Ghosting: The Long Life of Red Scares

 

from facebook

This post could be considered a follow up to my previous post on The Communist Manifesto.  In each case it is a matter of what could be considered an error of the Manifesto. I know that it seems wrong to pick on the Manifesto a text which is less an attempt to state everything than an intervention in a specific theoretical and political conjunction--a stunning one. My one real criticism of the Manifesto is that its length has led to be being seen as THE summation of Marx's position so that even Jordan Peterson can read it before debating Zizek. However, it is a useful text to confront some of the limitations of Marxist thought. As I argued in the previous post, the assertion of the ruthlessly modernizing of the bourgeois mode of production makes it difficult to grasp the way in which not all that is solid melts into air, some of keeps coming back. 

Everybody is a Troll to Somebody: On Chris Beckett's Two Tribes (partially)

 

More than once I have made the joke that if philosophy really wanted to go back to its Platonic (or Socratic roots) then it most recognizing trolling as the new sophists. Trolling seems to be a more relevant form of "anti-philosophy," to use Badiou's term, than Wittgenstein or Nietzsche if only because the former is more prevalent, shaping the arguments that make up what passes for the public sphere, and not just a few philosophy classrooms.

...as if it was Salvation: Dialectics of Obedience in Spinoza

 

I do not remember who made this meme, but I love it.

Dimitris Vardoulakis' Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism puts forward the bold thesis that there is a dialectic of authority and utility in Spinoza. That obedience is situated between authority, between the "Potestas" of kings and God, and utility, the potentia of intellect and bodies. It is from this perspective that Vardoulakis presents a reading of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Despite the title of the book, which suggests a more modest exegetical undertaking, the stakes of this are less a matter of simply tracing the epicurean dimensions of Spinoza's thought (although it does that) than using those threads to expand the stakes of Spinoza's political thought. Vardoulakis' book takes on not only other readers of Spinoza, Negri, Deleuze, Althusser, Balibar, and Sharp, but also the central question of Spinoza's thought, why do people fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?

Waiting for the Robots: Benanav and Smith on the Illusions of Automation and Realities of Exploitation

All images from Starstream

In the last month or so two remarkably similar books appeared, Aaron Benanav's Automation and the Future of Work and Jason E. Smith's Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation. The books are similar without being redundant. They are too similar to construct anything like a provocative debate between them. They are perhaps best viewed not just in terms of their polemics against certain fantasies or fears of automation but the way in which they constitute an emergent, or even dominant, sensibility and orientation of Marxist thought, one that makes sense of the present through the infamous tendency of the rate of profit to fall. 

Pop Culture Prophecy: Empire's Decline from Fantasy to Reality

All panels and art from Tim Truman Scout, Eclipse comics

During the odd grifter's interregnum of the last few weeks a particular image came to mind. The image, reproduced above, depicts the President of a dystopian American turning into a monster and clinging to power. I am not sure how it was jogged from my memory, but it seemed to fit the last few weeks since the election. It is from the comic book Scout written and drawn by Tim Truman and published by Eclipse Comics from 1985-1987. It was one of my favorite comics growing up even though judging by its status today, and conversations with other comics fans, it has been overlooked or forgotten. I haven't been able to forget it, and in many ways it seems to be a better guide to our present than the superheroes from the same era who have only become more central to popular culture. 

Solidarities: Negative, Symbolic, and Actual

 

As I write this the COVID-19 pandemic is returning to rates of infection and death in the US that exceed even the peak of last spring. The only difference is that, with a few exceptions, there are no new lockdowns. Schools are, partially in session, restaurants are open, and it might even be possible to go see a movie. The gap between the current crisis and the response is so wide that it has all of the feel of some kind of science fiction dystopia, noticing it feels like you are wearing the special glasses. I am sometimes find myself wanting to run through the streets screaming COVID-19 is still happening!

What Do Werewolves Dream of? On An American Werewolf in London

Of the three werewolf films that were released in 1981 An American Werewolf in London is that one that I have the strongest memory of even though it has had the least impact on me in the years that followed. Wolfen is a cult classic, and I am definitely in the cult, The Howling is a solid film, but An American Werewolf in London scared the hell out of me as a kid. This was in part because I saw it at far too young of an age. I do not know what my parents were thinking when they took me to it at ten, perhaps that it would be more comedy than horror, which makes sense given Blues Brothers and Animal House. All I really remember was asking to leave the theater after first werewolf attack scene on the moors, my parents tried to get me to stay, knowing that I loved monsters, but by the time Jack showed up as an ambulatory corpse I was done. We left the theater.  

Man is a Super-Villain to Man: The Boys and the limits of Satire

 

Horkheimer and Adorno had to invent the neologism the "culture industry" to criticize the subordination of culture to commerce, these days we can accomplish the same thing by just saying "comic book movies." Comic book movies, or, to be more specific "Marvel movies" has become a shorthand for getting at the intersection of branding, commerce, and culture. I would argue that this particular shorthand leaves too many terrible, cynical, and derivative products off of the hook, like the execrable Rise of the Skywalker and the latest sequels to Jurassic Park and Terminator, but that is not the point here. My point is the way that the Amazon series The Boys takes this idea of the superhero as a figure of cultural and commercial dominance and doubles down on it.

Ideological Tendencies: Machiavelli, Spinoza, Marx

Graphic by Joelle Glidden

 It is perhaps because my first real philosophical love was Gilles Deleuze that I have been drawn to the idea that traditions and precursors in philosophy where less a matter of hallowed traditions than retroactive constructions, framed by new readings and new problems. As much as I got this idea from Deleuze, I have been drawn to different inventions of traditions, Balibar's creation of transindividual thread in Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, and Freud; Althusser's creation of a subterranean current of aleatory materialism that encompasses Machiavelli, Spinoza, Rousseau, Marx, and Darwin (to name few); or Negri's creation of a tradition of constituent power. 

God's Fortune: Reading Machiavelli in Spinoza

 

Posing with Machiavelli and Spinoza

Since Vittorio Morfino's The Spinoza-Machiavelli Encounter: Time and Occasion is out in paperback, and since I am teaching both Machiavelli and Spinoza this semester, I thought that I would write a short response to the book. The strength of Morfino's book is how it manages to both do its due diligence, tracing the influences and intersections of Machiavelli and Spinoza, while simultaneously making that encounter something truly inventive. 

Another Dialectic of the Other Scene: This Time It is Tosel

Mr. Block He Meets Others

I am aware, but only vaguely aware, that there is a schism of sorts between so called "class reductionists" and "identity politics," between those who claim that matters of class and economics are all that matter and those that claim that such a reductive insistence on class overlooks the reality of oppression around race, gender, and sexuality. It is hard to summarize this lines of demarcation since it is less a debate than a series of epithets and insults, and to be honest I do not listen to enough podcasts to keep up. Anyone looking for a summary should look to Asad Haider, who has been doing some of the best work on this ongoing "debate" . 

Seeing the Better and Doing the Worse: The Assistant and Work

 

Kitty Green's The Assistant was immediately greeted as the film of the #metoo movement. It is hard not to see it that way. The film, referred to by the director/writer as "scripted non-fiction" deals with one day in the life of an assistant to a Hollywood producer, who, for all intents and purposes, seems like a Harvey Weinstein character, right down to the supply of aliprostadil syringes he keeps stocked in his office. What is interesting about the film is that we never seen this character, only hear his yelling voice and see his manipulative emails, the film is not interested in the proverbial "bad apple, " as Green puts it, but on structural conditions that make such a person possible. 

The Interruption of Individuation: Some Tertiary Retentions in Memory of Bernard Stiegler

In memory of Bernard Stiegler I thought that I would post the following excerpt from The Politics of Transindividuality.  As an introduction I will return to the idea of interruption that I wrote about in my first response to Stiegler.  

According to Stiegler, as much as Marx interrupted Hegel, positing proletarianization as that which interrupts the passage from slave to master, he never fully grasped the full implications of proletarianization. Which is to say Marx never grasped the extension of proletarianization from the hidden abode of production to consumption. Marx primarily examined consumption as a necessary endpoint and part of the economic process, but not as a transindividual individuation, a process of the production of subjectivity. The consumption of use values is predominantly left outside of the examination. While this is the dominant tendency, Marx’s writings do suggest that consumption needs to be historicized as the transformation of the mode of production, a transformation that includes its effects on social relations, but such remarks are marginal for reasons that are both historical and philosophical. Consumption at the time of Marx’s writing was only formally subsumed, as capital produced and circulated the commodities of food, clothing, and shelter that existed in previous economic conditions, hence the coats, coal, and linen that illustrate Capital. Which is not to say that Marx does not sometimes historicize consumption. Stiegler cites Marx’s statement in the Grundrisse that, ‘Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth,’ as an oblique reference to the constitutive role of consumption.[1] However, such isolated remarks do not constitute anything like a theory of the mode of consumption, in which consumption is considered alongside production as a specific transindividual individuation.[2] While Stiegler’s comments would seem to contradict Marx’s theorization of the sphere of circulation as the production of “freedom, equality, and Bentham,” it is important to differentiate exchange, which produces individuals isolated and separated from each other and productive relations, and consumption, which demands a disindividuation that exceeds isolation. 

The Use and Abuse of Blockbusters for Life: Movies and Memes in the Age of Viral Collapse

Lately, I have been considering a hopelessly naive question, namely: What is popular culture for? Or, more to the point how does it function for us as culture, as a way to make sense of the world and express our desires. I have been prompted by this question by two unrelated events. First, I am currently preparing a Freshman Seminar on Politics and Culture which has me reviewing some of the classic arguments about the use and abuse of culture from Williams to Adorno and De Certeau. Second, and more immediately, when I am not working on this course or doing anything productive I am doing what nearly everyone is doing and that is trying to figure out what movie or TV show might pass the time of lockdown.

A Habitus for the Rest of Us: Lantoine on Spinoza and Disposition

Jacques-Louis Lantoine's L'Intelligence de la pratique: Le Concept de disposition chez Spinoza is a contribution to what I have called Spinozist Social Thought. Social thought here is understood as distinct from but not entirely separable from the political, social thought is more concerned with social relations, imitation, affect, and habits, rather rights, powers and states. The book is a dissertation completed under the guidance of Chantal Jaquet and Frédéric Lordon (among others), two of the thinkers at the center of this turn to the socio-political in and after Spinoza. It is also a follow up to Lantoine's Spinoza Après Bourdieu: Politiques des Dispositions.

The Most Dangerous Myths: On Ready or Not and The Hunt

Hollywood B pictures often come in twos. Somehow, almost inexplicably, we get two movies about undersea monsters, Leviathan and Deepstar Six, Volcanoes, Dante's Peak and Volcano, and asteroids hitting Earth, Armageddon and Deep Impact. Last year, in the brief interregnum between blockbusters and prestige pictures we got two pictures about people hunting people for sport, or at least we were supposed to.

Anti-Racist Noir: On Odds Against Tomorrow

For Ted Stolze

A few weeks into the pandemic lockdown I went through a brief noir phase. It was somehow easier to watch films from a very different time than have the uncanny experience of watching people inhabit a world that looked like the present but was governed by very different social norms. Watching people walk around and go to bars and restaurants unmasked and unaware of social distancing was a bit too much, it was easier to watch people wear fedoras and ties, make calls from pay phones, and live on a diet of alcohol and coffee. A world long gone was easier to watch than a world that had just disappeared.

Work and Production: On Fischbach's Après la Production

One of the common criticism of Marx is that his thought is dominated by production. Philosophers from Jean Baudrillard to Hannah Arendt have criticized Marx for the way in which his thought is dominated by production, with its corollaries of instrumentality, teleology, and mastery of nature. All of these different critiques have taken on added salience and importance in the anthropocene which has exposed the limitations of ideal of production as Promethean overcoming of the limits of nature. Infinite productivity confronts the limits of finite planet and its resources

Neo-Feudalism with Capitalist Characteristics: A Response to Jodi Dean

I had the chance to respond to Jodi Dean's Communism or Neo-Feudalism at Red May. The following are are a revised version of my response. 

Writing Rifts: On Balibar's Écrits I and II

Anyone who has read this blog knows that I am influenced by the work of Etienne Balibar. His work has profoundly shaped my published work. I have even considered writing a book on Balibar, and have dedicated a few notes to what the book would entail. A provisional title of this book is Etienne Balibar: A Study of the Unity of his Thought. The title is stolen from Lukács’ book on Lenin.