that individuate us, a manner of thinking, speaking, inhabiting the world, are drawn from the common, and the common does not exist outside these acts of individuation. The common produces subjectivity and subjectivity produces the common. To quote Negri once again, “It follows that subjectivity is not something interior placed before an ‘exterior’ that we define as language; on the contrary, like language it is another mode of common being and nothing more.”

To return to the theme of this series of posts, the communism of Badiou and Negri, this insistence on the intersection of the common and the production of subjectivity is based on very different grounds than the former’s axioms of equality. In Badiou’s case (as well as that of Rancière) it is a matter of communism based on the axiom, or invariant of equality. Equality is an axiom, and a prescription, a here and now insistence, indexed only to the generic equality of thought. While in Negri’s thought (and in post-operaismo) it is a matter of a communism of the common, a communism of the production of the common, in which capital’s subsumption of the capacitites for language, knowledge, and desires, produces a common ensemble of capacities, the conditions for not only he creation of wealth, but also the transformation of society.

There are very different philosophical anthropologies underlying these two concepts. In the first it is the matter of isolating a generic invariant, thought or speech as that which precedes and exceeds the hierarchies and classifications of any social order. While in the second, it is a matter of locating the historical nexus of productive capacities that defines the common. The risk of the first approach, the axiom of equality, is that it overlooks the actual divisions and mutations of thought and speech that are produced through historical structures. While the latter carries with it all of the baggage of any historicism; just look at all of problems and debates surrounding the attempt to identify the present through the concepts of “immaterial labor” and “real subsumption.” The strength of both these perspectives, and the debate that opens up between them, is that they foreground the idea of a different account of the social order and the human subject, against the consensus that locates a self interested individual at the basis of all of history, and any social order.

Spinoza and Marx: Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together

It is no secret that I consider Marx and Spinoza to be “two great tastes that taste great together.” I also really like Reese's peanut butter cups, and have fond memories of their old commercials, which involved people walking down the street eating from jars of peanut butter only to collide with people eating chocolate bars. This is why jars of peanut butter should only be consumed in the kitchen or possibly while watching television. It is just too dangerous to eat peanut butter in public. I consider pushing this analogy to extremes (“hey, your immanent ontology is in my socio-historical critique!”), but I decide to spare you that, dear reader.

Last Communist Standing II: This Time it’s Personal

This is something of a follow up to my earlier post on Badiou and Negri. This is not actually more personal, I just think that the second in an any series needs to have as its tag line either “This time it’s personal” or “The War.” The third in any series then should be in 3-D (a la “Jaws” and “Friday the Thirteenth”). The fourth is then set in space, and the fifth can then only take place in “Da Hood.” There is a science to sequels, just look at the Leprechaun films.

Anyway, what I really wanted to do was to add the following to the Badiou and Negri comparison. With respect to a renewal of communist thought, the writing of Negri and Badiou could be seen to represent two major trends: in the first case a communism based on the axiom of equality and, in the second case, a communism based on a reconsideration of the common.

The first is, in a general sense, a perspective shared by Badiou, Ranciere, and Sylvan Lazarus. Defining characteristic that could be said to unite all of these thinkers is that in each case equality is an axiom, a presupposition for politics, and not something to be realized. To state that equality is an axiom for politics is to remove politics from the idea of a program or a plan, since equality means that there is always the possibility of a political event. Rancière goes the furthest is maintaining the anarchic dimension of the axiom of equality. As Rancière writes in Disagreement:

“Politics only occurs when these mechanisms are stopped in their tracks by the effect of a presupposition that is totally foreign to them yet without which none of them could ultimately function: the presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone, or the paradoxical effectiveness of the sheer contingency of any order.”

Equality means that any order, any hierarchy, is ultimately illegitimate. Especially since, as Rancière points out, any hierarchical order makes the point of explaining itself to those who are inferior, simultaneously acknowledging and denying their equality in understanding. While equality has a disruptive effect on any attempt to ground politics, there is still the question of its ground. What justifies such an axiom? This might be the wrong question, and it is quite possible that it bears the ideological weight of the times that asserts the equality is nonexistent (after all nature is filled with hierarchies) and thus impossible. (Badiou’s The Century has some interesting remarks mapping the ideological vicissitudes of the last century according to shifting emphasis given to one or the other of the terms in the formula “liberty, equality, and fraternity.”) However, I still think that it is an important question to ask, if only because the answers get to some interesting points of distinction.

In the case of Rancière the answer would seem to speech, the equal capacity for speech. This in some sense shows the influence of Aristotle on Rancière. In many ways Rancière could be understood as working through the connection that Arisotle initially asserted between mankind as a speaking animal and a political animal. However, Rancière argues that far from being an anthropological constant speech is in some sense “always already” political. As Rancière argues “This is because the possession of language is not a physical capacity. It is a symbolic division, that is a symbolic determination of the relation between the order of speech and that of bodies…” Thus, speech refers back to the distribution of the sensible. Despite this move, it does seem to me that speech or rather language, the language through which political orders are articulated and contested, remains something of a ground, or a basis, of this axiom of equality.

In many respects Badiou seems less cautious with respect to the anthropological ground of this axiom. For Badiou it is not speech which provides the basis for equality, but thought, or as Lazarus writes, “man thinks.’ Equality is not a political goal to be realized, but a fundamental axiom, a starting point for politics based on the universal human capacity for thought. For Badiou there is an anthropological division at the heart of mankind, between thought, the human capacity to maintain itself in fidelity to truth, and interest, the preservation of self that mankind shares with all animals. Behind every “Thermidor,” every attempt to put an end to the political process, every reaction which occludes the event, “there is the idea that an interest lies at the heart of every subjective demand.”

The axiom of equality is thus not without its anthropological postulates. Postulates which refer to human capacities which are at once generic, shared by all, and ahistorical, thought and speech do not substantially change over time. Although one should not be too quick to simply assume the first. In fact what strikes me about this generic equality of thought is how it immediately calls to mind a very different sort of thought about anthropology in what Etienne Balibar calls “anthropological difference.’ What Balibar calls “anthropological difference” is a difference that fulfills two conditions: first, it is a necessary component of any definition of the human (such as language); and second, the dividing line can never finally be objectively drawn. Examples of this would include sexual difference and the difference between sickness and health. In each case there is no division of humanity into men and women (or the healthy and the sick) without remainders, intersections, and identities that would ultimately need to be policed and patrolled. Balibar includes the division of labor, or what he calls “intellectual difference”, within this category. Humankind cannot be defined without the idea of thought (as Spinoza writes: “Man Thinks”), but this general definition is divided by the practices and institutions which determine and dictate the division between the “ignorant” and the “educated” or between “manual” and “mental” labor.

Balibar’s concept stands as a necessary correction to the work of Rancière and Badiou. One that introduces what I see as a necessarily materialist dimension, since these divisions relate ultimately to the division of mental and manual labor, that is the historical production of divisions and differences. As such this division is complicated by technological history, which continually redraws the line between head and hand, through automation and labor saving devices, thus fundamentally rewriting the very schema or idea of the human body. Through the use of computers and technology intellectual operations are broken down and subject to the same mechanization as physical operations, while at the same time other intellectual operations are "somatized," inscribed in the body, as in "the aesthetization of the executive as decision maker, intellectual, and athlete." The division between head and hand determines and modifies the very figure, and ideal, of humanity into "body-men" and "men without bodies." These images of perversions of the human are ambiguous objects of both fear and idealization. For example: "body-men" human beings reduced to brute physicality by the labor process are objects of both an aesthetization and idealization, as athletes, and fear, as contemporary savages. As such the division between mental and manual labor is integral to, without determining, the imagery of various racisms and other forms of conflict, which are in part conflicts over the proper identity of the human, over the ideal of the "correct" integration of mind and body. The division of mental and manual labor is the point of intersection of the figure of the idea of humanity, as it is envisioned and lived, and the historical transformations of technology and the economy.

However, the direction that I wanted to go in was not to contest the generic aspect of equality, its anthropological basis in speech or thought, but its ahistorical basis. As I stated in the outset, what I want to do is contrast the axiom of equality to the materialism of the common in the work of Negri, Virno, etc. But I guess that is going to have to wait for the sequel. So stay tuned for “The Last Communist Standing III: In 3-D.” (I am going to have to figure out a way to distribute those cardboard glasses.)

Blogcapsule

[blägkapsel] noun. 1. A blog which was regularly updated for a period of time, but has since fallen into neglect. It remains on the web as a sort of time capsule of the period in which its author was active. 2. What "unemployed negativity" was in the danger of becoming.

It has obviously been a very long time since I have updated this blog. The reasons for this are quite mundane, the usual end of the semester crunch combined with a conference and a brief period of travel in which I was off the grid for a little bit. These mundane reasons have combined to break the habit of "blogging" so now, even when I have the time (arguably), I do not have the inclination. I have even gone back to writing random thoughts in my notebook instead of posting them here. I am now trying to get the habit back and am taking advantage of some jetlag which has me wide awake at 3:47 AM to get back into the habit. This blog was begun in jetlag and in jetlag it shall be reborn.

Of course starting the habit is not the same as having an idea. The only glimmer of an idea that I have right now has to do with title of this post. As a reader of blogs I have noticed that more often than not, when the author (or authors) of a blog stop posting, the blog continues to linger online for a long period of time, preserving the moment that it was active. This brings up an aspect of the relationship of the internet to temporality that one does not often think about.

It has become commonplace (even banal) to indentify the internet in general with immediacy, it is the place where one goes for up to the minute news, commentary, etc. Thus, the internet easily serves as a kind of technological stand in for the decline of historical comprehension in contemporary capitalism. The reduction of time and history to the instant and pure speed of communication. However, as I have already indicated this image does not fit the internet itself, which perserves the traces of not only various blogs but many things. One can still find archived discussions on listservs when performing searches on Google. On the internet the past and present coexist, appearing on the same list of search results. Like Freud's use of the ruins of Rome as a metaphor for the unconscious, past and present exist side by side without distinction or differentiation. I am not sure what this says about time, or historicity, other than that the temporality of the internet (and perhaps of society in general) is not just the pure present but an unthinking and unreflecting retention of the past. Nothing is forgotten. To quote Deleuze and Guattari, “a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed.”

No Admittance Except on Business

This is going to be one of those posts where I stitch together a few quotes, make a few comments that are somewhere between banal and provocative, and leave it at that. I consider this to be fair warning.

If I had to pick my favorite passage in all of Capital, it would be the following, which is the transition from Part Two to Part Three:

Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face “No admittance except on business.” Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making.

This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all.

On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.

(OK, that is probably more than could be called a “passage,” it is more like page). There is so much that could be said about the sheer rhetorical density of this passage, the allusions, sarcasm, and characterizations. I suspect that it was a good writing day for Marx. Marx’s general point is the division between the sphere of production and exchange. A division that offers another account of ideology or fetishism; ideology is a necessarily partial view of society, based on the market, a partial view which takes itself for the whole. The “eden of the innate rights of man” is an after image of market activity itself. Lately, I have been wondering if it is possible to push Marx on this point. I wonder if he may be understood to be saying something about the relationship between work and representation. What if the no admittance sign obscures work, and production, from the realm of social representation?

I have seen this theme come up a few places as of late. First, I am reminded of a theme that appears in Anti-Oedipus. As Deleuze and Guattari argue repeatedly in that book,“desire is not recorded in the same way that it is produced.” The entire thematic of the production of desire against the theater of desire is one form that this distinction takes. Deleuze and Guattari also suggest that since production is upresentable, idealist explanations rush in to fill the void. As Deleuze and Guattari write: “Let us remember once again one of Marx's caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of the wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and relations of production. The product appears to be all the more specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends.”

In a short piece titled “The Factory as Event Site” Alain Badiou goes the furthest in suggesting that there is a general division between production and presentation. As Badiou writes: “Whomsoever is in civil society is presented, since presentation defines sociality as such. But the factory is precisely separated from society, by wall, security guards, hierarchies, schedules…That is because its norm, productivity, is entirely different from general social presentation.”
Finally, Rancière relates the “unpresentability” of labor to the “distribution of the sensible, a particular articulation of what is seen and felt, rather than a general ontological problem. As Rancière writes of the exclusion of the worker from public space in the nineteenth century: “That is, relations between workers’ practice—located in private space and in a definite temporal alternation of labor and rest—and a form of visibility that equated to their public invisibility relations between their practice and the presupposition of a certain kind of body, of the capacities and incapacities of that body—the first of which being their incapacity to voice their experience as a common experience in the universal language of public argumentation.”
Whatever the reasons, ontological, aesthetic, or political, the division between work and representation, would seem to necessitate two things: democratic politics, politics of representation are ideological, or rather fetishistic at their very core, and, second, the politics of work can only exist as a disruption of this order.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 1922-2007

I have been trying to write something in honor of Kurt Vonnegut for some time now. While it has been awhile since I read his books, I poured through them in high school, and they were quite influential on my young impressionable mind. So in lieu of an actual post, I am going to post the following email that my father sent to my brother and I on the day of Vonnegut's death (which is fitting since most of the Vonnegut I read in high school were his old books).

Guys:

I am sure that you have noted the death of Kurt Vonnegut. In my life he played a significant role in: (i) questioning the assumptions that are implicit in our daily lives; (ii) valuing our humanity and (iii) and the role of irony in maintaining some semblance of sanity. He addressed with considerable insight important themes in modern life:

1. Corporate Capitalism’s attack on individuality and community--Player Piano

2. Corrosive effects of consumer culture--God Bless you Mr. Rosewater

3. Crimes committed in the “fight against evil”--Slaughterhouse Five

4. Perversion of science as a weapon--Cat’s Cradle

5. Then emptiness of entrepreneurialism--Breakfast of Champions

He has been dismissed as a comic outsider speaking only to the disaffected. However, I believe that he will be recognized as someone who illuminated modern culture and focused on important issues. The NY Times obituary is very good and I urge you to read it.

Unfortunately, as was evident in his more recent writing, he was unable to take comfort from his own insights and had given up on humanity. Regardless of the effects on him, I love his writing for its intelligence and humor and will miss him greatly.

Love

Dad

Those Who Dream with Their Eyes Open

Recently, I picked up Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy by Stephen Duncombe. I am not really sure why, it is not the sort of thing I generally read. I would classify it as pop-progressive, and I find that in general I do not have time to read those sorts of things. For example it took nearly a decade, and several friends, students, and colleagues recommending it to me, for me to get around to reading No Logo.

The book takes as its starting point the following anecdote about the Bush administration, relayed in The New York Times:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

While many within the “center-left-progressive” camp have cited this passage to stress the Bush administration’s disconnect from reality, claiming with pride to be part of the “reality-based community,” Duncombe takes it in an opposite direction, pointing out how ineffective the “murmured” enlightenment principles have been within politics. Ultimately he argues that “progressives” (to use his term) need to understand the constitutive nature of the imagination; the way the imagination, desire, and fantasy constitute community, subjectivity, and investments. Now, the book is not primarily theoretical in its orientation. It deals with specific sites of the imagination, video games, advertising, celebrity-worship, and Las Vegas, all of which are usually held in contempt, and tries to reconstruct their radical potential. This is done through the example of such political movements as “Billionaires for Bush” and “Reclaim the Streets.”

Now, I am in fundamental agreement with this book, I still have my suspicions about “Grand Theft Auto,” however, but aside from that I basically agree. What strikes me is that his central criticism of progressives, the idea that politics should eschew imagination, desire, and fantasy in favor of truth, reason, and the force of the better argument, is not just a bias on the left. It is also what I call “the spontaneous ideology of philosophy,” the idea that the “better argument always wins”: that truth has an effectivity in and of itself, and once enunciated and circulated it will change the world. Duscombe does not address this dimension. Like I said the book is not very theoretical, aside from references to Debord and Machiavelli, it addresses practical instances.

Of course there have been a few philosophers who have broken with this ideology; notably Marx, Machiavelli, Spinoza, and, oddly enough, perhaps even J.S. Mill. I was struck to discover again the following passage in Mill: “It is a piece of idle sentiment sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either.” In some ways this reads like a muted echo of Spinoza’s idea of limited effectivity of the true insofar as it is true, but ultimately I think that Mill is conflicted on this point: propagating “true” principles while at the same time recognizing the forces of custom, habit, affects, and fashion, have more force than any principle.

Well, I seem to have blogged myself into a corner. It is not my intention to discuss the contradictions of Mill. I guess I will end with two projects that I think need more work: First, the constitutive dimension of the imagination; and, Second, the critique of the “spontaneous ideology of philosophy.”

Nightmares of the Present (to be followed shortly with a post on dreams)

Wendy Brown’s “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization” (Political Theory 34/6) is a great article, part of a growing literature of critical philosophical responses to Neoliberalism. (Well, that sentence is a wee-bit hyperbolic, since I am primarily thinking of two other things: Brown’s essay in Edgework and Foucault’s Naissance de la Biopolitique, the latter of which is technically almost thirty years old). It is primary strength is that it takes as a philosophical problem the articulation of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.

It has been commonplace on the center-left to dismiss the relationship between these two political “rationalities” (to use Brown’s term) as one that is purely strategic: some dark cabal between Dick Cheney and James Dobson. Or, to cite the argument of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas, to see the neoconservatism of the right as simply the sheep’s clothing of values (technically a lamb) worn by the wolf of privatization. Brown, however, argues for a more intimate, even essential, connection, based upon their shared anti-democratic tendencies. Neoliberalism’s tendency to privatize social issues (to depoliticize them), not just in the literal sense of turning public spaces to private profit, but in the sense that every social problem becomes a private matter, addressed by commodities, crime by gated communities, pollution by bottled water, etc., paves the way for neoconservatism.

At first it would seem that these two rationalities are linked by more of what they oppose than what they have in common. What they oppose are first and foremost equality, which neoliberalism can only see as an authoritarian imposition on the “natural” competition and hierarchies of the market and neoconservatism sees as a violation of the authority of church and family. But they are also opposed to freedom and democracy defined in anything other than individualistic terms. However, the two rationalities do not just share the same enemy, which would have to be called democracy, or democratization. They also work on the same terrain or conditions, reinforcing each other as they oppose each other. As Brown writes: “What this suggests is that the moralism, statism, and authoritarianism of neoconservatism are profoundly enabled by neoliberal rationality, even as neoconservatism aims to limit and supplement some of neoliberalism’s effects, and even as the two rationalities are not concordant. Neoliberalism does not simply produce a set of problems that neoconservatism addresses or, as critics claim, operate as neoconservatisms’s corporate economic plank. Rather, neoliberal political rationality…has inadvertently prepared the ground for profoundly antidemocratic ideas and practices to take root in the culture and subject.” Thus it is possible to see both as privatizations, as reductions of the social to the individual. Neoliberalism reduces the social to the individual of the market, defined by calculations of cost and profit. Neoconservatism reduces society to the individual of morality, defined by faith and sin.

What strikes me about the general problem of neoliberalism and neoconservatism is that the very problem appears in fundamental points in the history of philosophy, albeit modified. From a particular perspective one could read Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, specifically the dialectic of “civil society” and the state, as a contradictory logic which demonstrates how the possessive individualism of the market is reinforced by the authoritarian tendencies of the state. As is so often the case, Hegel is most revealing about this in a remark prior to the section on ethical life where he discusses Protestantism (a conceptual stand in for subjectivity) and Catholicism (a conceptual stand in for the objectivity of institutions). “A longing may therefore arise for an objective condition, a condition in which the human being gladly debases himself to servitude and total subjection simply in order to escape the torment of vacuity and negativity. If many Protestants have recently gone over to the Catholic Church, they have done so because they found that their inner life was impoverished, and they reached out for a fixed point, a support, and an authority, even if what was gained was not the stability of thought.” Unlike the latter discussions of civil society and the state, which focus on the structural conditions of competition and overproduction, this remark, which completes part two of The Philosophy of Right, offers an existential understanding of the dialectic.

I foreground this existential, or subjective dimension, in part because of Brown’s remark about the “culture and the subject,” but also because I would like to drawn a point of comparison between dialectics as a logic of the conjuncture and Deleuze and Guattari’s logic of deterritorialization. To quote the famous passage from Anti-Oedipus:

“Civilized modern societies are defined by processes of decoding and deterritorialization. But what they deterritorialize with one hand, they reterritorialize with the other. These neoterritorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; but they are archaisms having a perfectly current function, our modern way of ‘imbricating,’ of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resuscitating old codes inventing pseudo codes or jargons…These modern archaisms are extremely complex and varied. Some are mainly folkloric, but they nonetheless represent social and potentially political forces…. Others are enclaves whose archaism is just as capable of nourishing a modern fascism as of freeing a revolutionary charge…Some of these archaisms take form as if spontaneously in the current of the movement of deterritorialization…Others are organized and promoted by the state, even though the might turn against the state and cause it serious problems (regionalism, nationalism).”

Two things about this passage: First, It is hard not to read this as a version of the relation of neoliberalism and neoconservatism; and, second, it is equally difficult not to read this passage existentially.

By way of a conclusion: I take Brown’s essay to be something of a provocation, an attempt to grasp the logic of the current conjuncture, the intersection of the seemingly opposed rationalities of capital and the state, freedom and authority. To which I would add, or have attempted by way of Hegel, Deleuze, and Guattari, that philosophy is not free of this logic, that perhaps in some form or another all thought of society has tried to grasp the problem of capital and the state, under various names, dialectics, desiring-production, etc.



Finally, I just want to add a note about The Host. A film that could take the mantle of the most biopolitical film of the year. Now it is commonplace to understand horror films as the projection of some cultural anxiety (Godzilla and the Atom Bomb, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and communism), however, I do not think that would apply here. The monster in this film does not stand for anything, if only because the film spends so much time on the “real” threats that it would represent, pollution, disease, chemical weapons, all of these things are given full reign within the plot of the film. These things all appear as “conditions” within the film, in that there is a pretty standard monster movie narrative (tampering with nature creates monster which harms humans and must be destroyed), which is refracted through the lens of biopolitical panic and authority. It gives a vision of a state which pollutes and contaminates the environment while simultaneously offering itself as the only possible protection of this environment.

Love and Cartoons

It starts out a bit slow, but Michael Hardt's discussion of Spinoza's concept of love and political organization reminds me of why I love them both (Hardt and Spinoza).

While you are on Youtube, check this version of The Communist Manifesto illustrated by cartoons:



The voice over is not great. I mean is a little passion too much to ask for? It is the Manifesto after all. The images, however, are not only riddled with nostalgia (Underdog, Rocky and Bullwinkle, etc), but show that there were some really interesting representations of work in old cartoons. Thanks to Tzuchien for the latter.

The Prehistory of Neoliberalism

In Book IV of the Politics, after classifying all of the various types of political constitution monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, etc., Aristotle argues that there are mainly two constitutions, of which all the others are only variations: democracy (rule of the poor, and many) and oligarchy (rule of the rich, and few). The reason for this is quite simply the principle of non-contradiction. It is possible for the same person to be both a farmer and a warrior, a craftsman and judge, thus making possible any combination of positions and tasks (e.g. an agrarian military dictatorship), but it is not possible for the same person to be both rich and poor (1291b). Rich and poor remain irreducible as identities and thus the conflict between the rich and the poor is unavoidable for every constitution.

Aristotle’s assertion of the fundamental nature of class struggle for politics beats The Communist Manifesto to the punch by over two thousand years. It is perhaps not surprising that Alain Badiou cites Aristotle in a chapter of Being and Event dealing with Marxist state theory. As Badiou writes: “Aristotle had already pointed out that the de facto prohibition which prevents thinkable constitutions—those which conform to the equilibrium of the concept—from becoming a reality, and which makes politics into such a strange domain…is in the end the existence of the rich and the poor” (pg. 104). Unlike the Manifesto Aristotle does not propose to overcome this rift through revolution but seeks to manage it by conjoining aspects of democracy and oligarchy. Aristotle argues that one solution is to promote the formation of a middle class. For Aristotle this middle class, neither rich nor poor, is also a “mean” between two extremes politically, it is a class that neither “avoids ruling” or “pursues it” (1295b). Underlying Aristotle’s assertion regarding the virtue of the middle class is an argument that is so contemporary that it is almost unrecognizable: the identification of the social position of the middle class with the political position of the center. What is contemporary about this argument, which is really more of an axiomatic assumption than an argument, is the assertion, that the class which is in the economic middle is also the mean between extremes politically. The middle class is free of the arrogance and major vice of the rich and the malice and petty vice of the poor. They are the moral center of the polis. It turns out, however, that the middle class is as precarious as it is ideal, the middle class is constantly at risk of disappearing into its two extremes. (Two themes that which we might associate with contemporary invocations of the “middle class”: its fundamentally decent and honest nature and its “disappearance” turn out to quite ancient) It is for this reason that Aristotle lists other ways of resolving the tension between the rich and the poor, other ways of protecting the middle from its extremes. One strategy is to place the capital in the middle, equidistant from the small farms and villages, which make up the populace. The people, including the poor, are the permitted to participate in politics by right, but excluding by the mundane facts of life. As Aristotle writes: “For they have enough to live on as long as they keep working, but they cannot afford any leisure time” (1292b27). The rift between the rich and the poor is unavoidable, but it can be managed by other facts that are just as unavoidable. There is only so much time in a day, and given a choice between political participation and making a living the poor will always choose the latter—if it can be called a choice. The translation puts a particular contemporary spin on the matter by foregrounding “leisure time,” suggesting the contemporary situation in which politics is simply the least entertaining of several “leisure time” activities.

Rancière has gone so far as to argue that what we find in Aristotle, the idea of the middle class and the use of the mundane facts of space and timing to manage political conflicts, is the strategy of contemporary politics. “Aristotle is the inventor of…the art of underpinning the social by means of the political and the political by means of the social.” As Rancière writes:

The primary task of politics can indeed be precisely described in modern terms as the political reduction of the social (that is to say the distribution of wealth) and the social reduction of the political (that is to say the distribution of various powers and the imaginary investments attached to them). On the one hand, to quiet the conflict of rich and poor through the distribution of rights, responsibilities and controls; on the other, to quiet the passions aroused by the occupation of the centre by virtue of spontaneous social activities. (On the Shores of Politics pg. 14)

Politics undermines the social by displacing the divisions of the rich and the poor with a unified identity, that of the citizen, or of the nation. At the same time the social or economic activities of work and leisure are used to temper political grievances, the conflict over the distribution of offices. In contemporary terms, Rancière argues that there is a “reduction” of the social by the political whenever national unity is used to ward off the facts and conflicts of social division. The inverse, the reduction of the political by the social, takes place whenever the promise of general economic development, of progress, is offered as a solution to political conflict.

What Rancière finds in Aristotle is a “strategy” that he argues is paradoxically as ancient as it is modern. Aristotle’s text is exemplary in that the double process of the reduction of the political by the social and the political by the social is explicitly articulated. Aristotle explicitly articulates the various strategies or deceptions by which the tension between the rich and the poor can be overcome or displaced. In On the Shores of Politics Rancière is critical of the reduction of democracy to a democracy of consumer choices, “the banal themes of the pluralist society, where commercial competition, sexual permissiveness, world music and cheap charter flights to the antipodes quite naturally create individuals smitten with equality and tolerant of difference.” Thus, suggesting that the reduction of the political by the social has triumphed. At the same time, however, Rancière is quick to distance himself from “metapolitical” critics such as Marx who reduce democracy to a merely an appearance, an after image of the realm of exchange with its “Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.”

What Rancière’s interpretation leaves open, however, is precisely how this “double process” can be related to the contemporary world. What institutions, structures, and organizations perform this dual action of reduction? To what end? This question seems all the more pertinent today in that we are witnessing in the form of “neo-liberalism” a reinforcement of the overlap between the political and the social. The very term “free markets,” the dominant ideal of political and economic life according to neo-liberalism, articulates this overlap and consumes: “free” invokes political ideals of freedom while the term “market” grounds these ideas in economic life. The term “free-markets,” and its associated rhetorics, politicizes economic life, making the market a space of freedom rather than of the production, circulation, and exchange of resources, while at the same time “economizing” politics, freedom becomes a choice between consumer goods. The term “free market,” at least in the manner in which it functions in contemporary polemics, defines politics and economics by each other, simultaneously confusing the two. Thus democracy and free markets become not only conditions of each other, but ultimately the same thing.

In Hatred of Democracy Rancière turns his attention not to neoliberalism, to the practices that reduce democracy to consumer choice, but to the theories quasi-sociological and philosophical, which reduce the politics of democracy to a pop-sociology of consumer society, what he calls the collapse of political, sociological, and economic onto the same plane. What this paves the way for is ultimately a reduction of democracy to an anthropology, or an anthropological opposition between “an adult humanity faithful to tradition, which it institutes as such, and childish humanity whose dream of engendering itself anew leads to self-destruction.” I will say two things about this: one, it is oddly reminiscent of Rancière’s critique of the 1844 Manuscripts, which he argues reduced such terms as value, wealth, and alienation to an anthropological meaning, and two, it is a little disappointing. Now this disappointment may have to do with untranslatable nature of a polemic. Ultimately what Rancière offers is a critique of what we would call in neoconservatism and not neoliberalism, or the juncture between the two.

Mediocrity Rules: Notes from TV Land

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

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

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

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

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

Best "Get Your War On" Cartoon ever.

Experiments in Sarcasm

I just got home from going to see Little Children. Not a perfect movie, not by a long shot. For one thing the voice over sounded a little like someone decided to read the actor's directions out loud, in case the audience just wasn't getting it. A few of the scenes were really well done, but the back and forth between the effective scenes and and the pedantic voiceover was a little like reading a good novel only to find that random pages have been torn out and replaced by pages from the Cliffs Notes. But any movie that has Kate Winslet, a discussion of Madame Bovary, and a bunch of Hummels getting smashed to pieces can't be all bad (Although, with respect to the Hummels, the film suffers from a bit from SYMBOLISM. "Quick class what does the playground symbolize?").

I went to this movie alone, something I do quite often nowadays in this solitary phase of my life. I really don't mind going to see movies alone. When it comes down to it movies are not much of a social activity, yes you get to talk before and after, and hopefully there is dinner or drinks or something, but most of the time, during the actual film, you might as well be alone. However, I find that if you are going to the movies alone, it is best to plan the showing accordingly, in general matinees are good, weekdays best of all. Then practically everyone is alone. This particular evening I went to see a movie alone on a Saturday night, which is perhaps not the best choice. Saturday night tends to be filled with couples, this can easily make the transition from alone to lonely.

I got to the film five minutes before it was supposed to start, in general a little late for my taste, but I thought that this would allow me to slip in as the one solitary guy amongst all of the dating couples. Alas, no. There was a huge crowd filling the lobby and spilling out onto the street. Apparently, the last showing of the film had not let out yet, and didn't get out for another fifteen minutes. First, this was awkward. There were many colleagues from the University in the crowd, a few of whom do not even know that I am no longer married. (Well at least I have not told them, I find that word has a way of spreading, and, believe me, when you have difficult news to deliver, the kind that makes you feel like crying, gossip is your friend.) Second, and more importantly for my story, I couldn't quite get past the fact that the last film went over. After all, it is not like this is basketball (do they have overtime in basketball? I hope so. It would really help my point). Movies have a fixed length; in this case 130 minutes. Granted that is a bit long, but it is not like the theater did not know how long the film was. In fact I know from looking at the theater's web site. So I could not contain myself, I made few sarcastic remarks, to everyone and no one. A very uncharacteristic gesture on my part. People seemed to be amused.

Which brings me to the title of this story: once in college participated in psychological experiment on sarcasm. I was something like the mole, or plant, or accomplice (there must be a technical term for this, for the person who appears to be in the experiment but is actually in on it). My friend had the thesis that the conditions for sarcasm are: a) an incompetent authority figure and b) a pointless task. So he had volunteers sign up for what they were told was an experiment on memory. They were then given a lengthy and easy test, matching shapes or some other idiotic task for pages on end. My role was to get the sarcasm going, I would say things like, "This guy has a real winning project" (referring to my friend, when he was out of the room). Despite the fact that my experience this evening confirms one of the theses, nothing calls for sarcasm like incompetent authority, it was not a very succesful experiment, but it was a lot of fun. Since the whole things was filmed, I felt like I had participated in the long history of psychological films; like Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience...

And the Stanford Prison Experiment...

As a philosopher, and one of an anti-humanist materialist orientation, I find it necessary to criticize psychology for its focus on interiority and subjectivity, but I have to admit they have some of the best documentaries. Or maybe it is just the look of the sixties and seventies that makes them so enjoyable, like watching old Twilight Zones or episodes of In Search Of...

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.