Emotechnics, Lachrymators & the Tears of the Occupiers

I want to think today about the semiotics of tear gas. We know what the deployment of gas looks like: masses lined up against police, a canister thrown, a rising cloud, people running, and then, in the aftermath, tears. Lots of them. The primary function of tear gas obviously inheres in its capacity to disperse crowds, but I want to suggest that tears are not a secondary effect, a mere index of having-been-gassed, the trace that power leaves behind. As signs, tears have a constitutive function in such enactments of power: to produce a semiotic articulation (and reconciliation) between subjects-in-revolt and the state.

To be blunt, the use of a lachrymatory agent enables the state to visually recode subjects-in-revolt as contritely lachrymose. Tear gas disciplines subjects not simply by inflicting (what I’ve heard is) excruciating pain and thus inducing flight and crowd dispersal; rather, the subject’s somatic response to the irritant simulates an affective response to a personal sin. After the revolt, tears of sorrow, and perhaps one will come to recognize the merciful beneficence of the Sovereign we dared to contest. Huic ergo parce, Deus, pie Jesu Domine, and please don’t shoot. We were bad, we’re sorry, and we promise to be good.

Emotechnics produce somatic responses in order to simulate affective investments in power. (We are more accustomed, through critiques of nationalism, to states operationalizing affects of love, say, or rage-against-others to generate cathexes to power.) In conditions of neoliberal capital—that is, at a moment when the bundle of rights and protections to which citizens are or feel entitled is becoming unbundled in order to facilitate capital accumulation—the only ties binding citizens to the state are affective ties. When these ties don’t exist, emotechnics do the trick.

But what necessity drives the production of such affective ties? I want to suggest that the state’s reconstitution of citizens as disposable and negligible, the state’s total irresponsibility to its citizenry, has put its sovereignty into question. The sovereign’s secret power, as Derrida points out in volume 1 of The Beast & the Sovereign, is the sovereign’s ability to absolve itself of sovereign responsibility. The exercise of this power-to-be-irresponsible, however, is self-destructive, insofar as sovereignty imaginatively and materially commands allegiance only insofar as addresses directed toward a sovereign can become felicitous speech-acts. Minus the possibility of felicitous address, after a while we’ll all get tired of making demands of an absent God. If protego ergo obligo is the cogito of the political, protection subtends the possibility of obligation; but, in our neoliberal moment, with the withdrawal of protection, all that remains of the state/citizen articulation is the bare coercive demand for obligation, for good subjects who will cry (or seem to cry) when they don’t oblige the state. Occupy not only refuses to oblige the state by committing acts of dubious legality: it also refuses to oblige the state by refusing to direct its tears toward the state, by unlearning the political grammar that made state-citizenship a source of hope (and thus refusing to reaffirm the irresponsible state as a sovereign site of responsibility), by becoming as indifferent to the state as the state is to us. We’re moving past the ugly affects of abandonment and neglect by neglecting the state—by affectively disinvesting from the state and investing in one another.

The state is learning how cruel it is to be abandoned. It’s important to note that the Oakland Commune was really truly not looking for a fight; they were, rather, really truly attempting to establish an alter-state of care, one indifferent to the given state of indifference. And so, to reaffirm an unearned sovereignty, to command obligation without offering protection, the state shot tear gas to recode subjects-in-revolt as sad citizens. Of course, we’re not sad, we’re past that, we’re ready to make new worlds. It’s the state that becomes sad as it anticipates a state without citizens, without subjects.

We caught a glimpse of the state’s sadness during the battle in Oakland. Miscalculations about wind direction (as well as Occupiers returning gas canisters back to sender) resulted in the clouds of gas enshrouding the line of riot cops. A backfire of emotechnics. They had to pause and re-affix their masks before they could advance and try to simulate sadness in subjects entirely indifferent to them. It’s hard to see through the gas, through their masks, in order to get a glimpse at their faces, but one can imagine police officers silently crying as they try to make post-citizens sad for abandoning the state that abandoned them.                        

On the Statement, "Occupy has Changed the 'National Conversation'"

It’s a refrain: Occupy has begun a national conversation about income inequality. Slight modifications are allowed: add or subtract something about finance capital, replace “conversation” with “dialogue” or “discussion,” smarter people will talk about “wealth” inequality. Soon you arrive at a judgment regarding the merits of Occupy, one that circulates through Twitter, through the media, and even through Occupy sites. (Just Google “Occupy national conversation.”) The other night, I was struck by how frequently this sentiment was voiced as I scanned the Twitter feeds to see what was going on with Occupy DC, a camp that faces eviction. The utterance is mostly reparative, enabling us to extract a last kernel of value from Occupy before all encampments are swept away. But I think that the utterance is more than reparative—that in fact it destroys what it would repair. Locating the primary value of Occupy in its discursive effects, the utterance actually produces an indifference to the materiality and practical reality of Occupy. The sites could go on or not, tevs, it will continue to exist in the airy ideality of a national conversation. We can all go home; we’ve done our jobs.

That this utterance is sayable indexes the fact that Occupy has not changed the “national conversation.” Not one bit. Not even a little. And this is because the public who utters this statement still thinks having a conversation, saying things, having an opinion, matters, and matters as a politics. Indeed, such utterances place in a position of priority and superiority the abstract liberal subject who opines, who reflects, who debates—but never decides, because there is no real apparatus linking reflexive judgment to determinative judgment, to a decision for and on the political. After all, the “conversation” being changed is that which is staged in the hypercapitalized world of televisual media; it needn’t even be our conversation that is changing, then, so much as that of (wealthier) others. But even if our own conversation is changing—at bars late at night, at Thanksgiving dinners with conservative uncles, wherever—this is meaningless so long as the effect of the change in conversation is simply a change in conversation. The point of crisis to which Occupy needs to bring the “national conversation” is to show that having an opinion—a private reflection that is expressed occasionally—is not a political act. That conversing cannot be the transcendent value of the political, or politics turns into a spectacle that we simply discuss from a distance—without touching or being touched by it. And Occupy is all about touching, about bodies in contact, about being-there on the scene, about, well, occupying materiality.

Badiou neatly attends to this dynamic in his critique of Arendt and Arendt’s reading of Kant. He writes that in Arendt’s idea of “the political” that the “perspective of the spectator is systematically privileged. Arendt justifies the fact that Kant had a ‘boundless admiration’ for the French Revolution as a phenomenon, or historical appearance, whilst nurturing ‘a boundless opposition’ to its revolutionary ventures and their actors. As a public spectacle the Revolution is admirable, while its militants are contemptible.” This neatly maps onto the discursive economy I’m describing. As an item of public debate, Occupy is admirable; it has, after all, brought our attention to “inequality.” But Occupiers are dirty smelly anarchists who should just disappear into the ideality of their discursive effects. Those deciding against “inequality” are replaced by those who reflectively determinate that inequality is bad, say so, and…sleep or go bowling or something. The revolution is awesome—it gives us more shit to talk about—but fuck the revolutionaries.

I’m not against conversing, at all. Indeed, isn’t Occupy frequently mocked for its discursive aneconomy, the way that everyone gets their say, the slowed articulation between speech and act, the hyperproceduralist commitment to clarifying questions, straw polls, friendly amendments, and so on? We reflect all day—and then determine ourselves, set ourselves to a goal, decide on a new kind of political truth or aim. One isn’t a spectator on the political here; that is, one who looks, reflects, and aimlessly judges. (One isn't, in short, a liberal.) One is in the grip of the political, in a full spectrum of sensations: looking and thinking, no doubt, but also smelling, touching, tasting, hearing… And it’s from this whole range of sensations, affects, and ideas that one comes to co-decide on the political—not opine on the lamentable fact of inequality, a spectacle piped into bedroom TVs.

Occupy will not have changed the "national conversation" until conversing is reconstituted as a mechanism of decision, not reflection—as a political act, not a retreat from the political.

Revolutionary Ex-orbitancy

Pardon the silence; I’ve been sojourning in the land of the academic job market.

I want to think today, quite bluntly, about political subjectivation. How is it that in the punctum of our present a political subject has emerged? Why Occupy? And what do I even mean by political subject, by the political itself? Gestures toward “the political” saturate my own discourse, and, thus far I’ve refused to define the term except indirectly: it’s something lost, something irreducible to regimes of calculability, and so on.  But it remains a vague term. Those of us who live anti-liberalism religiously tend to invoke the political as a blank, critical resource. Given that the political is that against which liberalism defines itself, that which liberalism seeks to limit, contain, and expel, we inflate the signifier as signifier, as if “the political” has a transcendent signified utterly exorbitant to linguistic capture. It has no such signified, and we kind of know this, and when we’re pressed to contort the exorbitant(ly empty) term into a communicable form we typically stutter out some Schmittian line. Here, I don’t want to define “the political”; rather, I want to think of the political itself as the process by which signifiers, on one hand, point beyond themselves to a transcendent exorbitancy and, on the other hand, point to nothing in the world. Let’s say that the political is ex-orbitant: it names a world saturated with transcendent meaning even as it marks an emptying-out, a cancellation, an active ex-ing of the orbis. In this double-play of the ex-orbitant we can locate the emergence of the political subject called Occupy.

The political isn’t identical to a scale, institution, or form; rather, the political is what advenes in the de-structuring of a worldly ordinary. It comes to pass in the conditions of absolute undecidability, when the nomos of the given world is cancelled. I use the passive voice [“is cancelled”] because I want to leave the agency of cancellation unmarked, just as I want to leave the structuring nomos unmarked. This cancellation, I want to suggest, actually produces the nomos it cancels as a self-conscious entity; it subjectivates it. (The “Keynesian state” becomes subjectivated after its wholesale destruction, and is subjectivated as a critique of neoliberalism, for instance.) The political takes place in the withdrawal of a world that only appears as a world in its withdrawal, when the ex produces the orbis it cancels. The political, then, couldn’t be a scale or form of activity—it takes place in the break, between regimes, as an interregnum where undecidability is the norm. Nor could it be an agential subject, something that an intending actor does, for subjectivation happens as an effect of structural cancellation, as the subjectivation of a lost world, a lost ordinary. The political subject is called into being by a lost world, a cancellation of a structure that becomes legible only through its cancellation. The ancien regime appears as a political subject only through revolutionary fighting in the streets.

The political subject is a structure of intentionality that survives the loss of the world that made that mode of being-toward-the-world an unexceptional aspect of being-in-the-world. It emerges in the cruelty of a desire or demand that won’t quit despite the structural impossibility of its realization—a demand for a state that cares, for instance, that is not set to work merely to facilitate the valorization of capital. The political begins when we’ve lost our grip on reality, when our worldly ordinary vanishes and, vanishing, seems to have been real, when we're forced to decide on new approaches to the real. The inaugural tonality of the political is thus one of frustration, of disorientation. This frustration, I want to suggest, is not primarily a frustration with the given world, but a frustration with one’s inability to unlearn the protocols of intentionality that produce this frustration—a frustration not with the world in which one is but a frustration with one’s being-toward-the-world that could only produce frustration. Conservative political subjectivity refuses to let go of this frustration; it wishes for the world to re-conform to its worldless structure of intentionality. This dynamic explains how both conservative and radical political subjectivity can be denigrated as romantic, as utopian—each prioritizes a structure of intentionality over an epistemically valid description of the world as such.

But the radical political subject relates to intentionality differently. If the political emerges in the mismatch between a structure of intentionality and the given world, radical political subjectivity enacts itself by unlearning the intentionality that binds subjects to a lost world, by destroying the phenomenological structure that makes the subject optimistically invest again and again in a world that has abandoned the worldly structures that might have made this investment worthwhile. The radical political subject is not one who decides, simply, on a new world but one who, in all its fractured plurality, co-decides on a new being-toward-the-world.

Occupy is now, finally, radicalizing, becoming a radical political subject. (There were always radicals a part of Occupy, those for whom the world of capital held no promise. My point is that the radical is becoming the set that incorporates the reformist [and Ron Paulite] elements.) Oakland is in the lead here, and their example is contagious, spreading in the form of small acts. Occupy Philly’s march through Center City last night—tying up traffic, confusing police, generating a carnival atmosphere in which people in cars honked out tunes in time with our chants—ended with some tearing down the fence around a privatized Dilworth Plaza, tearing down the stupid Dilworth project banners that surround the site to tell the public that privatization is just fucking awesome. We’re getting angry, we’re learning from our own frustration, we’re cultivating our hatred for capitalism, we’re starting to work on our own structure of desire to come to a point where we can begin to co-decide on new modes of being-toward-the-world. Occupy is now undertaking the revolutionary labor of ex-ing the orbis by unlearning the epistemic programming that makes subjects invest in a world that is always already lost. Reformists will drop out. Bye!

Will the world follow our intentions? Who knows. The co-decision on a new being-toward-the-world is necessarily exorbitant to the world that is—there is nothing that guarantees that the world will bear the burden of the novel intentionality we will decide upon. We don’t necessarily know what a new world will look like, and we couldn’t: the exorbitant will remain undecidable, and we’re leaning how to dwell in this undecidability, how to occupy the space of the incalculable. For now, we’re content to frighten power by our radical refusal to be frustrated by a world that has abandoned its promises. We’re already desiring other worlds. We're already political. 

Why We Should Read Thomas Clarkson

“For let us consider how many, both of the living and the dead, could be made to animate us.” So writes Thomas Clarkson in chapter eleven of The History of the Rise, Progress, & Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-trade (1808), the chapter in which Clarkson explains his famous riverine “map” that traces the confluences of antislavery sentiment that led, in part, to the abolition of the trade in 1807. Clarkson’s graphical depiction of the rhizomatic communication of influence functions as an interesting counterpoint to the rather linear narrative given theretofore. Through the image, we see that political animation—the kind that Clarkson described above—is never linear, obvious; it snakes around, twists about, drawing even on the life of the dead for its motive force. Looking back over the image as I re-read Clarkson’s masterpiece, I was struck by how it approximates one mapping of OWSTwitter networks I had seen two months ago. This similitude prompted a question: How could the social movement propelled by Clarkson’s labors “be made to animate us”? What lessons does Clarkson hold for us?

Admittedly, Clarkson is probably not the literary bread-and-butter of Occupy. Occupiers are more likely to read Marcuse, for instance, or other 20^th century quasi-/post-/neo-Marxists, than they are to settle down with a history of a reformist movement composed in 1808. Particularly on college campuses, it is perhaps through an intellectual engagement with the questions of class and exploitation posed by these theorists that students come to desire an involvement with a movement like Occupy. Here, theory quickens and animates, transforming intellectuals thinking about the world into intellectuals attempting to change it. For many Occupiers I know, theory isn’t merely theory: even if theoretical engagement began as a merely scholastic exercise, it became a call to action. And this is the first lesson we can take from Clarkson. In a biographical section of his history, he describes how he came to awareness of the slave-trade. Students at Cambridge competitively submitted dissertations in the hopes of securing a university prize. Young Thomas had won such a prize the year before, and desired the fame of winning first prize again. The prompt for the prize was simple: “Anne liceat Invitos in Servitutem dare? or, Is it right to make slaves of other against their will?” Clarkson eagerly anticipated both the intellectual enjoyments of crafting a fine Latin essay and the honors that such a fine essay would bring. Like a good grad student, he began to diligently research slavery, focusing on the present-day slave-trade. He began to write, but the pleasures he had anticipated were “damped by the facts which were now continually before me. It was but one gloomy subject from morning to night…It became now not so much a trial for academical reputation, as for the production of a work, which might be useful to injured Africa.” A fight for academic prestige, the flexing of rhetorical and analytic muscles…these served to bring Clarkson into ethical, and then organizational, contact with British antislavery.

Lesson one, then: we don’t get to choose the manner of our activist animation, we don’t get to choose how a politico-ethical demand appears within the bland contexts of our everyday worlds. We might begin as silly students, reading Heidegger and Nancy late at night to catch up with our peers in the battle for prestige, but we don’t know, we can’t know, how these texts might serve as so many tributaries sending us, gently at first, to a broader social movement. Nor do we get to choose the manner in which we comport ourselves once we’ve made contact with the animated world of activism; we don’t get to choose, I mean, what the practice of activism looks like. Sure, antislavery historians or Hollywood movies will direct us to the spectacular scenes of popular mobilization—loud speeches, louder crowds, and all topped off with petitions, written on streaming rolls of paper, unraveled before Parliament. But anyone involved with Occupy knows that much of the work of Occupy takes place in front of a computer, navigating cluttered inboxes, making sense of lengthy email chains, reading and writing endless responses. Clarkson had a similar experience. Supposed to send his comrade a “weekly account” of his progress in stirring up initial support, Clarkson describes the textual bloat: “At the end of the first week my letter to him contained little more than a sheet of paper. At the end of the second it contained three; at the end of the third six; and at the end of the fourth I found it would be so voluminous, that I was obliged to decline writing it.” But the reading and writing didn’t stop. Clarkson describes daily sessions that stretched from 9pm until 3am where he and his colleagues examined custom-house receipts until their “eyes were enflamed by the candle.” And Clarkson’s History is itself an artifact of the humdrum textuality of revolutionary activism.

If lesson two is that revolutionary activism entails decidedly nonrevolutionary, unsexy, and (let’s say it) boring activity, the third lesson we can take from Clarkson is the importance of not letting our revolutionary aims be trumped by the feeling of quotidian normality that even revolutionary activity assumes. In a beautiful passage, Clarkson describes how, eyes enflamed, “tired by fatigue,” he and his comrade would “relieve ourselves by walking out within the precincts of Lincoln’s Inn, when all seemed to be fast asleep, and thus, as it were, in solitude and in stillness to converse upon them, as well as the best means of the further promotion of our cause…Having recruited ourselves in this manner, we used to return to our work.” Dreaming dreams in the solitude of night. But we also get a lesson, shortly thereafter, about the possible consequences of failing to dream well enough, to dream deeply enough. Clarkson and company are in a meeting, one of the first of their formally organized society, and someone poses the question: Do we oppose merely the slave-trade, or slavery as an institution? The conveyance of slaves or the very mode of labor? You probably know how the debate goes: Given that plantation slavery relied on fresh imports due to staggering death-rates, and given that Parliament definitely had the sovereign power to regulate commerce but did not have uncontested sovereignty over the internal affairs of colonies with representative assemblies, and given that property rights—even in people—should remain inviolate, the society decided to focus on the slave-trade, leaving slavery a fact of the British world for decades more. It’s tragic reasoning, a failure of imagination, a reformist approach to the real. An anti-lesson.

If we let Clarkson animate us, we’ll derive three lessons: We don’t choose what propels us to act; revolutionary action is less a punctual moment of affective intensity than a humdrum labor that takes time; and, despite the routine and routinized work of revolution, we need to keep our revolutionary dreams alive. Let’s add one more: Clarkson’s work—his history, his activism—demonstrate that another world is indeed possible. For thousands of years, slavery, commerce in people, was simply a fact. Without making too big a claim for Anglo-Atlantic exceptionalism, we need to take seriously the fact that the zone of formal freedom that Clarkson helped carve into being was minimal compared to the zones where human “enslaveability,” to use Drescher’s term, would continue to condition human life. Antislavery beat the odds, beat the weight of history, and made opposition to slavery, and thus formal freedom, a ground-level assumption about human being in the world. There were and are limits to the value of this formal freedom, as any post-emancipation society shows. But taking this long historical view, we might see ourselves as the newest tributaries on Clarkson’s riverine map—we might see ourselves as people struggling to achieve substantial freedom in a world where formal, merely formal, freedom is the norm.

Stuttering toward the Future

 

A new year, a planetary revolution completed: a good time to consider the hermeneutics of novelty, of revolution. If such a hermeneutics could exist, and nothing is less certain. For, certainly, liberal capitalism has functioned through the banalization of the new. We could think of myriad media technologies (the newspaper, the novel, a 24-hour news-cycle), consumption habits (“fashion” being the most obvious habit of practicing novelty), and technologies of governmentality as mechanisms that contain the new by proliferating novelties, inventions, deviations. The problem facing a hermeneutics of revolutionary novelty is this: How to read the appearance of the new in such a way that it is not (dis)figured by liberal capitalism’s deep embrace of novelty? We are, after all, conscripted imaginatively into liberalism: How are we to unthink the cognitive frameworks that enable thought at all?

Marx articulates the problem neatly in a famous passage. On one hand, “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.” For Marx, earlier revolutions suffered from a failure of imagination; they could not read the poetry to come, the poetry of the future: “Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to drug themselves concerning their own content.” Marx resolves the problem with a normative claim—one that, humorously, “require[s]” a Christological messianism for it to make sense: “In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead.” (For readers without the dubious benefit of 12 years of Catholic education, “let the dead bury the dead” is an utterance of Jesus, Matthew 8:22.) That is, the revolution must move beyond the poetry of the past, the “required recollections,” and live dangerously open to a future-oriented present. Indeed, it must speak the future in the present as if it were already the future (“draw[ing] its poetry…only from the future”). But what would this poetry sound like, look like? Marx makes this poetry thinkable by comparing it, formally and semantically, to the past-oriented poetry of earlier revolutions: “There [in the past] the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase.” It’s not that the phrase says more than it means—rather, the phrase cannot say what it means. We don’t have the language yet, but the intuition of this content, this poetry of the future that lacks a language, has already beggared the words, the phrases that we do possess. The future that affects language does so by loosening its hold on the future, insofar as the future (the content) goes beyond the phrase.

Language has nothing to say about the future.

With brutal honesty, Marx submits his own work to the double bind he diagnoses. The future cannot be said, its content is exorbitant to its phrasing. Yet one writes. And, indeed, writes with phrases derived from “recollections of past world history” (e.g., “let the dead bury the dead”). One could read Marx’s entire corpus as a negotiation with this double bind: How to write the new, to develop a hermeneutic for reading novelty, knowing that one only possesses the poetry of the past—that one is “required,” cognitively, to read the future in the determinate figures generated by the past? Capital is little more than the generalization of this requirement, as if, one day, everyday, capitalism reads a kind of requerimiento to those whose imaginations it would colonize. We can see Marx playing with this fact at multiple points: the subordination of variable capital to constant capital discussed in volume 1 has its cultural-linguistic counterpart in Marx’s claim that “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Value—as both a body of theoretical ruminations on value from Petty to Smith to Ricardo to Mill and as the value-form itself—similarly performs this operation of fashioning the new in a determinate image. All that remains for the revolutionary is this blank sign, the “future,” the “new,” which intimates a “content” that exceeds its phrasing. But one cannot speak the new as new, in new terms, in new words, because we lack the language, because we’re required, as conscripts of capital, to speak in such and such a way. But, at the same time, one cannot not speak: the future is the only thing worth speaking about, even if one cannot speak it.

The point is this: we lack a cognitive structure to perceive the new, because the new renders the cognitive structures that we do possess indeterminate. We might not know it when it hits us. But we might symptomatize it. As I re-read Marx’s sentence about phrasing revolution (“…here the content goes beyond the phrase”), I’m struck by how this seems to mimic a kind of stutter. A meaning-to-say that stumbles on the materiality of language, a content that can’t quite—but not for lack of trying—articulate itself. It’s at this point, where language can’t fully grasp the object or process it tries taking in hand, that some kind of newness is being illumined. The future appears, first and foremost, in moments where the epistemological authority of the past and present is evacuated. Not as a destruction, but as an indetermination—one that exposes the poetry of the past to the possibility of a poetry of the future. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must stutter—that is, one must perform that inability of language to speak the force that affects one, that brings one to speech.

I want to think of Occupy as a series of revolutionary stutters, a movement that has brought one language (that of neoliberalism in the U.S.) to crisis while, simultaneously, seeking a language to describe the future it would inaugurate. We need to hold onto this stuttering revolutionary speech. (That, at least, is what I’ve been trying to do: to see how the slogans and practices of Occupy are potentiated by a “content” exorbitant to their “phras[ing],” a content that fleetingly appears in the articulation of such phrases.) We need to do so because the moment that Occupy’s stuttering indeterminacy becomes easily articulated speech, we will have lost the future, Occupy will have become a reform movement, and we will be left speaking the language of the present. We need to see in our stuttering critiques and programs that force of a future to come, to, indeed, become comfortable with the fact that we don’t have a language for what we want.  

Radically Stylish (This Is What Democracy Looks Like II)

“This is what democracy looks like.” In my previous posts on this infinitely readable locution, I opposed the affectivity of ostension—the way that, at a certain point, the finger that points takes leave of the discursive and touches on the event of the political—to the residual mimeticism that the simile invites. Implicitly governing my reading was the idea that being-alike restrains the eruptive potentiality, the singularity, of the demos’ taking-place. I don’t know if I can unwork this opposition, or if it is worth doing so. I do, however, want to focus more on the event of looking-like, what appearing in a determinate fashion, appearing-as, has to do with revolutionary democracy. It’s of note that “This is what democracy looks like” typically a response to a demand, “Show me / Tell me what democracy looks like.” The imperative embedded in the call is, I think, a demand leveled at the concept of political democracy itself: Any democracy worthy of the name will necessarily appear, have a phenomenal status, give itself to be looked at in a way so particular that it can bear the weight of the “this.” We have to be able to see it, it has to look like something, it can’t hide in a conceptual ineffability, a future-oriented temporality, whatever. It might be that democracy is the conflation or the adequation of noumenality to phenomenality, of concept to what-gives-itself to sense. Better: the concept of democracy is always right at the flesh, the eyes, the body, the world. Its phenomenality is its noumenality. Democracy cuts a new figure for itself each time it appears, and it is nothing more than this appearance. A desperate superficiality. Let’s say that “This is what democracy looks like” uncovers the superficial secret of democracy as the non-secret of style—that is, the practices by which subjects make themselves appear in the world knowing well that their being in the world has no basis but this modality of making-appear.

I’m thinking about style quite literally. At a bar the other night, wearing my hobo coat that looks like a dirty carpet, Occupy Philly button properly affixed, someone told me that they liked my “look” and that they were glad that I occupy, as my button proclaimed. This is what democracy looks like, I guess. The encounter reminded me of the great, and greatly impoverished, discourse on clothes that met the emergence of Occupy. There was some half-witted New York Times article/slideshow, in which people a) apologized for the expense of the clothes they wore to a “protest” against “corporate greed” or b) came of with charming ways of not answering, giving partial answers, or embedding their clothes within a circuit of gift/thrift exchange so as to preserve non-/anti-capitalist authenticity. I’m not trying to mock the respondents; I imagine any answer I would give, at that moment, would be silly, a mix of (a) and (b). But I like how the article, in all its appalling fatuousness, exposed a discomfort with sartorial appearance within Occupy. What, after all, does one wear to a revolution? Which is to say: Given the necessity that, as people in the world, you cut some phenomenal figure, what figure will you cut? How will you style yourself? The silly photographer, the sillier editor who cooked up the idea, they actually leveled the same demand written above: “Show me what democracy looks like.”

If the Times piece showed that one could wear a $5,000 suit and be a prolie too, others highlighted the fact that we don’t all own $5,000 suits. All Occupiers smell, we need to take baths, we’re hippies, we don’t care about our appearances at all. Here, Occupy signifies as an aesthetic refusal; it refuses to be responsible for its mode of appearance, and, indeed, in appears in and through this appearance, its anti-style. Still others—I’m thinking of some silly Penn undergrad Facebook group, in particular—thought our democracy looked too cool. A bunch of tight-pants-wearing, cheap-booze-swilling, too-thin-looking, show-going cats who moved Brooklyn or NoLibs to Dilworth in response to trust-fund devaluation.

Out of all of the debates that Occupy has opened, this one seems the least important. No response would be more improper to the demand, “Show me…” than to describe what one is wearing, it would seem. But I want to think of the radical import of thinking democracy from the perspective of style. Etymologically, style derives from the Latin “stylus”: a writing instrument, a stake, something pointy, sharp. One cuts with a stylus, leaves a mark, an inscription. Style is a performative writing, and, as with most kinds of writing, it’s a writing that one cannot not undertake, even if one seems to refuse to style oneself, to write oneself, to give oneself to the senses of others. But we know “style” as a slightly debased term. Like graphical writing, style is just play on a surface, alterations of appearances that do not get to the actuality of the matter. And thus, I think, the radical (if mildly infantile) negativity of thinking democracy from the basis of style: it hollows out the conceptual gravitas of the term, its conflation with a) overvalued philosophemes and b) overvalued empirical/institutional factors (e.g., parliamentary systems). To simply describe one’s clothes in response to the demand would be to expose the false noumenality of democracy to the play of the phenomenal, to take the critical step of asserting that democracy is nothing more than the figure it cuts in the world (and heretofore it’s cut a fucking terrible figure). Democracy is simply a style of political sociality; the appearance of democracy has nothing underwriting it, no support, no conceptual core. Just a set of stylistic devices. The model it “looks like” is simply that iteration of democracy retroactively and metaleptically displacing its self-foundedness, its desperately superficial apparitionality, by fashioning itself as an exemplum of a pre-comprehended model.

But this critical move—the suggestion that the noumenality of democracy is exhausted by, and nothing more than, its phenomenality, that democracy is a style, a drag, a performance, an act—needs to be recuperated, ascribed a post-critical positivity. If democracy is nothing more than the apparition of democracy, democratic power-sharing would consist in the shared capacity to create and distribute appearances. A world free of theologically saturated concepts would be one in which style would matter in a most earnest way, because all that would remain would be the appearances that we are, the modalities in which we co-appear. Any democracy that does not give itself to sense is not a democracy, it’s an ideology, it’s a ghost, a trace, a word of command, a term that silences. Even ghosts cut figures in the world, appearing in a determinate fashion. The point, I think, is to let ourselves be haunted by the fact of our own materiality, the fact that we need to appear and co-appear—that we’re given over to a world in which we cannot not by stylish.

(Sorry for no links--writing and posting on train.)

The Fiscal Polity; or, "What Does Occupy Cost Philly?"

I haven’t posted for some time because I’ve been finishing a dispatch for the SSRC Possible Futures project. Today I want to think about one dominant modality through which Occupy is represented in official media outlets—that is, the “cost” of Occupy to the municipalities in which occupations have taken place. I am curious about the very possibility of the question (“What does Occupy cost?”) and what this question indicates about political belonging and citizenship today.

Let’s say, quite simply, that fiscality is the modality through which the polity is made to appear in conditions of (neo)liberal capitalism. The question, “What does Occupy cost?” implicitly asks, “What does Occupy cost me, us, we who have contributed to the municipal fisc?” The who appears in the objective case (“me…us”) and as an effect of the what. The polity is subjectivated through the objectivity of accountancy. I stuttered on the “neo-” in “neoliberalism” because the process by which a polity figures itself through fiscal reform is nothing new—Magna Carta, anyone? But I do want to suggest that conditions of (neo)liberal parliamentarianism exacerbate the figurative function of the fisc.

I could make this claim historically. Following Parliamentary reform in 1832, which significantly (albeit modestly, by the standard of full suffrage) increased the British electorate, Richard Cobden’s Anti-Corn Law League and his Financial Reform Association exploded in popularity. (To avoid lengthy explanations, the ACLL and FRA are the Tea Party’s ideological forerunners.) As Frank Trentmann’s Free Trade Nation suggests, Cobden’s liberal critique of British tariff and tax structure provided a political grammar for segments of society recently inducted into formal/institutional politics. This is in part because taxation was/is the primary modality through which “citizens” achieve recognition by the state. Let’s be clear: Cobden wanted to make sure that a greater portion of Britain’s net wealth would be available to private individuals for consumption—not tied up in supporting “corrupt” officials, the poor (c.f. Poor Law reform in 1834), or moribund colonies (c.f. the Sugar Duties Act of 1846). And thus the paradox: politics became the site where private individuals came to free themselves from the political, where the private (like private wealth, private consumption) could be shielded from political/state control. Fiscal representations (the budget, the debt) phenomenalize the polity as co-proprietors: this is our money. It also always represents the polity as co-proprietors of a failing, corrupt corporation. The solution is to “starve the beast,” to bring costs to zero. But in so doing, liberal critiques of the costs of the political threaten to render the polity a null-set. That is, if the liberal polity represents itself as a (too-great) monetary quantum, and if the solution is to bring this figure to zero, the polity works toward its own figurative dissolution, its own becoming-zero. If one defines the political as a site of cost-cutting, the disappearance of costs is the disappearance of the political. In a fantastic Liebestod, the liberal embraces the political at the moment of its death.

The (neo)liberal paradigm of the political is thus managerial efficiency. I’m struck by the fact that that fucking asshole, Bloomberg, lists “Entrepreneur” before “Mayor of New York City” in his biographical description on his Twitter feed. This won’t strike many as scandalous—after all, people voted for him because of his economic success, they wanted him to run NYC as one runs a profitable corporation, and, indeed, to refashion NYC as a city in which others would want to run corporations. The polity decided to make the telos of the political something exorbitant to the political, to transform the political into an instrument for capital accumulation. The efficient conduction of economic growth is now the “deliverable” of the political.

The question of costs is the mode by which the fiscal-polity attempts to contain the eruption of the political. And, let’s be clear, the monetary figures published by cities throughout the U.S. are figures—that is, metaphors that indicate nothing but that are set to work to capture the incalculability of the political. When Citizen Bob hears that Occupy Philly costs the city over a million dollars (the number released was more precise, thus more real), Bob imagines that that million dollars could have been better spent on a school, a bridge, or whatever; Citizen Palin declares it shouldn’t have been spent at all, but returned to consumer-citizens in the form of tax cuts. But the money that we’re talking about is not the same kind of money sitting in an interest-bearing bank account. Ramsey and Nutter didn’t—nor could they—run to an ATM to pay police overtime, and it’s not because a cash-strapped Philadelphia would have been overdrawing. The one million dollars are, first of all, so many accountancy units, not liquid funds with which I could buy 847938 vegan cheesesteaks. The public force of the numbers, their ability to enrage Citizens Bob and Palin, derives from the conflation of money-as-unit-of-account, money-as-medium-of-exchange, and money-as-wealth. Certainly, these modalities of money teeter into one another, but they’re not identical. The “costs” of the political, I’m suggesting, are purely notional at this point. Incalculablity drags as calculability. (Any transnational firm knows this: intra-corporate transfers of goods are priced for accountancy purposes, but without a market mechanism these prices are at best approximations. This is how slave plantations worked also. Thanks, dissertation!) And so the citation of the figure is merely a reinscription of the logic of fiscality against the incalculability of the political.

We live in incalculable times. If the bloat of finance capital has taught us nothing, it’s that the capitalist value-form has mutated beyond the value-form that Ricardo developed and Marx dissected. As Negri would put it, the declining purchase of the classical value-form exposes the coercion at the core of any capitalist regime—money is no longer indicative of value, it is simply a performative language of command. The subject positions that emerged in the composition/distribution of value (variable capital and constant capital, laborer and capitalist) come apart in a hyperfinanced world-system, insofar as money comes to valorize itself autotelically. (Money making money without the mediation of a commodity-value: M-M` instead of M-C-M`.) We could see Occupy as a response to the dissolution of capitalist forms of value and thus liberal forms of accountancy and calculability. Occupy camps refuse to count—or at least to count in available fiscal grammars. I’m sure that someone, somewhere is doing a costs/benefits analysis of Occupy Philly, placing the expense of police against the social services (like feeding the homeless, providing medical attention, and so on) provided on site. But these numbers could only be, as numbers today could only be, metaphorics. Nothing is being counted. Indeed, what we are seeing is a struggle over the ethics of incalculability—a struggle between a capitalism that now truly runs naked, without the cloak of the value-form covering its secret shame, its incalculable power of coercion, and a few thousand people who pitch tents and seek to reembed this incalculable power within an instituted democratic polity.

Meanwhile, Philly suburbanites will continue to be upset that the battle for control of the incalculable costs a quantum of cash.