Periodizing the Present: Nostalgia in X-Men: First Class and Super 8

A quick glance at this year’s slew of summer blockbusters suggests a noticeable turn to other historical moments: Captain America, Pirates of the Caribbean, Cowboys and Aliens all suggest that this years escapist entertainment is trying to escape the present. Of course such period escapism is not new, but it is striking against the usual tendency of remakes, which set everything in the eternal present with the most current B-list actors, pop songs, and hairstyles. (As I suggested earlier, the remake is an evasion of history) Within this crop of movies two films stand out in that they are not just set in the past, but set in the film styles and conventions of a bygone era. These films are X-Men: First Class and Super 8. 

Capital (The Book and the Totality): On Jameson’s Representing Capital

It is impossible not to compare Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One with last year’s The Hegel Variations: in each case it is a rather succinct reflection, a  brief examination of one of the books that is a pillar of Jameson's thought. This book too has a pedagogical quality, which is not to say that it is pedantic at all, just that it is easy to imagine the book as stemming from a seminar. Like the previous book it offers reflections on themes central to Jameson’s work, such as dialectic and history, as well as some engagements with the broader intellectual horizon, including some surprising remarks on Heidegger’s critique of technology. 

Social Life: Towards (Spinozist) Socio-Political Thought

The socio-political, or the social, has been out of favor for some time now. Perhaps this started with Hannah Arendt’s influential critique, which defined the social as the nebulous space that blurred the necessary distinctions of home and polis. Beyond that, and closer to hand, there was perhaps the dominance, semantic and otherwise, of the ethico-political; a phrase that was initially associated with Foucault but soon spread to various attempts, including those that were anti-Foucauldian, to articulate politics with ethics. Politics would be henceforth founded on ethics, whether it be the ethics of human rights and communicative reason or the infinite alterity of the other. The dominance of this term was followed by the recent revival of the political, understood as prescription, or the axiom of equality, separated from any engagement with economy or society. This evasion of the social at the level of political thought has been doubled with rise of new materialisms that define the material is cosmological or vital terms, throwing out the “historical” or “dialectical” baby with the correlationist bathwater. 

The Affective Composition of Labor

Of all the various concepts, innovations, and interventions of “autonomist Marxism,” perhaps the most well known is the so-called autonomist hypothesis. This idea, first developed by Mario Tronti, and publicized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, fundamentally argued that resistance precedes and prefigures exploitation. The appeal of this hypothesis almost goes without saying, it makes it possible to see not capital, or Empire, everywhere, to see living labor and the multitude in place of exploitation and domination. However, its limitations are just as clear, it is too easy to simply identify this “hypothesis” with an unproblematic assertion of the ubiquity of resistance, of an insurrection that it is all the more impotent as it is everywhere. Thus, as something of an alternative, I propose that we take a different concept as our starting point, one that is perhaps more analytical, more of a conceptual problem than a political assertion. This concept is “class composition,” which can be broadly defined as an examination of the social, technological, and political composition of class, the structure of work, its relations of command and hierarchy, as well as the political articulation of the class, its cohesion and antagonism. 

Reanimating Dead Dogs: Foucault on Political Economy

It is perhaps true that every generation treats the revered thinkers of the previous generation as a “dead dog,” to quote Marx’s famous phrase. When I was in grad school I remember that Sartre in particular was dead to us, too tainted by humanism to be interesting. This was of course a shame. From a rather cursory observation of current conferences and publications it seems that a similar fate is befalling Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard. This may just be another example of a generational shift, but it also may have to do with the revival of interest in Marx and Marxist thought. (The "dead dog" of their generation.) Thus, focusing on one of these figures in particular, namely Foucault, I offer the following two paragraphs, paragraphs edited out of a published piece, as something of a provocation.

Works and Days: Remarks on the First Season of Treme

Comparisons between Treme and The Wire are inevitable. Unlike Generation Kill, which seems more and more like a side project, Treme has the same sprawling story line, the same focus on an American city, and even some of the same actors as The Wire. 

You Have to Get Mad: Spinoza, Lumet, and the Politics of Indignation

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have remarked that for Spinoza the central question is “Why do people fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?” and I have often cited them on this point. Ted Stolze and Alexandre Matheron have argued that this is only half the question, its corollary (geometrically speaking) would have to be why do people revolt? The answer for both of these questions has to be sought on the terrain of the affects and the imagination. Revolt is founded on the political affect of indignation, which Spinoza defines as “a hate toward someone who has done evil to another.” As such indignation is grounded on the basic communication of the affects, in indignation I expand the horizon of the affects to found a common enemy, a common evil. 

“A Subjection Much More Profound Than Himself”: A Few Remarks on Source Code

Duncan Jones’ Source Code has all the telltale signs of a second movie, it has bigger stars, bigger explosions, and the requisite romantic subplot. Of course it wouldn’t be hard to outspend the rather minimalist Moon. Less is more in this case, and all of these things serve to highlight just how engaging the first film was through its minimalist aesthetic. However, what is striking about the second film is its thematic continuity with the first. 

Spoiler Alert 

Still Anomalous After All These Years: Negri’s Latest Book on Spinoza

Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the French and Italian turn to Spinoza over the past forty years is the sheer volume of the texts produced. A volume in terms of the massive tomes, such as Matheron, Moreau, and Macherey’s studies, but also in terms of the repeated returns to Spinoza’s thought, returns that attest to what Macherey referred to as its infinite productive nature, its capacity to produce new readings, new effects. Negri’s latest book on Spinoza, Spinoza et nous (Translated into French by Judith Revel, although I could not find a corresponding Italian text) is his third book on Spinoza.

Teachers are the New Welfare Queens

I am sure that you have seen the bumper stickers before. They say things like “Keep Working Millions on Welfare Depend on You” and, more recently, “Spread My Work Ethic, Not My Wealth.” They reflect a cornerstone of conservative ideology, the distinction between those hard working real Americans and the lazy people on welfare. 

The General Intellect Personified: More Notes on Capitalism as a Social Relation

This is a continuation of the reading of Capital I begun earlier, and a return to a passage in Capital that I have written on several times, Chapter Thirteen on Cooperation. Whereas I wrote a previous post on Cooperation in terms of Marx’s theory of social relations, my concern now is what this passage has to say about surplus value. (This is not to say that the two are separate, far from it actually: what I want to argue is that these two questions, social relations and surplus, are never separable from Marx).

What We Write About When We Write About Movies: Or, Memory in the Age of Youtube

Jonathan Lethem’s little book on They Live (part of a relatively new series on films by Soft Skull Press, a cinematic equivalent of Continuum’s 33-1/3 books on records) offers two beginnings. The first presents the film as a dream, focusing on the things that everyone will remember even years after seeing the film, the glasses, the decoded billboards, and of course this:

Another Day in the Future: Philip K. Dick and the Philosophy of Science Fiction

The recent news that Michel Gondry planned to make a film based on Ubik convinced me to look at this again. It is an old piece, and one that I wrote for an undergraduate audience. I can’t really say that my thinking on the matter has changed much, however, in part because I have not have had time to revisit it, so I thought that I would post it.

Isolation and Relation: Notes on Capital

I am teaching Capital, or at least parts of Volume One. This is not the first time that I have done this, I have taught selections of it in my nineteenth century philosophy class and have taught parts of Marx, in some form or another, every year. However, this is the most of the book that I have ever taught, almost all of it over seven weeks. It is also my attempt to break with my past reading, more or less documented in the Micro-Politics book and heavily influenced by Althusser and Negri. Along these lines I have been reading some of the more or less recent interpretations by Arthur, Bidet, and Harvey, as well as collection of essays titled Relire Le Capital edited by Franck Fischbach.

In Body if not in Spirit: Butler and Malabou on Hegel

In the history of philosophy there are some texts that are difficult to say anything new about. These texts are so dominated by one influential reading that it becomes difficult, even impossible, to say something new. Paradigmatic in these respects is the brief section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit known as the “master/slave dialectic” or “dialectic of lordship and bondage”.This section is so dominated by Kojeve’s canonical reading that is almost as if his words were already there on the pages of Hegel’s text.

This is one reason why Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou’s exchange on “Domination and Servitude” published in French as Sois mon corps: une lecture contemporaine de la domination et servitude chez Hegel is engaging. It is a reading of this all too well known section of Hegel’s text, but one that dispenses with the preoccupations of a previous generation in order to reread Hegel. Butler and Malabou each address Hegel from their particular philosophical commitments and engagements: Butler’s intervention is framed by her reading of Hegel in The Psychic Life of Power and Malabou continues her development of plasticity in her reading of Hegel. Which is not to say that the concerns of Kojeve are entirely absent. He is mentioned not just in name, but also in general orientation. His reading, which influenced Lacan, Bataille, etc., made this particular passage not just the genesis of self-consciousness, but an anthropogenesis, the constitution of the human as such.

In Butler’s reading in particular, this passage from animal to human becomes about attachment to the body. The title would translate into English as “Be my body,” which is the masters injunction to the slave. The slave will work and toil and the master will consume the fruits of the labor. It is worth noting, and this is something that comes up in both Butler and Malabou’s intervention, that Hegel does not speak of the body as such. Any attempt to comprehend “the body” would have to be framed by the discussion of “life” that precedes the section, and the intersections of fear, work, death, consumption, and consciousness that punctuate the passage. It is on this point, on their attempt to not just read the body, but read it through death, work, and fear, that Butler and Malabou’s intervention joins what Negri describes as a post-humanist anthropology.

Although it remains to be seen how post-humanist this anthropology is, how much it can work through the defining aspects of human existence, construed as practices and relations, without relying on a concept of the human, constituted as an essence. This problem is especially vexing given the role death, the fear, or death or finitude plays in this text, and Kojeve’s reading. Death in post-Heideggarian thought, functions as a kind of finite transcendence: it is finite, being death and all, but it avoids whether or not there might be other ways of figuring finitude and, more importantly, it functions as a kind transcendent condition, as that which exceeds and structures all experience. This is of course, Kojeve’s contribution to Hegel, of his radically interrupted reading that makes death the “absolute master,” failing to notice that it is not Hegel’s last word on finitude or negativity. This is both the challenge and the limit of their project: in some sense a post-humanist interpretation of “Domination and Servitude” is nearly impossible because it is precisely placing this section, with its drama of death, work, and desire, at the center of Hegel’s thought that constitutes the humanist reading.

Malabou and Butler both focus on the impossibility of actualizing the injunction, the separation of subjectivity from the body. The master still needs to eat, to consume, and is thus confronted by the very object that he sought to avoid. The same could be said of the slave’s encounter death: the slave flees death in the struggle for recognition only to find it again waiting, in the fear of the master. Complete detachment from the body is just as impossible as complete surrender to the demands of life, a purely animal existence, physicality and negativity, determination and intederminacy, are equally unavoidable aspects of human life. There is nothing terribly new to this reading, but it perhaps has the merit of avoiding “recognition” as its central concept.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Malabou and Butler’s confrontation is the way in which it pits their particular conceptual innovations, plasticity in the case of Malabou and subjection/attachment in the case of Butler, in relation to Hegel’s text. In each case the concept in question is developed in relation to Hegel’s thought, albeit differently. To start with Malabou’s reading of Butler, Malabou poses the question as to what extent Foucault’s problematic of subjectivity/subjection, especially once understood as an attachment and detachment to a particular kind of power differs from a dialectic, countering Butler’s Foucauldian reading of Hegel with a Hegelian reading of Foucault. The slave's subjection is nothing other than a kind of attachment, the attachment to simply living, to the body as given, and mastery is a kind of detachment, an active constitution of the self as something other than this particular life, this body.What makes this possible is her concept of plasticity, the capacity to give and receive form, which cuts through dialects and subjection/subjectivity, to think the interconnection of passivity and activity.

In the end plasticity, as the simultaneity of shaping and being shaped of consciousness, and performativity, as constraint and action, circle around the same fundamental problem: as Spinoza perhaps was the first to note, every finite thing, which is to say everything, is simultaneously determined and determining, affected by other things around it and striving to act on the world. Thinking the specific conjunction of these two aspects is to some extent the task of any materialist philosophy, which is to say any philosophy that is not hopelessly caught up in a metaphysics of freedom and freewill. Malabou and Butler’s argument about Hegel has the merit of putting some of these different concepts of servitude and mastery in relation, most notably Hegel and Foucault, but, despite itself, it also indicates the limit of a purely philosophical investigation. If Foucault’s problem of subjection, the fact that we are always saying yes and no to power, can itself be understood as a restaging of the dialectic of attachment and detachment that defines servitude and domination, then wouldn’t it be possible to say the same thing about performativity and plasticity? My point is not to confirm Foucault’s nightmare in which Hegel subsumes all attempts to escape his influence, but to pose the question of a reorientation of thought. Perhaps the task is not to conceptualize this relation, to rigorously isolate the point where passivity becomes activity, but to think the materiality and specificity of different ways in which one becomes the other. What is perhaps important is not the general dimension of the concept, but the specific modality of the encounter. This maybe the reason that Hegel’s little narrative draws us back again and again: it offers us not the general figure of negation but something of the specific contours of domination and struggle.

Negativity Employed: Benjamin Noys’ The Persistence of the Negative

Ben Noys’ The Persistence of the Negative is interesting to me for at least two reasons. 1) As someone whose introduction to philosophy, or theory, if you prefer, was through the intersecting texts of Deleuze, Spinoza, and Negri, I am firmly within the strain of affirmative thought that Noys critiques. Thus, the text constitutes something of a critical reckoning with my own philosophical consciousness. 2) Noys text is not just an argument for or against a particular theoretical perspective, but is ultimately concerned with a larger problem; namely, the relationship between history and theory, or, more precisely, between the real abstractions of capital and the abstraction of thought.

I initially approached the book thinking that it would be the first aspect that would be most interesting. My own particular trajectory of thinking as of late has been somewhat away from my affirmationist roots (more on this particular terminology in a little bit) and towards a reconsideration of dialectical thought, towards the problem of a materialist dialectic. However, Noys book is less about that than I imagined. Noys book is less an argument for “The Dialectic,” especially in its more rigid form, as it is concerned with the question of negativity, within and beyond its dialectical role. While this revalorization of the negative is interesting, and timely, just think of the trajectory from Adorno to Deleuze, it is Noys’ particular understanding of the intersection of theoretical positions and the vicissitudes of history that make the book particularly compelling.

As much as Noys will offer a very developed criticism of Negri in the final pages in his text, he begins with a quote from Negri, which situates the intersection of theory and politics. As Negri writes, “The clash between productive forces and capitalist relations of production, both in reality and in representation (theoretical and metaphysical, scientific and historiographical) is always linked to events, to relationships of forces, to the creative capacity of historical subjects.” It is from this overdetermined, for lack of a better word, intersection that Noys makes sense of “accelerationism.” Accelerationism is the position attributed to Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari in which capital itself is identified with its own forces of dissolution, or deterritorialization, constantly overcoming itself. It does not create its gravediggers but is its own pallbearer. One only has to step out of its way, or push it along. Noys argues that this position is in some sense what remains after May ’68, when there is revolution but no revolutionary subject: one retains the revolutionary idea of desire, of overcoming every moral and social constraint, but one projects this onto the social forces themselves, or an indeterminate subject such as the “schizo.” On this reading accelerationism exhausts itself as the various deterritorializations of norms seem to be less and less capitalism’s undoing than its perpetual reinvention. What is the nineteen-eighties, and the rise of neoliberalism, but history’s revenge against accelerationism?

(As something of an aside, I should say that I am less than comfortable with these labels, accelerationism, weak and strong affirmation, etc. I understand their tactical value, but, to take Anti-Oedipus as an example, I have always thought that it offers more for thinking about subjectivity and capitalism than its dubious claims about the revolutionary schizophrenic tendencies of capital. If, as Walter Benjamin argues, the work is the death mask of its conception then the classification can only be its corpse. However, I do stress the tactical importance, and it is possible that these new terms, distinct from the old classifications of post-structuralism, Marxism, etc., reflect a more engaged mode of thought.)

If accelerationism can be understood as a response to a particular historical situation, a particular position of the French ultra-left, affirmationism is more ambiguous. Defined broadly it encompasses the work of Derrida, Deleuze, Latour, Negri, and Badiou, all of whom have eschewed the dialectic, negative, and critique in favor of multiplicity, affirmation, and constitution. However, if, as Noys argues, the French (and Italians) pursued metaphysics as politics, then it must be said that metaphysics makes even stranger bedfellows than politics. Affirmation joins disparate figures of thought. Most suggestive in this regard is the connections that Noys sketches between Latour, whose insistence on the ontology of networks is explicitly aimed against the reductions, criticisms, and totalizations of Marxism, and Negri for whom the networks of immaterial labor are the ontology of communism to come.

“In many ways Negri (with or with Hardt) offers the flip side of Latour’s modeling of networks. Both agree on the fundamental positivity of networks, but while Latour uses this to constrain political activity and to resist any conceptualization of capital, Negri simply takes it as a sign of an immanent and imminent communism to come. This is not only an ontologically flattened network, but also a politically flattened network. In the case of Negri it functions to give capitalism a false consistency to all the while accrue the true consistency of the side of the multitude. ‘Power is everywhere’ is a banal truism, especially when it leave us with a multitude that is everywhere without intervening anywhere.”

Noys critique of Latour is devasting in revealing the “reactionary” political positions that underlie the alluring ontology of networks. The connection to Negri then, is perhaps no less devastating. However, as the last sentences of the passages above make clear, Noys real target is less affirmation itself, than the way in which affirmation, the assertion that power, the multitude, or difference is everywhere, forecloses any real thought that would locate points of tension and transformation. For Noys affirmation is not even complicit with capitalism, since capital has its own negativity, alienations, and separations, rather it is complicit with capitalisms ideological image of itself, with the flows and networks the dominate adds for Microsoft.

Noys says less about some of the theoretical positions that would be opposed to this broad affirmationist trend, but he has some incisive remarks about the way in which finitude has functioned as a kind of alibi and justification for negation. As Noys writes:

“The inscription of negativity in the subject, usually in the form of a constitutive finitude is taken as a sign of what allows the subject to always escape or evade capitalist capture. We have a symmetrical affirmation and ontologization of resistance to high affirmationism, simply recast in different terms. The deflationary concept of the subject, however, leaves mysterious the process by which the failure of the subject will be converted into active and successful resistance.”

I wish Noys said more about this particular rendering of negativity, if only because it is so dominant in Anglo-American continental philosophy. However, that is not why I cite the passage here. The symmetry that Noys points to (as well as the symmetry to the quote about Negri above) reveals that Noys is not interested in positing an ontology of negativity against the ontologies of affirmation. Negativity is a practice, not a principle, a destruction of existing positivities.

In the end I think that it is possible to read Noys’ insistence on the negative as a practice to be an insistence on localizing thought and practices, resisting both an ontology of affirmation and an ontology of finitude. As such it is not to be confused with a simple invocation of context, the injunction to “always historicize.” This is because Noys takes seriously Sohn-Rethel’s (and others) fundamental point regarding real abstractions, the abstractions of value, the commodity form, and money. These abstractions are real in that they are constituted through practice, not just through thought, and as such they frame our world. Thus, in contemporary capitalism we cannot simply refer to the Marx’s “activity and material conditions of real individuals” in order to contextualize or specify thinking or practice because our present is defined less by the concrete content of our experience than the abstractions that evade it. In this context negativity cannot be grounded on some supposed element of finite transcendence, the insurmountable facticity of death or finitude, but nor cannot it be an ontological principle. It can only be the situated détournement, the rupture of the existing positivities. This is Noys idea of agency, of transformation, but I will argue that what is perhaps more interesting, at least to me, is the way that he makes “real abstractions” not just some point of reference for understanding capitalist society, but for understanding “theory.”

Theory has come under abuse as of late, and there has been much talk of a return to good old fashion philosophy and ethics. What Noys’ book demonstrates that at its best theory, and debates within theory, are situated at that obscure point where the contradictions of historical forces pass into thought and vice versa.

Winchester ’73: Destiny or Contingency

“…the American cinema constantly shoots and re-shoots a single fundamental film, which is the birth of a nation-civilization…” –Gilles Deleuze


I have often thought that one could write something of an history of American ideology in the middle of the last century through the films of Jimmy Stewart. This is in part due to his casting as a sort of “everyman,” the generic subject of mass society, but, more importantly, it is the way in which this “everyman” was cast in very different light from the black and white morality of Capra to Hitchcock’s infinite shades of grey. The shift of directors is not just a shift of style, but a fundamental shift in the understanding of subjectivity and the world. The Capra, Ford, and Hitchcock films are well known. Perhaps less well known are the Westerns that Stewart made with Anthony Mann. Mann’s films are thematically and chronologically placed between the films of Capra and Hitchcock: Stewart plays the hero but one who is often driven by an obsession, conflicted beneath his generic exterior.

Stewart may seem like an unlikely western hero, especially to anyone who has seen The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. Mann seemed to be aware of this, Jacques Rancière cites him as saying that he found it necessary to follow a “series of precautions” in order to make Stewart, who is not "the broad shouldered type," believable as a man who can take on the world, precautions that define the relationship between what one can do and what one must do within the film. These precautions define the relation between the character and action, a relation that breaks with almost organic connection with a mileu that Deleuze argues defines Ford’s and Hawk’s westerns. As Rancière writes, “It doesn’t much matter whether Mann’s hero is a man of justice or a reformed criminal, since that is not the source of his quality. His hero belongs to no place, has no social function and no typical Western role: he is not a sheriff, bandit, ranch owner, cowboy, or officer; he doesn’t defend or attack the established order, and he does not conquer or defend any land. He acts and that’s it, he does some things.”

In Winchester ’73 Stewart plays Lin McAdam a brother pitted against brother, seeking to avenge his father’s murder. Cain doesn’t so much slay Abel, but his father. This fact, this crucial motivation, is only alluded to in the opening of the film: it is finally explained  much latter, during the final shootout. Initially we only know that he is pursuing a man to Dodge City with determination that borders on the murderous. Narrative completion is only given retroactively in the closing scene. Up to that point we only have a quest, a conflict without a clear sense of its stakes. This quest, with its linear obsessive determination, is immediately displaced and deferred by the rifle of the film’s title. The rifle, which is introduced before any character, the subject of the first close up,  first appears as the prize in the fourth of July shooting contest organized by Wyatt Earp. The contest, and Dodge City in general, are presented as ordered and just: the story begins in place order and descends into lawlessness, a reversal of the traditional western narrative.



The contest pits Stewart against his brother, “Dutch Henry” (an alias) as two expert marksmen, both taught by the same man (their father). As Stewart says, hinting at the murder he is seeking to avenge, they were both taught how to shoot, but not why: equal in skill, but distinguished only by a slight moral difference. Just how slight this difference is made clear in the first scene where brother encounters brother. They both simultaneously reach for their guns. There is no difference of hero and villain at the level of basic actions: they are both prepared to shoot the other in (relative) cold blood. They would have shot each other, but there are no guns allowed in the oasis of order that is Dodge City, so all they can do is reach for their thighs, grasping at absent guns. As is so often the case in this film, intention exceeds action, the logic of the film restores one to the other.

Stewart wins the shooting contest, but is ambushed by his brother and the prize gun is stolen. This crime takes place within Dodge City, suggesting as the film does repeatedly that order and authority are only appearances. The plot of the film then follows three series of events. First, there is Stewart doggedly pursuing his brother from Dodge City across the west; then there is Dutch Henry, who isn’t so much fleeing pursuit as setting off on his own attempt to rob a bank; and finally there is the gun itself, which travels from the hands of Dutch, to the gun dealer who swindles him out of it, to a Native American chief (played by Rock Hudson), to the calvary, to “Waco Johnny Dean,” a member of Henry’s gang, eventually back to Henry for the final shootout. In the end Dutch Henry is defeated by Stewart and the gun is returned to its rightful owner.

This trajectory of the rifle’s movement, from hand to hand, could be understood as a kind of test, a quest with an object at its center. Criminals, corrupt gun dealers, "Indians," and cowards all try to possess the gun, only to be deemed unworthy in the moral (and racist) logic of the film. Read this way the trajectory of the rifle overlaps with that of the moral quest for vengeance and the restoration of order. It is logic of fate: the murdering brother will be killed, and the gun will return to its rightful owner. However, the gun’s trajectory is overdetermined by the events of history itself. The film makes constant reference to the Battle of Little Big Horn, and the role that the Native American’s Winchesters played in Custer’s last stand. The repeating Winchesters were able to outgun the calvary’s single shot rifles. Custer’s defeat is presented as a kind of trauma, of a reversal of the established order based on the slight difference of a faster rifle. In the final shootout Stewart is able to defeat his brother, despite his superior gun, by tossing pebbles, distracting him to waste ammunition shooting at rocks and shadows. Underneath the moral narrative in which the gun is restored to its proper owner, and justice is dealt, there is the contingency of history, of the slight differences of technology, speed, and skill that simultaneously realize and undermine any intention.

The rifle doesn't just move from hand to hand, passing from Dutch, to the gun dealer, to the chief, and so on, it also passes between two different ways of understanding events; it passes between the moral logic of destiny and the historical logic of contingency.

Mann is most well known for introducing a noir sensibility to the Western, of bringing the conflicted and ambiguous psyche of the postwar urban milieu into the open spaces of the West. However, what is interesting about Winchester ’73 is the way in which this interior space, Stewart’s drive for vengeance, a drive that borders on the obsessive, is displaced by the pure exteriority of history. History in this case is indicated by the gun itself: it is an object that is always out of place, despite being named and dated. There is nothing to keep this gun from falling into the wrong hands: materiality is defined as that which simultaneously enables and thwarts the intentions of individuals. The gun might have a rightful owner, and there might be a rightful order of justice, but a faster gun and the luck of finding it can set everything off kilter. In the end the only way to correct this, to right things, is to toss a few pebbles into the air. Slight differences of speed and timing ultimately matter more than official differences of law and order.

Perhaps when Althusser invoked the figure of the cowboy to sketch his portrait of a materialist philosopher, the philosopher of aleatory materialism who catches a moving train, he was thinking of Anthony Mann.

Everyone is Kettled: Lordon on Marx and Spinoza (with some reflections on the current conjuncture)

Frédéric Lordon’s Capitalisme, désir et servitude: Marx et Spinoza is not so much a book on Marx and Spinoza, on the influences and affiliations that would connect them, but a book that immediately puts Spinoza’s philosophy to work within Marx’s problematics. It is similar in this respect to Franck Fischbach’s La Production de hommes: Marx avec Spinoza. The major difference being that the while latter book is primarily concerned with ontology, with production, nature, and the subject, Lordon’s book is primarily concerned with politics and the current conjuncture.

Lordon could be understood as connecting the lines between Spinoza’s often cited question, “why do men fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?” and the general problematic of subjection in Marx. Which is to say that Lordon is interested in how it is that people not only tolerate exploitation, continuing to reproduce the system, but actively desire it. Lordon is interested in precisely the way that contemporary capitalism, or neoliberalism, has moved beyond Marx’s concepts of exploitation and alienation to involve an active participation in one’s subjection, exactly what Spinoza question, and his examination of the affects, would seem to analyze.

The general problem of society, any society, is the articulation of its particular conatus, its particular striving, or functioning, with that of the individuals and collectives that constitute it. For society to function we must desire to do so, and we do this because we must believe that it is the necessary condition of our desires. Lordon dubs this problem, or its solution, colinearization. One of the most important factors of colinearization in capitalism is money itself. For Spinoza anything that is believed to be the cause of joy, of the increase of one’s power, is an object of love. Thus, it is possible to consider money as the “universal equivalent of desire,” as the object which is seen as the cause of any possible joy, any possible desire. Money captures desire and imagination.

Perhaps one of the most interesting remarks that Lordon makes has to do with precisely how he understands the politics of the imagination. Lordon cites the passage from Spinoza in which he argues that there is no opposite of excessive self-esteem. It is possible to overestimate oneself, and to some extent this overestimation, mankind as "kingdom within a kingdom" is the human condition. As Spinoza writes,

“For no one, out of hate, thinks less highly of himself than is just. Indeed, no one thinks less highly of himself than is just, insofar as he imagines that he cannot do this or that. For whatever man imagines he cannot do, he necessarily images; and he is so disposed by this imagination that he really cannot do what he imagines he cannot do this or that, he is not determined to do it, and consequently it is impossible for him to do it.”

Thus, to use the language of pop psychology, there is thus no such thing as “low self-esteem.” If one thinks that one cannot do something, then one effectively cannot do it. The imagination is a material force that determines one’s conduct.

There are thus two strategies for colinearization, for making the desire of individuals conform to society. The first is a kind of imaginary fullness, as in the case of money as the object of desire. It is full because through it the given social order represents itself as the possible realization of every desire. The second draws the limits of what is possible, curtailing modes of thinking and living. These limitations, the poverty of the imagination, has real material effects,.The central message of any social order, reflected in its practices, ideologies, and actions is “everything is here, nothing else is possible.” Society, or should we say capital, is the kettling of the imagination.

The determining and delimiting of the imagination is not alienation. It is one of the merits of Lordon’s book that he is so attentive to Spinoza’s position with respect to the bourgeois homilies of self, interiority and freedom. He argues that Spinoza’s capacity to “affect and be affected” is always realized, always actualized. There is no reserve in Spinoza’s ontology. Lordon follows Pascal Sévérac in arguing that Spinoza’s merit is in abandoning all themes of alienation or separation, themes that still show up in Deleuze (not to mention Fischbach), in favor of fixation. No one is every really separated from the powers, from their capacities; these capacities are just fixated into particular objects and goals, objects which are defined by the poverty of the social imagination.

The outside of fixation, of a limited and curtailed imagination, cannot come from a reservoir of freedom, from a subject outside of history. It must come from within the order itself. Lordon’s answer to this is Spinoza’s concept of indignation, “the hate towards someone who has done evil toward another.” Indignation, expanded to encompass the affective hatred for the existing order, is something precarious, produced by a series of encounters and frustrations, extending throughout the social body through a series of encounters. Indignation does not come from the outside, from outside of the social order, but is produced internally, by any orders limited conception of desire. As such it is not some return to an originary freedom, but only a “détournent du détourement,” a deviation of the already established goals of society to something other.

That is precisely the question: what is this something else? Or, more importantly, how can it be produced? Spinoza’s immanence reminds us that our minds our limited by our imagination, which are in turn limited by our bodies, which are in turn limited by our minds, and so on. The intersection of all of these determinations is also the intersection of different sites for transformation. We imagine that nothing is possible, that nothing can be done, but only up to the point that someone actually does something. Once that happens, once there is an opposition to an existing order, a Paris Commune, a May '68, etc., In such moments the very limits of the world, of what is possible, are redrawn. However, these fleeting moments of possibility, the indignation of the moment, need new thoughts new bodies to sustain them. According to Lordon, the transformation of bodies by the imagination and the extension of indignation into organization is the work of politics.

David Graeber's remarks on politics, the cuts to the university, and the imagination inspired much of this, and are well worth listening to.

The True Meaning of Thanksgiving

Every year, at least since sometime in the middle of the last century, the President of the United States pardons a turkey. The ceremony, which could be described as a kind of sovereignty kitsch, is covered by the media, becoming part of the general holiday pablum along with the stories of the new floats at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and "what to do with holiday leftovers."

There is something so obviously absurd about this ritual that it is almost pointless to point it out. There is of course the question of guilt, of what crime the turkeys are being pardoned for, other than their rather unfortunate luck of coming into this world as a domesticated turkey. While the turkeys have been spared since Kennedy the use of the term pardon has a much more recent pedigree; Reagan first use the term to deflect questions about Iran-Contra, jokingly pardoning the bird to avoid answering the press. Despite this recent history for term there is, however, a symmetry between the pardon of the turkey and the holiday in general. The turkey is spared just before millions are cooked in a massive consumption of a single species: it is an idyllic symbol of peace between man and beast just before the true slaughter. Thanksgiving is supposedly the celebration of a peaceful cooperation between colonists and Native Americans: as we all know, this peaceful celebration, if it existed, comes before genocide. Each ritual is a staging of a just world that we know to be a lie.

One question remained, however, what happens to these turkeys after they are spared. I found the following statement in The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, The Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánomo by Magnus Fiskejö:

"The birds are then, in proverbial fashion, said to live happily ever after. In reality, however, they are usually killed within a year and stand-in turkeys are supplied. This goes on year after year. The chosen birds are killed because they have been engineered and packed with hormones to the point that they are unfit for any other purpose than their own slaughter and consumption. They are fast-forward turkeys. Presidential turkey caretakers have explained that most succumb rather quickly to joint disease—their frail joints simply cannot bear the weight of their artificially enhanced bodies. The sturdiest survivors may live a little more than a year. But the birds are always finally put out of their growing misery. Then they are buried nearby in a presidential turkey cemetery—the ritualistic significance of which remains to be explored. (May the archaeologists of the future excavate it!)"

The reason that these turkeys are so ill suited for their lives of freedom is that they are supplied by the National Turkey Federation. They are products of industrial farms, bred to grow fat quick rather than live long. Much could be said about the fact that corporate lobby's interests trumps even the symbolism of the ceremony, making even the pardon itself a lie within a lie. The whole thing is so overdetermined, a "turducken" of empty symbolism, sovereign authority, and corporate power. However, my mind remains fixated on that cemetery of (what I imagine to be) unmarked graves where the birds go, unable to bear the weight of their supposed freedoms. They are creatures designed for the cage, and no decree can change that. Yep, the holiday really symbolizes the nation.

Transindividuality as Critique: Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx

The long philosophical cold war has almost completely evacuated any conception of collectivity from political and social thought. On the one hand, we have the individual, the unquestioned basis of possessive and methodological individualism, of liberalism both classical and “neo”; while on the other hand, we have the spectre of totality, of the state as a nightmare in which all jumpsuits are grey. Etienne Balibar has suggested the term transindividuality to conceptualize that which both sides of this alternative occlude: relations as mutually constitutive of the individual and collective. The term is drawn from the work of Gilbert Simondon, who contested the privilege Western thought gave to the individual, developing an ontology, or ontogenesis, of individuation. Balibar has suggested that this term could be used to make sense of various figures in the history of philosophy, Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, whose thought refuses the binary of individual or totality. Following Balibar, but moving beyond his suggestive remarks, this paper seeks to examine the critical dimension of transindividuality. By critical I mean the way in which each of these philosophers provides not just an account of the constitutive dimension of social relations, but more importantly, how the experience of these relations fundamentally effaces their collective dimension. In other words, Marx’s to be precise, it is a matter of understanding how “the most developed social relations” produces the “standpoint of the isolated individual.” The three thinkers assembled here offer different critical accounts of this problem, focusing on its ontological, political, and historical aspects. By examining them in conjunction it is possible to produce not only a critique of the inadequate idea of the individual, but a new conceptual vocabulary to comprehend the production of collectivity.

A snapshot of what is meant by transindividuality as critique can be gleaned from the passage that I have already referred to from Marx’s Grundrisse. In that passage, Marx criticizes political economy for writing only Robinsonades, for placing the isolated individual at the beginning rather the end of history. To which Marx offers the following corrective,

"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."

Critique in this context is not the sterile opposition of the true to the false, of a correct to an incorrect view of society; the true account, the history of the mode of production, must be able to account for the genesis of the false. The isolated individual is not simply a false way of grasping social relations, but is itself a product (and condition) of those relations. Critique is not denunciation, but a materialist account of conditions.

This general strategy can be found in Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, but its terms and objects change, along with the historical moment and specific practice of philosophy. Spinoza’s critique is oriented primarily towards the ontology of the individual, man as a kingdom within a kingdom; Hegel critiques the idea of the autonomous individual that is the starting point for social contract theory; and finally, as we have already stated, Marx’s critique is aimed primarily at the Robinsonades of bourgeois political economy. Thus the examination of the different philosophers is not the simple repetition of the same basic formula, but its transformation into the different levels and domains of ontology, politics, and political economy. These domains overlap as ontology, political philosophy, and political economy coalesce around a particular ontology of the individual.

Any exploration of transindividuality in Spinoza must begin with the conatus, the general striving to persist in its being that defines everything. Far from an assertion of an irreducible atomism, this striving is always determined by other strivings, other relations. Everything is compelled to produce an effect in a certain and determinate manner. This is to some extent “the anti-human condition” for Spinoza: anti-human because it is a general situation of all things and ideas, striving and finitude, and because it is precisely what counters the humanist tendency to see individuals as a “kingdom within a kingdom.” Despite this general condition there is a difference specific to thought, which transforms this striving into desire. This difference does not so much place us above the world of causality and conditions, but further immerses us in it. We are born “ignorant of the causes of things…and conscious of our appetite.” The combination of inadequate and adequate ideas produces the mutually constitutive fictions of the autonomous individual and the anthropomorphic God: the autonomous individual is the vague consciousness of our appetite, and God is nothing other than the sum total effect of out ignorance of causes. It is because we do not adequately grasp the transindividual conditions of our desire that we believe ourselves to be free, to truly desire what we desire, and it is because we believe ourselves to be free that we do not adequately grasp our transindividual conditions. In Spinoza’s thought there is a connection between the transindividual conditions of our desire and the opacity of the self. However, it is precisely because it is the condition of every finite thing to be conditioned and determined by another in a certain and determinate manner, to be relational, that this cannot be considered any statement of even the anti-human condition in the transcendental sense of the term. Or rather, the only thing that we can say about humanity in general is that we strive and are affected. The particular orientation of our striving and the particular affects that define it are defined by and define a socio-historical condition: in Spinoza’s time, the forces of superstition and prejudice.

The critique of man as kingdom within a kingdom and the spontaneous theology of the individual constitutes a kind of degree zero the transindividual constitution of individuality, the inadequate of idea of autonomy. Spinoza builds from this, demonstrating how the primary affects of joy and sadness and their infinite permutations into love and hate with their accompanying representations constitute specific individualities and collectivities. Love and hate are extended to their apparent cause and durations over time, constituting a particular character, a particular subjectivity. Just as they are extended intensively, through the time of memory that frames a causal exchange of associations, they are extended extensively, encompassing more and more individuals that love and hate the same thing. These extensive and intensive constitutions are themselves split between inadequate and adequate ideas, passivity and activity; which is to say that sometimes the connections are the purely situational effects of the conjunction of encounters, seeing Paul in the morning etc., and sometimes they reflect a real causal connections, common notions. This perhaps nowhere more clear than in the case of social relations. As Spinoza argues according to the guidance of reason nothing is more useful to man than man, the formation of some kind of collectivity, of some kind of social relation, is based on a common utility. However, this rational basis is simultaneously underwritten and undercut by the affects, by the desire for a imagined agreement, that others would love what I love (EIVP37). The latter desire is fundamentally ambivalent, since the desire that others love what I love is caught up with the unavoidable jealousy that follows (something that can be seen in the love of one’s country). As Balibar writes, “Sociability is therefore the unity of a real agreement and an imaginary ambivalence both of which have real effects.” What is true of the community, that it is constituted by both inadequate ideas (imaginary connections) and adequate ideas, is equally true of the individual, of any individuation, which is always simultaneously imagination and reason. As Spinoza argues in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the social contract is overdetermined by the rituals of belonging that constitute a people as a people, defining a collective identity through rituals.

While for Spinoza the transindividual critique is framed between ontology and theology, between the fiction of the autonomous self and the fiction of an anthropomorphic God organizing the world, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right frames its transindividual critique between civil society and the state. The common connection between Spinoza and Hegel, despite the differences of history, ontology, and logic, is that in each case it is a matter of a critique of a “spontaneous philosophy,” of a philosophy that emerges from practices and relations. For Hegel the relations in question are those of civil society, the world of commerce, the market, and work. The spontaneous philosophy of civil society is the individual of all Robinsonades, from the state of nature to the maximum/minimum hypothesis of neoliberalism, seeking its individual realization in a world where everything counts as a mean to this end. Civil society is place between the family and the state, between the affective immediacy and conceptual universality, as such its presentation is inseparable from its education. Thus, to revise the initial formulation, self-interested particularity emerges from the conflict and competition of market relations, but no sooner does it emerge than those very same structures compel it to begin to recognize its relations and connections. In choosing from the variety of goods available on the market, rather than what is given, determined by the contingency of place, one necessarily chooses according to social criteria, the recognition of others. Labor follows the same fundamental logic, moving from immediacy and particularity to mediation and universality through socialization and technology: as I am forced to work with others, and with the forces of machines, my work loses its one sided and rough character to become universal. Both consumption and work overcome the immediate particularity of individuality, the self-interest of civil society, but they do so in opposed ways. They are both transindividual individuations, the one pushed towards individuality, the other towards interchangeability: consumption is the moment of individuation, of differentiation, the particular in the universal, while labor is the moment of discipline, the universal in the particular. Misrecognition is given only to pass necessarily into recognition. Here misrecognition concerns individuality, the subject of civil society sees him or herself as autonomous and others merely as means. The education of universality ultimately undoes this perspective: work and desire remain all too subject to the contingencies of early capitalist existence, the contamination of commodities and uncertainties of work, and the self-interested individual must ultimately recognize itself in the structures and institutions of the state. It must consciously will the universal, rather than simply see it as means to its particular end. Civil society passes into the state.

Hegel and Spinoza each offer a critical account of individualism, of the isolated autonomous subject that much political thought, not to mention contemporary common sense, takes to be a natural given. This account is critical in that it exposes the transindividual conditions of this perspective. For Hegel it is rooted in the practices and relations of civil society, which isolate individuals while relating them behind their backs. For Spinoza these practices are primarily religious, the rituals and practices that produce the imaginary of an autonomous individual, anthropocentric God, and chosen community. This difference is less one of philosophical and political position, a fundamental argument about the centrality of economy or religion, base or superstructure, than it is a difference of historical moment, the difference of over one hundred and fifty years, from the dominance of religion to that of civil society and capital. Which does not mean that there are not overlaps and points of contact. Matheron has suggested that Spinoza’s general remark about the communication of affects, the constitution of objects through desire, and the critique of finalism provides a basis for an understanding of economic alienation. What is money but the universal object of love, the cause of every possible joy, an object that imposes its finality over other particular strivings. This somewhat anachronistic, and underdeveloped critique, is useful in underscoring an important difference between Spinoza and Hegel. As criticial as Hegel is of civil society, or its atomistic perspective, it remains for him a moment, a moment that will pass as individuality recognizes the necessity of the state. Misrecognition necessarily passes to recognition. For Spinoza, however, there is in general no such progression. The imagination, whether it takes its object God or money, the universal object of desire, is as much a part of human existence as reason. There is no telos, no necessary progression from an inadequate conception of one’s connections and relations to an adequate one. Instead there is a necessary ambivalence between the transindividual dimensions of desire and rationality.

It is at this point, with the problem of money as an object of desire, that we can return to Marx, who in some sense defined our problem. The point is not simply to add another terrain, and another historical moment, to those provide by Spinoza and Hegel, to add the critique of political economy to the transindividual critique of the spontaneous theology of the individual subject or the spontaneous ideology of civil society. First, of all because the overlap between Hegel and Marx is too significant to over look, and secondly, but less obviously, this overlap returns us to the transindividual constitution of imagination and reason and the point of difference between Spinoza and Hegel. To begin with the point of overlap, Hegel and Marx each engage in a critique of political economy, at least in terms of its particular ontology of individuation, its Robinsonade. Hegel, however, situates this critique within a Bildungsroman in which the particular self-interest is educated through work and consumption into the perspective of the universal. Marx interrupts this transition by demonstrating that there is no passage from the particular to universal in political economy: no way in which the perspective of isolated self-interest is forced to confront the limitations of its perspective and recognize its constitutive relations with others. The name of this interruption, this impasse, is commodity fetishism: fetishism understood not simply as a critical statement about the limits of bourgeois political economy, but as a critical perspective on consciousness in capitalism. The “perspective of political economy” generates a point of view in which the economy appears to be independent and autonomous. It is no longer seen as the sum total of the effects of individual actions, as a sphere of human activity that can be transformed and acted on, but as a quasi-natural phenomena with its laws, its own crises and transformations. As Marx writes, reflecting on the relation of individuals to the economy, their own economic activity: “To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.”

This reevaluation of the “perspective of political economy,” could be understood as just another historical moment: in the years between Marx and Hegel it perhaps became less and less possible to see the universal emerge from the conflict of particular wills. More importantly, however, Marx divides what Hegel unifies: whereas Hegel presented labor and consumption as two sides of the same basic transindividuation, as two sides of the same process of individuation and collective constitution, Marx argues that consumption and labor, the sphere of circulation and production are fundamentally distinct in terms of their perspective. The first presents an image of society as an “eden of the innate rights of man,” of freedom, equality, and Bentham, while the second reveals the exploitation that subtends the former. The difference is not just the difference between the false appearance of equality and the reality of exploitation, but two different conditions of transindividuation. The sphere of circulation allows for the appearance of isolation and separation: commodity fetishism is not just the particular condition of the appearance of value, but an appearance made possible by the fact that we confront each other’s labor in isolation. In contrast to this, labor is irreducibly transindividual, not just in terms of cooperation and the social relations of the labor process but also in terms of its irreducible mental component. We simultaneously inhabit two different individuations, two different collectivities, the first based on formal equality and isolation, the other on conflictual relation. We could follow Spinoza and argue that the first is imagination, an inadequate idea of our relations, and the second is reason, an adequate idea, revealing the production of things, but of social relations as well. The analogy holds, to a point: it is perhaps more accurate to say that each sphere, production and circulation, which is to say each collectivity, has its imaginary and rational components, its fictions and its common notions. What is more important, however, is that there is no telos, no necessary resolution of the sphere of consumption into production, of imagination into reason. They are each constitutive of perceptions, desires, and relations, and constituted by practices. However, we could add that what Marx adds to this situation, or at least emphasizes, is the idea that in order to pass from one to the other, from inadequate to adequate, it is necessary to change practices as much as thoughts. This practical dimension was perhaps already there, in the spontaneous philosophy of theology and civil society identified by Spinoza and Hegel, Marx foregrounds it through the switch from critique to revolution. Such a revolution presupposes as much as it makes possible a change of ideas: it is a matter of becoming active in the full sense of the world.