Gregarious Isolation

It perhaps goes without saying that at any given moment I am ruminating over some quote from Marx. As of late it has been this one from the Grundrisse:

“Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations.”

Marx’s interest in presenting this is at least for the most part to stress the historical nature of the category of the individual. However, I think that it could be understood as particular mode of sociality that is paradoxically social in its isolation (isolation as a general social experience) and isolated in its sociality (market relations as a precondition of individuality). I could go on about this again, and probably will, but what struck me about this idea recently is the discovery of a precursor of it in the most unlikely of places: Descartes’ Discourse on Method

“…[T]his desire made me resolve to take leave of all those places where I could have acquaintances, and to retire here, in a country where the long duration of the war has established such well-ordered discipline…and where among the crowds of a great and very busy people and more concerned with their own affairs than curious about the affairs of others, I have been able to live as solitary and as retired a life as I could in the remotest deserts—but without lacking any of the amenities that are to be found in the most populous cities.”

Much could be said about this idealization of the anonymity and security of early modern life, the life of the emerging city, and how it relates to the famous problem of Descartes’ borderline solipsism: the cogito cut off from others, pondering the men across the street, who very well could be automatons. What is striking is the manner in which an emerging social reality immediately becomes an epistemological ideal. The world is thought, and recreated from the perspective of the isolated individual. Producers who work in isolation and only meet through the anonymity of the market is not just an emerging economic reality (although, on this point it is important to note how ahead of the curve Descartes is), but an ideal for the comprehension of reality. As Adorno defines this problem:

“The intellectual, particularly when philosophically inclined, is cut off from practical life: revulsion from it has driven him to concern himself with so-called things of the mind. But material practice is not only the pre-condition of his existence, it is basic to the world which he criticizes in his work. If he knows nothing of this basis he shoots into thin air…[H]e hypostatizes as an absolute his intellect which was only formed through contact with economic reality and abstract exchange relations, and which can become intellect solely by reflecting on its own conditions.”

For Adorno the less one thinks of economic reality, the more one thinks in line with it. Adorno’s extended aphorism on this takes on a characteristically negative tone, it is a lose or lose situation. Either one fails to think of material reality, and its fundamental categories and relations reappear in disguised form, or one thinks of it, and philosophy loses its specificity. To put this problem in a different register, that of Negri, we could say that Descartes politics is his ontology, and vice versa, and this connection between politics and ontology is underwritten by a social dimension, by the way in which labor and society are reflected in thought. Society is immanent to thought before becoming its specific object.

Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Being Singular Plural” puts forward two crucial statements in his reflections on being as being-with. First, is that isolation, separation, and solitude must themselves be thought of as a kind of sociality. That even the moment of absolute isolation is itself a social moment: this is demonstrated by Descartes own meditations, which even in their isolation are addressed to another. “The ego sum counts as “evident,” as a first truth, only because its certainty can be recognized by anyone.” (This first point is a polemic against Heidegger, who as much as he argued for the constitutive nature of Mitsein continued to see it as primarily a degraded form of existence, as less authentic than the solitary relations with death). Second, Nancy argues that it is impossible to separate sociality, collective existence, from its image, from its representation that is also its falsification. “There is no society without the spectacle because society is the spectacle of itself.” The world cannot be disassociated from its theater, to return to Descartes once more. (This last polemic is against Marxist attempts to separate society from its specular fetishization, including Situationism, which took this problem the farthest). Nancy’s polemics are thus aimed against the two places in the twentieth century that attempted to think social relations as something other the sum total of individuals.

These two polemics against hitherto presentations of the problem of sociality are each predicated on the ambiguity of the “with.” With is the degree zero of relation, an inclusive disjunction, in that it does not differentiate the manner of relation. To say something is “with” something else does not specify its manner of being with: society appears with its spectacle, the desiring machines with their full body (as this last point indicates, I think that Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of desiring machines are an idea of sociality). Whatever appears, appears with: this fact is unavoidable. Thinking is always thinking with.

Sociality is difficult to think because we are already, even always already, immersed within it. Although, and this might be the closest I get to a conclusion here, this always already takes multiple forms that are not reducible. It reflects a historical condition, in the sense that the categories and conditions of thought are always historically produced, but it also reflects, as Nancy demonstrates, an ontological condition, the primacy of relation. These two things are simultaneous, but also in extreme tension. It is difficult to think the social, that is, historical, constitution of sociality along with its ontological constitution. Social ontology remains at the very least a concept of dialectical tension, if not an oxymoron, but an unavoidable one.

The Essence of Ideology

The following scene from The Wire is in my estimation brilliant, not just because it reveals the functioning of the drug trade, but more importantly it reveals something essential about capitalist ideology.




As Bodie states, after a lesson on the fundamentally rigid hierarchy that characterizes both the chess board and the drug trade, that a "smart ass pawn" could not only make it through the game but get to be queen. This statement describes his own perspective of his situation: a lowly soldier in the drug war who believes that his intelligence and perseverance will ultimately see him through to the end. This idea, an awareness that the odds are stacked, that most of us wont get rich, coupled with a confidence that the odds do not apply to us, is the the fundamental ideology of capitalism. It is in a sense what Althusser meant when he wrote that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects, as much as we are aware of the historical conditions that define and limit our situation we believe that they do not apply to us, that we transcend them as a kingdom within a kingdom (to cite Spinoza, Althusser's point of reference).

Althusser thought that his applied to all ideology, but it seems to be in many ways specific to capitalist ideology. After all capitalist ideology disentengles power from any specific condition, all those motley ties; one does have to be descended from a particular family, a particular race, or background to have money. The only thing that characterizes the ruling class is money. There is no barrier that keeps us from changing our class position. Thus, we all fantasize that we will one day be rich: as the New York State lottery used to say, "It could happen to you."

Many progressives or leftists are constantly frustrated that the working class fails to vote their interest, supporting tax breaks, like the "death tax," that do not apply to them. I think that this is because they, or we, do not identify with our interests, our specific position, we identify with the fantasy. We are all the "smart ass pawn," the exception, the person who makes it rich, or to take an example closer to home, gets tenure in a job market that increasingly eliminates tenure track jobs for temporary or adjunct work. This makes it very difficult to construct politics that address systematic failures, like that of health insurance or the mortgage industry; most of us believe that such bad things happen only to others.

In case you are wondering how things turn out for Bodie (spoiler alert for those who have not seen Season Four).

Updated 6/30/25 

I have no idea why this post still gets traffic seventeen years later, but it does seem to. Perhaps because of that I did write an updated version which you can find here. 

Or read it below: 

 For the most part The Wire (2002-2008) has been embraced by educators for its realism, for the way that it shows in almost journalistic detail the effects of the war on drugs on inner city life, deindustrialization on the working class, and underfunded schools on children growing up in the projects. These are all aspects of life absent from television, and the show has been embraced for its ability to depict aspects of urban life that are invisible. However, there is one important scene from The Wire that is less a journalistic exploration of reality than a philosophical reflection of how people endure that, or any, reality. 

 In the third episode of the first season two, low level dealers in the Barksdale gang, Wallace and Bodie Broadus are dealing with a slow day by playing checkers with a chess set. Their supervisor, D’Angelo Barksdale sees them and mocks them for playing checkers with a chess set. He offers to teach them chess, the better game, explaining the functions of each piece. As he explains each piece, his audience, Bodie and Wallace, draw analogies to the Barksdale gang and their world. The King is compared to Avon Barksdale, the often invisible kingpin of the gang, and the queen is compared to Stringer Bell, his ruthless enforcer. It is when they get to pawns that things get interesting. D’Angelo insists that pawns are just that pawns, they are mainly sacrificed and “get capped early.” Bodie insists that a pawn could make it to other end of the board and become queen. D’Angelo points out that this is not the object of the game, and for the most part the pieces stay what they are, “the king stays king.” Bodie insists that a “smart ass pawn” could not only survive the gang, but rise through the ranks to become queen. 

When teaching I have used this scene to illustrate Louis Althusser’s concept of ideology. In his famous essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards and Investigation” Althusser argues that Marx’s theory of ideology, which only really received a cursory definition as the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, needed to be clarified and expanded. First, there is a matter of clarifying what ideology does, ideology reproduces the relations of production. It keeps people coming back to work each day. Second, there is a matter of how ideology functions, which Althusser defines in terms of two theses. 

The two theses are 

1) ideology represents an imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence and 

2) ideology interpellates individuals as subjects. 

Both of these theses can be illustrated with help of the scene from The Wire. D’Angelo explains that the game of chess is inherently hierarchical, the goal is to protect the king, and by extension this is the same way that the gang works. Underlings may risk arrest and violence selling on the streets, but high up leaders never risk their lives. Bodie has an imaginary relation to his real conditions of existence: his real conditions are to be a pawn in a violent and powerful organization aimed at protecting those at the top of the organization, but he sees a path to make it to the top. This imaginary relation is sustained by his belief that he is “a smart ass pawn” that he has the knowledge and ability to make it to the top. In other words, he is interpellated as a subject. In this case a subject is one who believes that their individual qualities, their knowledge and intentions, are more important in determining their fate and position than the institutions or structures that they situated in. These two theses, the imaginary relation and the idea of the subject are then corollaries of each other, two sides of the same relation. It is worth noting here that in season four of the show, Bodie comes to recognize the other, dominant meaning of the word pawn before he is “capped.” 

 It is always easier for us to see the ideological fallacies of others, and most watching the show will recognize how foolish Bodie is in his belief in meritocratic rise in a violent world. Such a misplaced belief is not just a matter of the hierarchical and violent world of drug gangs. I would argue, following Althusser, that in capitalist society, a society structured both by hierarchy of class, and an ideology of individual achievement, we all believe ourselves to be “smart ass pawns.” We all know on some level that for the most part the rich stay the rich, passing on their wealth to family members, and pawns never advance beyond pawns, but our imaginary relation to these real conditions, our belief that we are subjects, leads us to overestimate our ability to make it to the other end of the board. Case in point for years in undergraduate and graduate school I was warned of the shrinking job prospects in academia. Adjuncts were being hired to replace full time faculty leading to less jobs overall. I was told this, but I believed myself to be a “smart ass pawn” which is to say I believed myself to be an exception, a subject. Althusser’s theory focuses on the intersection between structural conditions and psychological processes that make it difficult for us to make sense of the world around us.

Know your Place

The following is what happens when you combine teaching Plato’s Republic with reflecting on the current election, specifically the Republican National Convention.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
-Theodor Adorno

One of the many merits of Jacques Rancière’s The Philosopher and his Poor is that it reveals how much Plato’s Republic is structured around an understanding of work. Rancière underlines a very basic point, that the definition of justice that we get in Book IV (doing one's own work and not meddling) is a repetition of what was already stated in Book II as an essentially economic argument, that every person must dedicate him or herself to one job. As Rancière writes: "The image of justice is the division of labor that already organizes the healthy city." Plato repeatedly praises the virtue of the craftsman or worker, the dedication to a single task, going so far as to see the worker as the solution to all of the decadence of society. When it comes to sickness, the craftsman understands that he has no time for a lengthy cure, for anything that would keep him out of work for a long time. The craftsman must return to work, even if this means death. The singular dedication to a task is, in the end, the ideal of a society in which everything is in its place. As Rancière writes: “The Platonic statement, affirming that the workers had no time to do two things at the same time, had to be taken as a definition of the worker in terms of the distribution of the sensible: the worker is he who has no time to do anything but his own work.” The well-known objects of criticism, artistic imitation and democracy, are in the end criticized for violating this fundamental economy of focus: they are fundamentally out of place, and displacing. What threatens the order of the city, an order that is at once aesthetic and political, is anything that deviates from its assigned place: the worker who thinks or the artisan that imitates the voice of a general or the appearance of a king.

I think that Rancière’s reading of Plato, which I have hastily tried to summarize here, could be taken as a model of a certain kind of right-populism. (Yes, I know that there is more to it than that). At least this is what occurred to me as I was watching the Republican National Convention. The Republicans favorite rhetorical ploy is to criticize the Democrats for their disdain of the simple working folk, for “saying one thing in Scranton and another in San Francisco.” Against this the virtues of rural life are repeatedly espoused, moose hunting, church, hard work, etcetera. This vision of the charms of simple life is of course first and foremost patently false; case in point, Giuliani’s claim that Palin’s hometown is perhaps not cosmopolitan enough for Obama is beyond satire, as is the claim of “outsider” status for a party that has been in power for over eight years. More to the point it is fundamentally regressive, the praise of the values of the small town worker are the praise of people who know their place and never step out of it. It is a life entirely dedicated to the private sphere, to work and family, a life that leaves the state and politics in the hands of the true political subjects, the corporate interests. Thus the criticism of “community organizers” was not simply an opportunistic attack on a detail of Obama’s biography but an expression of a fundamental principle: communities should not be organized but dispersed to the vicissitudes of an entirely private life.

Sorry, It's much worse: (somewhat less than a book report, even)

As something of a follow up to the recent post on Negri it makes sense to write a short review of sorts of Richard Sennett’s The Culture of the New Capitalism. Like Negri, Sennett ascribes to the view that there has been a radical transformation of labor, and that this transformation has effects that reach far beyond the economy to constitute a new basis for politics and a new articulation of culture. However, unlike Negri, Sennett is almost entirely pessimistic about this transformation.

Sennett’s sketch of the present focuses on two fundamental transformations of the structure of work. First, there is the demise of a certain model of hierarchy and bureaucracy, of the pyramid structure of the corporation. The loss of this is also a loss of a particular relation to time, to social capital, and ultimately to a particular kind of subjectivity. The subject of the hierarchical corporation worked to “climb the ladder,” accumulating knowledge, and social capital (defined as a particular investment in one’s social involvements). This also entails a particular involvement and investment in time, a time of delayed gratification, in which work is towards constructing a future. Ultimately Sennet is more concerned with the particular subjectivity that accompanies this structure, than the structure itself, that of the citizen/craftsman. This is the second transformation. Sennett defines the craftsman as someone willing to do something for its own sake, something which requires an objectification in an object or practice. As philosophers such as Aristotle and Arendt have argued, this “thing,” car, cake, law, or institution becomes the standard of the action.


These two things, the institution of delayed gratification and the ethic of the craftsman, overlap and reinforce each other in that both require a certain construction of the future, a certain ideal of stability. They are thus both destroyed by the way in which work has been reorganized by the twin specters of uselessness, automation and outsourcing. These have fundamentally restructured the organization of the corporation, from a hierarchy, in which one accumulates expertise and social capital, to a lateral system of networks, where one moves from job to job, starting over each time, never accumulating knowledge (because it is continually radically redefined) or social capital. In place of the craftsman the contemporary subject of work is defined by potential. It is this potential that is assessed in the various tests that start in the early years of life, and becomes the basis for future movement. This potential exists as something fundamentally unrealized and unrealizable, it is a vague ability to adapt to new situations, to respond to the situation, and to interact, to “work with people.” Sennett connects this to a fundamental change of attitudes, this subject as potential is caught between the anxiety of uselessness and the flexibility of adapting to new rules and structures. We are all little ipods, obsessed with potential that cannot be realized, all of that excess memory, and capable of indifferently switching in new programs, new rules, depending on the situation. In this way his work echoes themes in Paolo Virno's work regarding anxiety, cynicism, and opportunism.


It is important to stress that Sennett connects this ideal of the craftsman with a particular idea of the citizen. The citizen-craftsman is able to dedicate his or herself to the difficult task of constructing institutions and structures, structures that have a certain objectivity, which outlast the individuals that create them. More importantly the citizen-craftsmen is able to research issues and ideas, dedicating time towards the eventual good of knowledge and participation. In its place we now have the “citizen consumer.” The actions of the citizen consumer are modeled on the general trends in consumption in general. Sennett points out that contemporary production is based on more or less standardized products, which have slight variations of style or packaging. Politicians and political events take on the same structure, a fundamental homogeneity that underlies the various pseudo-events, the scandals and slight changes that make up the din of political coverage.


“So familiar are we with this crossover from consumer to political behavior that we lose sight of the consequences: the press’s and public’s endless obsession with politician’s individual character traits mask the reality of the consensus platform. In modern political performances, the marketing of personality further and frequently eschews a narrative of the politician’s history and record in office; its too boring. He or she embodies intentions, desires, values, beliefs, tastes—an emphasis which has again the effect of divorcing power and responsibility.”


Sennett’s skepticism regarding the liberatory effects of immaterial production is in part based on the shift from the production to consumption. Whereas Negri focuses almost exclusively on the production of subjectivity through labor, finding a subject which is communicative, ethical, and capable of organizing itself outside of the control of capital, Sennett focuses on consumption, finding a subject which is isolated and subject to the narcissism of minor difference.


Finally, I would argue that the connection that Sennett (and others such as Negri, Virno, etc.,) explore between a mode of labor and a mode of social existence can and should be deepened. Sennett’s fundamental point of a transformation of time, from an ethic of deferred gratification to an ethic of anxiety and short term connections, should be examined and extended. It would seem that the most fundamental challenge in the present is the one that Virno outlines:


"What is involved here is the conceptualization of the field of immediate coincidence between production and ethics, structure and superstructure, between the revolution of labor process and the revolution of sentiments, between technology and emotional tonality, between material development and culture. By confining ourselves narrowly to this dichotomy, however, we fatally renew the metaphysical split between “lower” and higher, animal and rational, body and soul—and it makes little difference if we boast of our pretensions to historical materialism. If we fail to perceive the points of identity between labor practices and modes of life, we will comprehend nothing of the changes taking place in present-day production and misunderstand a great deal about the forms of contemporary culture."

Diminishing Returns

Two of my favorite blogs (The Pinocchio Theory and What in the Hell…) have written about Negri’s recent books, namely The Porcelain Factory and Good-Bye Mr. Socialism, expressing disappointment. I have to admit that I share this disappointment. I am not going to address the specific texts in question, I read the former over a year ago when it appeared in French and am only halfway through the latter, but I agree with the fundamental point that with the exception of Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo Negri’s recent work does not touch the sheer greatness of The Savage Anomaly, Marx Beyond Marx, or Insurgencies (Constituent Power).

The criticism of these recent works (in these blogs and elsewhere) basically follows two fundamental points: First, the excessive confidence in the fundamentally creative and subversive nature of the existing labor practices and social relations, the multitude as a latent reservoir of revolution and, second, the misplaced emphasis on the present as a radical break with the past, immaterial labor as something fundamentally unseen. I do not want to address these criticisms here, rather I would like to focus on another problem, one that has to do with the provocations of Negri’s early works.

In The Politics of Subversion Negri makes a point which I have taken to be fundamental regarding his understanding of the production of subjectivity, in that book he writes: “The ontological aspects of subjectivity are produced in different (or rather, antagonistic) ways.” As Negri elaborates, there is a proletarian production of subjectivity, passing through the wage, through the social relations of cooperation, and into insurrection. Against this there is leveled a capitalist production of subjectivity that breaks down this collective subjectivity through competition and the market. In these passages Negri maintains in productive tension between what could be broadly described as post-structuralism, (namely, Foucault) in which subjectivity is effectively produced by discourses and relations of power, and Marxism, insisting on a duality of struggle, even if it is produced rather than given. This assertion in an early work is to some extent vexed by the problem of lapsing back into a dialectic, or what Negri refers to as an “antagonistic Manicheism”; that is to say it is a matter of maintaining antagonism without lapsing into the symmetry of opposites or the inevitable conflict of pregiven social substances.

It is this sense of the antagonistic constitution of subjectivity that is largely absent from Negri’s later works. In later works the networks and social relations of immaterial labor produced a subject that is wholly opposed to capital, untouched by the market, by neoliberal strategies. This is largely the case, but not entirely. In Empire Hardt and Negri cite Debord’s theory of the spectacle as a fundamental dimension of the antagnostic constitution of subjectivity, and not a misrepresentation of a given reality. As Hardt and Negri write: “The spectacle destroys any collective form of sociality—individualizing social actors in their separate automobiles and in front of separate video screens—and at the same time imposes a new mass sociality, a new uniformity of action and thought.” This idea of a production of subjectivity that passes through the media, through the “immaterial” technologies of television and the internet, and does not produce a multitude but something else also appears, albeit briefly, in Negri’s latest works. As Negri states in Goodbye, Mr. Socialism the public functions as a kind of capitalist production of subjectivity.“The public is a medium between people, class, and individuality: the people were formed by the State the class by the party, while the public is constructed from a mixture of the media, television, newspaper, and by small editorial production of the worst type…This public isn’t multitude at all.”

This discussion of the antagonistic production of subjectivity is not only more interesting than the endless repetition of the power of the multitude versus the empty shell of capital it is more useful as well. What we need are the tools for the analysis of the production of subjectivity. We need to understand the way in which the existing power structure, Empire, for lack of a better word, is produced and reproduced by the existing machines of consumption and production. To paraphrase Alain Badiou, who in turn was paraphrasing Hegel, “We must think Empire not just as substance but as subject.” Less cryptically we need to understand how Empire is not something out there, but in us, part of our subjectivity. Second, we need to understand the tools and techniques that make possible a counter production of subjectivity. Negri’s provocative statements regarding the changing status of labor, the emerging affective and intellectual dimensions, are an important part of this, but they are not the whole picture.

The Many Faces and Names of Finitude

In Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (a book which will require a more thorough review at another time), Stiegler suggests that the original relation between anthropology and technology should be considered through the perspective of a thanatology. It is death that introduces the fundamental absence through which technology enters into the world. It is because we die, and are aware of this fact that we create a memory for ourselves in the form of languages, tools, and devices. Animals, which are ignorant of their death, are also unaware of artifice.

The Cinema of Isolation

Image from "that book by derrida" on Flickr

The movies construct subjectivity. This is true in at least two senses. Taken to its extreme, this statement would mean that the movies, taken here in the broadest sense of the term to include whatever is projected onto any screen of any dimensions, TV, computer, ipod, construct subjectivity by giving the audience the codes, affects, and styles that make up the basic backdrop of our existence. In a more moderate sense this would mean simply that the movies construct subjectivity on the screen, convert a series of images into characters, or subjects. This construction is laid bare whenever something non-human, a car, a duck, a zombie, a robot, is given subjectivity, depth. The basic vocabulary of this construction is “shot-reverse-shot,” show the object then the thing reacting to the object (a shot of the face, or whatever stands in for the face), then an action on the second thing, action, contemplation, reaction, the basic elements of subjectivity. As Walter Benjamin argued, subjectivity is often constructed on the cutting room floor.

It goes without saying that Wall-e is a film about isolation, about separation, and ultimately about loneliness. It goes without saying, but it is worth mentioning that we are talking about a children’s cartoon that deals with these things. What is perhaps interesting is that every character in the film is presented as lonely or isolated in some sense, and their ways of coping with this reflect aspects of contemporary life.

Wall-e, the film’s central character, is introduced through his loneliness and isolation. The opening third of the film defines him a character, a subject, that is not only alone (shots of other broken down robots, of huge expanses of wasteland) but lonely. This loneliness is established through his relation with objects. Wall-e collects objects found in the garbage, objects like the rubik cube, the dolls, the lighters, and the video tape that seem to suggest a world. The objects not only reflect a world, one that is gone, but make up a world, a world that defines an interior subjective space; a point that is reinforced in the final moments of the film, when these same objects are used to awaken Wall-e’s memory, to remind him who he is.

Aboard the spaceship we meet the humans who are isolated in a fundamentally different way. The denizens of the spaceship Axiom cruise about in separate floating chairs, interacting only through screens no matter how physically close they may be. The image conjures up a phrase that Hardt and Negri use discuss the current spectacle, which they describe as—“individualizing social actors in their separate automobiles and in front of separate video screens.” In this way the humans occupy a strange sort of isolation, they are not alone, in fact they are unified in their isolation or isolated in their unity. They travel along parallel tracks, never seeing anything outside the screen in front of them. Moreover, such isolation is only possible given a great deal of social organization, even if in this case it falls to robots. Such a situation recalls Marx’s overlooked, but important description of modern existence as a kind of asocial sociality:

“Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations.”

The humans in the film take this to an almost absurd level, they are the completely isolated consuming subject, infantilized, overweight, and absolutely passive. In fact this opens up many questions, they are so isolated, so disconnected, it remains difficult to see how they could ever reproduce. More disappointingly, the film subscribes to the worse ideology of ideology: the idea that to escape ideology it is enough to turn off the screen and simply open one’s eyes to reality. We all know what happens when the screen turns blank, when the machine breaks down, people do not see reality and each other for the first time, they call tech support or the cable company. (It is perhaps too much to expect ideology critique from a Disney film, but those opening scenes of a desolate and abandoned Earth are just so good, it tends to get one’s hopes up.)

To conclude somewhat abruptly, the movie outlines several contemporary strategies for dealing with isolation, and what strikes me is how easy it is to map them unto contemporary existence. Wall-e embodies a particular idea of fan culture: collecting objects with nostalgia for a better world, and watching the same film again and again to extract lessons. In our contemporary world he would be shopping on ebay and keeping a blog on old musicals. While the human’s in the film embody a kind of digitally connected materially disconnected existence. In our world they would have hundreds of “friends” on facebook, but little or no contact with their neighbors. I am not sure what children think of this film, but it does seem well suited to prepare them for life in the contemporary world.

Follow the Money

What follows are some reflections on the final season of The Wire so Spoiler Alert.

The fifth season of The Wire is best understood as the intersection, maybe even the collision, of two trajectories. The first is the culmination of a theme introduced in the first season, namely money. Money has always been an integral part of the drug investigation on The Wire, but it is also that which expands and disrupts the drug investigation connecting it to the broader world of politicians and corruption. As Lester Freamon stated in the first season, “You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where the fuck it's gonna take you.” The second theme is unique to the fifth season, and constitutes something of a meta-level reflection of the show itself and that is the relation of truth and fiction.

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.