The Matter of Thought

Lately, I have been reading some Gilbert Simondon. The particular book I have is L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information which includes both L’individu et sa genèse psycho-biologique (which initially appeared in 1964, and was influential for Deleuze) and L’individuation psychique et collective (which was published in 1989, and develops the idea of transindividuality, important for Balibar and Virno), as well as an unfinished Histoire de la Notion de’Individu. I am primarily interested in the latter two, or at least the latter two fit my current areas of research, but there is something in the first book/section that struck me as interesting.

Simondon criticizes the hylomorphic model of understanding the constitution of individuality, the idea that individual things are defined by a particular combination of form and matter. In examining this idea, Simondon relates it back to its technological conditions, the practices that would seem to generate the model. Simondon argues that even those activities that would seem to exemplify this idea of form and matter, such as brick making, are actually more complex than the model would suggest. Clay is not just a formless, generic matter, but must itself be selected and prepared according to the way in which specific qualities lend themselves to particular forms. Not to mention the fact that the form, in this case the mould is not a pure idea, but must be made of matter, with particular qualities and limitations. There is always more matter in form and more form in matter than the model would suggest. This leads Simondon to argue that the form/matter pair is not simply a practical idea that has been extended to explain everything from the soul to human reproduction (as in Aristotle), but is ultimately the effect of a particular social relation. “One could say that in a civilization that divides men into two groups, those who give orders and those who execute them, the principal of individuation, following a technological example, is necessarily attributed either to form or to matter, but never the two together. (pg. 58)” Thus we could say that the form/matter distinction is the effect of a particular division of mental and manual labor.

This is the idea that interests me: the connection between a metaphysical concept and a particular social formation, an immediate connection not just between base and superstructure, but between the very possibility of thought and the most basic practical activities. Perhaps the most audacious example of such a short circuit comes from Marx himself, who writes the following in Capital:

“The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.” (page 172)

It seems to me that at this point we are not speaking of ideology, at least as it is generally understood. Ideology generally designates a specific doctrine, or set of representations, and not, as in the above examples, such generic an unavoidable ideas as form/matter or abstract humanity. Understood broadly this idea does not just appear in Marx. Heidegger at times makes the argument that metaphysical concepts are simply the effects of our pre-reflexive understanding of being, an understanding rooted in practical comportments. As Heidegger writes:

“In production, therefore, we come up against just what does not need to be produced. In the course of producing and using beings we come up against the actuality of what is already there before all producing, products, and producibles, or of what offers resistance to the formative process that produces things. The concepts of matter and material have their origin in the understanding of being that is oriented to production.” (The Basic Problems of Phenomenology pg. 116).

The passage refers specifically to matter, but in full section Heidegger is referring to the practical basis of the medieval metaphysical (predominantly Aquinas) of existence and essence. It is not just that the idea of matte comes from production, but substance as well. My point is not equate these various assertions, far from it. For Simondon and Marx the connection is between social relations and conceptual production, while for Heidegger it is production in a technological (or even anthropological sense). What interests is the sporadic appearance of this “short circuit,” appearing primarily as an aside and rarely as a theory. (The exception would perhaps be Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labor). A few questions follow from this: What does it mean to trace the origin of some metaphysical concept to some social and practical structure? What does this say about practice or thought? What does it mean that such origins are always effaced? Finally, what about the limitations of such a project; that is, what are the social conditions or the connection between concepts and social conditions?

The Meaninglessness of Style

Subcultures are defined not so much by their particular kind of commodities, music, clothes, etc., but by a particular relation to commodities. This relation runs the gambit from a strong sense of identification, which is usually exclusive (the rest of the world does not appreciate the genus of “blank”), to ironic detachment, “so bad its good.” Often it is the particular relation, and not the aesthetic values of the commodities concerned, that takes precedence. Case in point, the concern about “selling out” in circles of punk, indie rock, etc.: what is lost when the band moves to a major label is not so much its particular sound, but that feeling of exclusive identification. The band is no longer your band when all of he kids at the mall are wearing their shirt.

These are the thoughts that crossed my mind last night when I was watching The White Stripes perform. At one point I really liked The White Stripes, but then all of the exposure, the guess stints on The Simpsons and Cold Mountain, not to mention the fact that the records after “White Blood Cells” that lacked the geeky intensity of the early recordings, made it difficult to sustain the same level of enthusiasm. When the show began I was firmly entrenched in the existential position of jaded indie-rocker. The first thing I noticed was all of the kids wearing brand-spanking new White Stripes t-shirts; I thought to myself, have the rules of cool changed that much? You do not wear a new shirt of the band you are seeing, an old shirt from their first tour, maybe. Better yet, a shirt from another band somehow related, but more obscure than the band that you are seeing, in this case The Detroit Cobras or The Black Keyes. Then, I a said to my friend Ron, “It makes you wonder what were all of these kids with new shirts wearing to the show?” To which he replied, “Maybe there is a dumpster full of Killer’s t-shirts out back.” Yeah it went like that, at least at the beginning.

As Jack and Meg entered the stage to the sounds of “Boogie Chillin’,” I thought to myself, I wonder how many people here even know who John Lee Hooker is, let alone catch the reference to the Detroit blues sound, which is so important to the White Stripes? My bitter mocking may have something to do with the fact that, when I was in High School, I went to see John Lee Hooker play and the only person I could get to go with me was my father, my peers did not care. So perhaps I was just jealous of the fact that those cool points came nearly twenty years too late. Then something happened as The White Stripes played, I forgot all about kids with new shirts, the widely out of place mosh pit up front, and sad attempts as Mohawks, I just heard the music. I am not claiming an unmediated experience here, all I am saying is that they rocked. Sometimes it is good to remember that it can be about the music.

New Foucault Against the Final Foucault

Anyone who has been around philosophy for even a little bit of time is familiar with its cyclical nature, old ideas and philosophers are continually being reborn and repackaged, there is a “New” Nietzsche, Spinoza, Bergson, even Sartre. At times this seems to be a reflection of a genuine change and insight and at other times it just seems like a lot of repackaging. One philosopher who seems due for such a resurgence, or reconsideration, is Michel Foucault. This might seem odd, since Foucault, unlike the other philosophers considered above has not disappeared from intellectual debates and discussions. (For example at the time that the “New Spinoza” was published it was nearly impossible to find a decent translation of the Political Treatise.) While it is true that Foucault’s work and works on Foucault are never in short supply, what does seem to be in short supply is original thinking when it comes to Foucault. Foucault scholarship has ossified into a rather standard narrative: after coming up with an original theory of power that unfortunately lacked agency and normative criteria, Foucault thankfully discovered the Greek’s practices of freedom, admitted that he liked Kant, and had dinner with Jürgen Habermas.

What is missing in this narrative (which I have simplified in the most insulting way possible), besides a more nuanced understanding of Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality, is any explanation or account of what happened in the interim years between the first and second volumes of the History of Sexuality. Well now it is possible to at least have some understanding of what happened in that period through the publication of the courses from 1977-1979, Sécurité, Territoire, Population (recently translated into English) and Naissance de la biopolitique. These courses do not pursue the question of how individuals became subjects of desire but examine governmentality, the other theme of Foucault’s work in the late seventies and early eighties.

What is most striking, however, is Naissance de la biopolitique, which focuses on neoliberalism: making it both Foucault’s only sustained study of politics in the twentieth century and his first engagement with political economy since The Order of Things. More importantly the focus on governmentality, and neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, undermines one of the central commonplaces of Foucault’s turn. It has often been said, even by Foucault himself, that the shift from the work of the seventies to the eighties is a shift from studying the objectivizing of the subject, the way the human individual is made a subject of inquiry by others, to the subjectivizing of the subject, the way individuals constitute themselves as subjects. (Foucault said this in “The Subject and Power,” from there it became canonized in Dreyfus and Rabinow’s book) Thomas Lemke has argued that the concept of governmentality undermines any opposition between “object” and “subject”: governmentality constitutes a continuum encompassing everything from the state down to an individual’s conduct.

This seems to me to be especially true of neoliberalism, which is as much a practice of the self as it is a government policy. As much as neoliberalism theoretically reimagines society as a marketplace, as competition between self-interested individuals, the breakdown of social structures such as unions practically accomplishes the same thing. It encourages individuals to see themselves not as “workers” in a political sense, who have something to gain through solidarity and collective organization, but as “companies of one.” They become individuals for whom every action, from taking courses on a new computer software application to having their teeth whitened, can be considered an investment in human capital. As Eric Alliez and Michel Feher write: “Corporations’ massive recourse to subcontracting plays a fundamental role in this to the extent that it turns the workers’ desire for independence…into a “business spirit” which meets capital’s growing need for satellites” (In “The Luster of Capital” published in the first Zone collection). Neoliberalism makes it harder to think of opposition between “objectifying” and “subjectifying” as an opposition between domination and agency. In neoliberalism governmentality is subcontracted, we govern ourselves.

Christian Laval has written an interesting study of neoliberalism, or really the prehistory of neoliberalism, in a book called L’homme économique: essai sur les raciness du néoliberalisme, which also stresses the untenable nature of this division between object and subject. Central to Laval’s argument is a thorough reading of Bentham, a reading that moves beyond the panopticon to Bentham’s understanding of the role of reputation and publicity in a free market society. In such a society, where reputation and image are integral to economic exchanges, determining how and if one gets, hired, bought from etc., everyone is simultaneously policing and policed. As Laval writes, “The primary panoptic apparatus [dispositif] is society itself as a space of mutual surveillance.” Thus, following the provocations of Lemke and Laval, the new Foucault would not try to salvage agency, to oppose the work of subjectification to that of obectification, but to see how in neoliberalism our agency, our self-interest and self-policing, is a form of subjection.

It seems to me that such an inquiry would be more interesting than yet another reconsideration of Foucault’s essay on the enlightenment.

Marx and Averroes: Communism of the Intellect

While there has been a great deal of writing about Marx’s idea of the “general intellect” in circles of post-operaismo, little has been said about the anomalous nature of the concept. Appearing in the Grundrisse the concept appears to be completely orphaned, cut off from not only any connection with the rest of Marx’s thought, but with the history of philosophy in general. It is perhaps for this reason that the term appears in English in Marx’s writing, a foreign idea. The passage in which the term appears is as follows:

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 (Grundrisse pg. 706).

What sets the concept apart from the rest of Marx’s thought, as well as the history of philosophy altogether, is the idea of the productivity of social knowledge, of thought as something that is both incorporeal, residing in no one individual, and concrete, directly having effects. One could argue that this idea is not entirely without precursor in Marx, that Marx continually “flirted” with this problem, from ideology, to fetishism, and through the discussions of the divisions of mental and manual labor. Even so, the concept, and the problem it entails, is completely alien to western thought, which has tended to posit the intellect as always the intellect of an individual.

Thus it is interesting and surprising to see Giorgio Agamben invent a lineage for this concept. In the short essay “Form of Life,” Agamben writes the following:

We can communicate with others only through what in us—as much as in others—has remained potential, and any communication is first of all communication not of something in common but of communicability itself…That is why modern political philosophy does not begin with classical thought, which had made of contemplation, of the bios theoreticos, a separate and solitary activity…but rather only with Averroism, that is, with the thought of the one and only intellect common to all human beings, and crucially with Dante’s affirmation—in De Monarchia—of the inherence of the multitude to the very power of thought...(Means without Ends pg. 10).

Agamben completes this passage with an overt reference to the diffuse intellectuality of Marx’s general intellect. Now, Agamben’s interest in Averroes, and in Medieval Thought in general, dates back to at least to Stanzas (from 1977). Anyone who reads Agamben is accustomed to these jarring conjunctions, which put Aquinas next to Debord, Marx and Grandville, etc, but in this case the conjunction suggests a larger point of overlap. Agamben is referring to the problem of the active (or agent) intellect and potential (or material) intellect in Islamic discussions of Aristotle. The discussion has to do with Aristotle’s assertion in De Anima that the mind must have both a matter and an agent or cause. In the case of the mind it must be an entirely potential matter with no property of its own, since the mind must be able to think the intelligible nature of anything whatsoever. This problem gets a larger discussion after Aristotle than it does in Aristotle. In the various Islamic philosophers which have addressed this question, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, both the matter and agent are understood to be something transindividual, even cosmological, a capacity for thought and an agent for thought that exceeds the confines of the individual mind. In fact the individual mind, the thoughts that an individual has at a given moment are only a small part of what one can potentially think, a philosopher is not always thinking philosophically, a poet poetically, etc, potential always exceeds the actual.

While Agamben’s interest in this seem to be primarily focused on rethinking the relation between potentiality and actuality, I am interested in this conjunction for three reasons. First, it underscores the “communism of thought,” the fact that both the matter of thought, language, concepts, and images, and the agent of thought, that which provokes thought, are never the products of a solitary mind, but collective products. Second, they have been so not just since the internet, but since humans began to think with conceps and words. (Which is not to say that there have not been changes with the role of thought in the productive process.) Finally, it offers an interesting way to “practice philosophy” after Marx; rather than search for a precursor to Marx’s concept, it takes a concept from Marx and tries to find a conceptual articulation that does justice to it. This is the same thing that is happening with some of the work on Spinoza. (Incidentally Spinoza’s thought of “common notions” could be used to expand the idea of the “general intellect.”)

The All Seeing Eye

So I have made at least one mention of The Evens on this blog before, making a link to their song about vowels. However, I have not really expressed the particular fondness I have for this band, a fondness based in large part on their stripped down but intense sound. I also love the band for the way in which their aesthetic can be understood as an answer a very particular existential question: How to maintain fidelity to youthful rebellion as one gets older?

That is a little awkwardly phrased, but I thought that the Badiou term was appropriate. Let me explain. First, as a general background point, in the United States radical politics has been identified with youth culture, anarchism is tied to punks, peace to hippies, etc. (If I wanted to continue writing this in Badiouisms, I would say that radical politics has been sutured to adolescent counterculture.) Thus, making it very difficult to think of how one can maintain such political commitments into adulthood. A grown up anarchist, an adult anti-war activists, the phrases suggest the caricature of an aging hippy with a ponytail comb-over. Radical politics are for the young, for those who have not learned the ways of the world. That old saying about "anyone who isn't a socialist at twenty having no heart" and so on carries particular weight here.

One half of The Evens is Ian Mackaye, famous for such bands as Minor Threat, Embrace, and Fugazi. A living icon of sorts. Now he could perhaps follow the icons of a previous generation in continuing to market nostalgia, perhaps a Minor Threat reunion tour? After all it worked for The Sex Pistols. Or give up entirely. Instead we have The Evens. The Evens have what could be described a more mature sound, played sitting down, no more jumping around; so they have left some of the kid's stuff to the kids. At the same time they have not sacrificed the core of rebellion. If anything their songs are even more direct than at least Fugazi; the chorus of "Everyone knows," which is about the current administration is quite simply, "Everyone knows you are a liar."

So one can grow old and still be punk as fuck.

Of course given my age, I almost have to believe this to be possible. I just got back from seeing The Evens live. I wont say that I was the oldest person at the show, there were some adults who brought their kids to the all ages show. I did, however, run into a few students there. One of whom pointed out that I was probably old enough to have seen Fugazi. Yes, I am that old.

One final note on the show itself. Ian Mackaye was very much what one would expect. The title of this post comes from a comment he made about a kid who had brought his laptop to record the show for Youtube. Which prompted a rant about the all seeing eye, the desire to tape everything, record everything (one could add blog everything) rather than experience it. Mackaye's impromptu lectures are as much a part of the show as the music, and all of well known topics were covered, punk breaking down the wall between performer and audience, the war, and even a brief digression about cadence. Amy Farina has a quieter intensity, focusing on singing, only really speaking up to mock Ian as a walking encyclopedia . They complement each other well.

My New Favorite Movie

I had heard about this six hour film about the Paris Commune, but for some reason I was under the mistaken impression that it was a film by Chris Marker. I am not sure why I thought that, other than the fact that Chris Marker is one of the few directors who I could imagine making a six hour film about the Paris Commune. Anyway, it certainly was not the sort of film that I would have expected to find at my local video store. Don't get me wrong it is a very good video store, a great one in fact, but even they cannot work miracles. They do not have much Chris Marker, for example, and whenever I ask about Europa '51, they calmly point out that it does not exist in any format.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across La Commune (de Paris, 1871) at the video store the other day. I was wandering through the video store looking for something to complete my rent one get one free deal on "Thrifty Thursday" (my primary choice was Fay Grim, a total disappointment) when it just sort of jumped out at me. Even as I rented it, I was not sure that I would have the energy to watch a film that long. I found it utterly compeling, however, a real joy.

The film was made with primarily amateur actors, filmed entirely in a large warehouse, minimally redecorated to suggest the alleys and cafés of nineteenth century Paris. I know that those do not sound like selling points, but they are. The movie is made of equal parts documentary verisimilitude and anachronism; the action is punctuated by texts that detail the events of the commune, while at the same time part of the narrative is told by TV Newscasts on the competing networks "Versailles TV" and "Commune TV." Reporters from "Commune TV" debate the role of censorship in the revolution, while the talking heads on "Versailles TV" dismisses the commune as the product of a few foreign agitators. The combination of fact and fiction really pays off in the final hours of the film, as scenes of actors in character debating the actions of the commune and its various committee and decrees are spliced together with scenes of the same actors, now out of character, discussing the meaning of the commune and revolution to day. As the text linked to above, and the documentary included with the film, indicate the making of this film was for many of the people involved a life changing experience. So much so that many of them continued to meet and act in the spirit of the commune. In the end the film convinces you that this is the only way to make a film of the commune. The only way to represent collective action is through collective action.

So, I am curious if anyone has seen this, or any of Peter Watkins other films, or has thoughts.

The Zombie as Critic

If I were Slavoj Zizek, I would begin this post with something to the effect that each period in history gets the monsters it deserves. These monsters express a fundamental contradiction at the heart of reality, a particular social nightmare. Thus while the nineteen-nineties may have been the decade of the vampire, from the brooding Goth vampires of Anne Rice to the nightmarishly adolescent vampires of Buffy, the first decade of this century has clearly been the decade of the zombie. The zombie movie has come back in multiple forms, from horror to comedy, and has even given rise to various “pseudo-zombies” such as the rage infected of the 28…films and the “reavers” of Firefly. There are even zombie books such as Max Brook’s World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide.

The zombie film carries particular heavy symbolic baggage, placed upon it by the genre’s creator George Romero, to serve as a metaphor or allegory (to use Shaviro’s term) for something about reality. Ever since Romero’s “living dead” wandered through the shopping mall, the zombie film has been inseparable from a social critique. The political subtext is not just tacked onto these films as some kind of didactic message, but stems directly from the narrative of the film. Romero’s zombies are so slow and lumbering that any destructive power that they have must be an effect of internal tensions within humanity. In each of Romero’s films it is ultimately the fissures within society, fissures of class, race, and gender, that lead to the zombie’s victory over the living. It is true that some films have avoided this burden of subtext, case in point the remake of Dawn of the Dead, which eschews the original’s anti-consumerism for a vaguely nihilistic apocalypse. The 28… films seem to embrace the imperative of subtext, making allusions to everything from fears of contagion to the contagious nature of violence itself.

What interested me about the first film, 28 Days Later, is the way in which it uses the geographical isolation of the UK as an element of its plot structure. One of the central questions of the first film has to do with the scope of the “rage infection” itself: does it encompass the globe, or is it limited to the island nation of the UK? This question is answered in the film by the memorable shot of the jet contrails in the sky. This could be seen as a sign of hope, that all is not lost. However, it also suggests that the UK is simply quarantined from the rest of the world. There is something horrific about the contrast between the apocalyptic violence on the ground and the image of the jet streaming peacefully overhead. What makes it horrific is that this is not just something invented by the film, but is in actuality a occurring event. All around the world jets full of businessmen and tourists coast blissfully unaware of the struggles for basic survival that rages below. At one point in the film a character imagines that life goes on outside of the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the UK, conjuring up images of people watching “The Simpsons.” What the character of the film imagines is us, the audience who seeks out horrors on the screen in a world full of horror.

The first film deals with the relation between what Balibar calls “ultra-objective violence,” the violence of the quarantine or embargo that simply renders a part of society expendable, and “ultra-subjective violence,” not just in the form of the “infected” of the film, but the soldiers who have become violently corrupt. In Balibar’s thought these two forms of violence are never separate, but exist in a dense “overdetermined” dialectic that it is necessary to untangle. As Balibar writes, discussing Bernard Ogilvie’s concept of a “l’homme jetable,” a disposable human being, individuals left to the ravages of AIDs, malnutrition, and ethnic battles.

“The “disposable human being” is indeed a social phenomenon, but it tends to look, at least in some cases, like a ‘natural’ phenomenon, or a phenomenon of violence in which the boundaries between what is human and what is natural, or what is post-human and what is post-natural, tend to become blurred; what I would be tempted to call an ultra-objective form of violence, or cruelty without a face; whereas the practices and theories of ethnic cleansing confront us with what I would call ultra-subjective forms of violence, or cruelty with a Medusa face.”

In the second film, 28 Weeks Later, the dialectic of types of violence is almost entirely absent. The soldiers in this film are no longer the unstable but charismatic faces of violence of the first one, they are, for the most part, pure functionaries of orders, automatons of calculated risk and procedure. The narrative of the second film deals with the attempt to repopulate and repatriate London twenty-eight weeks after the rage infection, hence the title. The US Army is undertaking the mission that can only be called, quite literally, “nation building.” The soldiers are there not so much to protect the new population but to ensure the success of the mission, even if this means killing the people in order to stop the infection. The central horror of the film takes place in the scenes in which the military firebombs part of London. Thus, to paraphrase an infamous saying, “Bombing London in order to save London.” It is worth noting that the allusions to Iraq are quite heavy in this film, right down to a green zone and an enemy that cannot be eradicated.

What is somewhat disappointing about the second film is the way in which it dispenses with the structural conflict between types of violence in favor of a narrative focused around responsibility. The film opens with a horrific scene of betrayal, as the central character abandons his wife to the violence of the infected to save his own life. This sets up the question of guilt and culpability. What is more central to film is the fact that this act has unintended consequences that set the rest of the plot in motion. The focus of the film is thus not so much responsibility in the face of a horrific situation, which would be interesting, but the unintended effects of individual actions. In the end, the film would seem to suggest that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” in that the acts of heroism and responsibility only serve to further the spread of the infection.

I suppose it is possible to see the second film as indicating the inadequacy of individual responsibility in the face of both the objective violence of markets and law and the subjective violence of hatred and corruption. However, it seems more likely that it will be understood cynically as simply underscoring the impossibility of acting responsibly in a corrupt world.

Last Communist Standing 3-D: The Commons

If you have the glasses I believe this picture will be in 3-D. I would have made the entire post in 3D, but who really wants a buch of words jumping out at them?

As I stated in a previous post, I consider Badiou and Rancière’s work on "the axiom of equality" as well as Negri and Virno’s work on “the commons” to be important aspects for a renewal of communist thought. (I could also say the same for Balibar’s work on equaliberty.) Communist, and not Marxist, first, because as it has been documented Marx had little to say about communism, and second, because it is less a matter of citation of textual authority than drawing out the logics of political practice. Finally, such works deal with the axiom or the ideal that one struggles for, rather than what one struggles against: elaborating a theory of communism rather than furthering the critique of capital.

So, how to define the commons? In one of Negri’s latest books, published in French as Fabrique de porcelaine: pour une nouvelle grammaire du politique, the common is defined through the old problem of the relation between public and private. As Negri states, following arguments that are as old as Marx’s writing, capitalist appropriation is always private while its form, that of contractual law, is public, defined by the state. Capital is thus neither public nor private, it is what Marx refers to as a “social power.” The liminal position of capital only increases as it appropriates not only the physical aspects of labor but language, science, and social knowledge, what Marx calls he “general intellect.” The common must thus be thought as the inverse of capital, occupying the same liminal space. It is neither public nor private, collective nor individual, but the ground through which such distinctions are made.

Three things make this argument interesting. One, as it takes as its starting point the contradictions within capital itself. This is a departure from some of Negri’s definitions of the common, which are often excessively celebratory. Secondly, in that Negri writes of the emergence of the common from the transformation of capital, it stresses the fact that Negri’s understanding of the common has little to do with a nostalgia for “the commons” for pre-capitalist relations of shared use. Capital is criticized from the future it makes possible not the past that it destroys. Finally, it draws out one of the strengths of the concept of the common and that is ambiguous or liminal nature. This comes out must strongly in the work of Paolo Virno, for whom the common (or the multitude, a term which is thoroughly intertwined with the meaning of the former), is situated at a point of indistinction between collective and individual; public and private; work and action (to use Arendt’s categories).

This last point is perhaps the most important, the common is not the collective, nor is it any term, such as society that could be understood to stand above or beyond the individual. The idea of the common is inseparable from rethinking these oppositions from the perspective of “the production of subjectivity.” As Negri and Hardt write in Multitude “Subjectivity, in other words, is produced through cooperation and communication and, in turn, this produced subjectivity itself produces new forms of cooperation and communication, which in turn produce new subjectivity, and so forth.” The concept of the common is inseparable from a new thought of subjectivity one that moves beyond the opposition of individual and collective. The very things that individuate us, a manner of thinking, speaking, inhabiting the world, are drawn from the common, and the common does not exist outside these acts of individuation. The common produces subjectivity and subjectivity produces the common. To quote Negri once again, “It follows that subjectivity is not something interior placed before an ‘exterior’ that we define as language; on the contrary, like language it is another mode of common being and nothing more.”

To return to the theme of this series of posts, the communism of Badiou and Negri, this insistence on the intersection of the common and the production of subjectivity is based on very different grounds than the former’s axioms of equality. In Badiou’s case (as well as that of Rancière) it is a matter of communism based on the axiom, or invariant of equality. Equality is an axiom, and a prescription, a here and now insistence, indexed only to the generic equality of thought. While in Negri’s thought (and in post-operaismo) it is a matter of a communism of the common, a communism of the production of the common, in which capital’s subsumption of the capacitites for language, knowledge, and desires, produces a common ensemble of capacities, the conditions for not only he creation of wealth, but also the transformation of society.

There are very different philosophical anthropologies underlying these two concepts. In the first it is the matter of isolating a generic invariant, thought or speech as that which precedes and exceeds the hierarchies and classifications of any social order. While in the second, it is a matter of locating the historical nexus of productive capacities that defines the common. The risk of the first approach, the axiom of equality, is that it overlooks the actual divisions and mutations of thought and speech that are produced through historical structures. While the latter carries with it all of the baggage of any historicism; just look at all of problems and debates surrounding the attempt to identify the present through the concepts of “immaterial labor” and “real subsumption.” The strength of both these perspectives, and the debate that opens up between them, is that they foreground the idea of a different account of the social order and the human subject, against the consensus that locates a self interested individual at the basis of all of history, and any social order.

Spinoza and Marx: Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together

It is no secret that I consider Marx and Spinoza to be “two great tastes that taste great together.” I also really like Reese's peanut butter cups, and have fond memories of their old commercials, which involved people walking down the street eating from jars of peanut butter only to collide with people eating chocolate bars. This is why jars of peanut butter should only be consumed in the kitchen or possibly while watching television. It is just too dangerous to eat peanut butter in public. I consider pushing this analogy to extremes (“hey, your immanent ontology is in my socio-historical critique!”), but I decide to spare you that, dear reader.

Last Communist Standing II: This Time it’s Personal

This is something of a follow up to my earlier post on Badiou and Negri. This is not actually more personal, I just think that the second in an any series needs to have as its tag line either “This time it’s personal” or “The War.” The third in any series then should be in 3-D (a la “Jaws” and “Friday the Thirteenth”). The fourth is then set in space, and the fifth can then only take place in “Da Hood.” There is a science to sequels, just look at the Leprechaun films.

Anyway, what I really wanted to do was to add the following to the Badiou and Negri comparison. With respect to a renewal of communist thought, the writing of Negri and Badiou could be seen to represent two major trends: in the first case a communism based on the axiom of equality and, in the second case, a communism based on a reconsideration of the common.

The first is, in a general sense, a perspective shared by Badiou, Ranciere, and Sylvan Lazarus. Defining characteristic that could be said to unite all of these thinkers is that in each case equality is an axiom, a presupposition for politics, and not something to be realized. To state that equality is an axiom for politics is to remove politics from the idea of a program or a plan, since equality means that there is always the possibility of a political event. Rancière goes the furthest is maintaining the anarchic dimension of the axiom of equality. As Rancière writes in Disagreement:

“Politics only occurs when these mechanisms are stopped in their tracks by the effect of a presupposition that is totally foreign to them yet without which none of them could ultimately function: the presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone, or the paradoxical effectiveness of the sheer contingency of any order.”

Equality means that any order, any hierarchy, is ultimately illegitimate. Especially since, as Rancière points out, any hierarchical order makes the point of explaining itself to those who are inferior, simultaneously acknowledging and denying their equality in understanding. While equality has a disruptive effect on any attempt to ground politics, there is still the question of its ground. What justifies such an axiom? This might be the wrong question, and it is quite possible that it bears the ideological weight of the times that asserts the equality is nonexistent (after all nature is filled with hierarchies) and thus impossible. (Badiou’s The Century has some interesting remarks mapping the ideological vicissitudes of the last century according to shifting emphasis given to one or the other of the terms in the formula “liberty, equality, and fraternity.”) However, I still think that it is an important question to ask, if only because the answers get to some interesting points of distinction.

In the case of Rancière the answer would seem to speech, the equal capacity for speech. This in some sense shows the influence of Aristotle on Rancière. In many ways Rancière could be understood as working through the connection that Arisotle initially asserted between mankind as a speaking animal and a political animal. However, Rancière argues that far from being an anthropological constant speech is in some sense “always already” political. As Rancière argues “This is because the possession of language is not a physical capacity. It is a symbolic division, that is a symbolic determination of the relation between the order of speech and that of bodies…” Thus, speech refers back to the distribution of the sensible. Despite this move, it does seem to me that speech or rather language, the language through which political orders are articulated and contested, remains something of a ground, or a basis, of this axiom of equality.

In many respects Badiou seems less cautious with respect to the anthropological ground of this axiom. For Badiou it is not speech which provides the basis for equality, but thought, or as Lazarus writes, “man thinks.’ Equality is not a political goal to be realized, but a fundamental axiom, a starting point for politics based on the universal human capacity for thought. For Badiou there is an anthropological division at the heart of mankind, between thought, the human capacity to maintain itself in fidelity to truth, and interest, the preservation of self that mankind shares with all animals. Behind every “Thermidor,” every attempt to put an end to the political process, every reaction which occludes the event, “there is the idea that an interest lies at the heart of every subjective demand.”

The axiom of equality is thus not without its anthropological postulates. Postulates which refer to human capacities which are at once generic, shared by all, and ahistorical, thought and speech do not substantially change over time. Although one should not be too quick to simply assume the first. In fact what strikes me about this generic equality of thought is how it immediately calls to mind a very different sort of thought about anthropology in what Etienne Balibar calls “anthropological difference.’ What Balibar calls “anthropological difference” is a difference that fulfills two conditions: first, it is a necessary component of any definition of the human (such as language); and second, the dividing line can never finally be objectively drawn. Examples of this would include sexual difference and the difference between sickness and health. In each case there is no division of humanity into men and women (or the healthy and the sick) without remainders, intersections, and identities that would ultimately need to be policed and patrolled. Balibar includes the division of labor, or what he calls “intellectual difference”, within this category. Humankind cannot be defined without the idea of thought (as Spinoza writes: “Man Thinks”), but this general definition is divided by the practices and institutions which determine and dictate the division between the “ignorant” and the “educated” or between “manual” and “mental” labor.

Balibar’s concept stands as a necessary correction to the work of Rancière and Badiou. One that introduces what I see as a necessarily materialist dimension, since these divisions relate ultimately to the division of mental and manual labor, that is the historical production of divisions and differences. As such this division is complicated by technological history, which continually redraws the line between head and hand, through automation and labor saving devices, thus fundamentally rewriting the very schema or idea of the human body. Through the use of computers and technology intellectual operations are broken down and subject to the same mechanization as physical operations, while at the same time other intellectual operations are "somatized," inscribed in the body, as in "the aesthetization of the executive as decision maker, intellectual, and athlete." The division between head and hand determines and modifies the very figure, and ideal, of humanity into "body-men" and "men without bodies." These images of perversions of the human are ambiguous objects of both fear and idealization. For example: "body-men" human beings reduced to brute physicality by the labor process are objects of both an aesthetization and idealization, as athletes, and fear, as contemporary savages. As such the division between mental and manual labor is integral to, without determining, the imagery of various racisms and other forms of conflict, which are in part conflicts over the proper identity of the human, over the ideal of the "correct" integration of mind and body. The division of mental and manual labor is the point of intersection of the figure of the idea of humanity, as it is envisioned and lived, and the historical transformations of technology and the economy.

However, the direction that I wanted to go in was not to contest the generic aspect of equality, its anthropological basis in speech or thought, but its ahistorical basis. As I stated in the outset, what I want to do is contrast the axiom of equality to the materialism of the common in the work of Negri, Virno, etc. But I guess that is going to have to wait for the sequel. So stay tuned for “The Last Communist Standing III: In 3-D.” (I am going to have to figure out a way to distribute those cardboard glasses.)

Blogcapsule

[blägkapsel] noun. 1. A blog which was regularly updated for a period of time, but has since fallen into neglect. It remains on the web as a sort of time capsule of the period in which its author was active. 2. What "unemployed negativity" was in the danger of becoming.

It has obviously been a very long time since I have updated this blog. The reasons for this are quite mundane, the usual end of the semester crunch combined with a conference and a brief period of travel in which I was off the grid for a little bit. These mundane reasons have combined to break the habit of "blogging" so now, even when I have the time (arguably), I do not have the inclination. I have even gone back to writing random thoughts in my notebook instead of posting them here. I am now trying to get the habit back and am taking advantage of some jetlag which has me wide awake at 3:47 AM to get back into the habit. This blog was begun in jetlag and in jetlag it shall be reborn.

Of course starting the habit is not the same as having an idea. The only glimmer of an idea that I have right now has to do with title of this post. As a reader of blogs I have noticed that more often than not, when the author (or authors) of a blog stop posting, the blog continues to linger online for a long period of time, preserving the moment that it was active. This brings up an aspect of the relationship of the internet to temporality that one does not often think about.

It has become commonplace (even banal) to indentify the internet in general with immediacy, it is the place where one goes for up to the minute news, commentary, etc. Thus, the internet easily serves as a kind of technological stand in for the decline of historical comprehension in contemporary capitalism. The reduction of time and history to the instant and pure speed of communication. However, as I have already indicated this image does not fit the internet itself, which perserves the traces of not only various blogs but many things. One can still find archived discussions on listservs when performing searches on Google. On the internet the past and present coexist, appearing on the same list of search results. Like Freud's use of the ruins of Rome as a metaphor for the unconscious, past and present exist side by side without distinction or differentiation. I am not sure what this says about time, or historicity, other than that the temporality of the internet (and perhaps of society in general) is not just the pure present but an unthinking and unreflecting retention of the past. Nothing is forgotten. To quote Deleuze and Guattari, “a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed.”

No Admittance Except on Business

This is going to be one of those posts where I stitch together a few quotes, make a few comments that are somewhere between banal and provocative, and leave it at that. I consider this to be fair warning.

If I had to pick my favorite passage in all of Capital, it would be the following, which is the transition from Part Two to Part Three:

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

This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all.

On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.

(OK, that is probably more than could be called a “passage,” it is more like page). There is so much that could be said about the sheer rhetorical density of this passage, the allusions, sarcasm, and characterizations. I suspect that it was a good writing day for Marx. Marx’s general point is the division between the sphere of production and exchange. A division that offers another account of ideology or fetishism; ideology is a necessarily partial view of society, based on the market, a partial view which takes itself for the whole. The “eden of the innate rights of man” is an after image of market activity itself. Lately, I have been wondering if it is possible to push Marx on this point. I wonder if he may be understood to be saying something about the relationship between work and representation. What if the no admittance sign obscures work, and production, from the realm of social representation?

I have seen this theme come up a few places as of late. First, I am reminded of a theme that appears in Anti-Oedipus. As Deleuze and Guattari argue repeatedly in that book,“desire is not recorded in the same way that it is produced.” The entire thematic of the production of desire against the theater of desire is one form that this distinction takes. Deleuze and Guattari also suggest that since production is upresentable, idealist explanations rush in to fill the void. As Deleuze and Guattari write: “Let us remember once again one of Marx's caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of the wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and relations of production. The product appears to be all the more specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends.”

In a short piece titled “The Factory as Event Site” Alain Badiou goes the furthest in suggesting that there is a general division between production and presentation. As Badiou writes: “Whomsoever is in civil society is presented, since presentation defines sociality as such. But the factory is precisely separated from society, by wall, security guards, hierarchies, schedules…That is because its norm, productivity, is entirely different from general social presentation.”
Finally, Rancière relates the “unpresentability” of labor to the “distribution of the sensible, a particular articulation of what is seen and felt, rather than a general ontological problem. As Rancière writes of the exclusion of the worker from public space in the nineteenth century: “That is, relations between workers’ practice—located in private space and in a definite temporal alternation of labor and rest—and a form of visibility that equated to their public invisibility relations between their practice and the presupposition of a certain kind of body, of the capacities and incapacities of that body—the first of which being their incapacity to voice their experience as a common experience in the universal language of public argumentation.”
Whatever the reasons, ontological, aesthetic, or political, the division between work and representation, would seem to necessitate two things: democratic politics, politics of representation are ideological, or rather fetishistic at their very core, and, second, the politics of work can only exist as a disruption of this order.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 1922-2007

I have been trying to write something in honor of Kurt Vonnegut for some time now. While it has been awhile since I read his books, I poured through them in high school, and they were quite influential on my young impressionable mind. So in lieu of an actual post, I am going to post the following email that my father sent to my brother and I on the day of Vonnegut's death (which is fitting since most of the Vonnegut I read in high school were his old books).

Guys:

I am sure that you have noted the death of Kurt Vonnegut. In my life he played a significant role in: (i) questioning the assumptions that are implicit in our daily lives; (ii) valuing our humanity and (iii) and the role of irony in maintaining some semblance of sanity. He addressed with considerable insight important themes in modern life:

1. Corporate Capitalism’s attack on individuality and community--Player Piano

2. Corrosive effects of consumer culture--God Bless you Mr. Rosewater

3. Crimes committed in the “fight against evil”--Slaughterhouse Five

4. Perversion of science as a weapon--Cat’s Cradle

5. Then emptiness of entrepreneurialism--Breakfast of Champions

He has been dismissed as a comic outsider speaking only to the disaffected. However, I believe that he will be recognized as someone who illuminated modern culture and focused on important issues. The NY Times obituary is very good and I urge you to read it.

Unfortunately, as was evident in his more recent writing, he was unable to take comfort from his own insights and had given up on humanity. Regardless of the effects on him, I love his writing for its intelligence and humor and will miss him greatly.

Love

Dad

Those Who Dream with Their Eyes Open

Recently, I picked up Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy by Stephen Duncombe. I am not really sure why, it is not the sort of thing I generally read. I would classify it as pop-progressive, and I find that in general I do not have time to read those sorts of things. For example it took nearly a decade, and several friends, students, and colleagues recommending it to me, for me to get around to reading No Logo.

The book takes as its starting point the following anecdote about the Bush administration, relayed in The New York Times:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

While many within the “center-left-progressive” camp have cited this passage to stress the Bush administration’s disconnect from reality, claiming with pride to be part of the “reality-based community,” Duncombe takes it in an opposite direction, pointing out how ineffective the “murmured” enlightenment principles have been within politics. Ultimately he argues that “progressives” (to use his term) need to understand the constitutive nature of the imagination; the way the imagination, desire, and fantasy constitute community, subjectivity, and investments. Now, the book is not primarily theoretical in its orientation. It deals with specific sites of the imagination, video games, advertising, celebrity-worship, and Las Vegas, all of which are usually held in contempt, and tries to reconstruct their radical potential. This is done through the example of such political movements as “Billionaires for Bush” and “Reclaim the Streets.”

Now, I am in fundamental agreement with this book, I still have my suspicions about “Grand Theft Auto,” however, but aside from that I basically agree. What strikes me is that his central criticism of progressives, the idea that politics should eschew imagination, desire, and fantasy in favor of truth, reason, and the force of the better argument, is not just a bias on the left. It is also what I call “the spontaneous ideology of philosophy,” the idea that the “better argument always wins”: that truth has an effectivity in and of itself, and once enunciated and circulated it will change the world. Duscombe does not address this dimension. Like I said the book is not very theoretical, aside from references to Debord and Machiavelli, it addresses practical instances.

Of course there have been a few philosophers who have broken with this ideology; notably Marx, Machiavelli, Spinoza, and, oddly enough, perhaps even J.S. Mill. I was struck to discover again the following passage in Mill: “It is a piece of idle sentiment sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either.” In some ways this reads like a muted echo of Spinoza’s idea of limited effectivity of the true insofar as it is true, but ultimately I think that Mill is conflicted on this point: propagating “true” principles while at the same time recognizing the forces of custom, habit, affects, and fashion, have more force than any principle.

Well, I seem to have blogged myself into a corner. It is not my intention to discuss the contradictions of Mill. I guess I will end with two projects that I think need more work: First, the constitutive dimension of the imagination; and, Second, the critique of the “spontaneous ideology of philosophy.”

Nightmares of the Present (to be followed shortly with a post on dreams)

Wendy Brown’s “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization” (Political Theory 34/6) is a great article, part of a growing literature of critical philosophical responses to Neoliberalism. (Well, that sentence is a wee-bit hyperbolic, since I am primarily thinking of two other things: Brown’s essay in Edgework and Foucault’s Naissance de la Biopolitique, the latter of which is technically almost thirty years old). It is primary strength is that it takes as a philosophical problem the articulation of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.

It has been commonplace on the center-left to dismiss the relationship between these two political “rationalities” (to use Brown’s term) as one that is purely strategic: some dark cabal between Dick Cheney and James Dobson. Or, to cite the argument of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas, to see the neoconservatism of the right as simply the sheep’s clothing of values (technically a lamb) worn by the wolf of privatization. Brown, however, argues for a more intimate, even essential, connection, based upon their shared anti-democratic tendencies. Neoliberalism’s tendency to privatize social issues (to depoliticize them), not just in the literal sense of turning public spaces to private profit, but in the sense that every social problem becomes a private matter, addressed by commodities, crime by gated communities, pollution by bottled water, etc., paves the way for neoconservatism.

At first it would seem that these two rationalities are linked by more of what they oppose than what they have in common. What they oppose are first and foremost equality, which neoliberalism can only see as an authoritarian imposition on the “natural” competition and hierarchies of the market and neoconservatism sees as a violation of the authority of church and family. But they are also opposed to freedom and democracy defined in anything other than individualistic terms. However, the two rationalities do not just share the same enemy, which would have to be called democracy, or democratization. They also work on the same terrain or conditions, reinforcing each other as they oppose each other. As Brown writes: “What this suggests is that the moralism, statism, and authoritarianism of neoconservatism are profoundly enabled by neoliberal rationality, even as neoconservatism aims to limit and supplement some of neoliberalism’s effects, and even as the two rationalities are not concordant. Neoliberalism does not simply produce a set of problems that neoconservatism addresses or, as critics claim, operate as neoconservatisms’s corporate economic plank. Rather, neoliberal political rationality…has inadvertently prepared the ground for profoundly antidemocratic ideas and practices to take root in the culture and subject.” Thus it is possible to see both as privatizations, as reductions of the social to the individual. Neoliberalism reduces the social to the individual of the market, defined by calculations of cost and profit. Neoconservatism reduces society to the individual of morality, defined by faith and sin.

What strikes me about the general problem of neoliberalism and neoconservatism is that the very problem appears in fundamental points in the history of philosophy, albeit modified. From a particular perspective one could read Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, specifically the dialectic of “civil society” and the state, as a contradictory logic which demonstrates how the possessive individualism of the market is reinforced by the authoritarian tendencies of the state. As is so often the case, Hegel is most revealing about this in a remark prior to the section on ethical life where he discusses Protestantism (a conceptual stand in for subjectivity) and Catholicism (a conceptual stand in for the objectivity of institutions). “A longing may therefore arise for an objective condition, a condition in which the human being gladly debases himself to servitude and total subjection simply in order to escape the torment of vacuity and negativity. If many Protestants have recently gone over to the Catholic Church, they have done so because they found that their inner life was impoverished, and they reached out for a fixed point, a support, and an authority, even if what was gained was not the stability of thought.” Unlike the latter discussions of civil society and the state, which focus on the structural conditions of competition and overproduction, this remark, which completes part two of The Philosophy of Right, offers an existential understanding of the dialectic.

I foreground this existential, or subjective dimension, in part because of Brown’s remark about the “culture and the subject,” but also because I would like to drawn a point of comparison between dialectics as a logic of the conjuncture and Deleuze and Guattari’s logic of deterritorialization. To quote the famous passage from Anti-Oedipus:

“Civilized modern societies are defined by processes of decoding and deterritorialization. But what they deterritorialize with one hand, they reterritorialize with the other. These neoterritorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; but they are archaisms having a perfectly current function, our modern way of ‘imbricating,’ of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resuscitating old codes inventing pseudo codes or jargons…These modern archaisms are extremely complex and varied. Some are mainly folkloric, but they nonetheless represent social and potentially political forces…. Others are enclaves whose archaism is just as capable of nourishing a modern fascism as of freeing a revolutionary charge…Some of these archaisms take form as if spontaneously in the current of the movement of deterritorialization…Others are organized and promoted by the state, even though the might turn against the state and cause it serious problems (regionalism, nationalism).”

Two things about this passage: First, It is hard not to read this as a version of the relation of neoliberalism and neoconservatism; and, second, it is equally difficult not to read this passage existentially.

By way of a conclusion: I take Brown’s essay to be something of a provocation, an attempt to grasp the logic of the current conjuncture, the intersection of the seemingly opposed rationalities of capital and the state, freedom and authority. To which I would add, or have attempted by way of Hegel, Deleuze, and Guattari, that philosophy is not free of this logic, that perhaps in some form or another all thought of society has tried to grasp the problem of capital and the state, under various names, dialectics, desiring-production, etc.



Finally, I just want to add a note about The Host. A film that could take the mantle of the most biopolitical film of the year. Now it is commonplace to understand horror films as the projection of some cultural anxiety (Godzilla and the Atom Bomb, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and communism), however, I do not think that would apply here. The monster in this film does not stand for anything, if only because the film spends so much time on the “real” threats that it would represent, pollution, disease, chemical weapons, all of these things are given full reign within the plot of the film. These things all appear as “conditions” within the film, in that there is a pretty standard monster movie narrative (tampering with nature creates monster which harms humans and must be destroyed), which is refracted through the lens of biopolitical panic and authority. It gives a vision of a state which pollutes and contaminates the environment while simultaneously offering itself as the only possible protection of this environment.

Love and Cartoons

It starts out a bit slow, but Michael Hardt's discussion of Spinoza's concept of love and political organization reminds me of why I love them both (Hardt and Spinoza).

While you are on Youtube, check this version of The Communist Manifesto illustrated by cartoons:



The voice over is not great. I mean is a little passion too much to ask for? It is the Manifesto after all. The images, however, are not only riddled with nostalgia (Underdog, Rocky and Bullwinkle, etc), but show that there were some really interesting representations of work in old cartoons. Thanks to Tzuchien for the latter.

The Prehistory of Neoliberalism

In Book IV of the Politics, after classifying all of the various types of political constitution monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, etc., Aristotle argues that there are mainly two constitutions, of which all the others are only variations: democracy (rule of the poor, and many) and oligarchy (rule of the rich, and few). The reason for this is quite simply the principle of non-contradiction. It is possible for the same person to be both a farmer and a warrior, a craftsman and judge, thus making possible any combination of positions and tasks (e.g. an agrarian military dictatorship), but it is not possible for the same person to be both rich and poor (1291b). Rich and poor remain irreducible as identities and thus the conflict between the rich and the poor is unavoidable for every constitution.

Aristotle’s assertion of the fundamental nature of class struggle for politics beats The Communist Manifesto to the punch by over two thousand years. It is perhaps not surprising that Alain Badiou cites Aristotle in a chapter of Being and Event dealing with Marxist state theory. As Badiou writes: “Aristotle had already pointed out that the de facto prohibition which prevents thinkable constitutions—those which conform to the equilibrium of the concept—from becoming a reality, and which makes politics into such a strange domain…is in the end the existence of the rich and the poor” (pg. 104). Unlike the Manifesto Aristotle does not propose to overcome this rift through revolution but seeks to manage it by conjoining aspects of democracy and oligarchy. Aristotle argues that one solution is to promote the formation of a middle class. For Aristotle this middle class, neither rich nor poor, is also a “mean” between two extremes politically, it is a class that neither “avoids ruling” or “pursues it” (1295b). Underlying Aristotle’s assertion regarding the virtue of the middle class is an argument that is so contemporary that it is almost unrecognizable: the identification of the social position of the middle class with the political position of the center. What is contemporary about this argument, which is really more of an axiomatic assumption than an argument, is the assertion, that the class which is in the economic middle is also the mean between extremes politically. The middle class is free of the arrogance and major vice of the rich and the malice and petty vice of the poor. They are the moral center of the polis. It turns out, however, that the middle class is as precarious as it is ideal, the middle class is constantly at risk of disappearing into its two extremes. (Two themes that which we might associate with contemporary invocations of the “middle class”: its fundamentally decent and honest nature and its “disappearance” turn out to quite ancient) It is for this reason that Aristotle lists other ways of resolving the tension between the rich and the poor, other ways of protecting the middle from its extremes. One strategy is to place the capital in the middle, equidistant from the small farms and villages, which make up the populace. The people, including the poor, are the permitted to participate in politics by right, but excluding by the mundane facts of life. As Aristotle writes: “For they have enough to live on as long as they keep working, but they cannot afford any leisure time” (1292b27). The rift between the rich and the poor is unavoidable, but it can be managed by other facts that are just as unavoidable. There is only so much time in a day, and given a choice between political participation and making a living the poor will always choose the latter—if it can be called a choice. The translation puts a particular contemporary spin on the matter by foregrounding “leisure time,” suggesting the contemporary situation in which politics is simply the least entertaining of several “leisure time” activities.

Rancière has gone so far as to argue that what we find in Aristotle, the idea of the middle class and the use of the mundane facts of space and timing to manage political conflicts, is the strategy of contemporary politics. “Aristotle is the inventor of…the art of underpinning the social by means of the political and the political by means of the social.” As Rancière writes:

The primary task of politics can indeed be precisely described in modern terms as the political reduction of the social (that is to say the distribution of wealth) and the social reduction of the political (that is to say the distribution of various powers and the imaginary investments attached to them). On the one hand, to quiet the conflict of rich and poor through the distribution of rights, responsibilities and controls; on the other, to quiet the passions aroused by the occupation of the centre by virtue of spontaneous social activities. (On the Shores of Politics pg. 14)

Politics undermines the social by displacing the divisions of the rich and the poor with a unified identity, that of the citizen, or of the nation. At the same time the social or economic activities of work and leisure are used to temper political grievances, the conflict over the distribution of offices. In contemporary terms, Rancière argues that there is a “reduction” of the social by the political whenever national unity is used to ward off the facts and conflicts of social division. The inverse, the reduction of the political by the social, takes place whenever the promise of general economic development, of progress, is offered as a solution to political conflict.

What Rancière finds in Aristotle is a “strategy” that he argues is paradoxically as ancient as it is modern. Aristotle’s text is exemplary in that the double process of the reduction of the political by the social and the political by the social is explicitly articulated. Aristotle explicitly articulates the various strategies or deceptions by which the tension between the rich and the poor can be overcome or displaced. In On the Shores of Politics Rancière is critical of the reduction of democracy to a democracy of consumer choices, “the banal themes of the pluralist society, where commercial competition, sexual permissiveness, world music and cheap charter flights to the antipodes quite naturally create individuals smitten with equality and tolerant of difference.” Thus, suggesting that the reduction of the political by the social has triumphed. At the same time, however, Rancière is quick to distance himself from “metapolitical” critics such as Marx who reduce democracy to a merely an appearance, an after image of the realm of exchange with its “Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.”

What Rancière’s interpretation leaves open, however, is precisely how this “double process” can be related to the contemporary world. What institutions, structures, and organizations perform this dual action of reduction? To what end? This question seems all the more pertinent today in that we are witnessing in the form of “neo-liberalism” a reinforcement of the overlap between the political and the social. The very term “free markets,” the dominant ideal of political and economic life according to neo-liberalism, articulates this overlap and consumes: “free” invokes political ideals of freedom while the term “market” grounds these ideas in economic life. The term “free-markets,” and its associated rhetorics, politicizes economic life, making the market a space of freedom rather than of the production, circulation, and exchange of resources, while at the same time “economizing” politics, freedom becomes a choice between consumer goods. The term “free market,” at least in the manner in which it functions in contemporary polemics, defines politics and economics by each other, simultaneously confusing the two. Thus democracy and free markets become not only conditions of each other, but ultimately the same thing.

In Hatred of Democracy Rancière turns his attention not to neoliberalism, to the practices that reduce democracy to consumer choice, but to the theories quasi-sociological and philosophical, which reduce the politics of democracy to a pop-sociology of consumer society, what he calls the collapse of political, sociological, and economic onto the same plane. What this paves the way for is ultimately a reduction of democracy to an anthropology, or an anthropological opposition between “an adult humanity faithful to tradition, which it institutes as such, and childish humanity whose dream of engendering itself anew leads to self-destruction.” I will say two things about this: one, it is oddly reminiscent of Rancière’s critique of the 1844 Manuscripts, which he argues reduced such terms as value, wealth, and alienation to an anthropological meaning, and two, it is a little disappointing. Now this disappointment may have to do with untranslatable nature of a polemic. Ultimately what Rancière offers is a critique of what we would call in neoconservatism and not neoliberalism, or the juncture between the two.

Mediocrity Rules: Notes from TV Land

Just when I was losing all patience with Battlestar Galactica, the show springs a plot with a general strike. There is nothing like the promise of a general strike to reignite my interest in a television show (Do you hear that Gilmore Girls?). However, I have to say that the actual episode did not live up to the promise, clearly an example of what Sorel would call a political and not a proletarian general strike. Worse than that is making Baltar the author of a radical manifesto. This seemed completely out of character, not to mention ideological, the radical intellectual as self-serving effete. What I enjoy about the character of Baltar is that he is pure opportunism, his evil is simply an effect of weakness. Like Spinoza’s devil he is a being to be pitied. (A more favorable discussion of the show can be found here).

I have become hooked on The Wire as of late, and have watched the whole first season over the last few weeks. I was incredibly reluctant to start watching this show, despite its praise by critics and friends. This is mainly I really do not like cop shows, I have no patience for the various “CSI: Texarkana” and “Law and Order: Traffic Court” that populate television. However, I found myself getting interested in The Wire because it is, as the creators of the show argue, really a show about the decline of the American city and the futility of the war on drugs. More than that I find the most compelling thing about the show to be its representation of the modern relation between the state, which is to say bureaucracy, and capital.

On the surface the first season of the show deals with the Baltimore police’s attempt to break a drug cartel in a housing project. The police are not the pure representatives of good, found in usual shows, but a collection of individuals driven by motivations of career, prejudice, petty revenge, and macho brutality. The series also foregrounds the institutional structure of the police, and not just in the sense of the usual “lone cop against a bureaucracy.” One of the phrases heard throughout the series is “chain of command,” meaning a respect for the structures of institutional hierarchy. The series reveals that as one goes up the chain, dealing with judges, city council, etc., the motivations become more unclear, more political, in the pejorative sense. Case in point: important leads and convictions are squandered when the higher ups decide, after the shooting of a police officer, that they need “drugs on the table,” one of those photo-ops where piles of drugs, money, and guns are displayed as some kind of trophy from the war on drugs. The demand to appear effective outweighs the need to be effective.

It is hard not to think of every theory of bureaucracy that I have ever read while watching the show, from Marx (“the materialism of passive obedience, of faith in authority, of the mechanism of fixed and formalistic behavior…”) to Claude Lefort, as well as my own experience within a state institution. In fact what it reminds me of most of all is a discussion I had with an anthropology professor years ago. It was when I was involved in some political struggle over curriculum reform. The professor explained, in the calm and detached way that one would expect from an anthropologist, how the university functions. The explanation went a little like this: The dedicated members of the faculty are too busy with research, writing, and teaching to really bother with committees, seeking the service appointments that distract the least. Thus, the mediocre professors, the ones with their best years behind them, gravitate to the really important committees, the ones that determine curriculum, tenure, etc. Of course he explained all of this as if he was discussing the rituals of the Yanomamö of Central Brazil, ultimately concluding that the university bureaucracy rewards mediocrity.

Back to The Wire: If the police are the state, then the drug dealers are capital. The latter are brutally inefficient, free of the conflicted motivations of the police/state. In the beginning of the series one cop says to a dealer something to the effect of, “Why is that everything else can be bought and sold without people being killed?” For the conflicted dealer at the center of the show, D’Angelo Barksdale, this becomes something of a utopian dream, the idea of pure business without violence. Over the course of the first season this ideal become increasingly impossible, not only with respect to the drug business, but with respect to capital itself. [Spoilers ahead] It is eventually revealed that the economy of drugs is not the outside, the dark underbelly, of the legitimate economy, but is internal to it, as the money trail leads to connections between the drug trade and real estate speculation, connections that lead to politics etc. Thus, there is no opposition between the state and capital.

Best "Get Your War On" Cartoon ever.

Experiments in Sarcasm

I just got home from going to see Little Children. Not a perfect movie, not by a long shot. For one thing the voice over sounded a little like someone decided to read the actor's directions out loud, in case the audience just wasn't getting it. A few of the scenes were really well done, but the back and forth between the effective scenes and and the pedantic voiceover was a little like reading a good novel only to find that random pages have been torn out and replaced by pages from the Cliffs Notes. But any movie that has Kate Winslet, a discussion of Madame Bovary, and a bunch of Hummels getting smashed to pieces can't be all bad (Although, with respect to the Hummels, the film suffers from a bit from SYMBOLISM. "Quick class what does the playground symbolize?").

I went to this movie alone, something I do quite often nowadays in this solitary phase of my life. I really don't mind going to see movies alone. When it comes down to it movies are not much of a social activity, yes you get to talk before and after, and hopefully there is dinner or drinks or something, but most of the time, during the actual film, you might as well be alone. However, I find that if you are going to the movies alone, it is best to plan the showing accordingly, in general matinees are good, weekdays best of all. Then practically everyone is alone. This particular evening I went to see a movie alone on a Saturday night, which is perhaps not the best choice. Saturday night tends to be filled with couples, this can easily make the transition from alone to lonely.

I got to the film five minutes before it was supposed to start, in general a little late for my taste, but I thought that this would allow me to slip in as the one solitary guy amongst all of the dating couples. Alas, no. There was a huge crowd filling the lobby and spilling out onto the street. Apparently, the last showing of the film had not let out yet, and didn't get out for another fifteen minutes. First, this was awkward. There were many colleagues from the University in the crowd, a few of whom do not even know that I am no longer married. (Well at least I have not told them, I find that word has a way of spreading, and, believe me, when you have difficult news to deliver, the kind that makes you feel like crying, gossip is your friend.) Second, and more importantly for my story, I couldn't quite get past the fact that the last film went over. After all, it is not like this is basketball (do they have overtime in basketball? I hope so. It would really help my point). Movies have a fixed length; in this case 130 minutes. Granted that is a bit long, but it is not like the theater did not know how long the film was. In fact I know from looking at the theater's web site. So I could not contain myself, I made few sarcastic remarks, to everyone and no one. A very uncharacteristic gesture on my part. People seemed to be amused.

Which brings me to the title of this story: once in college participated in psychological experiment on sarcasm. I was something like the mole, or plant, or accomplice (there must be a technical term for this, for the person who appears to be in the experiment but is actually in on it). My friend had the thesis that the conditions for sarcasm are: a) an incompetent authority figure and b) a pointless task. So he had volunteers sign up for what they were told was an experiment on memory. They were then given a lengthy and easy test, matching shapes or some other idiotic task for pages on end. My role was to get the sarcasm going, I would say things like, "This guy has a real winning project" (referring to my friend, when he was out of the room). Despite the fact that my experience this evening confirms one of the theses, nothing calls for sarcasm like incompetent authority, it was not a very succesful experiment, but it was a lot of fun. Since the whole things was filmed, I felt like I had participated in the long history of psychological films; like Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience...

And the Stanford Prison Experiment...

As a philosopher, and one of an anti-humanist materialist orientation, I find it necessary to criticize psychology for its focus on interiority and subjectivity, but I have to admit they have some of the best documentaries. Or maybe it is just the look of the sixties and seventies that makes them so enjoyable, like watching old Twilight Zones or episodes of In Search Of...