The Brain that Would Not Die: Between Caricature and Creation

In Multitude Hardt and Negri write that “Each [historical] period is characterized by one or several forms that structure the various elements of social reality and thought.” They argue that the contemporary form is the network: everything from technology, to society, to the environment, to the brain itself is envisioned as a network. Networking is our word for friendships and machines alike. Hardt and Negri’s thesis, a thesis that I am tempted to sum up with the formulation “every mode of production imagines the world in its own image,” even though they are making an argument that is derived more from Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari than Marx, raises interesting questions. It is easy to see this in retrospect, to see the persistence of mechanistic modes of thinking in the seventeenth century, and a general problematic of thermodynamics of heat and pressure in the nineteenth century. (What is class struggle but the engine that drives history?) What remains to be seen, however, is what this means for us in the present? What do we do with a concept, or an image of thought, that would seem to be part of this general social structure. What do we do with these forms of thought? Do we dismiss them as the ideological residue of the existing social order?

This question is one of the central questions of Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain? At the outset the central concern of this book is to bridge a gap between continental philosophy and neuroscience, but this is ultimately secondary to Malabou’s interest in the dominant image of the brain in neuroscience. “Plasticity” is the concept underlying each of these problems. Plasticity, the capacity to both give and receive from, to be formed and formative, is the link between Malabou’s earlier work on Hegel and the current work on neuroscience. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest that the brain is less hardwired than constantly rewiring itself: as new memories are formed, new pathways and connections are formed. We form our brain, our neural connections, as it forms us.

“Plasticity, between determinism and freedom, designates all the types of transformation deployed between the closed meaning of plasticity (the definitive character of form) and its open meaning (the malleability of form). It does this to such a degree that cerebral systems today appear as self-sculpted structures that, without being elastic or polymorphic, still tolerate constant self-reworking, differences in destiny, and the fashioning of a single identity.”

It is this idea of plasticity, of a brain that is less a sovereign instance of command than a decentered network of connections, that brings us back to the specific image that Hardt and Negri cite, as well as the general problem of the image of thought. As Malabou argues, the modern decentralized and plastic brain is in many respects the image of contemporary capitalism, which is governed less by central command, the central nervous system, than by the imperatives of flexibility, decentralization, and connection. The image of the contemporary brain is the image of the neoliberal world.

One could use this to dismiss these discoveries, to see them as another instance of neoliberalism making the world in its own image. One could view the plasticity of the brain like evolutionary psychology, which makes the neoliberal subject, homo economicus as entrepreneur of himself, the image of subjectivity itself: we are all investors in our genetic material, seeking the best return on our investment. This is not Malabou’s conclusion. She seeks to draw a line of demarcation between science and the spontaneous ideology of the scientists, to use Althusser’s terms, or between the caricature and the possibility that it conceals, her terms. As Malabou writes, “Not to replicate the caricature of the world: this is what we should do with our brain.” The line of demarcation between the caricature and possibility hinges on the distinction between flexibility and plasticity. Flexibility is a management watchword that stresses the ultimate ability for employees to constantly be remolded and shaped according to the demands of the labor market. As such it only captures half of what it as stake in plasticity, which is both a being molded and activity molding. Flexibility is plasticity refigured as passivity. In some sense flexibility is less than half, it is not just the active component that flexibility overlooks, but also the fact that the reshaping and being reshaped is not a smooth process. We are constantly transforming ourselves and being transformed, but this does not take place without tension and crisis. As Malabou writes, “Paradoxially, if we were flexible, in other words, if we didn’t explode at each transition, if we didn’t destroy ourselves a bit we could not live. Identity resists its own occurrence to the very extent that it forms it.”

What is intriguing is that Malabou offers an interesting case study in how to think through the image and the caricature of the world. It almost goes without saying that any image that we have of the world, whether it is produced by science, technology, or politics, is going to be something of a caricature. It will be a product of the dominant institutions (plasticity itself will demand it) but it will not be just that (plasticity once again). The trick is drawing the line of demarcation, of extracting creativity from the caricature.

UNmasked

When I started this blog almost four years ago the advice I received from nearly everyone was to keep it anonymous. I was told that as a nontenured faculty member a blog was career suicide. (In this case the title of the blog could become all too true) At first I rigorously stuck to that advice, even earning the name "Un" from some of the blogs that referred to me, a nickname that I liked. Gradually, however, the wall began to break down. First, there were a series of citations that referred to me by name. Then I set up the link to facebook, put up the lecture on The Wire, and so on, to the point that it became an open secret. Now that I have tenure I have decided to give up the last remnant of secrecy and openly declare my identity (updating the profile to the right).

I doubt that this will have much of an effect. My fantasies of becoming the focus of some right wing talk show will probably never come true. It should, however, remind me to proofread these posts a little better. Although, I have to admit that part of what I enjoy about blogging is the opportunity to quickly get something out to produce something, anything. It is often a break from teaching and the frustratingly glacial pace of my other writing. Deleuze's citation of Godard, "Not ideas that are just, just ideas," seems to apply blogging more than anything else.

Bending the Stick: The Returns of Political Economy and Philosophical Anthropology Into Philosophy

Paolo Virno writes the following:

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

Virno’s idea of the immediate coincidence between affects and economics not only characterizes his own work, or much of it (some of the recent work is focused more on the problem of philosophical anthropology, which is perhaps already alluded to in the quote above), but several other works in philosophy. These works stem from two central conditions: First, a breakdown of a certain version of Marxism for which the relationship between production and ethics always passed through the necessary mediations of the base and superstructure, law and politics, hence the immediacy. Second, as the quote above suggests, this change is also brought about by the transformation of capitalism itself, a transformation that Virno will later qualify according to the centrality of the very question of the human in the production process: the increasing importance of not just language and thought, but of human flexibility and neoteny in post-Fordist capitalism. As Virno argues the current regime of labor with its combined demands of professionalization and precariousness results in a model of labor which is not so much about particular skills, talents, and knowledge, but the capacity to acquire skills, knowledge, etc. We sell species being, not the alienation from species being. “Human nature returns to the centre of attention not because we are finally dealing with biology rather than history, but because the biological prerogatives of the human animal have acquired undeniable historical relevance in the current productive process.”

I am interested in both this return to philosophical anthropology, to a speculation of the fundamentals of human existence, and political economy, to an unmediated examination of the economy in terms of its effects. In the last decades of the last millennium, both of these things were forbidden: economism and humanism were epithets to avoid at all costs. What interests me about this recent turn, not just in the work of Virno, but others, is not so much the return of the repressed, but this idea of an immediate coincidence. of a combination (or is it a dialectic) in which the human is displaced by its immediate entry into the economic and the economic is understand as constitutive of the human. Immanence is perhaps the key to not overcoming the old taboos, but understanding the present.

Moreover, to cite Stiegler, who I will be discussing in a minute, the retreat from political economy by philosophy has been coupled with a retreat in engagement at the level of politics. I would add to this that similar perils confront any philosophy that leaves the anthropological terrain, which is distinct from anthropology or humanism. This terrain covers that highly ambivalent intersection of culture and nature that constitutes human life, what Virno calls historico-natural and Balibar calls anthropological difference. I am thinking here of the long night of “social construction” in which the only thing that one could say about anything, desire, labor, identity, language, etc., was that it was socially constructed, contingent not necessary. This important emphasis on construction crashed upon the shores of its unexamined ontology (everything is socially constructed) and its non-existent politics (we should construct things differently…or better)

All of this is a preamble of sorts for a review of two of Franco Berardi’s recently translated works (The Soul at Work and Precarious Rhapsody) and Bernard Stiegler’s Pour une nouvelle critique de l’economie. They are connected by this theme, and the much more contingent fact that I just happened to read them at the same time.

To begin with Stiegler, an intersection of interests (primarily Simondon) has drawn me to read some of Stiegler’s works, the translated books and a few of the shorter books in French. I remain ambivalent, however, and not ready to dive in. When it comes to Stiegler, diving in really is diving in: he seems to come up with multi book series the way the rest of us come up with shows to watch on DVD. There is a little of a bad infinity to these writings as they gravitate around the same these and ideas. Anyway I was curious enough of his attempt to take on the economy that I read his new book (at least it was his new book, he probably finished something else by the time I wrote this blog post).


Stiegler approaches the economy through some of the central themes of his work: individuation, borrowed in part from Simondon, and his general idea of grammatization (the word he uses in this book), which is to say the exteriorization of memory, in tools, writing, and devices, which is constitutive of history and humanity as such. As Stiegler argues, such grammatization is a condition of proletarianization: workers can only be reduced to simple abstract labor power if the machine can take on their specific memory.(The term grammatization, my awkward and literal translation, obviously has its origins in Derrida’a trace, but like all of Stiegler’s concepts it is fundamentally eclectic: drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the inscribing socius.) This is also where the new dimension of the critique comes into play, Stiegler criticizes Marx for not taking into account consumption. Consumption is another kind of proletarianization, a loss of subjectivity and individuation. Just as the machine at work takes on the subjectivity of the worker, the memory and knowledge, the machines at home, in consumption, does the same. Proletarianization becomes a general condition, distinct from pauperization.

As I have noted previously, Stiegler’s critique seems to overlook the activity in modern consumption. However, his critique, which focuses on the economy as a phenomenon of subjectivity and belief has some merit. Drawing on the concept of externality, he argues that we lack the positive externalities, education and sociality, that make it possible to combat the negative externalities of capital. The subjectivity that capital produces is incapable of combating its effects, and ultimately even of sustaining it.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi belongs to the same generation as such thinkers as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno, but with the exception of his piece on the semiotext(e) collection on Autonomia, much of his work has not been translated into English. This has all changed rather abruptly with the recent publication of The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy and Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation. The first book is a necessary update to the concept of alienation: a word that is as unavoidable as it is discredited, as well as an attempt to situate the Italian Marxist tradition within the larger context of the Frankfurt School and French Thought. With respect to the first aspect the book points out a positive dimension of alienation, alienation as the basis of refusal, in the thought of Tronti, juxtaposing his work with Marcuse as two very different reflections on the same period. As Bifo writes about this positive dimension: “Alienation is then considered not as the loss of human authenticity, but as an estrangement from capitalistic interest, and therefore as a necessary condition for the construction—in a space estranged from and hostile to labor relations—of an ultimately human relationship.” Thus, inserting a necessary political dimension into the debate on alienation.

The real difference with respect to alienation, the real reason that it has fallen out of favor, is not political, but historical, concerning the change of the economy. Alienation corresponded to the Fordist economy, to a production process in which information and communication flowed only in one direction, in which work imposed a mute necessity on laboring bodies. This has fundamentally changed, and with it the situation of the soul in work. This new situation cannot be accurately captured by alienation. Bifo’s work has the benefit of underscore the political and economic transformations underlying the theoretical shifts from alienation to the production of subjectivity. It is not a matter of a change of trends, but a change of the real conditions. The new work process does not so much alienate subjectivity, but produces it. The worker is not excluded from the production process, but brought into it, compelled to communicate and compete with all of their being. Alienation and the old pathologies will not describe this situation.



Precarious Rhapsody is the most concerned with this shift and the new pathologies. New pathologies brought about by the shift to semio-capitalism, capitalism of signs. As Bifo writes:

“Semio-capital is in a crisis of overproduction, but the form of this crisis is not only economic but also psychopathic. Semio-capital, in fact, is not about the production of material goods, but about the production of psychic stimulation. The mental environment is saturated by signs that create a sort of continuous excitation, a permanent electrocution, which leads the individual mind as well as the collective mind to a state of collapse.”

Much of Bifo’s analysis comes close to Stiegler, his “post-alpha generation” refers to a generation that learns more words from machines than their others, which justifies my review of the two together. Bifo even shares some of Stiegler’s faults, tending toward an apocalyptic understanding of this shift. Bifo like Stiegler sees a loss of sensitivity and attentiveness to others in the digital world, connect it to a particular pathological incident (the Virginia Tech Shooting). Stiegler and Bifo overlap in an apocalyptic tone of sorts. However, such limitations of their pronouncements shouldn’t overshadow their strength. This strength is most clearly pronounced in Bifo who uses the term compositionism to define Italian workerism: the reference is not just to class composition, but to all of the technical, economic, cultural, and political dimensions that make up the conjuncture.

We must think together the new pathologies of the present, ADD and depression; the new technologies, social networks; the new regimes of regulation, neoliberal deregulation; and the new productive classes; the cogitariat, if we are to make any sense of the present. The old categories, and taboos, cannot restrict this, humanism, economism, etc. all must be reexamined.

Everything I Needed to Know About Capitalism I Learned from Watching Television: The Wire and Marx

I decided to post the audio of a talk that I recently gave on The Wire and Marx here:


The talk covers some of the same territory as a few previous blog posts as well as other writings, and was meant for a general audience of undergraduate students. It was meant as a public lecture and not reading of a prepared talk, so for better or worse I am pretty much just working from some notes. I ended up saying less about Marx than the title promised, and more about David Simon and Ed Burns particular critique of capitalism (as well as running some metaphors about chess and checkers into the ground).

The clips that I refer to can be found by following the following links: clip one, clip two, clip three, clip four, clip five, clip six, and clip seven (you can hear them on the audio file).

Sooner or Later Everyone Jumps the Shark: Parting Remarks on Dollhouse

The phrase “jump the shark” has come and gone as a snarky fundamental term of television criticism. Initially, it was used to refer to a show that had exhausted its premise and desperately devised some new element, an adorable cousin or a new career as a stuntman, in order to restore some life to the show. It is in that initial context that the term became the basis for a website, and later a book, before it became a term applied to everything and anything.

The program Dollhouse has most definitely jumped the shark, but oddly so in that it seems to have been conceived to do so from the beginning. As I wrote earlier, the show began as a creepy high tech version of Charlie’s Angels; became a political/corporate thriller, with shades of Manchurian Candidate; and ended with the end of the world as we knew it, borrowing heavily from Philip K. Dick and The Matrix along the way. (I say seems because the show was canceled halfway through its second season. It is possible that the apocalyptic ending was a last ditch way to conclude the show, and a great one at that, why not take the world with you.) What is frustrating about this, and may have led to the show’s demise, is that unlike most instances of “jumping the shark” the show it became was much more interesting than the show that began.

What interests me about the show is the link, the continuity, between these different genres. At the level of plot the transitions are made possible by the show’s technology, a device that makes it possible to upload or download any personality including, knowledge, skills, and memories, effectively rendering people into walking iphones with many “apps” to choose from. At the beginning of the show this technology is cumbersome, requiring people, “the dolls” or actives, to sit in a chair, but it eventually goes viral, making it possible to reprogram people at a distance. That is what connects the shows premise to its conclusion at the level of plot, but I am more interested in how the show functions at the level of the apocalyptic imaginary. What is it, besides the standard Frankenstein parable, which makes this a vision of the apocalypse?

As it has been noted elsewhere the show’s initial premise can easily be interpreted to be about exploitation. The dolls are ridiculously expensive prostitutes. They are not simply that, however, they are also the dream employees of capitalism. Skill, habits, and personalities can be uploaded and dumped. Moreover, these capacities can be developed without costly and difficult externalities, no need for schools, for research, or for urban spaces. (Although it is neverly entirely clear where they get the memories and skills of an anti-terrorism expert or dominatrix, if such knowledge is every paid for or if it is part of some high tech digital commons). When the “dolls” are not working they are the very picture of docility. They spend their days as relatively mindless drones practicing yoga, indulging in various creative pursuits, and eating healthy meals. Their dollhouse is modeled after a spa or the latest resort hotel: it is the dream of contemporary relaxation rendered as prison.

The dolls can be easily read as allegories of Paolo Virno’s interpretation of the general intellect. The term general intellect comes from the following passage in Marx:

“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are the products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge objectified [vergegenständlichte Wissenskraft]. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.”

Virno stresses that the centrality of the general intellect in the production process entails a fundamental shift in not just the structure of work but its emotional tonality as well. The general intellect has to be distinguished from the regime of abstract labor, in which the focus was on the commensurability between different types of labor, different laboring, subjects, which were rendered interchangeable. The exploitation of labor power presupposed equality as a real abstraction. This changes as knowledge, science and intellect comes to forefront of the production process. These different forms of knowledge are incommensurable. “They are not units of measure, but rather are the measureless presuppositions of heterogeneous operative possibilities.” With respect to the first “real abstraction,” abstract labor, there was always a contradiction between the ideal of equality and the reality of exploitation. The general intellect is defined not only by incommensurable forms of knowledge but also by the need for workers to constantly shift from one to another, as new jobs demand new skills and knowledges. There is no equivalence, no ground of comparison, between these different activities and skills.

Virno argues that this constant and groundless shifting produces a flexible kind of cynicism. “Cynics reach the point where they entrust their self-affirmation precisely to the multiplication (and fluidification) of hierarchies and inequalities which the unexpected centrality of production knowledge seems to entail.” The “dolls” are not even cynical because they never have to deal with incommensurability of the different types of knowledge. They never have to confront the contradiction between the affective demands of a care worker and a security worker because they are “wiped” clean each time. To quote Franco Berardi, “The worker does not exist any more as a person. He is just the interchangeable producer of microfragments of recombinant semiosis which enters into the continuous flux of the network.”

In the first season the show offers two personifications of this loss of self in the form of two anomalous characters, two dolls who cannot be wiped. They accumulate the knowledge and personalities of multiple lifetimes, becoming legion as the bible would say. The first, Alpha, loses any sense of empathy or morality, becoming a bad reading of Nietzsche's übermensch. While the second, Echo, the shows heroine, becomes the personification of the multitude, the general intellect as superhero. In the second season this loss of self is socialized, extended across all of society. The show offers an immediate image of this in terms of individuals who walk around with a necklace of “memory sticks” (the little flash drives that have become the talismans of the immaterial laborer). On these sticks are not just powerpoint presentations or term papers, but subjective capabilities, from weapons skills to mercy. All these images, and the fears and fantasies they embody, seem like various ways to cognitively map the otherwise disorienting present, which places the power of knowledge objectified not just at the center of the production process but in all of our laps.

Form matches content in this case. “Jumping the shark” is nothing other than a drastic shift in operative paradigms, a new operating system, new job, or job description. The modern cultural forms of reboots and mash-ups (zombies with Jane Austen, and so on) seems strikingly appropriate to an economy of precarity and shifts in careers. The cultural logic of late capitalism may have been pastiche and irony, but the logic of real subsumption is the mash-up.

The situation of the Dollhouse also intersects with the situation of the informatization of production in its very layout. On the bottom floor are the dolls, confined in cells and waiting to be reprogrammed with the next set of instructions. They are the ultimate machine, utterly reprogrammable; or rather, they are the brain as machine, its fundamental plasticity and neoteny put to work: they are permanent children. On the floors above are their programmers, who work in an environment reminiscent of stories of tech start-ups before the dot-com bust: informal dress and a ready supply of snack foods and games. While the dolls are completely confined, the programmers are not only free but they constantly draw from a reservoir of knowledge that is freely available: flows of knowledge that depend on confinement in order to function. (Bittorrent sites coexistence with prison like compounds producing ipods.) Above the programmers is the CEO’s office, modern wood interiors and a stocked bar. Security traverses the entire structure.

This is at least how things appear as the outset, but as the show progresses it becomes more and more clear that this vertical model, itself a kind of panopticon, is permeated by horizontal flows of power. The real power does not move from top to bottom, at least not exactly. As I wrote earlier, the dolls only appear to be at the bottom of the hierarchy, they are actually apparatuses for the capture of the dreams and fantasies of the people on the outside. This was at least the second phase of the show, Dollhouse 2.0, in which everyone and anyone could be a doll, a programmed individual, or working under the influence of a doll. It was an image of complete control; not the complete control of the dollhouse compound, which operated through the rather crude technologies of surveillance cameras but a more flexible form of control (in Deleuze’s sense) that operated on memories, desires, and fantasies. As the technology progresses, however, even this control falls apart and the final version of the show, Dollhouse 3.0, suggests a future in which the ability to reprogram anyone and everyone with ease leads to a breakdown of society.

There is thus a certain sense in which Dollhouse presents a new version of the apocalypse, one that is explicitly technological and political rather than ecological. Thus, breaking with the pattern of contemporary popular culture where the apocalypse is either ecological or sublime, unexplained. In Dollhouse the apocalypse is brought about by the excess of information over subjectivity. This is the apocalyptic vision shared by such thinkers as Bernard Stiegler who point to a breakdown of the basic conditions of subjectivation brought about by the speed of communication and new technologies. To quote Berardi again, “The great majority of humanity is subjected to the invasion of the video-electronic flux, and suffers the superimposition of digital code over the codes of recognition and of identification of reality that permeate organic cultures.” Or, to put all of this in a more mundane context, it is the nightmare scenario of various columnists and pundits who predict a fragmented blogosphere of various subcultures (tea baggers, 9/11 conspiracy believers, etc.) who are entirely programmed by their specific media. However, this vision of the apocalypse is also very old, with all of the trappings of the Mad Max films, shoulder pads and a massive armored truck. Thus, in the end, revealing how stilted our imagination of the new actually is. Or, perhaps we are more programmed than we would like to think.

You Would Make a Good Cop: Wacquant on the Neoliberal State

Loïc Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity is a book that had been recommended to me by many people. I have not read anything else by Wacquant, nor have I read much in the emerging studies of the prison or “prison-industrial complex” (a term that Wacquant rejects, by the way). Like many trained in philosophy, my understanding of the politics of the prison begins and ends with Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. I have, however, read and written some on neoliberalism, so it is primarily from that perspective that I approach the book.

First of all, it is worth saying that the book presents an exhaustive and depressing picture of the United States as a country that has increased the penal population drastically in the last thirty years (from 1.84 million in 1980 to 6.47); an increase that has nothing to do with any corresponding rise in crime. It is fueled by the “war on drugs” and a get tough on crime attitude that enforces mandatory sentencing and harsh penalties. This increase is coupled with a massive gutting of social spending and a transformation of welfare to workfare. The end result, and this is Wacquant’s central argument, is that there has been a fundamental shift in the way in which America deals with its subproletariat, the people at the bottom of the economic ladder, burdened by racial discrimination and longstanding marginalization. We lock them up: prison is our social program.

However, I am not really prepared or able to assess the book at the level of statistical and historical analysis. I am more interested in viewing it at the level of political philosophy, as a theory of the state. Wacquant makes it clear that he intends to view the rise of penal technologies economically, rather than as part of some new regime of power, but at the same time, they cannot be viewed simply economically. This is why Wacquant rejects the term “prison-industrial complex,” which too easily reduces the rise of the prison to the economic interest of a dominant industry. The materialist explanation must be understood along with the symbolic dimension, or, in Wacquant’s terms, Marx must be read with Durkheim.

“Weaving together concerns for control and communication, the management of dispossessed categories and the affirmation of salient social boundaries, has enabled us to go beyond an analysis couched in the language of prohibition to trace how the expansion and redeployment of the prison and its institutional tentacles…has reshaped the socio-symbolic landscape and remade the state itself. Tracking down the conjoint material and symbolic effects of punishment reveals that the penal state has become a potent cultural engine in its own right, which spawns categories, classifications, and images of wide import and use in broad sectors of government action and civic life.”

As Wacquant argues, despite its overarching rationale, the transformation from welfare to penalization is not necessarily efficient. Welfare spending, what Wacquant refers to the charitable state, was always a small part of federal spending, dwarfed by aid to middle and upper class families in the form of mortgage tax credits. Everyone knows the often-cited statistic regarding the cost of incarceration versus the cost of education. Wacquant’s point is that such purely economic analyses miss what he refers to the symbolic dimension. The destruction of the remnants of a social safety net and its replacement with a punitive dragnet is justified by a moral idea of individual responsibility, in which everyone must be held individually accountable. This moral individualism is reinforced by a racism that is wise enough to remain more or less implied: all of the deviant subjects that inform the contemporary discourse of responsibility, from welfare queens to delinquents, are black. As Wacquant writes, detailing the racist dimension of “welfare reform,” “As the poor grew darker in the collective conscience, they were also cast in an increasingly unsympathetic and lurid light, as irresponsible, profligate and dissolute.”

This is not to say that this moral individualism does not have an economic function. Wacquant’s central point with respect to neoliberalism is that the destruction of social services and increasing powers of surveillance have as their ultimate function the regulation of population exposed to the precariousness of labor conditions. It is a matter of a new regime of discipline; a new regime of discipline to produce a new laboring subject, one that must accept instability and poverty as facts of life. For Wacquant the neoliberal state is a police state through and through. (He thus rejects Harvey’s analysis which leaves the security/penal dimension to the side, or others who see in the repressive arm of the state some sort of hybrid of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.) The only legitimate interventions into social life are those attached to the ideas of security and discipline, and these interventions are quite extensive, but any other intervention, any attempt to ameliorate the precariousness of life under market conditions, is immediately suspect.

Wacquant’s thesis of the symbolic dimension of prison reverses Foucault’s claim that we have done away with the spectacle of the scaffold. We may have done away with public executions and the chain gang, but that does not mean that the prison has retreated from public view. The prison has reemerged as part of a “law-and-order-pornography” that appears in campaign slogans and in a criminal culture made up of such shows as Cops and America’s Most Wanted. Wacquant says more about the former than the latter, which is unfortunate since the cultural dimension would seem to be integral to understanding the contemporary regime of penal power.

What interests me the most, at least theoretically, about Wacquant’s book is his assertion that prison and “workfare” most be viewed twice: materially at the level of economic structures and symbolically at the level of values, meanings, and images. These two dimensions follow each other, as Spinoza argued that the order and connection of ideas follows the order and connection of things, but they do no always coincide. As Wacquant argues voters in the U.S. do not want to pay for the penal state that they support. Moreover, one could say that the entire effort to “change welfare as we know it” was based on an entirely fictitious understanding of the overall cost of the government’s rather minimal expenditure on Aid to Families with Dependent Children. To this day one still sees the bumper sticker which reads, “Keep Working: Millions on Welfare Depend On You.” The symbolic dimension of welfare far exceeds the economic rationale. What matters most is not the economic justification, the reduction in state spending, but the symbolic dimension of the economy itself, the values of work and discipline. The same could be said for demand to be tough on crime, which continues to be a necessary refrain of elected officials despite decades of decline in crime. The destruction of the welfare safety net and the tightening of the security net are political strategies that exceed any strictly economic utility. They intersect with the economy obliquely only through their common denominator, that of the disciplined subject of labor.

Two (hurried) conclusions follow from this:

First, I think that much could be done with Wacquant’s general point that institutions should be viewed in terms of both the symbolic and material dimensions. One could apply this analysis to the “market” itself, which functions as a powerful symbol and image more than a reality. The image of the market has gone beyond “freedom, equality, and Bentham” to become the site of a massive libidinal investment, it is a free place where desires are realized. Such an image is at odds with its mundane functioning as the distributor of all kinds of materially necessary goods, not to mention the labor market, which produces insecurity and fear rather than desire.

Which brings me to my second point, one could conclude that the state is not only thoroughly repressive, but that “we” who support it are thoroughly fascist in our desires. We cry again and again for more cops and less bread. However, following the maxim that there is a utopian dimension in even the most repressive ideology, it is possible to perhaps see a glimmer of liberation in this desire for repression. It is possible that our obsession with “welfare queens” and prisoners watching cable television might just be our own muted revolt against the current regime of work. Not to mention the fact that this obsession with people who do not work, who live off of the work of others, is a Marxist critique inverted. I have often thought about making my own version of the bumper sticker mentioned above. It would read, “Keep Working: The Capitalist Class Depends On You.”

Writing Degree Zero: or, In Praise of Short Punchy Books

Anyone who teaches feminism or Marxism to undergraduates invariably encounters certain resistances on the part of students. There are multiple resistances obviously, but in large part they concern the practical nature of each of these theories, their capacity to be realized. As Homer Simpson said of Marxism, or communism, actually, it works in theory, but not in practice. The Marxist critique of capital, the ideas of alienation, exploitation, and reification are all considered to be good and valid by most students that I encounter, but they quickly counter that any attempt to turn these into an actual project, to produce a world other than a capitalist world, organized according to the relentless pursuit of profit has been and will be a disaster. Thus, teaching Marxism ends up reinforcing contemporary cynicism: the sense that the world is bad, but nothing can be done about it. Inversely, feminism, students claim, has already been realized: women vote, own property, pursue careers, and are free to do whatever they wish. Marxism and feminism are inversely related to practice, one is impossible and the other is already done, but the overall effect is the same for each: there is no point in talking about them or studying them now. They have only a historical significance (and who cares about history?)

This little observation, which is not free of its own cynicism and exhaustion, came to mind recently as I read two little volumes from Zero Books: One Dimensional Woman by Nina Power and Capitalist: Realism: Is There No Alternative by Mark Fisher. These are short little books. I read each of them in one sitting. They are part of Zero books project of “publishing as the making public of the intellectual,” overcoming the divide between the popular and the academic. They are also in their own way positioned against the two obstacles indicated above. Nina Power takes on what passes as the realization of feminism, specifically its Sex in the City, post girl power manifestations. Mark Fisher, on the other hand, takes on not so much the feasibility of a Marxist or Communist project, but the necessity and difficulty of thinking an alternative to capitalism. What follows will be a few remarks on each of these books, a lengthy exhortation to read them, and not an actual review.

There is much polemic to Nina Power’s book, aimed at everything from Sarah Palin to contemporary porn, but there is also analysis of the current conjuncture. The most interesting and provocative interpretation concerns the “feminization” of labor. Most discussions of the feminization distance the concept from gender, stressing that it is more a less an allegory: work is increasingly become like the work done by women, flexible, service oriented, communicative, and emotional, or affective. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue in Commonwealth that the confusion the term implies, a category confusion of the kind of work that has been historically performed by women and the attributes of that work, makes it preferable to replace the term with biopolitical production, as a general term reflecting the increased intersection of work and life. Power, however, takes the term in the opposite direction. She examines the connections between contemporary labor and contemporary femininity, not in terms of the number of women who are working at what job, but in terms of the qualities demanded of both workers and women. Specifically, Power argues that the feminization of labor is inseparable from the “becoming CV of the human,” the transformation of every skill, every activity into a job activity, and thus a constant demand to expose oneself. As Power writes on Girls Gone Wild (which on first glace would have nothing to do with labor):

“When the Girls Gone Wild team hand out hats or t-shirts in exchange for a shot of breasts, or the performance of a snog with another woman, the logic is right out in the open: we’ll give you something obviously crap in exchange for a kind of performance that reveals that there is nothing subjective, nothing left, hidden behind the appearance, that you simply are commensurate with your comportment in the world. You are your breasts.”

As Power argues this goes beyond objectification. It is a subjectification, or form of subjection, that crosses labor and leisure, as everything becomes visible. “The personal is no longer just political it’s economic through and through.” In the end, as something, of a summation, I understand Power’s book to an argument not just for a renewed feminism, but for a renewed Marxist, or materialist, feminism. The latter disappeared too quickly from the intellectual and political scene, burdened by bad arguments about the primacy of capitalism or patriarchy and worse metaphors about unhappy marriages. Power demonstrates how much it can be renewed by attention to the new forms of domination in the current economy and the theoretical tools of post-humanism.

Fisher’s book is of course more specifically concerned with the renewal of an anti-capitalist project. The book takes its bearing from Jameson’s remark that “it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.” This remark (from The Seeds of Time) is often cited, by Zizek among others, as a truism of the present, but most do not seek to explain it. Fisher tries to explain this “weakness in our imagination” (to quote Jameson again). This is what he means by capitalist realism, which is less an aesthetic style, as in the old socialist realism, than the incapacity to imagine anything outside of capitalism. This realism is in part made possible by the fact that capitalism does not require our belief in order to function (a point drawn from Deleuze and Guattari): it functions outside of belief which makes it all the easier for it to define what can be imagined. As Fisher writes, commenting on Wall-E (but we could just as easily substitute the latest anti-capitalist blockbuster, Avatar):

“A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalism without propaganda—but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it.”

Fisher connects this cynicism, this fact that capitalism functions without belief, with a pervasive inability to believe in anything, to engage in anything other than the pursuit of the latest distraction or pleasure, what he calls “hedonic depression.” The strongest points of Fisher’s book, aside from the brilliant readings of Heat and Nirvana, are the connections that he draws between the economic order, without justification or possible outside, and certain subjective states such as depression and boredom (subjective states that are effectively privatization of social problems as long as they are treated as simply subjective conditions). Anyone who has taught in a university classroom will recognize Fisher’s description of boredom, which is less about the specifics of any topic or class than the current production of subjectivity. As Fisher writes: “To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, You Tube, and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand.”

Power’s and Fisher’s books are singular interventions in specific political/philosophical fields, and they should be read as such. However, if one approaches them together a common them emerges: they insist on viewing the intersection of the economic and the personal, the objective and subjective, on seeing the way in which the seemingly private and trivial is shaped by, and shapes, the official powers. In this way they follow the works of not only Deleuze and Guattari (cited by Fisher), but Paolo Virno (cited by Power) as well as anticipating some of Franco Berardi’s remarks on depression in The Soul at Work. This is not to suggest that these works are faithful citations of intellectual masters; on the contrary, they are attempts to invent new concepts and vocabularies to address the current conjuncture. They take seriously the idea that the present is different from the past, and that understanding this is the prerequisite of making a different future.

Like I said, not so much a review as an exhortation.

Finally, since I am writing in praise of Zero (books, that is) and math, infinity, and the void are such hot topics, I thought that I would include the following.

Faux + Homey =Fauxmey (or Foamy)

In the film Up in the Air the term Fauxmey, a combination of faux and homey, is coined to describe the little touches of hominess used by hotels, such as the “Fresh Baked Cookies” available at checkout. This is a clever little turn of phrase, but it is also incredibly risky one for a Hollywood movie, especially one released over the holidays, to utter. Fauxmey is what Hollywood specializes in.

Up in the Air has been embraced by some as the first real film of the current economic depression. On the surface this would seem to be the case; the film’s central character Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) works for an unnamed company that is sent into to do the dirty work of laying off thousands of employees. As the film begins, however, it is his job that is in jeopardy as his company contemplates replacing the expensive flights cross country with firing by teleconference. Economic insecurity, the thing that Americans flock to the theaters to avoid, would seem to be given center stage. This expression of the current age comes heavily mediated by the homilies that are the stock and trade of Hollywood.

Bingham is presented not so much as someone who lays people off for a living, lagging slightly behind the migrating flows of capital to inform people that their position is no longer available, but as someone who makes flight, movement, and instability a virtue. As he remarks in narration, the airport lounge, first class seat, and hotel bar are his home. (And you know what they say, anyone who questions the virtues of home and family in the first act, will discover find themselves longing for them in the third.) He expresses the virtues of displacement and movement every time that he informs someone that they have been terminated (a word that he is careful not to use). In a speech that is reminiscent of Machiavelli’s discussion of the good fortune of Romulus, Moses, and others, a good fortune that is nothing other than being cast out of the existing order, he states that “everyone who ever founded an empire or started a company sat in that chair, and was able to do so because he sat there” (rough paraphrase). Losing one’s job is represented as an opportunity to follow one’s dream, as a chance to become one’s true self. In case that is not clear enough, Bingham also moonlights as a motivational speaker, delivering speeches with the title “What is in Your Backpack?” which argue for emptying the proverbial backpack of the various impediments and attachments of home and family. Life is movement, he declares, summing up the virtues of the neoliberal subject.

These three different testaments to the virtues of movement are somehow both overkill and contradictory. There are of course fundamental differences between the mobility of flying first class and the flexibility of being fired from your job after seventeen years of hard work and dedication. Bingham works hard to not so much conceal these differences but to model the mobility of his life with the mobility of capital. His goal in life is to accumulate ten million miles with his airline, a goal that is seemingly devoid of any end other than pure quantitative accumulation. He does not plan to do anything with these miles; accumulation is its own end and justification.

As fast as Bingham moves, however, it is not fast enough. As I stated at the beginning, Bingham is being outpaced by technological innovation itself, by virtual networks that make airline travel obsolete. Part of the film’s drama has to do with irony of the master of mobility being confronted with the horrors of stability, with having to stay in one place. That is part of the drama, but only part. Eventually Bingham is lead to desire family and stability. He is tempted in part by a new jet setting lover named Alex (Vera Farmiga) and by a return home for a family wedding. I will spare you the details, but let you know that you get all of the requisite scenes of dramatic reversal of values, including a last minute dash through an airport. It is not love unless there is a last minute run through a crowded place to stop a wedding or reunite with a spurned lover.

(Spoiler Alert) What is surprising and curious, albeit not as clever as the film thinks, is that it does not pursue this direction. One assumes that Alex, being a woman, secretly desires home and hearth. However, this turns out not to be the case, or not exactly. This is conveyed in a scene in which Alex describes her perfect man, a stable good natured lover of children with a nice smile. Alex already has those things, a husband and kid: her relationship with Bingham is not some frustrated desire for the corporate bad boy who will never settle down, but simply an affair on the road. He is just one of those transgressions that one allows oneself while in travel, like watching lots of television. Bingham is  thus rejected, his attempt to become a family man fails. In a response to this he returns to the sky, to a life in transit. In doing so he meets his goal, he flies ten million miles and gets a special elite business card and meets the pilot. The film ends with Bingham singing the praises of the open sky, but now it is not so much the sky of ten million miles, of a pure quantity, but a sky of special perks, of hospitality and the warm smile of Sam Elliot (playing the embodiment of folksy charm yet again).

Oddly enough the film would seem to end with a praise of the fauxmey, of the false charms of corporate perks. People are shown to be unreliable and disloyal. In their place we have the reliable world of corporate rewards in which loyalty always comes with perks. To put it in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the film is less a celebration of deterritorialization, of pure mobility, but of reterritorialization, of the codes of home and friendship that have become part of every brand. This celebration of fauxmey at the level of content is duplicated at the level of form. The film quite famously cast actually downsized individuals to flesh out the emotional intensity of people losing their jobs. These individuals are shown are in the closing credits, discussing the virtues of family against the world of work, lessons learned from losing their jobs. These statements contradict the overall arch of the film, but no matter, they reassure us of its seriousness and concern.

Adorno once compared the products of the culture industry to baby food, predigested. It is perhaps more accurate to say that they are chocolate chip cookies, microwave reheated and available at checkout.

You Can't Kill a Ghost: Hegel, Hardt, and Negri

It was perhaps Foucault who first cast Hegel in the light of a horror movie, who argued that for all of his generation’s attempts to escape Hegel, they still might find him “motionless, waiting for us.” Like the killer in a slasher movie, Hegel springs out of the dark just when you thought he was dead. Perhaps a fitting fate for the philosopher who gave us the conceptual underpinnings of the contemporary sequel: the bad infinity, a series of differences that do not make a difference.

I thought of these remarks on Hegel, which suggest that all anti-Hegelianism will return to Hegel in some way or another, in reading Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth. Hardt and Negri are famously anti-Hegelian, presenting an immanent constitutive tradition of Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx, against a political tradition of dialectic and mediation, made up of Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. However, Hegel, or at least a ghost of Hegel makes an odd reappearance in this text, raising some interesting questions.

As the title suggests, Commonwealth is concerned with the common. The common is defined as that which exceeds state or private ownership, everything from natural resources to the second nature of language, knowledge, and habits that becomes the basis for wealth production but cannot be owned. (Hardt and Negri’s primary concern in Commonwealth is with the latter, second nature; they say little about the former. Michael Hardt recently made some interesting remarks about the distinction between nature, as the commons, and the common in Copenhagen.) The common is what capital exploits, but it is also what gives the multitude direction and consistency: the goal is to liberate the common from all of the corrupt institutions, which exploit its creativity and openness.

In what is perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book they outline the family, corporation, and the state as the three “specters of the common,” three institutions that corrupt and limit it. To return to the metaphor of a horror movie, the frightening theme would cue up right about now, suggesting that the monster is lurking about, just out of sight. The family, cooperation (or civil society), and the state are the three spheres of Hegel’s ethical life. Hegel’s presentation of these three spheres, in which the family is immediacy, all warm and confining; civil society, is the negation, competition as the war of all against all; and the state is the reconciliation of the two, individual freedom and ethical substance, is one of the places where Hegel risks collapsing into a caricature of himself. Which is unfortunate, since these passages constitute some of Hegel’s most important socio-historical writing, incorporating his reflection on the limits of political economy and its perspective on the state. It also suggests that politics should be understood in terms of the various institutions and relations that traverse it, relations which are also productions of subjectivity.

(The curious thing about this oddly spectral Hegel is that Hardt has written one of the better essays on the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s conception of civil society. In that essay, “The Withering of Civil Society,” Hardt follows Deleuze’s idea of a control society, arguing that Hegel’s civil society corresponds to Foucault’s disciplinary power. The very idea of civil society, situated between family and the state, demands heterogeneity and separation of institutions, each with their own norm and structures. In its place we have control which permeates all of these structures, subordinating to the same relations of debt; think of the breakdown of family, work, and school that confronts the modern university student, still at home, working, and already in debt. Finally, Hardt and Negri argue that the “withering away” of civil society often entails the creation of a simulation of society, such as the media, which simulates society without its conflicts. This historicization of the concept, as well as a specific mention of Hegel, is absent from Commonwealth.)

What is most striking, however, in this contrast between Hegel, Hardt, and Negri is the presence of this logical, or conceptual structure, that of the dialectic itself in the former. Hardt and Negri’s presentation of the corruption of the common contains many insights, but there is no real articulation of the relation between these three different sites. The family is presented as the primary institution in society for mobilizing the common as the sole paradigm for relationships of intimacy and solidarity. The family corrupts the common in limiting it, isolating it to what is essentially an extended narcissism: my family as a projection of myself. The corporation is then presented as a massive corruption of cooperation: it is the primary experience most of us have of cooperation, but it is cooperation subordinated to a false unity, that of the corporation as our common interest. Finally, the nation remains the “only community imaginable,” the only common basis for politics.

These remarks are interesting, and I share their fundamental idea that the task of any committed political philosophy is thinking the social relations, collectivity, or the common beyond the ossified structures of family, corporation, and nation. However, the contrast with Hegel demonstrates that it is not enough to posit each of these as institutions as corruptions of the common, it is necessary to grasp the relations between them. Hegel presents family, civil society, and the state not just as different corruptions of the common, but as a dialectical progression, defined by their relations, by contradiction and negation.

In Empire Hardt and Negri argued that various fundamentalisms, returns to family, religion, and the state, are themselves made possible by the abstractions and connections of capital. Which is to say that corruptions of one form of the common produce a kind of fetishization of other forms of the common: globalization produces a return to the family. In my view Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, and the conceptual apparatus of deterritorializarion and reterritorialization remains a crucial and even exemplary way to think about these odd anachronisms of the present, but this would take us too far off topic.

I am not arguing for a return to the dialectic, the reference to Deleuze and Guattari should make that clear, but for at least a conceptualization of the relation between the different corruptions of the common. Finally, and I am aware that this heresy, it is worth asking the question as to what extent Hegel’s ethical life (Sittlichkeit) can be reconsidered as a kind of figure of the common, or, if at least not the common, then transindividuality. I take it as foundational that any new politics capable of countering capitalisms subordination of social relations to the imaginary atoms of individuals and the axioms of accumulation will require a new understanding of social relations, if not relations in general. It is also true that the language and concepts to develop this are sorely lacking. Philosophy has been dominated by the spontaneous ontology of individualism, and to what extent the common appears it appears in its corrupt form as family, nation, and corporation. In other words, philosophy has been dominated by ideology. Developing these concepts may require a rereading of the history of philosophy. Perhaps it is time to stop being so afraid of Hegel.

Post-Post-Modernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Zombie Capitalism

Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic is a book that is very similar to Archeologies of the Future. They are both massive tomes, comprised in part of new material and republished essays, that represent sustained meditations on the central and enduring concepts of Jameson’s thought, namely Utopia and Dialectics. Beyond such superficial resemblances they also function together. If the earlier book on utopia revealed something a dialectic of the very presentation of utopia itself, in which the later cannot be separated from its negation, from dystopia, then the latter reveals a utopian dimension of the dialectic itself: the goals of the dialectic, overcoming reification and the static binary between self and society, are inseparable from utopia, from a transformation of social conditions. This last point, which constitutes not so much a new position on the part of Jameson, but a new articulation of existing themes and problematics (after all, the essays in question go back over twenty years) will have to wait for a later post, after I finish the book on the dialectic.


At this point I would like to approach Valences of the Dialectic rather obliquely, from what it says about the more or less current conjuncture. Given that Jameson is most famous for describing “postmodernism” as the cultural logic of late capitalism it makes sense to ask where we stand now with respect to capitalism, late, resurgent, or dying, and its specific cultural logic. There are two statements that appear more than once in Jameson’s book, albeit in different formulations.

The first describes the present as a simplifying of the ideological dimension. As Jameson writes:

“What is paradoxical is that the crudest forms of ideology seem to have returned, and that in our public life an older vulgar Marxism would have no need of the hypersubtleties of the Frankfurt School and of negative dialectics, let alone of deconstruction, to identify and unmask the simplest and most class conscious motives and interests at work, from Reaganism and Thatcherism down to our own politicians: to lower taxes so rich people can keep more of their money, a simple principle about which what is surprising is that so few people find it surprising anymore, and what is scandalous, in the universality of market values, is the way it goes without saying and scarcely scandalizes anyone.”

One could see this as a much delayed fulfillment of Marx’s statement in The Communist Manifesto, where Marx argues that capitalism entails a reduction of ideology to its material base. All the illusions of religion and monarchy fall aside and “man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.” The major exception being that in Marx’s account this clarity is the catalyst for revolution, while Jameson suggests that it is met with a shrug. We all know that the rich pass laws in their interest, and the best we can hope to do is to one day become rich so that we might do the same. Jameson could be describing a kind of universal cynicism that is synonymous with the post-modern condition.

However, the second description of the present suggests something else entirely. As Jameson writes in an often repeated formula:

“The dualism of culture and the economic has however come to seem unproductive, particularly in the third stage of capitalism (postmodernity or late capitalism), in which these two dimensions have seemed to dedifferentiate and to fold back in on each other: culture becoming a commodity and the economic becoming a process of libidinal and symbolic investment.”

On first glance one could say that this second statement contradicts the first, but that seems almost silly given that both of these statements come from a book on dialectics. However, the second does complicate the first. It is no longer that the economy, and with it the interests of class, emerges from an ideological cloud, but that the economy becomes its own kind of ideology (Think of the proliferation of investing magazines and television shows, aimed less at informing an invest class than produce this “economy as culture’). The trajectory of these two remarks follows Marx’s own trajectory from the Manifesto to Capital, from the holy that is profaned to the misty enshrouded realm of commodity fetishism.

Two provisional conclusions:

We are living in an age in which the category of ideology is increasing inadequate. This is not because it is metaphysically suspect, as Foucault and others claimed, but because it no longer adequately grasps the way society functions. One of the things that I like about the first quote is that it demonstrates that what is theoretically sophisticated is not necessarily political useful (a difficult lesson, and one coming from an odd place). However, the second quote points to the fact that this is not an “end of ideology,” but that new critical concepts are needed to make sense of this new order.

Second, and this is much more provisional, I think that understanding the combination of cyncism and libidinal investment in the economy might help explain the peculiarities of the current situation. We are cynical about capital's capacity to deliver any kind of just order, yet invested in it all the same. Zombie capitalism: desire lingering on, long after its rational has ceased.

Photo of Randall Park Mall, Cleveland, Ohio.

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.