A Comment on Ritual

This post is in many ways a follow up to the previous post on good and evil. The title however is a tribute to the late great Nation of Ulysses.

In his short book on an anarchist anthropology David Graeber says two seemingly contradictory things about Utopia. First, he issues a tiny manifesto against anti-utopianism (an anti-anti-utopian manifesto). Graeber’s point is fairly straightforward, since we cannot ultimately know if the world can be a better place, if we can live without hierarchy, exploitation, and domination, then we would be wrong to not at least try to improve things. As the epigraph to the book states, citing Jonothon Feldman, “Basically if you’re not a utopianist, you’re a schmuck.” It is only cowardice or an invested interest in the existing order that would lead one to present it as the only possibility.

Later, however, Graeber makes a fundamentally different point about utopia. This second point follows one of Graeber’s most significant theoretical points, so it is going to take a bit to set it up. Drawing from his own fieldwork and the ethnographic record, Graeber reflects on societies which are relatively egalitarian. While these societies are in predominantly governed by relations that are noncoercive and anti-hierarchal they have mythologies or religious that are characterized by violence and exploitation. Day to day life maybe characterized by relations of cooperation and consensus, marred “only” by gender inequality, but the supernatural world is characterized by violence, revenge, and the threat of constant unseen enemies.

Graeber draws two conclusions from this fact. First, following Pierre Clastres and Marcel Mauss he argues that non-market and non-state societies should not be understood as residing in some primitive antechamber to market and state societies, yet to develop these crucial institutions, but as actively warding off such societies. Gift economies, described famously by Mauss, are not simply an alternative to market societies, but actively ward off the accumulation of wealth and power that make the later possible. The same could be said of Clastres understanding of “societies against the state.” Proof of this is to be found in the violent mythologies of these otherwise egalitarian societies; such societies are not ignorant of the “evils” of humanity, the capacity for domination, they merely relegate such possibilities to the imagination, to myth and religion.

This leads to Graeber’s second point, the one which relates to the question of utopia. The fact that such societies do not completely dispense with domination and violation means that these are unavoidable, they can be situated in fantasy, but not dispensed with altogether. As Graeber writes: “There would appear to be no society which does not see human life as fundamentally a problem. However much they might differ on what they deem the problem to be, at the very least, the existence of work, sex, and reproduction are seen as fraught with all kinds of quandaries; human desires are always fickle; and then there’s the fact we’re all going to die…Indeed, the fantasy that it might, that the human condition, desire, mortality, can all be somehow resolved seems to be an especially dangerous one, an image of utopia which always seems to lurk somewhere behind the pretentions of Power and the state.” I must admit that it is a little frustrating that Graeber uses the term “utopia” in such opposed ways in the same short text, once to refer to the possibility of a better world and a second time to the unrealizable nature of a complete realization of that possibility. (Two bring to otherwise unrelated thinkers into relation, Graeber’s point here is similar to Badiou’s idea of the unnamable or the evil of dogmatism) Despite this contradiction, or rather because of it, Graeber’s point is a fairly consistent agnosticism with respect to human nature. Between the two invocations of utopia, one optimistic the other pessimistic, there is an idea of a human nature the limits and possibilities of which cannot be known.

In Graeber’s argument there is thus an echo of Emma Goldman’s counter-argument to the opposition to anarchism based on human nature. As Goldman writes:

But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism? 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? John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

Such an agnosticism with respect to human nature underlies “weak” conceptions of social construction. The idea being quite simply that we have never seen humans outside of this or that social context, so we never grasp human nature just this or that social political articulation of it. The trouble is that this particular sword cuts both ways, uncaged human nature may be Hobbes’ wolf or Rousseau’s noble savage. Last semester some of my students, eternal pessimists that they are, always looking for new apologies of the existing order, argued vehemently that uncaged man might simply be much worse.

In the recently published Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, Paolo Virno expands upon his remarks in the essay “Anthropology and the Theory of Institutions.” The central point is still the connection between good and evil, rooted in the radical indeterminacy of the human animal. As Virno writes:

Both “virtue” and “evil” require a deficit of instinctual orientation, and they feed off the uncertainty experienced in the face of “that which can be different from the way it is”; this is how Aristotle (Ethics) defines the contingency that distinguishes the praxis of the “animal in possession of language.”

The solution to this predicament is not to resolve this condition, to impose a law that would annul once and for all this indeterminacy with the categorical command to obey. Nor is it to liberate or realize human nature, which quite simply is nothing other than the indeterminacy of any specific nature. Rather, for Virno, the solution has to return to and rearticulate this fundamental indeterminacy. Institutions only protect us if they articulate rather than dispense with this fundamental ambivalence of the human condition: an excess of stimuli coupled with a deficit of determination, what is often referred to as an opening to a world. The examples Virno gives of this are language and ritual, with language being in some sense the clearest example. As Virno writes:

Language is also more natural and more historical than any other institution. More natural: unlike the world of fashion or of the State, the foundation of language lies in a “special organ prepared by nature,” or in that innate biological disposition that is the faculty of language. More historical: while marriage and law fit into the category of certain natural givens (sexual desire and the raising of children, for the former; symmetry of exchanges and the proportionality between damage and compensation for the latter), language is never bound to one of the other objective sphere, but it concerns the entire experience of the animal open to the world—the possible no less than the real—the unknown—as well as the habitual.

Virno coins a term historico-natural for such institutions as language in ritual, which address the fundamental fact of human existence, its indeterminacy, in historical specific ways. Every ritual, every common place of language, touches upon its indeterminacy and artifice in its very articulation. “The oscillation between the loss of presence and its act of reestablishing itself characterizes every aspect of social practice. The ambivalence between symptoms of crisis and symbols of redemption pervade the average everyday life.” Ultimately, Virno uses this to redefine multitude, as that which puts this historico-natural combination in maximum tension, but he also uses this to redefine the current conjuncture. It is that which I would like to conclude with.

Given that every human institution is caught between the indeterminacy that is its foundation and the regularity it would like to invoke, we can describe the present as characterized by both a defect and an excess of semanticity. We are caught between norms without justification, without sense, the structures of the market and institutions, and an excess of chatter, silent rules and ineffective words. Our problem is not action, but how to make action matter, to break free of both the senseless necessity of the market and the endless chatter of the public.

I am not a Marxist, but...

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

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

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

Everything is Externality

I have been working through two different problems lately, well longer, for the last few years. The first problem is a critique of neoliberalism, specifically a critical examination of its particular anthropology, its particular understanding of humankind as homo economicus as an isolated, rational, and calculating creature. The second can only be described as an examination of social ontology, specifically Simondon’s concept of transindividuality, Spinoza’s multitude, Tarde’s ideas of imitation and invention, and the revival of these theories in the work of Virno, Balibar, Deleuze, etc. Admittedly this second problem has occupied more of my time as of late, but for the most parts these have been two fairly separate projects, traveling along separate lines, with only the vaguest idea of any possible intersection. It is that vague idea that I would like to explore here.

In some brief remarks about neoliberalism in The Politics of Subversion Negri sketches something like a connection between these two projects. “The only problem is that extreme liberalization of the economy reveals its opposite, namely that the social and productive environment is not made up of atomized individuals…the real environment is made up of collective individuals,” What Negri suggests with this phrase “collective individuals” is that far from being a purely speculative exercise the question of what constitutes social relations is central to the political and economic struggles of the present.

Yann Moulier-Boutang has underscored the importance of grasping the paradoxical logic of externalities in contemporary capitalism. Traditionally defined externalities are the various impacts that a given transaction has on those who are not party to the transaction. Examples of this include such “negative” externalities as pollution and such “positive” externalities as the unintended cultural and social benefits of the formation of cities. In each case there are effects that are not paid for, not a part of anyone’s calculation. As Moulier Boutang presents it, “externalities are the representation of the outside of the economy acting on the economy.” One could push this a bit further to say that externalities are the way in which a neoliberal society imagines its constitutive conditions, they are everything that do not correspond to the strict calculation of cost for benefit. As such they represent the economy’s, or the market’s, attempt to represent its outside.

The problem is that these externalities have become increasingly difficult to ignore. This is especially true with respect to the environment, as a negative externality, and the knowledge involved in the production process, as a positive externality. There is a historical argument here about the transformation of capital, and it should be viewed critically, perhaps even dialectically, to recognize the continuities that underlie the changes, the complex mix of the new and old that constitutes any conjunction. It seems bizarre to say that the “environment” and “intellectual labor” are in any way new, but at the same time there is a certain manner in which they have recently become unavoidable. Capital’s negative effects on the environment go back to the very beginning, but have recently become unavoidable due to the density of population and intensity of accumulation; in other words, there are no new colonies left to exploit. At the same time capital has always put to work the accumulated knowledge of society, but for a long time it was able to work with the knowledge hierarchies that it found ready made, the medieval system of the university, the feudal system of guilds, etc, but now it must rewrite knowledge in its own image.

In an argument that is similar to Moulier Boutang's in many ways, Etienne Balibar underscores that what these “exernalities” call into question is first and foremost the idea of property as something that is absolutely and exclusively owned. As Balibar writes:

This question first arises “negatively,” by way of "ecology" in the broad sense, that is by the recognition of the harms that turn the "productive" balance sheet of human labor into a "destructive" one, and that suddenly make manifest that the use of nature is submitted to practically no law. By "nature" should be understood here precisely all the nonpossessable materials that are nonetheless an indispensable component of all "production," all "consumption," and all "enjoyment:" Their existence is only noticed when they are lacking (by the potential or ongoing exhaustion of certain fundamental "resources"), or when they are transformed into waste that cannot be eliminated, or when they produce effects capable of endangering the life of individuals and of humanity, which can be neither controlled nor repaired by the owners of their "causes," even when these owners are superpowers or multinational conglomerates with a worldwide reach....

In an opposite way the rise of intellectual production has challenged the particular identity of private property. Although as Balibar points out, this has perhaps always been the case; there has always been tension between the idea of absolute ownership and the production of knowledge and ideas, which in some sense depends on their transmission, their circulation beyond market exchanges. It has always been difficult to separate the work of art from its reproduction, the invention from its copy. Nevertheless there has been a quantitative if not qualitative transformation of this as well. As Balibar writes, “Data and methods are irresistibly "disseminated"; the "paternity" of the results of scientific and technological research can no longer be defined in an exclusive fashion - neither can, as a consequence, the property of objects that incorporate an ever greater amount of crystallized knowledge.” Ecological effects demonstrate that ownership, of land, resources, etc., are never discrete or total, it is impossible to limit the effects of any action to the chunk of the environment that I possess. At the same time the production of knowledge, or production through knowledge, reveals that the excess of effects over ownership are often a necessary condition for accumulation.

The conclusion that Balibar draws from these transformations are as follows:

It then becomes impossible in practice, and more and more difficult even to conceive of in theory, to pose on one side a right of property that would deal only with things, or with the individual concerned with the "administration of things" (with the societas rerum of the jurists of antiquity), and on the other side a sphere of the vita activa (Hannah Arendt) that would be the sphere of "man's power over man" and man's obligations toward man, of the formation of "public opinion," and of the conflict of ideologies. Property (dominium) reenters domination (imperium). The administration of things re-enters the government of men.

Balibar’s political statement reveals an ontological challenge as well. If it is no longer possible to separate the “administraton of things” from the “government of men” then it is equal impossible to rigorously and decisively separate objects form subject, things from agents. Thus we can perhaps locate the faint lines of this political transformation behind the various philosophical projects to recast reality as constituted of assemblages, networks, dispositifs, and so on. (All of which may also in some way be attempts to recapture or reinvigorate what Marx initially meant by a “mode of production,” which was not just a new name for an old thing, the economy, but an attempt to understand the mutually constitutive relations of subjects and objects, commodities and ideas.) Moreover, it is not just a matter of recognizing dense networks of relations that exceed any simple division of subjects and objects, but recognizing the constitutive character of relations. As Balibar argues Marx’s philosophy, like that of Spinoza and others, can be characterized as insisting on the primacy of relations, or, more accurately, the relation of relations. With respect to neoliberalism the externalities of the environment and of the circulation of knowledge underscore how completely impossible it is to understand our world through the category of the individual (object or subject) since everything seems to happen above and below the individual. To use Simondon’s terms, everything happens at the level of “pre-individual singularities,” the affects, habits, and perceptions, or transindividual relations, collectivities etc.

To return to Negri’s quote above, it is possible to understand neoliberalism as an ideology that is wholly out of touch with reality. At the exact moment that the world is made and remade through relations, of the sub and transindividual, it represents the world as made up entirely of individuals. However, such a characterization misses some of the strongest points of the criticism of neoliberalism in the work of Wendy Brown and even Foucault’s recently translated lecture course on “biopolitics.” Writers on neoliberalism have insisted that it is not just an ideology, in the pejorative sense of the term, a set of ideas one may or may not subscribe to, but a fundamental transformation of how we live and perceive the world, a production of subjectivity. As Wendy Brown argues, one can survey the quotidian effects or practices of neoliberalism in the manner in which individualized/market based solutions appear in lieu of collective political solutions: gated communities for concerns about security and safety; bottled water for concerns about water purity; and private schools (or vouchers) for failing public schools, all of which offer the opportunity for individuals to opt out rather than address political problems. Despite our best efforts we are all some sense produced as neoliberal subjects, calculating the maximum benefit for minimum cost with respect to our labors, actions, and desires.

In the end, and by way of a conclusion, the challenge would seem to be to retain these two ideas at once. To both recognize the constitutive nature of relations, relations which exceed the categories of subjects and objects, and to recognize that one of the things those relations constitute is the image of a world made up of isolated competitive individuals (an image which has very real effects).

Stringer Bell's Lament

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

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

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

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

Indiana Jones Versus the General Intellect

If one wanted to be generous to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull one could say that it tries to continue the self-reflexive nature of the previous films. Whereas the early films represented the 30s and 40s through the lens of the serials of the time, the current film represents the 50s through the conventions of a 50s B-movie, complete with the atom bomb, greasers, the red scare, and flying saucers. It does not go far enough in this direction, however, or, more to the point, it is hindered by Lucas and Spielberg’s desire to become caricatures of themselves.

One thing that has characterized Lucas’ filmmaking since the prequels is this relentless desire to connect all of the dots; the prequels find it necessary to present the origin of everything, from Boba Fett to Chewbacca’s uncle. The current film is burdened by filling in the loose ends to the point where we know not only that Marcus Brody (Indiana Jones’ colleague) is dead, but also that he became dean of the college before dying. From the very beginning Speilberg’s films were almost always family romances, the reconciliation of the family through some external event, aliens, dinosaurs, poltergeists, etc. In the latest Indiana Jones film this becomes incredibly literal and over the top, as Indiana Jones gains both a wife in being reunited with Marion Ravenwood and a son. The only thing missing is a family dog, but his son goes by the nickname Mutt, which is also a meta joke since "Indiana was the dogs name." So much of the film is driven by these rather uninteresting subplots and easter eggs.

The Indiana Jones films have always been on some level about the politics of knowledge. First, there is the “Orientalist” narrative in which only the West can comprehend the secrets of the ancient kingdoms of Egypt and Central America. The living denizens of the various exotic locales do not even have a clue what treasures lie beneath them, let alone how to find them. Only Indiana Jones can unlock the secrets of the ancient tombs (it is only a tragedy that he does not speak Hovitos.) Second, there is also often a quasi-religious idea of humility in the face of the divine. In the end Indiana Jones knows that the ark is best left alone.

The closing scene on the politics of knowledge in Raiders of the Lost Ark

Which is reborn as an easter egg in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, 

Look closely and you can see the Ark

In the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this focus on the politics of knowledge gets shifted a bit. With respect to the first, the Orientalist narrative, there are no "native informants" in this film, nothing like Sallah, Indiana's friend in Egypt. Knowledge exists only between different westerners, Indy spends most of the film tracking down the clues left by his old grad school buddy Harold Oxley, deciphering clues left in Mayan. When the natives do appear they appear as a screaming horde armed with blowguns, there is nothing to discuss, just punch and shoot. Second, the villains are now Communists rather than Nazis, so the plot of the first and third films, Hitler’s desire to turn religious artifacts into weapons, is absent. Second, because the object in question is now secular, an alien skull, rather than sacred, the ark of the Covenant of the Holy Grail. This leads to a very muddled final scene in which the communist villain points out that aliens have a hive mind. She latter is killed by her desire to “know everything.” In some ways this reproduces the end scene of the first film. Aren’t all sequels secretly remakes? This is where the film missed its mark, and could have really developed the anti-communist message. Given that the film dallies with the rumors of Stalinist psychic experiments, the film could have developed the hive mind versus individualistic knowledge. This also would have allowed for the film to develop the rather tacked on middle section about McCarthyism into something. It could have pitted Indiana Jones, the representative of western knowledge (of its others) and "free inquiry" against the collective intelligence of the soviets/aliens.

Hence the title of this post.

Matters of Substance

I will admit from the beginning that I am not a Lacanian. I am minimally competent in Lacan. I have read him, sure, the selections from Ecrits, The Four Fundamental Concepts, and even The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, but all of that was along time ago. Nowadays I tend to avoid him not out of some fundamental disagreement but more out of an acute awareness of how much work it would take to actually engage Lacan again.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up A. Kiarina Kordela’s $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan. Not that I think that the project of the book is totally unfounded. As the book suggests on the first page, Spinoza’s groundbreaking concept of immanent causality has, especially since Althusser’s invocation of it in Reading Capital, been inseparable from the concept of differential causality. So, perhaps, the encounter between Spinoza and Lacan has been a long time in coming.

The book takes as its central point of interpretation Spinoza’s difficult remark in Ethics II Prop 43, “As the light makes both itself and the darkness plain, so truth is the standard both of itself and of the false.” Kordela sees this statement as the basis for a contradiction in Spinoza’s thought. A contradiction between Spinoza’s ontology, which subordinates every final cause to a series of efficient and ultimately immanent causes (we call good what we have been determined to desire), and the requirements of human action that necessarily require some goal, some final cause. In Kordela’s Lacanian terms this becomes the necessity of a fiction. Thus to return to Spinoza’s somewhat puzzling statement, truth’s relation to its opposite, the false, becomes a matter of intimate interrelation. Truth is structured like a fiction.

Kordela illustrates this through Deleuze’s retelling of the story of the fall of Adam and Eve. As Deleuze stresses it is incoherent to think that God forbid Adam to eat the apple; rather it is necessary to understand the apparent injunction as a simple statement of causal effect—“in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” Kordela argues that Spinoza (and Deleuze’s) contradiction has to do with living and dying as ends, as final causes, the former of which is more desireable. What Spinoza (and Deleuze) overlook according to Kordela is the unavoidable nature of the final cause, the unavoidable nature of a fiction. This criticism seems to miss the mark on several points. First, Spinoza addresses this “contradiction” in the preface to part four of the Ethics. As Spinoza argues despite the fact that good and evil indicate nothing in terms of things, tell us nothing about the world, it is necessary to retain these terms practically, with respect to some model or ideal of existence, an ideal that necessarily contains living. More to the point, Kordela’s general criticism that Spinoza fails to recognize the “cognitive dimension” of fiction seems to overlook the status of fiction, or the imaginary in Spinoza political works as well as the Ethics.

Those are the books limitations. The books strength lies in the way in which it reinterprets immanent causality, drawing lines connecting Spinoza and Marx. What Kordela focuses on is the tripartite structure in which Spinoza immanent causality is God (or Substance) expressed in terms of the modes of thought and extension, three terms in which the first exists only in its differential articulation into the other two. The equivalent of this in Marx is Surplus value which exists only in the form of exchange values, which are taken as signs, and use values, objects of utility. (The order and connection of ideas and things.) The structure of being is as follows according to Kordela…1) being as the imaginary univocity of abstract thought, that is, as simulacrum (exchange value or signifier); 2) Beings as the multiplicity of beings (use value or physical beings); and 3) the primary, transcendent, yet immanent, differential (non)-substance that at once institutes the above duplicity and is the effect thereof (surplus).”

I have to say that there is something clever about this idea of surplus value as substance, as substance that exists only in terms of its effects (which are also causes). First, it is not something that I would have thought of, and it does an interesting job of drawing together Spinoza and Marx’s insistence that thought is part of the world. Secondly it insists on an ontological dimension of capital, capital transforms being. It is this last point that is also a bit vexing, as much as the author suggests that an immanent ontology de-ontologizes ontology, rendering it historical and worldly rather than transcendent, it is hard to see this as nothing other than a fixed structure in which only the slots change. There would then be different surpluses, different excess immanent elements, from God to capital, structuring the relationship between thought and being. I would argue that this immanent ontology is not immanent enough, it must take the turn (arguably) that Spinoza’s work takes in part three and four of the ethics, turning towards desire, affects, etc. So much work needs to be done in understanding the intertwining connections between capital and desire. What the book ultimately lacks is something that Fischbach’s book does well articulating, is a connection between Marx and Spinoza at the level of practice, at the level of their concepts of labor and conatus.

Summer Subtext: Only a Billionaire Arms Dealer Can Save Us Now

For the past few summers it seems that every blockbuster film has made some kind of oblique and often lazy reference to the "war on terror." There were references to secret government agencies operating outside of the law (The Bourne Ultimatum), to the difficulty of sustaining an occupation (28 Weeks Later, War of the Worlds), to the politics of fear (Batman Begins, Land of the Dead). This seems fitting, since the "war on terror" is itself a fiction sustained by fictions.

So this afternoon, when I went to see Iron Man the start of the summer blockbuster season, the question lingering in the back of my mind was one of subtext. (I am not totally sure why I saw the movie. An afternoon of grading may be the biggest motivation, but I was also curious to see how a film about a second rate comic book character ended up getting such rave reviews). As a work of ideology the film offers much to work with, terrorism, American exceptionalism, militarism, racism, etc.

It occurred to me at some point during the movie that superhero movies are not so much governed by specific ideological content (nationalism, militarism, etc) but by the form of ideological interpellation itself. The central drama concerns the question of belief or purpose, some kind of final cause. To put it in Aristotle's terms, the films often deal with the disjunct between the final cause, the purpose of the hero, and the efficient cause, the power, skills, or gadgets that make it possible to fulfill the cause. Sometimes the final cause comes first, as in the case of Batman, in which case the hero's origin is a search for the tools and skills necessary to complete the cause, and sometimes the efficient cause comes first, as in the case of Spiderman, and the hero's origin concerns some kind search for a purpose or meaning. Iron Man fits in the latter category, Tony Stark is immediately presented as a man with skills but no purpose other than the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure, in that way he stands in for the general subject of consumer capitalism. The hero's journey is complete when the causes come together, when powers find a purpose. Superhero's are almost defined by their purpose, their bit of ideology, Spiderman's "with great power comes great responsibility" and Superman's "truth, justice, and the American way." (Of course one would want to make a distinction between these two ideologies, but the point is that the ideology, the cause, is as central to the character as the costume.) Thus, one could argue that the appeal of the superhero film is not just in watching someone with amazing powers, gadgets, or skills, but in watching someone with a purpose, someone who believes. The superhero film does not so much interprellate its audience with an ideology, but with fantasy of truly believing in an ideology.

The Love Boat

In honor of the recent disruptions, almost a month since the last entry, I have decided to write some remarks on Love and Other Technologies by Dominic Pettman. This is one of the handful of books that I have read precisely because it was mentioned on multiple blog posts. That is at least the primary reason, the secondary reason is that it contains at least one oblique reference to Simondon (one of my recent interests), and it is about love (something I have always wanted to write about).

The opening sections of Pettman’s book can be understood as a reflection of that often unreflected fact of existence, “serial monogamy”: the fact that most of us will love several people, and will thus go through the same gestures, utter the same words, words and gestures of irreplaceable singularity, to several people, or at least more than one. (Come to think of it, the monogamy is not exactly necessary, just the intensity of an attachment). As Pettman writes:

Alongside the conceptually infinite interchangeability of love, we must acknowledge the existence of a stubborn irreplaceability a finite singularity of the other (as those who have mourned a loved one only know too well). Herein lies the tension of contemporary intimacy, the tension between this radical interchangeability and the simultaneous awareness of our/their profound unsubstitutability on the level of personal narrative. It could be anyone, yet it is irredeemably (th)us. (pg. 40)

Now it seems to me, and this is not one Pettman’s points, that in our day-to-day life we contain this tension through such common sense notions as “types.” The idea of the type somehow contains the open ended serial nature of the encounters, representing them as variations on a theme, or as bad copies of one original. I must admit that I am personally skeptical of the notion of “types,” they always seem like retroactive constructions, an attempt to make sense of our loves after the fact. What Pettman draws from this tension is a notion of “inessential essentially,” every love is a particular “one” but its particularity is situational, at least partially determined by the relation. What Pettman is primarily interested in is the openness of this situation, the love, the relation, the friendship that is outside of type. Moreover, given that this history of love fundamentally change us, providing new perspectives, new worlds, and new habits there is also an openness of the self to its constitutive conditions. We are made of our loves, requited and unrequited, blissful and painful.

Spinoza defines love as nothing but joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause (EIIIP13Schol). A definition that on first glance sounds incredibly instrumental, but if we recall that joy is an increase in our power to think and act, then we can think of love as a process of reciprocal self transformation. We love those who transform us, or are transformed by those that we love. This is where things get difficult. First there is a question of how to sustain this process. We are all familiar with the way in which a love can die, lose its intensity, bogged down in the mundane repetitions of daily existence. Not all transformations are good, there are those transformations that we cannot sustain, things that are too intense, too alien, too difficult. Every relation risks the total effacement or loss of self, two people become one, a bad copy of each other. If we add to this Spinoza’s fundamental insight that all affective relations are ambivalent then we would have to add that this transformation is riddled with difficulties, with pains, jealousy, etc., then the process always risks becoming a different kind of transformation, we become less than ourselves not more, bitter, jealous, angry.

This is not really a thorough consideration of Pettman’s book, just a rift off of one of his themes. I have been meaning to write about the discussion of pornography as well, especially since I watched Society of the Spectacle, but that will have to wait for another time.

Marx at the Movies

Last week I happened to see two (relatively mainstream) movies that referenced Marx in some way. The first was the delirious Southland Tales; a movie that famously was booed at Cannes, seen by like twelve people in the US, and quickly shuttled onto DVD release. I was ready to love this movie, to embrace it as a work of genius, or maybe I was just excited to see Sarah Michelle Gellar as an ex-pornstar turned neo-marxist radical who drives around in an ice-cream truck (that particular description turned out to be inaccurate). I did not love the movie, but not did I hate it, I found myself occupying a middle ground that I would have thought was impossible. I loved certain scenes like the following hallucinogenic dance scene with Justin Timberlake.



But what of the film's reference to Marx, or Neo-Marxism? As Steven Schaviro points out, while the film engages with a alternative future, it is very much made up the visual economy of our present: its aesthetic is mostly flat, like a television image, occasionally punctuated by news feeds (the effect is one of the common practice of watching tv while surfing the internet), and everything about the film, right down to its casting bears witness to our celebrity obsessed culture. I would say that it treats Marx in a similar manner. Marx's image is used several times, and various bits of his life are "name dropped" in the film, everything from the name Jenny Westphalen to Trier Germany is referenced in the film in the oddest manner possible, becoming the name of corporations or futuristic zeppelins, but little is said of class struggle or exploitation. As a friend of mine put it, "so all they did was read the wikipedia entry on Marx." This is not really a complaint about the film. In the world of the film Marx simply becomes one more image, in a flow of images.

Marx is treated very differently in the film Persepolis. In this film it is less the name of Marx, Marx the celebrity, than the spirit of Marx, or communism that is referenced. The film deals with life in Iran and is split into three parts, the first dealing with the rule of the Shah and the revolution, the second with the war with Iraq, and the third dealing with Iran after the war. In the middle section the main character, Marji is sent to live in Vienna to avoid the war. In this section the film follows a rather typical coming of age story, in which love is found and lost. The difference is that at this point both the protagonist and the audience is aware that the trials and tribulations of this coming of age story pale in comparison to the real pains and suffering of imprisonment, war, and persecution. Nevertheless they are treated as quite real, after losing her home and boyfriend, Marji nearly dies from heartache. This to me is where the film's Marxism lies, in the recognition that although the pains and pleasures of the bourgeois life are all situated against a backdrop of comfort, comfort which is made possible by exploitation and suffering elsewhere, these pains and pleasures are nonetheless experienced as very real. The class nature of conscious is the constitutive inability to situate one's own perspective, to not see how one's anxieties fit into a larger whole which dwarfs them. The film does not just leave it at that, however. In the third act, when Marji returns to Iran, all of the bourgeois pleasures of love, alcohol, music, and sex are now seen to be political acts. The same pleasures that were seen as narcissistic in the second act are now understood to be in some sense directly political. This could be seen as a difference of context or situation, a matter of "always historicize," but I think that it reflects a larger point about Marxism, or materialism, which is understood as not an opposition to the realm of pleasure and sexuality (as it would appear in the second act) but to the system in which the pleasures are distributed. I perhaps did not state that well, but the film does a brilliant job of demonstrating how daily life can become a terrain of political struggle. In this way it stands in sharp contrast to Southland Tales, in which the "everyday" is completely filled with images of celebrities and pseudo-events, to the point of becoming entirely empty. The sad part is that it is probably more accurate.

Beyond Good and Evil: Towards a Theory of the Buddy Movie

I am currently teaching a class on the introduction to political and social theory. One of themes that I have been focusing on as of late is the connection between various political theories and their underlying conception of human nature: from Aristotle’s “social animal,” to Hobbes “man is a wolf to man,” to Rousseau’s state of natural pity and self-sufficiency. My pedagogical point is fairly basic; I am trying to stress the importance of “political philosophy” that political questions of the state, law, and right cannot be dissociated from philosophical questions, in this case those of a philosophical anthropology. Even as an introductory pedagogical strategy it has its limits. First, students are all too quick to speak as if they know what human nature is, apparently it can be gleamed from some anecdotes from high school and a few seasons of Survivor. Second, and more importantly, it sets up a rather basic classificatory schema for understanding political philosophy, in which there are those who think that people are bad and those who think people are good. My point in setting this connection up, however, is to problematize it and go beyond it, a process that starts with teaching Rousseau and continues into Marx, Mills, and some anarchist writers (Goldman and Graeber).

In a short essay titled “Anthropology and Theory of Institutions” Paolo Virno reflects on this same connection between politics and anthropology. As Virno argues, this connection cuts both ways in that theories of human nature are also implicitly political. (Anyone who doubts this point needs only to read some of what gets called “evolutionary psychology.”) As Virno writes:

Let us avoid any misunderstandings: it would be unrealistic, even farcical, to believe that a model of the just society could be deducible from certain bio-anthropological invariants. Every political program is rooted in an unprecedented socio-historical context (religious civil wars in Hobbes’s case, a productive process directly based on the power of verbal thought in our own), confronting a unique constellation of passions and interests. Nevertheless, collective action is really contingent precisely because, while it seizes hold of the most volatile reality, it takes charge, in unpredictable and changing ways, of what is not contingent, which is to say of bio-anthropological invariants themselves. The reference to human nature does not dull, but rather accentuates to the highest degree, the particular and unrepeatable character of a political decision, the obligation to act in due time [tempo debito], the perception that yesterday was perhaps too early and tomorrow will be too late.

As much as Virno asserts the simultaneous unavoidable and unanswerable question of human nature he also seeks to separate the link that connects the “left” (communist, Anarchist, etc.) with some naïve belief in a fundamentally good human nature. (Anyone who has taught Marx knows how unavoidable this particular little ideological machine is; the fundamentally unavoidable nature of greed has become the strongest justification of capitalism.) As Virno writes: “Radicalism hostile to the state’ and to the capitalist mode of production, far from presupposing the innate meekness of our species, can find its genuine basis in the full recognition of the ‘problematic’ character of the human animal – which is to say its indefinite and potential (in other words, also dangerous) character.” Radical transformation of the existing order is not based on some supposed cooperative or collective character but on the indeterminacy of human existence, that are natural drives and desires only exist in their cultural articulation. This articulation can push these desires in multiple directions, for better or worse. For Virno the “social animal” that is at the basis of politics is neither good nor evil, but the unavoidable possibility of each.

Starting for a very different place Dominic Pettman makes a point that is somewhat related in Love and Other Technologies. Part of Pettman’s reflection begins with a fact so mundane it is rarely commented on, what could be called the conundrum of “serial monogamy.” That most people will fall in love multiple times, with multiple people, all of whom will seem to be “the one,” at least for the night. Pettman will use this fact to reflect on the generic and singular nature of human existence, eventually tending towards a thought of what Agamben termed “whatever being.”

No matter how much it insults our delicate sensibilities, the fact that remains that we are eminently replaceable on the macro or social plane…And that is why we must refuse to draw lines, distinctions, borders and conclusions prematurely. Precisely because everyone is a potential lover, he or she also is a potential victim of our hatred, and we foreclose on our own futures when we internalize an identity-as-essence or when we count off our conditions of belonging like rosaries or worry beads.

Love like hatred is always about a set of qualities, but it is never reducible to them. As much as we might have our types, the list of things that we look for or desire, their remains that irreducible “something” that is more than the sum total of items on a list. Moreover, there is often that point in any relationship when the very qualities that could have made up a list of desirable qualities become intolerable annoyances. Just as “good” and “evil” relate back to the undetermined potential, which is always capable of being determined in multiple ways, love and hatred relate to the indeterminacy and specificity of a person, their simultaneous generic interchangeability and specific singularity. What links these two arguments is that they attempt to think a politics from the perspective of what could only be called the “transindividual” (to use Simondon’s term), from the characteristics and relations that constitute the backdrop of individuals, rather than from already constitute human beings, or human natures.

So what does all of this have to do with the “Buddy film”? The Buddy film like the screwball romantic comedy begins with two people who completely detest each other and of course by the end that joined in homosocial friendship or heteronormative love. It is easy to interpret these films according to a version of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, in which misrecognition turns to recognition. Following Virno and Perelman it is possible to read this scenario differently; it is not so much a matter of moving from what was falsely seen to what is truly there (the cad is a sensitive gentleman, the heiress has a heart of gold, the gruff older cop has a profound sense of justice), in which one set of qualities replaces another. Rather, it is a matter of grasping the inessential nature of all qualities, their existence as potentiality and not essences.

Most of the time our relations, our loves and friendships, are narcissistic, we love those who are like ourselves. We treat our neighbor like ourselves so long as they are like us to begin with. However, every once and awhile the vicissitudes of location, work, politics, family, or even desire bring us close to someone with whom we have nothing in common, and yet we build some kind of relation. We could see these as the expression of some kind of human nature, that supposed thing that we all possess, or we could see them as a critique of the nature of the individual as an essence, as the sum total of its qualities.

Primitive Accumulation: The Movie

The last few entries on this blog have been notebook entries, the half formulated conceptual connections that used to belong in my little notebook (and should perhaps stay there). So as something of a change I thought that I would write about film.

I had a highly ambivalent reaction to There Will be Blood, an ambivalence that I could not pinpoint. This ambivalence was, and remains, primarily political, aimed at the political subtext of the film. Although I have to admit that this may have a lot to do with my expectations. I went into There Will be Blood half expecting to see Matewan except with oil; something about the scenes of the child preacher made me thing that this was the case. While I have come to appreciate the film, I still wonder about this particular omission of anything resembling class struggle. It is a film about capitalism, but without workers.

When Marx is writing about “primitive accumulation” he is writing about two things at once. The first is the account that capital gives of its own formation. This is essentially a moral story of thrift versus expenditure; the world is divided between those who save their money and become capitalists and those who spend theirs and are left with nothing but their labor power to sell. It is essentially a version of the old fable of the ant and the grasshopper. Marx, however, connects it to a different literary source. As Marx writes “This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology.” This is what Marx refers to as “so-called primitive accumulation.” It is not only an ideological conception of capital, a moral justification, but a complete inability to think historically, falling to grasp how one ends up with workers and capitalists to begin with. Against this conception Marx provides an account of the formation of capital that is opposed to the first on every point: focusing on force rather than morality, and on the aleatory encounters of multiple relations, rather than the linear trajectory of an intention. This is the second thing, an account of force and violence in history. As Marx writes, summing up this process.

"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of indigenous population of a that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of early capitalist production…These different moments are systematically combined together at the end of the seventeenth century in England; the combination embraces the colonies the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection. These methods depend on brute force, for instance the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power."

When I first saw There Will be Blood it occurred to me to view it as a narrative of “so-called primitive accumulation,” a moral story. How else does one interpret the long scene of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) working on his own silver mine? The first part of the film is very much the fantasy of the capitalist as the self-made man; which is why workers are oddly absent from the film. A great deal of writing on this film has labeled Plainview as the personification of capital. (The strongest argument for this interpretation can be found here). If this is so, then on first glance it is not necessarily a critical personification, since it holds onto one of the central ideas of capitalist ideology, the capitalist as one who has earned his wealth, the capitalist as “self-made man.” However, even this narrative is interrupted by the appearance of Paul Sunday, the goat farmer’s son who sells his family out of the desire for escape or perhaps spite. This contingent factor becomes the basis of Plainview’s later fortune, stressing that fortune is made up of frustration, desire, and spite as much as it is of thrift and work.

I am still at a bit of a loss as how to interpret the odd decision to cast the same actor (Paul Dano) as both Paul and Eli Sunday, as both opportunist in flight and would be moral core of the community. The explanation within the film is that they are brothers, ostensibly twins, but it leads to an odd confusion or doubling. All of which resonates in the final scene, when the brother that supposedly represents virtue and faith attempts to repeat the same gesture of opportunism and betrayal that the first brother did, only without success. One could thus argue that the casting, or the presentation of the brothers as twins, underscores the fact that the two narratives of primitive accumulation, morality and force, are never really separate, but intertwined.

This intertwining is given an added dimension by the presence of Plainview’s adopted son. In the long opening scene detailing Plainview’s initial accumulation of capital, he also acquires a bit of symbolic capital through the adoption of the son of a worker killed on the job. The son functions as Plainview’s morality externalized, his alibi as a “family man.” Capital does not so much follow from the moral actions of those who accumulate it, their thrift and hard work, rather it accumulates a moral image based on force. It can present the corporation as a “family business” only after it has destroyed the economic basis of the family. As Deleuze and Guattari stress in their brief remarks on “primitive accumulation,” primitive accumulation is not just violence but a violence that immediately cloaks itself in authority, by claiming a right to appropriate. To quote Deleuze and Guattari:

"Hence the very particular character of state violence: it is very difficult to pinpoint this violence because it always presents itself as pre-accomplished. It is not even adequate to say that the violence rests with the mode of production. Marx made the observation in the case of capitalism: there is a violence that necessarily operates through the state, precedes the capitalist mode of production, constitutes the primitive accumulation and makes possible the capitalist mode of production itself. From a standpoint within the capitalist mode of production, it is very difficult to say who is the thief and who is the victim, or even where the violence resides. That is because the worker is born entirely naked and the capitalist objectively “clothed” an independent owner. That which gave the worker and the capitalist this form eludes us because it operated in other modes of production."

Finally, it occurred to me to look at the film beyond the two perspectives on primitive accumulation, capital born from thrift and work or blood and destruction. What the film stresses, in a way that is more reminiscent of Horheimer and Adorno than Marx, is not just the intertwining of morality and violence, but that capital is born out of violence done to the self. The opening scene of the film, the long drawn out scene of struggle with the earth itself, is not that of a man pulling himself up by his bootstraps as it were, but of a man destroying any connection with others, anything that we confusedly call humanity. What remains is the façade of morality, the adopted son and the image of the family man, and the ruthless desire to accumulate.

The Real as Relation

There are several lines from Hegel that are not only cited often, but also modified to become the basis for new statements. I am thinking of the famous injunction to consider the absolute not just as substance but as subject, which Badiou transforms into demand to “conceive of imperialist society not just as substance, but also as subject,” or of the assertion that the rational is real, which Muriel Combes rewrites as “the relational is real, the real is relational.” It is the former, which appears in Combes short book on Simondon, that interests me now.

Combes remark follows an important insight of Simondon’s, that individuation is not just a process of the constitution of things, an ontogenesis, but of the constitution of thoughts, which are also individuated through operations that transform an inchoate backdrop of thought into discrete concepts. Against a tradition that has assumed that the individual is given, in terms of both individual things and concepts, Simondon argues that both thoughts and beings must be constituted and sustained through an operation, that is a relation with pre-individual singularities and metastable conditions that function as their outside. Ultimately Combes offers a “mash-up” of sorts of Hegel’s statement, substituting relations for rational, and Spinoza’s equally famous proposition seven of Part II of the Ethics, which states that the order and connection of ideas and things are the same. Ideas and things are both relations, not just in their relation to each other, but intrinsically as well; ideas are relations and things are relations.

It is possible to situate Combes remark alongside at least two others, which cross a similar terrain. First, and most immediately, there is Vittorio Morfino’s assertion that Spinoza’s thought is an ontology of relation, rather than a metaphysics of substance. Of course Morfino is going against the dominant tradition of interpretation here, years of commentary that have focused on the stable presence of substance underneath the vacillations of the modes. However, it is precisely this division between primary substance and accidents that Spinoza’s thought refuses. There is no practical division between primary and secondary aspects, between what is intrinsic to a thing and its extrinsic relations. Spinoza defines the essence of a thing in such a way that it cannot be separated from its accidents. Desire is the essence of man; desire which is nothing other than the historically constituted articulation of the conatus, of a particular striving. A thing, a body, a mind, an individual, is nothing other than a relationship with its outside.

Second, Etienne Balibar has argued that Marx’s critique of ideology in The German Ideology has as its corollary a concept of the “real as relation.” The specific quote is: “The materialist critique of ideology, for its part corresponds to the analysis of the real as relation, as a structure of practical relations.” As Balibar notes, Marx does not just denounce ideology in the name of the actually existing material relations of production, in which case the relations would be the truth of the fiction of ideology, but attempts to demonstrate how ideology emerges through those relations, constituted by the division between mental and manual labor. Thus, it is not possible to simply juxtapose an ideological conception to a real condition since that real condition, the structure of material relations of production and reproduction, includes ideology.

There is nothing particularly unique or particularly unified about these three different texts. They are held together only by the tenuous threads of memory, as they all happen to be books or articles I have rea. Beyond that one could make the argument that philosophy has been trying to think the real of relation, or reality as a relation for a long time. After all, this is perhaps part of the meaning of Hegel’s idea of the absolute as subject. Dialectics, structuralism, and so-called post-structuralism have all attempted to pinpoint the particular consistency and logic of relations. If anything justifies this post it is the particular impetus that Combes’ reading of Simondon gives this idea: it is not just that what is exists as a relation, but thought is a relation as well. Thought is not outside of the relations that it is trying to grasp, but is thoroughly immanent to them and constituted by those relations. It seems to me that in this series of clippings and citations there is something like the basis for a materialist redefinition of philosophy.

On a similar point, and as a follow up to my previous post on “The Production of Stupidity,” I would recommend Yves Citton’s “Noo-politique spinoziste ? (Recension de deux livres récents sur Spinoza, de Lorenzo Vinciguerra et de Pascal Sévérac)” The article, which is in part a book review, attempts to bridge the gap between Spinozist discussions of the materiality of thought and Lazzarato’s work on noo-politics. The article ends with a discussion of the particular production of stupidity in contemporary society. As Citton argues stupidity is produced when an event or happening is situated outside the common, outside the dense network of relations that constitute it, and rendered incomprehensible in its singularity. To which I would add, in thinking about the forces of mass media, that such events are then related only to a moral dimension. After all it was Spinoza who taught us that moral understanding of phenomena, of God’s supposed law, tell us nothing; they are the effect and cause of ignorance.

The Power of Form

For a bit of irony I should start with a confession; as I have indicated in my discussion of Lazzarato below, I have little or no patience for knee-jerk criticisms of Marx, criticism based on some supposed identity of Marxism. I find this to be particularly the case with respect to Foucault, who quite famously criticizes Marxism, only to then cite Marx repeatedly “without quotation marks.” I could go on an on about this, pointing out that Foucault often picks the strangest things to retain from Marx, the grand battle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat that ends The History of Sexuality, or, stranger still, the concept of petty-bourgeoisie, for example. I could write a book about this, and would if it was still the nineteen-eighties.

Actually, I should start with two confessions, the idea for this post stems from a certain contingent encounter of two passages, to things that I happened to be reading at the same time that seemed similar. I confess, because I realize that such encounters are banal to say the least; everyone who teaches has had to endure the student who figures out that the thing that he or she is reading in class x is just like the thing he or she is reading in class y.

The first bit is from Foucault’s lecture titled “Truth and Juridical Forms” collected in the third of the “essential” works series. (Another day, when I am in an even more vitriolic mood I am going to write about how much I hate these collections, how much of the really interesting stuff from Dits et Écrits is left out, how they are basically just a repackaged collection of mostly already translated material, and, finally, how they are a horrible hatchet job, disconnecting Foucault’s thought from Deleuze, Marx, Blanchot, etc.) Where was I? Oh yeah the quote, here it is:

Those wishing to establish a relation between what is known and the political, social, or economic forms that serve as a context for that knowledge need to trace that relation by way of consciousness or the subject of knowledge. It seems to that the real junction between economico-politico processes and the conflicts of knowledge might be found in those forms which are, at the same time, modes of power exercise and modes of knowledge acquisition and transmission.

Throughout these lectures, as in many places, Foucault is distancing himself from the concept of ideology, a concept that he argues retains the “subject of knowledge”: ideology is inseparable from a distinction between truth and falsity. In the quote above, however, Foucault adds the concept of “form” to this distinction. To understand the connection between power and knowledge we should examine the forms of knowledge, the test, inquiry, and discipline, not the contents of knowledge. What is so striking to me, and he is where the other reading comes in, is how much Foucault’s emphasis on form rather than content echoes so much interesting Marxist writing on form, real abstraction, etc. This struck me because I happened to be reading Pashukanis’ The General Theory of Law and Marxism at about the same time. Pashukanis is at great pains to stress that a Marxist theory of law is not simple based on the idea of class struggle, on seeing bourgeois interests behind the supposedly neutral categories of law, but on examining the fundamental relation between the commodity form and the legal form. As Pashukanis writes:

Just as in the commodity, the multiplicity of use values natural to a product appears simply as the shell of value, and the concrete types of human labor are dissolved into abstract human labor as the creator of value, so also the concrete multiplicity of relations between man and object manifests itself as the abstract will of the owner. All concrete particularities which distinguish one representative of the genus homo sapiens from another dissolve into the abstraction of man in general, man as a legal subject.

Now one does not have to dredge up such a thinker as Pashukanis to make this point; all one has to do is read the opening of Capital, which focuses on the “commodity form.” Marx’s materialism is grounded on the paradoxical materiality of form, it is the form of the commodity that “matters,” that has effects. One could argue that Foucault knows this, after all his understanding of the norm, as an abstract ideal productive of multiple effects, is indebted to Marx’s concept of abstract labor. That is not the point I want to make here, rather, I want to turn to the odd point of overlap between these two unrelated texts—the distinction between ideology (as content) and commodity (as form).

In a great little book, that recently came back into print, Etienne Balibar examines the different problems underlying the concepts of “ideology” and “commodity fetishism.” These concepts refer not only to specific texts, The German Ideology and Capital, but also to specific problems. The first refers to the state, to power, while the second refers to the market, to subjection. Ideology emerges from the division of mental and manual labor, from the conflict of classes, while fetishism emerges from the quotidian practice of market exchange, from social relations. To this series of oppositions we could add the following: ideology concerns a content of thought while fetishism concerns the very form of thought.

The reason that this is important is not only that it reveals how mistaken Foucault is in his criticism, but it reveals something of a trend in contemporary thought: away from ideology and towards the fetish. Foucault’s remark about forms of knowledge, Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the image of thought, Adorno’s critique of identity, and even Althusser’s concept of ideology all focus on the question of form, and its effects. Finally, if one remembers Balibar’s remark that fetishism concerns a particular mode of appearance, the way things in a commodity society must appear, then one could extend this list to include the revival of a certain idea of aesthetics in Ranciére; aesthetics understood not as a theory of the ideal forms of the beautiful, but as the distribution that determines what appears and how it is sensed.

I am not sure where all of this is going, except to perhaps point out that the question of how to change a form of thought, or perception, is a much more vexing question than simply substituting one ideological content for another. Marx could only begin to address this question by referring to the question of social practice.

Vice Versa

The following quote from Althusser is one that I am quite fond of, and have cited, or at least referred to, more than once:

I claimed that it was necessary to get rid of the suspect division between philosophy and politics which at one and the same time treats the political figures as inferior—that is, as non-philosophers or Sunday afternoon philosophers—and also implies that the political positions of philosophers must be sought exclusively in the texts in which they talk explicitly about politics. On the one hand I was of the opinion that every political thinker, even if he says almost nothing about philosophy, like Machiavelli, can nevertheless be considered a philosopher in a strong sense; on the other hand I held that every philosopher, even if he says almost nothing about politics, like Descartes, can nevertheless be considered a political thinker in a strong sense, because the politics of philosophers—that is, the politics which make philosophies what they are—are something quite different from the political ideas of their authors.” (“Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?” pg. 206)

It appears that I am not alone in my admiration for this quote, much of Negri’s writing would follow this pattern,the ontology of “living labor,” which Negri finds in the Grundrisse and Capital; the assertion that for Spinoza “metaphysics is politics”: and the book on the “political Descartes,” all cross the division between philosophy and politics. In fact much of contemporary philosophy, from Derrida to Badiou, follows this general scrambling locating politics and ontologies where one would least expect to find them.

I wonder, however, if we can shift the angle of focus, from philosophy and politics, to philosophy and socio-historical analysis, then things get a little murky. Initially it would seem that Althusser’s fundamental insight would seem to apply: many works of “pure” philosophy have an understated reference to their social historical conditions. I am thinking specifically of the following passage from the opening of Difference and Repetition:

Modern life is such that confronted with the most mechanical, the most stereotypical repetitions, inside and outside ourselves, we endlessly extract from them little differences, variations, and modifications. Conversely, secret disguised and hidden repetitions, animated by the perpetual displacement of difference, restore bare, mechanical and stereotypical repetitions, within and without us.

But, what I am saying is not limited to that text, the discussions of “das man” and “idle chatter” of Being and Time also come to mind. On the flipside, one could argue that much of the work on Foucault tries to extract a general philosophy from a series of socio-historical analyses. With respect to the first set of texts, pure philosophical texts read for socio-historical analysis and criticism, such a reading would reorient the entire text. Sometimes I think that this would be for the better, I think that Being and Time is best read as a text on modernity, mass society, and reification. (See for example Lucien Goldmann’s discussion of Heidegger and Lukacs.) Better or worse, it opens new directions new connections; what would it mean to read Difference and Repetition for what it says about the repetitions, the repeated and identical objects that structure our existence? Such a reading would open up new connections between that text and the engagement with Marx in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, for one.

Here is where things get tricky, however, if every political, every social-historical analysis can be mined for the secret ontology, or philosophy it contains, and, if every treatise on ontology makes a reference to its historical condition, then how does one even begin to make sense of things? It would seem that all of the old and reliable methods of differentiating between context and text, history and idea, would go out the window. If Marx’s texts are read for an understanding of the production and productivity of being, can they still function as texts that help us make sense of our historical moment? Or, on the flipside, if Spinoza’s texts express something of the fundamental crisis at work in the formation of capitalism itself, the emergence of the multitude, can they still even count as metaphysics? This is a question that could be brought to bear on Negri, but more importantly it seems to be a question that is contained in Althusser’s question.

In the end it is not so much deciding whether or not it is difficult to be a Marxist in philosophy, but, as Althusser also argued, understanding that Marx entails a transformation of philosophy. Thus, contrary to the image of Marxism as a stilted and dogmatic philosophy, it is only through the destabilization of the division between politics and philosophy, between history and theory of history, that philosophy can grasp something of what it truly means to think.

Now is the time to invent

Every philosophical library, public or private, has to deal with the unstable division between “primary” and “secondary” literature. At what point does a book on Nietzsche for example cease to be a book on Nietzsche and become a philosophical work in its own right; are Heidegger’s four volumes on Nietzsche Nietzsche books or books to be shelved with the rest of Heidegger? How about Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche?

This is not really the question that I want to ask, but it does occur to me as I sit down to write some reflections on Maurizio Lazzarato’s Puissance de l’invention: La psychologie économique de Gabriel Tarde contre l’économie politique. This book could arguably be considered a secondary source, a work on Tarde, and in some sense it is. However, that is not how I initially approached it. I read it because I was interested by Lazzarato’s work, specifically Les revolutions de capitalisme, and not so much because of an interest in Tarde, of whom I have read very little. (In fact I read the book in part to figure out if I should be really interested in Tarde, if it is worth the commitment of time to slog through the many long books that Tarde wrote).


The book definitely stands on its own in part because of its thorough consideration of Tarde’s work, but also due to the fact that it is situated within the contemporary debates: Tarde is examined alongside Deleuze, Guattari, Rancière, Foucault, Arendt, and Negri, not to mention Marx. As the title suggests, of all these names Marx is the central focus, given that the work positions Tarde’s conception of “economic psychology” against “political economy.” I have to say that some of the criticisms of Marx are the weakest part of the book. As is so often the case with criticism of “Marxism,” it is often unclear who (or what period of Marx’s writing) is being referred to when the standard ideas of so-called Marxism are trotted out: superstructure a mere reflection of base, labor as primarily industrial labor, and so on. These are arguably tendencies within Marxism, and it would be foolish to deny that they exist, but they are only tendencies, which are always countered by counter-tendencies. Lazzarato, who traveled in circles with Negri and Virno, should know better than to reduce Marxism to such tendencies.

However, Lazzarato argues that Tarde’s target is not just Marxist political economy but Marxist and classical political economy. Specifically he is targeting their specific psychologies, or theories of subjectivity. Classical (or bourgeois political economy) posits the subject as a bearer of pleasure or pain, happiness or sadness. These affects which provide the backdrop for the calculations of cost and benefit are irreducibly individual, unaffected by any relations with others, by collective or social evaluations. (This what some in the economics business call the myth of the rational consumer, the idea that there are only individual choices animated by pleasure and pain underlying the economy, that everyone really likes those stupid “crocs”). While Marx introduces a social and collective dimension to economics, this dimension is primarily seen as defined by labor, by abstract labor that has been rendered interchangeable. Aside from the few remarks on cooperation labor does not really interact with anything other than capital, the social dimension is subordinated to a dialectic of struggle. On the one side, there is a subject of pleasure and pain that can only be conceived as an atom of society, and on the other, there is a social relation founded primarily on labor.

What is missing from both of these accounts is what Tarde calls the relation between minds, or the cooperation of “brains” [cerveaux]. What Tarde is referring to, according to Lazzarato, is the myriad way that thinking, believing, and desiring is defined by the capacity to affect and be affected: habits, beliefs, ideas, and desires are defined by a fundamental instability and contagion in which thoughts determine thoughts. Ultimately, and this gets us to what is meant by the idea of economic psychology, Lazzarato argues that these relations between minds are fundamental to any economy. This is true of production; every labor process is ultimately a set of habits that must be communicated and shared. In a similar sense, the economy of goods depends on an economy of desires and beliefs without which the former would not function. Notwithstanding the polemics against Marxism here, there is a lot to this idea of examining the circulation of ideas and habits that underlie the economy, society, and politics. Lazzarato’s argument is strengthened by the fact that he distances himself here from any sort of epochal argument in which the economy is now at this moment an economy of habits, desires, etc. (Although it should be noted that Lazzarato does follow Tarde on another epochal division, that which divides a premodern society of custom, stable and conservative, from a modern society of ever changing and circulating habits, caught in relations of flux. And if I wanted to extend this parenthesis, to the point where it should be its own paragraph or post, I would say that Lazzarato’s Les Révolutions du Capitalisme does pursue a more epochal argument, linking Tarde’s idea of the relation between minds, and the technologies that make action at a distance possible, with Deleuze’s concept of control).

While Lazzarato’s invocation of Tarde’s theory of subjectivity opens up an interesting “micro-political” terrain of habits and desires, the more he discusses hiss theory the more it seems to pivot around an impasse of sorts. Lazzarato stresses that at the basis of Tarde’s psychology is difference, sensations, memories, and habits are articulated based on difference. Case in point, two of the fundamental categories of Tarde’s theory are imitation, the process by which a habit, belief, or desire is passed between minds, and invention, the creation of the new. Lazzarato stresses that these are each relations of difference: imitation is the repetition of the same habit in new conditions and invention is the creation of a different way of acting or thinking. The point, as Lazzarato sees it is to bridge the gap between imitation and invention. Imitation is more inventive than it would first appear, since it must recreate the old in new situations, and invention is nothing more than the transformation of certain undiscovered potentialities in what already exists. What appears to be radically new is dependent on small scale differences and transformations.

It is around these points that we see Lazzarato circle around a point that is both unavoidable and all too familiar: subjectivity must be thought as simultaneously conditioned and irreducible to its conditions, as constrained and free. This point shows up repeatedly in contemporary theory under various names: enabling constraints, iterability, power/resistance, deterritorialization/reterritorialization, etc. Its ubiquity may be due to fact that it is true, it is perhaps a fact of life that we are passive and active. At the same time, however, it appears to be a dead end of thought, a fact that can be asserted and renamed, couched in new philosophical language, that of power, habit, language, affects, etc., but never really elucidated. I wonder if it can be elucidated, at least theoretically. To go beyond this fact, one needs a concrete instance, a specific site, someway of moving beyond abstract possibility, the capacity to affect and be affected, to the concrete ways in which this particular capacity has been realized.

Despite these limits, I am now tempted to read some Tarde. Just what I need, another French guy to read up on, which will soon have me spending lots of money on alapage and lots of time that I should be doing other things.

Movies: Ruining the Book since 1920

For Christmas this year I got a t-shirt that reads: “Movies: Ruining the Book Since 1920.” I am not sure if always agree with the sentiment, especially since Hollywood has long since moved on from books to video games, toys, and tv shows. Can anyone really shed a tear for the Transformers, which went from a half hour toy commercial to a two hour one? However, today I saw I am Legend, and I most agree with what the shirt says wholeheartedly.

First Impressions: Reflections on Japan

Roland Barthes supposedly wrote “Those who do not reread are doomed to read the same thing over and over again.” I have always liked this quote, even if I never took the trouble to verify that he ever wrote it, or what its exact wording is, for that matter. What I like about this sentence, which was relayed to me at some point, is that it says something about the fundamental inaccuracy of first reads, first impressions, which are nothing more than our initial prejudices and preconceptions. I think that this is true of reading, especially students who excel at finding themselves in everything they read no matter how hostile it is to their neoliberal ideology, but I also think it is true or experience, or at least travel.

I recently returned from Japan, which I visited for the first time. During my trip, which was part academic conference and part tourist excursion, I tried to see Japan, to understand something about the culture and people; you know all of the reasons that we are supposed to travel and see the world. The search took a myriad of random forms: everything from just walking around, to conversations with locals and academics who study Japan, to explorations assisted by those hallowed tomes of brief excursions, Rough Guide and Time Out. However, I felt that my search for some kind of knowledge was thwarted at every turn. Of course I picked up some trivia and bits of knowledge: I now have a working knowledge of the basic geography of Tokyo; some understanding of its subway system; and have some awareness of such cultural peculiarities as the cold mask, love hotel, Shinto, host/hostess club, toilet slippers, Christmas cakes, and the fashions of Tokyo. Most of the impressions that I came with, however, are nothing but confirmations of all of the things that one expects to find in Japan: the people were polite but reserved, the city was crowded and efficient, and so on. Whatever I was looking for, whatever exceeds the pages of a tourist guide, eluded me.

I did learn a few things about myself, however. First of all I should say that with the exception of a few hours listening to language tapes and a few years studying aikido, I know absolutely no Japanese; so I am only able to say things like “please,” “do you speak English?” and “two handed wrist grab.” I have never been more lost, linguistically speaking, than in Japan. In Tokyo this does not matter much; most signs are in English and Japanese, and even the subway announces stops in a polite English accent (like the computer in a sci-fi movie). Outside the city, however, one can get lost real quick, and I found myself playing "memorize the kanji" desperately trying to learn the characters for things like men's bathroom and the town I was trying to find. This language difficulty hit me the hardest when it comes to finding out about the world. Without a laptop, a paper, or a radio station to listen to, I went into serious news withdrawal. Lesson one: I am more of a news junky than I would like to admit. As much as I criticize and even despise "The New York Times" and NPR, I need them like an addict needs whatever substance he or she is addicted to. Second, despite everything I heard about distrust of foreigners, especially in more rural areas, I wanted to believe that the polite and enthusiastic way that I asked "Excuse me do you speak English?" (in Japanese) made me some kind an exception. I truly believed that I was not the obnoxious and ignorant foreigner. So in many ways I am such a fucking American, desperately believing that I am an exception to the rule, and ever so likeable.

It is pretty depressing, but on the plus side: monkeys!


I made it Jigokudani YaenKoen (otherwise known as "Monkey Park") to see the famous Snow Monkeys (Japanese Macaques), which, embarrassingly enough, has been something of a lifelong dream. Monkeys running in snow and bathing in hot springs: great fun. My picture is crap, I know, so if you need more monkey action you can check out their very own webcam. Clever monkeys.