Abstract Materiality: In Praise of Alfred Sohn-Rethel

Materialism has always been the bastard stepson of philosophy. Its very position is paradoxical, if not impossible. It must use concepts and arguments to conceptualize and argue against the primacy of concepts and argument. Materialism is predicated on the principle that material forces and relations determine thought, not the either way around. This perennial problem is even worse today. If Marx was in some sense the most sophisticated materialist philosopher, elevating the material beyond the brute materiality of the body, to locate the material in the conflicted terrain of social relations, then one could argue that even this version of materialism is in jeopardy today. The economy, the last instance of materialist philosophy after Marx, can no longer be identified with the machines and noise of the factory, it has become digital, immaterial. What then remains of materialism when the economy has become ideal, determined more and more by the idealist category par excellence, speculation, and even labor has been declared immaterial, intersecting with beliefs and desires? At least the beginning of a response can be found in the seemingly paradoxical concept of “real abstraction.” This term, introduced by Marx, takes on a central importance in the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, where it is no longer a methodological necessity, but the cornerstone of a philosophy that seeks to understand the material basis of abstraction itself. 

In order to clarify this concept, or to clarify the specific way in which it intersects with materialism, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by materialism. I have already shown my cards in this respect, demonstrating that I define materialism through Marx, and, more specifically in this context, the Theses on Feuerbach. Without engaging in all the tensions and paradoxes that these theses demand, I will extract a general definition of materialism from them: First, the primacy of practice, of acting, over contemplation (from Thesis One) and second, the primacy of relations, specifically social relations, over constituted things (drawn in part from Thesis Six). With these in mind we can now turn to Sohn-Rethel’s use of the concept of real abstraction. Sohn-Rethel’s understanding of real abstraction takes as its starting point Marx’s presentation of the commodity form in the opening of Capital. Sohn Rethel reads these passages to extract a thought of practice; contrary to what one might expect, it is not drawn from Marx’s distinction between concrete and abstract labor, but from the exchange relation. What Sohn-Rethel stresses is that in the act of a commodity exchange one may be focused on the concrete qualities of the commodity, its use value, but acts as if its quantitative exchange value really mattered, it is this after all that governs exchange. “It is the action of exchange, and the action alone that is abstract. The consciousness and the action of the people part company in exchange and go different ways” (Sohn-Rethel 26). This is the scandal that Marx’s thought represents for philosophy: it is not just that “consciousness is determined by life” in terms of the content and concepts that make up ideology, but that the very form of thought, abstraction, is determined by practice. The practice of exchanging does not so much constitute exchange value but constitutes its separation from use, a separation from the thing as material use value and value as an abstract quantity. Despite the fact that this abstraction takes place practically in the sphere of the market, it is this abstraction that makes possible the abstractions of thought: all of which are dependent on abstract space and time as their constitutive conditions. Practice is primary to thought, but practice is less labor as some kind of metabolic relation with nature than second nature: the relations of exchange and the division between exchange and use that constitutes the form of social activity.

Sohn-Rethel’s focus on exchange rather than labor as the activity constitutive of thought may seem strange, undermining Marx’s fundamental assertion that society is best understood from the mode of production not distribution. Sohn-Rethel does not so much dispense with labor, but justifies his selection through a theory of social relations, what he calls a social synthesis. Sohn-Rethel’s idea of a social synthesis is an attempt to answer the question as to how society coheres, holds itself together: in other words, why is there society rather than nothing? A problem that is particularly vexing in a society defined by competition. As Sohn-Rethel writes: “How does society hold together when production is carried out independently by private producers, and all forms of previous production in common have broken asunder? ” (Sohn-Rethel 29). The answer is the social synthesis, and the particular form that this synthesis takes in capitalist society. Basically, a capitalist society is held together through the abstract concepts of value, and the abstraction that it makes possible, despite the fact that physically, at the level of laboring bodies and the accumulation of use values, it remains distinct. We labor in isolation and consume in the privacy of our home, but the condition of both this production and consumption is the totality of relations of value. Sohn-Rethel refers to this as a society of appropriation, in which society is socialized at the level of appropriation, or exchange. It is a society unified in the head, despite its isolation in the laboring or consuming body. This unity does not entail a particular content, a set of ideological beliefs but a form: the form of abstract value as a quantitative unit. A society of appropriation is distinct from a society of production: the latter would imply not only different social relations, but different forms of thought, no longer predicated on the radical divide between the physical object and abstract unit.

Sohn-Rethel’s social synthesis is ultimately not just a theory of how society holds together, but how thought holds together as well. As Sohn-Rethel writes, “forms of thought and forms of society have one thing in common. They are both forms” (Sohn-Rethel 17). A social synthesis expresses this identity of thinking and society. Thus, it constitutes another blow to the claims of idealist thought, if not philosophy itself: it is not just that the abstraction is primarily practical rather than conceptual, but that thought is not the attribute of an individual consciouness it is a social process through and through, it is common.

The two materialist theses that I outlined at the beginning, the primacy of practice and the primacy of social relations, become an emphasis on the primacy of exchange as an activity constitutive of thought and society as a social synthesis. These concepts converge in the idea of real abstraction: abstractions that are lived prior to being thought, and are social before being individual. Or, put differently, thought is irreducibly social because it is irredeemably practical, structured by practice. Having defined the basic contours of Sohn-Rethel’s materialist philosophy, we can now return to the initial question as to the question of materiality today. The final chapter of Intellectual and Manual Labor lays out a particular interpretation of Marx’s methodology. As Sohn-Rethel argues Marx’s central works were always a critique of political economy, rather than a direct exposition of capitalist reality: materiality is always approached through a particular form of thought (Sohn-Rethel 195). This suggests that philosophical texts can always be interrogated against the present at the same time that they make such an interrogation possible. We can then ask where do we stand with this concept of real abstraction today: what does it make possible, and what are its limitations. First, there is the way in which it posits a particular split in the intellect. The intellect is immediately social: the fundamental conceptual schemas of thought are produced by social relations, but this sociality is lived differently than it is constituted. The basic forms of its thought are social, the abstract entities of space and time, but unconsciously so, consciously the focus is on the specific qualities of the commodity in question. This is the division between use value and exchange value, only now it explains the genesis of thought not value. “Nothing could be wrapped in greater secrecy than the truth that the independence of the intellect is owed to its original social character” (Sohn-Rethel 77). Sohn-Rethel’s assertion could be used to make sense of Marx’s formulation in the Grundrisse of the fundamental paradox of capitalist social existence:

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 223)

Only now these developed relations do not just concern the interconnected relations of civil society, but the relations constitutive of thought. To cast it into a different conceptual vocabulary, Sohn-Rethel’s thought is rigorously transindividual, in that the individual, even the solipsistic individual, acting in competitive isolation or fulfilling its own independent desires on the market, is an effect and condition of social relations, relations that exceed its comprehension precisely because they are relations.

At the same time as Sohn-Rethel’s reading casts light on the present, illustrating the constitution of an intellect that is at once separate, individual, and social, collective, it is also tied to particular labor conditions, that of “private individuals who work independently of each other” (Marx 165). The social synthesis of appropriation presupposes that labor cannot be the ground for the social synthesis: exchange and not labor forms the basis of society. There is thus a sense in which Sohn-Rethel’s analysis is all too dependent on Marx’s formulation from the chapter on commodity fetishism, in which labor is carried out in isolation. Such a formulation already seems to be in tension with Marx’s analysis of cooperation in Chapter 13 of Capital, in which labor is socialized through the cooperative relations of the factory. The idea of individuals working independently of each other would appear to be already anachronistic at the time of Marx’s writing, let alone in the present. Sohn-Rethel’s does not base the entire idea of the social synthesis of appropriation on the isolation of work: it is more central that the work is governed by the division between the head and hand. This division, as he demonstrated with his analysis of Taylorism, is not just predicated on the dominance of the head over the hand, but on a dominance in which the head is determined by the abstract relations of time and space. The science underlying scientific management is founded on the abstract quantity of time, not the singular case of this or that laboring body. Taylorism is the culmination of the synthesis of appropriation on labor, both in the sense that it is determined by the demands to make a higher concentration of technology profitable by keeping it working at a faster rate and in that its science, like all sciences, is based on the abstractions constituted by the exchange relation. However, this more sophisticated understanding of the synthesis of appropriation would seem inadequate to a present dominated by what has been alternately called cognitive capital or immaterial labor. As Sohn-Rethel argues, one of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism is the resocialization of labor, a trend which has continued to this day. Labor has become more social, moving out of the factory to the call center and the public relations office. This limit can be drawn with respect to two points: first, the post-fordist present can be defined by an increased tendency in the socialization of labor, in which labor is no longer carried out by isolated producers, but actively incorporates socialization and communication. Second, the abstractions of the present are not limited to the commodity form, or even money, but include highly speculative forms of finance capital. Drawing the lines of intersection of these two points, the new socialization and new abstractions, is necessary to comprehend the present.

With respect to the former, real abstraction, Paolo Virno has suggested that the present is defined by a fundamental mutation of the real abstraction. Virno argues that the real abstractions that Sohn-Rethel addressed had one defining characteristic: equality. The socialization of the labor process, the transformation of work in post-fordist capitalism as an activity that is not so much governed by an absent and indifferent intellect, but animated by a plurality of paradigms and concepts, fundamentally changes the nature of the real abstraction. Virno argues that the concept that best illustrates the real abstraction of contemporary capitalism is not the abstract equivalent of exchange value, but what Marx referred to as the “general intellect,” the concepts, paradigms, and knowledges embodied in machines and subjectivity. As Virno writes:

Whereas money, the “universal equivalent” itself incarnates in its independent existence the commensurability of products, jobs, and subjects, the general intellect instead stabilizes the analytic premises of every type of practice. Models of social knowledge do not equate the various activities of labor, but rather present themselves as the “immediate forces of production (Virno 1996, 22)

It is no longer the abstractions of appropriation that constitute the basis for the social synthesis, but the relations of production. However, these relations are not the unity of the head and hand that Sohn-Rethel juxtaposed to societies of appropriation. Virno argues that the general intellect, the abstract formulas, paradigms and concepts, have not disappeared, but have become internal to experience. As Virno writes:

Innumerable conceptual constructions, embodied in as many techniques, procedures, and regulations, orient the gaze and serve as the premises of any operation whatsoever. Direct perception and the most spontaneous action come last. This is the historical situation that comes about once the split between hand and mind manifests its irreversibility; when the autonomy of abstract intellect conditions and regulates the social productive process, on the whole and in every one of its singular aspects. (Virno 2001, 171)

Whereas Sohn-Rethel’s concept of the social synthesis of appropriation was based on the radical division between the practical abstraction, exchange value, and the concrete thought, use value, Virno presents a situation in which this division is not so much overcome, but internalized: abstraction is directly sensed. In Virno’s writing this sense defines the affective tonality of the present: the rise of cynicism and opportunism, as affective compositions predicated on the absence of any equivalence between different rules, structures, and norms become not just the basis for action, but experience as well.

While Virno’s distinction captures much of the present, defining a new social synthesis that is predicated less on the equivalent abstractions of money and exchange value than on the flexible rules and relations of a service and information based economy, its risk is that it makes it appear as if appropriation, which is to say the subordination of all of this to the accumulation of surplus value, has disappeared. To return to Sohn-Rethel’s distinction our society is still very much a society of appropriation, even if the terms of that appropriation have moved away from the simple equivalence of exchange value. It is at this point that the two shifts addressed above converge, the social dimension of labor and the new formulas of appropriation. As writers such as Matteo Pasquinelli, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Antonio Negri have, in different veins, argued, there is a connection between the socialization of labor, between a labor that has internalized various modes of knowing and sensing, and the speculative dimension of contemporary appropriation. This can be seen in the phenomena of rent or real estate value, which is often inseparable from the transformation of modes of knowing and perceiving, the cliché of the connection between gentrification and aesthetic production. A similar connection between speculation and the internalization for forms of knowledge and relations runs through the constitution of various forms of appropriation from the constitution of brand identity to the formation of the value of stocks. In each case speculation is speculation on the constitution and transformation of knowledges and operative paradigms, beliefs and desires. These are merely meant as sketches of a problem posed, not a fully developed theory. The central point, however, is that appropriation operates not through the abstraction of equivalence but through the speculation on differences.

In making sense of this connection between the new forms of labor and new forms of accumulation, in trying to understand the new social synthesis, it is important to keep in mind two of Sohn-Rethel’s fundamental points. First, a social synthesis is both a form of society and a form of thought, as such it constitutes a kind of common. However, and this is the second point, it is not directly perceived as such: central to Sohn-Rethel’s understanding of the social synthesis of appropriation is the way in which it constitutes a divide between the way this form of thought, which is also a form of subjectivity, is split between the social dimension of its constitution and the individual dimension of its apprehension. For Sohn-Rethel the fully socialized abstractions of value make possible an isolation and fragmentation of its apprehension. Thus, following Sohn-Rethel we can ask what are the formations of isolation and fragmentation produced by the transformations of the social synthesis? Virno’s argument about cynicism and opportunism offers a glimpse of what ways a social synthesis constitutes its own specific relations of asociality. The paradox that Marx saw in the eighteenth century, between the most developed relations and fragmentation and isolation, has only deepened since then: now it takes the form of Virno’s cynic who sees every rule, every structure as artificial and contingent, and the modern subject of neoliberalism, who views every relation as the basis for accumulating human capital. Sohn-Rethel’s analysis of the real abstraction has the merit of revealing the social synthesis, the common relations underlying such fragmentation and isolation. Grasping the rift between the social constitution and asocial perception of this constitution is the task of a materialist philosophy, overcoming it is the task of a communist politics.

The Jargon of Inauthenticity

A casual reader of Adorno, and I am afraid that is all that I am, cannot help but notice his repeated use (or at least a translators repeated use) of the prefix pseudo. Here is a quote from the famous chapter on the Culture Industry (co-authored with Max Horkheimer) in which the term first appears:“From the standardized improvisation in jazz to the original film personality who must have a lock of hair straying over her eyes so that she can be recognized as such, pseudo-individuality reigns.”

Horkheimer and Adorno at first utilize the term to address what remains of individuality in the standardized products of the culture industry: character is reduced to a lock of hair, a funny hat, a hint of ethnicity. “Personality means hardly more than dazzling white teeth and freedom from bodily odor and emotions.”As Horkheimer and Adorno write:

Mass culture thereby reveals the fictitious quality which has characterized the individual throughout the bourgeois era and is wrong only in priding itself on this murky harmony between universal and particular. The principle of individuality was contradictory from the outset. First, no individuation was ever really achieved. The class-determined form of self-preservation maintained everyone at the level of mere species being. Every bourgeois character expressed the same thing, even and especially when deviating from it: the harshness of competitive society.

The use of species being in this passage is strange, the assertion of "mere species being" would contradict Marx's use, suggesting more of the reduction of man to an animal rather than a universal potential. Species is cast in an a strictly biological sense.However, I see their basic point about the status of the individual. As much as the bourgeois philosophy of possessive individualism asserts the individual as its foundation, the competitive relations that are its basis produce an underlying similarity of behavior, namely, individualistic competition. The result of this is paradoxical, individuals are similar in their fundamental isolation and competition. Individuality is to some extent always pseudo-individuality.

One could explore that this means for a rereading of the political anthropology of bourgeois philosophy and political economy, but my focus is on this idea of “pseudo”. The prefix "pseudo "also makes a prominent appearance in Adorno’s essay on “Free-Time.” Pseudo-activity is the term that Adorno uses to describe the various hobbies and other activities that people use to fill their time. These activities are pseudo-activities in that their terms and conditions of the activities are determined in advance: all is left to do is “paint by numbers,” follow the instructions, or fill in the blanks. Paint by numbers is Adorno’s dated example, I prefer Guitar Hero as a contemporary example of pseudo-activity. With respect to this definition of pseudo-activity, Adorno begins to outline some of the ways in which this prefix functions. As Adorno writes, “Generally speaking there is good reason to assume that all forms of pseudo-activity contain a pent-up need to change the petrified relations of society. Pseudo-activity is misguided spontaneity.”

This statement about pseudo-activity would seem to apply to pseudo-individuality: in each case there is a genuine striving, a genuine attempt to assert something, activity or the individual. The “pseudo” turns it and warps it, ultimately undermining it, producing individuals who are the same and activity that is nothing but busy work. "Pseudo" makes it possible for Adorno to have it both ways, to recognize the simultaneous illusion and the real drive underlying the illusion.

Adorno’s use of pseudo-activity would seem to fit into a general paradox that defines the twentieth century. This paradox is caught between a tendency within the critique of metaphysics in which the distinction between essence and appearance breaks down. This metaphysical tendency is countered by a tendency within social and political thought in which the task is to recognize the role of appearance, of spectacle and simulacra in modern life. One the one hand there is the rejection of the distinction between essence and appearance, of real society versus its image; while, on the other, there is a renewed importance in understanding the “powers of the false.” Capitalist society is recognized as a spectacle at the exact moment that that distinction between image and reality breaks down. (This paradox explains much of the thought of the later Baudrillard and other “postmodern” thinkers.) Adorno’s use of the prefix “pseudo” is poised between these two tendencies:

I have some other thoughts that tie this idea of pseudo to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in which his critique of theocracy could be understood as a pseudo-democracy, but I do not have time to develop them here. The end point would have been to bring this full circle to discuss fascism, and fascist tendencies as pseudo-democracy, but that is going to have to wait for another time.

Reductions/Amplifications of the Political

I realize that I have been neglecting this blog as of late, and, to be honest, that is not going to change in the next few weeks. I am at the point in the semester when anytime that I have for writing is dedicated to upcoming presentations or other crashing deadlines. Of course this is not a crisis, but I feel the imperative to post even if few people ever come to this blog. Caught between the imperative to post and the lack of time to write I scrounged around looking for anything that I have written in the past year or so that has not found a home. Well, I have this piece which is essentially homeless: I presented versions of it, but its breadth of references (Aristotle, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Rancière) give it a widely speculative, if not rambling, quality. No journal or book would accept this, it is the kind of thing that only gets published if you are famous and dead. Parts of it have been expanded to become the basis of actual publications, but the rest has been left to "gnawing criticism of the mice" or their twenty-first century digital equivalent. I realize that I am not exactly selling this, so I should mention that there is much in this that I am committed to: the critique of social contract theory, the oblique approach to the Hegel/Marx relationship, and the distinction mentioned in the title, all seem like worthwhile ideas.

Violence and the Common: Truth is Structured Like a (Science) Fiction Part Two

It has been said that every generation invents its own Marx: colonialism, alienation, commodity fetishism, and living labor have all at one time or another occupied center stage as different texts are discovered and different vicissitudes of struggle emerge. If this is true, and I realize that I have done little to do back it up here, then it could be argued that the Marxist themes that define the present are violence and the common. The first, violence, is primarily examined through the concluding chapters of Capital on primitive accumulation. Although this is not the only point of reference, the overt violence of primitive accumulation has also made possible a renewed examination into the structural violence of capital, the anonymous violence of day-to-day exploitation. Alternately, the common appears first and foremost as the commons, as the commonly held resources, such as land and woods, that primitive accumulation destroys. It is also not limited to that, however, there is also a reading of the common that works through the concept of species being and Marx’s writing on cooperation in the factory to articulate a different sense of the common. Not the common as a thing, but potentialities and relations internal to subjectivity.

Vietnam is in Our Boardroom: Or, Everyone is a Colonist to Someone

Shelton has been doing a great job with this season of Mad Men over at his blog. I do not want to intrude, but I had a few thoughts about this week’s episode. First, I have been rereading Kristin Ross' May ’68 and its Afterlives, a book that I still think is very important, albeit a bit too heavily influenced by Rancière. This last point is not so much meant as a criticism of Ross or Rancière, it just reflects a general problem: how to theorize an event that is itself the impetus behind so much thought, so much theory? Interpreting it through the lense of one theorist (why not Deleuze, Badiou, Foucault, the situationists?) seems like an unfortunate reduction. But, I digress…


Anyway, at some point in her book she discusses the role that the anti-colonial struggles, Algieria and Vietnam, played in radicalizing French politics, making way for the famous events of May. One example of this is the phrase “Vietnam is in Our Factories.” The phrase is taken from a Fiat strike in Turin, but in Ross’ view it captures some of thought and action of the French sixties, in which the direct and brutal exploitation in the colonies exposed exploitation at the heart of the West. Such an idea can even be traced back to Marx, who recognized the necessity of primitive accumulation, and thus of violence in the more open colonies. As Marx writes, “In the old civilized countries the worker, although free, is by a law of nature dependent on the capitalist; in the colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means. ”

What does any of this have to do with Mad Men. Well after watching last weeks episode I thought about the phrase that Ross cites, or my own twist on it. This was my reaction to the brutal and shocking scene at the center of this week’s episode. [Spoiler alert] I am referring to the scene in which the hapless secretary, Lois, runs over Guy Mckendrick’s foot with a lawn mower in the offices of Sterling-Cooper. The riding lawnmower is Ken Cosgrove’s trophy from his latest victory, securing the John Deere account. This scene, which is shot with all of the conventions of cinematic violence (the blood that spatters across the faces and shirts of Sterling Cooper’s junior executives), is a shock because it is such a departure from the show’s aesthetic of smoldering understatement. What does it have to do with Vietnam? Well for starters in a few moments before, at the company party, members of the staff were discussing the escalating war in Vietnam. The blood and screams that follows a few seconds later feels like an interruption of traumatic reality at the heart of the shows fantasy of the sixties. One of the interesting things about this season is the way in which blood and violence has gradually begun to enter the show’s frame: Gene’s war souvenir, the self-immolation of a Monk, and Medgar Evers’ ghostly presence. The bloody foot, and the shattered life of a young man, is then just part of the escalation.

Beyond that, the scene got me thinking about the way in which the particular episode is all about colonizers and colonized. First, there are the obvious references to Sterling Cooper’s new British owners (I forget the company name) arriving for an inspection visit on the eve of the Fourth of July. Beyond that the episode is riddled with visual cues of empires that have fallen: Japanese and British armor decorate the halls, a member of the company is sent to the new offices in Bombay, and so on. Beyond these literal colonies there is the way in which the past weighs on the present. The moment before the violent explosion of blood is also framed by Joan and Peggy’s discussion of their different attempts to deal with the crushing weight of patriarchy: Joan’s attempt to marry her way out of the office and Peggy’s difficult climb into the male dominated world of copywriting. Their different routes out of the restricted life of secretary have led to conflicts between them, but Peggy is trying to make peace, a peace founded upon a recognition of their shared condition as women in the sixties. Lastly, there is the story that frames the episode, Sally Draper’s difficulty in dealing not so much with the death of her grandfather, but his apparent rebirth in the form of her brother. (After all, he looks the same, and even sleeps in the same room). What can these be, but the ultimate colony: the way in which the past, dead labor, constantly determines the fate of the future. Sons try to be their fathers, daughters are shaped to be like their mothers (complete with Barbie) and colonies eventually become colonizers.

Thus, to close with Marx:

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”

Man is a Wolf to Man: An Appreciation of Wolfen

One could argue that the three classic monsters of American culture are the vampire, zombie, and the werewolf, each handed down by folklore and solidified in popular culture. (I am leaving the Mummy out of this, as well as Frankenstein’s monster which is not a generic type, but a specific monster) Of these three the first two are definitely dominant. They not only make up much of the films, comics, and TV shows, but they have proven themselves the most versatile in terms of both the kinds of stories they can tell and what they can symbolize. Vampires are truly polymorphous in their significations. They are situated everywhere that sex intersects with death and fear. Zombies have proven to be much more versatile, symbolizing everything from the drudgery of work to the insatiable desire to consume.


Werewolves have lagged behind their cinematic brethren for at least two reasons. The first is purely technical. The werewolf is difficult to pull off, it is hard to combine the figure of the wolf with that of a human in a way that looks both convincing and menacing. The new CGI technologies do not really help either, leaving us with oddly hairless werewolves in the case of the Underworld movies. More importantly the werewolf has not proven itself so adept at symbolization, at providing the subtext that makes a horror movie work. There is the general theme of the animal within, but this is almost too literal, too direct, in the case of the werewolf. When it comes to symbolizing unchecked desires, the id within, the vampire and zombie have the market cornered. Vampires have become such versatile symbols of sexuality that they can cover everything from queer identity (True Blood) to the fear and desire of a first sexual encounter (Buffy). Zombies cover a more inchoate desire or hunger, but one that has been linked to shopping ever since Romero’s zombies went to the mall. With sex and consumption covered there is very little left of unchecked desire for the werewolf to symbolize.

However, it is possible to detect a bit of exhaustion with each of the two big figures. When vampires become part of a series of novels about teenage abstinence and when zombies are part of a Woody Harrelson comedy, one has to ask how many more movies can be churned out. It is at this point that our attention turns toward the werewolf as perhaps the next big thing in movies. In order for this to happen the werewolf will have to find its place in some kind of symbolic economy.

(This idea, the idea of the monster as symbol, is not sophisticated at all; in fact, one could argue that it constitutes a kind of degree zero of film interpretation, cited by almost anyone who does not know the gaze from the look. That is precisely my interest in it, and in so-called genre films themselves, which demand at least a minimum of interpretation to be viewed at all)

All of this is really a preamble to writing a few words about Wolfen. I know that I saw this movie years and years ago, during an adolescence in which I watched a lot of monster movies. Infinite thought posted about the film recently, suggesting a secret connection between it and Chris Marker, at least at the level of documentary footage (scroll down to September 5th). This prompted me to watch the film again.



The opening scene situates the film within the universe of the post-Watergate paranoid thrillers and the early films of Cronenberg. It is a world in which total and complete surveillance is emerging as a reality, carried out by a global corporation in a sterile and imposing office tower. This corporation, ESS, is responsible for protecting the elite against such forces as the Red Brigades, NAM, and Red Army Faction (all mentioned by name in the film). Caught between these two global forces are the police, city coroner, and a scientist at the city zoo, their dilapidated offices stand in sharp contrast to ultra sleek interiors of the corporations and super rich. This is very much a film about urban space, about the layers of space as the new city is built over the old. The old city cannot be entirely effaced by the new--the ruins, Native Americans, and wolves remain. The spaces also constitute a kind of shorthand for the dynamics of power: the powerful inhabit the skyscrapers and the powerless dwell in the derelict spaces of old buildings, the middle ground is made up of small shops and overburdened structures of civil society.

The plot of the movie begins when the wolves (or, inexplicably, wolfen) attack and kill a wealthy real estate developer, his wife, and driver. (As something of an aside I should point out that these are wolves, at least in appearance, and not awkward half-wolf/half human creatures that I wrote about above. Their human part comes in through their intelligence, and the suggestion that they were once part of an original tribe of man and wolf, a kind of cross-species primitive communism) The police and private corporation (ESS) each conduct their investigation of the murders, and from that point forward the film becomes explicitly about what is seen and unseen. This is highlighted in the films primary special effect, a kind of wolf-vision, in which the wolf’s perspectives is shown in a kind of pseudo-infrared, seeing in the dark where humans cannot see. Less explicitly, the corporation turns its attention to the usual subjects, various international terrorist groups and even a disgruntled rich daughter, playing at being radical, subjecting them to the latest biometric techniques to distinguish truth from fiction. In contrast to this the cop, Dewey Wilson (played by Albert Finney) teams up with the city coroner (played by Gregory Hines) to investigate the margins of the city, derelict spaces and a Native American bar. All of the different actors of the film are distinguished as much by what they can see as what they look at.

The difference of vision is not just framed in terms of how the two investigation agencies look—the corporation rounding up subjects to place in their high tech monitoring equipment versus the street smart cop investigating leads—but ultimately in terms of what they see. Wilson’s investigation leads to an encounter with a group of Native Americans who have relocated to New York City to work in the construction industry. One of these, Eddie Holt (played by Edward James Olmos), plays the role of informant, explaining to Wilson the origin of the wolves that live at the heart of New York City. As Holt and an elderly native American explain to Wilson.

Eddie Holt: It's not wolves, it's Wolfen. For 20,000 years Wilson- ten times your fucking Christian era- the 'skins and wolves, the great hunting nations, lived together, nature in balance. Then the slaughter came.The smartest ones, they went underground into a new wilderness, YOUR CITIES. You have your technology but you lost. You lost your senses
Elderly Native American: In their world, there can be no lies, no crimes.
Eddie Holt: No need for detectives.
Elderly Native American: In their eyes, YOU ARE THE SAVAGE.

In the end this how Wilson does not so much solve the crime, but brings the narrative to a close, by recognizing that the savage and brutal attacks that he has been investigating are a kind of justice. He learns to see himself as savage, as outsider, to his own city. The wealthy real estate developer killed in the beginning was planning to convert the wolves’ space, the abandoned buildings they live in, hunting the sick and forgotten of the human pack, into condos and commercial development. In the final scene, when Wilson is cornered and surrounded by the wolf pack, he destroys the model of the new real estate development. This is an interesting reversal of the clichéd scene from horror and fantasy movies in which the protagonist has to destroy the magic amulet or some other cursed object in order to destroy the monster: the same magic which created the monster must be destroyed, restoring a natural balance. In this case the monster is us, and what has to be destroyed is not some primitive magic, but a symbol of urban gentrification. In the end what makes the movie interesting is how it solves the problem of the werewolf as symbol and subtext. The wolves are not symbols of some repressed animal nature, but are the return of the repressed, the vengeance of a population subject to genocidal slaughter.

Teenage Caveman: or, Leroi-Gourhan Explains the Eternal Appeal of Teen Movies

Years ago I purchased a used copy of André Leroi-Gourhan's Gesture and Speech . My purchase at the time was motivated by a vague memory of a few references to Leroi-Gourhan in Anti-Oedipus combined with a desire to have some kind of ultimate library, made up of all kinds of obscure yet important texts. It remained unread and even untouched for years, and I only picked it up at the end of the summer after reading some of Bernard Stiegler’s writing. My first impression, which was perhaps already indicated by the multiple references throughout Stiegler’s writing, was that Leroi-Gourhan is perhaps more of a central figure for Stiegler than I first thought, much more central than Simondon.

I expected that Stiegler developed his general idea of the connection between technics and memory from Leroi-Gourhan. After all, the central thesis of Leroi-Gourhan’s book is that mankind emerges with the first tool, the tool that even in its most basic instrumental function is inseparable from the exteriorization of a memory, that anthropogenesis is inseparable from the history of technology. As Leroi-Gourhan writes:

“The whole of our evolution has been oriented toward placing outside ourselves what in the rest of the animal world is achieved inside by species adaptation. The most striking material fact is certainly the “freeing” of tools, but the fundamental fact is really the freeing of the world and our unique ability to transfer our memory to a social organism outside ourselves.”

This idea, the idea that mankind constitutes a memory through tools, figures, and language, simultaneously constituting a who (a sense of ethnic identity) and a what (a material culture) is central to Stiegler’s philosophy. What I did not expect is that Leroi-Gourhan would have his own version of the destructive effects of the modern transformation of culture and memory. Whereas Stiegler’s concern is primarily with the way in which the industrialization of memory through film, television, and the internet precludes even the minimum amount of interaction on the part of the individual, Leroi-Gourhan is more worried about the standardization and massification of a global monoculture. As Leroi-Gourhan writes:

“An increasingly small minority will plan not only society’s vital political, administrative, and technical programs but also its ration of emotions, its epic adventures, its image of a life which will have become totally figurative—for the transition from real social life to one that is purely figurative can take place quite smoothly.”

Two interesting passages that I would like to remark on follow from this, or rather are associated, since one actually comes before it in the text. The first is a prediction about the future, which is interestingly wrong in the way that only a fifty-year old book can be. Leroi-Gourhan predicts that generations will be increasingly raised on pre-packaged and pre-constituted cultural memories (his analogy is canned food) so much so that the future cultural producers will have no raw material, no unmediated experiences from which to draw on. Thus Leroi-Gourhan predicts the following:

“Ten generations from now a writer selected to produce social fiction will probably be sent on a “renaturation” course in a park a corner of which he or she will have to till a plough copied from a museum exhibit and pulled by a horse borrowed from a zoo. He or she will cook and eat the family meal at the family table, organize neighborhood visits, enact a wedding, sell cabbages from a market stall…and learn anew how to relate to the ancient writings of Gustave Flaubert to the meagerly reconstituted reality, after which this person will no doubt be capable of submitting a batch of freshened up emotions to the broadcasting authorities.”

(I am going to just remark in passing how much this sounds like a George Saunders story)

The ten generations have not yet come to past, but I still feel secure in declaring this to have missed the mark. Leroi-Gourhan assumes that social literature needs to be drawn from some kind of ideal of unmediated experience, of nature. What he has missed is one of the defining characteristics of so-called postmodern culture: the way in which the plurality of genres, clichés, and manufactured experiences can itself become the raw material of culture. Films, books, and music do not need to refer to anything else than other films or books, cut up and reassembled. There is no need to sell cabbages in order to relate to Flaubert, not when one could write

Madam Bovary and Mole Men.

Leroi-Gourhan suggests that this ideal of a totally manufactured experience is an impossibility in the second passage.

“The age we live in is still filled with survivals from the past. The city worker still goes out to watch a soccer game, catch a fish, or attend a parade, and still has a life of responsiveness, restricted it is true but one that may stretch to taking part in the activities of a club. If we exclude the vital cycle, activities involving direct response are increasingly confined to adolescence and the pre-conjugal period, when direct participation is necessary to collective survival. Until we get to the stage already reached by the species of domestic animals that are best suited to productivity—the stage of artificial insemination—it would, for the time being, seem that a modicum of social aesthetics will continue to surround our years of social maturing.”

I am less interested in his remarks about the uneven development of cultural experience, despite the fact that is seems to be true, than I am in his allusion to a general theory of adolescence. As much of life becomes administered, subject to rules and structures, adolescence remains the last remnant of “activities involving direct response.” This is in part due to the vital cycle, to sexuality as a necessary component of human existence, but it is also due to the undetermined nature of identity (Leroi-Gourham makes a reference to adolescence and insect larvae.) In Leroi-Gourhan’s world-view, which mourns the loss of “ethnic” belonging, in the name of some mega-ethnic global culture, high school cliques are perhaps all that remains of transindividual culture, of groups that can be influenced as much as they influence one. One can always transform one’s clique by coining  a phrase, inventing a look,  or be the one who introduces an important aspect of music or literature. There are the last collective that we both constitute and are constituted by, everything that comes after, the school, the factory, the company, the army, etc., is less open to our interventions. I am not sure that I totally agree with all of this, but it does offer an interesting take on why we return to teen dramas again and again. They offer us a moment when we acted with drama and determination.

If you put these two remarks together, however, the derivative nature of modern culture and the endless appeal of adolescence, you get the endless remakes of High School dramas and John Hughes knock offs. Perhaps Leroi-Gourhan predicted the future better than I first thought.

Truth is Structure Like a (Science) Fiction: Notes on Moon and District 9

Last summer, and perhaps even the summer before, I did a series of blog entries on the summer blockbusters, viewing them for their subtle and not so subtle ideological dimensions. I have not done this at all this summer, in part because I have not seen many blockbusters this year. Aside from Star Trek, I just could not stomach this summer’s offerings. I have, however, seen a few films, two of which I want to write about now. These two films are Moon and District 9. At first glance it would make sense to write about them at the same time because they have generally been spoken of in the same breath of almost hyperbolic praise. They are said to represent a renaissance in science fiction cinema, a return of character, story, and concept in a genre long dominated by special effects, remakes, and marketing.

Beyond such a superficial resemblance, a resemblance defined primarily by what they are not, namely, yet another effects driven remake, there does not seem to anything to link these two films. The first, Moon, is practically a one-man show, a meditation on isolation and identity, with a strong retro aesthetic. Its image of a moon base made of white plastic, as well as its use of models, would seem to place it in any earlier era. District 9 on the other hand is filmed using the faux documentary techniques and handheld camera made popular in recent films. It is also an action film that utilizes the recent CGI techniques, but one that in terms of its location, South Africa, and lack of a single recognizable star, does not resemble any other such film.

It occurs to me that if one begins to look at the narrative of each film, especially for the ideological dimensions referenced above, one arrives at other similarities. In each film we have a protagonist who begins as a functioning member of the existing society, who then, by discovering the true basis of that society, necessarily revolts against it. This is a common trope in science fiction, that of the outsider, a character who is outside of the world in question, a time traveler or visitor to an alien world. This perhaps due to the limitations of the genre itself. One of the difficulties of science fiction film (and literature) is that it must present a world that is alien to the viewer (or reader), some distant future, alternate history, or alien culture, but familiar to the characters in the story. In film in particular there are not a lot of good ways to solve this problem, there is the ponderous opening narration (“In a world…”), the scrolling screen made famous by Star Wars, or the break in the action where some sage like character explains everything, think Morpheus in The Matrix. The outsider character, such as Neo, solves some of the more awkward aspects of this in that it makes disclosing the world part of the narrative. However, these two films offer something like a variation on this, a character who becomes an outsider. In a manner of speaking, they are narratives of “consciousness raising,” perhaps even class-consciousness.

(ALL KINDS OF SPOILERS FOLLOW)

In Moon, the main character, Sam Bell, is completing the end of a three-year contract as the only human inhabitant of lunar mining colony. He has an accident that nearly kills him and because of this eventually discovers that he is a clone, one of many stored in a secret basement of the lunar base. Video footage of the base’s security cameras suggests that the three-year “contract” is actually the lifespan of each clone (shades of Bladerunner). This suggests an interesting legal loophole; if the contract in question has a clause that renders the contract null and void at the time of death, then the corporation running the moon base is in some sense honoring its contract, only employing the person in question for three years. That it then activates another clone with the same memories and personality cannot really be said to be a violation of the terms of the contract. Moon suggests that the old metaphysical problem of identity (am I the same person as my clone?) is destined to become the fine print in the labor contract.

Moon calls to mind one of the most rhetorically dense and conceptually rich passages from Capital. In this passage Marx distinguishes between the sphere of circulation, the labor market, where goods, including labor power are sold and the site of production. Marx’s point is that it is from this realm, that of the market, that we get our ideology of the free market, of exchange as a relation between equals in which individual self interest always prevails. As Marx writes:

“The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labor-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, equality, and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say of labor power, are determined by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law…The only force bringing them together, and putting them into relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interest of each….”

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

In the hidden abode of production the equality that characterizes individuals in market relations collapses. As Marx writes, “He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.” In other words, the labor market is not at all like the market of goods, it is defined by a fundamental conflict, and asymmetry, between the worker with only his labor power to sell and the capitalist. The film displays this radical division between two realms. Underneath the lunar base there is a massive storehouse of clones (and the food to feed them). Within the base itself employer and employee may meet as equals, but beneath it lies a massive “reserve army of the unemployed”: the neutrality of the contract is contradicted by the technological and social conditions that remain out of sight. Only an anomalous accident brings Sam Bell face to face with his own clone, with his own expendability and exploitation, making it possible, in an act of solidarity with himself, for him to resist the system.



District 9 is also a film about an individual coming to recognize exploitation, only in this case it is not the central character that is being exploited. The film takes place in an alternate South Africa, where an alien spaceship has become stranded over Johannesburg for the last twenty-eight years. The aliens, referred to throughout the movie by the derogatory term “prawns” because of their crustacean/insect appearance, have been living in a giant ghetto since then. While the ship is technologically sophisticated the prawns do not appear to have the knowledge to master it, suggesting that they were part of the cargo, as food or slaves, and not crew. At the beginning of the film the aliens are in the process of being relocated to a camp far outside of the city. This is presented as a humanitarian gesture, as something that will lessen the conflicts between humans and aliens and the tendency for the aliens to be exploited by gangs. The film centers on Wikus Van De Merwe, an agent for the apparently private corporation, MNU (Multi-National United) that is charged with the task of managing the aliens. Early in the film we learn two things about Wikus: first, he has been promoted to a central role in the relocation project primary because his father-in-law is one of the people in charge of the organization, and, second, he truly believes in the idea of the alien’s containment and relocation. This second fact instantly sets him apart from some of the military and private police in charge of the district, who relish their ability to persecute the aliens at will. Wikus would rather cajole the aliens with cat food, something that is “like catnip to them,” than beat them into submission. In other words Wikus is the distillation of all of the recent headlines about private contract firms and NGOs: he has been promoted due to nepotism and connections (shades of Michael "Heckuva job, Brownie" Brown) and yet sincerely believes in his mission.

District 9 is in some sense a story about a race traitor. Wikus becomes exposed to alien technology that gradually begins to alter his DNA transforming him into an alien. This makes it possible for him to utilize the alien’s weapons, which are bioengineered to interact with the alien’s physiology. He becomes a valuable commodity to the organization he works for, eventually destined to be harvested for his organs. Wikus eventually comes to learn that the truth of exploitation underlies the ideal of humanitarian aid. MNU’s real interest is not the private management of humanitarian aid to non humans, but weapons development. As Wikus is transformed, his allegiances shift as well, forcing him into an uneasy alliance with the aliens that he formerly managed with an air of superiority. The allegiance is never an easy one;  this is not a buddy movie. Wikus is reluctant to join the aliens, desiring nothing more than returning to normal, in part because he was formerly so complicit in the aliens exploitation, albeit unknowingly. The scenes in which he confronts his own complicity in what has happened to the aliens are some of the most powerful in the film. Wikus is thus an interesting sort of anti-hero, who sacrifices himself almost despite himself. Ultimately, it is the contradiction in his life that makes him a hero at all. He got to where he is through his connections, through his father in-law, but would much rather be behind a desk, making gifts for his wife. His failure to fully identify with the repressive aspect of his job makes it possible for him to turn against it. He believes too much in the public face he is supposed to present, that of benevolent aid to a wayward species, to see that its unofficial version, violent hatred and exploitation, is just as central, if not more so, to his function.

In the end that is what ties these two films together, they both present characters that believe very much in the ideas of rules and contracts, of the benevolence of the established powers and the rewards that come with following the rules. It takes a massive psychic and physical transformation, meeting one’s clone or being transformed into an alien, in order for them to arrive at a different understanding of society, to see that rules are more often than not masks for exploitation. They are us, the docile subjects of the modern neoliberal order, now only if we could meet our clone or get hit by massive amounts of alien DNA.

Don't get Mad, get Coopted: A Few Thoughts on Mad Men

Mad Men is perhaps unique among American Television and even popular culture in that its subject matter is history. By history I do not simply mean to say that it deals with a different time period, while such programs are rare, they do exist (for example Deadwood, Rome, etc.). Rather, it is historical in Foucault’s sense of a historical ontology of ourselves; in presenting life in a nineteen sixties add agency it continually examines the gulf that separates then and now.


History appears in the show in three ways.

In the first, it is a matter of creating a kind of alienation effect, of exposing the differences of habits, expectations, and ideals that separate the present from the past. In the first season especially, many of these differences are played for laughs, the kid running around the house in a plastic dry cleaning bag playing spaceman and the countless cigarettes consumed, provoke shock and a chuckle. The laughter punctuates the difference between then and now. In these moments it is the pure difference between then and now that stands out. There is no connection, no link, between the time when there was a bar in every office and now: difference precludes causality.

The second historical aspect has to do with the recognizable events and timelines that define the past: the election of John F. Kennedy, the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. These events frame the show, taking place off screen, or rather on screens, on the televisions in the homes and offices of the show, but are not part of the narrative. They are nonetheless immediate in their mediation. At times they are used to provoke action on the show, as was the case with the Missile Crisis, which precipitated several crises (most notably Peggy’s revelation to Peter) and resolved others (bringing Don Draper home) within the shows narrative. What is interesting about this second dimension of history is that it demands some kind of historical literacy on the part of the audience. This distinguishes the show from programs like Rome, which used historical material for the basis of narrative: it was possible to follow the entire series on its own, without knowing anything about the Roman Empire. With Mad Men one must know, or at least be willing to wikipedia, what happened in the nineteen-sixties in order to follow what is happening on the program. The more one knows about the past, the more the suspense increases and the more the show creates a highly ambivalent nostalgia about the past it depicts.

Finally, there is the third, and most interesting historical aspect of the program: the way that it functions as a kind of genealogy of the current historical moment. This has to do with its setting in a specific period in the age of advertising. As books like Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool have argued, the show takes place on the eve of a revolution in advertising, which is also a revolution in consumer culture. This was the shift from advertisements that purported to convey some information about the product, men in white lab coats testing cigarettes, to adds that bathe the product in some kind of glow of sentiment or desire. The major events of this transition are depicted in the show in terms of the shift in smoking advertisements brought about by the discovery of the link between smoking and cancer, the shift from commercials citing "tar content" to Malboro men and the Volkswagen “Think Small” campaign. The show depicts the prehistory of the spectacle, of images that promise pleasure and happiness rather than just promote products.

In the show the catalyst of this shift in advertising culture is Don Draper, whose rousing pitches extol the sentiments of such products as the Kodak Carousel. Draper is able to do this in part because he always has one foot outside of the office, in the emergent counter culture. He spends his afternoons watching Italian and French post-war films, and, through his affairs, he has contact with the bohemian counterculture of New York. Draper’s contact with the critics of bourgeois culture make it possible for him to see the longing at the heart of it. Of course the details of life contribute to this as well, the fact that he is quite literally a self made man, who fabricated his identity out of the remains of another man’s. This makes him someone who had to self-consciously adopt the habits of his new status, rather than simply receive them. Some have suggested that he is talented at advertising because he is invented, absent, and one-dimensional. I have to admit that I do not find the Don Draper/Dick Whitman subplot to be as compelling as other aspects of the show. I think that the show could function without it, or, rather, without it the focus would be on something that is far more interesting: the way in which advertising has perhaps always channeled discontent resistance and rebellion to capitalism in order to serve consumer culture. This is perhaps a cultural version of the “autonomist hypothesis,” the idea that it is resistance to capital that shapes and prefigures capital itself. Mad Men is then a kind of history of the present. The dapper men and women of Sterling-Cooper, frustrated artists and writers, prefigure later age’s web designers and “ immaterial laborers.”

Archaisms with a Current Function

Daniel J. Martinez’s 2006 billboard for LAXART, with quote from Horkheimer & Adorno’s 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment

It would seem that the only thing that links Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus are a few superficial and extraneous factors; namely, that they are two collectively authored books, and are works that continue to circulate in the same circles of often cited “theorists.” It is difficult to say more beyond such superficial connections, the walls that separate Critical Theory from post-structuralism are just too high and too thick to allow any exploration of the points of intersection between these two works. At least I do not know of any essay or book which has addressed them both, with the exception of general surveys of twentieth century philosophy or theory. To remedy this situation I would like to sketch out something of their possible points of intersection.


Most immediately there are certain formal connections at the level of what could be called “Theory.” I realize that the term “Theory” is a best a misnomer and at worse a pejorative term, referring to the marginalization of certain types of philosophy, but I am following Jameson’s remarks about theory as general problematization of representation, of language and concept, that breaks down the borders between philosophy and literature. Both of the works in question engage in some very provocative readings, even misreadings, in which concepts and narratives switch places: The Odyssey and Kafka’s "Penal Colony" are read for theories of modernity and power, while the works of Marx and Nietzsche are read in such a way that their narratives and metaphors are as important as their concepts. This is not unique to these works, but it bears notice if only because such modes of writing are often explicated and commented upon, but almost never duplicated. They are more often than not treated as raw material, for conferences and dissertations, rather than models or even tools.

Beyond this formal similarity, a similarity that must be qualified by the difference of theoretical perspectives, there is a shared narrative, even content. Both texts critique the present “anthropologically” or “anthropogenetically,” focusing on society not just as a political system or economic order, but as a formation of subjectivity. The term “anthropology” or “philosophical anthropology” is actively embraced by Horkheimer and Adorno, but perhaps seems out of place with respect to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of desiring machines and bodies without organs. However, the recent revival of a kind of “philosophical anthropology” in the works of Paolo Virno and Bernard Stiegler, in which the emphasis is less on some putative human “nature” than on the relations and processes constitutive of humanity, makes it possible to see the way in which Deleuze and Guattari’s text is concerned with the reproduction and transformation of the human, through multiple codings of desire.

Their respective philosophical anthropology’s are framed by the imposing figures of Nietzsche and Marx. The synthesis of Nietzsche and Marx, if such a thing is possible, is not just a matter of two imposing names, but of two theses. In these texts, Nietzsche stands in for an originary and inescapable cruelty, a violence at the origin of things that never dissipates but only mutates. The Genealogy of Morals is the central text of reference.“The great book of modern ethnology is not so much Mauss’s The Gift as Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals.” While the reference to Marx is twofold: first, there is the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts, who wrote of man’s metabolic nature, as nature transforming itself; and, second, there is the general Marxist idea that everything must be historicized, that conflict has to be related back to the mode of production. These two anthropologies conflict: the first sees conflict as primary and irreducible, while the second sees unity as primary, conflict must be historicized. This is a general picture, but one that fits the texts in question. In their quasi-popular reception Nietzsche and Marx could be considered our Hobbes and Rousseau, the first insisting on a war of conflicting wills while the latter holds out the possibility of some kind of cooperation. The writers involved refuse this moralizing reading, but do not refuse the general problem. The idea of a human nature is neither rejected nor embraced, but problematized.

For Horkheimer and Adorno the relation between cruelty and nature, a relation that frames their particular (negative) dialectic forms the modern subject. The overcoming of myth and nature, that defines enlightenment, leads to an overcoming of, and destruction of the nature internal to mankind. The central figure of this narrative is Odysseus who can only escape the horrors of the ancient world by sacrificing himself and calculating. “The lone voyager armed with cunning is already homo economicus, who all reasonable people will one day resemble.” For Deleuze and Guattari the passage into the modern world is less the narrative of a subject, than the formation of subjectivity altogether. Desire, or desiring production, is at first directly political, it is only through capital that desire becomes a private affair. The transition is one from Oedipus, the Greek figure whose desire is immediately public, to the Oedipus complex, desire becomes a private affair and transgression becomes banal. Each text is characterized by odd anachronisms, by a history of the bourgeois subject that begins with Homer, or a genealogy of the state that begins with Ur. In each case there is a similar basic intuition, that the present can only be grasped by seeing the archaic within it. This intuition stems from Marx’s fundamental observation underlying “commodity fetishism,” the mists of the ancient world cast more light on the present than its contemporary texts and debates.

Where they differ is in how they understand the dynamic underlying this history. For Horkheimer and Adorno it is very much a dialectic of enlightenment, a history of reason becoming its other, becoming myth and domination. (I have always viewed this critique of reason as something of a wrong turn, not because I believe in the intrinsically liberating dimension of reason, but because as a materialist I do not believe in “Reason,” as something transcendent and unified. There are only specific rationalities, situated within specific practices. The reason of homo economicus is not reason tout court, as much as it would try to present itself that way.). Deleuze and Guattari provide a history of desire, or, more accurately, desiring production. This term leads to a great deal of confusion and many misreadings that cannot be dispelled here. Desiring production is always assembled, always structured, while simultaneously in excess of the structure. It is what structures the various idols and fetishes, while undermining them. The difference between these two understanding is that the former constitutes a kind of iron cage, in which there is no escape, while the later sees society as constituted by what escapes it. What is less obvious is the way in which this difference has to do with the way in which the latter concept is formulated through an expansion of labor. “Desire is part of the infrastructure.” This expansion is in part made possible by Horkheimer and Adorno’s insights. If culture is indeed an industry, then it must be examined not just according to its standardization and manipulation of its audience, but according to the labor and desire that sustains it. (Which is not to suggest that Deleuze and Guattari have read their work, but have followed the fundamental idea that capital has seized not just industrial production but cultural production as well.)

I not entirely sure where I am going with all of this, my point is not to argue that these two books are THE SAME, by any means, merely that they are more similar than their epigones would admit. I suppose that could be my purpose, to break down the labels and camps that present every text to us as something already categorized, and already read. Second, I would also like to applaud the sheer inventiveness of these texts, their attempt to create new concepts, and new connections. It is clear that such inventiveness is out of sync with contemporary scholarly production. Remove the names and send either one of these books to a publisher, and the rejection notices would come rolling in. Of course there is always room for one more commentary, one more introduction, to these books. If I had a final point to end on, it would be where I began, in praise of such inventiveness.

Missed Connections: Spinoza and Simondon

Picture of Spinoza-Car from The Bijlmer Spinoza Festival.

The idea for this post stems in part from Deleuze’s remark that encounters between independent thinkers always occur in a blind zone; that is, that one has to look beyond the stated terms of criticism and opposition to find the real intersection and connections. Of course the title comes from the hopeless romantic section of craigslist where people post adds hoping to connect to their barista or the guy buying lettuce in the supermarket. Unfortunately, it is not written in the actual form of the latter.


The case of Spinoza and Simondon would seem to fit Deleuze’s description perfectly. Many commentators, such as Muriel Combes and Etienne Balibar, have remarked on the virtual proximity of their ideas, a proximity for the most part overlooked by Simondon. This is not entirely true, Simondon primarily overlooks the connection where it would seem to be of most interest to contemporary interpreters, the idea of transindividuality. When it comes to Spinoza’s theory of the individual Simondon repeats some fairly standard clichés, seeing Spinoza’s philosophy as one that slips into a pantheism, making the entire cosmos one individual as it attempts to move beyond an anthropomorphic conception of the individual. This criticism is similar to the Ango-American response to Spinoza that sees in substance or the politics of a multitude “acting as if with one mind” the destruction of the individual into some higher order entity. This is not Simondon’s last word on the Spinoza, however; elsewhere, when discussing the experience of the transindividual, an experience that he compares to religion, he cites Spinoza’s cryptic passage of experiencing something that is “eternal.” For Simondon we experience something that is eternal in that we experience both our power and limits: we are aware that there is something in us that exceeds this moment, and something of us that is so ephemeral, disappearing the moment that it is experienced. In each case we are aware that our individuality is not the end all and be all of our existence. For Simondon it is situated between the preindividual components of our existence the transindividual relations that we enter into.

Muriel Combes has drawn out the implications of this remark in her book on Simondon, referring to the “intimacy of the common.” The common, the shared language, habits, and affects that make up the backdrop of our subjectivity, a common which exists only in and through social relations, transindividuality, is not something that we only experience in moments in collectivity, in the delusions and madness of crowds, but is always present. The reference to intimacy also underscores that what is common is not something that is exterior to our individuality, it is not some role that we play, but is constitutive. Thus, to draw the two remarks together, the eternal that we experience is perhaps the common, is the irreducible relational aspect of our existence.

Any reference to the connections between Spinoza and Simondon would be incomplete if it did not include the affects. For Simondon there is a distinction between affects and emotions, the echoes of which shows up in Deleuze’s writings: affects are preindividual, existing in a metastable state, while emotions are individuated, distinct. To have emotions is to determine both the object of one’s affections (or hatreds) and the subject, we are defined by our feelings. I realize that I muddled the distinction there for the sake of a pun, but it was also to make a point: Spinoza does not have a distinction between emotions and affects (it depends on what translation you use) but he does make a similar point. If one reads the various progressions of the affects through Part Three and Four of the Ethics, the way in which the initial joys and sorrows are extended to various objects and subject to the vacillations of time, then it becomes clear that this is the constitution of both an object, or a series of objects, and a subject of sorts. If one were to fill in the blanks as it were, move beyond the generic equations of love and hate, one would arrive at specific individual, within a specific community. For Simondon the identity of a community cannot be found at the level of action, too discontinuous, or representations, too large, but at the level of affects, a “structure of feeling” to use the old Raymond Williams phrase. It seems to me that such an idea runs through Spinoza’s reflections on the relation between superstition and the constitution of community. A collective or an individual is constituted by its affects, its desires hopes and fears.

One of the difficulty of Simondon’s theory of individuation is how broadly how utilizes the term, encompassing not just physical, biological, psychic, and collective individuation, but thought itself. Thinking is an act of individuation, as some determinate thing is pulled out of a flux of preindividual sensations and intuitions. Individuation encompasses both thinking and existence. Combes relates this to Proposition Seven of Part Two of the Ethics, “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” For Simondon this order and connection is the transductive relation of individuation, both things and thoughts are in the process of individuation from a preindividual state. This poses particular epistemological challenges: we are always on this side of individuation, on this side of individuated subjects and concepts. Individuation can only be grasped after the fact: the preindividual can only be grasped in moments of transformation or crisis. This is why Bernard Stiegler argues that there is an irreducible performative dimension of individuation: to think about individuation is to individuate oneself differently, to constitute oneself differently. Thus the similarity of the order and connection converges on the same idea, there is no mode of thinking which is not a mode of being.

This is your TV on Drugs

As something of a preliminary observation it is curious that three of the cable networks known for their high end shows (the sort that end up in TV critics list, box sets, and in “Stuff White People Like”) have programs that deal with the “war on drugs”: HBO has The Wire, Showtime has Weeds, and AMC has Breaking Bad. Except these shows aren’t really about the “war on drugs,” at least exclusively; even The Wire, which has the strongest claim for authenticity and spends the most time on the details of the drug trade, ultimately makes drugs something like a refracted lens from which to observe the decline of the American city. In each of these shows the drug trade becomes the equivalent of the monster or alien in old horror movies: the question is what does it signify, what does it stand in for?


One might wonder what is happening culturally and politically for the “war on drugs” to become a metaphor. After all it has not gone away, it still makes money and fills prisons. It has seemed to have faded into the background of cultural consciousness, however, so much so that it can never function as narrative material all on its own, it must stand for something. In some sense genres are constituted by this symbolization, film-noir, the western, the samurai film, or the sci-fi film are all defined by their mythologization of their narrative basis, it is symbolic of something. However, in all those cases the symbolism takes place after the fact, or with respect to an imaginary condition, with the war on drugs we are mythologizing our reality.

I do no plan to write about The Wire here, having done that before, but I should say that The Wire remains for me the gold standard of what can be done with the medium of television. Since The Wire ended last year I have searched in vain for something that might fill its void. To use my own drug metaphor: I have been searching for the television equivalent of methadone. I have tried Rome, Deadwood, Mad Men, Generation Kill, and now Breaking Bad, to varying degrees of success. I have watched some of those until the end and some have trailed off, but I have not written about any, until now.

One of the many ways that The Wire has spoiled me has to do with its particular narrative structure. The Wire eschews the trappings of what passes for depth, the flashbacks and dream sequences that give us privileged access to the interior of a character, in favor of a focus on the institutions that structure an individual’s actions. This institutional perspective is combined with an egalitarian aesthetic in which minor characters will come to the forefront while major characters will fade into the background, at least temporarily. There are no minor characters on The Wire, at least no minor characters who might not become central in a later season. This has left me very impatient with the more conventional structure of a show with its major characters, given depth, and minor characters, defined in terms of stereotypes.

The plot of Breaking Bad is fairly simple: Walter White, a chemistry teacher finds out that he has inoperable lung cancer and goes into the drug business (crystal meth) in order to provide for his families future. (I hear that this basic plot is similar to Weeds, which I have never seen). This basic plot is complicated by the fact that his brother is a high ranking DEA officer, and his business partner Jesse is a failed former student. It is by and large a character study, or two character studies, however, it is less interested in the socio-economic structures of the crystal meth trade than it is on the effect of this trade on the individuals involved. Despite all of this I have found Breaking Bad compelling.

Walter White is played by Bryan Cranston, an actor most famous for his part as the father in Malcolm in the Middle. He has a comic actors talent for slapstick, and in the first season he uses this talent to embody the indignities of contemporary existence. He is an enthusiastic teacher, but his enthusiasm is played to a comic effect in front of an audience of bored students. Money is tight, so after school Walter works at a carwash where he washes some of the same student’s cars. At first his diagnosis, and descent into crime, liberates Walter, he becomes a man between two deaths, as it were. His death sentence has been pronounced, so he is a free man. He uses this freedom to not only embark on a new life as a drug kingpin, but to stand up to the daily indignities of life—quitting his car wash job and standing up to obnoxious jocks and yuppies. It would be wrong, however, to see Walter as a rebel, as someone liberated from all societies norms; his entire criminal enterprise is all about one over-arching masculine ideal, being a good provider. It is one thing to escape the fear of death, a fear that keeps us from taking risks, it is another thing altogether to escape our most internalized ideologies. Walter, the formerly mild mannered chemistry teacher, can face down a drug kingpin, even commit murder, but he cannot stand the idea that his family would take money from others.



This ideal of a provider becomes increasingly pathological in the second season, as Walter destroys his position as father, husband, and teacher in order to make more money. In order to save his family he has to destroy it. [Spoiler Alert] I know that some people are frustrated with the much hyped season finale, as the scenes of destruction that were flash-forwarded to all season proved to be something else than the dramatic showdown with Mexican cartels. However, the real devastation happened a few seconds prior, as Walter proved incapable of recognizing his family’s respect, only seeing the need to make more money. The money starts out as something of an insurance policy, later a way to pay for cancer treatment, in the end it becomes its own end, a pure symbol of masculine power.

There is a way in which Walter's arc is structurally similar to Stringer Bell from The Wire. With Stringer the central narrative was one ascent, a Horatio Algers, by the bootstraps story of one man's attempt to go from drug dealer to real estate investor; accept that it was a dark perversion of this narrative, in which the two, dealer and business man, are shown not to be so different. The drug trade exposes the ruthless calculation that is at the core of capitalism. Walter's story is a story of a fall from respected family man to meth dealer, but the refraction is the same. What the show exposes, or pathologizes, is not so much the ruthless capacity to calculate, but masculinity itself, at least an ideal of masculinity as the provider.

As a final remark I will add that one of the interesting things about the show is that is in many ways a show about knowledge and its limits; chemistry first and foremost, which functions as the shows central metaphor (the composition and decomposition of relations, the storing and release of energy) while simultaneously serving as an actual mode of thought. Walter is ingenious at using chemistry to solve every problem from a dead car battery to a dead body. However, Walter is clueless about how the drug trade works, this is where Jesse his former student comes in. Much of the shows dark humor comes from the bickering conversations between the chemistry teacher and low level drug dealer, each ignorant about the other’s basis of knowledge. Ultimately the show deals with another limit of knowledge, not that of chemistry or the streets, but a fundamental ignorance about oneself. Despite all of his knowledge Walter reacts to everything emotionally, going from despair to rage. To risk a Socratic cliché, he does not seem to know himself, and this, and not the Mexicans or the DEA will be his undoing.

In the past few weeks I have also been reading a lot of Bernard Stiegler's cultural and political criticism of contemporary society. (More on that later) One of the things that he stresses is that modern hyperindustrial society is a society of pulsions, of drives, not desire. Our current media stimulates us to feel anger, humiliation, lust, etc., while destroying any sense of shared values, of the sublimated values necessary for desire. Despite his intelligence, Walter is very much a figure of this regime of affects, he feels a deep sense of anger, humiliation, and, at times, pride, but all of these affects are immediate and unyielding. He is less a character, a person with a history and a place and society, than a collection of affects and drives.

In the end this might explain the centrality of the "war on drugs" as a metaphor for understanding contemporary society. It offers the clearest illustration of need, addiction, and greed, of the market as the source of all our pain and pleasures.