The Play of Form and Content: Scattered Remarks on Popular Culture, Part Two

It is no secret that I enjoy Joss Whedon’s work. Enjoy is the operative word: while other shows such as The Wire are more intellectually and politically engaging, Whedon’s shows and movie, Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Serenity, and Dr. Horrible, have always been about enjoyment. Thus it was with a great deal of anticipation that I tuned into the first episodes of Dollhouse. I was almost immediately disappointed. I wasn’t sure why, my first thought was that everything I enjoyed from previous shows was missing. Whereas past shows had ultimately focused on the development of the relationships amongst an ultimately likable group, Dollhouse actively makes this impossible.

The premise of the show is a mysterious organization, the dollhouse, that supplies individuals, “dolls” or “actives,” who can have any memory, personality, or set of skills implanted in their minds only to be erased later. This means that the show effectively presses the reset button, at least with the central characters, every episode. The characters who are not actives, the staff of the dollhouse and the FBI agents investigating them, are mired in deception and intrigue. There are moles within the organization and multiple spies. On the one hand disconnection, the impossibility of relationships, or connection; on the other hand, relationships that are never what they seem.

At this point it is perhaps worth pointing out that the enjoyment I referred to above, the relationships amongst likable characters, is perhaps the ideological degree zero of television, the “imaginary relationship to the real relations of production.” Television series, successful and loved ones, offer an imaginary family or group of Friends that one can meet up with every week. Perhaps then Whedon’s show is a kind of self-critique of television, a show that refuses connection, refuses to offer the viewer a place “where everybody knows your name.” This is possible, especially since the fact that the show’s central characters hit the reset button mimics the other unstated presupposition of television: the repetition underlying television series, that every week, after all the mad cap adventures, everything goes back to square one. The show pits one unstated presupposition of television against another. (These two elements of television, the linear and the episodic, are often in contradiction; case in point, The X-Files in which the repetition of the conflict between skeptic (Scully) and believer (Mulder) was in extreme tension with the linear development of the alien conspiracy.)

This might be the case, especially since Whedon has often struggled with network executives who have wanted shows that were more “serial” in nature; shows without complex histories of characters and involved plots, shows that can be consumed and resold as independent units. (It is interesting to note that television seems to be dividing along these lines: cable television is generally characterized by shows that are linear, while network television sticks to the “procedurals” and “sitcoms” that function without history) However, I think that it might be going too far to see the show as television’s self critique. At the same time the show has become, if not more enjoyable, at least more interesting in recent weeks, and this enjoyment has something to do with the way in which the show touches on the core of television, fantasy and repetition.

When the show began, its premise was that the dollhouse served elite clientele with people, the actives, who could do anything, be anyone, and forget it all when it was over. There are many problems with this premise; most importantly it is hard to believe that such a high tech service would be needed to serve the needs of the ultra-wealthy. The technology just seems overkill; why couldn’t the wealthy and powerful just hire regular call girls and hostage negotiators? However, recent episodes have begun to suggest that this premise is something of a ruse. The dollhouse does not serve the wealthy, but secretly controls them by controlling their fantasies. This idea that control operates not through overt power, or even wealth, is underscored by the show’s repeated insistence on the constitutive nature of fantasy. The show returns again and again to the question as to the difference between a relationship with an active, with a programmed individual with whom one cannot have a history, and a relationship with a “real” person. The people involved in the dollhouse, the people who run it and are served by it, stress that illusion, fantasy, is not seem deviation from “real relationships” but constitutive of them. As Adelle DeWitt, the woman who runs the dollhouse, says on the episode that I am watching as I type this: “Illusions aren’t worthless, they are at the heart of most relationships.” If fantasy, idealization, or imagination is part of every relationship, if these fantasies sustain us, then how does one distinguish between a real and fake relationship?

This emphasis on fantasy as constitutive of reality and control is complicated by a second theme, that of resistance. The press surrounding the show has stated from the beginning that the arc of at least the first (and possibly only) season had to do with the central character, Echo, eventually recovering her memories, and presumably resisting the dollhouse. This bit of detail may have been released early as an attempt to ward off criticism. Whedon is famous for his strong female characters, and, as many critics have pointed out, dollhouse breaks with that element of his reputation as well. The question remains where will this resistance come from? Will it be some core of the self that cannot be erased? Or is it just a glitch in the system? I am pleased to say that the show has been refreshingly ambiguous on this point. Suggesting at times that resistance is transcendental, stemming from an element of the self that perseveres through the multiple erases; while, at other times, suggesting that the tendency to exceed the program is an effect of some other technology, a mind control chemical, or even other attempts to manipulate the program. Resistance is then sometimes presented as external to the machinery of control, some core self, and sometimes as nothing other than the noise internal to the machine itself. In the first case it is dependent upon some idea of an essence, of something that cannot be produced. In the second, however, resistance is nothing other than the excess of every program over its parameters.

(As something of a side note: I was always intrigued by Spike’s arc in Buffy. In that show Angel was the vampire cursed to have a soul. Spike didn’t have a soul, just a chip that caused pain whenever he tried to kill someone. However, this chip effectively changed his relations to others, setting him on the path to redemption. What then is the difference between a soul and a chip that shocks you when you are bad? This always seemed to be Whedon at his most Foucaultian: “The soul is the prison of the body.”)

I do not want to draw all of the theoretical connections that could be made out of these two points: control through fantasy and the immanence of resistance. Rather, I will conclude by saying, perhaps too late, that Dollhouse has potential; not the potential to be another Buffy, a reliable hour of entertainment, but to do what much good science fiction does; that is present the present to us in the form of a fiction. I feel that in saying that I have doomed the show because that is perhaps simply too much to expect from television.

The Play of Form and Content: Scattered Remarks on Popular Culture

This weekend I happened to see the film State of Play: It was a compromise.

Occasionally, when watching a film, I feel as if I can imagine the moments of its articulation: the pitch meeting or writing session. Sometimes this is because the selling point of the movie is so obvious (“It is like Alien, but at sea” or “Like Rocky but with a female boxer”), but sometimes, as in the case of State of Play, it is because one can see the joints, the points where different ideas are hobbled together. (I should mention now that I have not seen the BBC original from which the film has been adapted, an omission that might throw my entire argument off kilter—oh yeah, and SPOILER ALERT).

In this case it is the way in which the film combines two different conspiracy theories, both of which are “ripped from today’s headlines.” The first, which could be broadly characterized as liberal or even left, has to do with the influence of a private security company (basically Blackwater) on the government. The second theory, which could be broadly characterized as conservative, has to do with Senator’s use of his power to carry on an affair with a young intern. Two different ideas of conspiracy, two different visions of corruption: one economic and the other moral. One can imagine these two plots as a way to please two different constituencies. Through most of the film these two different conspiracies are offered as two different explanation for the events of the film: a young, attractive senator’s aid appears to have committed suicide the very morning that the senator is to begin important hearings on the influence of the private security company. Much of the film is spent exploring the first conspiracy, which gives the film the feel of the great conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, in which each new piece of evidence only extends the conspiracy to the highest corridors of power. In the films final twist, however, the story of infidelity, sex, and the abuse of personal power becomes the central story, in some sense effacing the other conspiracy.

This shift of narrative structure, content if I am going to justify my title, takes place against a much more overt struggle borrowed from the form. The central drama of the film, also ripped from today’s headlines, concerns the newspaper reporters that cover this story. The first reporter, played by Russell Crowe, is an old school print journalist, interested in following the story no matter where it leads. (In case you are wondering about his politics, it is possible to see a bumper-sticker for “Democracy Now” on his fridge, in what has to be one of the oddest bits of product placement committed to film.) The second, played by Rachel McAdams, writes for the paper’s blog, and is concerned primarily with gossip. The film borrows much of its narrative form from the “buddy film”: the two initially hate each other, but eventually learn to respect one another and in doing so emerge as victorious.. This is supposed to be situated within the crisis of print media: the paper has just been bought by new corporation, convinced that it can still get a profit from a dying medium.

The film is supposed to be a simple matter of good guys triumphing over these corporate forces, telling the true story despite market constraints. However, at this point the narrative compromises of the film contradict the story that it is trying to tell. At the exact moment that the film’s protagonists are victorious against market forces, stopping the presses to get the true story out, the film tells a different story. What the film reveals is that sex scandal will always outsell politics. That the real conflict is not so much between blogs and print, between young upstart bloggers and grizzled reporters, but between different ways of mapping and comprehending social space: one sees social forces and the abstractions of capital and the other sees only individuals and morality. There are different names for each in contemporary theory, science and ideology or axioms and recodings, but in our current conjuncture the latter seems to always win.

As Fredric Jameson famously remarked, the conspiracy film is an attempt to imagine the totality, capital. It is a kind of a degree zero of ideology critique: it imagines ideology within ideology itself. Impersonal social forces, capital and the state, are presented as the machinations of “evil individuals.” What makes State of Play frustrating is that it retreats from even this level of critique, ultimately returning the critique of institutions to the idea of corrupt individuals, individuals whose corruption is only ever a personal failing.

Anthropogenesis Part Three: Reification Reconsidered

This is a third in a series of posts on what I am calling, for lack of a better word, “Left-Simondonians”: A term that I define simply as philosophers/theorists who use the work of Simondon to understand and critique the current conjuncture. I do not know of any “Right-Simondonians,” and the term is obviously a slightly humorous allusion to post Hegelian thought. If the term has any justification at all it is in the fact that Simondon’s investigations of transindividuality and technology seem to be a necessary reorientation of thought in an age so mediated by technology but so lacking in collectivity. Now, I am not saying that he is our Hegel, just that we are desperately in need of new ways of thinking.

As I promised earlier, a while ago, actually, having written on Bernard Stiegler, I now want to focus on Paolo Virno. As an interview in Radical Philosophy makes clear, Virno’s has kept up a sustained engagement with Simondon’s work in terms of writing, editing, and teaching.

It seems to me that Virno’s engagement with the concept of the “transindividual” is situated between his engagement with Simondon and themes developed from Marx and the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel. What I am interested is the point of intersection of those themes. First, Virno revives Marx’s notion of the social individual to describe not just an ontological fact, that people can only be individuated through society, but an economic reality, that social relations and shared capacities are at the center of contemporary productive relations. Second, and more importantly, here is how Virno offers a redefinition of the central Marxist concepts of reification and alienation through Simondon’s idea of preindividual reality:

“Reification is what I call the process through which preindividual reality becomes an external thing, a res that appears as a manifest phenomenon, a set of public institutions. By alienation I understand the situation in which the preindividual remains an internal component of the subject but one that the subject is unable to command. The preindividual reality that remains implicit, like a presupposition that conditions us but that we are unable to grasp, is alienated.”

With the exception of the use of the word “preindividual” Virno’s definition of reification is standard, almost textbook. Virno deviates from this standard definition, however, in making a distinction between reification and fetishism. In the standard Marxist version, developed from Marx to Lukacs, commodity fetishism is an example of reification or reification is developed on the basis of commodity fetishism. In the same interview Virno defines fetishism as follows, ‘Fetishism means assigning to something—for example to money—characteristics that belong to the human mind (sociality, capacity for abstraction and communication, etc.).’ The distinction that Virno makes here seems to be another way of cleaving through the real abstraction.

Virno develops the idea of real abstraction from the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel. For Sohn-Rethel the real abstraction refers back to Marx’s analysis of the commodity form and money, abstractions that are all the more real because their realized through action, rather than thought. Exchange value is entirely abstract, having no basis in use value, but it is an abstraction that is effected through the practical activity of exchange. In Virno’s earlier works he made a distinction between money, or the general equivalent, as a real abstraction and the “general intellect,” Marx’s description of the productive powers of science in the Grundrisse made famous by the autonomist tradition. In those texts the relevant distinction was between a real abstraction predicated on equality, money, commodities, even labor must be rendered interchangeable, and a real abstraction predicated on difference and flexibility, the paradigms and language games of the general intellect, which can always be replaced. This is Virno’s version of the transition from formal to real subsumption; a transition that has profound effects on the tonality of modern existence. In the first equality still retains some force while the second is associated with the rise of cynicism, with acceptance of the groundless nature of rules and structures. In the context of his discussion of Simondon, however, Virno makes a different distinction: alienation, fetishism, and reification are different ways of relating to the preindividual conditions of subjectivity (which Virno identifies as language, habits, and productive relations). Thus it is given that subjectivity is constituted by these preindividual conditions, which always exceed it, what differs is how it relates to these conditions, to its presuppositions. (In this way we are perhaps not that far from Hegel)

Virno’s definition of alienation, a presupposition that cannot be conditioned, comes closest to Stiegler’s critique of the “industrialization of memory.” I think each of these theoretical perspectives are perhaps different ways of comprehending the increased commodification of the preindividual. The preindividual conditions of language, habits, and productive relations, what we could call culture, comes to us now in the form of commodities rather than traditions. Commodities are pre-packaged, their conditions of production are inaccessible to us. Virno differs from Stiegler in adding to this the exploitation of the transindividual. Virno’s definintion of fetish and reification reflect the way in which the transindividual relations have become incorporated into structures and relations. The difference is that in reification the relational dimension remains explicit, while in the fetish these relations are obscured by a thing that takes on the qualities of the relation, the abstraction and relations. As Marx once put it, “money is the alienated ability of mankind.” If money is the paradigmatic of fetishization, then what is the corresponding instance of reification in Virno’s sense. Virno’s answer would seem to be the general intellect, but the general intellect remains largely obscured, appearing only in the texts that discuss it. As Marx argued the more labor becomes social and dependent on knowledge, the more it appears as the power of capital. Virno sometimes refers to this reification as a “non-state” public sphere, as the collective powers of social relations acting outside of the state. However, it seems that this is what needs to be produced.

We Love Our Logos: Or, Only a Corporate Mascot Can Save Us Now

I like browsing. I like the physical space of a good bookstore, a good record store, and even a good video store. Sure I buy books online when I have to, but it is not the same. All of the various programs which have been invented to simulate the effects of browsing, such as ipod’s genius or “Amazon recommends”, fail to recreate the experience of browsing, which is always framed somewhere between the structured and the random. These programs can tell what others might like, or point out such painfully obvious connections such as the fact that people who bought one book by Badiou might like another. It is perhaps because I live in a town that lost its last good independent bookstore years ago that I find myself mourning these spaces a bit prematurely. Of course it will always be possible to find good records, books, and movies, but it will be harder to have those random encounters that sometimes produce interesting results.

The other day I wandered into my local video store, which is actually quite good (and the reason that I refuse to use Netflicks). I had no idea what I was looking for; I knew that a red-eye flight the night before had left me exhausted, and I was just looking for something mildly entertaining to occupy that could not be spent doing anything productive or demanding. So I was looking for something short and stupid (but not too stupid). I finally settled on the following:

I remembered seeing the trailer on something else I rented, and it looked amusing, but mostly I was drawn to its 86 minute running time: just enough to fill that gap of time between utter exhaustion and an appropriate time to fall asleep. The plot concerns Leslie (Lisa Kudrow) whose husband is a National Guard soldier in Iraq. At the beginning of the film she learns that her husband’s tour of duty has been extended: this pushes her to the end of her rope financially (she will lose her healthcare if she continues to stay at home and care for her children) and emotionally (she cannot deal with her kids). Her brother-in-law, one of those ubiquitous slacker man-childs of contemporary cinema, is reluctantly brought in as source of help. He fails miserably as a nanny, and the film really takes off when he takes a job for a failing dotcom company. (One of the odd things about this film is that in foreshortening the time between two historical events, the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the Iraq war, it ends up painting a fairly accurate picture of a present dominated by an ongoing war and a collapsing economy). His job is to dress up as the firm’s mascot, a sort of blue Keith Harring-esque homunculus, and hand out flyers advertising office space for rent on a desolate bit of roadway.


The brother, Salman, is perpetually awkward in real life, unable to do much more than mumble and stare at the events in front of him. It is not just him, however, every encounter in the film, from discussions on the bus to the job interview, is a non-relation. People talk to each other, or at each other, utterly oblivious to how their actions are perceived by other people. Distrust and deception characterize every human relationship in the film; the children threaten to kill Salman in private, concealing their murderous desires when the mother it present. However, nearly everyone treats the blue corporate mascot warmly: children rejoice in his presence and a road crew hands him beer.


The film reverses some of the established ideas of alienation. In his job Salman loses all traces of identity, becoming a blue screen for other’s fantasies, but it is not this that is alienating. It is daily life that is alienating, a daily life characterized by solipsistic individuals, unable to comprehend that others exist or have a point of view. The film made me think of those studies that come out every few years, revealing how people not only recognize corporate mascots but rate them favorably. Not that the blue mascot is necessarily cute, but something about the film speaks to the ascendancy of cute, of Lol cats and cartoonish creatures, in a world characterized by purely commercial relationships. I am reminded of William James remarks about sentimentality, the story of the wealthy woman who lets her coachman freeze outside while weeping in the theater. Perhaps this is a kind of a return of the repressed. In a day-to-day way we protect ourselves from feeling anything at all, we watch despair and death with indifference, only to get all teary-eyed over some cartoon robot or overweight cat.


It is significant that the mascot is very much a featureless blue figure, a kind of corporate body-without-organs, a blank screen to project one’s fantasies onto. I have always been puzzled by the continuing popularity of Mickey Mouse, a cartoon character who (until recently) does not appear in any cartoons and yet becomes all the more “beloved by children of all ages everywhere.” He is an icon. What we want from our icons, from our cartoons, is that they embody some kind of pure cute, devoid of any history or complexity.


What follows is an odd twist on the familiar superhero story. Salman is able to utilize his odd mix of anonymity and acceptance to intervene in the relationships around him. In doing so the film makes an interesting, albeit not too subtle, point, about our ability to relate to mascots rather than humans. Hey, I am not saying it was a great film, just something that I stumbled across.

Open Question: Work and Film

I am currently putting together a course on the politics and philosophy of work. The course is a survey of sorts, taking the place of a more general survey of social and political philosophy; it begins with the contradiction between the place of work and the model of work in Plato and Aristotle (with a nod to Rancière) and then continues through Locke, Smith, Hegel, Marx, and Arendt, ending with feminism and then the "immaterial labor" debate (some Virno, Negri, and Sennett). Because the course is a summer course, and thus is packed into these horrendous three hour sessions that meet several times a week, I was thinking of adding some films. These would break up the heavy reading load, and give me time to prepare lectures.

So this has led me to think, albeit in a loose and provisional manner, about the relationship between work and film as I look for suitable films. Last night I watched Blue Collar, which I learned about from Kino Fist. While watching the film two things occured to me. First, there is an almost uncanny relationship between film and modern factory work. The montage is the natural medium for the assembly line: it is impossible to show it any other way. Film and the Fordist assembly line both fragment the body and its gestures, ultimately reassembling them into a different totality than the one organized by the individual. Despite this vague resemblance at the level of technique (or this vague thought of ressemblance) work is unpresentable, at least in terms of the commercial film. A film that captured the reality of work would beyond the point of boring. Film exists as an escape from work.

So anyway, I am trying to think about interesting films about work. Ideally these films would reflect the historical nature of the survey. Despite what I said above it is relatively easy to find films about modern industrial work, but harder to find films about praxis and poesis, or films which critically interrogate possessive individualism. So far I have considered Strike (or something by Eisenstein), Fast Food Nation, Mardi Gras: Made in China, and perhaps even The Wrestler (given what I have written below).

Suggestions?

Not with a Bang but a Whimper

Two quick points:
First, it is utterly surprising to me how quickly the language around the economy and politics has changed. For years, even decades, we have heard not only that "free markets" could regulate themselves, but that they were the key to regulating anything else, to fixing any social ill, from health care to social security. Now this seems to be very much in question. Of course the charges of socialism, first against Obama and now against the stimulus package, are hyperbolic and hysterical. The hysteria is, however, a symptom, a symptom of profound unease around the once fundamental justifications of neoliberalism and capitalism. Something has changed, but what?

Second, all of this has taken place with very little popular revolt and uprising, at least in this country. There was the much discussed incident at Republic Doors in Chicago, but not much aside from that. There have been large protests in Europe, but in the US "the left" has not even managed to put pressure on the stimulus package. Of course there has been a vague sense of anger and bitterness, manifested primarily in terms jokes about bankers.

The question then is how do these two things combine? What, if anything, will fill the void left behind by the fantasies of the market? And when, if ever, will people take to the streets?

What Interests Me

I have been following the news of the economic collapse and the stimulus bill with some interest. Although I have to admit that I am of two minds on the issue. As a tenure track (but not yet tenured) philosophy professor at a state university I am keenly aware of my precarious job position. I am also concerned for the well being of my friends and family, many of whom work in non-profits, education, and social services, in other words all of whom are expendable. Because of this, part of me would to see this bill succeed, to see the economy restored, or at least brought out of this downward spiral. At the same time, however, I do not want to say that I would like to see it fail, but at the very least I would like to see something other than a restoration of business as usual. I would like to see this conjuncture extended into real critical reflection about the fundamentals of our economy: of what counts as wealth and how it is distributed. I am not hoping for a revolution (at least yet) just a transformation, and it seems like it has to get much worse for that to happen.

One could label the first thought, that of hope for success of the economic stimulus package, interest, since it bears directly on my economic wellbeing. In doing so it brings to mind the critical ways in which interest has been discussed by Badiou, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. (Admittedly this is a somewhat odd constellation since it encompasses texts written over the last thirty-five years). In Badiou’s little text on Ethics, he argues that “interest” is fundamentally conservative, even nihilistic, because it can recognize no event other than harm, than the eventual death of the human animal. “The ordinary behavior of the human animal is a matter of what Spinoza calls perseverance in being, which is nothing other than the pursuit of interest, or the conservation of self.” In Metapolitics Badiou goes on to argue that “interest” is at the heart of every “Thermidor” of every attempt to deny the truth of a revolutionary event. The revolution comes to an end when it is declared that “interest lies at the heart of every subjective demand.” Politics is reduced to the conflict of interests—truth, equality, and universality collapse in the face of competing interest groups. I find Badiou’s scattered remarks of interest to be well interesting, they capture something that is essential to both neoliberalism and interest group politics. However, they are not presented as such, as diagnoses of the present. For Badiou there is a fundamental split in humanity: on the one side there is interest, a struggle for survival shared with all living things, on the other there is the capacity to be immortal, to maintain fidelity to the truth of equality and justice.

In a different way Deleuze and Guattari argue for a division, not between interest and truth, but between interest and desire. However, for Deleuze and Guattari, interest is not the residue of a purely animalistic existence, rather it is the product of a particular social formation. As Deleuze writes in Desert Islands, “Once interests have been defined within the confines of a society, the rational is the way in which people pursue those interests and attempt to realize them. But underneath that, you find desires, investments of desire that are not to be confused with investments of interests, and on which interests depend for their determination and very distribution: an enormous flow, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that constitute the delirium of this society.” The distinction between interest and desire relates to a short period in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, roughly the years around Anti-Oedipus, and it seems to be part of the incomplete project of that early work: the project of schizoanalysis as an analysis of the political unconscious. Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the distinction between desire and interest is an attempt to overcome two dualisms: one between base and superstructure, desire is part of the infrastructure, and one between rational interest and irrational false interest. Thus sometimes it is desire that is completely subjugated to the system, caught in the flows of money that make it appear as if we all participate in the massive flows of wealth. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “Desire of the most disadvantaged creature will invest with all its strength, irrespective of any economic understanding or lack of it, the capitalist social field as a whole.” At other times, interest is entirely subordinate to the social aggregates, to the socius, and it is desire that is revolutionary. It is possible to be radical at the level of desire, breaking the chains of society, and reactionary at the level of interest, or, and this is more Deleuze and Guattari’s concern, vice versa, to have an interest in changing society but fascist desires. What is essential, at least as far as differentiating Deleuze and Guattari from Badiou, is that neither interest nor desire are natural; they are not anthropological constants, but thoroughly historical and social, even at the point where they break with society.

Michel Foucault continues this discontinuous line of considering the historicity of subjects of interest in his lectures on neoliberalism (The Birth of Biopolitics). According to Foucault neoliberalism can best be understood as a form (or would that be mode?) of governmentality that acts on interests rather than on rights. Rights by definition are exchangeable; in fact one could argue that, at least in classical social contract theory, rights come into existence through the exchange of certain “natural rights” for the right of security, safety, and property. Thus rights are oddly social even in their separation. Interests are irreducible, they cannot be exchanged or alienated. To be governed by interests is to take this irreducible asocial aspect as foundational: one channels interest by making certain activities cheap and others costly.

I am not sure what this quick survey of interest has to do with the dilemma above, except to pose the following question: what if we assume that we are governed by interest? Which is to say that we are not so much controlled by ideology, by arguments and ideals about how we should live, but by our simple desire to live. Our interest causes us to be invested in things that we might otherwise oppose, like huge bailouts to banks, because we need them to simply survive. Interest ties us to society as it exists. It seems to me that we can then follow Badiou and Deleuze’s route, and try to find that which radically breaks with interest: truth or desire. We could try to recognize in interest the seeds of our subjection and try to think about how we could constitute ourselves otherwise.

Anthropogenesis Two: The Part Played in Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, Or, Everyone Loves a Prequel

In the last post I said that I was going to follow the last post on Stiegler with a post on Virno, but I have decided to write a little about Lukács’ The Ontology of Social Being instead. I have been reading this over the last few weeks, and during that time it has occurred to me that Lukács could be understood as proposing a theory of anthropogenesis, a theory of the constitution of the human, that like Stiegler and Virno, sees this constitution as inseparable from the development of technology and social relations. This immediately superficial resemblance may just be another example of the way in which almost any two books read at the same time will begin to resemble each other, or at least produce effects of similarity or resemblance. (This phenomena really needs a name by the way)

First a word or two about Lukács, as Timothy Murphy has pointed out in his interesting essay on Lukács and Negri, Lukács is a philosopher who is often not read simply because he is so readily comprehended. Any student of critical theory, Marxism, or contemporary social thought knows about his essay on reification, an essay that, in the words of one of my professors, pretty much invented Marx’s early texts on alienation before they were published. That little thumbnail sketch, like all thumbnail sketches, has probably done more than anything else to keep Lukács from being read. Lukács’ fate then becomes much like Althusser’s, despite their strong differences of philosophical position. Althusser too has been reduced to a thumbnail, that of the break between the “young Marx” and the mature Marx, which sums up and reduces all of his writing.

Lukács’ project for an ontology is interesting to me now for at least two reasons. First, as Murphy points out, ontology would seem to be antithetical to the materialist or Marxist project: it is after all the epitome of a philosophy that has only interpreted the world. Second, we could add that this paradox has become increasingly prevalent, to the point where it does not appear as a paradox at all: Negri, Deleuze, Badiou, Zizek, and so on have all proposed ontologies, ontologies that are supposed to be aligned with a political project.

Lukács’ social ontology is an incomplete manuscript, made up of one volume on Hegel, one on Marx, and a final volume on labor. Aside from the two named philosophers the strongest philosophical influence is Engels, whose essay, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man,” provides much of the philosophical impetus for Lukács. As Lukács argues labor fundamentally alters the status of consciousness, constituting human consciousness. Animals may be conscious of this or that thing, but this consciousness, this memory, perishes with creature in question. It remains an “epiphenomenon of organic being.” Labor changes this, not only transforming consciousness, since labor is inseparable from the positing of a goal, from the recognition of something unrealized, but with the instruments and techniques of labor this consciousness becomes something that matters, that has effects. The social as a level of reality that has consistency, that constitutes man’s second nature, comes into being with labor.

Lukács point about the role of labor and its exteriorization plays in the constitution of humanity anticipates Stiegler’s point. They may in fact share a similar set of anthropological or archaelogical references. Stiegler’s point of reference is primarily Leroi-Gourhan who may or may not have influenced some of the anthropological and archaeological writers Lukács sites. I haven’t yet fully traced the history of this notion of anthropogenesis, especially its connections to materialist ontology. I am still trying to get my hands on Anton Pannekoek’s book on Anthropogenesis.

What is interesting is the particular sense that Lukács gives ontology, or “social being,” and the strengths and limits of this conception. Lukács focus here, as it was in his famous essay, is primarily the antinomies of bourgeois thought: antinomies which pit the abstract “ought” against mankind’s animal nature, or a world of purpose, governed by God, against utter meaningless. What these perspectives miss in their antinomies, or out and out opposition, is what passes between both sides of the opposition, and that is the social. For Lukács it is senseless to speak of mind and body, of consciousness and nature, without recognizing that the social is that which constantly passes between the two, naturalizing consciousness by making it part of nature and constituting the backdrop of a second nature. Labor constantly shifts the relation between nature and society.

For Lukács this second nature is best understood through labor, or rather through the teleology of labor. This perspective, which Lukács attributes to Marx, overcomes the limitations of philosophies that understand nature, or history, through teleology or dispense with teleology altogether. (As Lukács points out, even Spinoza had to acknowledge a teleology for human action). As Lukács writes: “It is precisely the Marxian theory of labor as the sole existing form of a teleologically produced existence what founds for the first time the specificity of social being.” Labor is inseparable from a telos, from the idea of some end, but it can only arrive at this end if it subordinates itself to the materiality of conditions. One does not master nature, but studies it and only by learning of its properties can one transform it: the history of technology from the flint axe to the computer chip are as much about understanding the immanent properties of material than about any mastery. Labor is thus a transformation of both nature and the subject. In order to work it is necessary to master oneself, to put off desire. As nature and the subject are transformed labor produces a surplus, above and beyond any product or commodity, and that is the knowledge of this process. This surplus, along with the transformation of nature and the subject that it entails, is what is called social being.

Lukács philosophy, like other Marxist philosophies (Althusser comes to mind) attempts to expand the terrain covered by Marx by expanding labor. Labor becomes the basis of not just a politics and an economics but an ontology. (Of course it is an ontology that Lukács argues was already there in Marx’s remarks about the labor process). I am sympathetic to Lukács perspective, but I cannot help but think that it generates more questions than it answers. As Lukács states the contemporary labor process is much more complicated than the simple positing of an end to be realized through a process. The ends of my actions are no longer needs, even those needs that have been transformed by society, but something that is simultaneously much more abstract and immediate, the “need” to make a living, to earn a wage. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the means of the contemporary labor process are no longer the natural world, or its laws, but encompass the social world, social being itself. Lukács repeatedly gestures to the fact that labor increasingly works on social relations as much as on material things, even making reference to Marx’s concept of ‘real subsumption.’ However, the actual difference between labor carried out in formal subsumption and in real subsumption is not really theorized.

On the one hand we have this fundamental principle: “Even the most complicated economy is a resultant of individual teleological positings and their realizations, both in the form of alternatives.” This is modified by another fundamental principle, borrowed from Hartmann, that the more complex levels of social complexes attain supremacy over simpler levels, even as the latter remain in some sense determinate. In other words, no matter how hungry we get, we do not eat dogs (social being taking precedence over natural being). These two principles, the individual teleogical positings and the determination of the simple by the complex, constitute something of a contradiction, a contradiction that marks the limits of Lukács’ text. Of course it is unfair to point to limits to an incomplete manuscript, but Lukács’ limits here are the limits of social theory itself, caught between the perspective of the individual and that of the social totality.

Anthropogenesis, Part One: More Remarks on Stiegler

A few posts ago I said that I was going to write a little about Paolo Virno and Bernard Stiegler. Initially I stated that I was going to examine the two as “Left-Simondonians,” as two thinkers that use Simondon to analyze the current conjuncture, specifically the current situation of capital. What initially interested me was the way in which the came to very different conclusions about the current situation. This is still the point that I want to get to, but before I do I want to reframe their respective projects through the general problem of “anthropogenesis.”

The term “anthropogenesis" defined as the study of the origin of humans, is drawn from the work of André Leroi-Gourhan. As a concept and general problem it underlies both Virno and Stiegler's work, but it is more central to Stiegler’s work, whose constant discussion of Leroi-Gourhan and the archaeological record reveals how concerned he is with the origin of humanity. In many ways this idea of “anthropogenesis” is structurally similar to Simondon. For Simondon the individual, the privileged starting point of Western metaphysics and politics, has to be considered as part of a process, not its beginning or ultimate endpoint. In a similar way, anthropogenesis locates humanity, the human, as part of a process and not the ultimate beginning or end. In each case a term, the individual or the human, is criticized not by simply being done away with, but is critically resituated with respect to practices and technologies. What was once posited as origin and end is placed in a dense network.

For Bernard Stiegler humanity begins, when memory ceases to be something interiorized, part of the synthesis of consciousness, and becomes something objectified, embodied in physical structures. “Memory is objectified when it is technically synthesized.” This objectification can be something very basic, even a simple tool, such as a flint axe, embodies a memory, a particular way of comporting oneself, of holding the arm and hand. This memory, embodied in particular technologies and devices, constitutes the basis of a common culture, a “we.” Following Simondon this “we” does not stand apart from an “I,” but is constituted by it. For Stiegler it is necessary to posit the overdetermined articulation of the individuation of an “I,” a “we” and a “what”: less cryptically, at each moment we are dealing with the constitution of a collectivity, of individuality, and of technology. Individuation is historical; it is dependent on the existing technical conditions.

However, something fundamental changes when we get to modern technology, to films, television, and the internet, what Stiegler refers to as the “industrialization of memory.” These technologies do not just create a memory in the passive sense, in the sense of the habits and comportments that underlies any technology; such as the layout of “QWERTY” keyboard, which is the condition of my writing, itself an act of individuation, and your reading, which is individuation as well. As Stiegler says I can only individuate myself if I individuate you, which in turn individuates some third thing, some shared culture. To write is to transform one’s readers, a transformation that cannot take place unless some third thing, in this case philosophy is also transformed. Sorry, I got a little off track there, the crucial point is that this overdetermined articulation is dependent on a difference of time, my time is not the same as my culture. It existed before me and will outlast me; I cannot help but bring a diachronic dimension to its structures. I am invariably out of sync with the very culture milieu that creates me. That difference, which produces a differential of individuations is lost in the industrialization of memory. When I watch a film, or the television, its time becomes mine. I can only follow the movie if I subordinate my times to its time.

Ultimately Stiegler’s point is that modern technology, and with it consumer capitalism, does not allow for the constitution of a “we” or an “I.” The individuals watching do not have the sufficient difference to be constituted as “I’s.” Nor do they make up a “we.” A television audience does not make up a “we”: the population of TV Land is always one. What we are left with is neither a “we” or an “I” but a “they.” I think Stiegler is onto something here: a television audience is neither individual, after all they are watching the same thing, nor collective, since they are isolated in their sameness. It is a kind of serialized isolation. However, I think that he is too quick to conclude that this is a loss of self, of individuation. It seems to me that much of the last fifty or so years of pop-culture, and with it cultural studies, has been obsessed with the question of how to reconstitute individuality and collectivity in the face of the serialized “they” of “industrialized memory.” Fan culture, slash fiction, and ironic distance are all ways to remake some sense sense of self, of collectivity, in the face of a culture that is addressed to “they” to everyone and no one at once.

As something of an aside I should point out that recent transformations in technical/popular culture are thoroughly ambivalent. In some sense technologies such as youtube and wikipedia represent a complete mediation of memory. If I think of an old music video or the opening credits to Land of the Lost, there is no need to simply try and recall it, I can watch it on Youtube. If I have trouble remembering some random fact I can always look it up on wikipedia or google it. Nothing is lost, everything is retained. There is no more hazy nostalgia; no more difference between my memory at that of culture in general. At the same the very presence of all these bits of collected video, not to mention extended wikipedia pages on the life story of Nightcrawler, reflect the individual and idiosyncratic interests of a few individuals.

Ultimately Stiegler seems to identify the loss of self and collective associated with the “industrialization of memory,” a loss of primary narcissism and collectivity, with a kind of cultural destruction. The second essay from Acting Out, as essay that I have been drawing from here, is based in part on the journals of Richard Durn, a Frenchman who stormed his city’s town hall, killing eight people. The loss of self and community is a disease.

Next time I will try to write about Virno’s take on the transformation of the conditions of individuation.

Finance and the Production of Subjectivity

Christian Marazzi’s Capital and Language was written well before the current crisis, but that does not mean that it does not offer some terms with which to understand the current crisis. Most importantly it offers a context for understanding what he calls “financialization.” Financialization marks a fundamental change in accumulation, shifting money from household savings and union run pension funds to the stock market. This of course “liberates” a great deal of money, freeing up flows for profits. More importantly, at least in my view, is that it transforms the terms of antagonism. The opposition between work and capital, between wages and profits, is transformed when workers look to the stock market for their future. This in some sense divides the worker faced with downsizing, an act that will cut off wages but increase stock value. As Marazzi succinctly puts it, “In the name of his interests as a shareholder the salaried employee (in the public or private sector) is prepared to fire himself if Wall Street should demand it.” This is not just an isolated phenomena, as Marazzi argues financialization generates profits by destroying salaries and stable employment through mergers and acquisitions.

It is the subjective dimension of this that interests me, the way that financialization can be understood as a production of subjectivity. Maurizio Lazzarato underscores the subjective dimension in Les Révolutions du Capitalisme. As Lazzarato writes, “The workers are caught in a relation of exploitation when they sell their labor power [force de travail] to an entrepreneur, but they are implicated within a majortarian dynamic [dynamique majoritaire], when, for example their revenues are invested in pension funds.” Lazzarato’s use of Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction of major and minor is crucial, as it stresses that the worker as a minor position is destroyed by investment. As Deleuze and Guattari write elsewhere, in capitalism the most disadvantaged creature invests in the economy. Of course apologists for capital would argue that the extension of stock options to workers represents a massive democratization of wealth. However, I would argue that it is a less a matter of redistributing wealth than a transformation of the appearance of the economy. As Alain Badiou writes: “what is counted is the level of the stock market, the Euro, financial investment, competition, and so on: the figure of the worker, on the other hand, counts for nothing.” The economy is counted in terms of the market, wages count for nothing. This transformation of the account of the economy is also a transformation of subjectivity, we see ourselves as investors or potential investors.

If the current crisis is going to mean anything politically it must become a crisis of how capital is counted, and how we see ourselves as subjects of capital.

Who are we? What do we want?

Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri’s In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics is truly a pleasant surprise. As an admirer of both Casarino (whose book on Melville and Marx remains unfortunately overlooked) and Negri I was excited to read the book, my excitement was tempered a bit, however, when I saw that it was primarily made up of interviews. I am not a fan of interviews, specifically philosophical interviews, which tend to produce statements of clarification, rather than real insight. As the title suggests, the work is more of a conversation, with each side exchanging ideas, than an interview. This is partly what makes it rewarding to read, but a great deal of what makes the conversation interesting depends on Casarino’s ability to press Negri on key points. I found his engagement with Negri on the tone of Empire and Multitude to be particularly interesting. Casarino engages with Negri as a “fellow-traveler” a reader of Marx and Spinoza, committed to the general orientation of his thought, but not always the specific formulations and pronouncements. In the years since the publication of Empire Negri has been more interested in pronouncements than problems, pronouncements about the nature of political power, labor, etc. Politics might need pronouncements, but philosophy requires problems. The conversations expose not just the problems underlying the pronouncements, but the problematics, the orientation of thought.

I do not want to simply praise Casarino, but rather focus on the book’s central concern: the common. The “common” has become a term of increasing focus, bringing together ecological and technical concerns, as well as Marxists of the “new enclosures” and “immaterial labor.” It is also the focus of Hardt and Negri’s forthcoming book on the Commonwealth. The question then is: what does this concept, with its dense history, add to the existing discussion? Casarino suggests that it offers a way of thinking the point of differentiation of the multitude and empire (or capital), or more precisely, sees a difficult point of differentiation in the manner in which the “common” is both the condition and excess of production. As Casarino writes:

“The qualitative difference between capital and the common consists in positing surplus in different ways, in engaging surplus to different ends. Surplus value is living surplus as separation (in the form of value par excellence, namely, money). Surplus common is living surplus as incorporation (in the forms of the common, including and especially our bodies).”

In Casarino’s writing, and in the discussions that follow, the “common” becomes a manner of reframing and focusing the dualities that traverse both Negri’s work, dualities that hover around the central division between potential and actual, between the multitude in-itself and for-itself. What interests me about the common, however, is that it shifts the focus of Negri’s work (as well as other post-autonomists such as Virno) from the who, the constitution of the multitude as a kind of subjectivity, to the what, to the structures and institutions (borrowing Stiegler’s terms). Or rather, it stresses that there is no who without a what, no constitution of subjectivity without material structures and institutions. I think this focus makes it possible to think what I have often referred to as the paradox of contemporary capitalism: never have human beings been more social in their existence, but more individualized, privatized, in the apprehension of their existence. On the one hand, the simplest action from making a meal to writing an essay engages the labor of individuals around the world, materialized in commodities, habits, and machines, while on the other, everything, every social relation can be purchased as a commodity. This paradox is not just the conflict between two different productions of subjectivity, the emergent multitude, collective to the core, and the neoliberal subject, locked in a competitive struggle that defines its very existence. It is also a conflict between different structures and materializations of subjectivity, between the commodity, which privatizes desire, and the commons, inseparable from collectivity (incidentally Casarino has interesting remarks about the former). As Nick Dyer-Witherfood argues, if the elementary unit of capitalism is the commodity then the elementary unit of communism is the commons. Thus, as something of a conclusion, the politics of the future must produce both the multitude and the commons, subjectivity and its material conditions.

The Body Remains

So far I have spent a good part of break getting caught up on movies. Last night I saw Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. The Wrestler is a very visceral movie, like Requiem for Dream. The major difference between the two is that whereas the first dealt with the effects of addiction on the body, the latter deals with the body’s breakdown and decay, its status as a “broken down piece of meat.” A breakdown that has everything to do with the relation of capital to the body.

Eternal Return

So I happened upon a folder of old drawings an cartoons that I did for my old zine. These drawings and cartoons are over fifteen years old. Two things come to mind: One that I am in many ways still pursuing the same critique of capital, in this blog and in my published writings. The references have become more extensive and sophisticated, but the basic themes remain the same: what is the "Manufactured Needs" about but the production of subjectivity and the commodification of existence? Second, that I should draw more, but perhaps not comics, which tended to descend into a didactic screed by the last panel.


As for the first point, I could feel bad about this, that I have never actually gotten anywhere, but i prefer to see it as fidelity to a fundamental idea. I have to, because the alternative is depressing.

Incomplete Me

As someone who reads, teaches, and writes on a great deal of French philosophy I hate to get caught up in the phenomena of the “next big thing from France”: the way in which there always seems to be a new French philosopher of the moment, from Derrida, to Foucault, to Deleuze, to Badiou, etc. For me “French Philosophy” is interesting for the questions it addresses, questions that ultimately have to do with the constitution of subjectivity and the formation of knowledge, but are not limited to that. Moreover, these are not exclusively French concerns, extending into the work of Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri and drawing on the work of Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche (to name a few). All of this is really nothing more than an apology, however, for what follows: a discussion of the work of Bernard Stiegler, arguably “the newest thing” from France.

In the last month two translations of Stiegler’s works have come out from Stanford Press. This is to some extent odd, since it is not as if people were clamoring for new translations. I bought a copy of the first volume of Technics and Time a while ago, up until this point the only work of his to appear in translation, and it is a used copy that had been taken out of circulation by a university library. So, based on my incredibly unscientific sampling, I would say that there has not been much of an interest in Stiegler up until now.

(Perhaps it has already been done, but someone should do a study of the politics and chronology of translations of French philosophers, but not just the French: it seems to me that there are odd itineraries and incomplete translations that produce their own odd receptions. Case in point: Stiegler has now been translated but Gerard Granel, his teacher, has largely not been translated. Or a similar point could be made with Badiou, whose works of the seventies and eighties, works in dialogue with Lacan, Deleuze, and Althusser, are just now being translated.)

I first learned of Stiegler when I watched, and then screened, the film The Ister. I was initially struck by his theory of historical time as something that is dependent upon technology, understood in its broadest sense. To put it too simply: we have an understanding of ourselves as historical beings because we have artifacts, relics of past ages. These things, such as tools, art, and writing, create a memory, which is fundamentally different from the individual memory that dies with us and the species’ genetic memory that cannot be transformed in our life. Since watching that film, which is primarily about Heidegger, I became further interested in Stiegler when I saw that he cited Simondon. Thus started an inquiry into Stiegler’s work.

To offer something of a brief encapsulation of what I find interesting about Stiegler, I would like to follow Balibar’s suggestion that works of philosophy “incomplete” other works of philosophy, and themselves. Balibar’s examples here are the way in which almost all of Marx’s corpus could be considered to actively “incomplete” Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, calling into question the dialectical sublimation of civil society into the state, but also works such as Heidegger’s Being and Time, which incompletes itself, rendering a second volume impossible. Following this idea of the way in which philosophical works interrupt others, calling into question their theoretical unity, or completing their own unraveling, I could describe Stiegler’s work through two interruptions.

First, and this is close to Balibar’s point, Stiegler completes (or perhaps incompletes) Heidegger’s line of demarcation with Husserl. As Stiegler argues, one of the key points of demarcation between Husserl and Heidegger is the discussion of historicity in the second part of Being and Time. For Heidegger memory, temporality, is not just a synthesis of an individual’s experience, but necessarily involves the already there of traditions and histories. Memory is always already materialized in institutions, structures, tools, and techniques. Second, and in a point that seems to be initially distinct, Stiegler argues that Simondon never connected his concept of the social with his analysis of technology. These two interruptions intersect in that obscure region where the constitution of subjectivity, or modes of being in the world, intersects with objectivity, with things structures and institutions: or, as Stiegler puts it, where the consitution of the who intersects with the what.

To step back a bit, it is perhaps worth clarifying just what precisely is Simondon’s account of sociality. On this point Stiegler stresses that Simondon’s concept of transindividuality is the mutual individuation of the “I” and the “we,” in which individuals are only constituted through collectivities and vice versa.

“In effect, if every I is inscribed in the we that constitutes it, and that it constitutes, if the I and the we are two faces of the same process of individuation, at the core of which develops their tendency to become-indivisible, ceaselessly projecting their accomplished unity, this projection is never concretized except by default, in other words by ceaselessly deferring this completion which, if realized, would be the end of the process of individuation or, in other words, the end of the individual.”

This mutually constitution of the individual and the collective, the “I” and the “we,” is what makes up a history; a history in which a third thing, a culture or a language, is also individuated. If one needed a classical reference for this process, Stiegler argues that this relation of transindividuality can be seen in Plato’s Apology and Crito: the first asserts Socrates’ individuality, his eccentric nature with respect to the community, while the second underscores his belonging to this community. In the interplay between the two, according to Stiegler, a third “individual” is constituted, and that is philosophy. Philosophy remains then for Stiegler an exploration of the relation between the “I” and the “we,” the exploration of their mutual constitution.

This link, constitutive of the “who,” is inseparable from the “what” from the technologies and techniques that constitute memory, from writing to the internet. It is the intersection of the three, the “I,” the “we,” and the “what,” that interests me, as technologies transform the conditions of individuation and the constitution of collectivities. I should add at this point that I have only begun to read the second volume of Time and Technics, and thus begun to explore this relation, but, and his will have to serve as a conclusion it strikes me that Stiegler’s emphasis on the present is in the disorientation of the “I” and the “we” produced by the transformation of the “what,” the deterritorialization of self and community made possible by the industrialization and then digitization of memory. This is in contrast with the work of Paolo Virno, who also takes inspiration from Simondon: for Virno the introduction of the transindividual, language, habits, and affects, into the production process opens up the possibility of the articulation of the common. In a future post I hope to explore the tension between these two Left-Simondonians, as well as the larger question of what Simondon’s concept of the transindividual offers for politics.

Fear of the State/the State of Fear

A few weeks ago I happened to catch Bill O’Reilly on The Daily Show. The topic of the interview was the “politics of fear” that the Fox Network has propagated since Barak Obama’s election. I am not sure if I got the words right, but when asked why he was afraid of an Obama presidency, O’Reilly said something to the effect of, “I do not know how he is going to govern.” Now O’Reilly was being disingenuous with this, almost as disingenuous as his claim that he is an anarchist and wants power to the people, but what if we took him seriously?

Why? Well because I think that there is something to looking at the present through this perspective of how one is governed or, in Foucault’s terms, governmentality. First of all it underscores the fact that we have been governed in a particular manner for at least the last eight years. Speaking broadly I would say that this governmentality has combined an inchoate fear of the “terrorist” with a neoliberal model of interest. The fear stems from 9/11 and has been mobilized repeatedly whenever there has been a need to curtail rights. The “neoliberal” interest has roots that extend much farther back: it is our basic idea of government as a service that we purchase with our taxes. Neoliberal interest does not just demand that the government cost less in a monetary sense, taking less of our tax dollars, but that it cost less in terms of our time and attention as well. As Lawrence Grossberg once wrote, “the government which distracts the least, governs best.” Neoliberal interest understands freedom to be something that is primarily realized in the market, in shopping. These two modes of governmentality overlap, sometimes spectacularly so, as in George W. Bush’s call to “Unite, consume and fly” after 9/11. They also overlap the more mundane way that neoliberalism’s massive disinvestment in the public, as a realm of freedom and action, paves the way for the complete and utter destruction of the rights of the public.

Based on this rather cursory analysis one cans see the recipe for the republican’s recent collapse: When the market itself becomes an object of fear the combination of neoliberal interest and fear comes unraveled. Bush’s speech in favor of the $700 billion bail-out was in many ways modeled after post-9/11 politics of fear: the same claim of a terrifying exigency that trumps discussion, debate, and politics, but this time it fell flat. The last few weeks of the McCain campaign, in which there was an attempt to resuscitate at any costs the politics of fear, bringing back ‘60s radicals and the red scare, were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the affective composition of the electorate. It is not that fear was lacking, it is just that its object had changed: the economy which was supposed to be an outlet of what remains of freedom had become an object of fear.

(As something of an aside, I reminded of Spinoza’s remarks about the internal limitations of a politics of fear and superstition in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. As Spinoza argues nothing is more unstable than a state founded on fear and ignorance. “The multitude has no ruler more powerful than superstition,” but superstition itself cannot be ruled.)

Based on this analysis it does seem to me that there is a real question as to how Obama will govern. The reason that this is such a question is that I think that it is pretty clear that the democrats lack their own specific form of governmentality (to borrow and twist Foucault’s point about Marxism). The democrats by and large have simply adopted the terms of neoliberal governmentality and their supplementary politics of fear: claiming to be both fiscally more responsible and more intelligent in terms of the “war on terror.” While Obama’s politics by and large follows this trend, disappointingly claiming to return to the “war on terror” to its true front line in Afghanistan, he has made a few rhetorical gestures outside of it: namely, his critique of the “ownership society” as an “on your own society,” his attempt to invoke some idea of (nonmilitary) sacrifice, not to mention his reference of “spreading the wealth. What remains to be seen is if these will constitute another idea of governmentality; that is, if there is something beyond the empty signifier of “change.”

Ultimately I am less concerned with Obama’s specific governmentality than what an Obama presidency means for those to the left of the democrats: in other words, the left. To return briefly to Foucault’s remarks on governmentality, which provides the barest of conceptual skeletons for this rant, in Security, Territory, Population he suggests that governmentalities emerge and change through the various counter-conducts that challenge them. The real question then is how are “we” going to protest and provoke the Obama presidency? What counter-conducts are possible. This question is important for two reasons. The first is the frightening collapse of critical thought in the face of the admittedly inspiring and historical event of the Obama presidency. The second is that eight years of the Bush presidency has led to its own exhaustion of critical thought: everything Bush did was so wrong, morally, politically, tactically, etc., it just got to be so easy to say no to the whole thing. Rage and anger eventually gave way to irony: politics collapsed into discussing the latest gaffe.

As Mike Davis suggests, it is perhaps time to construct the equivalent of tent cities.

Unclear on the Concept

I was thoroughly amused and delighted by the events recounted in today's New York Times. First, one has to admire the sheer discipline and organization that led to physical copies of a faux-times being handed out across New York City. More importantly there is the content of the edition itself. While it is in many respects "too liberal" for my taste, wage caps, taxes that reflect social cost etc., It at least has the advantage of expressing some fundamental fantasies and desires: most importantly the end of the Iraq war.

However, as the article makes clear the "Times" quite simply fails to get it. First of all, it cannot really be called a spoof. Second, it is almost sad to learn that the only response to such an event that the article can imagine is selling a copy of the counterfeit "Times" on ebay. (Dream Big) What the authors fail to grasp is the politics of the imagination: the political dimension of imagining a better world. It is quite possible that many of the people who received copies of the paper felt a moment of elation when they read its headlines. There is something valuable in that feeling, if even for a moment, that another world is possible.

Since the election last week there has been a small scale reaction, laying the ground for a mini-Thermidor, against the tiny, and all too modest progress of change. Articles in the "Times" and elsewhere have sought to curtail the sense of the possible, reminding us that America is a "center-right" nation, lest we get any ideas. What these articles forget, what the "Times" forget is that the political orientation of the nation, and the sense of the possible, are not given, but produced.

Preemptive Strikes (of a philosophical variety)

Materialism is a paradoxical philosophy, for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that on some fundamental level it diverges from the basic premise underlying the very practice of philosophy. This premise is the fundamental idea that the best argument always wins, that the true has an efficacy in and of itself to overcome any illusion, error, or bias. However, if we take as one of the defining characteristics of materialism Marx’s dictum that “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life,” then it is clear that it is “life,” understood as material conditions and social relations, and not the better argument that has the last word. The question then arises, how to do philosophy in a materialist manner. How do you argue when you recognize that arguments have only a limited force against ideologies, which are sustained and embedded in material practices?

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. 

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.