This is your TV on Drugs

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


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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

What We Strive For

This is going to sound terrible, but I will say it anyway: the problem with any living philosopher, or political theorist is that they go on living. When a philosopher dies a space opens up between their texts and whatever contemporary problem or situation which one might want to address. It is debatable that Spinoza would recognize himself in the idea of the multitude, or if Bergson would embrace the vitalist accounts of contemporary society, but this does not matter. As long as a philosopher is still alive, capable of commenting on current events, then it is tempting to take their word as the last word on the matter at hand.

This seems like an oddly appropriate way to introduce Massimo De Angelis’ The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. De Angelis is not explicitly concerned with the tricky matter of offering an interpretation of a living philosopher, but he does offer a different interpretation of school of thought than its living epigones. The school of thought is autonomist Marxist, and the epigones in question are Antonio Negri and Maurizio Lazzarato, who have replaced class composition and self-valorization with immaterial labor the end of value. De Angelis presents the difference as “between a politics that looks to creative, immaterial workers almost as the vanguard of the revolution and those like myself who look instead to the Zapatistas and other similar commoners, especially the indigenous, the peasants, the just in time factory workers in the ‘free trade zones” of the third world, the peasant mothers, the slum communities struggling in a variety of contexts for livelihoods and dignity.”

Now, beyond the rhetorical heavy-handedness of this point, which is ultimately about two different ideas of the common, De Angelis is primarily concerned with how one sees the possibilities for struggle in contemporary capitalism. De Angelis primarily takes issue with Hardt and Negri’s claim that in empire capital no longer has an outside. For De Angelis capital is permeated by outsides, by commons; in fact, the system of capitalism is best understood as a conflict of values between commons, all of the various ways in which human beings produce and reproduce their means of existence, and enclosures, which subordinate that production and reproduction to capital’s drive to realize surplus value.

I have to admit that these grand statements are perhaps the weakest elements of the book: the discussion of the “outside,” in particular, is so slippery that it often seems worth jettisoning altogether. It is equally convincing to say that capital has no outside, as it is nothing but outside and the same activities—housework, babysitting, and community gardens—can be presented as exterior to capital, based on other values, or interior, since they ultimately reduce the cost of labor power. However, that does not mean that the book itself is weak. In many ways it functions best not as a polemic, but in terms of its own specific argument about the nature of capitalism. Most interesting is the way that De Angelis understands the specific way in which the market regulates cooperation. The market has to be seen as a particular mode of cooperation, a paradoxical mode of cooperation that can only function through antagonism.

“The problem with the market as the central order through which the co-producing social body reproduces livelihoods is in the fact that, paradoxically, it makes people cooperate socially by threatening each others’ livelihoods, subordinating each singularity to the artificial rule of an increasingly demanding clock, and thus turning any innovation, any creative idea, any new product of human communication and ingenuity, no matter how well its use values might solve certain problems, into a force threatening someone else’s livelihood, into a benchmark with the power of disciplining.”

In capitalism whatever invention helps my livelihood, whatever policy attracts jobs to my region, can only destroy other’s livelihoods, other ways of living in some other location. This is the unavoidable effect of competition. In order to theorize this relationship De Angelis borrows the concept of the conatus from Spinoza. Conatus is defined as the general striving, the persistence in being, that defines everything, including such artificial bodies as capital. Capital has its own particular striving, to realizing profit. De Angelis uses the idea of conatus to describe the way in which capital functions by grafting its conatus unto our strivings (or maybe it is the other way around). The point is that without alternatives to capital, to commons, every attempt to improve one’s condition, to produce and reproduce one’s existence necessarily involves aligning one’s actions and energies with that of capitalism. Thus De Angelis analysis invokes Marx’s idea of prehistory, as a fundamental alienation of our striving and powers. As Marx writes, “This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting out expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.”(That is from The German Ideology, the actual remark about prehistory is in the Contribution, but the fundamental point is still the same. De Angelis’ title reflects the importance of this idea.) Much of what De Angelis says stems from this basic idea of capital as a condition for human activity that can only undermine it. Thus De Angelis is not so much concerned with charting the losers of capitalism, the lives destroyed and untold ecological damage, but on pointing out that capitalism is a system that necessarily pits humanity in a system of competition that remains unseen.

“Some of us win, and some of us lose; in either case we are involved in perpetrating the system that keeps us reproducing scarcity when in fact we could be celebrating abundance.”

De Angelis’ engagement with Spinoza is rather limited; he just borrows the word conatus to refer to a general striving that can be applied to living things, or abstract structures, such as capital. One has to wonder, however, given the immense literature on Spinoza, if there is not more room to consider this idea of the alienation of conatus. Such a concept almost seems fundamental to Spinoza’s philosophy. The critique of superstition in the Appendix to Part One of the Appendix of the Ethics, develops an idea that God is nothing other than a projection, and thus a misrepresentation of our human, all too human striving. The same could be said of the critique of scripture in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Now this might seem like an unnecessary philosophical digression, but as De Angelis makes it clear one of the fundamental problems of the struggle of values, is seeing the commons that we produce and reproduce in our day-to-day actions, commons that are enclosed by capital. This was Spinoza’s problem as well. As Antonio Negri writes, “In other words, in the postindustrial age the Spinozian critique of representation of capitalist power corresponds more to the truth than does the analysis of political economy.”

Perhaps the most interesting chapter from a theoretical perspective is the chapter on Hayek and Bentham. This is an important chapter in its own right. One of De Angelis’s central points is that markets, distribution, have to be seen not simply as mankind’s tendency to “barter, truck, and exchange,” but as a disciplinary mechanism. Comparing Bentham and Hayek draws out interesting similarities; both philosopher’s were interested in creating an apparatus that utilized the partial and incomplete perspective of isolated individuals to create an effect of discipline and control. What is perhaps more striking, however, is the light that this analogy casts on the work of Michel Foucault. Christian Laval has criticized Foucault for failing to grasp that Bentham was as much interested in the market as he was in prisons, and he saw the former as functioning by a kind mutual surveillance. (“Le premier dispositif panoptique, c’est la société elle meme comme espace d’intersurveillance”). In Foucault’s recently published lectures he makes a distinction between discipline, which is seen as more rigid and structured, and neoliberal governmentality, which is more flexible. What De Angelis suggests is that perhaps neoliberal society is a more abstract and less personal form of discipline, and not some flexible alternative.--control, security,or neoliberal governance. We are disciplined by the market, an impersonal form of evaluation that is nothing more than the effects of the striving of others.

De Angelis also argues against the dominance of linear temporality in Marxist thought: the idea of communism as something that necessarily comes after capitalism. Instead De Angelis sees multiple temporalities at work, times of valorization and reproduction. There are alternatives in the present, not just in the distance future. The commons are not the culmination of capital, but its persistent shadow. De Angelis book also demonstrates that the same is true of theory. The linear progression that makes immaterial labor the necessary end result of class composition, or governmentality the necessary corrective to discipline, is only one possibility. Every text, like every society is riddled with possibilities.

Class Composition in Reverse

I recently started reading Massimo De Angelis’ The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital, as part of some reading I am doing on the concept of the commons, and I definitely recommend it. I plan to put together some notes and something like a review as soon as I finish, but in the meantime it provoked me to write the following. In part De Angelis’ book constitutes something of a return to first principles, a return to some of the original ideas of autonomist Marxism. This return is in part explicitly aimed against the contemporary turn in post-autonomist Marxism towards the ideas of “immaterial labor” and Empire. This is what I plan to address in a week or so, or whenever I finish the book.

What struck me recently, however, is the way that the book reframes the autonomist concept of “class composition.” It is class composition, the analysis of the social, technical, and political composition of work, as both cause and effect of struggle, that underlies such concepts as “mass worker” and “social worker.” De Angelis expands the concept of class composition, however, to include reproductive work, following Dalla Costa in arguing for the centrality of unwaged housework to the production and reproduction of capital, renaming it community composition. But the basic tenet remains the same, the tenet that “the forms, the objectives, the dynamics of social conflict are linked to the ways people relate to each other in the places of production and life within a certain historical context.”

It is worth noting, since the matter of the conflicts between “old” and “new” autonomist thought has been raised, that Nick Dyer-Witheford has argued for a revival of a compositional analysis with respect to the multitude. This analysis has the benefit of removing the multitude from a celebration of the new, situating it with respect to the conflicts that animate it. Thus, the emphasis on global relations and new forms of technology are maintained, but they have to be understood in relation to the local conditions and underdevelopments that act as counter-tendencies. Dyer-Witheford’s position seems to make the most sense to me, not only in that it moves us beyond the ridiculous argument of “everything has changed” versus “nothing has changed,” but that it also revives the idea of research, or worker’s inquiry. Ironically there is a great deal of research and inquiry underlying such concepts as “immaterial labor,” it is just that none of this research, which has appeared in such texts as Le Bassin de Travail Immatériel (BTI) dans la Métropole Parisienne, has not appeared in English, lending credibility to the idea that such concepts are the products of the philosopher’s abstraction rather than worker’s enquiry.

This is not the point that I would like to raise now, after all I have to save something for the review, I would like to discuss something entirely different, something that comes out of one of those contingent mental events that happens when one happens to read two things at the same time. In this case, it is a matter of reading Massimo De Angelis at the same time as I am preparing a class on the Frankfurt School. One of the things that strikes me is that there is, in the early works of Horkheimer and Adorno, at least, something like a thought of class composition, of the technological, social, and political constitution of a class. The major exception is that the class in question is no longer the working class, whose struggle drives capital, but the bourgeoisie, the ruling class.

At different and sporadic points, Horkheimer and Adorno make the point that the values and ideals of bourgeois philosophy, autonomy, freedom, conscience, relate to a particular stage of the development of capitalism. As Horkheimer writes:

“Admiration for nobility of character, fidelity to one’s word, independence of judgment and so forth are traits of a society of relatively independent economic subjects who enter into contractual relations with each other…Under the conditions of a monopolistic capitalism, however, even such a relative individual independence is a thing of the past. The individual no longer has any ideas of his own.”

The liberal subject, the subject of conscience, rights, and autonomy, is a product of liberal capitalism, capitalism of the small business, the entrepreneur, and the individual craftsman. (Although it might be more accurate to say that it is both effect and cause, producing its justification) Horkheimer and Adorno are less interested in describing this “liberal” phase of capitalism, or in nostalgia for its charms, than in charting what happens to these ideals under monopoly capitalism, the capitalism of large scale industry and the totally managed enterprise (in the form of fascism or even state capitalism). This transformation does not so much invalidate the ideals of liberal capitalism as it undermines their material basis. These ideals are necessarily transformed as their fundamental conditions, most notably the division between private and public, collapse. To quote Adorno from Minima Moralia:

“With the dissolution of liberalism, the truly bourgeois principle, that of competition, far from being overcome, has passed from the objectivity of the social process into the composition of its colliding and jostling atoms, and therewith as if into anthropology.”

Or to take a few more impressionist passages from Minima Moralia:

“As the professions of the middle-man lose their economic basis, the private lives of countless people are becoming those of agents and go-betweens; indeed the entire private domain is being engulfed by a mysterious activity that bears all the features of commercial life without there being actually any business to transact.”

And…

“Whatever was once good and decent in bourgeois values, independence, perseverance, forethought, circumspection, has been corrupted utterly. For while bourgeois forms of existence are truculently conserved their economic precondition has fallen away. Privacy has given way entirely to the privation it always secretly was and with the stubborn adherence to particular interests is now mingled fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and better.”

One could go on; in fact this idea of the decaying husk of bourgeois subjectivity becoming more malevolent as its conditions disappear constitutes something like a minor theme of Minima Moralia. With the loss of the independence and protection of private property, the private home that offered refuge from the demands of competition and the private industry of the small enterprise that rewarded honesty and inniative, the admirable moral qualities of bourgeois life disintegrate in the face of a generalized competition and “networking” that converts every social relation into a business contact. This description is a kind of “neoliberalism” avant la lettre, in which economic relations subsume all of society. It is also similar to the autonomist discussion of real subsumption, with the exception that it is less about the composition of the working class, than of the bourgeoisie that clings to its ideals long past their economic justification.

This is obviously a first glance, as I have not even finished reading De Angelis’ book or rereading Minima Moralia, but a few conclusions follow. It seems to me that class composition must be extended across both sides of class struggle; it is not just the working class whose conditions are structured by the economic, political, and social constitution of its existence, so are the capitalists. As Alain Badiou writes,“Il faut concevoir la société impérialiste non seulement comme substance, mais aussi comme sujet.” (It is necessary to conceive of imperialist society not just as substance but also as subject). Subjectivity is not only on the side of resistance, it is not a matter of a class confronting a structure, multitude against empire, but of different subjectivities. However, the picture is not one of two necessarily opposed camps, in which the new global bourgeoisie confronts the multitude, but of the constant transformation of the terms of antagonism. As Negri writes, “The ontological aspects of subjectivity are produced in different (or rather, antagonistic) ways.” It seems to me that focusing on the composition means that the different elements, technical, social, economic and political do not have a necessary capitalist or anti-capitalist dimension. New technologies can lead to either the constitution of a new commons of information and knowledge or to new realities of surveillance and work. At the same time even an economic crisis, the destruction of the existing conditions for exploitation, can become part of a revolutionary or reactionary composition.

The Industrialization of Nostalgia

“Capitalism is only a repetition” –Alain Badiou



In recent years the remake, or reboot, has ceased to be one sort of film that Hollywood produces to become its dominant form, at least when it comes to summer movies. The dominant films this summer, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek, Terminator: Salvation, Taking of Pelham 123, Land of the Lost, G.I. Joe, and so on are all remakes of something that existed in some form or another, comic book, television series, movie or cartoon. Of course much can be made of this transformation of contemporary film, and I am sure that more qualified folks than I will weigh in on the issue. However, I thought that I would jot down the following thoughts.

“Let’s get an old movie, like something from the eighties.”—Overheard at a videostore

As the quote from Badiou makes clear, capitalism can be defined as the absence of history. It is what Jameson refers to as the eternal present. This criticism of capitalisms lack of historical consciousness is as old as Marx himself, and it takes on myriad forms. What specifically does it mean with respect to the Hollywood remake. It seems to me, and this perhaps the wrong way of looking at it, is that the assumption underlying the remake is that people, at least the dominant movie going audience, does not want to watch a film that is twenty or even ten years old. Special effects have changed making the once awe-inspiring now laughable crude, and this might explain the need to constantly update films as a purely technical matter--like new phones or faster computers. The remakes is not entirely a technical matter and many films that used minimal special effects are remade. When one watches a film from even a few years ago one needs to possess a bare minimum of historical consciousness to orient oneself in terms of the technological, social, and cultural points of reference. You have to know when it is reasonable to expect someone in a film to use a cellphone, or a computer, both of which have become ubiquitous in contemporary films. Or, for that matter, what counts as the expected fashions of a period versus a personal affectation. This is only history at its most micro and quotidian level, there are also the historical events that structure the narratives of films. A remake removes the need for this minimal displacement: one no longer has to transport oneself to the cultural, technological, and social milieu of another period. One no longer has to transport oneself to the world of nineteen seventies in order to understand the Taking of Pelham 123; one no longer has to wonder why someone on the train does not just use a cellphone. The world is remade in the form of the present. “Look they are using an iphone.” Moreover, the stars, music, and clothing are all completely recognizable. Everything is ripped from the headlines of the latest celebrity rag. It is not accident that the films, once made and released on DVD, will end up on the adjecant rack at the supermarket checkout. Films have become much more disposable as the time between original and remake shrinks.

This idea of the remake as effacing history can only, at best, account for half the picture. Why not just make new films, with current actors, under contemporary conditions? Why tarry with the past at all? Of course the standard explanation to this is that Hollywood has run out of ideas? But there must be more than this cliché, especially since the originals are not ideas, in any strict sense of the term. G.I. Joe and Transformers were basically half-hour long toy commercials, and has anyone seen the original Land of the Lost? There is nothing in the original that merits repeating. The remake does not use the original, which in some sense is its raw material, for its ideas, for some script or narrative. The remake utilizes the original, the TV show or comic book, at the level of memory. 

Contemporary philosophers such as Maurizzio Lazzarato and Bernard Stiegler have focused on the relationship between contemporary capitalism and memory, the latter even coining the phrase “the industrialization of memory” to describe the way in contemporary cultural commodities such as films or programs structure their own sense of temporality. I think that the modern remake is more of an industrialization of nostalgia, or, more to the point a primitive accumulation of nostalgia, an enclosure of hazy, happy memories that is being strip mined for the last bits of entertainment. The studio is not so much remaking the original film, but utilizing the name and associations to drum up nostalgia. There is a phrase that has become popular in various websites where people discuss film, a phrase that people use to condemn the various remakes and reboots, that phrase is “raping my childhood.” Now the trivialization of rape implied in the phrase is no doubt offensive, but it does get at something essential. Remakes are aimed at the childhood memories of a generation, They address us not as adults, but as children. As Adorno wrote, "It is no coincidence that cynical American film producers are heard to say that their pictures must take into consideration the level of eleven-year-olds. In doing so they would very much like to make adults into eleven-year-olds.” Contemporary fan culture bears witness to this in that it often insists that the rights of the eleven year old's memory takes precedence over everything else. 


Nostalgia against history: there is no need to go outside oneself, to imagine other conditions, not when every film becomes one’s own private screening room.

I am an Animal, You’re an Animal Too: Matteo Pasquinelli’s Animal Spirits

This probably needs more critical work to qualify as even a book review, as is it is more of a book report on a book that I think is deserving of critical and political attention. It is worth writing about because I just happened to stumble upon this book in a little anarchist bookstore in Baltimore.

Understood polemically Matteo Pasquinelli’s Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons can be understood as an attack on certain reigning fetishes of the immaterial and the creative that pervade contemporary culture. These fetishes take many forms and are articulated in many contexts, from theoretical texts to popular texts such as Wired and Richard Florida’s writing on “creative cities.” Pasquinelli focuses more on the latter, on the popular and ubiquitious writers, which makes sense given the way in which these popular texts have had maximum effects; there is not a rust belt, or dying mill town, in the US that has not held city council meetings, Florida’s book in hand, on how to stimulate the “creative economy.” Pasquinelli primarily objects to the ideal of information or creativity that functions without conflict, noise, or, most importantly, exploitation: the idea underlying such slogans as “information wants to be free.” Against this ideal, Pasquinelli focuses on several ways in which the immaterial “spirit” continues to be burdened by matter, by its animality. Pasquinelli gives three general versions of this critique.

First, at least in the order of presentation, is Paolo Virno’s work on philosophical anthropology. In an essay, which I have discussed elsewhere (and that has also been discussed here), Virno contests the reigning idea that criticism of capital and of the state ultimately presupposes some idea of the fundamental goodness of human nature. This is the idea that fuels much of the discussion in undergraduate philosophy classes, pitting Hobbes and his epigones against the various versions of Rousseau. Against this Virno insists that man is evil, or, more to the point man is evil to the same extent that he or she is good: both evil and good stem from the fundamental fact that humanity is an excess of natural determination. For Virno politics should not suppress this fundamental indeterminacy, or ambivalence, by replacing the lack of instinctual determination by an artificial determination, a Leviathan that would compensate for nature by providing a second nature, law would replace instinct. Rather politics ought to cultivate this indeterminacy, as the human institutions of language and ritual do. What does this have to do with the idea of the creative commons? As Pasquinelli argues, the slogan “information wants to be free,” overlooks the conflicts and rivalry that animate even most immaterial production. (Anyone who works in academia is more than familiar with all of the petty antagonisms and jealousies, jealousies that persist even as the fruits of that labor are increasingly available on free online journals). Moreover, much of the internet is fueled by fundamentally anti-social drives, the netporn and warporn that drives sharing and innovation. Rather than seeing the commons as something that exists outside of drives to dominate and control, there is no commons without the antisocial tendencies that animate it. To cite Pasquinelli, “Collective intelligence is the ambivalent exoskeleton of the species: at once the basis for institutions of the common and an extension of humanity’s inborn aggressiveness.” I must admit that I was very interested to see Pasquinelli’s citation of Virno. This is not just because of my interest in Virno, but it suggests that Virno’s essay on evil offers an important reorientation of thought, that it might become a crucial point of reference.

Second, and perhaps more familiar, is the relationship between the various commons, or even “illegal” p2p sharing and capitalist exploitation. Celebrations of the “free” nature of shared music and other forms of digital media neglect to examine the way in which this circulation of content becomes the basis of other forms of exploitation. As Pasquinelli writes, “P2P networks may have weakened the music industry, but the surplus has been reallocated in favour of companies producing new forms of hardware or controlling access to the internet.” The sharing of content does not undermine commodification; it only shifts it to a different level, to different industries, from the cd to the ipod. In this instance the animal is no longer the antisocial drives inhabiting the internet but the parasite. The parasite in Michel Serres’ book of the same name is the third that interrupts any peer-to-peer relation. As a file is shared between two computers, a disc burned and handed to two individuals, there is always a third, the owner of the network, or the hardware, that profits from it. This leads Pasquinelli to declare, along with, Vercellone, that “rent is the new profit.” (Pasquinelli also develops this idea through a discussion of this essay by David Harvey). This new form of rent operates in terms of speed and time rather than space. The goal is to beat the eventual dissemination of whatever is produced.

Finally, this idea of rent allows Pasquinelli to take up the question of gentrification. It has long been a truism that “artists” function as the advance guard of gentrification. Pasquinelli goes beyond this cliché to find the social subject, and productive activity, underlying the new form of value in sky-high rents. If it is true that ‘the multitude is to the metropolis, as the working class is to the factory,” then the multitude must in some sense produce the skyrocketing rents of gentrification. Cities become more valuable when a history of associations and relations, a kind of symbolic capital, make an area desirable. Much work must be done to make a city, a neighborhood, or area desirable: not just the work that converts neglected buildings into lofts, but the work that transforms the associations and symbolic meaning of a neighborhood. The famous high rent neighborhoods of the world are defined by histories of experimentation: histories that generally encompass social as well as symbolic revolt. “Beneath the condos, the communes.”

These three criticisms of the fetish of code, of creativity, or the new commons, each invoke materiality, but in different senses. In the first, it is a matter of the materiality of the body, of the flesh, which connects us to the animal kingdom even as it distinguishes us from it. In the second case it is a matter of the materiality of capital, of the pursuit of surplus value in its various forms, profit or rent; it is an oddly abstract materiality. While in the third case it is a matter of the materiality of space and history. Matter is, as Althusser famously wrote, discussed in many senses, and the trick is relating these multiple senses, the multiple points in which the airless immateriality of the digital commons intersects with the matter of bodies, capital, and history. It is not a matter of celebrating the new digital commons or of denigrating it as the most recent form of techno-utopianism, but of understanding the relations that such a commons has with desires, profits, and exploitation. As Pasquinelli is quick to point out this commons only relates to a small portion of the economy, that which can be digitally produced and circulated, leaving open how all of this relates to other commodities, to other inequalities.

Pasquinelli’s book is perhaps more interesting for the problems that it poses than its solutions. No, that is not fair, there are very interesting analyses here, even if they are burdened at times by a syncretism that combines Ballard, Bataille, Harvey, and Marx. I have nothing against the combination of different perspectives: in fact, it beats the breakdown of thought into “Team Badiou” versus “Team Negri,” as if such academic divisions had anything to do with the world. Such combinations require real theoretical work in order to clarify the connections and limitations. In the end Pasquinelli’s book is a reminder of how much work needs to be done, work to sort out the overlapping intersections of matter and abstraction in contemporary life.

We Are All Neoliberals

This is something of a follow up to a previous post. It is actually awkwardly framed between reflections on “the current crisis” and some attempt to compile some notes on the work of Maurizio Lazzarato. In many ways the political terrain has changed; it is no longer true that there are no popular protests to the current capitalist crisis and the government response to it. There are the infamous Tea Parties, but these are not protests against capital, against profits, exploitation, and corporate power, but against government, against taxes, and “socialism.” Of course their status as actual political protests can be disputed, they have more of the status of simulated protests, advertised and televised. It is a perfect example of that all too clever neologism “astro-turf,” an artificial or simulated grassroots organization.

I do not want to discuss these protests here, but merely entertain a hypothesis. The current economic crisis is not only a crisis of neoliberalism but in neoliberalism as well. The first part of the statement should be fairly clear. As I stated earlier, it is a crisis of the idea of the market as a self-regulating system, capable of not only governing over itself but of all other areas of social life. This first aspect, this crisis of neoliberalism, is seriously complicated by it being a crisis in neoliberalism. By “in” neoliberalism I mean that this crisis takes place within a terrain in which the dominant common sense is shaped by neoliberalism.

In order to clarify what this means I take as a starting point a remark by Maurizio Lazzarato in Les gouvernement des inégalités: critique de l’insécurité néolibérale. Lazzarato argues, following Foucault, that neoliberalism has as a fundamental project a polarization of power and wealth that simultaneously seeks to neutralize the antagonisms that such a polarization risks producing. As Lazzarato points out, it does this through a disintegration of the social: health insurance is replaced by individual savings accounts and social security by individual investment accounts. Against everything that would produce a common problem and a common solution, neoliberal “social” programs reduce to individual solutions, solutions that demand different, which is to say unequal, results. On this point Lazzarato is repeating a refrain that can be found in Brown and Foucault.

Although it is worth pointing out that Lazzarato critiques the latter (and is most likely unaware of the former) for failing to adequately consider the role of “financialization” in the formation of neoliberalism. Lazzarato thinks that financialization should be considered not just as an economic strategy, as a mode of generating wealth, but as a political strategy as well, a transformation of subjectivity. Most importantly it is a manner of shifting the understanding of risk. He argues that Fordist policies of social security (in France) were legitimated by the asymmetry of power between employer and employee implied in every labor contract. It was compensation for subordination in the labor process. There was an understanding of an asymmetry of risk. Financialization transforms this social risk to an individual risk. It is no longer the risk of a class, but of the individual conceived no longer as a member of a class, defined by wages or profits, but the general figure of investment. Lazzarato then turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of money, specifically the way in which the asymmetry of the two flows of money, payment and credit, are effaced by the same object, by money.

(Lazzarato’s turn to the discussion of money in Anti-Oedipus is interesting for two reasons, reasons that are somewhat peripheral to my discussion here. First, it represents a more nuanced engagement with Marx than Lazzarato suggested in Les Révolutions du capitalisme. Not that Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of finance capital is doctrinaire, but that is precisely the point; in Révolutions Lazzarato reduced Marx to a caricature of doctrine. Second, it turns attention to an important and overlooked dimension of Deleuze and Guattari, the theory of finance, which is important for a critique of neoliberalism.)

At the core of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of money is that idea that money reduces the qualitative difference between wages and surplus value, or profit, represented by the equations C-M-C and M-C-M, to a simple quantitative difference. The only thing that separates the wage earner and the capitalist is a certain quantity of money, with a few dollars more my savings could become an investment. Financialization continues this trend by transforming the minimal elements of social welfare, pensions, health care, and social security, all which are the products of social struggles, into individual investments.

All of this culminates in “human capital” the term of the complete effacement of the difference between wage and surplus value, worker and capitalist. In another essay, Lazzarato cites a remark from Deleuze and Guattari in which capital is defined as a “point of subjectivation that constitutes all human beings as subjects; but some, the ‘capitalists’, are subjects of enunciation […], while others, the ‘proletarians’, are subjects of the statement, subjected to the technical machines.” Capitalist and worker are differentiated according the one who speaks and the one who is spoken. (I must admit that I have never really been interested in this distinction, I much more interested in the second point) human capital combines these two aspects, making everyone capitalist and worker.

“The transformation of a salaried employee into “human capital”, into an entrepreneur of her/himself, a transformation facilitated by contemporary management techniques, represents the fulfilment of the process of subjectivation and exploitation, since in this case it is the same individual who splits in two. On the one hand, the individual brings the subjectivation process to its pinnacle, because in all these activities s/he involves the “immaterial” and “cognitive” resources of her/his “self”, while on the other, s/he inclines towards identification, subjectivation and exploitation, given that s/he is both her/his own master and slave, a capitalist and a proletarian, the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement.”

What does all of this have to do with protest or lack of protest in the current crisis? Up to this point much of the protest against the crisis of capital has been entirely within neoliberalism, framed entirely in terms of individual cost and responsibility. The bailouts have been criticized in terms that are entirely consistent with neoliberalism, as an improper response to a risk assumed, or an improper use of task money, understood as “our” money. As much as there have been positive effects to this criticism, as the excessive bonuses of Wall Street have come to light, bonuses that show themselves to be entirely disconnected from any moral justification of productivity (that old capitalist standby), this criticism has remained within the terrain of neoliberalism. Popular outrage has been able to swing easily from the cost of banker’s office renovations to autoworker’s health care, both of which are seen as an excessive public cost or a failure to assume individual risk. What is missing is not only some understanding of class, the difference between a banker and an autoworker, but the very idea of the social or collective goods. Everything becomes a profit, some gain on an individual risk.

Everyone is Educated




This is not exactly the Bunny Colvin scene from The Wire I was looking for, but it will have to do for now. The scene that I was looking for is where Bunny discusses his impression of the Junior High School. Against the common impression that the kids are not learning, Bunny responds that the kids are learning just not in the way that the teachers imagine. The kids are learning lessons that are relevant to their world, to the world of hoppers and corners; they are learning how to negotiate the world of rules and authority, to get away with stuff, before breaking those rules have any real consequences. As Bunny makes clear, in the scene I am thinking of, as well as the scene above, the kids are always learning, but what they learn and how reflects previous lessons. Education always already begins before the school bell rings. The educator must be educated.

It is admittedly quite a leap from the inner city school depicted in The Wire to my experience at a state university. Despite that difference I found myself thinking of Bunny’s remarks this week. We are in the final weeks of classes, and the final philosopher we are reading in my “intro to political philosophy class” is Paolo Virno. This follows a semester of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, Arendt, and others, all of which sets up Virno: a philosopher that I consider to be offering both an interesting summation of that history and an engaging take on the current conjuncture. Class went well. I reviewed Aristotle, Marx, and Arendt in order to set up Virno’s argument about contemporary labor and its connection with politics. I could tell that they were struggling however, especially with Virno’s idea of “intellect in general,” the diffuse intelligence underlying production.

After the class I had a bunch of students who wanted to talk to me about their final essay. Some had actually questions, but others wanted extensions or wanted to figure out how to get through the essay with as little work as possible. It occurred to me that this is what many students learn in college: how to negotiate the bureaucracy, how to get by, how to brown nose a little, and how to navigate the structures around them. This lesson will probably serve them more than reading any “great mind.” For most students college is bureaucracy 101. This education, the education in how to follow rules, bend rules, and keep up appearances is perhaps what will best serve them as future employees. What I wonder is how they learned to learn this, I suppose that it is the lesson of all education.

The irony of it all is that the very students who were struggling with Virno’s concept of cynicism in theory demonstrated in practice that they understood it all too well.

The Play of Form and Content: Scattered Remarks on Popular Culture, Part Two

It is no secret that I enjoy Joss Whedon’s work. Enjoy is the operative word: while other shows such as The Wire are more intellectually and politically engaging, Whedon’s shows and movie, Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Serenity, and Dr. Horrible, have always been about enjoyment. Thus it was with a great deal of anticipation that I tuned into the first episodes of Dollhouse. I was almost immediately disappointed. I wasn’t sure why, my first thought was that everything I enjoyed from previous shows was missing. Whereas past shows had ultimately focused on the development of the relationships amongst an ultimately likable group, Dollhouse actively makes this impossible.

The premise of the show is a mysterious organization, the dollhouse, that supplies individuals, “dolls” or “actives,” who can have any memory, personality, or set of skills implanted in their minds only to be erased later. This means that the show effectively presses the reset button, at least with the central characters, every episode. The characters who are not actives, the staff of the dollhouse and the FBI agents investigating them, are mired in deception and intrigue. There are moles within the organization and multiple spies. On the one hand disconnection, the impossibility of relationships, or connection; on the other hand, relationships that are never what they seem.

At this point it is perhaps worth pointing out that the enjoyment I referred to above, the relationships amongst likable characters, is perhaps the ideological degree zero of television, the “imaginary relationship to the real relations of production.” Television series, successful and loved ones, offer an imaginary family or group of Friends that one can meet up with every week. Perhaps then Whedon’s show is a kind of self-critique of television, a show that refuses connection, refuses to offer the viewer a place “where everybody knows your name.” This is possible, especially since the fact that the show’s central characters hit the reset button mimics the other unstated presupposition of television: the repetition underlying television series, that every week, after all the mad cap adventures, everything goes back to square one. The show pits one unstated presupposition of television against another. (These two elements of television, the linear and the episodic, are often in contradiction; case in point, The X-Files in which the repetition of the conflict between skeptic (Scully) and believer (Mulder) was in extreme tension with the linear development of the alien conspiracy.)

This might be the case, especially since Whedon has often struggled with network executives who have wanted shows that were more “serial” in nature; shows without complex histories of characters and involved plots, shows that can be consumed and resold as independent units. (It is interesting to note that television seems to be dividing along these lines: cable television is generally characterized by shows that are linear, while network television sticks to the “procedurals” and “sitcoms” that function without history) However, I think that it might be going too far to see the show as television’s self critique. At the same time the show has become, if not more enjoyable, at least more interesting in recent weeks, and this enjoyment has something to do with the way in which the show touches on the core of television, fantasy and repetition.

When the show began, its premise was that the dollhouse served elite clientele with people, the actives, who could do anything, be anyone, and forget it all when it was over. There are many problems with this premise; most importantly it is hard to believe that such a high tech service would be needed to serve the needs of the ultra-wealthy. The technology just seems overkill; why couldn’t the wealthy and powerful just hire regular call girls and hostage negotiators? However, recent episodes have begun to suggest that this premise is something of a ruse. The dollhouse does not serve the wealthy, but secretly controls them by controlling their fantasies. This idea that control operates not through overt power, or even wealth, is underscored by the show’s repeated insistence on the constitutive nature of fantasy. The show returns again and again to the question as to the difference between a relationship with an active, with a programmed individual with whom one cannot have a history, and a relationship with a “real” person. The people involved in the dollhouse, the people who run it and are served by it, stress that illusion, fantasy, is not seem deviation from “real relationships” but constitutive of them. As Adelle DeWitt, the woman who runs the dollhouse, says on the episode that I am watching as I type this: “Illusions aren’t worthless, they are at the heart of most relationships.” If fantasy, idealization, or imagination is part of every relationship, if these fantasies sustain us, then how does one distinguish between a real and fake relationship?

This emphasis on fantasy as constitutive of reality and control is complicated by a second theme, that of resistance. The press surrounding the show has stated from the beginning that the arc of at least the first (and possibly only) season had to do with the central character, Echo, eventually recovering her memories, and presumably resisting the dollhouse. This bit of detail may have been released early as an attempt to ward off criticism. Whedon is famous for his strong female characters, and, as many critics have pointed out, dollhouse breaks with that element of his reputation as well. The question remains where will this resistance come from? Will it be some core of the self that cannot be erased? Or is it just a glitch in the system? I am pleased to say that the show has been refreshingly ambiguous on this point. Suggesting at times that resistance is transcendental, stemming from an element of the self that perseveres through the multiple erases; while, at other times, suggesting that the tendency to exceed the program is an effect of some other technology, a mind control chemical, or even other attempts to manipulate the program. Resistance is then sometimes presented as external to the machinery of control, some core self, and sometimes as nothing other than the noise internal to the machine itself. In the first case it is dependent upon some idea of an essence, of something that cannot be produced. In the second, however, resistance is nothing other than the excess of every program over its parameters.

(As something of a side note: I was always intrigued by Spike’s arc in Buffy. In that show Angel was the vampire cursed to have a soul. Spike didn’t have a soul, just a chip that caused pain whenever he tried to kill someone. However, this chip effectively changed his relations to others, setting him on the path to redemption. What then is the difference between a soul and a chip that shocks you when you are bad? This always seemed to be Whedon at his most Foucaultian: “The soul is the prison of the body.”)

I do not want to draw all of the theoretical connections that could be made out of these two points: control through fantasy and the immanence of resistance. Rather, I will conclude by saying, perhaps too late, that Dollhouse has potential; not the potential to be another Buffy, a reliable hour of entertainment, but to do what much good science fiction does; that is present the present to us in the form of a fiction. I feel that in saying that I have doomed the show because that is perhaps simply too much to expect from television.

The Play of Form and Content: Scattered Remarks on Popular Culture

This weekend I happened to see the film State of Play: It was a compromise.

Occasionally, when watching a film, I feel as if I can imagine the moments of its articulation: the pitch meeting or writing session. Sometimes this is because the selling point of the movie is so obvious (“It is like Alien, but at sea” or “Like Rocky but with a female boxer”), but sometimes, as in the case of State of Play, it is because one can see the joints, the points where different ideas are hobbled together. (I should mention now that I have not seen the BBC original from which the film has been adapted, an omission that might throw my entire argument off kilter—oh yeah, and SPOILER ALERT).

In this case it is the way in which the film combines two different conspiracy theories, both of which are “ripped from today’s headlines.” The first, which could be broadly characterized as liberal or even left, has to do with the influence of a private security company (basically Blackwater) on the government. The second theory, which could be broadly characterized as conservative, has to do with Senator’s use of his power to carry on an affair with a young intern. Two different ideas of conspiracy, two different visions of corruption: one economic and the other moral. One can imagine these two plots as a way to please two different constituencies. Through most of the film these two different conspiracies are offered as two different explanation for the events of the film: a young, attractive senator’s aid appears to have committed suicide the very morning that the senator is to begin important hearings on the influence of the private security company. Much of the film is spent exploring the first conspiracy, which gives the film the feel of the great conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, in which each new piece of evidence only extends the conspiracy to the highest corridors of power. In the films final twist, however, the story of infidelity, sex, and the abuse of personal power becomes the central story, in some sense effacing the other conspiracy.

This shift of narrative structure, content if I am going to justify my title, takes place against a much more overt struggle borrowed from the form. The central drama of the film, also ripped from today’s headlines, concerns the newspaper reporters that cover this story. The first reporter, played by Russell Crowe, is an old school print journalist, interested in following the story no matter where it leads. (In case you are wondering about his politics, it is possible to see a bumper-sticker for “Democracy Now” on his fridge, in what has to be one of the oddest bits of product placement committed to film.) The second, played by Rachel McAdams, writes for the paper’s blog, and is concerned primarily with gossip. The film borrows much of its narrative form from the “buddy film”: the two initially hate each other, but eventually learn to respect one another and in doing so emerge as victorious.. This is supposed to be situated within the crisis of print media: the paper has just been bought by new corporation, convinced that it can still get a profit from a dying medium.

The film is supposed to be a simple matter of good guys triumphing over these corporate forces, telling the true story despite market constraints. However, at this point the narrative compromises of the film contradict the story that it is trying to tell. At the exact moment that the film’s protagonists are victorious against market forces, stopping the presses to get the true story out, the film tells a different story. What the film reveals is that sex scandal will always outsell politics. That the real conflict is not so much between blogs and print, between young upstart bloggers and grizzled reporters, but between different ways of mapping and comprehending social space: one sees social forces and the abstractions of capital and the other sees only individuals and morality. There are different names for each in contemporary theory, science and ideology or axioms and recodings, but in our current conjuncture the latter seems to always win.

As Fredric Jameson famously remarked, the conspiracy film is an attempt to imagine the totality, capital. It is a kind of a degree zero of ideology critique: it imagines ideology within ideology itself. Impersonal social forces, capital and the state, are presented as the machinations of “evil individuals.” What makes State of Play frustrating is that it retreats from even this level of critique, ultimately returning the critique of institutions to the idea of corrupt individuals, individuals whose corruption is only ever a personal failing.

Anthropogenesis Part Three: Reification Reconsidered

This is a third in a series of posts on what I am calling, for lack of a better word, “Left-Simondonians”: A term that I define simply as philosophers/theorists who use the work of Simondon to understand and critique the current conjuncture. I do not know of any “Right-Simondonians,” and the term is obviously a slightly humorous allusion to post Hegelian thought. If the term has any justification at all it is in the fact that Simondon’s investigations of transindividuality and technology seem to be a necessary reorientation of thought in an age so mediated by technology but so lacking in collectivity. Now, I am not saying that he is our Hegel, just that we are desperately in need of new ways of thinking.

As I promised earlier, a while ago, actually, having written on Bernard Stiegler, I now want to focus on Paolo Virno. As an interview in Radical Philosophy makes clear, Virno’s has kept up a sustained engagement with Simondon’s work in terms of writing, editing, and teaching.

It seems to me that Virno’s engagement with the concept of the “transindividual” is situated between his engagement with Simondon and themes developed from Marx and the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel. What I am interested is the point of intersection of those themes. First, Virno revives Marx’s notion of the social individual to describe not just an ontological fact, that people can only be individuated through society, but an economic reality, that social relations and shared capacities are at the center of contemporary productive relations. Second, and more importantly, here is how Virno offers a redefinition of the central Marxist concepts of reification and alienation through Simondon’s idea of preindividual reality:

“Reification is what I call the process through which preindividual reality becomes an external thing, a res that appears as a manifest phenomenon, a set of public institutions. By alienation I understand the situation in which the preindividual remains an internal component of the subject but one that the subject is unable to command. The preindividual reality that remains implicit, like a presupposition that conditions us but that we are unable to grasp, is alienated.”

With the exception of the use of the word “preindividual” Virno’s definition of reification is standard, almost textbook. Virno deviates from this standard definition, however, in making a distinction between reification and fetishism. In the standard Marxist version, developed from Marx to Lukacs, commodity fetishism is an example of reification or reification is developed on the basis of commodity fetishism. In the same interview Virno defines fetishism as follows, ‘Fetishism means assigning to something—for example to money—characteristics that belong to the human mind (sociality, capacity for abstraction and communication, etc.).’ The distinction that Virno makes here seems to be another way of cleaving through the real abstraction.

Virno develops the idea of real abstraction from the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel. For Sohn-Rethel the real abstraction refers back to Marx’s analysis of the commodity form and money, abstractions that are all the more real because their realized through action, rather than thought. Exchange value is entirely abstract, having no basis in use value, but it is an abstraction that is effected through the practical activity of exchange. In Virno’s earlier works he made a distinction between money, or the general equivalent, as a real abstraction and the “general intellect,” Marx’s description of the productive powers of science in the Grundrisse made famous by the autonomist tradition. In those texts the relevant distinction was between a real abstraction predicated on equality, money, commodities, even labor must be rendered interchangeable, and a real abstraction predicated on difference and flexibility, the paradigms and language games of the general intellect, which can always be replaced. This is Virno’s version of the transition from formal to real subsumption; a transition that has profound effects on the tonality of modern existence. In the first equality still retains some force while the second is associated with the rise of cynicism, with acceptance of the groundless nature of rules and structures. In the context of his discussion of Simondon, however, Virno makes a different distinction: alienation, fetishism, and reification are different ways of relating to the preindividual conditions of subjectivity (which Virno identifies as language, habits, and productive relations). Thus it is given that subjectivity is constituted by these preindividual conditions, which always exceed it, what differs is how it relates to these conditions, to its presuppositions. (In this way we are perhaps not that far from Hegel)

Virno’s definition of alienation, a presupposition that cannot be conditioned, comes closest to Stiegler’s critique of the “industrialization of memory.” I think each of these theoretical perspectives are perhaps different ways of comprehending the increased commodification of the preindividual. The preindividual conditions of language, habits, and productive relations, what we could call culture, comes to us now in the form of commodities rather than traditions. Commodities are pre-packaged, their conditions of production are inaccessible to us. Virno differs from Stiegler in adding to this the exploitation of the transindividual. Virno’s definintion of fetish and reification reflect the way in which the transindividual relations have become incorporated into structures and relations. The difference is that in reification the relational dimension remains explicit, while in the fetish these relations are obscured by a thing that takes on the qualities of the relation, the abstraction and relations. As Marx once put it, “money is the alienated ability of mankind.” If money is the paradigmatic of fetishization, then what is the corresponding instance of reification in Virno’s sense. Virno’s answer would seem to be the general intellect, but the general intellect remains largely obscured, appearing only in the texts that discuss it. As Marx argued the more labor becomes social and dependent on knowledge, the more it appears as the power of capital. Virno sometimes refers to this reification as a “non-state” public sphere, as the collective powers of social relations acting outside of the state. However, it seems that this is what needs to be produced.

We Love Our Logos: Or, Only a Corporate Mascot Can Save Us Now

I like browsing. I like the physical space of a good bookstore, a good record store, and even a good video store. Sure I buy books online when I have to, but it is not the same. All of the various programs which have been invented to simulate the effects of browsing, such as ipod’s genius or “Amazon recommends”, fail to recreate the experience of browsing, which is always framed somewhere between the structured and the random. These programs can tell what others might like, or point out such painfully obvious connections such as the fact that people who bought one book by Badiou might like another. It is perhaps because I live in a town that lost its last good independent bookstore years ago that I find myself mourning these spaces a bit prematurely. Of course it will always be possible to find good records, books, and movies, but it will be harder to have those random encounters that sometimes produce interesting results.

The other day I wandered into my local video store, which is actually quite good (and the reason that I refuse to use Netflicks). I had no idea what I was looking for; I knew that a red-eye flight the night before had left me exhausted, and I was just looking for something mildly entertaining to occupy that could not be spent doing anything productive or demanding. So I was looking for something short and stupid (but not too stupid). I finally settled on the following:

I remembered seeing the trailer on something else I rented, and it looked amusing, but mostly I was drawn to its 86 minute running time: just enough to fill that gap of time between utter exhaustion and an appropriate time to fall asleep. The plot concerns Leslie (Lisa Kudrow) whose husband is a National Guard soldier in Iraq. At the beginning of the film she learns that her husband’s tour of duty has been extended: this pushes her to the end of her rope financially (she will lose her healthcare if she continues to stay at home and care for her children) and emotionally (she cannot deal with her kids). Her brother-in-law, one of those ubiquitous slacker man-childs of contemporary cinema, is reluctantly brought in as source of help. He fails miserably as a nanny, and the film really takes off when he takes a job for a failing dotcom company. (One of the odd things about this film is that in foreshortening the time between two historical events, the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the Iraq war, it ends up painting a fairly accurate picture of a present dominated by an ongoing war and a collapsing economy). His job is to dress up as the firm’s mascot, a sort of blue Keith Harring-esque homunculus, and hand out flyers advertising office space for rent on a desolate bit of roadway.


The brother, Salman, is perpetually awkward in real life, unable to do much more than mumble and stare at the events in front of him. It is not just him, however, every encounter in the film, from discussions on the bus to the job interview, is a non-relation. People talk to each other, or at each other, utterly oblivious to how their actions are perceived by other people. Distrust and deception characterize every human relationship in the film; the children threaten to kill Salman in private, concealing their murderous desires when the mother it present. However, nearly everyone treats the blue corporate mascot warmly: children rejoice in his presence and a road crew hands him beer.


The film reverses some of the established ideas of alienation. In his job Salman loses all traces of identity, becoming a blue screen for other’s fantasies, but it is not this that is alienating. It is daily life that is alienating, a daily life characterized by solipsistic individuals, unable to comprehend that others exist or have a point of view. The film made me think of those studies that come out every few years, revealing how people not only recognize corporate mascots but rate them favorably. Not that the blue mascot is necessarily cute, but something about the film speaks to the ascendancy of cute, of Lol cats and cartoonish creatures, in a world characterized by purely commercial relationships. I am reminded of William James remarks about sentimentality, the story of the wealthy woman who lets her coachman freeze outside while weeping in the theater. Perhaps this is a kind of a return of the repressed. In a day-to-day way we protect ourselves from feeling anything at all, we watch despair and death with indifference, only to get all teary-eyed over some cartoon robot or overweight cat.


It is significant that the mascot is very much a featureless blue figure, a kind of corporate body-without-organs, a blank screen to project one’s fantasies onto. I have always been puzzled by the continuing popularity of Mickey Mouse, a cartoon character who (until recently) does not appear in any cartoons and yet becomes all the more “beloved by children of all ages everywhere.” He is an icon. What we want from our icons, from our cartoons, is that they embody some kind of pure cute, devoid of any history or complexity.


What follows is an odd twist on the familiar superhero story. Salman is able to utilize his odd mix of anonymity and acceptance to intervene in the relationships around him. In doing so the film makes an interesting, albeit not too subtle, point, about our ability to relate to mascots rather than humans. Hey, I am not saying it was a great film, just something that I stumbled across.

Open Question: Work and Film

I am currently putting together a course on the politics and philosophy of work. The course is a survey of sorts, taking the place of a more general survey of social and political philosophy; it begins with the contradiction between the place of work and the model of work in Plato and Aristotle (with a nod to Rancière) and then continues through Locke, Smith, Hegel, Marx, and Arendt, ending with feminism and then the "immaterial labor" debate (some Virno, Negri, and Sennett). Because the course is a summer course, and thus is packed into these horrendous three hour sessions that meet several times a week, I was thinking of adding some films. These would break up the heavy reading load, and give me time to prepare lectures.

So this has led me to think, albeit in a loose and provisional manner, about the relationship between work and film as I look for suitable films. Last night I watched Blue Collar, which I learned about from Kino Fist. While watching the film two things occured to me. First, there is an almost uncanny relationship between film and modern factory work. The montage is the natural medium for the assembly line: it is impossible to show it any other way. Film and the Fordist assembly line both fragment the body and its gestures, ultimately reassembling them into a different totality than the one organized by the individual. Despite this vague resemblance at the level of technique (or this vague thought of ressemblance) work is unpresentable, at least in terms of the commercial film. A film that captured the reality of work would beyond the point of boring. Film exists as an escape from work.

So anyway, I am trying to think about interesting films about work. Ideally these films would reflect the historical nature of the survey. Despite what I said above it is relatively easy to find films about modern industrial work, but harder to find films about praxis and poesis, or films which critically interrogate possessive individualism. So far I have considered Strike (or something by Eisenstein), Fast Food Nation, Mardi Gras: Made in China, and perhaps even The Wrestler (given what I have written below).

Suggestions?

Not with a Bang but a Whimper

Two quick points:
First, it is utterly surprising to me how quickly the language around the economy and politics has changed. For years, even decades, we have heard not only that "free markets" could regulate themselves, but that they were the key to regulating anything else, to fixing any social ill, from health care to social security. Now this seems to be very much in question. Of course the charges of socialism, first against Obama and now against the stimulus package, are hyperbolic and hysterical. The hysteria is, however, a symptom, a symptom of profound unease around the once fundamental justifications of neoliberalism and capitalism. Something has changed, but what?

Second, all of this has taken place with very little popular revolt and uprising, at least in this country. There was the much discussed incident at Republic Doors in Chicago, but not much aside from that. There have been large protests in Europe, but in the US "the left" has not even managed to put pressure on the stimulus package. Of course there has been a vague sense of anger and bitterness, manifested primarily in terms jokes about bankers.

The question then is how do these two things combine? What, if anything, will fill the void left behind by the fantasies of the market? And when, if ever, will people take to the streets?

What Interests Me

I have been following the news of the economic collapse and the stimulus bill with some interest. Although I have to admit that I am of two minds on the issue. As a tenure track (but not yet tenured) philosophy professor at a state university I am keenly aware of my precarious job position. I am also concerned for the well being of my friends and family, many of whom work in non-profits, education, and social services, in other words all of whom are expendable. Because of this, part of me would to see this bill succeed, to see the economy restored, or at least brought out of this downward spiral. At the same time, however, I do not want to say that I would like to see it fail, but at the very least I would like to see something other than a restoration of business as usual. I would like to see this conjuncture extended into real critical reflection about the fundamentals of our economy: of what counts as wealth and how it is distributed. I am not hoping for a revolution (at least yet) just a transformation, and it seems like it has to get much worse for that to happen.

One could label the first thought, that of hope for success of the economic stimulus package, interest, since it bears directly on my economic wellbeing. In doing so it brings to mind the critical ways in which interest has been discussed by Badiou, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. (Admittedly this is a somewhat odd constellation since it encompasses texts written over the last thirty-five years). In Badiou’s little text on Ethics, he argues that “interest” is fundamentally conservative, even nihilistic, because it can recognize no event other than harm, than the eventual death of the human animal. “The ordinary behavior of the human animal is a matter of what Spinoza calls perseverance in being, which is nothing other than the pursuit of interest, or the conservation of self.” In Metapolitics Badiou goes on to argue that “interest” is at the heart of every “Thermidor” of every attempt to deny the truth of a revolutionary event. The revolution comes to an end when it is declared that “interest lies at the heart of every subjective demand.” Politics is reduced to the conflict of interests—truth, equality, and universality collapse in the face of competing interest groups. I find Badiou’s scattered remarks of interest to be well interesting, they capture something that is essential to both neoliberalism and interest group politics. However, they are not presented as such, as diagnoses of the present. For Badiou there is a fundamental split in humanity: on the one side there is interest, a struggle for survival shared with all living things, on the other there is the capacity to be immortal, to maintain fidelity to the truth of equality and justice.

In a different way Deleuze and Guattari argue for a division, not between interest and truth, but between interest and desire. However, for Deleuze and Guattari, interest is not the residue of a purely animalistic existence, rather it is the product of a particular social formation. As Deleuze writes in Desert Islands, “Once interests have been defined within the confines of a society, the rational is the way in which people pursue those interests and attempt to realize them. But underneath that, you find desires, investments of desire that are not to be confused with investments of interests, and on which interests depend for their determination and very distribution: an enormous flow, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that constitute the delirium of this society.” The distinction between interest and desire relates to a short period in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, roughly the years around Anti-Oedipus, and it seems to be part of the incomplete project of that early work: the project of schizoanalysis as an analysis of the political unconscious. Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the distinction between desire and interest is an attempt to overcome two dualisms: one between base and superstructure, desire is part of the infrastructure, and one between rational interest and irrational false interest. Thus sometimes it is desire that is completely subjugated to the system, caught in the flows of money that make it appear as if we all participate in the massive flows of wealth. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “Desire of the most disadvantaged creature will invest with all its strength, irrespective of any economic understanding or lack of it, the capitalist social field as a whole.” At other times, interest is entirely subordinate to the social aggregates, to the socius, and it is desire that is revolutionary. It is possible to be radical at the level of desire, breaking the chains of society, and reactionary at the level of interest, or, and this is more Deleuze and Guattari’s concern, vice versa, to have an interest in changing society but fascist desires. What is essential, at least as far as differentiating Deleuze and Guattari from Badiou, is that neither interest nor desire are natural; they are not anthropological constants, but thoroughly historical and social, even at the point where they break with society.

Michel Foucault continues this discontinuous line of considering the historicity of subjects of interest in his lectures on neoliberalism (The Birth of Biopolitics). According to Foucault neoliberalism can best be understood as a form (or would that be mode?) of governmentality that acts on interests rather than on rights. Rights by definition are exchangeable; in fact one could argue that, at least in classical social contract theory, rights come into existence through the exchange of certain “natural rights” for the right of security, safety, and property. Thus rights are oddly social even in their separation. Interests are irreducible, they cannot be exchanged or alienated. To be governed by interests is to take this irreducible asocial aspect as foundational: one channels interest by making certain activities cheap and others costly.

I am not sure what this quick survey of interest has to do with the dilemma above, except to pose the following question: what if we assume that we are governed by interest? Which is to say that we are not so much controlled by ideology, by arguments and ideals about how we should live, but by our simple desire to live. Our interest causes us to be invested in things that we might otherwise oppose, like huge bailouts to banks, because we need them to simply survive. Interest ties us to society as it exists. It seems to me that we can then follow Badiou and Deleuze’s route, and try to find that which radically breaks with interest: truth or desire. We could try to recognize in interest the seeds of our subjection and try to think about how we could constitute ourselves otherwise.

Anthropogenesis Two: The Part Played in Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, Or, Everyone Loves a Prequel

In the last post I said that I was going to follow the last post on Stiegler with a post on Virno, but I have decided to write a little about Lukács’ The Ontology of Social Being instead. I have been reading this over the last few weeks, and during that time it has occurred to me that Lukács could be understood as proposing a theory of anthropogenesis, a theory of the constitution of the human, that like Stiegler and Virno, sees this constitution as inseparable from the development of technology and social relations. This immediately superficial resemblance may just be another example of the way in which almost any two books read at the same time will begin to resemble each other, or at least produce effects of similarity or resemblance. (This phenomena really needs a name by the way)

First a word or two about Lukács, as Timothy Murphy has pointed out in his interesting essay on Lukács and Negri, Lukács is a philosopher who is often not read simply because he is so readily comprehended. Any student of critical theory, Marxism, or contemporary social thought knows about his essay on reification, an essay that, in the words of one of my professors, pretty much invented Marx’s early texts on alienation before they were published. That little thumbnail sketch, like all thumbnail sketches, has probably done more than anything else to keep Lukács from being read. Lukács’ fate then becomes much like Althusser’s, despite their strong differences of philosophical position. Althusser too has been reduced to a thumbnail, that of the break between the “young Marx” and the mature Marx, which sums up and reduces all of his writing.

Lukács’ project for an ontology is interesting to me now for at least two reasons. First, as Murphy points out, ontology would seem to be antithetical to the materialist or Marxist project: it is after all the epitome of a philosophy that has only interpreted the world. Second, we could add that this paradox has become increasingly prevalent, to the point where it does not appear as a paradox at all: Negri, Deleuze, Badiou, Zizek, and so on have all proposed ontologies, ontologies that are supposed to be aligned with a political project.

Lukács’ social ontology is an incomplete manuscript, made up of one volume on Hegel, one on Marx, and a final volume on labor. Aside from the two named philosophers the strongest philosophical influence is Engels, whose essay, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man,” provides much of the philosophical impetus for Lukács. As Lukács argues labor fundamentally alters the status of consciousness, constituting human consciousness. Animals may be conscious of this or that thing, but this consciousness, this memory, perishes with creature in question. It remains an “epiphenomenon of organic being.” Labor changes this, not only transforming consciousness, since labor is inseparable from the positing of a goal, from the recognition of something unrealized, but with the instruments and techniques of labor this consciousness becomes something that matters, that has effects. The social as a level of reality that has consistency, that constitutes man’s second nature, comes into being with labor.

Lukács point about the role of labor and its exteriorization plays in the constitution of humanity anticipates Stiegler’s point. They may in fact share a similar set of anthropological or archaelogical references. Stiegler’s point of reference is primarily Leroi-Gourhan who may or may not have influenced some of the anthropological and archaeological writers Lukács sites. I haven’t yet fully traced the history of this notion of anthropogenesis, especially its connections to materialist ontology. I am still trying to get my hands on Anton Pannekoek’s book on Anthropogenesis.

What is interesting is the particular sense that Lukács gives ontology, or “social being,” and the strengths and limits of this conception. Lukács focus here, as it was in his famous essay, is primarily the antinomies of bourgeois thought: antinomies which pit the abstract “ought” against mankind’s animal nature, or a world of purpose, governed by God, against utter meaningless. What these perspectives miss in their antinomies, or out and out opposition, is what passes between both sides of the opposition, and that is the social. For Lukács it is senseless to speak of mind and body, of consciousness and nature, without recognizing that the social is that which constantly passes between the two, naturalizing consciousness by making it part of nature and constituting the backdrop of a second nature. Labor constantly shifts the relation between nature and society.

For Lukács this second nature is best understood through labor, or rather through the teleology of labor. This perspective, which Lukács attributes to Marx, overcomes the limitations of philosophies that understand nature, or history, through teleology or dispense with teleology altogether. (As Lukács points out, even Spinoza had to acknowledge a teleology for human action). As Lukács writes: “It is precisely the Marxian theory of labor as the sole existing form of a teleologically produced existence what founds for the first time the specificity of social being.” Labor is inseparable from a telos, from the idea of some end, but it can only arrive at this end if it subordinates itself to the materiality of conditions. One does not master nature, but studies it and only by learning of its properties can one transform it: the history of technology from the flint axe to the computer chip are as much about understanding the immanent properties of material than about any mastery. Labor is thus a transformation of both nature and the subject. In order to work it is necessary to master oneself, to put off desire. As nature and the subject are transformed labor produces a surplus, above and beyond any product or commodity, and that is the knowledge of this process. This surplus, along with the transformation of nature and the subject that it entails, is what is called social being.

Lukács philosophy, like other Marxist philosophies (Althusser comes to mind) attempts to expand the terrain covered by Marx by expanding labor. Labor becomes the basis of not just a politics and an economics but an ontology. (Of course it is an ontology that Lukács argues was already there in Marx’s remarks about the labor process). I am sympathetic to Lukács perspective, but I cannot help but think that it generates more questions than it answers. As Lukács states the contemporary labor process is much more complicated than the simple positing of an end to be realized through a process. The ends of my actions are no longer needs, even those needs that have been transformed by society, but something that is simultaneously much more abstract and immediate, the “need” to make a living, to earn a wage. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the means of the contemporary labor process are no longer the natural world, or its laws, but encompass the social world, social being itself. Lukács repeatedly gestures to the fact that labor increasingly works on social relations as much as on material things, even making reference to Marx’s concept of ‘real subsumption.’ However, the actual difference between labor carried out in formal subsumption and in real subsumption is not really theorized.

On the one hand we have this fundamental principle: “Even the most complicated economy is a resultant of individual teleological positings and their realizations, both in the form of alternatives.” This is modified by another fundamental principle, borrowed from Hartmann, that the more complex levels of social complexes attain supremacy over simpler levels, even as the latter remain in some sense determinate. In other words, no matter how hungry we get, we do not eat dogs (social being taking precedence over natural being). These two principles, the individual teleogical positings and the determination of the simple by the complex, constitute something of a contradiction, a contradiction that marks the limits of Lukács’ text. Of course it is unfair to point to limits to an incomplete manuscript, but Lukács’ limits here are the limits of social theory itself, caught between the perspective of the individual and that of the social totality.